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Search Engine Strategies – How To Increase Your Search Engine Ranking
posted by Web_University @ 8:00 AM
Saturday, October 9, 2010
Search Engine Strategies – How To Increase Your Search Engine Ranking
The methods employed to increase your search engine rankings may seem like rocket science to you, so you have probably avoided dealing with this issue. I am here to tell you—the time has come to face your website! A high search engine ranking for your website is so essential that if you have the slightest desire to actually succeed in your business, there is no way you can continue to avoid this issue.
At least 85% of people looking for goods and services on the Internet find websites through search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. The idea of optimizing your pages for high search engine rankings is to attract targeted customers to your site who will be more than likely to make a purchase. The higher your page comes up in search engine results, the greater the traffic that is directed to your website. That’s what search engine optimization is about.
You can immerse yourself in all the technical information available online to figure out how to optimize your web pages to achieve higher rankings. Or you can look at a few simple items on your pages, make some small adjustments, and most likely see improved rankings quite rapidly. The first item you should examine is the title bar on your home page.
The title bar is the colored bar at the top of the page. Look at the words that appear there when you access your home page. To increase search engine rankings, the words on your homepage’s title bar should include the most important keywords or phrases, one of which would include your company name.
Then click on all your links and examine the title bars on the pages you access. Each title bar on every single page of your site should contain the most important keywords and phrases taken from the page itself. However, avoid very long strings of keywords, keeping them to six words or less. Avoid repeating keywords more than once in the title bars, and make sure that identical words are not next to each other.
The next item to put under your microscope is your website content. Search engines generally list sites that contain quality content rather than scintillating graphics. The text on your site must contain the most important keywords—the words that potential customers will be typing into search engines to find your site.
Aim to have around 250 words on each page, but if this is not desirable due to your design, aim for at least 100 carefully chosen words. If you want to achieve a high ranking on search engines, this text is essential. However, the search engines must be able to read the text, meaning that the text must be in HTML and not graphic format.
To find out if your text is in HTML format, take your cursor and try to highlight a word or two. If you are able to do this, the text is HTML. If the text will not highlight, it is probably in graphic form. In this case, ask your webmaster to change the text into HTML format in order to increase your search engine rankings.
Next we come to what is called metatags. I know this sounds like something out of science fiction, but it is really just simple code. Many people believe that metatags are the key to high search engine rankings, but in reality, they only have a limited effect. Still, it’s worth adding them in the event that a search engine will use metatags in their ranking formula.
To find out if your page is set up with metatags, you must access the code. To do this, click the “view” button on the browser menu bar, and select “source”. This will pull up a window revealing the underlying code that created the page. If there are metatags, they usually appear near the top of the window. For example, a metatag would read: meta name=”keywords” content=. If you do not find code that reads like this, ask your webmaster to put them in. This may not do much for your search engine rankings, but any little boost helps.
Lastly, we come to the issue of link popularity. This is a factor that is extremely important in terms of search engine rankings. Almost all search engines use link popularity to rank your website. Link popularity is based on the quality of the sites you have linked to from your links page.
If you type in “free link popularity check” in a popular search engine, the search engine will then show you what sites are linked to your site. In the case that there aren’t many sites linked up to yours, or that the sites that are linked up have low search engine rankings, consider launching a link popularity campaign. Essentially, this entails contacting quality sites and requesting that they exchange links with your site. Of course, this requires checking out the rankings of the websites you want to link up with. Linking to popular, quality sites not only boosts your search engine ranking, but it also directs more quality traffic to your website.
Search engine rankings are extremely important for a successful Internet Marketing campaign. Before you go out and hire a search engine optimization company, try taking some of the simple steps listed above, and see if you can’t boost your rankings yourself. Don’t ever ignore this all-important factor in Internet marketing. Remember, the higher your search engine ranking, the more quality customers will be directed your way.
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How to Create a Search Engine Friendly Website
posted by Web_University @ 8:00 AM
Thursday, September 23, 2010
How to Create a Search Engine Friendly Website
Many webmasters complain about their website not ranking well in the SERPs. What they fail to realize is that their website is not search engine friendly. An SEO friendly website contains more than keyword filled Meta tags and content.
A website must be created and designed keeping the visitors in mind. Search engines can get your website in the top ranking; but a well crafted website ensures that the visitor gets converted into a customer. You need to ensure that your website is both search engine and visitor friendly.
Tips for Creating a Search Engine Friendly Website:
Fill the Meta tags: Search engines come across the Meta tags well before the content. A major part of the search result is picked up from the Meta tags. The title tag helps the search engines and visitors in understanding what the webpage is about. The Meta description gets listed as the snippet in the search result. Well formatted Meta tags play a major role in making the website SEO friendly.
Include Breadcrumbs in the website: Breadcrumbs are navigational links present in the inner pages of the website. They link a web page to its respective category and sub category. Breadcrumbs help in the even distribution of the page rank to the connected web pages. You must include keywords as the anchor text of the breadcrumbs. Remember to place the breadcrumbs before the main heading of the web page.
Perform the On Page Optimization Activities: SEO of a website mainly consists of on page optimization activities. Implement these tips:
- Add a heading tag to the web page.
- As search engines cannot read images, add an alt tag to the images.
- Name the image according to the selected keywords. Use hyphens to separate long keywords.
- Place a keyword as the anchor text of a link.
- Optimize the content of your web page. Make sure that the keyword density doesn’t exceed 2%.
Interlink all the important web pages: Interlinking web pages helps the search spiders to navigate the website. Web pages can be linked based on their category. E.g. an online book store can link their web pages based on the authors. It has been observed that a well linked website will always rank better than the non-linked websites. You can link to the important pages of your website from the homepage by using appropriate anchor text.
Use SEO Friendly URL Structure: Search engines do not understand the URL’s which contain the PHP / ASP code in them. A SEO friendly URL structure contains words separated by hyphens. You can rewrite your URL’s manually via the.htaccess file. WordPress gives you an option to change your URL structure with one click.
Generate XML Sitemaps: Sitemaps help the engines discover all the pages in your website. There are a lot of free XML sitemap generator tools available online. You can include the “priority” and “change frequency” tags in your sitemap. The priority tag indicates the importance of the web page to the search engines. The Change frequency tag tells the search engines how frequently the page is likely to change.
A fully optimized site increases your chances of ranking well in the SERPs. Once in the top SERPs, your website has a good chance of converting its visitors into customers.
This morning I woke up to someone having submitted a pile of SEO questions using our newsletter question form. At first I thought, “Yikes, that’s kind of pushy to think I have time to answer all those questions!” But then I remembered that this was a newsletter week and I still had no idea what I was going to write about. A second look at the questions made me think that you guys would probably be interested in the answers to many of them, so it worked out perfectly.
Most of these questions have been answered in greater detail in various articles that I’ve written, so if you’d like more info on any of them, I’ve linked to the relevant ones for your convenience.
Thanks to Umair R., who submitted these questions.
1. Is there any fixed rule for Google as far as SEO is concerned? If so, what are the steps?
If only! There are no fixed rules because every website is different and has different needs. There are basic things that all websites need to do in order to improve their chances of showing up in Google search results for relevant phrases, but no magic formula.
See “The Art of SEO” article for more on this.
2. Do the following play important roles in website page ranking and positioning?
• PR
Yes, real PageRank (PR), the kind that only Google knows about plays a very large part in websites showing up (or not) for search queries that are relevant to it. But toolbar PageRank is another matter entirely. What you see there doesn’t correlate very well to where your page will show up in the search results.
See: “Getting Into Google” (Scroll down to the “Google Still Loves Its PageRank” part.)
• The number of incoming links
Not so much in and of itself. Real PR, as mentioned above, is calculated not only on the number of links, but also on the quality of those links. A handful of links from authoritative, trustworthy, relevant pages should far outweigh hundreds of links from so-so sites.
See the High Rankings Link Building Forum.
• Keyword density
Not in that there’s some special percentage that you need to aim for. Certainly it’s helpful to have the keyword phrases that you’d like to show up being used within the content of your page. But that’s just common sense, if you ask me. Surely, if your page is about a certain something (your keyword phrase), how could that phrase NOT be on the page?
See the various threads on keyword density on the High Rankings Forum.
• Page response time
This is important only because if it takes too long to load, it might not be properly (or completely) indexed.
• Bounce rate
It’s doubtful that this matters, because there’s no way for Google to know the bounce rate of every site. And it wouldn’t be fair for them to only count the bounce rates of those sites that have Google Analytics installed, so my guess is that this is not a factor.
See various High Rankings forum threads.
• Time on site
Like the above answer, they don’t know this number unless the site has Google Analytics installed. That said, they may sometimes incorporate the old trick of seeing if a searcher clicks to another site in the search results after clicking one result, and how long it took them to click another. In other words, if they find that lots of people who clicked to one site in the search engine results pages (SERPs) always end up back at Google to try another site, then perhaps that first site wasn’t a great answer to the search query after all.
• Domain page / Page age
From what I can tell, this can often be a factor. But it doesn’t seem to be as prominent a factor as it was a few years ago.
3. Is there any special technique for content writing?
There’s no special technique, but I highly suggest hiring a professional marketing copywriter. You will see a positive return on your investment very quickly if you do. In addition, the tried and true SEO copyediting techniques in my “Nitty-gritty of Writing for Search Engines” may come in handy if you’re not sure how to integrate your keyword phrases into your professionally written content.
4. Should we cater to code-to-text ratio while developing websites?
There’s not one shred of evidence that this would have an effect on where a page would show up in the search results for a relevant search query.
5. If active scripting is a must for webpage development, how harmful can it be for PageRank and positions?
It’s typically not harmful at all because it’s usually done before a browser (or search engine spider) sees a page. To users and search engines, your dynamically generated pages are just static HTML by the time they get to them. Still, not all dynamically generated pages are created equal. There are some ways of developing your site that are less search friendly than others. For example, some JavaScript menus, some AJAX, etc.
See “Diagnosing the SEO Health of Your Website”.
6. If a webpage is ranking top for a specific keyword, if we make textual changes in that webpage, is there any chance that we lose the rankings?
Any changes you make to a page’s content can affect how relevant the search engines believe it to be for any particular search query. That doesn’t mean it definitely will change the search results, but it could. The only way to know is to try it and see. Usually, if you’re rewriting your page to be more useful to your site visitors and you don’t remove all the instances of the keyword phrase, you should be fine. Because nothing is permanent with SEO, if you don’t like what you see you can tweak it until you do.
Google’s SEO Report Card… Information Nuggets or Fool’s Gold?
posted by Luigi_M_Scollo @ 8:00 AM
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Google’s SEO Report Card… Information Nuggets or Fool’s Gold?
While ostensibly aimed at helping Google target potential weaknesses in its own product pages, and of no direct use to SEOs, there is nonetheless more than a little gold to be found here, if one just examines the document in a little more depth. So while the post at Google’s Webmaster Central Blog is already beginning to bristle with comments lamenting the fact that this isn’t a clear treasure map to the search-ranking mother lode, it’s worth sifting through the Report Card to see what informational nuggets are hidden inside.
Subject I: Search Result Presentation
It’s easy to see why some readers simply dismissed this document out of hand, as the first section starts off being little more than a rehash of the standard “Use Page Titles, Use Meta Descriptions” advice found in any SEO-101 manual. Only by persevering to the part talking about Google Sitelink Triggering, does one begin to suspect that there may be a little more to the report card than meets the eye. Here the authors throw out a couple of crumbs about categorizing website and link-structure, and consolidating a site’s URLs to maximize its informational focus with the aim of increasing the chances of Google generating Sitelinks.
Even so, it’s nothing most professionals haven’t heard before, and I suspect that by this time a lot of readers had given up, thinking that nothing interesting was in store.
Subject II: URLs and Redirects
This is where we see a little glitter among the rubble, as the section starts off with the statement that: “Google products’ URLs take many different forms. Most larger products use a subdomain, while smaller ones usually use a directory form…”
In itself this is not an exceptional statement, and the chapter continues to give handy, but hardly unique, information about canonicalization, URL structure, and redirects until Page 10, where we find the following declaration:
“Subdomains require an extra DNS lookup, slightly affecting latency, which is very important at Google.”
Page load-speeds are an important factor to Google. There’s been talk and speculation about this ever since Matt Cutts dropped the first hints last year, and these days most SEOs are busily proclaiming that slow websites are now a handicap.
Haven’t they always been?
Be that as it may, this fact is not common knowledge with the average webmaster, as demonstrated by a question I’m regularly confronted with over at the Google Webmaster Help Forum:
“Which is a better way to categorize my site, subdomains or folders?”
The standard answer to this question used to be “Whichever you prefer” before load-times became an issue. Now, however, we find a clear indicator that a folder-based approach is much-preferable unless a category actually contains enough information to merit its own site, which is effectively what a subdomain turns it into.
Subject III: On-Page Optimizations
While at first glance this chapter is more standard SEO-101 fodder, it’s where we find a sizable nugget, as the report talks about semantic markup, and how Google uses it to gauge a page’s content.
“Nothing new here; we all use H1 tags.” you might say, but you’d only be partially right, because this issue not only runs much deeper than H1 headings, it runs beyond Heading tags altogether, as I’ll explain shortly. For the moment, however, let’s stay with them.
In the past few years, a great many Optimizers have reached the conclusion that only H1, and, to a degree, H2 are of any promotional value, and that lesser headings (H3 – H6) carry practically no weight at all. But let’s take a look at the following statement, taken from Page 38 of the Report:
“Most product main pages have an opportuníty to use one
tag, like the example above, but they’re currently only using other heading tags (
in this case) or larger font styling. While styling your text so it appears larger might achieve the same visual presentation, it does not provide the same semantic meaning to the search engine that an
tag does.”
tag does.”
For starters it’s obvious that the lesser headings are alive and well, and being used by Google. We’re also told that Google does not, or cannot, judge the visual-context meaning of CSS styled text. The conclusion is to use more heading tags instead of CSS styles wherever your content calls for it. However, there’s more to it still. Let’s take another look at part of that statement:
“…but they’re currently only using other heading tags…”
It would appear that Google still places greater value on other semantic markup tags (em, strong, blockquote, etc.) than many professionals give them acknowledgment, for these days. Otherwise why would the author specifically note the fact that Google only uses headings and font styles?
I personally know quite a few professionals who have long-since abandoned most semantic markup tags in favour of CSS style, since the prevailing attitude of designers and SEOs has been that making text bold or italic no longer carries much promotional weight, following widespread abuses in the mid-2000s and Google’s consequent algorithm updates.
And although the above statement may be a tentative one, it might just point the way back to a more HTML-based approach to web design. Indeed, if it can be taken at face-value, it’s entirely possible that those SEOs and designers advocating CSS-based, table-less design as the way forward are barking up the wrong tree. Whatever the case may be, there is undoubtedly more to the SEO Report Card than first meets the eye, and at the very least, there is a little gold to be extracted from the mass of standard information. Only by reading the full document will you be able to make an assessment yourself.
What should also be remembered is that the SEO Report Card is not aimed at high-flying SEOs or E-lebrity industry pundits, but at the intermediate webmaster for whom even the report’s basic information is of immense value, if read alongside Google’s SEO Starter Guide
Adding Search to Your Marketing Mix
The powerful capabilities of organic search engine optimization (SEO) are now a highly sought after marketing tool by many companies that want to alert customers to their products or services by focusing on certain keyphrases that highlight these offerings. And though SEO has embarked on a meteoric rise in the past few years, other non-traditional forms of marketing are now gaining a great deal of well-deserved credibility as well. More and more marketers are using paid ads to hone in on a potentially profitable client base, while other more traditional channels, such as PR and print ads, appear to be becoming somewhat less effective.
In a recent study (1), Forrester Research found that interactive marketing spending will reach nearly $55 billion by 2014, representing 21% of all marketing spend. And the fact of the matter is that marketers are continuing to place more stock in newer forms of marketing and social media, leaving many higher-ups to wonder if it is time for them to include these channels in their own marketing mixes. And with the help of your search engine optimization company, it’s possible to achieve outstanding rankings and results!
What follows are some common considerations that should be analyzed prior to the launch of an SEO campaign so that you will know what you are getting into, what you will need from your team and your prospective search engine optimization company, and how to most effectively pursue this particular form of marketing.
Achieving Buy-in
Search engine optimization is unlike many traditional forms of marketing in that several departments must be involved in order for the SEO campaign to be successful. Apart from the obvious need to get buy-in from upper management (unless, of course, you are upper management), you will also need to get buy-in from your sales department and, very importantly, your IT department before pursuing the powerful capabilities your search engine optimization company can bring to the table.
Upper Management
While a well thought out, highly targeted SEO campaign is becoming an increasingly popular marketing tool, many “old school” bigwigs are uncomfortable pursuing something that is completely foreign to them. This is not an indictment of the individual – keep in mind that the traditional marketing methods that the company has likely relied upon (trade shows, direct mail, print advertising, etc.) have been relatively unchanged for decades.
While these traditional marketing channels may have remained relatively stagnant, the allocation of spend for them has not. According to a 2008 SEMPO report, more marketers are shifting their budgets to search rather than spending it on the more traditional channels of the past. Nearly 26% of advertisers shifted budget for print magazines to search; 23% from direct mail; 18% from print newspaper; 15% from website development; and 7% from email marketíng.
One of the reasons for this is obviously the effectiveness of the channel. In the same study, SEMPO found that respondents viewed marketing online efforts as their strongest tactic or best ROI. 63% of respondents saw paid search as the best return on investment in terms of marketing or advertising efforts; 49% for organic SEO; 43% for email marketíng; 12% for conferences and exhibitions; 11% for public relations; and 6% for print magazines.
Another reason for the shift in marketing dollars, which can be used as ammunition when you are trying to convince your higher-ups to go with a search engine optimization company, is the ultimate accountability that goes along with online marketing: the data that indicates success or failure of your SEO campaign is of the black-or-white variety.
When describing the effectiveness of a company’s marketing strategy, there is often an old sentiment tossed around – “I know that half of my marketing is not working, just not which half.” Because of the analytics involved in search engine optimization, your company higher-ups can take comfort in the fact that this is not another marketing initiative that will self-perpetuate indefinitely – the metrics involved in your SEO campaign will demonstrate that it is working, justifying the continued expenditure.
When trying to get buy-in from upper management, you also have a formidable weapon in the actions, or inaction, of your competitors. If your hated rivals are actively embracing the tools offered by a search engine optimization company, there will be a tendency among upper management not to want to let them get too far ahead. If none of your top competitors appear to be actively pursuing this channel, your company can gain traction before your rivals do and thus gain the competitive edge. Whichever the case, it is now much easier to present a compelling argument to pursue an SEO campaign.
Sales Department
There is often a mutual suspicion and distrust between sales and marketing, but in order for your SEO campaign initiative to be as successful as possible, you should involve sales in the process of selecting a search engine optimization company as early as possible. Achieving buy-in from the salespeople is critical in making certain that the leads that are generated from the website are followed up on as diligently as they should be. By asking sales to assist in important areas of the SEO campaign, like creating an ideal prospect profile and helping to identify targeted keyphrases (after all, they talk to your prospects more often than anyone), you should be able to ensure that when the leads start coming in, your sales team will believe that leads from the website are high-quality and worthy of their immediate attention. After all, without increased revenues, the SEO campaign is not a success – and your salespeople will play a crucial role in determining this.
IT Department
This can be your most difficult challenge. Unlike most other forms of marketing, search engine optimization is a mixture of marketing and technology. Without achieving buy-in, or at least acceptance, from the IT team prior to the launch of an SEO campaign, you are likely to run into problems. IT teams can be particularly protective of their “turf” and may be reluctant to hand over information to your prospective search engine optimization company. This is not inherently bad (it obviously shows dedication to the job), but it can make things difficult when your search engine optimization company is requesting that changes be made to the company website or that analytics platforms be introduced (to name only two likely scenarios).
If you are not used to dealing with your IT department, it would probably serve you well to involve your prospective search engine optimization company in the process of achieving buy-in with them. After all, the vendor should have years of experience in approaching these situations without ruffling feathers. If you choose to approach IT yourself, make it a point to let them know that they will receive a fair share of recognition for the success of the initiative and involve them in how you are defining success. This may be enough to win them over to your side.
Works Cited:
1. U.S. Interactive Marketing Forecast, 2009 – 2014
Discover the Answers to the Top 10 SEO Questions
posted by Luigi_M_Scollo @ 8:00 AM
Friday, February 26, 2010
Discover the Answers to the Top 10 SEO Questions
Any type of online business will strongly benefit from a few SEO techniques. However, everyone and their brother has advice on how to do it. All this ‘expert’ advice can make the simple task of optimizing your site incredibly confusing. Here are some straightforward answers to the most common SEO questions.
1. What is SEO?
SEO stands for search engine optimization. A search engine is a tool many internet users use to find sites that are relevant to their needs. The three biggies when it comes to search engines are Google, Yahoo and MSN. There are however, hundreds of search engines available to internet users. Search engines work by sending out spiders to crawl through the World Wide Web and gather information. If you have the information they’re looking for, in the places they are looking, they’ll find you and place you in their results when a person is looking for your information.
The task of understanding what search engines are looking for and putting it in the right places on your website and in your content, is the essence of search engine optimization. So now you might be asking…what do search engines look for and where do they look for it? The answer is keywords and links. Keywords in your html coding, keywords on your webpage content, keywords in your content, and the number of incoming links you have to your website.
2. How Important is SEO?
Let’s just put it this way. What’s better, a few visitors who stumble upon your website or hundreds of visitors that go to your website with the direct intention of learning more or making a purchase?
With more and more people searching and shopping online, getting on the first page or two of the search engine results can mean the difference between keeping your day job and becoming an internet millionaire.
3. What are Text Links?
Links are just one of the tools you can use to improve your search engine optimization. The more quality links you have, the better your search engine ranking will be. Text links are links that contain only text. Wikipedia is a great place to examine internal text links. The links are contained within a sentence and when a reader clicks on them they are taken to a different page on the same website. The kind of text links you’re looking for will be text links that will take readers from your article, ebook, or web copy to your website.
An excellent tool to generate incoming links is to write copy for online audiences like article directories, blogs, and ezines and insert text links in the copy. Webmasters will link to the content and thus to your site. Additionally, when you allow free reprints of your copy and provided the links are maintained, you’re encouraging links to your website.
4. What are Link Farms and Link Exchanges?
Search engines don’t accept just any old link. The link has to be from a relevant and quality company. This means you don’t want to participate in link farming. If a search engine suspects your links to be lacking, they’ll actually penalize you. Link farming or link exchanging is essentially the process of exchanging reciprocal links with Web sites in order to improve your search engine ranking. A link farm is a Web page that is nothing more than a page of links to other sites. Stay away from link farms. When you generate a link from another site, it had better be relevant and coming from a real web site.
5. What is Duplicate Content?
The definition of duplicate content is web pages that contain substantially the same content. Search engines will penalize you for this. How do you avoid duplicate content? Don’t publish the same article in several locations. There are many tools available online to help you re-write your content so that it is 30%, 40%, and even 50% different. However, the best way to avoid duplicate content is to simply write new content.
6. How do I Find the Right Keywords?
There are several steps to finding the most profitable keywords. The first step is to generally do a bit of brainstorming and come up with a list of keywords you think people will use to find your products. The next step is to research supply and demand for those particular keywords. Supply means how many other websites are using those same keywords and demand is how many people are looking for those particular keywords.
The key is to find keywords with high demand and relatively low supply. There are many effective and useful keyword tools to help you find this information and to generate keyword ideas. Once you decide on a few keywords, it may be useful to do a bit of testing before you commit to them.
7. How do I Optimize My Web Pages?
Placing your keywords in the right location is a good start to optimizing your web pages. Search engines look to the headings, subheadings, domain name, and title of your website. They also look in the content on your page and primarily focus on the first paragraph.
Try to get a domain name with your primary keyword included. When you include your keyword in your URL it tells the search engine spiders immediately what your site is about.
Title Tag. Your title tag is the line of text that appears on search engine results pages that acts as a link to your site. This is a crucial element of your webpage as it describes to your visitors what your page is about.
If you view your source code, your title tag will look something like this:
Keeping your title tags brief, descriptive, up to date, and keyword rich will help to improve the relevance of your site in the eyes of the search engines, as well as giving your potential visitors a good idea of what they can expect from your site.
Meta Tags have lost their importance to the search engines, however, it is still helpful to place your keywords in your meta tags. In your source code they look something like this:
8. Do I Need to Submít My Site to The Search Engines?
The simple answer is – no. Search engine spiders are always out there doing their job and collecting information. Every time you update your website, add content, or change your keywords, the search engines capture the information and record it. However, if you want to be listed in a dírectory, like the DMOZ Open Directory Project, then you will need to submit to those.
9. What are Spiders?
Search engine spiders are also called web crawlers or bots. They’re basically automated programs which scan websites to provide information to search engines often for the purpose of indexing or ranking them.
10. How does Content Help My SEO?
Content is one of the best tools to improve your search engine ranking. It is a great place to emphasize keywords, encourage linking to your site, and boost traffic. The key to content is to make sure you’re offering quality content and you’re updating your website and your content frequently. Content can be provided in many forms including:
• Blogs
• Forums and chat rooms
• Articles
• Reviews
• Case studies
• Reports
• How to guides
• Tutorials
• e-books and much more.
Keyword Fundamentals Will Determine Your Website Success
posted by Luigi_M_Scollo @ 8:00 AM
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Keyword Fundamentals Will Determine Your Website Success
Successful sports teams have engrained in their heads the fundamentals of their sports. Business leaders and coaches alike who dwell on the fundamentals usually have the most successful outcomes. Failure is almost always rooted in a deviation from the fundamentals. So if your website is not delivering clients, perhaps you’re missing the fundamentals.
Part of the answer is no one actually taught you the fundamentals of website success. Most businesses understand the need for a website, few understand the fundamentals. Getting your website to deliver clients is an exercise in fundamentals. First and foremost is a back to basics, grass roots understandng of your market, website style.
Keyword research is the first thing every website owner should have done but most didn’t. With respect to your online business, keyword research equals market research. The coolest thing about being online is that you can absolutely KNOW your market, understand their interests and create an online business and marketing plan relative to your market and their needs.
There are probably hundreds of keyword research tools online that can help you do research. Our advice is to seek out an expert. Getting the data is one thing. Knowing what to do with it is quite a different thing.
Relative to keyword research, here’s what we can find via search engine tools: keywords and keyword phrases, search volumes, total web pages using those keywords, web pages optimized for those keywords, keywords in hypertext (called anchor text) linking to other sites and pages. We can even look at any specific website and determine what keywords they are at least trying to rank for. And of course, type the keyword phrase into a search box will list the top ten sites ranking for that term. The result of such a search is referred to as the SERPS or the Search Engine Results Pages.
The best keywords to use are ones that will generate reasonable traffic AND have very little competition. One of the parameters we seek in our keyword research is to determine the competitiveness of the keyword phrases. Google will tell us how many web pages are indexed for the search term. Just run a search and notice in the upper right of the results that Google will tell you how many pages are indexed with your search keywords. Without getting too technical here, Google and the other major search engines will also tell you how many web pages use those keywords in the page title, an indication that those pages specifically cover the topic of your search. Having keywords in the page title is one of the key ways to optimize a webpage for the keyword. Knowing how many pages are doing this gives you a better idea of how many pages are intentionally using the keywords you’re researching.
KEYWORD STRATEGY
The first thing that has to go is the ego of the site and/or business owner. Unless you show up in the first page of the search engine results, you’re NOBODY! Worse, you can’t push your way through the crowd to get to the top of the SERPS. You can get there by Google sponsored ads – Adwords guarantee your visibility on the SERPS. But still the point is, you’ll pay.
Let’s consider three strategies for beating your competition relative to the search engine results.
DIRECT STRATEGY
Choose the same keywords that your competition is ranking for and go head to head. If they are doing pay-per-click, you do it too. In this scenario, you’ll end up spending a lot of money to achieve and maintain top SERPS positions. If your competition is ranking on good, high traffic terms, plan on spending time, money and resources to get to the same position it may have taken them years to achieve. A direct strategy can get bloody. Ultimately, it is the most obvious choice, the least creative and the stupidest!
INDIRECT STRATEGY
Choose keywords that your competitors didn’t even think of! An indirect strategy is often associated with cross marketing and selling through an indirect channel. If you sell a service or product that your competitors don’t have, you channel your efforts through that market knowing there’s some pull-through relative to your other products and services. Very often you could be sucking business right out from under your competition’ s nose and they don’t even see it!
DIVISIONAL STRATEGY
Find out what keywords your competition is NOT ranking for in the same keyword set and go after them. The divisional strategy is the primary marketing method of niche marketers. Most business owners will equate the word “niche” with the word “small”. On the web, niche site owners are millionaires! Get rid of your pre-conceptions. The web is huge.
We use a two step process for choosing keywords. First, you have to take your direct competition into account. The second part is to look specifically at the search engine optimization parameters to determine which keywords make sense for you to specifically go after.
The leverage a website carries is in part determined by its page rank. Page rank is in large part determined by how many other sites on the web link to yours. Your exposure in the SERPS is in turn affected by your page rank. The reason you need to know this is if the top ten websites all out rank you in terms of page rank, you’re better off choosing another keyword.
Fundamental lesson: Small Fish eat smaller fish to grow bigger.
The Three SEO Factors That Really Matter
posted by Luigi_M_Scollo @ 8:00 AM
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
The Three SEO Factors That Really Matter
Search for a list of SEO factors and you’ll find that most feature at least 50.
That’s 50+ elements of your website that influence your ability to rank in search engines. Sounds complicated, doesn’t it?
Some SEO Consultants will tell you that ranking in search engines is about applying a precise formula to these 50+ elements – about using “special proprietary techniques” fine-tuned to search algorithms to boost your website above the competition.
Not exactly.
There are actually more like 200+ signals that search engines use when ranking websites.
Imagine trying to reverse-engineer something like that? Sounds impossible, right?
That’s because it is.
The good news: it doesn’t matter.
You don’t need to be a computer engineer to rank well in search engines. Relieving, isn’t it?
The truth is that everything boils down to three factors:
1. Search-Friendly Pages
2. Relevant Content
3. A Trusted Website
All of those other factors and elements of SEO? They all fit into one of these three basic categories.
You don’t need to be a search scientist to understand the basics of what’s going on with these three factors and improve them for your website.
1) Search-Friendly Pages
Essentially, this first factor has to do with the technical aspects of how your website and pages work.
Search engines use crawlers (or “bots”) to browse the web by following links. As they browse, these crawlers scan the content they see and store it in databases. These databases form the search engine’s web index – and when a user comes along and enters a search phrase the index is scanned for pages that match.
The basic idea: you want to make sure your pages, and the content that fills them, are visible to search engine crawlers.
There are a few things you should know about crawlers:
• They don’t support JavaScript – so that rollover menu, those drop-down links, etc, might not be visible to search engine crawlers.
• They don’t support Flash (mostly) – while there have been a few developments in this regard recently, Flash websites still aren’t too search engine friendly .
• They can’t “see” – sometimes designers use images instead of HTML text (usually because they want to use a certain font that isn’t web-safe), and search engine crawlers can’t read or index this text. Crawlers can only read code – and if your content isn’t found there it’s essentially invisible to search engines.
• They skimp on resources – it takes a lot of energy and time (and money) to crawl the web (there are a lot of pages out there) so crawlers are usually programmed to be conservative with how far they’ll dive into a page. If your web pages take a long time to load or feature a tremendous amount of content crawlers might leave without scanning/indexing everything.
There are some other things crawlers can’t/won’t do. To get a sense of what they can see on your website try SEO-Browser.com . This tool allows you to enter the address of a web page and see it as search crawlers see it.
The bottom line: you might have the best content in the world, but if crawlers can’t see it you won’t rank for relevant keywords.
2) Relevant Content
This factor is all about the words on your pages.
As we discussed above, the visible content on your pages is stored and searched every time someone uses a search engine. If the keyword or phrase entered doesn’t occur on your page you probably won’t show up.
There are a few key places where you’ll want to use the right language on your pages:
• Title tags
• Headlines
• Body copy
• Anchor text (links pointing to internal pages)
As you browse the web you’ll probably notice that lots of webmasters have gotten a bit, shall we say, “overzealous” with optimizing their content. Title tags stuffed to the brim with dozens of keyword variations is common. Sometimes even the body copy itself is stuffed with keywords in an attempt to boost rankings.
You might be tempted to do this yourself to try and enhance your chances of ranking for a given keyword.
Don’t do it. Please.
Why not? Try reading a page that’s been stuffed with keywords this way. It’s an awful experience, right? Certainly enough to stop your reading flow and send you to another website, isn’t it?
Don’t sacrifice your user’s reading experience in the aim of ranking for a given keyword. It’s not worth it. All of the traffic in the world won’t mean a thing if the users who land at your pages are turned off and leave. Your competitors are just a few painless clicks away.
To learn about what keywords people use when they search for your products/services/info try Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool – enter either your website address or a keyword and this tool will return a líst of related keywords including numbers on how many people search for them.
The bottom line: it’s rare to rank for a keyword that doesn’t occur on your pages so use the language your users do when they search. Don’t overdo it and stuff keywords, though, because you’ll annoy your visitors (and search engines don’t like it either – they might flag you as SPAM).
3) A Trusted Website
When you’ve got 1) search-friendly pages and 2) relevant content it’s still not time to sit back and let the search traffic pour in.
The truth is that most of your competitors will have looked into these factors already – they’re kind of the “low hanging fruit” of SEO, because they’re not usually terribly difficult to work out.
Trust is what sets you apart. It is by far the most important of the three factors.
Before Google came onto the scene using PageRank (a measurement of link popularity) to rank websites, search engines generally based their rankings on the first two factors we’ve discussed.
What was the problem with that approach?
Webmasters are greedy. We can’t help ourselves. We love traffic.
Keyword stuffing was rampant, and rarely did webmasters stick to the honest truth about what their website was relevant to. The result: search results littered with SPAM and just about anything with very little relevance.
The reason links were a better signal to Google was simple – it’s harder to game. While you can control the content/keywords on your website, it’s a lot harder to control it on someone else’s. It’s pretty tough to get someone to link to you against their will.
The model simply worked – Google’s results were better. The other search engines quickly caught on and looked to signals of trust for sorting through the SPAM.
Some signals that search engines use to determine whether they can trust your website:
• Inbound links – quality is more important than quantity here – that’s why those “500 directory links for $49.95″ deals are worthless. The easiest links to get are the least valuable/powerful. A single link from Google.com, for example, would outweigh tens of thousands of weaker links – that’s how much quality matters.
• Website age – if your website is new there’s not much you can do about it without a Delorian and a working flux capacitor (“Marty, the website is in place – now we gotta go back to the future!”). A website that’s been around for a while is simply more trusted by search engines.
• Who you link to – it’s not just about inbound links. Search engines also look at what websites you link to from your pages. If you’re linking out to SPAMMY websites, they might consider you part of that “bad neighborhood” and penalize your website. Be careful who you vouch for.
There are other signals involved, but if you’ve got these three trust factors working in your favor you’re very likely to dominate the competition.
The bottom line: search engines don’t like getting burned by ranking SPAMMY websites. They want to know they can trust your website. Once you’ve got your on-page factors right (#1 and #2 above), you’ll need to build trust signals before your website will rank competitively.
Simple And Successful SEO Strategies – On Page Optimization
posted by Luigi_M_Scollo @ 8:00 AM
Monday, February 22, 2010
Simple And Successful SEO Strategies – On Page Optimization
SEO doesn’t have to be complex and by following these simple on-page optimization techniques you can give your SEO campaign the perfect start.
SEO is often seen as being a difficult and in-depth process, but the reality is that by following some reasonably common sense guidelines it is possible to get good rankings. That’s not to say that optimization is a simple or quick process; there are, unfortunately, no short cuts. Your SEO efforts should be a concerted and long term endeavour, in order for you to enjoy the best possible results, and should incorporate both on-page and off-page optimization techniques. By following the on-page SEO strategies below you can set a strong foundation for all your SEO work.
Keyword Research
Before you begin penning content and writing title and meta tags you first need to research the keywords you will use on each of your pages. Using the wrong keywords can negatively impact your entire campaign, causing you to lose untold hours and days of work and eventually forcing you to concede that you made the wrong decision and start all over again.
The most appropriate and most beneficial keywords are popular enough that they will enjoy regular searches but without being prohibitively competitive or overly generic. A number of keyword research tools exist and your competitors’ websites are a good place to start your early research. Ensure keywords are targeted specifically to the type of content you will provide as well as the service or product you will be selling. More targeted keywords will result in more targeted visitors and targeted visitors mean greater conversion rates and an improved return on your efforts.
Niche And Semantically Related Keywords
A good strategy is to incorporate a reasonable list of competitive keywords with less competitive ones. The more niche keywords will serve you well during the early days of your website and over time you should be able to start competing for the more challenging of the keywords you use. Also incorporate semantically or topically related keywords into your keyword list because the search engines are placing more and more emphasis on those pages that use related keywords as well as primary keywords.
Accessibility And Standards
Site accessibility is an integral part of good website design, but it should also be considered an important factor in any SEO strategy. Using standards based code for your website will help to ensure that anybody that wishes to access and view your website will be able to do so. It will also mean that the spiders used by search engines will be able to access and index your pages effectively ensuring that you get the full credít for your site.
Navigation And Intra-Linking
Your navigation menu and internal links should be prominently placed, easy to see, and easy to follow for the spiders. It is good practice to include a text link from the home page to a compliant sitemap on your site, alleviating any potential problems that might arise from broken links or the use of graphical or flash based navigation menus. You can also consider adding links into the main body of your content, although too many will make the page difficult to read and therefore diminish the overall effectiveness so don’t get too carried away.
Title And Meta Tags
While search engines do not specifically use the meta tags to help assess the value of a page like they once did, meta tags are still critical to good SEO performance. The title and description tags that you add at the top of a page are used in various ways including in the compiling and display of Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). This is the first thing a potential site visitor will see from your site so this mini listing needs to be as effective as any paid advert or PPC ad. Poorly written titles and descriptions can put many readers off viewing your pages so a little time and effort here can have a very positive effect.
Using your keywords in the title and the description is good practice because these will be highlighted in the search results if they were used in the search query itself. This will make your result more prominent and instantly identify your page as being relevant to the user. Don’t needlessly use keywords, however, and don’t throw extra keywords into the description at the cost of a well written, short ad.
Other Formatting Tags
On-page content should always be written with the visitor in mind, although obviously it can still be optimized for search engines. As such, proper page structure is important to your reader as well as to the engines. H1 and H2 tags are an effective way of breaking up page content, and give readers the chance to skim through a page and determine its relevance.
A page should only contain a single H1 tag at the top of the content but can include multiple H2 and H3 tags. Alt tags on images should also be included and these as well as the actual file path to the image itself can include important keywords (but do make sure that they actually make sense and are more than just a keyword thrown in for the sake of SEO).
Page Content Optimization
Finally, we get to the heart of the page – the content itself. Use the keywords you researched for a page, including semantically related keywords. Write as naturally and appealingly as possible while keeping those keywords in mind and don’t get carried away stuffing or cramming them into the body of the text. Not only is this unappealing to readers but is seriously frowned upon by the search engines.
The reader really is the most important aspect of your content. If the majority of your visitors are coming from the search engines, remember that they arrived using specific keywords. This means that they are searching for equally specific information relating to those keywords – make sure you deliver on the promise that you made in your title and description tags.
Top 10 Don’ts for SEO Copywriting
Following in the footsteps of Rand Fishkin and Guy Kawasaki, I decided to come up with my own list of don’ts.
There is no shortage of don’ts when it comes to SEO copywriting. It seems this niche got off to a rough start many years ago when early comers somehow misconstrued the core principles of the trade. Allow me to elaborate on how not to write SEO copy.
1. Don’t shove as many keyphrases into the copy as humanly possible. It’s not about the sheer volume of search terms you include. Yes, Google and other engines should be able to follow what the page is about. Yes, engines are looking to match a searcher’s query with search engine optimized content on your web pages, but which pages land at the top is decided through a series of calculations far more complex than any simple ratio. When you overload copy with keyphrases you sacrifice quality and user experience.
2. Don’t lose site of balance. If SEO copywriting isn’t about the percentage of keywords within the copy, then what is it about? Balance. You have two audiences with SEO copywriting: the search engines and your site visitors. But surprisingly, the balance doesn’t come with serving both masters well. The balance comes in how much you cater to the engines. You see, your site visitors always come first. However, if you write with too little focus on the engines, you won’t see good rankings. If you put too much focus on the engines, you’ll start to lose your target audience. Balance. Always balance.
3. Don’t let someone else choose the keywords. If keyword research isn’t a service you offer, an SEO firm, keyword specialist or some other professional that your client hires will have to conduct the research. Don’t just accept keyphrases these folks toss your way. Ask to see the entire list with recommendations as to which terms would be best strategically. Then you, as the professional writer, can decide which will also work best within the copy.
4. Don’t sacrifice flow for numbers. This is a follow-up to number three and is a major issue with bad SEO copywriting. SEOs or clients sometimes insist on using hacked-up search phrases that simply don’t work in a normal sentence. An example? “Candies samples free.” Many copywriters will just grin and bear it, sacrificing quality and flow for the sake of competitive values or other numbers. The result is often some obnoxious sentence like, “If you’re looking for candies samples free, you’ve come to the right place!” Forcing a phrase into the copy at all costs never turns out well.
5. Don’t use keyphrases that don’t apply to the page. If you operate a site about wedding receptions, don’t try to force a search term about wedding dresses into the copy just because it pulls a lot of traffic. (A) Unless you sell, alter or design wedding dresses, it won’t be applicable. (B) Even if you manage to get the page ranked well for the phrase [wedding dresses], once the visitor clicks to your site and realizes you have nothing to do with wedding dresses, they will leave. It’s a waste of time and effort and it creates a poor user experience.
6. Don’t use misspellings and correct spellings on the same page. I fully understand that the misspellings of keyphrases can be valuable search terms. However, to mix correct spellings and misspellings within the same page of copy looks like you’ve got a bunch of typos in the content. It’s just not professional. Some writers will go for the old, “We rent limousines (sometimes spelled limosenes) for the most affordable prices in town.” I don’t care for that approach. It’s just not natural. Would you ever see brochure or newspaper copy that reads that way? I think not.
7. Don’t use keyphrases the exact same way every time. This is how we end up with horrible SEO copy that sounds like a 4th grader wrote it. (See #4.) There are lots of ways to use keywords in copy, not just one. In order to sound natural, you have to get creative with your keyphrase use. One way is to break up phrases using punctuation. Since search engines don’t pay attention to basic punctuation marks, you can easily write something using the search term [real estate Hawaii] that reads like this: “Currently there is an impressive selection of available real estate. Hawaii listings can be.” See? “Real estate” is at the end of the first sentence and “Hawaii” is at the beginning of the second sentence. The engines ignore the period so there’s no problem.
8. Don’t use all types of search phrases for every situation. There are many ways in which this “don’t” applies. One quick example is that of an ecommerce site. It wouldn’t be advisable to use specific, long-tail keyphrases on the home page of your site. They are much too specific in most cases and are better suited for individual product pages. Broader terms are typically best for an ecommerce home page. If you don’t understand the best applications for the various types of keywords, you’re likely to have lackluster results.
9. Don’t neglect ALT tags/image attributes. These tags are the ones associated with images on your pages and they carry a good deal of weight especially if the image is used as a link. The ALT text counts the same as anchor text in a text-based link. Depending on a few different factors, ALT text may be a good place for those misspellings mentioned in #6.
10. Don’t forget the chain of protocol. There’s a method to the SEO copywriting madness. The idea is not to get as many different keyphrases onto a page as possible. Just the opposite, in fact. Rather than having 12 different search terms used only one time each, you need to use two to four keyphrases (depending on the length of your copy) per page. The title, META tags, ALT tags, other coding elements and on-page copy need to support each other as far as keyphrase use goes. Your goal is to let the engines know that you have original, relevant content about a narrow topic.
Unless you have an exceptional number of back links built up, just mentioning [dark chocolate], [chocolate strawberries], [chocolate chip cookies], [chocolate cake], [chocolate desserts], [organic chocolate] and [chocolate cheesecake] once each on a web page isn’t likely to do a lot of good. Instead, pick two or three terms which are closely related and use them several times each along with mentioning them in your tags.
When you avoid making common mistakes, you’ll find your SEO copywriting flows much better, is more natural-sounding and ranks higher, too.
Top 5 SEO Copywriting Mistakes That Will Cost You Money
posted by Luigi_M_Scollo @ 8:00 AM
Friday, February 19, 2010
Top 5 SEO Copywriting Mistakes That Will Cost You Money
Just as there are different ways of writing for novels, for advertising and for films, there is a way to write for the Internet. To find content on the web we use search engines. To make sure the search engines find our content we optimize it. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) copywriting is writing content that the reader wants to read and will be easily found and rank well with search engines.
The object of writing for the Internet is to get the reader to use your content to click through to your website. If they don’t get to your website, they can’t look at your products or services and you will have lost a potential customer. Here are a few mistakes that you’ll want to avoid.
Mistake #1 – Have a Boring Or Vague Title
This is a very important mistake not to make. If they don’t even look at your article, all your time and effort are wasted. If you provide an attention grabbing title, one that makes them curious enough to open your article, you’re halfway there.
Here are just a few ideas to get you thinking: Use titles that describe the content of your article but are short and concise; Use keywords in your title that people might be searching for; People can’t resist articles with lists or tips such as, “Top 10 Copywriting Mistakes” or “Top Tips on Getting Your Articles Read”; and “How to” articles are popular as well.
The bottom line here is to put some thought into your title. Think about how to get a reader’s attention.
Mistake #2 – Create Bland Content
From beginning to end – try to keep it interesting. Make reading your article a pleasurable experience for your reader. Here are a few suggestions.
Make it fun, relevant and grammatically correct. Nothing pulls the reader out of a story more than bad grammar and misspelled words.
Use short sentences and try to limit paragraphs to two or three lines. Concentrate on writing rich and appropriate copy rather than just practical words.
Have a sense of humor. This gives your articles personality. Don’t give a sales pitch – use a call to action. The purpose of your article is to get your reader to get to your website. Your writing could include a reason for them to find more information, either from another article that you’ve written or from your website.
“Content is king”. If you keep this in mind, you’ll be ahead of the game. Search engines love well-written and useful content. So do readers.
Mistake #3 – Make Your Article As Hard To Read As Possible
Every post should be easy to scan. That means your reader should be able to easily scan your article and find headings that will tell them what the section is about. You can use numbered lists and bullets to organize your ideas so they are quickly read. If you italicize, bold or underline a word, the search engine assumes that it’s a keyword. You can use this to your advantage. However, if you use these tags a lot or if you use them on non-keywords, you’ll confuse the search engines and lose any advantage you would have gained.
The other thing that makes a page easy to scan is short paragraphs. When you look at your copy on the page, you should see a lot of white space. Looking at a page that’s completely filled with words is intimidating to a reader. You want to make it as friendly and welcoming and as easy to read as possible.
Mistake #4 – Misuse Keywords
Keywords are at the core of writing for the web. You should research and know your keywords. Here are a few suggestions about keywords:
• Target a set of keywords in every post but don’t use them more than three or four times on a page. If you use the same keywords again and again, search engines can tell that the article isn’t very useful.
• Use a wide variety of words that pertain to your topic.
• Use synonyms of your keywords in addition to the keywords.
• Don’t stick to a standard keyword density for every article or post. You want your words to flow naturally, and overuse of keywords makes your copy sound forced.
• Review your keywords every so often. Sometimes your business changes and you want your articles to change also.
If you provide your reader with content that lets them learn or experience something, you’ll have a happy reader. If you provide the search engines with good keywords and a variety of them, you’ll have a happy search engine.
Mistake #5 – Try To Trick the Search Engines
Practicing questionable tactics like cloaking and using hidden text is a bad idea. The last thing you want is to get your site banned. These kinds of tricks will do it. So can using hidden links, link farms, linking to bad sites, distributing viruses and sending spam. Don’t try to trick the search engines and don’t work with any companies that use these techniques.
Overcoming these common mistakes can give you head start when creating effective content on the Internet. SEO copywriting requires effort. Putting content on your site and distributing it on the web takes time. If you work at it over time and create lots of valuable content, effectively “brandcasting” your site, you’ll be rewarded with more traffíc.
Search Engine Optimization SEO is No Place for Amateurs
posted by Luigi_M_Scollo @ 8:00 AM
Thursday, February 18, 2010
SEO is No Place for Amateurs
How come everybody nowadays is an SEO Expert?
Let’s face it; not a day goes by where we don’t see someone offering their services as a Search Engine Optimization specialist. The strange thing is however, many of the people offering such services on the various forums tend to have no runs on the board themselves.
Of course, I’m not saying there aren’t a great deal of reputable internet marketing services out there, but they are becoming increasingly outnumbered by those with little or no background at all, and it is these people and their companies which are highly unlikely to ever produce satisfactory results for their clients.
Perhaps one should bear in mind that there is no difference between investing your money in internet marketing, and investing your money in a regular market. In both cases you need to measure your results just as you need to target the correct audience. For example, you wouldn’t even consider wasting your money by advertising your product or your service in a newspaper that is completely irrelevant to your target market. Advertising is done for one purpose and one purpose only, and that is to bring in a return on your investment, irrespective of whether the advertising is done online or offline.
Why You Should Avoid the Amateurs
Essentially, you need to bear in mind that while any Tom, Dick, and Harry can learn about search engine optimization, it takes several years of dedication, practice, and careful analysis, in order to fully understand the different techniques, and how to apply different techniques to different types of business.
The bottom line is; a SEO campaign is in fact a highly intensive process that starts out with intense keyword research in order to establish which keywords are the most likely to produce maximum results for a website. Once the ideal keywords have been established, it can be incredibly tempting to simply spread them around on your website and hope for the best. However, in most cases you’ll find that the most popular keywords also have the most competition.
As such, why bother targeting particular key words, irrespective of how popular they are, if there’s virtually no chance they are going to help in terms of ranking? In fact, you could end up waiting for several months before the major search engines start recognizing your website.
On the other hand, a specialist who is highly skilled in internet marketing will be aware of which relevant keywords and keyword phrases will help to improve a website’s ranking. Likewise, a true professional will also know where the keywords and keyword phrases should be placed on a website in order for them to have the maximum amount of impact, without being penalized for keyword stuffing.
Onsite optimization of keywords is notoriously time consuming if it’s being done properly. But if your goal is to give a website a boost in search engine ranking, then this optimization process needs to be continued off-site as well. Here again, a competent SEO professional will know exactly how to go about implementing a successful link building campaign, including article marketing, submittíng articles to directories, taking advantage of several social networking sites, and also social book marking.
Furthermore, because a professional SEO specialist appreciates the importance of being able to get a good return on investment, they will also make use of Analytics tools in order to track conversions and monitor the success of an internet marketing campaign. Bear in mind, that these tools are essential in order to fine tune any good SEO campaign.
Steer Clear of Internet Marketing Fraudsters
Unfortunately, but also to be expected, the internet is full of undesirable people who focus entirely on targeting honorable businesses by means of providing them with false promises regarding guaranteed results. These people will more often than not guarantee that they will get your website to the top of the search rankings by using specific keywords. However, in most cases, they simply use keywords which are so rarely used, they show at the top of search rankings simply because they have no competition – no one uses them.
Obviously, if no one is ever typing that keyword into the search box, then why waste money on it? One of the easiest ways to determine whether or not an internet marketing expert is in fact legitimate, is that the legitimate ones don’t ever provide any guarantees with regards to getting you in the top spot on search results. This is because they know that no one can guarantee such results due to a number of reasons, such as algorithms which change continuously.
How to Avoid the Wrong Internet Marketing Service
First and foremost, you need to ask the right questions:
1. You need to determine how long the company has been involved with Internet marketing.
2. You should ask to see testimonials from past clients.
3. You should search online for their services. In fact, you should attempt to find their website by using keywords and keyword phrases which are relevant to the services they provide. Obviously, if you fail to find them on the first page of Google search results, then your alarm bells should start ringing. For example, if you were considering using the services of Sunshine Coast Internet Marketing Company, you could do a search for Sunshine Coast Internet marketing, internet marketing Sunshine Coast, etc.
The most important thing of all is that you acknowledge the fact that going with the wrong internet marketing company can end up costing you a considerable amount of money for nothing. On the other hand, if you choose to use the services of a reputable company, you can almost be certain that your website will end up ranking much higher than it did before.
Putting SEO Under the Microscope
There is not a day that goes by that people recommending search engine optimization (SEO) don’t come up with yet another interesting idea or opinion on a topic in their field. They are all so focused on structures and procedures that they often forget that not every one agrees with their viewpoints and practices – that is, if their technical mumbo-jumbo can be understood.
The following are 5 SEO topics that are frequently discussed and disagreed upon:
1 – The Importance of Content Structure & Keywords
While keywords may add great value from a technical, algorithmic ranking perspective, their presence may not always entice the audience to explore the site they are visiting. The content may seem boring and unappealing, rather than grabbing and fascinating. In that case, the psychological triggers that will tell the reader to continue browsing will be missing, as will the desire to share the information with their friends and family.
SEO experts won’t ever agree on which is more important when it comes to keywords and compelling content. In the end, it will be up to the website owner or manager to decide what is more important to him: search engine rankings or sales.
2 – Pro or Con Reciprocal Link Exchange
A ‘reciprocal link exchange’ is an effective and efficient way of driving traffic to a website and improving the search engine placement of participating websites. At least, that is what some experts believe, while others are fearful and refuse to swap any kind of link that may refer to their business.
Artificially manipulating links may not be the best SEO idea on the market, but there is definitely nothing wrong with link trading programs that exchange links of companies endorsing a relationship, or business related directories.
If you do decide to participate in a link exchange, check the links regularly and report the dead ones to the webmaster so they can either be fixed or removed.
3 – Should the H1 Headline and Title Tag Match – or Not?
Many SEO consultants are skeptical when they notice sites whose H1 header is different from the title tag. One may wonder what the reasoning may be, because this action may confuse and upset the audience. Users click on a certain headline because they are interested in its content, yet when the search result is complete, and the header and title tag do not match, they may find themselves confronted with a completely different message, which may be something they are not interested in. That is very disappointing for the user, even if it may result in a higher ranking.
4 – The Relevance of a Website’s Age
Although many web designers believe that the age and history of a website are pertinent, it is not quite clear if search engines actually do use an ‘age’ or an ‘age of links’ metric to inflate incumbent rankings. Search engines check keywords, pay-per-click, link building and other SEO features and don’t necessarily verify when a website was built. All they care about is how user friendly and SEO strong the site is, which means that a younger, highly efficient site should absolutely be able to compete with more mature competitors.
5 – Reporting a Competitor’s Spam Activities
Spam is a reality and spammers should be reported. At least, that is what a number of SEO specialists would argue. Others may disagree and point out that those who are extremely vocal about competitors’ manipulative tactics to enhance search engine ranking are usually the ones abusing it the most. All they are trying to do is shift the focus away from them.
Anyone reporting spam should not publicly announce their actions because, even if spammers are breaking guidelines, the SEO community is vehement about socially shunning those violating the “code of silence”. As unethical as this blackmail may seem, it should not stop you from warning the search engines about illegal activities and, at the same time, reap some of the benefits associated with this. In the end, you will have to market and protect your site and business.
Here are several arguments in favor of spam reporting:
• Taking out spammers will improve the value of the Internet and help search engines provide more accurate search results.
• Your ranking may improve by eliminating a competitor.
• Removing manipulators will leave more room for your site to achieve better rankings, to boost visibility and to boost your sales.
• You can learn from researching spam activities and tactics. You will learn what is inappropriate, what the engines do/don’t tolerate and what penalties can be expected for which unlawful actions.
• As long as you are clean yourself, reporting spammers can gain you trust with the search engines.
These are a few reasons against it:
• If you are engaged in certain types of spam, or unknowingly benefit from it, you can accidentally hurt your website’s ranking.
• It is unethical to blow the whistle on and hurt other SEO specialists. People have been arguing about ethics for centuries and in the end it will be up to each individual to decide what is more important to them and to their website.
Search Engine Optimization and Paid Search: What Should Your Philosophy Be?
posted by Luigi_M_Scollo @ 8:00 AM
Monday, February 15, 2010
Search Engine Optimization and Paid Search: What Should Your Philosophy Be?
As a search engine marketing company, we are often asked by clients and prospects if there’s a basic philosophy when it comes to organic search engine optimization and paid search advertising.
“Is one tactic more favorable than another? How do I know which channel to pursue? Should I do both?”
Without a hard look at your company’s goals and unique situation, there really isn’t a concrete answer to these questions. The true test of pursuing either an SEO campaign or PPC advertising (or both) is knowing that it all boils down to your company philosophy, ROI objectives, budget, and countless other monetary and marketing factors. To determine which, or what combination of both, might provide the most bang for your buck, let’s examine five types of “models” that my search engine marketing company often deals with.
1. SEO Only.
Some clients are strictly interested in kicking off an SEO campaign, usually for a few basic reasons. They often have tried pay-per-click and decided it didn’t work, so they aren’t interested in trying it again in the foreseeable future (whether the initial campaign was set up effectively and the channel should be revisited is a subject for future discussion). They also often feel that since they themselves ignore PPC ads on the right hand side of the page, everybody else must do the same.
While there’s nothing inherently wrong with pursuing search engine optimization exclusively, it can take awhile to achieve rankings for competitive, profitable keyphrases, and there’s simply no way for your search engine marketing company to accurately predict (as they probably can with some degree of accuracy with PPC advertising) exactly what the initial results will be, and precisely when they will appear. However, for companies which do not have an immediate sense of urgency in their marketing initiatives and who for whatever reason do not want to pursue PPC, organic SEO still offers a great, albeit slightly delayed, return on investment.
2. PPC Only.
Alternatively, a search engine marketing company may encounter the clients who are primarily interested in PPC… and nothing else. Even with a limited spend, clients can turn their campaigns on and off as needed, making market segments easier to control than with an SEO campaign. Pay-per-click also allows clients to achieve a somewhat predictable ROI if the campaign is managed effectively: “If I spend X, I’ll get back Y.”
The clients that fall within the ‘PPC advertising only’ category may have worked with a search engine marketing company before, pursuing SEO exclusively, and achieved less than stellar results. Despite all the positive press hyping up what search engine optimization can do for website visibility in recent years, it still tends to be viewed as more voodoo than science by most companies pursuing online marketíng for the first time. With such companies, organic SEO is usually a topic we broach after achieving success with PPC.
3. SEO with PPC Stopgap.
The first and most common question a search engine marketing company may hear concerning an SEO campaign is how long it will take to achieve results. Naturally, clients want to be able to see the investment almost immediately.
This is where the PPC stopgap approach comes in. Though a client’s budget is usually fixed, they are often willing to spend a little more on the front end to see immediate results. Once positive results are evident, PPC spending is scaled back as SEO takes hold. An advantage of this approach to clients with limited budgets is that it can be managed on a very granular level. When top organic results are achieved for a given keyphrase, PPC bidding for that term can cease. Over time, PPC expenditures can theoretically be eliminated entirely. This model appeals to those who want a wide range of coverage and immediate results but have a fixed monthly budget that they do not control.
4. Hybrid Model.
A hybrid model is similar to a stopgap model, except that the client has no intention of eventually leaving the PPC arena entirely. Rather, the client has their search engine marketing company do a full on optimization AND paid search campaign at the outset, with the expectation that PPC costs will be reduced but not eliminated as the organic campaign takes hold.
In this model, a client recognizes that in an organic SEO campaign, they will be limited in the number of keyphrases that they can target by the amount of real estate on their website. With a PPC campaign, however, there is no downside to targeting thousands upon thousands of relevant “long tail” keyphrases, that is, search terms that are comprised of longer strings of words. Using the hybrid model, a company removes keyphrases from the PPC campaign on a granular level as they achieve top organic results for those phrases, but continue to bid on keyphrases that the site does not currently target.
5. Full Out SEM.
This approach calls for both SEO and PPC initiatives running at full speed. These types of clients are generally those that consider these two efforts as separate ‘beasts’ and frankly believe that showing up highly in both channels is a good thing … as long as the return justifies the spend.
These clients are happy to spend as much as possible with their search engine marketing company and do not usually have a set marketing budget – just strict ROI objectives. As long as each channel is performing within acceptable ranges, they are happy to reap the benefits. Generally, they treat the two disciplines as unique channels and monitor the results independently.
Choosing the Right Model
Which approach is right? It depends (you weren’t expecting a definitive answer, right?). The decision between SEO efforts vs. PPC advertising depends on means, goals, budget, comfort level, corporate restrictions, and many other elements. Keep in mind that these are only five possible models that we often encounter. Many clients do not fit neatly into any of these scenarios. Some clients may start out with one option and evolve into another. Some switch back and forth depending on their own ever-changing situation. The most important thing is to be aware of your options and pursue a path that fits your current goals.
Video SEO – A Neglected Path To Higher Search Rankings
posted by Luigi_M_Scollo @ 8:00 AM
Sunday, February 14, 2010
Video SEO – A Neglected Path To Higher Search Rankings
Video SEO is an underutilized search engine marketing
strategy. Even as videos continue to gain significant
traction in the search engines’ natural listings, most
companies either ignore them, or remain completely unaware
of their potency. That oversight represents a valuable edge
your company can use to leapfrog your competitors in the
organic rankings.
The strategy blends traditional search optimization tactics
with a relatively new platform. With the rise of YouTube,
Revver, Blip, and similar video sites, consumption patterns
have driven the search engines to provide these sites with
greater ranking authority. As long as your primary
objective is clearly established, a video SEO campaign can
have a dramatic effect on your exposure in Google, Yahoo,
and Bing.
In this article, we’ll explain why you should integrate
video SEO into your current search marketing strategy. We
will also provide a few ingredients that will help you
avoid potential pitfalls along the way. Last, you will
learn what to look out for when choosing a video SEO
company that can drive traffic and conversions.
How Video SEO Improves Your Search Exposure
Before Google released their Universal Search platform in
May 2007, their natural listings were dominated by
text-based pages. Videos were rare in the top spots.
Universal Search changed the way Google displayed their
primary index. Google, Yahoo, and Bing now include entries
from their respective video search platforms. What’s more,
popular video-sharing sites have been given higher ranking
authority and increased link weight (we’ll describe this
latter point in a moment).
Video SEO gives you greater exposure in the search engines
through two levers. First, it caters to the algorithm used
for Universal Search. By allowing syndication of your
videos to authoritative video-sharing sites, you will enjoy
more exposure through their increased ranking authority. In
effect, those sites will rank higher, drawing more people
to your videos.
Second, videos that are placed on your site (as opposed to
syndicating them) attract links – both directly and
indirectly. As your videos gain popularity, direct links
will naturally build, pointing to the pages on your site
that host the videos. Indirect links will point from other
sites whose owners have embedded your videos. As a result,
your inbound link profile will continue to grow and
strengthen, lifting your site higher within the search
engines’ organic listings.
3 SEO Video Tips To Capture Higher Search Positions
Your video SEO campaign can only be effective if you
recognize the limitations of the search engines. First,
their algorithms cannot read lips. In order to rank for
your target keywords, they must be available to the search
engines’ spiders in text form. If you’re placing videos on
your site, optimize your titles and surrounding text, and
include an edited transcript of the video. If you’re
syndicating them, optimize your external titles and tags.
Second, focus on inbound links. An effective video SEO
campaign relies on contextually related links pointing from
a wide breadth of sites. Videos that spark a groundswell of
attention – whether through entertainment, information, or
controversy – can achieve this easily.
Third, integrate a social media sharing component. You want
viewers to share your videos with their friends on
Facebook. You want them to “Tweet” about your videos on
Twitter. You want them to bookmark your videos on
StumbleUpon, Digg and Delicious. These social media sites
can form the backbone of your video SEO campaign, driving
waves of inbound links to your site.
Key Factors In Choosing A Video SEO Company
Traditional search optimization is a mature strategy. SEO
specialists have honed their craft for more than a decade.
By contrast, video SEO is still an evolving science. Even
though it leverages the core tenets of a traditional SEO
campaign, the rise of social media and video-sharing sites
have infused video SEO with enormous complexity. Hiring a
video SEO company removes the need to keep up with the
roiling landscape. The key is using the right criteria to
identify a proficient firm.
A professional video SEO company should have an established
track record that shows a keen grasp of the search engines’
organic algorithms. That track record should also
demonstrate an ability to evolve as the algorithms change.
Many search optimization experts were completely unprepared
for the debut of Universal Search. By extension, so too,
were their clients.
Leveraging Video SEO For More Traffic And Higher Conversions
A carefully executed video SEO campaign can sharply
increase your exposure within the search engine’s natural
listings. When implemented as a component of a
multi-pronged search engine marketing campaign, it can
drive more targeted traffic to your site. Targeted traffic
translates into higher conversions. If you are not yet
utilizing video SEO for your site, your current organic
rankings may be more vulnerable than you realize.
Do You Really Want Your Site on Page One of Google?
posted by Luigi_M_Scollo @ 8:00 AM
Saturday, February 13, 2010
Do You Really Want Your Site on Page One of Google?
Do you really want your website on page one of Google for your
chosen keyword phrase(s)? What do you want your online marketing
campaign to accomplish for you?
I asked a potential new SEO Coaching client last week this first
question. From my end of the phone call, it sounded as if he
almost fell out of his chair!
I followed up by asking him if he could ever think of ANY reason
for his website pages NOT to be found on page 1 in the Google
SERPs (search engine results pages).
How ’bout you? Can you think of any reasons you’d NOT want
your pages to be found for your targeted keyword phrases on page
1?
Keep in mind, I’m talking about your chosen keyword search
phrases.
I can think of at least 3 reasons. Maybe you can come up with
some of your own.
Is there Commercial Intent?
Let’s say you have not just a page 1 Google result, but you’re
actually the first result. Here is an important question for you
to ask yourself.
What is the commercial intent of this keyword phrase? Do the
words contained in the keyword phrase give any indication of
someone getting ready to spend money on a product or service
like you offer?
For instance, compare these keyword phrases: Keyword Research,
Keyword Research Specialist and Keyword Research Consultant. The
latter 2 phrases give an indication of someone who is getting
ready to spend money.
You can also Google the Microsoft Commercial Intent Tool
(http://adlab.microsoft.com/Online-Commercial-Intention/) and
consider its results when evaluating your keyword search
phrase choices.
If you are targeting a keyword phrase that has questionable
commercial intention at best, is there any reason to really
be found on page 1? Wouldn’t it be better to target more
appropriate phrases instead?
If there’s no commercial intent, how does that help your online
marketing?
Can you see where I’m going?
How Much Traffic Really Matters
Now, I’m giving you a choice: you can have a first page result
(with commercial intent) and your position number is 4.
Your other choice is a different keyword search phrase with a
second page result, position number 12, also with commercial
intent.
So, the choice is obvious?
Well, I forgot to give you the rest of the details.
The first page choice has monthly search queries for its
phrase of 3,240.
The second page result choice has monthly search queries for
its phrase of 22,167.
Do you still believe that the best choice in this example is the
first page result?
According to numbers from Aaron Wall’s site, approximately 6%
of search users will click on that number 4 result in Google.
That’s 194 visitors in a month.
This is figuring average title and description tags of typical
online marketing ability to convert to a click. “Your mileage
may vary.”
And for that second choice, the second page result? Over 1%
should click on the search result, but let’s use just 1%.
That’s 222 visitors per month.
Last time I checked, 222 is more than 194, so the second page
result trumps the first page result, because the second page
result has much more traffic than can convert to a transaction.
How Many Google AdWords Ads Show for your Chosen Keyword?
If you don’t see many AdWords ads, this should be a warning!
One of 2 problems exist (or both):
1. There isn’t enough traffic for AdWords advertisers to target
the phrase.
2. There isn’t commercial viability for the phrase.
Either way, is a first page result going to help you? Probably
not.
The Value of a Committed Searcher
Want a recipe to waste your time (or your employees’)?
Get a first page result in Google for your keyword search phrase
and place your toll-free phone number in big numbers on the top
right of each of your Web pages.
People clicking the first result in the SERPs are often less
serious than those who go through the first few results or who
continue searching onto the second page.
There may be something to be said for avoiding people who almost
randomly click the first result and who may have impulse control
“issues”.
Now, if you have a large staff to answer your incoming phone
calls AND if your conversion rate from those calls is strong,
then the potential problem I described probably isn’t a problem
for your business.
On the other hand, if you are a solo professional, this strategy
can be hazardous!
How are you going to perform your paid work when you get
“Internet lookiloos” asking you questions they could get
answered, if they would simply read a few words on your
website?
Are these the best potential clients for your services or
products and the best use of your time?
A second page result could bring you more serious potential
customers, people who might be more likely to actually READ your
website content, understand your products or services better and
who might be more likely to convert to a transaction.
It’s sure something to think about. 
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not against first page rankings for
your online marketing. I’m just for thinking a little further
down the road than JUST first page rankings.
The Fundamentals of Search Engine Optimization SEO
posted by Luigi_M_Scollo @ 8:00 AM
Friday, February 12, 2010
The Fundamentals of SEO
Why SEO?
Search engines provide the majority of traffic to websites
across the Internet, regardless of website focus. Therefore, if
your site cannot be properly located and indexed by the leading
search engines, you are missing out on the best opportunity to
drive targeted visitors and potential revenue.
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization or SEO, is the process by which pages
are improved to increase their organic search engine rankings.
This is done by assessing what the individual search engines are
looking for and providing that. The outcome of an SEO Campaign
is to create high organic rankings for the keywords/phrases for
which the client is indeed an authority. This will ultimately
create an increase in targeted traffic. A good SEO campaign
includes the following three aspects:
1. Keyword Analysis
2. Onsite Optimization
3. Offsite Optimization
Keyword analysis is the process by which you analyze and
select keywords based on traffic, competition, and relevance. If
you are not selecting the proper keywords, then the rest of the
optimization is really a lost cause. The text and theme of the
site needs to revolve around these keywords and very much define
how the site appears to both users and search engines.
Onsite optimization deals with changes made to the site
itself. This involves making changes to the text content,
architecture of the site, HTML code, and page layout.
CSS design http://www.webassist.com/dreamweaver-extensions/
css-sculptor/?WAAID=898″) is often recommended when working
to optimize a website as it helps keep important content at the
top of your pages and allows for your pages to be easily and
efficiently crawled by the search engines. This is the most
commonly understood aspect of SEO, but only accounts for about
40% of a site’s rankings. This is where your keywords are placed
throughout the code to show the search engines what your site is
about.
Offsite optimization deals with changes made outside the
scope of the site. This mainly involves increasing the quantity
and quality of inbound links to the site. Approximately 60% of
Google’s current ranking algorithm is based on inbound linking.
Your goal is to maximize the site’s exposure on the Web and get
as many sites as possible to link back to your site.
What is a Good Keyword and What is Not?
This is the ultimate question we have to ask ourselves when
judging keywords. There are many variables you have to take into
account when selecting exactly what keywords your site will be
optimized for. Use the following criteria to determine the
viability of a keyword:
* The estimated amount of searches for the keyword in a 24
hour period
* The number of sites competing for the keyword
* The quality of the sites competing for the keyword
* The ability of the site to support the keyword
* Relevance between keywords
* The target audience of the site
Keep in mind that your number one goal is to accurately depict
what the site is about through the keywords (and the eventual
text content). If your site is not properly described by the
keywords, then either the site is targeted wrong or you’ve
selected the wrong keywords.
Search engines like sites that are targeted to a specific topic.
If a site is spread too thin as far as topic goes, then it will
be much harder to appear as an authority for any one topic.
Search engines do favor large sites, but generally it is better
to have a smaller targeted site than a larger broad site that is
about many topics.
It’s not uncommon to discover site theme issues when doing
keyword selection. Oftentimes, it leads to a reassessment of the
site as a whole (which is a positive). In this way, general
marketing, user experience, and SEO overlap. If you do not feel
your site is targeted towards the correct keywords and themes,
it is important that you re-target the site and its content prior
to optimization. You should understand your audience, the
purpose of your site, and its themes before even starting an SEO
initiative.
It is also common for sites to get caught up in industry jargon.
You have to look at your keywords as your target audience would.
If you’re targeting the general consumer and you use lots of
industry jargon, then you cannot expect much of a return on
investment.
Another thing to watch out for is overly generic keywords. If
you are attempting to optimize your site for keywords that can
mean many other things, you are bringing in a whole lot of new
competition. So, we have a small list now of what to avoid.
* Keywords that are not relevant to each other
* Keywords that do not fit the theme of the site
* Industry jargon, if it is not applicable to the audience
* Keywords that are too generic/overly competitive
META Headers
Optimizing the META header is the first and easiest step in
onsite optimization. There are four main areas that you should
be concerned with:
1. Title
2. Description
3. Keywords
4. Robots
Depending on the keyword selection, the Title should be made up
of the first two keywords. This provides high density and
prominence for both keywords instead of using it all on one. Of
course, the Title should make sense and be descriptive of the
page. The Description borrows the same idea, but expands on it a
little. It is ideal to include both the primary and secondary
keyword in a short sentence describing the page. The Keywords
field is simply a list of the keywords separated by commas with
no spaces in between. The Robots tag tell the search engine
spiders what to do with the page.
Links
“Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by
page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than
the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for
example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes
cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily
and help to make other pages ‘important.’” -Quote from Google’s
website.
Link popularity is one of the most important factors search
engines use in determining where you will rank in the search
engine results (SERPs) for your keywords and phrases, as it
helps them to determine how important or popular your site is
and what its reputation is. Link building, as part of the
offsite optimization process, is the process of finding
related/relevant websites and receiving a link from them to you.
Natural linking occurs when a site has good content that others
will link to without being asked. But to get these links, people
have to know about you. It is a catch 22. Building links has
become pretty sophisticated over the last couple of years. Today
you need a mixture of links from many sources including
articles, press releases, social media, blogs, directories and
others.
10 Things You Need to Know about SEO
I have compiled a list of 10 vital things – from choosing an
expert to instructing your web developer – that every marketer
needs to consider when undertaking search engine optimisation as
part of their marketing mix.
1. Strategy First
Please, don’t ask for a full SEO proposal from an agency until
you have set your strategy. Too often, agencies will respond
with a full proposal, including lots of articles to be created,
sites to be built and links to be implemented without a clear
strategy.
Some sites are more straight forward but others are complex and
would benefit from asking a couple of agencies to get involved
at the research stage – ask them about the strengths and
weaknesses of your site, what they think of your competitors,
and what strategic approach they would take with your site.
To get the best advice from this process, expect to pay the
agencies involved. A small percentage of your online budget
spent on good strategy will save you money in the long term.
Even better, pay two agencies for a strategy recommendation and
then choose the best one for your business!
2. Choosing a Consultant
You need to work with someone who can communicate about SEO in
plain English, someone who can take complicated ideas and
techniques and turn them into something you can understand,
then make a decision on – especially as there are often many
possible solutions to choose from.
Someone with experience in your vertical – such as travel,
finance, retail – as well as several other verticals is
important. An SEO consultant with experience across multiple
types of business, as well as experience that is directly
relevant to you will have better problem solving skills and more
exposure to technologies. Experience in your sector will mean
the consultant will be very helpful in defining your strategy,
understanding terminology, and knowing what your competitors are
doing.
3. Expectations
What are realistic expectations from your investment in SEO?
Too often, we see marketers defining their keyword set or crazy
goals for their site without any basis in how SEO really works.
If you are a law firm, for example, and you want to rank highly
for terms such as “lawyer”, or “barrister”, then you have to
take into account that these are extremely popular and
competitive terms. It might not be achievable, and even if it
is, it’s probably a very hard road to get there.
Be open to advice when setting the goals for your website (which
should be a part of the keyword research period of your SEO
project). If you have a PPC campaign running first, you can use
the keyword data from that campaign to gain an understanding of
what is important for your website.
4. Using the Right Language
Optimising begins with keyword research that helps you
understand the language your customers are using to find your
products and services.
Be realistic. It may sound obvious but, if the words your
customers are using to search are not on your website pages,
then you won’t be found in the search engines for those words.
Similarly, brand words and buzz words are all very nice in
marketing, but if people aren’t using those words to search,
then again you won’t be found.
Be ready to change the language of your site. Be open to the
idea of conforming your website to the language people use.
Optimisation is about including those words in the right areas
of your pages (such as navigation, links, headings, meta tags
and content) so the search engine sees all the right signals to
understand what your site’s pages should be ranked for.
5. Measurement
Rankings are not the only measure of success! For many years,
SEO firms have measured everything on rankings. However, we
recommend using analytics similar to a PPC (paid) search
campaign for a more comprehensive measure of success.
Here is a simple description of how to do that: Take what you
are spending on SEO and put it against traffic and conversions
to work out cost per unique browser, cost per click and cost per
conversion. It’s best to analyse these over a period of six
and/or twelve months to allow for any changes in SEO to come into
effect. This is because the major difference between SEO and PPC
is the implementation time – for SEO, the results will take
months, rather than days.
6. Moving Variables
There are so many moving variables in SEO that it would be
impossible to find one person who knows everything! But a good
SEO consultant is worth their weight in gold. Their value is not
necessarily in the implementation, but in tapping into their
experience to find the right implementation. One tiny piece of
advice from them which may take 10 minutes to explain could be
worth more than a copywriter producing numerous articles for
your site each month.
7. One Agency or Two?
Some agencies have two separate teams working on SEO and PPC.
Some marketers choose two completely different agencies to
handle their SEO and PPC campaigns.
However, the two are very closely related and the results from
one can be useful to the other. For instance, the keyword data
from your PPC campaign can help with your SEO keyword research.
On the flip side, optimising pages for SEO will usually provide
your PPC campaigns with a better quality score. When PPC and SEO
listings are seen together on a search engine, they usually
increase the click-through and conversion rates for both
campaigns.
They go hand in hand, and each can have a positive effect on the
other if done well. And with one agency on both campaigns, they
will have a greater depth of experience with your business,
which can only help you to succeed.
8. Web Developers are not SEO Experts
Finally, a word on expertise. Most web developers say they are
experts in SEO (http://www.dgmmarketing.com.au/
search-engine-optimisation.htm). There is no doubting that many
of them do a reasonable job, but they are not truly specialists
in the area of SEO.
In the same way, I wouldn’t recommend that an SEO specialist
designs your website. They are specialist skills, which both
contribute to the success of your business online.
9. Use of Java Script
Those pesky robots that the major search engines rely on to rank
web pages have until recently imposed some limitations for web
development. While useful code such as Java Script can make your
website really functional – a simple example is a loan
calculator, and many websites’ navigation and links – and thus
attractive to users, the robots often couldn’t follow the code
properly, and thus skipped over it. The major problem was that
commonly, web developers didn’t know that Java Script wasn’t
being read or followed by the robots.
That has changed recently, with Google updating its technology
so that the robots can read and follow Java Script. When the
robots can follow a website’s navigation and links properly, the
SEO rankings are greatly influenced.
10. Flash
Potentially any Flash file can now be indexed, according to
Google, but it still depends on how that Flash site is
constructed. Generally older Flash sites are not seen in the
most effective way by the search engines, though it depends on
the practices of the Flash developer. Many older Flash sites
have overcome this problem by building an underlying version of
the site in html – though this method too has its drawbacks.
Flash sites need to be built like html sites, with multiple
files that optimise each keyword. If you are building a new
Flash site, be sure to consult with an SEO expert before the
developer starts on the build.
Sitemaps and SEO
Creating an HTML sitemap and a XML sitemap for your website
could be the easiest thing you do to improve your exposure on
the web. For those of you who pay close attention to the search
engine optimization (SEO) of your site, this could be the one
thing that gets you onto the first page of Google’s results. For
those who don’t devote too much time on the SEO of their site -
this is a good place to start. By submitting a sitemap to
various search engines, you are telling them that you exist and
what pages your site has to offer the World Wide Web.
There are two types of sitemaps, HTML and XML. An HTML sitemap
provides a useful directory of all the pages that are in your
site. While XML sitemaps play an important role in helping the
search engine “crawl” the various pages of your site. This
Roadmap discusses the benefit of creating both an HTML sitemap
and XML sitemap, and how you can go about creating them using a
sitemap generator.
HTML Sitemaps
An HTML sitemap is a single HTML page that contains links to all
the pages of your website. Normally, this is accessible via a
link in your site footer, where it will be displayed on every
page. With large sites, it is easy to get lost and struggle to
find the page you are looking for. With a well organized HTML
sitemap, your site visitors will be able to use this to easily
find the page they are looking for.
From an SEO perspective, as the search engine’s robot (or
spider) crawls your site indexing pages, it may find some pages
on your site easier using this sitemap, rather than through the
general navigation. Therefore, sitemaps can benefit your site
visitors and even play a role in enhancing your exposure on the
web.
Take a look at WebAssist’s sitemap (http://www.webassist.com/
sitemap.php) to get an idea of what an HTML sitemap looks like.
Notice that each page on the WebAssist website contains a link
to this page in the footer.
XML Sitemaps
HTML sitemaps are designed to benefit your human site visitors,
whereas XML sitemaps are created specifically for the search
engines. All of the most popular search engines including
Google, Yahoo and Ask.com utilize XML sitemaps
(http://www.webassist.com/dreamweaver-extensions/surveyor/?WAAID=898)
as part of their process for indexing the pages of a website. A
good XML sitemap will tell the search engine what pages are in
your site, how often those pages are updated, and when they were
last modified. This way, the search engines know which pages to
revisit more regularly, and are likely to do a better job of
indexing them. Here’s an example of the XML you might include
in your XML sitemap:
Notice that for the index.htm page of this website, we have
provided details regarding the last modified date (
the frequency that this page is updated (
priority of this page in relation to the other pages of our site
(
possible to the search engine, they will be better equipped to
index your site, and give the correct pages the appropriate
attention.
TIP: Be honest about the information you provide in your
sitemap. If a search engine finds that you are not updating your
site as often as your sitemap suggests, they may come back less
often.
Creating both HTML and XML Sitemaps
Creating HTML sitemaps is as easy as creating a basic HTML page
that contains links to all the pages in your site. However, you
need to keep in mind that whenever you create new pages in your
site, you will want to add those links on the sitemap as
well.
Creating XML sitemaps manually can be quite a time consuming
process. However, there are many great sitemap generators out
there to help you automate this. If you Google “sitemap
generator” (http://www.webassist.com/dreamweaver-extensions/
surveyor/?WAAID=898) you will find that there are a number of
free and paid sitemap tools that you can use.
Here at WebAssist, we have developed Surveyor to help you create
both HTML sitemaps and XML sitemaps. Surveyor is a Dreamweaver
extension that you can use as part of your website development.
For Dreamweaver users, this is the easiest and most efficient
way to create sitemaps. Surveyor includes multiple step-by-step
interfaces that guide you through creating your sitemap with all
the necessary details, and then submits your sitemap to the five
most popular search engines on the web. Surveyor even includes a
reminder tool that you can schedule to alert you when it is time
to submit an updated sitemap.
How Often Should I Submit My Sitemap?
You should be in the habit of submitting a sitemap to search
engines a number of times a year. This allows you to update the
search engine on any new pages in your site. If you create new
pages on a regular basis, you may want to submit your sitemap
more frequently.
Conclusion
Both HTML sitemaps and XML sitemaps are a good step in the right
direction to improve your website’s exposure. You will most
likely find your search engine rankings climb after submitting a
sitemap for the first time. However, keep in mind that this is
only one part of search engine optimization, and there is a lot
more you can do to improve how search engines rank the pages on
your site and your website’s discoverability.
Any type of online business can grow through some basic solid SEO techniques. Here are some straight-forward answers to the most common SEO questions.
1. What is SEO?
SEO stands for search engine optimization. A search engine is a tool many internet users use to find sites that are relevant to their needs. The three biggies when it comes to search engines are Google, Yahoo! and MSN (Bing). There are however, hundreds of search engines available to internet users. Search engines work by sending out spiders to crawl through the World Wide Web and gather information. If you have the information they’re looking for, in the places they are looking, they’ll find you and place you in their search engine results page.
The task of understanding what search engines are looking for and putting it in the right places on your website and in your content, is the essence of search engine optimization. So now you might be asking…what do search engines look for and where do they look for it? The answer is keywords and links. Keywords in your html coding, keywords on your webpage content, keywords in your content, and the number of incoming links you have to your website.
2. How important is SEO?
Let’s just put it this way. What’s better? a few visitors who stumble upon your website or hundreds of visitors that go to your website with the direct intention of learning more or making a purchase? With more and more people searching and shopping online, getting on the first page or two of the search engine results can mean the difference between keeping your day job and becoming an internet millionaire.
3. What are text links?
Links are just one of the tools you can use to increase your search engine optimization. The more quality links you have, the better your search engine ranking will be. Text links are links that contain only text. Wikipedia is a great place to examine internal text links. The links are contained within a sentence and when a reader clicks on them they are taken to a different page on the same website. The kind of text links you’re looking for will be text links that will take readers from your article, eBook, or web copy to your website.
An excellent tool to generate incoming links is to write copy for online audiences like article directories, blogs, and ezines and insert text links in the copy. Webmasters will link to the content and thus to your site. Additionally, when you allow free reprints of your copy provided the links are maintained, you’re encouraging links to your website.
4. What are link farms and link exchanges?
Search engines don’t accept just any old link. The link has to be from a relevant and quality company. This means you don’t want to participate in link farming. If a search engine suspects your links to be lacking, they’ll actually penalize you. Link farming or link exchanging is essentially the process of exchanging reciprocal links with Web sites in order to increase your search engine ranking. A link farm is a Web page that is nothing more than a page of links to other sites. Stay away from link farms. When you generate a link from another site, it had better be relevant and coming from a real web site.
5. What is duplicate content?
The definition of duplicate content is web pages that contain substantially the same content. Search engines will penalize you for this. How do you avoid duplicate content? Don’t publish the same article in several locations. There are many tools available online to help you re-write your content so that it is 30%, 40%, and even 50% different. However, the best way to avoid duplicate content is to simply write new content.
6. How do I find the right keywords?
There are several steps to finding the most profitable keywords. The first step is to generally do a bit of brainstorming and come up with a list of keywords you think people will use to find your products and services. The next step is to research supply and demand for those particular keywords. Supply means how many other websites are using those same keywords and demand is how many people are looking for those particular keywords. The key is to find keywords with high demand and relatively low supply. There are many effective and useful keyword tools to help you find this information and to generate keyword ideas. Once you decide on a few keywords, it may be useful to do a bit of testing before you commit to them.
7. How do I optimize my web pages?
Placing your keywords in the right location is a good start to optimizing your web pages. Search engines look to the headings, subheadings, domain name, and title of your website. They also look in the content on your page and primarily focus on the first paragraph. Try to get a domain name with your primary keyword included. When you include your keyword in your URL it tells the search engine spiders immediately what your site is about.
Title Tag: Your title tag is the line of text that appears on search engine results pages that acts as a link to your site. This is a crucial element of your webpage as it describes to your visitors what your page is about. If you view your source code, your title tag will look something like this: <TITLE>Search Engine Optimization Tips</TITLE>. Keep your title tags brief, descriptive, up to date, and keyword rich will help to increase the relevance of your site in the eyes of the search engines, as well as giving your potential visitors a good idea of what they can expect from your site.
Meta Tags: it is helpful to place your keywords in your Meta tags. In your source code they look something like this: <META NAME=”description”
8. Do I need to submit my site to the search engines?
Need? No, Should? Yes!. Search engine spiders are always out there doing their job and collecting information. Every time you update your website, add content, or change your keywords, the search engines capture the information and record it. However, if you want to be listed on a directory, like the DMOZ Open directory project, then you will need to submit to those. You can be reactive, but you should certainly be thinking with a more proactive approach; If you tell them (the search engines) what your links are, your links will be submitted a lot faster and no pages will be missed.
9. What are spiders?
Search engine spiders are also called web crawlers or bot. They’re basically automated programs which scan websites to provide information to search engines often for the purpose of indexing or ranking the pages found.
10. How does content help my SEO?
Content is one of the best tools to improve your search engine ranking. It is a great place to emphasize keywords, encourage linking to your site, and increase traffic. The key to content is to make sure you’re offering quality content and you’re updating your website and your content frequently. Content can be provided in many forms including:
· Blogs
· Forums and chat rooms
· Articles
· Reviews
· Case studies
· Reports
· How to guides
· Tutorials
· E-books
· And much more
Link Web Services: http://www.LinkWebServices.com
Web University: http://WebUniversity.LinkWebServices.com
The Web Store: http://www.LinkWebServices.com/mm5/merchant.mvc
Need to increase website revenues this month? Affiliate programs have been a boon for the Web and a salvation for many Web-prenuers since the beginning of the commercial Internet. There are an endless number of ways to generate revenue from affiliate programs — and just as many sites and solutions to choose from. So finding a reputable and quality program that works within the scope of your business model is a serious challenge. Choose wisely and ’Net riches are yours. Choose poorly and you may be wasting your time, energy and resources. There are more fly-by-nights in this industry than anywhere else.
Website Services Magazine has put together the following list of 50 of the most popular affiliate industry sites on the ’Net — from directories to wildly popular individual programs. Research for this report is provided courtesy of Ranking.com — the Web’s largest provider of website popularity metrics
and detailed website information on over one million online destinations.
Link Web Services: http://www.LinkWebServices.com
Web University: http://WebUniversity.LinkWebServices.com
The Web Store: http://www.LinkWebServices.com/mm5/merchant.mvc
The powerful capabilities of organic search engine optimization (SEO) are now a highly sought after marketing tool by many companies that want to alert customers to their products or services by focusing on certain keyphrases that highlight these offerings. And though SEO has embarked on a meteoric rise in the past few years, other non-traditional forms of marketing are now gaining a great deal of well-deserved credibility as well. More and more marketers are using paid ads to hone in on a potentially profitable client base, while other more traditional channels, such as PR and print ads, appear to be becoming somewhat less effective.
In a recent study (1), Forrester Research found that interactive marketing spending will reach nearly $55 billion by 2014, representing 21% of all marketing spend. And the fact of the matter is that marketers are continuing to place more stock in newer forms of marketing and social media, leaving many higher-ups to wonder if it is time for them to include these channels in their own marketing mixes. And with the help of your search engine optimization company, it’s possible to achieve outstanding rankings and results!
What follows are some common considerations that should be analyzed prior to the launch of an SEO campaign so that you will know what you are getting into, what you will need from your own team and your prospective search engine optimization company, and how to most effectively pursue this particular form of marketing.
Achieving Buy-in
Search engine optimization is unlike many traditional forms of marketing in that several departments must be involved in order for the SEO campaign to be successful. Apart from the obvious need to get buy-in from upper management (unless, of course, you are upper management), you will also need to get buy-in from your sales department and, very importantly, your IT department before pursuing the powerful capabilities your search engine optimization company can bring to the table.
Upper Management
While a well thought out, highly targeted SEO campaign is becoming an increasingly popular marketing tool, many “old school” bigwigs are uncomfortable pursuing something that is completely foreign to them. This is not an indictment of the individual – keep in mind that the traditional marketing methods that the company has likely relied upon (trade shows, direct mail, print advertising, etc.) have been relatively unchanged for decades.
While these traditional marketing channels may have remained relatively stagnant, the allocation of spend for them has not. According to a 2008 SEMPO report, more marketers are shifting their budgets to search rather than spending it on the more traditional channels of the past. Nearly 26% of advertisers shifted budget for print magazines to search; 23% from direct mail; 18% from print newspaper; 15% from website development; and 7% from email marketing.
One of the reasons for this is obviously the effectiveness of the channel. In the same study, SEMPO found that respondents viewed online marketing efforts as their strongest tactic or best ROI. 63% of respondents saw paid search as the best return on investment in terms of marketing or advertising efforts; 49% for organic SEO; 43% for email marketing; 12% for conferences and exhibitions; 11% for public relations; and 6% for print magazines.
Another reason for the shift in marketing dollars, which can be used as ammunition when you are trying to convince your higher-ups to go with a search engine optimization company, is the ultimate accountability that goes along with online marketing: the data that indicates success or failure of your SEO campaign is of the black-or-white variety.
When describing the effectiveness of a company’s marketing strategy, there is often an old sentiment tossed around – “I know that half of my marketing is not working, just not which half.” Because of the analytics involved in search engine optimization, your company higher-ups can take comfort in the fact that this is not another marketing initiative that will self-perpetuate indefinitely – the metrics involved in your SEO campaign will demonstrate that it is working, justifying the continued expenditure.
When trying to get buy-in from upper management, you also have a formidable weapon in the actions, or inaction, of your competitors. If your hated rivals are actively embracing the tools offered by a search engine optimization company, there will be a tendency among upper management not to want to let them get too far ahead. If none of your top competitors appear to be actively pursuing this channel, your company can gain traction before your rivals do and thus gain the competitive edge. Whichever the case, it is now much easier to present a compelling argument to pursue an SEO campaign.
Sales Department
There is often a mutual suspicion and distrust between sales and marketing, but in order for your SEO campaign initiative to be as successful as possible, you should involve sales in the process of selecting a search engine optimization company as early as possible. Achieving buy-in from the salespeople is critical in making certain that the leads that are generated from the website are followed up on as diligently as they should be. By asking sales to assist in important areas of the SEO campaign, like creating an ideal prospect profile and helping to identify targeted keyphrases (after all, they talk to your prospects more often than anyone), you should be able to ensure that when the leads start coming in, your sales team will believe that leads from the website are high-quality and worthy of their immediate attention. After all, without increased revenues, the SEO campaign is not a success – and your salespeople will play a crucial role in determining this.
IT Department
This can be your most difficult challenge. Unlike most other forms of marketing, search engine optimization is a mixture of marketing and technology. Without achieving buy-in, or at least acceptance, from the IT team prior to the launch of an SEO campaign, you are likely to run into problems. IT teams can be particularly protective of their “turf” and may be reluctant to hand over information to your prospective search engine optimization company. This is not inherently bad (it obviously shows dedication to the job), but it can make things difficult when your search engine optimization company is requesting that changes be made to the company website or that analytics platforms be introduced (to name only two likely scenarios).
If you are not used to dealing with your IT department, it would probably serve you well to involve your prospective search engine optimization company in the process of achieving buy-in with them. After all, the vendor should have years of experience in approaching these situations without ruffling feathers. If you choose to approach IT yourself, make it a point to let them know that they will receive a fair share of credit for the success of the initiative and involve them in how you are defining success. This may be enough to win them over to your side.
Leveraging Your Assets
Search engine optimization is not something that should be done in a vacuum if you wish to achieve optimal results, nor is it a discipline in which it is necessary to start from scratch. Many of the pieces necessary for a successful SEO campaign are already in place – it is simply a matter of identifying them and using them (and your search engine optimization company) to their full potential.
Your People
While your search engine optimization company should take the time to understand everything that it possibly can about your business before embarking on your SEO campaign, nobody will ever understand your business better than you and your colleagues. This is why it is important for your search engine optimization company to help you to utilize key people that are vital to the success of the initiative, including people outside the marketing department.
Sales
Salespeople are the front line of your organization – the people who know how to talk to your prospects and understand what is involved in their decision making processes. When it comes to collaborating with your search engine optimization company on keyphrase selection (finding the phrases that will bring highly-motivated prospects to your site), your sales staff can be invaluable. Many companies have names for products or services that are very popular internally but very rarely used on the street, so targeting these phrases during your SEO campaign will not bring you the type of traffic that you seek. Your salespeople (at least the good ones) know how your prospects speak in the real world. A good search engine optimization company will help you to utilize your sales staff – and ensure they feel involved and enthusiastic about the SEO campaign in the process.
Customers
Customers can also be invaluable when it comes to selecting the keyphrases to target for your SEO campaign. Many companies are surprised when they enlist the help of a search engine optimization company to begin a campaign only to discover that their customers do not speak the same language that they do. This is common across just about every industry – most people are very intimately involved in their industries and use proprietary names, acronyms, and other verbiage that is, at the least, confusing to an outsider. Anyone who has ever been dragged along to a work function by a spouse can attest to this – it often sounds as though the employees are speaking animatedly in a foreign language, leaving the reluctant spouse to fend for him or herself. In short, talk to your best customers. Ask them what they would type into a search engine if they were looking for a company that provided what you offer. You will almost certainly be surprised by the responses.
Company Experts
Almost every company can boast that it has industry experts on staff – the ones who design products and services, the ones who implement them, etc. Yet very few companies take advantage of these experts to promote the company as a leader in their respective fields. Since search engines place a premium on valuable, educational content, leveraging your company experts to create articles and whitepapers for your SEO campaign is an excellent way to attain search engine rankings while also providing something of value to your site visitors. Adding this type of content throughout your SEO campaign also allows you the luxury of educating your prospects online so that they will be further down the line in the sales cycle when they eventually decide to make contact.
Your Content
Now that you have learned how to effectively make the best use out of your colleagues, it’s time to take an inventory of the content that is available to you for your SEO campaign initiatives. As mentioned previously, valuable content is held in high regard by engines and visitors alike. Often, however, much of this content never finds its way to the company website for whatever reason. Your search engine optimization company should help you to identify this content, which can include the following:
Whitepapers
Does your company have whitepapers that are used during presentations, at tradeshows, and in other areas but that are not available on your website? If so, you are missing out on a great opportunity to promote your expertise, educate your prospects, and impress the search engines. Most of these whitepapers can be optimized during the SEO campaign for maximum search engine benefit with minimal changes. Even older whitepapers can usually be dusted off by your search engine optimization company and brought up to date at a fraction of the effort that would be involved in creating a new one.
Articles
Similar to whitepapers but typically shorter, articles written by your company experts can be just as beneficial as whitepapers when added to the company site and for the same reason. Unless you have signed away the rights to any articles to the original publishing entity, there is no reason why your search engine optimization company cannot use them on your website for marketing purposes. Older articles, like older whitepapers, can typically be updated with minimal effort.
Press Releases
Your company press releases can also be optimized and utilized on your website. In fact, optimizing press releases prior to their distribution on the newswires is also a good idea. Unlike whitepapers and expert articles, it is usually unnecessary for your search engine optimization company to go back and update press releases during the SEO campaign, since they are historical in nature.
Offline Marketing
Almost every organization has offline marketing materials that are used at trade shows, in sales presentations, or in direct mail. Since this material has (usually) already been vetted by the marketing department, it is usually fit for consumption by the general public. Often, however, these materials are left to rot once they have served their offline purpose, when they could easily be repurposed by your search engine optimization company and used to great effect on the website. Of course, there may be good reasons for this – you may not want to give away your best sales pitch to your competitors by making it public.
Unique Challenges
Although it is wise to make the most out of your existing assets when you are launching an SEO campaign, you should also be aware of some of the unique challenges that are inherent to the online arena. Keeping these challenges in mind as you begin your SEO campaign can make a large difference in your results down the road.
Understanding Searcher Behavior
In marketing, it is accepted that one must grab the prospect’s attention with a compelling message in order to maintain his or her interest. On the Internet, this is paramount. People who are using search engines are, by definition, in a “searching” mode. While this is of course obvious, it is also important to remember that in no other form of marketing is it easier for the searcher to abandon your attempts to attract his or her attention and look elsewhere. Your competitors are a simple click of the ‘back’ button away. In fact, a recent study shows that the average visitor to a website stays for less than three minutes – hardly enough time for him or her to be sold.
Searchers have been conditioned, by the sheer amount of information available, to be impatient when they do not immediately find what it is they are seeking. What does this mean? It means that your pages should offer immediate insight on the common problems that your customers face. If you cannot communicate, within a few seconds, how you understand your prospect and how you are different from the myriad of other firms out there, you have lost them, perhaps forever. With help from your search engine optimization company, take a close look at every page of your website. Do you focus on the user, or do you focus on your company? Do you immediately engage your prospects with your knowledge of what particular business challenges they are facing? If not, it may be time to rethink the most prominent marketing message on your individual pages and devise a new action plan for your SEO campaign.
Redefining “Competition”
Almost every company has a list of four or five companies that it considers to be its primary competitors. These are generally the companies that it believes offer products and services most similar to its own. Often these companies steal employees from one another, and they seem forever concerned with what the other is doing.
On a search engine, however, your definition of competition should be broader. It should include any company that offers the same products or services as your company that outranks you for important terms. Whether or not these companies are on your immediate radar is immaterial – a searcher will not know the difference, nor will he or she care. The Internet is, by and large, a vast and level playing field. There are quite possibly companies that you have never heard of using the Internet almost exclusively to promote their brands. It is important to watch out for these competitors as well as the ones you and your search engine optimization company currently track.
The Role of Patience
Unlike with most marketing channels, search engine optimization has many variables that will be outside of your control and the benefits will not be immediate. Simply put, it takes time to properly optimize a website for optimal search engine performance, and there are no guarantees as to when the engines will re-visit your site and reward you for the efforts of your SEO campaign (although, if you select the right search engine optimization company and play your cards right, it will happen).
The obvious downside is that an SEO campaign can take time before you begin to see your ROI, and unlike most other forms of traditional marketing, the timing can vary greatly. The upside, which people who successfully engage in an SEO campaign realize, is that the ROI is typically much greater than other forms of marketing. It is also important to remember that working with a search engine optimization company is a longer-term investment, which, like other longer-term investments, takes time to mature. If you spend marketing dollars on a print ad, that ad will only be effective for as long as the publication is in the public eye. If you buy banner ads or use pay-per-click advertising, your presence will decline once you stop paying. But a website that’s been properly optimized by a competent, knowledgeable search engine optimization company will likely bring you traffic for years to come.
Works Cited
1. U.S. Interactive Marketing Forecast, 2009 – 2014
Keyword Fundamentals Will Determine Your Website Success
posted by Luigi_M_Scollo @ 11:37 AM
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Successful sports teams have engrained in their heads the fundamentals of their sports. Business leaders and coaches alike who dwell on the fundamentals usually have the most successful outcomes. Failure is almost always rooted in a deviation from the fundamentals. So if your website is not delivering clients, perhaps you’re missing the fundamentals.
Part of the answer is nobody actually taught you the fundamentals of website success. Most businesses understand the need for a website, few understand the fundamentals. Getting your website to deliver clients is an exercise in
Fundamentals. First and foremost is a back to basics, grass roots understanding of your market, website style.
Keyword research is the first thing every website owner should have done but most didn’t. With respect to your online business, keyword research equals market research. The coolest thing about being online is that you can absolutely KNOW your market, understand their interests and create an online business and marketing plan relative to your market and their needs.
There are probably hundreds of keyword research tools online that can help you do your own research. Our advice is to seek out an expert. Getting the data is one thing. Knowing what to do with it is quite a different thing.
Relative to keyword research, here’s what we can find via search engine tools: keywords and keyword phrases, search volumes, total web pages using those keywords, web pages optimized for those keywords, keywords in hypertext (called anchor text) linking to other sites and pages. We can even look at any specific website and determine what keywords they are at least trying to rank for. And of course, type the keyword phrase into a search box will list the top ten sites ranking for that term. The result of such a search is referred to as the SERPS or the Search Engine Results Pages.
The best keywords to use are ones that will generate reasonable traffic AND have very little competition. One of the parameters we seek in our keyword research is to determine the competitiveness of the keyword phrases. Google will tell us how many web pages are indexed for the search term. Just run a search and notice in the upper right of the results that Google will tell you how many pages are indexed with your search keywords. Without getting too technical here, Google and the other major search engines will also tell you how many web pages use those keywords in the page title, an indication that those pages specifically cover the topic of your search. Having keywords in the page title is one of the key ways to optimize a webpage for the keyword. Knowing how many pages are doing this gives you a better idea of how many pages are intentionally using the keywords you’re researching.
The first thing that has to go is the ego of the site and/or business owner. Unless you show up in the first page of the search engine results, you’re NOBODY! Worse, you can’t push your way through the crowd to get to the top of the SERPS. You can get there by Google sponsored ads – AdWords guarantee your visibility on the SERPS. But still the point is, you’ll pay.
Let’s consider three strategies for beating your competition relative to the search engine results.
DIRECT STRATEGY
Choose the same keywords that your competition is ranking for and go head to head. If they are doing pay-per-click, you do it too. In this scenario, you’ll end up spending a lot of money to achieve and maintain top SERPS positions. If your competition is ranking on good, high traffic terms, plan on spending time, money and resources to get to the same position it may have taken them years to achieve. A direct strategy can get bloody. Ultimately, it is the most obvious choice, the least creative and the stupidest!
INDIRECT STRATEGY
Choose keywords that your competitors didn’t even think of! An indirect strategy is often associated with cross marketing and selling through an indirect channel. If you sell a service or product that your competitors don’t have, you channel your efforts through that market knowing there’s some pull-through relative to your other products and services. Very often you could be sucking business right out from under your competition’s nose and they don’t even see it!
DIVISIONAL STRATEGY
Find out what keywords your competition is NOT ranking for in the same keyword set and go after them. The divisional strategy is the primary online marketing method of niche marketers. Most business owners will equate the word “niche” with the word “small”. On the web, niche site owners are millionaires! Get rid of your pre-conceptions. The web is huge.
We use a two step process for choosing keywords. First, you have to take your direct competition into account. The second part is to look specifically at the search engine optimization parameters to determine which keywords make sense for you to specifically go after.
The leverage a website carries is in part determined by its page rank. Page rank is in large part determined by how many other sites on the web link to yours. Your exposure in the SERPS is in turn affected by your page rank. The reason you need to know this is if the top ten websites all out rank you in terms of page rank, you’re better off choosing another keyword.
Fundamental lesson: Small Fish eat smaller fish to grow bigger.
By Matt Tuens (c) 2009
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) writing, as a distinct style, was born in the Internet era and has matured before our very eyes in a relatively short span of time. Although it is evolving and maturing still, and will continuously do so, we can define some of the tried and tested steps of content optimization to help unique pages place at or near the top of search engine rankings.
Some experts go on to say that the goal of SEO is two-fold, with the first objective to put out the appropriate “bait” for search engine spiders and the second to serve up useful information to people who want and need it. Debates about priorities continue among SEO professionals, but it is not a good idea to devalue the human factors in any success formula. The singular goal, then, would be to develop, position and refine content in such a way as to satisfy all visitors to the page and/or site, both human and bot alike.
Why Most SEO Projects Fail and How To Fix Them
posted by Luigi_M_Scollo @ 12:24 PM
Thursday, May 7, 2009
By Mike Tekula (c) 2009
I started in SEO working for an agency that required an annual contract. Clients who wanted to hire them had to be prepared to pay in full upfront for 12 months of service.
That’s a heck of a commitment, isn’t it?
The worst part is that most of the time what the client was “buying” wasn’t
By Scott Van Achte (c) 2009
In Part 1 (http://www.sitepronews.com/2009/04/30/
how-to-optimize-for-google-%e2%80%93-part-1-of-3-2/) and Part 2
of How to Optimize for Google (http://www.sitepronews.com/2009/
05/01/how-to-optimize-for-google-part-2-of-3-2/)I discussed
general website optimization, links, and Google webmaster tools.
In Part 3 we will look at a number of other considerations which
play a role in successful rankings in Google, and also touch on
some tactics which are best avoided.
Completing Optimization: Other Considerations
By Scott Van Achte in Featured
Optimizing for top Google rankings includes a number of factors. In Part 1 of 3 we discussed onsite optimization. In Part 2 we will touch on incoming links as well as using Google Webmaster Tools.
LINKS
In today’s online world search engine rankings can make your business succeed, and while rankings in Yahoo and MSN are very valuable, their combined market value is still less than that of Google. This makes achieving top rankings in Google that much more important.
In this three-part series on How to Optimize for Google we will touch on a number of important aspects for top Google rankings including website optimization, links, Google Webmaster tools, and a number of other
Finding Balance Between SEO and Non-SEO Traffic Generation
posted by Luigi_M_Scollo @ 1:23 PM
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
By Kurt D. Lynn
So much SEO.
You might think, from all the buzz about search engine optimization – SEO – that it offers a cure for all the world’s business ills. Somehow, SEO has been propelled from the backwaters of Internet geekdom into the forefront of modern business marketing. For example, if Google’s own search results are any indication, the interest in SEO yields almost 50% of the interest in general advertising. That level of interest seems way out of proportion to the realities of business advertising.
Peeling Back the Onion: Metrics that Matter to a Good Search Engine Optimization Company
posted by Luigi_M_Scollo @ 11:16 AM
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
By Scott Buresh (c) 2009
“I want to be number one on Google for (insert hyper-competitive keyphrase here).”
It’s usually the first thing we hear in terms of search engine optimization – a company wants to be in that coveted top spot on Google, Yahoo!, Ask, and MSN. No matter the industry or specialty, when companies approach us
By George Peirson (c) 2009
We are going to look at 7 Basics of SEO below. These aren’t the only things you want to know about SEO, but are the areas you should learn first. Some topics will only take you a minute, some will take a little longer, and others will become an ongoing process. But after reading through this list you should have a good handle on where to start and where to proceed next.
SEO Basic 1: Let’s start off with a definition. SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization” and is the process by which you Optimize your web site so that it is positioned well in the search engines. This is not the same thing as designing a site so that it attracts customers and entices them to buy.
SEO is what you do specifically on your site to improve your Search Engine Position. If you do a search on Google for any search term you will be
How Much SEO Do You Need To Get Top Rankings?
posted by Luigi_M_Scollo @ 10:05 AM
Thursday, April 2, 2009
By Titus Hoskins (c) 2009
Perhaps one of the biggest misconceptions, perpetuated by industry SEO experts, is that a website must follow perfect SEO strategies to get top rankings. While adhering to simple common SEO standards does help the search engines both find and index your site more quickly, it doesn’t guarantee by any stretch of the imagination that following those SEO guidelines will propel your site to the top of the rankings.
If only search engine optimization was that easy!
No doubt, there are some SEO faux pas that will do harm to your site’s rankings, especially in Google, the ultimate hall-monitor all puffed up and
Use Your Keywords In Your Titles
A <TITLE> tag is essentially an HTML markup tag whose job is to do exactly that — provide a title for a page. Your Web browser will typically also use this tag to update its title bar.
Search engines use title tags to gather information about your Website. The
Discover The Answers To The Top 10 SEO Questions
posted by Luigi_M_Scollo @ 11:14 AM
Saturday, March 14, 2009
Owning any type of online business will strongly benefit from a few SEO techniques. However, everyone and their brother has advice on how to do it. All this ‘expert’ advice can make the simple task of optimizing your site incredibly confusing.
Here are some straightforward answers to the most common SEO questions.
1. What is SEO?
SEO stands for search engine optimization. A search engine is a tool many internet users use to find sites that are relevant to their needs. The three biggies when it comes to search engines are Google, Yahoo and MSN. There
The Importance of Deep Linking in Your Search Engine Marketing
posted by Luigi_M_Scollo @ 9:36 AM
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
By Trey Pennewell (c) 2009 Links And Traffic
If you are an experienced webmaster then you probably know that creating back links to your website is one of the best things that you can do to improve your Search Engine Ranking Placement (SERP). Google openly discusses the importance that their algorithms place on back links and even recommend that webmasters who want to improve their traffic use back links. Both Yahoo! and MSN are starting to talk openly about the importance of back links in their search algorithms as well.
There are a number of strategies that you can use to create back links to your website. Some of these strategies include emailing webmasters and
Search Engine Optimization and the Three-way Benefit
posted by Luigi_M_Scollo @ 10:50 AM
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Who benefits from using Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
Everyone.
Let me explain.
It can be easy for business owners to look at SEO as an attractive means of improving their position with search engines. This can be a great long-term strategy that really works well for online business, but the benefits don’t stop there.
Your diligence in SEO also benefits the search engines. That’s right. The
One of the ways search engines determine site ranking is to sort through your online content and rank the site based on repeated keywords or phrases.
Content rich websites have found success in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies. While I highly recommend this strategy there is another viewpoint that is less dependent on content for exposure for site rankings.
Some webmasters are strong proponents of non-content SEO strategies.
Ten Website Design Rules For High Search Engine Rankings
posted by Luigi_M_Scollo @ 11:21 AM
Friday, February 13, 2009
Ten Website Design Rules
For High Search Engine Rankings
By Case Stevens (c) 2009
While millions of people run some sort of website, only a few – it’s estimated at only 1 to 2% – are really successful in accomplishing what they want on the Net.
The main reason for this is the lack of well defined goals and the necessary focus to achieve them. A great plan goes a long way. Part of a good plan is web design.
Successful website design lets your visitors focus on the most important part of your website: the content.
Whatever the content is, sales pages or valuable information, great website
Four Simple SEO Tips for Good Search Engine Rankings
posted by Luigi_M_Scollo @ 11:12 AM
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Making simple changes to a website to improve search engine rankings and drive traffic is not as complicated as it sounds. This article details the factors that can be simply manipulated yet produce big improvements if implemented correctly.
They are worth bookmarking or printing so they can be used in the future as a checklist when creating new pages or reviewing your website.
Thoughts On The Search Engine Industry
posted by Luigi_M_Scollo @ 9:59 AM
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
I thought it might be fun to write what I have noticed recently in the ongoing evolution of the Search Engine industry. To help set the stage – allow me to provide a little background.
That was then…
I was very active in building websites in the mid to late 90′s, I know, I know – that was oh so last century. I learned a great deal about how to help my clients get their websites into good positions on the search engines without using what is referred to today as Blackhat SEO. Eventually my interest in developing websites led to a position in a small dot com where I developed
How Much SEO Do You Need To Get Top Rankings?
posted by Luigi_M_Scollo @ 11:58 AM
Friday, January 23, 2009
Perhaps one of the biggest misconceptions, perpetuated by industry SEO experts, is that a website must follow perfect SEO strategies to get top rankings. While adhering to simple common SEO standards does help the search engines both find and index your site more quickly, it doesn’t guarantee by any stretch of the imagination that following those SEO guidelines will propel your site to the top of the rankings.
If only search engine optimization was that easy!
No doubt, there are some SEO faux pas that will do harm to your site’s rankings, especially in Google, the ultimate hall-monitor all puffed up and
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