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Search Engine Optimization

World’s major SEO companies

Google, AOL, Info Space, Yahoo, Askewest, MSN, AltaVista, Lycos, AllTheWeb, Netscape, Looksmart, Go/ InfoSeek, Overture, NBCi/Snap, Kanoodle, IX Quick, Northern Light, Excite, DMOZ, WiseNut, Teoma, Hog Search, MetaCrawler, Dogpile Web Search Eureka, EuroPages, Free Find, Go.com, Mirago, Nerd World, Northern Light, Open Directory Project, OpenText, Planet Search, Scoot, Starting Point, UK Directory, Webtop, Yellow Web

SEO an Overview

The objective of Search Engine Optimization is to increase web visitor counts by ranking very high in the results of searches using the most appropriate keywords describing the content of your site. This relative ranking is often viewed as a struggle to best use a few keywords, instead of a struggle to out-do your competition. If you search on your target keywords, you will see the leading site in the rankings. All you need to do is to be better than that number one site. This page suggests ways to optimize and improve search engine results with ranking and placement advice, placement hints, tips, and clues to improve your search engine keywords relative to existing leaders. After all, better keyword ranking is your real objective.

It is not enough to simply add META tags and do search engine submission of your site to a million search engine indexes and directories. The first placement step in obtaining significant web visitor counts is to seek first-page search engine results. An early step is to build a great content-rich site. One of the last steps is the proper submission of your great site to the search engine or directory. In the middle is a step that is VITAL if you want to obtain front-page results, and most sites skim past this step because it is forgotten or too complex, but without competent Search Engine Optimization you are destined to be search engine fodder.

There are no Search Engine Optimization secrets — just ranking and placement methodologies to follow in order to beat your competition in obtaining a high ranking for desired search keywords. This site targets improving search engine rankings by using a “follow the leader” approach to keyword selection and page wording. Once you know what keywords and search engine marketing services (not spam) worked for the “leaders”, you can “beat the leader” and do even better! Proper Search Engine Optimization requires that you beat your competition, so knowing the keywords and criterion used by your competition is the most important first step. It will become obvious that good ranking excludes keyword spamming the search engine, and that with the careful selection of your keywords that you will fare well for a little effort. Bruceclay.com offers help, hints, and tips for improving search engine results via a specific search engine keywords placement methodology.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the science of search as it relates to marketing on the web. It is mostly technical in nature, combining programming with business, persuasion, sales, and a love for competitive puzzle solving into a written form capable of maintaining desired revenue goals while achieving high rankings in the organic sections of search engine results pages. It is not just technical, nor copywriting, nor links, nor just search engine submission, but an intricate blend of over a hundred variables into the fabric of a website. It is difficult to accomplish without a formal proven methodology and strong proprietary tools. We offer you a tutorial on all of that and more on these pages…

Before you start, you should understand that top 10 rankings with every single major search engine and directory can be obtained, although very few sites can get there and the effort is often beyond reason. Note: URL ranking results change week-to-week due to competition, so maintaining a top ranking requires constant keywords monitoring and information rework. Search Engine Optimization never rests, much like your competition.

The key information on this page includes how to prepare both you and your site for the search engines, choosing the right keywords, how to analyze your competition, what is submission and how is it best accomplished, when to monitor your ranking, instructions for performing an analysis of your site results, complete with tools and aids. This site covers all basic and advanced strategies and the common mistakes to avoid.

The overall SEO involves:

o Attracting prospects to a web site

o that is properly designed to encourage visitors to browse like Web Site Design

o leads the visitor to a completed transaction by offering products easily and without undue complexity like Web Site Navigation

o Addresses concerns (perceived risks) that can scare off the potential buyer if left unanswered like risk avoidance.

The overall SEO involves

o Attracting prospects to a web site

o That is properly designed to encourage visitors to browse like Web Site Design

o Leads the visitor to a completed transaction by offering products easily and without undue complexity like Web Site Navigation

o Addresses concerns (perceived risks) that can scare off the potential buyer if left unanswered like risk avoidance.

SEO Case Study

o Do you have any intent to sell your product yourself?

o Do you have any intent to sell this product through a traditional retail channel?

o Have you decided to sell this product via the Web?

o Determine What You Have To Sell

o Determine Who Already Needs What You Have To Sell

o Determine What They Will Pay For What You Have To Sell

SEO Guidelines –

o Obtain A Domain Name And Site Host

o Search Engine Marketing Through Links

o Search Engine Marketing Through Public Relations

o Search Engine Marketing Through Banners and Print Media

o Search Engine Marketing Through Strategic Relationships And Reciprocal Links

o Search Engine Marketing Through Email Discussion Groups And News Groups

o Search Engine Marketing Through A Bulk Email Program (Careful!)

o Measure Progress And Change Only One Thing At A Time

o Proceed to Search Engine Placement Tactics and Tools Page

Develop A Website Using These Principles:

Before submission you must have prepared your site for search engine placement. If your site is not prepared for top ranking then a submission service can only give you many, many poor rankings.

Consider techniques for counting visitors and have a demographics collection process (newsletter registration or perhaps a Guest Book or equivalent) for capturing visitor name and email information.

1. It must showcase the need that your product addresses (public interest)

2. It must showcase the solution that you are offering.

3. It must provide instant gratification (for information and access to the solution).

4. It must provide appropriate and timely information (in images and words) to allow the visitor to make a decision. Help them to decide that your product meets their needs.

5. Allow the visitor to buy your product (or, if a service, allow them to contact you).

6. Allow for easy information requests if questions arise anytime, day or night. Always respond promptly!

7. Consider techniques for counting visitors and have a demographics collection process (newsletter registration or perhaps a Guest Book or equivalent) for capturing visitor name and email information.

8. Change the site often (at least once per week) to give users a reason to visit again and again.

9. Consider offering a “gift” to visitors (free is best, perhaps a contest) to have them tell their friends to visit your site. Word of mouth is a powerful tool. We have our own “tell-two-friends” referral script on our site.

10. Have the site be “High Class”. Curb appeal is important in determining if you want surfers to stop and visit. Opinions will be formed early about whether the customer wants to do business with you. Plan improvements.(Regardless of what you may think, every site on the Web is under construction all of the time). Make sure that your web site design does not violate any taboos.

11. Design for the masses. Do not use exceptionally advanced technology unless that is your product. The Web is still connected to a lot of slow computers, and many do not operate on the latest Netscape or Internet Explorer products. Keep it simple and still meet your web site design and promotion goals. The toys must be appropriate to the mission of your web site.

12. Write the text and “storyboard” your site much like creating a good product specification. Use a word processor to lay-out all of your pages. Make sure that the flow is simple for the novice Internet user. Try to keep the body content each Web page to one to two 8½ x 11 sheets of paper, or if heavy information, minimize graphics and limit the size to no more than six pages. Focus on making the message clear. Creativity, and how quickly the page loads, is more important than the use of extra artwork for the sake of “cute”. And when this is done, call a Marketing Consultant first, definitely before you call a web page designer. Message and Placement sell on the web.

13. It is important to consider some aspects of eCommerce: web-based commerce with a human touch is very effective in most cases, especially with 60% to 70% of all shopping carts being abandoned. Do not design around human contact if it increases the ability to sell your products. Factor it into your design. While this may be against the Amazon.com hands-off model, some firms like Face Time Communications are integrating AOL Instant Massager with their website eCommerce applications to answer last minute questions. Reports are that buy decisions increase six-fold if questions are answered. Customer Service is evolving, and it is alive and well on the web.

14. Double check the site architectural concepts.

15. There are obviously “things” that a Web architect must know. Much of this is contained in this site and many others linked to this site below. You still need to have a minds-eye image of what is possible before you spend too much money doing it. We recommend that for optimal search engine placement that you start by reviewing this site once, and then on the second pass spend more time on the Web by “surfing” my links and those linked from our links.

16. For all sites that you identify, go to their website and visit their home page. Choose the browser option to view their Home Page HTML source (this might be a complex process). Scan these sites for search engine placement keywords and terms to make sure that your list is as complete.

17. Marketing is everything. It brings potential buyers to your door. But proper design is vital, because without effective design the buyers who see your home page will leave before it finishes loading. The average home page loads in 48 seconds at 28.8, and the average visitor stays at a home page for 35 seconds, obviously many leave before the page finishes loading. We can learn from this.

18. Create/Design the site by taking content and art, mixing it with navigation and style, testing it on family and friends, and always listen to comments, grunts, pregnant pauses, and blank stares. Specific advice on development of a page is at our Quality Site Criteria page and we suggest that you visit it now, before you code your first Web page! Try not to copy a page layout from another site. Use your own words, ideas, and artwork whenever possible, making sure that the message in the image matches your text. Make sure that the visitor knows what you are saying/selling at all times.

19. Carefully consider the use of database tools, visual tools, and java tools. These are areas receiving a lot of interest, and technology work, and they might be right for your site. Carefully consider your options since some could adversely affect search engine placement.

20. Use the smallest graphics that you can to relay your message. It is estimated that 20% of all Web users surf the Web without graphics enabled! But always have graphics if it helps sell your product. Don’t add graphics just to be neat — an animated mail box is really not something to add to a commercial site.

Follow these rules (mandatory for Free Site Listings)

o Make sure the site is rated for Family Viewing (keep it clean).

o Be courteous to other authors at all times — respect their copyrights, trademarks, and intellectual property.

o Make sure the site is NOT a multi-level marketing site, a network marketing site, or a get rich quick site (although some MLM sites can get into the free lists if they are not moderated).

o Make sure the site is NOT graphically overburdened. Minimize the use of CAPITAL letters, large fonts, and extensive graphics, especially animation.

o Make sure the site Home Page loads quickly and informs the visitor what you have to offer them right up front. If using sounds, use MIDI files whenever possible instead or WAV files, and default to off unless sounds are short. Be careful, some browsers crash with sound enabled.

o If you entice visitors with a FREE OFFER or CONTEST, make sure you explain how to obtain the gift or prize in an obvious manner. (FREE is good, but contests usually don’t work and there may be legal problems).

o Always choose to communicate information rather than to display wiz-bang nifty technical skills. These gadgets are a no-no to many free sites even if mandatory for some award sites. Animation, although exciting to see sometimes, is a real distraction on most pages and actually decreases sales. Avoid it unless there is a purpose.

o If you are going to be selling a service or product, take the time to establish a merchant account and accept credit cards. The good news is that this is easily implemented with or without a store. The bad news is that it takes effort to set it up. It is strongly suggested that you visit our page on e-commerce considerations and follow those instructions carefully!

Search Engine Placement through Search Engines, Links, and Awards

Before submission you must have prepared your site for search engine placement. If your site is not prepared for top ranking then a submission service can only give you many, many poor rankings.

There are many Web businesses offering to list your site with search engines or directories for FREE for a few sites, and for a small fee for other sites. The key is that over time, the categories change, the registration format changes, and there is a great difference between being submitted and being registered. At present, there is a 25% mortality rate for search engine sites every few months, and those that survive do so by upgrading categories and registration formats.

Search engine placement requires some homework. Before making this commitment, make a written note with the below information:

1. Your Web address (URL) in the form of http://www.yoursite.com

2. Your email address in the form of yourname@yoursite.com

3. The title of your Home Page in the form of “your site -products for (need}”

4. A 40 character product description

5. A ten to twelve word site description (your site TITLE probably)

6. A twenty-five word site description

7. A forty word site description (keep in your paste buffer). Consider using this text at the top of the displayed area on your home page.

8. A list of sixteen to twenty words best describing criteria that a prospective visitor would use in a search engine to find your site

9. A complete list of keywords (up to 1000 characters) sequenced with the most important first (possibly from your HTML Keywords line)

Search Engine Optimization and Design

Building an attractive even beautiful is the goal of most website designers. In the process, sometimes the effectiveness of the website is diminished. We need to keep in mind that our goal is not only to have a beautiful website that will make people want to stay and look around and enjoy, but also a website that will be helpful to the engines in determining what our website is about or what it is relevant to.

Udi Manber, Google vice president overseeing search quality, in response to a question about webpage content evolving to be more search engine friendly explained, “It’s definitely still lacking. I wish people would put more effort into thinking about how other people will find them and putting the right keywords onto their pages.” Popular Mechanics – April 16, 2008

Search engine optimization or SEO is arguably the most essential way to drive targeted traffic to your website because it leads to improved search engine placement. Optimizing the benefits of a well-designed web site will result in much more traffic coming to the website thereby generating income for the company publishing the website. With this fact in mind however, optimizing your website might cost you thousands of dollars if you are not skilled in this area. Good search engine optimization that leads to improved search engine placement will, on the other hand, bring you a much higher return on the investment of either time or money you put into it.

My goal in this article is to give you the basics of search engine optimization so that you can understand it and incorporate it to help you accomplish your task. This will help you to improve your relevancy and search engines rankings for the best results possible through proven search engine optimization techniques.

What are the major mistakes in design

First is is important to remember that search engines are machines and read words they don’t see images or pictures. The most common mistakes form a search engine optimization standpoint are:

Making a website totally in Flash(TM)
Images without alt tags
Minimal or nonexistent meta title or title tag

Flash(TM) to the search engines is just like an image it is invisible although the Flash(TM) may capture the intrigue of the viewer it won’t help the search engine to know what your website is about. While the text display as a part of the Flash(TM) my be rich in keywords and information it will be lost completely to the search engines and you will go unnoticed. Flash(TM) and pictures can be used to enhance a website but the site must have text in order to build relevance for the search engines.

In the same sense images are also invisible, however we can include alt tags that will give the search engines an idea of what the viewer will see. In fact the alt tags can be very helpful since the search engines will place a little more emphasis on the text in alt tags. Don’t go overboard using keyword phrases in the alt tags but use some to help where appropriate.

The title tag as well discuss later is an important place to tell the search engines what your webpage is all about.

Where do we start?

Why is search engine optimization (SEO) so important? SEO is important because this will make your website relevant to your keywords during the search engine ranking process and will lead to improved search engine ranking. This is the reason why some businesses hire an SEO company to do this task.

You can get information on low cost related services anywhere on the internet. However, few are really showing you how to work out an inexpensive plan for improved search engine placement. Some companies will even use antiquated techniques that may slow the process down. Good search engine optimization should help you to start improving the search engine ranking of your website and start driving traffic to it in a matter of days or weeks with expensive processes.

Search engine optimization begins optimally on your website, as you plan and build it. If it was not done at first you are not too late, you can do it after you have it built and go back and revise it to improve the exposure to the search engines and still lead to improved search engine placement. It consists of the following elements referred to as “onsite optimization”.

Keyword Research – choosing the primary and secondary keywords you will use on your website or webpage
Implementing the keywords naturally into important elements in the website header and body.

Keyword Research and Usage

Let’s start first with keyword research. Why is keyword research important? The keyword research helps us to find the keywords that connect us with our targeted audience. They are the words that we want to use on our website in a variety of ways to build relevancy on our webpage so when search engines find our website and view / crawl our pages, they will then index us for those keywords. Once that happens, then when those keywords are typed into the search engine by potential customers, the search engine will then display our site in the search results, which is how they tie us to our targeted audience.

Ideally you will use a reverse search tool that will enable you to type in words you think are keywords people would search for and which will tell you the number of times those keywords were searched for over a given period of time. Depending on the tool you are using and the databases and the search engines they have access to for their search results you will get different numbers in your reverse search results. Your search engine optimization professional will know and have access to these tools and which ones are appropriate for specific uses. These tools can significantly speed up the process of onsite optimization lead to quicker improved search engine placement.

One tool you can use for manual research is http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html Keyword Discovery’s Free Search Term Suggestion Tool. It will limit your results to 100 keywords for any given search. Another manual search tool is http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword SEOBook.com’s Suggestion tool. Both of these manual reverse search tools will allow you to find the keywords that people type into the search engines and how many times they were searched for. Remember keywords are how we connect with our targeted audience.

How Do I Use My Keywords Once we have identified the keywords, next we need to know where and how to use them for improved search engine placement. The first and arguably the most important place to use our keywords would be the title tag for your website. The title tag appears in the header of the page and is the first opportunity we have to tell the search engine what our page is about.

The title tag should be 60 – 80 characters in length and use one or two of the most important and/or relevant keywords for that page and possibly your website domain name, especially if your domain name includes keywords in it. The title tag information appears in the blue header bar at the top of the window and is also used as the title of your listing when your website is displayed in the natural or organic search results.

The meta description should be about 2 – 3 sentences or up to about 200 characters that describe for the customer and the search engine what the webpage is about. In the natural or organic search engine results, this description will be the first choice for the text the search engine displays beneath the title. This description does not appear on the website page when the website is displayed for the visitor but is readable by the search engine and used in the search results primarily.

A third meta tag is the keywords meta tag which is also not displayed to the visitor of the website. The keywords meta tag is a hold over from early methods of search engine optimization, but because it was abused by website developers, it is seldom use by search engines. We still use the keywords meta tag, but most search engines ignore it due to those previous abuses. Some search engines may still evaluate it and you never know when search engines may start to use it again. The Keywords meta tag is simply a list of up to 12 keyword phrases separated by commas.

The example below exclude the angle brackets due to this article being written in HTML but the angle brackets are the less than and greater than signs.

“meta content=”Basic search engine optimizations concepts presented to give business owners and website developers and understanding of good SEO techniques…” name=”description” /” enclosed in angle brackets.

“meta content=”keyword phrase 1,keyword phrase 2,keyword phrase 3,…” name=”keywords” /” enclosed in angle brackets

Your keywords used in the title, description and keywords tags now need to be used on the page to validate to the search engine that your page is actually about what you told the search engine that your page is relevant to. If the search engine doesn’t see any of the keywords on your page, then it can only assume that your page is not relevant to the words you used in the title, description and keywords tags in the header area of the web site.

Now that we know that we need text on the page how can we use that text to help emphasize the relevancy of the keywords on the page? Mechanisms such as header tags for headings using keywords will give more emphasis to keywords. Hyperlinks where the anchor text is a keyword phrase will add relevance to the keyword phrase and since the anchor text and the associated hyperlink reference are indexed by the search engines, using a keyword phrase as the anchor text both on the website and in offsite marketing will increase your ranking for that keyword phrase. Bolding and italics also draw some attention to the keywords for the search engine. Each page needs to have enough text on it to allow that page to demonstrate the relevance of the keywords it displays in the header of the page to the search engine, if true search engine optimization is to be achieved.

Lets take a look at some of the other tags mentioned in the previous paragraph. Header tags alert the search engine to more important text on the page, much like the headline on the page of newspaper does to the reader. A header tag is a tag that contain a “H” and a number between 1 and 7. The lower the number the larger the text and the more important it is to the search engine. H1 tags can be formatted using font tags to control the size or .css files to control the formatting.

Hyperlinks consist of at least two components. The first component is the link destination represented by the term “href” referring to the hyperlink reference and the anchor text located between the beginning and ending anchor tags. An anchor tag is an “a” in angle brackets and ending with “/a” in angle brackets. The beginning tag also include the destination reference. Remember that you you could use a keyword phrase in place of the word home to designate your home page. That keyword phrase would be a link and would help to build relevance for your website for that keyword phrase.

As we use these structures in combination in a natural way we then are able to help the search engine to know what our page is about and also create a page that is functional for the user.

To optimize your website well for the search engines you should use unique meta tags on each page on your website. The keywords should be used in:

The title tag – big three
Meta description
Meta keywords
Header tag – big three
Opening paragraph – about 4% density
Alt tags on all images and using keywords on about 3 images per page
Link / anchor text or hyperlinks – big three
Body of the page – about 4% density (visible text)
Closing paragraph – about 4% density

They should be used in such a way as to feel natural on the page. If the page feels awkward, then look for ways to reword the information on the page and make sure you are not forcing the keywords in too many times. This in combination with other activities to build your page rank are the best ways to get your page listed on page one of the search engines.

These strategies are what we call onsite page optimization. Each page needs to have its own unique page optimization for the content on that page. Don’t make the mistake of using the same title, description and keywords meta tags for every page on your site.

Using these strategies in conjunction with the design of your website will vastly improve your search engine placement.

Search Engine Optimization – What Not To Look For

Have you received emails spam emails from people promising to increase traffic to your website by making you rank high in the SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages)? We get them all the time. As a matter of fact Google states they even get these unwanted solicitations. Here’s an example of an email Google received in the past:

“Dear google.com,
I visited your website and noticed that you are not listed in most of the major search engines and directories…”

Funny huh? But how many people are responding to these ridiculous emails and spending lots of money with hopes that they can increase traffic to their website? What’s worse, many of these companies are actually able to brainwash their clients into thinking they really are benefitting! Companies that use these unethical business practices give the entire SEO (Search Engine Optimization) community a bad reputation.

Two Point Enterprise writes this article about what NOT to look for when shopping for SEO so that you may arm yourself to make an informed choice. We know of no better way to illustrate this article for you than to present a spam email we received from one of these rogue companies. Carefully read the email in the capture below, and then see our comments afterwards.

Click here to see a capture of the email

The subject of the email was “Do You Want Referrals from you Website?” (I guess they were in such a hurry to fire this email off they didn’t even take time to check the spelling.)

The first red flag is your receipt of the email in the first place! Check out Google’s Information for Webmasters and you’ll see that the very first thing they tell you is “Be wary of SEO firms that send you email out of the blue.”

The next thing the author of this spam email tries to do is make a feeble attempt of identifying themselves with real estate agents. Hence the words, “Location, Location, Location”. (Sorry partner, you ain’t jumping in bed with me.) Then they pay credit that you might already have a nice website, but if traffic could be increased could potentially drive millions of customers and billions of dollars to your website. They rule out pay-per-click services apparently without giving credit that real estate is actually one thing pay-per-click can work fairly well with, namely in large cities. Finally, as with all spam emails like this, they believe they have the solution you’ve been looking for!

We couldn’t help but chuckle a little at the next line where they increase the font size and announce, “It’s Here!!!! & Satisfaction is GUARANTEED!!!!!!!!” (One more exclamation point and I think everybody in the office might have wet their pants.) Seriously though Mr. Spam Email Author, what’s here? Is it SEO services with a perpetuating monthly fee to guarantee yourself recurrent income? I hate to crash the party, but SEO was around a long time before you registered your domain on September 24, 2004. And monthly fees were invented a long time ago too. I will give them a little credit for putting a guarantee on your satisfaction rather than your ranking. Rule #2 from Google is, “No one can guarantee #1 ranking.” They don’t tell you how they guarantee your satisfaction in the email though. I’d be surprised if it’s a 100% money back guarantee. I’ll bet they have it set up where they end up pocketing money some way or another. If they can brainwash you into thinking they are doing a good job they don’t have to give any money back.

The next thing this spam email does is make an attempt to establish credibility for themselves. They want you to go to a search engine and search for the massive, non-competitive five keyword phrase “neighborhood prospecting websites for realtors”. If the reader hasn’t deleted the email and flushed it through their recycle bin by now they’ll see that the company that sent this email currently ranks #1 for this search. We plugged the five word phrase into a Google AdWords campaign and put a bid of $5 on it. After submitting, Google automatically adjusted the price down to $0.02 (because that’s how much it’s worth), assigned it the top position on the page (because there is no competition for that phrase), and estimated that our cost per day for the phrase would be $0.00 (because nobody in the world would be searching for that). So big deal guys if you are the #1 result for “neighborhood prospecting websites for realtors”. That’s because nobody else wants it!

Now look down a little further and see what we have here! Well if it isn’t an intellectual property and trademark infringement against the search engines, Google, MSN, and Yahoo!. I’d be willing to bet that these search engines didn’t authorize any use of their registered trademarks. Also I don’t see any notice at the bottom identifying the rightful owners of the trademarks, nor do I see the author disclaim himself from any affiliation with these search engines. Subtle little images like this can mislead the reader into thinking some kind of special relationship, or affiliation, has been radified with the search engines. Google says “beware of SEOs that allege a ‘special relationship’ with Google”. My guess is that Google has no plans of entering into some sort of strategic partnership with these whiz kids any time soon.

Next we have the sign-up button where we can make our monthly donation to these people. How thoughtful of them to make the button so nice and big. We don’t want to miss when we try to click it with our mouse!

At the very bottom they try to stay with the rules and offer you and itsy bitsy link to opt out of future emails from them. Unless they are conpensating you, why should you have to take time out of your day to opt out of this email you didn’t ask for in the first place? Good luck with that, by the way. Two weeks ago we received this email and we asked them to stop sending us spam. They replied and told us we received it because we signed up for something, which we know damn well we didn’t. However, we cut them some slack and dismissed it. Then on 3-2-2006 we received this same email again after we told them 2 weeks before to stop emailing us!

Hope you enjoyed the article! Good luck with your SEO!

Tips On Doing Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization or SEO, is the process of or a series of steps that one takes in an effort to make their website or other online assets more visible to others when others are searching for content online using search engines. This is also often referred to as positioning one’s assets to be found by “organic” searches as opposed to “Pay Per Click” (PPC) where you pay a fee to the search engines themselves so that they will help your site to stand out and be found.

So what actually is involved in this process called SEO? What are the steps you want to take to build out your online assets so as to be more easily found? My list below is by no means complete but it will serve to give you a solid overview to tasks you can complete to make your site more visible.

Search Engine Registration: The first thing you will want to do is to get your website registered with the search engines themselves. Most search engines offer you a method whereby you can tell them about your site and site ownership and you can also tell them what webpages exist on your website through submission of a “Sitemap.xml” file to them.

Search Engine Indexing: Next you will want to tell them more about your individual webpages so that this information can be stored and “Indexed” in their internal databases for use when people are making “Organic” searches. Each search engine has their own method of accepting your webpage indexing requests for example; Yahoo-Bing allows you to submit 10 webpages for indexing a day and Google, the largest search engine in the world today, provides you with a webpage indexing request tool called “Fetch as Google” where you can enter your pages to be indexed. Remember when using this tool to register each page as a standard webpage and also to register these same pages separately for mobile pages if they are “Mobile Responsive” in construction as Google maintains separate databases for mobile pages and to get found organically on a cellphone, you will need to have them registered in this second database as well.

Link Building: This is the art of building links back to your site from other quality Internet locations usually owned by others. This is often done by leaving posts on other forums, asking other site owners to link their sites with yours, building a presence on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Reddit, etc. and tying your presence on those sites back to your website, writing articles and press releases that mention your site, posting videos to places like YouTube and Vimeo that tie back to you, publishing e-books and more. The more “External Backlinks” you can create to your site, the stronger your site looks in the eyes of Google and other search engines and the better your site will rank within those engines organically.

On Site Optimization: There are also things you can do within your own website to strengthen your SEO rankings with search engines. You will be wanting to do keyword and keyword phrase research as you build webpage titles and write content for those pages, do the same for images you use so they are well described, link pages together so they can keep people on your site longer by easily giving them more access to additional related content on your site, create “Anchor Text” on your site which means taking strong keyword phrases and embedding hyperlinks to other locations on-site and off-site behind this text.

Content Creation: Write your website content in such a way that the webpage title and description are supported by your content words as close to the top of each page’s content as possible as this helps to validate these pages as being real and of value to the search engines when they render pages to their own content consumers.

Use of Videos, Audios and Images: Use them liberally on their site as search engines know that people to prefer to watch videos, look at pictures or listen to audios more than they like to read text – so use this strategy and be sure to richly describe them within your webpages’ “meta-data” and to also submit them for indexing to the search engines as well. It is tedious work, but will pay significant dividends to your site over time in terms of its visibility.

Build your webpages to be “Mobile-Responsive”: These days, search engines such as Google will not even display pages that are not responsive to people making “Organic” queries for content through them. If your webpage is not responsive, you will not be found.

Build Webpages Natively: Build your webpages natively as opposed to using templates wherever possible and test them for speed of loading. If your webpages and in particular your mobile webpages do not load completely within 2-4 seconds, your page will be penalized or not even be displayable through organic searches. Template pages tend to be “Fatter” so they take longer t load – which is why I make this point. Also keep your image sizes small – 4 megabyte images take much longer to load than 20K images…

Keyword Competitive Analysis: Do competitive analysis on your keyword research and where you place with those keywords in relation to your competitors. Look at what is making it to page one in an organic search for keywords and phrases you wish to rank for and research how hard it would be to displace them to get your content showing on page one of a search – and there are a number of tools out there that can help you make this job easier. Bottom line though is that you want to get to page one when ranking for the words and phrases that you choose and how you use them for SEO effect on your site – you don’t want to do all this work to rank on page 10 where much fewer content searchers get to.

Use Search Engine Dashboards: Search engines build informational dashboards for you to use to see how they are seeing your site and what errors they are finding on your site and they often offer suggestions for fixes and improvements. Use these dashboards! Get all you can from them about your site’s quality, make the fixes and let them know when you have fixed it so they can “recrawl” your site to register that it has improved. Doing this work is very important to maintaining good search engine rankings.

In summary, above are just some of the core things you will need to do to have a shot at getting to page one in search engines organically. Organic SEO takes a lot of work but those that put in the time to do this work on their sites are rewarded with organic traffic to their sites. Improving organic SEO should be a continual process for any company trying to do business online. Traffic is money and if others are doing this and you are not, they will be the ones making the sales you want to get. Often, doing this well means business survival itself.

Google Search Engine Optimization – My Own Road Map For Internet Success

One of the most profitable marketing techniques I’ve used for my businesses is without any doubt search engine optimization.

Since venturing into SEO, I’ve encountered much success for my websites. At first when I saw the top 10 websites in Google for a popular search term in one of my markets, it was kind of dream for me. I knew what they did to get there but I knew there was hard work to be done. But certainly it was achievable.

I have to admit it was a kind of obsession to get my website in the top 10 placement because I knew once I am there I will receive targeted traffic and sales for a long time to come. That thought just keep coming in my mind.

All I know is I have to take action right now and I was also really motivated to attain my goals. I know getting search engine traffic is passive and that to profit from passive traffic, I have to start promoting my site right now or else it will take more time to get those coveted rankings.

And once I’ve worked on my search engine rankings, I can leave it aside and concentrate on other aspects of my business but also look for other ways to promote my business. One fundamental thing you should always remember is to FOCUS. Focus on one marketing strategy and keep at it. Give it all you can before moving on to the next one. If you try to do too many things at once, it’s very difficult to find success and you will most likely fail.

The day will come when you will do a search for a keyword phrase that you have been working on and to your surprise, you’ll see your site in the SERPs(Search Engine Result Pages). This will just prove that what you’re doing is working. I’ve been there and I can tell you that you will feel proud and happy with such an accomplishment. It’s an amazing feeling. It’s kind of you don’t believe you are really there.

If you want to achieve those top search engine rankings in Google and other major search engines, educate yourself well and learn the search engine optimization strategies and techniques that work because you won’t be wasting your time and time is so precious in search engine marketing. Have a plan like what you’re going to do everyday to achieve your objectives ie doing some valuable link exchanges with related and relevant websites, article writing, directory submissions, text link advertising.

Link exchanges are not useless. In the past, they were the major ways to get top rankings but now they have been a bit devalued but still they are worth getting. Why? Simply because related and relevant links will bring direct traffic to your website and will help your link popularity too. They will help you in rankings automatically but less as compared to several years ago. Well just focus in getting targeted links and you will be surprised how much traffic you can get just with links from related and relevant sites. Even if one day, reciprocal links are completely dead, those links will still be of value in terms of direct traffic. So don’t get reciprocal links just for search engine ranking benefits and for a boost in link popularity. Article writing should be an ongoing process for direct traffic and automatically, it will help your link popularity. Directory submissions will give your site a solid foundation for link building and can make your site stable in the rankings. Concerning text link advertising, if you can afford it, it’s worth it. Just advertise your website on relevant and related sites and if they are high traffic sites, you can get good traffic and potential business. There was a discussion about paid text links and that Google might detect those in the future and maybe devalues them and here is what I have to say.

I think this would have happened sooner or later. Google might detect paid links depending on some criteria. Suppose a website is new and is getting a bunch of high quality links eg sites with good link popularity, high PageRank, high traffic, this might raise a red flag like this site is buying links. But that as well, it can be getting good links due to article submission.

Whatever happen in the future concerning paid links, I believe if you have to do it, do so such that you are getting targeted traffic from those links and websites alone and bypassing PageRank and backlinks. But first, check that website’s alexa ranking to get an idea of its traffic levels(the lower the number, usually the higher the traffic) and check its rankings for its primary keywords in the major search engines as an additional plus because you can have high traffic websites which don’t depend on search engine rankings. They can depend on other traffic sources. Now if you were to check the rankings, a top 10, a top 20 and even a top 30 is worth considering. The website’s homepage html title will usually contain the primary keywords. By knowing the alexa ranking and search engine rankings, this should give you an idea whether it’s worth advertising or not. This alone can justify your investment.

If there is good return on investment, why bother about the search engine ranking benefits from that link. Even if you don’t get any benefit, you won’t care as long as you’re getting business from your text link advertisement. You might need to test which sites bring you results or not. Advertise for a month with one or two good sites and see if there is any improvement in traffic and business. You can know which site brings you more traffic via your traffic logs. You will see visitors coming to your site from another website. If you’re getting traffic but no business, you have to work on your conversion and tweak it. You can have different business models like selling your own products, affiliate products and generating money from AdSense for instance. Here as well, focus is important. Don’t try to give too many options to your visitors or else they can get confused and leave for good. You need to test which business model is more profitable and lucrative for your Internet business. Testing is absolutely crucial in Internet marketing.

I don’t think there is anything wrong if you purchase links on relevant and related sites for the purpose of advertising but if you have to do it solely for PageRank and link popularity, you might be affected if Google detects paid links in the future and devalues them. You might not get any PageRank passed to your website and your rankings might not benefit. So what’s the use? You can be advertising for nothing. No traffic, no backlinks and no PageRank. You have just wasted your money. Usually when you go for PageRank and link popularity only and not focusing on the traffic rewards, you will not be too concerned about what type of sites you are advertising on whether they are related and relevant or not. You can just buy links on unrelated and irrelevant sites simply for the sake of getting PageRank and backlinks. And usually, you will go after high PageRank websites. Well this is not recommended at all. Opt for a long term strategy which can produce results time and time again not short term results.

On another note, it’s important to remember that before starting a search engine promotion campaign, it’s fundamental that you have already created useful, quality and original content on your site. You might need to outsource your content creation if you have problems coming up with original content. A website without useful content won’t have much merit for the search engines. Search engines love content and best of all if it’s original. It’s also a good idea to build a solid link structure for your site.

So here you are, to get top Google rankings, create your own Google search engine optimization plan and have your own road map for Internet success. You’ll be glad you did.

Web Design & Search Engine Optimization – A Technique to Find New Business

I stumbled across this method, quite by accident, when researching a potential new businesses web site after a standard call back request to my website. It is surprisingly straightforward and you can effortlessly find people in particular regions, your own town even, who are crying out for your brand of search engine expertise.

The elegance of this means is that it also provides the ammo you need to go to the potential client and show to them why their website is not performing for them nearly as well as it ought to be doing. It will allow you to show them that they are on the search engines and can be discovered, using a search (albeit a very poor and irrelevant one) and that to start driving traffic or to increase traffic to their website will be fairly low-priced (depending on your search engine optimisation rates of course).

Using site: in Google Searches: Google offer several useful search engine optimisation tools for discovering information concerning your web site and the information that it holds on your site, one of them is site: If you carry out a search for site: and add your domain name after, Google will return all of the Internet pages that it has indexed for that domain name, for instance site:amazon.co.uk. To search for your own website simply switch amazon.co.uk with your own domain name. You can also use the www. at the start but, as yet, I have not noticed a great deal of difference in the results. Google does allow you to specify if you want to have the www. on your domain name in it’s results using their webmaster tools. This search tool is intended to allow you to look for for a phrase in a particular site by putting the phrase in front of the site: bit in the search. For instance, a search for fantasy site:amazon.co.uk will search for the word fantasy in Amazons UK web site.

This will be helpful once you have found a website that is in need of search engine optimisation as you can then analyze all of the web pages that Google holds for them.

The Process of finding clients who need your search engine optimisation help is simply this. Go to Google and search for the phrase Untitled Document and then add a region afterward, for example search for Untitled Document London. This will display all web pages inside London that have Untitled Document, by and large in the Title. This shows to me that whoever built the web site has not bothered to fill out the Title Tag for the page and that the page in question is simply ignoring a wholly fine opportunity to get some keywords and key phrases into Google and to be discovered by their market and potential customers.

In my belief, every professional web designer ought to provide a website with at least a basic SEO template, which would involve filling out the Title and META Description (at minimum) so that search results look engaging and present some information when displayed in the Search Engines. Even if they are not on page one for their particular services, at least they will be on page something and not floating around at the bottom with no consequence to their business. Unless of course their business is selling documents titled Untitled, in which case good luck in trying to get that one onto a top result.

Using intitle: in Google Searches: If you would like to narrow this search down, you can use one more of Google’s search tools intitle. As the name suggests this will display all results with a word or phrase in the Page Title of the webpage. So try, in its place, to search for intitle:Untitled Document London. You can mess around with placing quotation marks each side of the first portion and adding your region afterward to make the search more technically correct, this does change the results slightly.

Once you have found a likely target you can now use the first tool (site:) to study the rest of their pages. If they have a long list of Untitled Document you can almost guarantee that they are not receiving a tenth of the hits they ought to be. Providing them swift and noticeable results should be simple. If they have had the website for some time, even better as their domain name will have some age. I have found that once you can show good traffic and the enquiries do increase slightly the next step will be to update their web site as an out of date web site will put a lot of people off. This is all leading to further business and another addition onto a Christmas card list for you.

This method will return a lot of old sites and in all probability some personal websites but there will be plenty of businesses in there that are plainly not aware of the opportunity they are wasting and the potential new business that they are passing up by not being noticeable (Using this method, for my home rural town I have discovered a solicitors, two nurseries and a company providing student letting, all would be fine leads, and in the first three pages of Google results).

In the end they will thank you as their hits and inquiries grow and you may get a decent long term client out of it.

Your job now is to persuade them of that, good luck.

Search Engine Optimization and Affiliate Marketing

Some people think that SEO is not a part of affiliate marketing. That’s rather unusual.

It struck me. The main reason many advertising and internet affiliate marketing agencies don’t like to pay attention to search engine optimization is that they don’t fully comprehend search engine optimization and don’t understand how to execute a highly effective SEO campaign. Instead of admit their lack of knowledge, they like to pay attention to internet marketing methods they’re saying to understand well.

Search engine optimization benefits

A current MarketingSherpa study shows top organic positions are clicked 20 % of time and top paid-up advertising positions are clicked 10 % of time. However, if your site includes a top organic position along with a top paid-advertising position, the backlinks leading to the site are clicked 60 % of times. It’s a unique situation: 10 + 20 = 60.

Affiliate marketers’ insufficient search engine optimization understanding is a big mistake. Having a well-built, user-friendly affiliate website, advertising costs can be reduced.

Affiliate Entrepreneurs: Internet Search Engine Friend or Foe?

More often affiliate entrepreneurs or marketers really are a bane to search engines like Google. After I think about internet affiliate marketing junk e-mail, I think about all of the Amazon affiliates’ entrance pages. Individuals could be some pretty ugly Internet sites.

However, the best Internet sites I’ve seen happen to be affiliate Internet sites. For instance, one client doesn’t sell straight to customers. The organization’s Site offers info on the organization and offers an introduction to its items, but customers can’t buy something on the website. They have to go to a joint venture partner to buy. In cases like this, likely to join a venture partner is really better for that consumer. The affiliate is generally situated close to the consumer, which makes it simpler for the consumer to obtain the product personalized and shipped rapidly.

The task within the client’s affiliate Search engine optimization plan’s to supply completely unique content towards the search engines without taking advantage of them. Furthermore, almost all clients don’t want an overzealous affiliate to obtain the corporate site and also the entire affiliate network into trouble. Everybody should benefit: customers, the organization’s site, affiliate marketers.

Affiliate SEO and search engine marketing plans

Affiliate management is really a key component of the effective SEO/search engine marketing plan. A lot of companies make affiliate management being an afterthought, frequently towards the corporation’s hindrance.

I’m helping a nonprofit become unfrozen in the search engines. Regrettably, helping sites get unfrozen is really a normal, everyday a part of the job of SEO specialists. The company itself hasn’t spammed Google. The site is very easy to use, and also the organization is really a well-established brand. You will find no technical causes of the website not to come in Google’s index. Yet after digging around for causes of a Google punishment, we discovered the issue: affiliate marketers gone wild.

As part of the internet affiliate marketing search engine optimization plan, companies should explain the significance of offering completely unique content additionally towards the corporation’s’ content. For instance, effective information architecture is definitely a very important element of engine optimization. There are ways affiliate marketers can group and classify info that are superior to the way the corporate site organizes it? Some items sell better in regional marketplaces than the others. Most likely the affiliate site could concentrate on the best retailers because of its region.

I have seen regional affiliate sites’ cross-linking (internal, page-to-page connecting) vary by region. By showing a distinctive cross-linking structure, affiliate marketers provide unique information towards the commercial search engines with a 100 % user-friendly scent of knowledge for clients.

Furthermore, a FAQ, customer support, or help section might be unique for every affiliate site. Many affiliate marketers work directly with clients. What questions do individuals clients frequently pose? Getting these questions as well as their solutions obtainable in a FAQ, customer support, or help section provides completely unique content for clients and search engines like Google.

Finally, among the greatest mistakes I see with affiliate Internet sites and companies is forcing affiliate marketers to utilize a print catalog’s exact wording. Print copywriting works fine inside a print medium; it doesn’t always work with an internet site. Since affiliate marketers frequently know their clients very well, they ought to have the ability to modify product explanations without deviating in the corporate branding message.

The finish result? Affiliate sites don’t get strained from search engine results because of duplicate content, and clients find what they’re trying to find rapidly and simply.

In conclusion I can say that despite the fact that internet affiliate marketing junk e-mail is a big problem for that commercial Web search engines, internet search engine reps wish to include affiliate content searching results (both paid and organic), particularly if the content and content organization are unique. Customers appreciate content that’s customized for their individual needs.

To know more about SEO and affiliate marketing read us.

What You Need to Know About Local Search Engine Optimization Services

SEO, search engine optimization has been the thorn in many companies sides when it comes to their online marketing efforts. Those that chose to carry out their search engine optimization in-house soon found that it required lots of time and focus, which would drain their valuable resources. Those that used internet marketing agencies soon saw the return on their investment.

Then as a nasty joke Google introduced their Pigeon update in July 2014, which made search engine optimization even more complicated than before. The new update was developed to make online searches more convenient for mobile users who are searching for a particular product or service. With their location active, Google is now able to provide them with the most relevant results in their local area first, this means that companies have had to include local in their search engine optimization services to ensure that they are seen first, reaching their local audience with ease and convenience.

Let’s admit it SEO has become very complicated and it takes up so much time, which is why so many companies use the services of internet marketing specialists, so that they free up their valuable resources for other important tasks within the company. There are a few things you need to know and do when it comes to local search engine optimization and ensure that the services you are paying for, includes these.

First is to ensure you have a Google My Business listing. This is imperative, you are going directly to one of the top search engines with this simple set up which takes a matter of minutes. You need to ensure that every section is completed in detail and make sure your address and contact information is accurate, enabling Google to identify your location without delay so that they can trawl your page and rank you in the potential customers search result.

Next you need to ensure your company is listed on all the other top online directory sites, such as Yelp, for example. Again you need to ensure that every section is completed in detail, making it easier for search engines to identify your company based on location and then rank you accordingly. This helps you reach a wider audience within your local area, ensuring your improve your visibility moving forward.

From here you need to get your customers to give online reviews on your products and services or testimonials that you can add to your website. Reviews are a fantastic way to get noticed online for your local search engine results. Speak to your SEO expert to identify the best way to do this. It can be something as simple as when clients purchase from your website they receive an email a few days later asking them to rank your service or asking them to provide a review based on their experience.

A very important part of local search engine optimization is to ensure you include your address and location on your website. Now this may sound obvious and you’re already thinking that you have this on your contact page already, but in order to ensure each of your pages are ranked effectively, you will want to include our location on each and every one of your web pages for the best end result.

Links are another very important part of your local search engine optimization services. Link building helps you reach your audience and improves your visibility with search engines. You want high quality links from reliable sources that are relevant to your industry, they should be location based to meet the Pigeon update requirements.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Ideas for 2011

With every new year, we all get a “fresh start.” This applies to both our personal interests and our professional pursuits. If you own or manage a business or have a serious hobby, now is the time to think about your online plans for 2011. A big part of your online strategy should focus on how to better Search Engine Optimize your website.

When it comes to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), there are two components: On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO.

On-Page SEO refers to your website’s overall design, navigation structure, internal linking structure, page titles and content, as well as the “behind the scenes” meta tags for Title, Description and Keywords.

Off-Page SEO refers to building links that reside on websites other than yours. The purpose of these types of links is to bring real people to your site from all around the Web, and as importantly to help the search engines find and index your website’s pages so they are available to be listed in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) – preferably on the first page – so real people who are using search engines to find information will see your listing(s) and click through to your website.

In order to properly Search Engine Optimize your website itself, i.e. On-Page SEO, you should: (a) design your website in a way which promotes simple and effective navigation from page to page so that a website visitor can easily access all of the information on your website; (b) produce and present unique content that adds value to your website visitors’ experience, and (c) ensure that each website page is properly set up “behind the scenes” by having the Title, Description and Keyword meta tags filled out completely and accurately.

In order to properly Search Engine Optimize your website around the Web, i.e. Off-Page SEO, you should produce and distribute unique content that adds value to real people visiting websites other than yours. Content distributed via article directories, video directories, blogs, forums, social networking websites, social bookmarking websites and news and information websites, contains links either within the text itself, or just outside of the text area, or both. Therefore, as you distribute your own unique content, you are building links back to your website. In other words, you are Search Engine Optimizing your website.

To put proper SEO into practice, you need to understand how to effectively design and structure your own website, as well as learn how to generate and distribute unique content around the Web. Content generation and distribution is not rocket science, but it does require a combination of training, natural skills and “insider knowledge” that not everyone has. Therefore, to maximize your SEO efforts, consider hiring an SEO professional. Before you hire an SEO professional, make sure you receive a free SEO consultation.

In conclusion, a couple great Search Engine Optimization ideas for 2011 are these: (a) your SEO strategy should focus on real people who are using the Web, and (b) carefully choose and invest in the services of a professional SEO consultant.