Article Categories

SiteProNews Blogs

7 Simple Steps to ‘SEO’ the heck out of your competition

03 2008 Monday

By Dave James in Featured

This article is meant for beginners who are new to SEO and for old-timers who are seeking new ways to get things done faster.

When thinking about Search Engine Optimization for your site, you must always keep in mind that the basic purpose of your web-site is to make you money. You make money when more people come to your site to purchase things they need. When your web-site has content they like, they spend money with you.

The sole reason you need to show up on search engines, is to let people spot you among the multitude of competitors. To be the first among the few sites a user actually visits, you need to come up among the top few. This is why you use Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

So when you prepare your site, remember that your site should cater mainly to human tastes, not just that of the Search Engines. To have a web-site that is great for search-engines but unbearable to humans is just waste of your time.

Most important : Get your web page in shape. Remember, people have tastes, likes, dislikes, emotions. Build a site for people.

Then,

1) Research your keywords thoroughly. Put your keywords in all the right places like Title tags, Meta Tags, Alt for images etc. Make sure your links are properly formatted. Read up on keyword Mastery and keyword research as well as how to place your keywords on the page.

2) Create great content. Search Engines provide you better ranking if you have better content. People visit your page for the content you have. Search Engines think that you have better content if you have ever new/updated content. The articles you have should reflect the title of your page. It should be about your core business or somehow affiliated with it.

You could either have content written by yourselves or republished with consent. The idea is to have people spend more time on your web-site. The more time they spend on your site, the better your chances of making a sale. If you are not very good at writing articles, you can get others to write them for you. There are quite a few websites that provide you with cheap content.

3) Create a google sitemap for use by google. This is a small xml file with the following values for each of your pages that you would like Google to index: url, last modified, change frequency, and priority. Make sure you submit this sitemap to google.

4) Publish your articles with article submission sites. Always have links within your articles to link back to your own site. Search Engines look for inward pointing links to your site. The higher the PageRank of sites your links appear, the better for you. There are tools available that find such sites for you.

5) If you are into email marketing (and I am yet to see a single instance where you should not be), always link back to your site from your email. Give your reader the opportunity to visit your site by clicking the link on the email.

6) Some websites have made it easy for others to link back to them. Scripts are available free all over the internet to accomplish this. Like I said before, Search Engines love a site that other people love to link to. It is pretty easy to provide a link.

7) Read up on google’s suggestions. http://www.google.com/webmasters/ . You will also find various tools here to help you with preparing your site for submission to google. These include tools to check which pages on your site have been indexed.

Very Important: Study your competition. See what they are doing to get to the top. ( There are tools that help you do this; see footnote.)

Bonus tips:

Add title tags for text links. These are similar to Alt tags for image links.
Study your PageRank religiously.
Add your navigation menus to the top and the bottom of the page.
Consider affiliate linking to sell your products(More links pointing to you plus more people selling for you).
Consider advertising on other web-sites(More links pointing to you).

Now that you are on your way to SEO heaven, let me add a few words of caution:

Avoid using the same title tag on all pages.
Avoid using link farms to get inbound links. Search Engines catch up soon enough and you end up being shunned.
Avoid using “Click here to…” as anchor text.
Avoid using Submission Services for submitting to search engines.
Remember that any attempt to “over-optimize” your site in an effort to cheat the search-engine spiders could get you banned too.

Of the various tools we have used in the past, two stand out.

#1 Pick: SEO Elite Website: www.eliteSEOtool.com Cost = $167 (lifetime free upgrades and no annual fees) Top Features: Finds best link partners with authority ranking; Automates link process; Monitors existing inbound links; keeps a watchful eye on your competition; Provides great Site Optimization Comments; Test Results: 100+ rankings mostly 1s , few 2s in 5 weeks : Good for beginners as well as experts. Very cost effective. 8 week trial period.

#2 Pick: WebPosition Website: www.webposition.com Cost = $389 WebPosition Pro or $149 Standard (plus $99 per year subscription fees for either) Test Results: 44 top 5 rankings in Google in eight weeks - Mostly 3’s and 4’s. Top Features: A little out of its depth when it comes to automatic linking capabilities. Reporting is nice. 4 week trial period.

Either tool is pretty easy to get started with & should pose you no problems.

You are all set to SEO your way to the top!

Happy hunting!

Author: Links to SEO Tools tested: #1 Pick: SEO Elite( http://www.eliteSEOtool.com ) #2 Pick: WebPosition (http://www.webposition.com )

Blogging: A New Asset To SEO

02 2008 Friday

By Carrie Haggerty in Featured

When you think of how blogging started so many moons ago, it was used as an online diary or more commonly a travel log. This would keep track of where you have been, what you saw and where you were going.

You could easily keep your family and friends updated on your latest excursion in a new place. The blogging world exploded and more often you were seeing political blogs, photography blogs and now corporate blogs? Did you hear me right? Yes.

Corporate blogs are the (not so) new seo tool that are vastly becoming popular on a number of sites showing up on and around the web. How do blogs help your SEO campaign? Well there are a number of factors that blogs can help you with in terms of SEO.

First of all, they are adding content. What is content? Content is king. When you decide to add a blog to any site you must first of all commit to actually adding content, at the very least on a weekly basis. The best content of course is original articles written by you or someone within your company. If you are not as scholarly as you would like and find it difficult to write articles on your desired subject, you can find yourself a content writer, there are many available for just this purpose, and you can verbalize what you would like to be told in an article and have them then put that verbage into an article, and voila! This can of course become very costly.

Another great way to add content, is to read articles written by other authors and comment on them. Find articles that you agree or disagree with and add your own ideas to that article (Alway’s remember to cite those authors). Finally the true tested method is keep up to date with the latest news in your field and keep your readers and customers up-to-date on the developments. Anyway you decide to keep your blog updated, just be sure you do just that. Blogging is a dedication and you will gain the benefits in your SEO efforts.

Secondly, a blog can be independently marketed within your SEO campaign. There are a number of blog directories such as blog catalog and Blogorama that you can add your blog to for free. These directories are great places to gain traffic to your site and find other interesting blogs to read and learn from.

You may be familiar with blog traffic sites which can gain your blog a number of loyal readers. These sites like Blog Mad and Blog Soldiers offer you a way to increase the number of times your site is being seen by simply surfing through a variety of sites included in their data base. Another great marketing tip for your corporate blog marketing.

A blog needs to be a functional and helpful resource and this will gain a number of subscribers to any blog. The more subscribers the blog has commenting and reading the content, the more likely your blog will create a buzz and become a useful tool to a number of people in your industry or field. What happens next, you ask? Natural linking. The ultimate in link development. By natural linking I mean, if your site is known as the ultimate resource other websites will naturally link to your blog as a tool for their clients and customers. We call this link baiting in the SEO world. Blogs are some of the best link bait there is in the seo world. So make your blog as creative, fun and informative for your readers so they will come back time and again.

In summary, SEO consists of two major components. Content development and link development, both of which can be achieved with the assistance of a blog. The initial stages of any new search engine optimization campaign can be difficult, but if you commit and stick to the power of blogging, you can create a community within your field and be a huge success in your SEO efforts.

Author: Carrie Haggerty has been working in SEO and Internet marketing over the past 3 years. She has started her own SEO Firm, http:// www.cmhwebservices.com. She also has started her own SEO article website strictly for webmasters to submit, and is marketing it the new internet business owners as a resource.

Differentiators in Keyphrases: What Every SEO Company Needs to Know

02 2008 Friday

By Scott Buresh in Featured

As any good search engine optimization company knows, in search, more so than any other medium, you have a very short window of opportunity in which to engage your prospect. The only way to get a solid competitive advantage in this arena is to utilize various techniques in order to make sure that you are giving a prospect exactly what it is that he or she is looking for. Otherwise, your prospect will simply click the back button and visit one of your competitors – a process that only takes seconds.

One way to gain a competitive advantage, of course, is to work on the website itself. Any search engine optimization company worth its salt will also be involved in conversion testing on your website – in other words, making certain that the visitors who arrive on your site are likely to take a point of action that eventually leads to a sale. Split tests, modifications in content, different color schemes, and numerous other variable elements can all have a measurable impact.

There is also another way that a quality search engine optimization company will seek to maximize the value of the prospects that find your website through search engines. In this case, however, it is using your company differentiators in the keyphrases that they target to make sure that the traffic that comes to your site is of a very high quality.

Gaining a Competitive Advantage with Differentiators

As more and more companies turn to organic search to gain a competitive advantage while promoting their products and services, it can be increasingly difficult to achieve high rankings for the generic terms that everyone in your industry is pursuing. While any ranking is ultimately attainable, eventually a search engine optimization company has to decide whether the effort involved is worth it, especially when it recognizes that you can get overall better results from the campaign by making sure that a very high percentage of people that are typing keyphrases into search engines are looking for exactly what you offer.

This is why your search engine optimization company should be able to leverage differentiators in your keyphrases to give you the best competitive advantage available.

What Keyphrases Will Work Best for Your Business?

Suppose that you are in an industry where companies can have a wide array of prices, approaches, customer service levels, and so on. Instead of targeting, from the outset, the general keyphrase that defines the industry (for example “email marketing”), a good search engine optimization company will take the time to help you gain a competitive advantage by realizing what is different about your company in order to a.) attract very highly targeted prospects who know what they are seeking and b.) reduce the competitiveness of the keyphrases they are choosing.

Let’s take a look at a high-end provider of email marketing that has advanced web-based functionality and focuses on the B2B market. This fictional business is seeking a competitive advantage by working with a search engine optimization company. We can safely assume that the percentage of people that type “email marketing” into a search engine who are looking for this exact type of company is anywhere from between 0 and 100%.

By looking into the popularity of other variations, however, we can see that it is nowhere near 100%. Phrases like “cheap email marketing” or “free email marketing” are very popular, demonstrating that many people seeking “email marketing” are not looking for exactly the service that the provider is offering.

Imagine that instead of targeting “email marketing”, a daunting task (that, even if achieved, assures that a high percentage of visitors that come to the site are not looking for the provider’s particular type of solution), the search engine optimization company takes advantage of the provider’s differentiators. In this case, the search engine optimization company would instead target phrases such as “business to business email marketing” and “web-based email marketing”. Suddenly the two objectives have been achieved - the provider knows that a much higher percentage of visitors that are typing these terms are actually looking for the right kind of company and the competitiveness of the phrases has also been reduced, leading to faster and higher rankings.

Using Modifiers to Give You the Edge

There are hundreds of modifiers that can give a competitive advantage by reflecting a company’s differentiators, including words such as “free”, “affordable”, “high-end”, “full service”, “proven”, “turnkey”, etc. The point is that by making use of your unique differentiators in the search terms you target, your search engine optimization company is already setting the table for your prospect before he or she even clicks over to your website. When the message that is seen on your site then supports the keyphrase that was typed, you now have an engaged visitor. This can mean more leads, less site abandonment, and better overall website performance.

Conclusion

Remember, your company is better than the others out there. Ask yourself why, and then tell your search engine optimization company to take advantage of these differences in your keyphrases to give you a competitive advantage in your industry. The subtle addition of a few seemingly minor modifiers can have a huge impact on your bottom line.

Author: Scott Buresh is the CEO of Medium Blue, which was named the number one organic search engine optimization company in the world by PromotionWorld in 2006 and 2007. Scott has contributed content to many publications including The Complete Guide to Google Advertising (Brown, 2008), Building Your Business with Google For Dummies (Wiley, 2004), MarketingProfs, ZDNet, WebProNews, DarwinMag, SiteProNews, ISEDB.com, and Search Engine Guide. Medium Blue serves local and national clients, including Boston Scientific, DS Waters, and Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center. Visit MediumBlue.com to request a custom SEO guarantee based on your goals and your data.

Universal Search - Organic Positioning and �The One Box�

02 2008 Thursday

By Jeffrey Smith in Featured

The golden achievement in organic search is the accomplishment of acquiring a “one box” in Google.

The one box is when you conduct a search and the site in question has such an enormous amount of themed content that it returns the main URL with subcategories underneath it to provide searchers with an extended selection.

Our site recently graduated to it’s own one box for the term SEO Design Solutions. Over time, your site can acquire additional keywords when referenced in searches as indicated by a prominent SEO company in this search for the keywords SEO Services.

Speaking from personal experience, this occurs when your site has amassed enough links and pages that are themed in nature about a particular subject and the search engine now views your content with a degree of authority and grants it the most relevant result for the query in question.

This is not limited to standard queries, according to this informative article in Google Operating System from 2006 this phenomenon is nothing new.

Deliberately creating the one box for your content represents (1) that you understand the value of delineated site structure for your internal links as a definitive factor of relevance and positioning and (2) your content has reached critical mass for your links per page equation or (3) it is simply the most relevant result. How Google determines that is a mystery to most, unless you happen to be one of the hundreds of PHD’s responsible for administering the algorithm. However, if you have more than 500 pages indexed in Google, then you are a candidate for the one box if your content is organized and linked appropriately.

Ways to toggle this are through positioning your site as a solution which involves numerous steps such as (1) creating an index or glossary of related terms and segmenting them into keyword rich folder names (2) then by linking to those references in your documents the value of the supported material lends authority to your entire site as a resource (wikipedia’s internal linking practices in essence).

The “One Box” is a graduation on one level as the first noticeable step that the spiders are referencing your data as a resource. Search engine spiders are smart enough to determine what an about us page is, read and organize your product offerings into subcategories for the sake of consolidation in the quest for returning the most relevant results.

To help search engines along however, you can use descriptive sub folders to augment this phenomenon (such as putting all of your services in a services folder, then taking a step further by adding specific information silos inside of each folder such as 3-5 pages of related content like SEO Services, Web Development Services, Keyword Research Services, etc.). Then build links to each of the pages until they are sufficiently positioned and ranking on their own accord (it may take 50 links per page or 100 links per page to set off the effect).

Although it may not be clear exactly what spawns the one box (aside from a well planned site structure and strategic linking), one thing is clear. With the advent of universal search replicating this phenomenon will become a true crowning achievement utilizing video, podcasts, news feeds and other forms of aggregated data to solidify a dominant search position.

Author: Jeffrey Smith is an active internet marketing optimization strategist, consultant and the founder of Seo Design Solutions Seo Company http://www.seodesignsolutions.com. He has actively been involved in internet marketing since 1995 and brings a wealth of collective experiences and fresh marketing strategies to individuals involved in online business.

Little Known On-Page Factors That Help To Improve Search Engine Rank

02 2008 Thursday

By admin in Featured

What can provide you the cheapest if not free targeted visitors in huge numbers to your website?

Undoubtedly the answer is ’search engines’. And the equation is very simple - improve search engine rank and gain more visitors.

To rank high in the result pages you need to supply the search engines with your worth and at the same time you must satisfy the existing visitors in your page.

Now, how do search engine get satisfied about the worth of a website for specific keywords (you must remember that search engines are bound to offer good result to retain the existing visitors in their own page)?

Bigger search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, puts more value on content (keyword density, variables and positioning) and incoming links. Whereas, smaller search engines (general category) still emphasizes on Meta keywords and Meta descriptions. (Perhaps you know that in the earlier stages of their development all search engines checked the Meta data to confirm the relative worth of a website.)

Black Hat search engine optimizers used to write different content for search engines and visitors. One of the most common formats was to provide two layers of content. In one layer the content was stuffed with keywords (or only keywords) and was written in the same color as the background (white text on white background) - naturally the content was not visible to general visitors. At the same time they used to create natural content for visitors. They used so many other techniques to forge content in a page.

However, over the time bigger search engines became too claver to identify those pages and banned them. In fact Google took thousands steps forward and introduced LSI (latent semantic indexing - any doubt about its introduction?) to identify quality content from original sources.

Today the best way to get better search engine rankings is to stay honest or follow the age old and proven process of pretending that you are honest. What does it mean - you must go for link building and at the same time make sure those search engines do not understand that you are doing that.

Here are some tips for on-page optimization to improve your search engine ranking:

Content - the primary solution is to have unique content in your site. To put it simply unique content means something that should not have any other similar web copy. Now you need to put your keywords strategically into the body of the content. The best way is to put keywords in sub headings (if you can break the content into different parts or sections, you can have more options to use sub headings). However, make sure that you do not follow any pattern in using key phrases. You can also make some keywords bold (bold words suggest that you are emphasizing on the text). It is always better to update your content occasionally.
Interlinking - Link the important landing pages from different pages with targeted keywords. It not only helps search engines to understand why you created that page but also help them to crawl internal pages.
Navigation - Use simple (html) navigation link pattern.
Meta Documents - even though major search engines tend to ignore them, meta documents still have a lot of importance among second level search engines. And in SEO, every little bit counts.
URL Structure - use keywords in the domain name. it is better to structure your URL like examplesite.com/targeted-keyword.html rather then using example-site.com/targeted_keyword_positioning_in_url.html
Sitemap - with links to all the internal pages - helps search engines to easily crawl the website.
Good Neighborhood - Link to worthy websites from your site. This will create a good neighborhood for your site and will help search engines to understand your site better.

And get as many links as possible from relevant websites. If you follow these simple tips, it will improve search engine rank of your website.

Discover the best kept secrets by asking an SEO expert. Find out how to improve search engine rank for your website using web 2.0 strategies.

Link Building - Building Fresh Links to Pages with Established Trust Rank!

02 2008 Wednesday

By Jeffrey Smith in Featured

It may not always seem like you against the world, when it comes to promoting your website, but on one level, it is simply a fact. So, how can you breathe new life into old pages and get the most wear from your content? The answer, aged pages and fresh links.

Aged pages have passed the most important factor for present-tense search engine optimization, they have earned a degree of trust and trust rank which can provide tremendous leverage in the SERPs.

What is the first sign? Usually a promotion from the gray bar to some page rank. Although page rank is not indicative of any inherent ranking factor alone, it is a popularity factor that indicates when your content been indexed, that it is connected to your main navigation or that it is in fact, getting a boost from links (either internally from your site or externally from other sites).

The next stage is, you start to see modest rankings as certain elements and keywords on that page acquire a relative position (nothing phenomenal, but in the 40-50’s in search engines), this is a tell tale sign that your page in question just needs a bit of a boost and is where the next portion of the equation comes into play.

The Value of Teamwork

Just like the buddy system, by teaming your older aged content with freshly created content (with purpose) your site has the ability to punch holes in the inertia and generate an upward velocity that can pull both pages into the top 10.

Fresh content has the ability to bypass many of the formalities and in a way has VIP access to the top 10 if your content is (a) honed & specific (b) has a great title that plays into the main keywords and (c) is interlinked to other pages with authority in the website (pages that rank for more competitive keywords).

Now just like the duo of the wonder twins, each page armed with what the other lacks and united by a common theme can leave your competition reeling as your pages fly by them like a bad episode of the road runner and coyote as you blaze a trail to the top 10.

The formula:

For seasoned types tools are not necessary, almost like being able to interpret code from the matrix, a good SEO can skim and consolidate key factors with ease. For those who may need a bit of guidance, you can use this free tool from Google Rankings to determine the keyword density.

Then after getting the highest ranking phrases sorted on the old / aged page, now is the time to make some last minute adjustments by weeding out any verbose language and adding another instance of the keyword in question. They say two heads are better than one, whereas in this instance two pages are better than one when a keyword conquest is underway.

Then write a new page of fresh content on the subject matter, drop a link to the old page to give it some link juice, do the same by reciprocating the linking between the old page to the new (using the new pages root keywords in the link). This creates a miniature dynamo between the pages that serves to propel both pages (the page with trust & the fresh page with fresh links) to the top of their respective category. The key here is to have a common denominator between the two with some portion of the title, this will create the double listing you see so often in search engines.

This method works particularly well for blogs that are hosted in a sub folder of the main domain name and the other pages are static and aged. There are advantages to being able to mold the flow of authority in your pages using static pages which are off the grid from internal / dynamically linked pages from a content management system like a blog for example.

The combination is a fantastic duo that you can invoke frequently to catapult content that is deserving of praise into the mainstream. In this instance you can give an entire segment of a site a boost by consolidating the two pages towards a less competitive keyword (like low hanging fruit) or team up to chip away at a more competitive keyword. The main asset to observe is that the first page has been indexed and pulling it’s own weight in the search index. Then it is merely a matter of leverage, some creative content and the use of an inherently aging page with trust.

Sam’s Club Wants to Be Your Search Engine Optimization Company � Should You Let It?

02 2008 Tuesday

By Scott Buresh in Featured

If the buzz is to be believed, Sam’s Club is now a search engine optimization company that is targeting the local search market aggressively. The fact is, this isn’t something new; it’s just recently come to the forefront. Sam’s Club has partnered with a company called Innuity to offer a program that is primarily targeted at small businesses looking to get noticed in the local search results.

Many people are screaming that this is a “worthless” service – but I disagree. It’s not worthless, but it also isn’t close to the service a comprehensive search engine optimization company can offer. Let’s take a closer look – with the caveat that I am assuming that the service listed on the Innuity page for LeadConnect (http://leadconnect.innuity.com/) is the same service being offered through Sam’s Club (also called LeadConnect).

What They’re Offering

For $25 a month for Sam’s Club members (and $39.95 a month for non-members), you can sign up for the LeadConnect service from Innuity. You’ll get access to a dashboard that you can update with all of the necessary details about your business – name, address, phone number, types of products you offer, and so on. Once you’ve completed your dashboard, Innuity will submit your site to various local search engines such as Yahoo! Local, YellowPages, Pricegrabber, Google Local, and more. Then, if you update your dashboard at any time, Innuity will update your information at all of those local search sites, just like any search engine optimization company being paid a retainer fee might.

Innuity also claims on its website that this program includes having them submit your website to the major search engines (not to be confused with the local ones). This part is largely window dressing, as any good search engine optimization company knows. The major engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.) all find sites on their own, and “submitting” sites won’t do anything to influence rankings.

My Opinion

If you don’t have the time to do it manually and you don’t have the budget to hire a search engine optimization company, paying $25 a month for a company to handle the submission to the local search sites isn’t a terrible deal. The ongoing fee also makes sense if your business changes frequently, as again it will save you time from needing to update your listing on each local search engine each time you make a change.

The big question is what happens when you disengage from the service. Will your results remain on the local sites after you stop paying the monthly fee? Or will they be dropped the day you stop paying? In my opinion, it would be somewhat unethical for them to actively remove you from local search sites if you disengage, and I’m betting that they don’t. I tried to reach them directly to ask but was unsuccessful (well, I called twice and was put on hold for an inordinate time in each instance without ever reaching a human being - you can draw your own conclusions from that).

Why This Is Good for the SEO Industry

Having a large, recognizable chain like Sam’s Club acting as a “search engine optimization company” and offering this type of service has several benefits for the SEO industry. People in the SEO industry often forget that most people do not even know what SEO is, so this initiative is bringing awareness of the industry as a whole, even if it is focused on local search.

Additionally, the Sam’s Club name gives SEO a bit of respectability. Search engine optimization has long been considered some voodoo science or, at best, a fringe discipline – but with this offering by a household name, it’s now something that the average person might want to investigate. This may help the mainstream accept the idea of hiring a search engine optimization company in general.

Why This Could Be Problematic for the SEO Industry

The problem with this offering is that it is rather limited in scope, focused only on local search initiatives for local businesses. Because it is more common for people to use the general search engines over the local search engines, this may not bring in a large volume of new business. Yet at the same time, it is advertised in such a way as to seem to the average person as full-service search engine optimization. Nothing in the description online or in any of the literature I’ve gotten my hands on indicates that Innuity is letting people know that local search is just a part of a larger, more disciplined approach that another search engine optimization company might provide.

As a result, businesses that use LeadConnect rather than a search engine optimization company may find the results are not what they were hoping for. And they then may dismiss SEO in general because they don’t understand that the LeadConnect service is limited. Local search is important, but there are many other ways to target a local market online that this service is not tapping into.

In addition, to see really great results from a local search initiative, your business must appear in the top few results in the local search engine – because those are the ones that will also appear on the main search results page. Any result beyond the top several will be more difficult for the average searcher to come by, whereas a first or second-page result on a main engine, which a full-service search engine optimization company might be able to garner, can be of great benefit to increasing exposure.

Conclusion

What Sam’s Club is offering cannot directly compete with the services provided by a search engine optimization company – and it’s not supposed to. This program is reasonable for a company with a small budget looking to boost its local exposure. Plus, it can bring the SEO concept to the masses. Unfortunately, it could also give people a false sense of what SEO is and what it can do for them. And it remains to be seen if people really want to buy an SEO package from the same vendor that sells them giant jars of mayo and bulk toilet paper.

Author: Scott Buresh is the CEO of Medium Blue, which was recently named the number one search engine optimization company in the world by PromotionWorld. Scott has contributed content to many publications including Building Your Business with Google For Dummies (Wiley, 2004), MarketingProfs, ZDNet, WebProNews, DarwinMag, SiteProNews, ISEDB.com, and Search Engine Guide. Medium Blue serves local and national clients, including Boston Scientific, DS Waters, and Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center. Visit MediumBlue.com to request a custom SEO guarantee based on your goals and your data.

SEO’s Unite! our future depends on it!

02 2008 Thursday

By Jennifer Osborne in Featured

The feds seem pretty hesitant to say th “R” word.

But between the sub prime crisis, the credit crunch and plummeting stock markets; you and I both know that it’s not a question of “if” a recession going to hit the US but “when?”

Recession is something that the search industry rarely talk about . . . most of us are currently experiencing a period of tremendous boom.

Our biggest constraint to growth is not finding new clients, it’s finding and training new SEO’s. Where optimizing a site might have cost $350 in the 90’s, now we see SEO’s charge $350 per hour, some even more.

SEO’s won’t be impacted by the recession

Whhaaatttt?

If our clients are affected by the recession then we will be too. Client decisions will be made using different criteria and this will impact us. But it won’t stop there, the industry as we know it is on the verge of a major shift.

Here’s how it’s going to play out…

The Good

A recession is going to drive increased demand for SEO.

It’s counter intuitive but it’s true. When a recession hits companies they respond by reducing costs. The first budgets to be hit are always Marketing and IT (remember the early 00’s?).

When Marketing budgets are decreased, executives will make difficult budgetary decisions based on metrics. All of those Clicks, Conversions and Measurable ROI that companies are currently experiencing with Search, is going to way heavy on their decisions. Much heavier than traditional marketing metrics of Impressions and Branding.

When faced with difficult choices, advertisers will shift their budgets to the mediums that they can measure.

When IT budgets are decreased, executives will trim IT budgets. Often this means an increase in outsourcing. The in-house SEO’s role will change from being the guy to “do” the work; to being the guy to “manage” the work (or the relationship with the outside vendors).

For the SEO shop, it means an HUGE increase in demand.

The Bad

A recession is going to drive increased competition which in turn will create a skilled labor shortage.

Traditional advertising shops are going to have to replace lost profits. Some will get into Search because the want to take control of the adversing dollars back. If they become the “search experts” they can minimize the growth and steer advertising dollars back to their comfort zone.

Others will have true vision. They will see Search for it’s full potential and embrace it. These forward thinking companies will help to grow the search industry.

For some it’s a natural fit. For others (lured into the lucrative search market merely as another way to grow) not so much… ergo, Walmart.

Regardless of motivation or sincerity, the result will be the same. An increased demand for experienced SEO Professionals.

Except,

there are no major barriers to entry into SEO.

Anyone can call themselves an SEO and there is no governing body (association) to dispute this. We have no formal accreditation process or certificates.

And this leaves our industry exposed…

The Ugly

Combine an increase in demand + a shortage in supply = a whole lot of bad SEO

What to do?

There are things that we can do as individual companies and there are things that we should do as an industry.

As an individual company we can…

1) Take a look at our reporting.

If metrics are going to be a Key Success Factor in the near future then improving upon your reporting now is crucial. I’m not just talking about putting together a slick power point presentation. I’m talking about becoming an evangelist for reporting.

Insist that your clients use analytics. Insist on defining what a conversion is and then figuring out how to measure it.

As a Professional SEO Firm you MUST be in a position to differentiate yourself from the UGLY SEO.

2) Review our talent acquisition and retention strategies.

Growing talent in-house will be critical. Do you have a apprenticeship program? Note: hiring a bunch of green SEO’s is not an apprenticeship program.

What about training? Spending time training others takes time away from actually doing the work. Can your work flows absorb the impact of mentoring on your Senior employees?

Growing in-house can be a huge strain on resources. It’s not a tactical decision, it’s a strategic investment.

As a cohesive industry we should……

wait a minute, we’re not a cohesive industry. but we could be…

SEO’s have what it takes to be a cohesive, powerful industry. We support the new guy by mentoring. We help each other out. We brainstorm together when the algorithms appear amiss.

The search industry has the spirit of cohesiveness. We simply lack organization. We are many singular voices.

But this is going to change. Big Business has their toe in the door.

When they come all the way in, they are going to make rampant changes. They’ll organize us. We’ll get our accreditation, but it will it be designed in Big Business’s favor and will probably be designed to keep the little guy out.

The search industry must unite and organize itself because if we don’t, someone is going to come along and do it for us.

Author: Jennifer Osborne writer and marketer for Search Engine People.

Getting The Most From Your Search Engine Optimization Efforts for Your Small Business

02 2008 Wednesday

By Misty Rae in Featured

Trying to achieve higher organic rankings, but not sure where to start? Here we’ll have a look at a statistically tested formula for the best rankings, and stress the importance of developing a plan, sticking with it, and having just a little bit of patience to see the results. The importance of following a defined strategy cannot be overemphasized — it’s so easy, yet such a waste of time, to get distracted by every new post by Matt Cuts, every new development at Blog-a-licious, or any one of the hundreds of SEO forum and blog postings daily. This is a huge hindrance to getting the real work done. And it is work — but once you’ve got the rhythm down, the rankings increase will be sure to follow.

Let’s start with the all important formula, the 40:40:20 ratio. Through statistical analysis of thousands of sites, these numbers appear to be fairly accurate across the major search portals: 40% of rankings are a result of ‘on-page’ factors, 40% a result of off-page factors (backlinks and same site links), and 20% a result of the page URL (the exact percentages vary slightly between engines). The beauty of this is data is the resultant simplicity of the approach to achieve better search results for your important keywords.

First, on-page factors: Get your keywords in all the right places, with the right density, for each important page on your site. So what are the right places and right density? Get the keyword in the title tag, the description tag and the keywords tag. DO NOT STUFF these tags, be elegant and think about your reader. Experience has shown minor variations to be insignificant in terms of rankings, and more often than not, it seems folks go overboard with their keywords.

Let’s look at the latest data for the ’sweet spots’ for on-page ranking factors. A 10 to 20% density keyword density for the tile, 10% for both the meta keywords description is optimal. The keyword at or toward the beginning of each of these is optimal, but not necessary. What’s this mean? If we use the term ‘essential oils’ again, an optimal title tag might be ‘Pure Essential Oils and Accessories for Natural Health Professionals’. The keyword list would be ten to twenty words, comma separated, with the most important words at the beginning, and ALL words should appear in the body text of the page. The description can be (but doesn’t have to) a well written, attention grabbing sentence — it will likely be displayed in the organic search results, so you’ll want it to be both SEO and customer friendly. Again, 20 or so words, keyword near or at the beginning. Keyword can appear twice, but no more than that. Body text: 1000 words or so (+/- a couple hundred), with a 2% keyword density, and the keyword (or words) appearing near the beginning, in the middle, and near the end of the page code (not just the output text). There are tons of density analyzers on the web — pick one, focus on the body text number and ignore the rest.

Briefly, other notable on-page factors are image alt tags, H1-H6 tags, bold and italic text, and the number of outgoing (inter and intra site) links. Here’s the scoop: Alt tags matter. Get your keywords in them, but don’t overdo it. Don’t use H tags, as according to the data, they’ll bring your rankings down. Use bold and italics if it suits the design and readability of your site; they may be a positive factor, but not a huge one, and don’t stuff your keywords in them. The higher the number of links on a page, the better. One hundred links seems optimal, but don’t sweat it. Always keep in mind that usability and aesthetics are crucial too. Having javascript on the page appears to be a positive ranking factor. Finally, page size (all the text, minus the images) is optimal at 50-60k. This number is shown adjacent to the page in search results. A note on on-page code in general, a balance is important — the search engines don’t care what your page looks like from a design standpoint, they only see the code. But your customers do. And while data is not available, it is more than likely the major search portals are noticing how long a visitor stays on the page, recording whether they return to the search results to find another page. Strive to make your site clean, useful and engaging — this will pay off in more ways than one.

Off page factors — these include links from within your site and ‘backlinks’ from other websites. You MUST get backlinks to rank well, and it’s probably the most challenging of all search engine optimization to do. You’ll need to continuously acquire backlinks, or your rankings will stagnate, or even slowly drop. Optimally, you’ll get a few links a day, with a steady increase in the total number. The two most often used routes are link exchange (asking for links from other sites, and putting their links on your site in exchange) or article distribution. There’s lots of information on the web about exchanging links, read some, develop a plan and stick to it. Once you’ve got a system in place, you’ll likely be able to hire someone to help you. Article distribution is another matter. Articles should really be quality, readable, helpful information for prospective customers. You’ll get to post links within the author resource box, which serves both as an enticement for readers to visit your site, a means to give credibility to your internet business, plus search engines will also see these links and use them in their ranking algorithm. An effective linking program will utilize both these link sources. Remember, it’s not the total number of links, but a consistently increasing number that has the greatest long-term results.

Some caveats about links — links from within your own site should be text links with the keyword in the link. So the Aroma therapy site would use ‘essential oils’ in all the links to their essential oils page. Off-site links should also use keywords in text links, but not always the same words. Mix it up. Here, for example, some of backlink text examples would be ‘pure essential oils’, ‘organic essential oils’, ‘aroma therapy essential oil’, and ‘essential oils’. Further, about 30% of your links should just include the webpage address, like ‘www.johnnysessentialoils.com’ or ‘www.bestbathproducts.com/essentialoils.php This helps your backlinks appear naturally created, rather than machine made search engine spider spam. A final note on backlinks, all pages that link to yours are not weighted equally. The older and more relevant the page, the more weight your link will garner.

With that we’ll describe the last 20%: the URL. Web pages with the keywords in the address, be it the homepage or any other page on the site, rank better. If the If you’re just starting a site, getting your primary keywords in the url is useful. If not, and it makes sense to do so, use keywords in the filename like www.homepage.com/essentialoilspage1.html. Again, it appears better if the file does not have only the keywords in it, like the title and meta tags. Use a 301 redirect if changing the names of ‘old’ pages. Hyphens are still questionable — short filenames and shallow directory structures appear best.

A few final notes — each search engine has different algorithms and different update frequencies. According to the data, ALL follow the 40:40:20 formula closely enough for you to ignore the differences. A site or page that begins to rank highly on one engine may take months before it ranks highly on another. Patience and persistence are crucial. The age of a page is a factor; wasting your time on minor tweaks, rather than writing a quality article, will lead you nowhere. ‘Close enough’ is close enough with the on-page factors and urls. Once these are done, try adding quality pages to your site regularly, and get backlinks regularly — if this is happening, free your mind to work on your site, or business plan, or product product photos, or whatever you think best. Traffic is only part of the equation for a successful internet business. Visitors plus a well-designed site, excellent products, competitive pricing and superior customer service is the real formula for success.

Author: The author is a jack of all trades and master of none, including search optimization for natural health websites, including The Ananda Apothecary at www.anandaapothecary.com a source for aroma therapy and essential oil information, and www.wellnessisnatural.com, the homepage for Boulder naturopath Tarah Michelle Cech.

WordPress SEO Tip: Implementing the Power of Theming and Siloing

02 2008 Friday

By John Lamansky in Featured

This is one of many other WordPress SEO Tips and is a follow up to 20 Practical SEO Tips to Super-Charge Your WordPress Blog!, another great resource for WordPress users looking to unleash the power of such a pliable CMS platform.

Let’s face it: Search engines really want to know what your blog is about in order to give relevant results to searchers.

Siloing is the technique of theming your site’s directories to increase search engine relevance in a natural and logical way. It is great for sites, such as blogs, that have quality, topical content for which high search engine rankings are desired.

This step-by-step guide will help you implement the powerful siloing technique on your WordPress blog through a combination of plugins, settings, and strategies.

Step 1: The Preliminary Status Check

Does your blog as a whole have a clear, distinguishable theme? Do your categories logically break your blog topic into subtopics?

I’ll use my blog as an example: The WordPress Expert is, of course, focused on the WordPress niche. Since my content is focused on one topic, the search engines should have a clear idea of what search queries my site is relevant for. My categories (SEO, Social Media, Tutorials, etc.) break the content down into logical subtopics, which further aids the engines in understanding and cataloging the content.

If your blog lacks organization and clarity, consider niche-hunting and/or restructuring your blog’s categories.

This is the critical, foundational step for an effective siloing implementation, so don’t skip past it!

Step 2: Setup Category-Based Permalinks

Go to your WordPress administration panel, then go to Options > Permalinks. Select the “Custom” option and type in:

/%category%/%postname%/

Tip: If you’re using a WordPress version prior to 2.3, install the Permalink Redirect plugin to make sure your old permalinks redirect to the new ones.

Step 3: Install the Top Level Categories plugin

By default, WordPress will setup your category archive pages like this:

www.example.com/category/seo/

In this example, we’d rather have the SEO category show up at this URL:

www.example.com/seo/

Achieving this is very simple: just install the Top Level Categories plugin, and voila!

Since we just set up category-based permalinks in the previous step, then posts in the category “SEO” will appear as subdirectories of the category’s URL. This is perfect for siloing purposes.

Step 4: Install the sCategory Permalink plugin

An annoyance with WordPress’s category-based permalinks system: When a post has more than one category, the category with the lowest ID will be used in the permalink URL.

Fix: Install the sCategory Permalink plugin, which will let you choose which category (silo) each post should go in.

Step 5: Show Excerpts in Your Category Archives

We want the category archive pages to be linking to the posts in the silo, not outputting the full posts themselves.

Whether or not your category pages display the post excerpts or the full content is up to the theme you have installed. Here’s how to check: In your WordPress admin, go to Presentation > Theme Editor > Category Template. See if the code has the text the_content and if so, replace it with the_excerpt

Step 6: Interlink Within Silos

Your silo-ed categories are now set up! Now you need to reinforce your silos by linking your posts to other posts in the same silo.

For example, if your silos (categories) are “SEO” and “WordPress,” then the goal is to have your SEO posts interlinking with each other and your WordPress posts interlinking with each other.

Here are some strategies:

Deep-link to other posts in the same silo.
Try to minimize links that don’t lead elsewhere in the same silo. For example, try adding rel=”nofollow” to external sidebar and/or footer links.
Install the Similar Posts plugin, which inserts a list of related posts you’ve written to the bottom of each of your blog posts.

For an added silo boost, go to your WordPress admin, go to Options > Similar Posts, and then set “Limit matches to same category” to “Yes.”

Conclusion

Siloing is a powerful tool for your WordPress SEO toolkit. It’s easy to implement thanks to the flexibility and extensibility of WordPress!

For more WordPress SEO tips, check out my 20 Practical SEO Tips to Super-Charge Your WordPress Blog.

Author: John Lamansky is an up-and-coming web developer who has building websites for 7 years and has been working with WordPress for almost 3 of its 5 years of existence. He is experienced with XHTML, CSS, PHP, WordPress, and much more, and looks forward to providing WordPress tips, services, and resources to the blogging community.

« Older Entries

Newer Entries »