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By Bjorn Allpas in SE Optimization

SEO2Without a solid search engine optimization (SEO) plan your website is just floating around not doing much. These 5 SEO tips will get you moving in the right direction to improve your search engine rankings and increase traffic to your website.

1. Extensive Keyword Research

SEO starts with a solid keyword research and sorting. Most Vernon search engine optimization professionals are impatient and always in a hurry to implement their ideas.

Well, that keeps them revising their SEO Services efforts and eventual loss of time and traffic. Keyword research for effective SEO results needs a lot of patience and intelligent calculations. Above all you should be using the best possible tools to perform keyword research for a strong search engine optimization.

For example Google Keyword Tool, Google Insight and Google Suggestions. You will get the exact number of monthly searches on Google Keyword Tool. Here is what you should do then;

a) Download them in an excel sheet.

b) Find out your kind of keywords (that match your website content and products).

c) Sort them by daily searches.

2. Original and Optimized Content

SEO based content writing is the best element on a live web page. Both, search engine crawlers and human beings love to read original and effective content filled with useful information. However; there has to be an efficient use of SEO content writing techniques as well. A smart and optimized piece of content contains the right balance of the keywords throughout. Usually, it should have a keyword density of 2% to 5%.

a) Use two to three keywords in the whole content.

b) Start the content with the most important keyword and end it with the same keyword.

3. Web Page Optimization

Search Engine Crawler reads only the HTML of the web-page and so it must be properly optimizes to guide the crawlers to the right areas and content of the website. Put the keywords in the title, description, and add more keywords in the keywords area. Do not forget to put H1 to H6 using the keywords. Alt Tags must be placed on the images wherever possible.

4. Article Syndication

Write articles and Press releases about your website, it’s products and services. Submit the articles into as many article submission and press releases into major press releases websites. Do not forget to leave anchor texts so that readers can come to your website as well.

This practice is easy and very effective. It helps the website gets crawled by the search engines within two days which reinforces the natural ranking of the website.If you leave anchor texts for the internal pages as well then you can expect to get your website’s internal pages caches (known to search engines). This boosts the website’s presence even more.

5. Social Bookmarking

It is very important to be a highly actively involved into social bookmarking activities. Join all the major Social Bookmarking websites like digg, delicious, etc. Bookmark your own articles and press releases, make friends, and share your bookmarks.

Social bookmarking websites are very well optimized and are cached by search engines everyday. If your website’s content, link, etc is bookmarked on these sites then you can expect your website to get cached by Google within twenty-four hours as well.

Try the above mentioned SEO ideas in your daily SEO work and experience the change in the results yourself.

My name is Bjorn Allpas and I am an Internet Marketing Consulting who helps small to medium sized business market themselves online. My company is named On3 Consulting. Check out our website for more information of SEO in Vernon. You will also learn a thing or two about QR Codes Vernon. http://www.on3consultinggroup.com/

By Jason C Maxwell in SE Optimization

wp-bigIf you have been around the world of internet marketing for any amount of time you have likely heard of something called SEO. Basically that just stands for Search Engine Optimization. In the world of computers everything gets an acronym and this one basically just means that your blog or website is set up in such a way that it is friendly to Google and the other major search engines. It allows the search engines to find your content and return your sites in their results when people search for things online.

Every second there are millions of searches being done all over the world for everything from Aardvarks to Zebras. Somewhere in all that are people who are searching for products and services that your business could provide for them.

If you are using a WordPress blog, which is what I recommend to all my clients, you have the benefit of a massive library of plugins to help you with your SEO. In the old days we had to do all of this by hand by going into the code of a site and changing things around. Now we have great plugins to help us.

The best plugin that you can get for your blog is one called All in one SEO. This plugin is free and is easy to download from the WordPress site. When you download it you will need to go into the options page and make some minor setup changes and then every time you make a post or create a page on your site you will be able to list the keywords, create a summary description of the post and make keyword rich titles. The rest of the work is done by the plugin. No need to go in and start writing code.

The next essential plugin that you should have is called XML sitemaps. This plugin allows you to create a sitemap for your blog that is friendly to the search engines. Site maps are very important because these are the quickest way for Google to index your site and learn what all is available from you. With a great site map your site can be indexed much faster than without one. This plugin is 100% free.

I often say to my clients that cars run on gas and the internet runs on words. No one TYPES a photo into Google. You type words and that is what makes your site able to be found by the search engines. At the same time human beings love pictures and video.

We are much more inclined to watch a video than we are to read pages and pages of an eBook. So when you have photos on your site you need this plugin. This plugin will allow you to attach what is called metadata to each of the photos that you put up on your site. So if you have a photo that is associated with a post that you have made the photo will get the title and keywords associated with it as well. This will allow this photo to show up in Google Photos and allows your blog to have better SEO in general. The plugin is called SEO Friendly Images and it is free.

If you have always wanted to know how to make more money with your business using the internet then I have a special gift for you. I have written an eBook on how to get the search engines to love your website/blog. I am offering it to you for free. Check out my blog and sign up for the free eBook here http://TheLocalBusinessGuru.com/ Free SEO eBook, don’t delay this may go away soon!

By Kristina Weis in SE Optimization

snailHelp your website be faster than this snail. (Photo from Flickr CC by Randy Son Of Robert.)

Faster Websites Can Rank Better

Having a fast site – or at least a site that’s not slower than the average – can help you gain or maintain good search engine rankings and traffic to your website.

Site speed refers to how fast all the elements of a web page – its text, images, video clips, etc. – appear in a web browser window after someone clicks a link to that page, or types its URL into the browser navigation bar.

Early in 2010, Google added site speed to its website ranking algorithm. Now a website’s loading speed is one of about 200 factors that help Google determine which websites to rank highest in results for a specific search term. That means site speed has to be considered when you’re working on your website’s search engine optimization (SEO).

Google added site speed because a faster site is better for people, and Google wants its results to be of high value to searchers.

First: Check How Fast Your Site Loads

Use any of these free tools to check how long it takes to load your website into a web browser window:

  • Pingdom’s site speed test is a popular tool for checking website load time. It’s easy to use.
  • Google Webmaster Tools has a section with information on the speed of your website, from the source that may matter the most. Once you’ve logged in to Webmaster Tools, click “Labs” on the left, and then “Site Performance.”
  • WebPageTest.org‘s website performance test lets you check the speed and performance of your website in different web browsers such as Internet Explorer 7 or Firefox. It also allows you to test how your site performs in different geographic locations.
  • GTmetrix.com‘s website speed test combines info from Google Page Speed and Yahoo! YSlow in a nice presentation with a nice list of things you can do.

What’s Considered a “Fast” Website?

Alexa says that Facebook has below average site speed.

To give you an idea, Alexa says that Facebook.com takes just over 2 seconds to load, and that 70 percent of sites are faster. Alexa.com provides traffic statistics for most of the world’s top million websites. If your site is in this group, you’ll find some good information about your site on Alexa, and you’ll be able to compare your site to others in the top million.

In general, a website that loads in 2 seconds or less is doing well. A website that loads in 2 to 5 seconds isn’t fast, but it’s probably good enough.

A website that takes more than 5 seconds to load is likely to annoy some of its visitors. The longer it takes a website to load, the more likely the site is to be hurting its standing with Google. The search giant considers site speed as a factor when ranking web pages in search results.

How Can I Make My Website Load Faster?

Here are some relatively simple and quick fixes to speed up your website.

Some of these things you may be able to do yourself. For the rest, your hosting company or the person or company that created your website for you should be able to make these changes pretty easily for you.

#1 Website Compression

Compressing your website’s content – using gzip compression, for example – can help reduce the time it takes your webserver to send your website’s content to site visitors.

Compression affects the text elements of your website — HTML, javascript, and CSS — and speeds up the time it takes them to load. For more information on website compression and how to do it, read our article about compression.

Compression does not affect the images on your website though, so read on.

#2 Optimize Your Images

a) Don’t Use Images Any Bigger than Necessary
Don’t use a large image. Yes, you can set the width and height in HTML to 100 pixels by 100 pixels, if that’s the size you want to display – but your site will still be carrying a large image that loads slowly. If you want to display an image that is 100 pixels by 100 pixels, use an image of that size, or scale down your large image before placing it on a web page.

I asked AboutUs community members to share their experiences with compression tools. Ed Mus of Deals2Save.net recommended a tool he’s used to optimize images for load speed: Smush.it, available at Yahoo.

b) Choose the Best File Format
The file format of your images can help you or hurt you. Don’t use a JPG file unless you want to include a photograph with a huge range of colors. For most images, using a GIF or PNG file is usually fine, and these types of files load faster.

  • GIF is great for images with few colors – for example, most company logos.
  • PNG is a file format specifically for websites. PNG images have good quality, but sometimes they don’t display in Internet Explorer 6.
  • JPG is a traditional and common file format for photos. It’s best to convert a JPG image to a PNG, unless you really want a highly detailed, slow-loading photo for a specific reason.

c) Don’t Use Images If You Don’t Need To
Your logo or a photo must be included as images – there’s no other way to convey them to your site visitors. But many websites put things like a phone number, address or other text into an image, even though it’s not necessary. And really, it’s not a good practice. Images are not only slow to load, they’re also essentially invisible to search engines, unless they include descriptive alt text. Search engines can’t “see” the information in an image, so use text to convey any information that can be rendered as text.

#3 Put Your Code in Optimum Order

Placing your style sheets near the top and JavaScript near the bottom of the coding for each of your web pages can improve the perceived speed of your website for human visitors.

When someone directs a web browser to a web page, the browser starts from the top of the code and works its way down. The style sheets are one of the more important pieces for human viewers, because they determine how the site will look. After that, your website’s actual content will load pretty quickly. It’s as if the style sheets set out a framework, and then the content loads into that framework.

The JavaScript – or <script> tags – provide things like interactive features or actions that your viewer won’t notice unless they perform an action on a web page. So allowing the JavaScript to load last means your visitors see everything on the page that’s visual, even while the JavaScript is still loading. So your visitors see your page as loading faster than it really does.

Why does this matter? Because people are impatient. If a web page seems very slow, they’re more likely to leave.

#4 Remove Unnecessary External Code

Many websites have some code whose purpose is to pull something from a service that’s out of their control. For example, a website may use:

  • A “share” button from a service such as AddThis
  • An e-commerce shopping cart provided by another company
  • A widget that displays the company’s recent tweets on Twitter

The code for Google Analytics can also slow your site down a bit, though the insights you’ll gain from using analytics usually outweigh this slight disadvantage. I recommend that you take advantage of other speed improvements, and keep the analytics.

It’s wise to check the speed of any external features on your site. If you aren’t using a feature, or if it is of minimal value to your business and website, you should remove it.

#5 Get Specific Recommendations for Increasing Site Speed

Google Webmaster Tools’ section about site speed. If you use Google Webmaster Tools for your site, you can find out how fast your site loads for Google. You’ll also find some general technical suggestions for improving your site’s performance, speed or both.

If you browse the web using Firefox and already have the Firebug add-on, you might find Yahoo’s YSlow and Google’s Page Speed extensions quite helpful. While you’re viewing a web page, you can click on these extensions to pull up information about why that web page is slow, and get ideas for improving its speed.

Google introduced a new tool on March 31, 2011 called Page Speed Online. It analyzes the speed of web pages — and the mobile version of pages — and gives suggestions for improving their load time.

#6 Get a Better Website Host

“Really, the best thing someone can do to speed up their website is to have a site hosted at an operator that knows what they are doing.”
—Karl Matthias, system administrator at AboutUs.org

For the majority of websites, many factors that can speed up a website – or slow it down – are in the control of the company that hosts the site. That’s why it’s important to have a competent host that responds quickly when you have a question or problem.

If your website is loading too slowly, you probably want to look at your hosting company’s service first. You may want to consider upgrading to a better hosting package with your current hosting company, if the better package includes a promise of increased speed. Otherwise, shift your site to a hosting company with a better offering, reputation, or both.

Note: Depending on the type of website software you use, not every host or hosting plan will be able to accommodate your site. Before you switch, make sure the company and hosting package you’re considering can handle everything on your website.

Some good hosting companies:

For the more technically inclined, consider Amazon EC2, Slicehost and Linnode.

How Do I Make These Changes?

You may be able to implement some of the suggestions above yourself through the system you use to edit your website’s content.

If you use WordPress, the W3 Total Cache plug-in may be a good do-it-yourself solution.

For anything you can’t do yourself, ask your website hosting company, or the person (or firm) who created your website for you.

Want more? For more complicated and technical methods for speeding up your website, see Yahoo’s list of rules for site performance and Google’s articles on site speed.

Check out how your home page looks to search engines and people with the free Home Page Analysis. Want a deeper look at all your site’s pages? Try an AboutUs Site Report.

This article, originally published on AboutUs.org, was contributed by Kristina Weis of AboutUs.org (visit). Kristina is a community manager for AboutUs.org who talks with a lot of website owners who are trying to promote their business online. Have a question? Contact me.

By Scott Buresh in SE Optimization

SEOptimizationThere are generally two types of clients who seek out search engine marketing services – those who are new to the discipline and are researching various companies, and those who were unhappy with a previous SEO company and are now looking to engage with the right vendor. Whatever your background or familiarity with SEO, it’s important to understand that while most good firms do require a contract for services, the firms that have the most confidence in their own abilities will offer the chance to prove themselves to you by first providing a no-contract, introductory pay-per-click campaign.

Understandably, clients are sometimes wary of handing over the reins to their website – most often their most powerful marketing tool – to a random search engine marketing firm. In order to test an SEO company’s mettle, why not give them the chance to prove how effective they can be at managing and improving your PPC campaign instead? This way, you are engaging in a low-risk, high-yield endeavor that will truly serve as a litmus test for your working relationship. First, if you are already running your own pay-per-click campaign, give the SEO company control over all or even a small portion of your account to prove that they’re worthy of your business by not only maintaining the account, but measurably improving your results. If you don’t have a current PPC campaign, you can take the money that you’d spend on SEO and request that the search engine marketing firm build and run a pay-per-click campaign to serve as a proof of concept. While SEO and PPC are certainly different disciplines, they share a number of similarities including keyphrase selection, creation of targeted copy, tracking of metrics, and overall ROI. If the SEO company excels in generating results for your company’s PPC campaign, there is a likely correlation to the success that they will deliver a return on a longer-term SEO campaign.

Another benefit to this trial relationship is that you can find out if you enjoy working with your search engine marketing firm. For whatever reason, sometimes business relationships just do not work out. Expectations, styles, and workflows differ, and these cultural and philosophical variations can render the relationship a poor fit. During your initial pay-per-click campaign, when your potential SEO company promises a deliverable, are they on time? Do they deliver results without asking for too much work on your end? Can and will this search engine marketing company accommodate your needs? And do they take the time to explain concepts that you don’t understand?

These same principles and considerations apply if you are looking for a search engine marketing firm to take control of your existing and ongoing campaign. A good SEO company with years of experience should be able to identify new search terms for cultivation, and improve the metrics of even your very well run in-house pay-per-click campaign. In addition to standard SEO knowledge, the firm should act in your best interest and should have access to a variety of cutting-edge tools to measure what works and what doesn’t for your campaign. Even if you allocate only a small portion of your budget to this trial-run, a good SEO firm should be able to deliver swift and impressive results.

Since the SEO company is supposed to be proving themselves to you during this time, a pay-per-click campaign with a new search engine marketing firm, especially serving as a proof of concept, should not have a contract term. This is meant to provide you with peace of mind and eliminate anxiety on your behalf for multiple reasons. For example, if you don’t think the company is a good fit and isn’t delivering results, you should be able to immediately leave without having any long-term damage done to your campaign. Even if the company is delivering improved results from the pay-per-click campaign, but you’ve experienced a negative or cantankerous relationship with the firm, you should be able to take your business elsewhere to another firm that will work with you to meet your goals, and match your business culture and communication style. Essentially, during a proof of concept period, you should have expended little capital, have experienced a symbiotic business relationship, and have developed a firm sense of trust with your future SEO company.

Another reason why a pay-per-click campaign is the ideal medium for acting as proof of concept is because unlike long-term search engine optimization, which can require weeks and months to deliver full results, you should see an almost instantaneous uptick in results from a PPC campaign with a skilled search engine marketing firm. Although SEO is almost always the better long-term investment for your money, a pay-per-click campaign as proof of concept should give you the confidence you’re looking for in your relationship with a SEO company. With PPC, you should see measurable results within 30-60 days. Not only should you see your cost-per-click go down and your conversion rates rise, but both of these variables should lead to an increase in revenue. And just think – if you spent this same 30-60 day period searching for a SEO company without engaging in a proof of concept pay-per-click campaign, this is a lost opportunity cost that could have brought you not only a financial return, but also the confidence to engage in a worry-free campaign with a reputable search engine marketing firm.

Every SEO company says that their reputation is solid and that they deliver results. But unless they’re willing to accommodate your needs and adjust their workflow to suit your business, they’re probably not the firm you’re looking for in the long run. So, whether your business is just exploring the world of search engine marketing firms, or if you are looking for a reputable vendor who can confidently stand behind their work, don’t be afraid to ask for no-contract pay-per-click campaign to see if they can really deliver.

Scott Buresh is the founder and CEO of Medium Blue, a search engine optimization company, which was awarded a prestigious American Marketing Association award in both 2008 and 2010. Buresh has been featured in respected publications such as Entrepreneur, Success, Direct Marketing News, Business to Business, Search Marketing Standard, Public Relations Tactics and the Atlanta Business Chronicle. His articles have appeared in numerous online publications, including ZDNet, WebProNews, MarketingProfs, DarwinMag, SiteProNews, ISEDB.com, and Search Engine Guide. He was also a contributor to How to Build Your Own Web Site with Little or No Money: The Complete Guide for Business and Personal Use (Brown, 2010), The Complete Guide to Google Advertising (Atlantic, 2008) and Building Your Business with Google for Dummies (Wiley, 2004). Medium Blue is an Atlanta search engine optimization company with local and international clients.

By Dr Adam Stetzer in SE Optimization

SEO2SEO resellers have traditionally earned their revenues by acting as middle-men. They manage the sales and marketing for search engine optimization services while outsourcing the delivery work to a third party. Many white label SEO reseller organizations have sprung up to meet this demand, making it considerably easier for a small web design, PR firm or ad agency to start reselling SEO services. But as the competitive landscape has become significantly more difficult, the traditional SEO reseller approach has been been less effective. Furthermore, there have been huge advances in the SEO industry in the last few years. This begs the question: What are the new trends for those wishing to gain competitive advantage reselling SEO?

Emphasize transparency With the recent Farmer Update, the issue of ethics in online marketing are once again front-and-center. Similar to the many highly public updates Google completed in 2007 and 2008, 2011 is proving to be an active year for the search engine optimization industry. This, once again, shines a light on those firms that prefer to do their work under the cover of darkness. While we don’t really know if there are ethical problems with how these firms operate, the bottom line is that you don’t want to find out. Don’t partner with these types of organizations.

J.C. Penney That almost says enough. If you have been following the SEO reseller industry then you know that J.C. Penney outsourced their search engine optimization services poorly. And the firm they selected most likely used a broker for link acquisition (outsourcing the outsourced SEO). It all ended quite badly. Know your SEO reseller organization and what they are doing. They should be very reachable, communicative and professional. These are easy things to determine through phone calls.

Selling SEO alone is no longer enough With social media gaining momentum, and email marketing a must for any business, it is clear that modern search engine marketing packages need to be a hybrid of these components. The idea that you can cobble together such an offering from 5 different Internet Marketing vendors is not viable. Many claim that they can pull the best SEO from Firm A, email marketing from Firm B and then social media management from Firm C. But this does not work in practice at any reasonable scale. In reality, you end up with a fragmented delivery team and higher costs. Modern SEO resellers are looking to one place to outsource their delivery needs. This keeps the partnership clean and the work delivery efficient.

SEO technology is essential The search engine optimization industry has come a long way from title tags and directory submissions. While that was a great gig in 2007, in 2011 the bar has been raised significantly higher. Today people expect solid analytics. They need backlink profiling as well as SEOMoz stats like Domain Authority and MozRank. They want to know how many backlinks to their website are being credited by the search engines, and how fast? Your SEO reseller should offer you an easy view into these important search engine optimization statistics.

Customer retention Finally, your ability to retain a customer will grow with the number of services you offer to them. Moreover, those services need to actually provide value. This thought should be pervasive in everything you sell and also in your decision criteria for selecting your vendors.

Conclusions The search engine optimization industry has been evolving quickly over the last 4 years. We’ve seen many significant changes with the addition of social media marketing, explosive growth in link-building activity and the introduction of innovative SEO statistics. People using an outdated SEO reseller strategy will have a competitive disadvantage to those who have partnered with more innovative delivery organizations that have embraced these industry trends and incorporated them into their product offerings.

Dr. Adam Stetzer is President and Co-Founder of HubShout, LLC, an online marketing and SEO reseller organization based in the US. With over 15 years experience in IT, working with Fortune 100 companies such as Coca Cola, General Electric, Chevron Texaco and AT&T, Dr Stetzer brings considerable experience to the SEO reseller community.

By SEO Daddy in SE Optimization

SEO2Hello Peeps!

As promised the next installment in Rik Pennington’s meteoric rise to the dizzy heights of Google Top Ten organic listings for the generic keyword ‘Wedding Photographer’. When I started this series of articles the focus was to convey SEO process, analysis and implementation using a varied arsenal of tools and techniques; detailing the journey from Zero to Hero. During this adventure the goal posts for me began to change and although I have achieved high rankings for Rik; in the back of my mind was the burning question – what if and can I actually get Rik to the very top of Google for this Keyword term? So not only have I detailed my process and tried to explore and present possible solutions, I have shared with you some of the external services offered by 3rd parties to help achieve these goals.

I have to admit there are limitations as to what I can achieve for I am a self-taught one-man band. I don’t physically mix with other SEOs but I do follow the ones I consider of importance and value to me on Twitter and I avidly follow their blogs. So when it came to the burning question “what if?” I had to look further afield to find the right solutions to my dilemma. I scoured the internet for SEO companies offering services that would complement my hard work and achievements to date.

And I found them, many of them. But which ones could be trusted? Were they reputable? Would they rip me off and take my cash and deliver very little? Questions, questions… and hard to find the right answers. So I got reading about different techniques to gain that extra boost I was looking for. You see, being on page one of Google is all well and good and an achievement to be proud of, but the real rewards are at the summit, right at the top. If you are looking for big traffic, high profile and a shed load of inquiries then you need to be in positions #No.1, #No.2, #No.3 on Google’s mountain. Those who reach the summit reap the rewards. Those who provide proven tools to get you to the summit are an invaluable resource to your SEO strategy. But that said, you need to know when to use them and critically at what point in the project cycle. These tools and companies are the true ‘Big Guns of SEO’ and I’m going to tell you all about one.

The data below is for you understand to value of Google Summit for click distribution:

• Position #1: 45.46% of all clicks
• Position #2: 15.69% of all clicks
• Position #3: 10.09% of all clicks
• Position #4: 5.49% of all clicks
• Position #5: 5.00% of all clicks
• Position #6: 3.94% of all clicks
• Position #7: 2.51% of all clicks
• Position #8: 2.94% of all clicks
• Position #9: 1.97% of all clicks
• Position #10: 2.71% of all clicks
• Total: 95.91% of all clicks occur on Page #1 of SERPs

Please keep in mind, that this is NOT an exact science. This is only a way of attempting to estimate the percentage of click volume you may receive based upon SERP position.

Note: This data has been correlated by Agent SEO (source data) and is a very useful guide, as is most of the information they provide online.

These are the sorts of places you should be looking for SEO information. I read a lot of posts online from supposed experts who are quite frankly churning out the same old stuff. Just spun with a different take on it and of little true value to you; the punters hungry to learn. Next week in the final installment of this story I will detail those I reckon you should be following if you want to be at the coal face of SEO and might even have a pop at those who are wasting your time, waxing lyrical about nothing of value! :)
Time to call in the professionals!

3 weeks ago I made the decision to bring out my biggest SEO Gun of all. This is the story of the impact that decision had on Rik Pennington’s SERP’s for the term ‘Wedding Photographer’. I had for some time been reading on the theories of ‘Link Wheels’ and how to employ them to your advantage. For those of you who have never come across this term, a ‘Link Wheel’ is a theory based on heating up a page for a particular search term by creating a wheel of back links form blog posts, press releases & web 2.0 sites all based on your specific keyword target. Basically they all interlink creating the wheel of links but each spoke in the wheel also points to target URL for target keyword. This in turn heats up the page in the eyes of Google and in theory your page climbs the ranking due to the new and powerful targeted influx of high value ‘Link Juice’. There are many firms offering this service but with all things in life; there are good and bad, there are transparent and cloudy approaches. I required a reputable firm with a transparent approach. I did my research, made a decision, reached out and made contact with Richard Saulsbury of SEOLinkWheelers, listened to what he proposed and then gave them the green light to GO! GO! GO!

My choice of company was a Florida based firm called SEOLinkWheelers.com and it turned out to be a very good choice indeed. SEOLinkWheelers gave me the confidence, reassurance and transparency in their process that I was looking for. On completion of the project I would be provided with a document of how my link wheel was created and more importantly where! I won’t be posting that information in this article but I can assure you it was completely transparent and very informative. :)

The history of Rik Pennington’s rankings – before and after the implementation of a project from SEOLinkWheelers.com.

Google.co.uk – For the generic search term ‘Wedding Photographer’ Rik was bouncing around between #No.7 – #No.3
Google.com – For the generic search term ‘Wedding Photographer’ Rik was bouncing around between #No.16 – #No.12

On 12th of February 2011 – I received a polite email form one of SEOLinkWheelers employees Levi to inform me the project was about to commence and should be complete in roughly 7 days. Excellent news I thought but there was an air of trepidation when entering the unknown with a 3rd party. Rik’s Google destiny had always been under my control but now I had to put my trust and faith in somebody new to me. Late evening on Saturday 12th February I received an email again from Levi letting me know that the project cycle was complete and attached was an Excel spreadsheet detailing my new and shiny SEO Link Wheel as promised. Now it was time to see if it had really worked.

As you may know when links are built it can take time for links to discovered, correlated by Google’s clever algorithms and for the gains to filter through to the ranking pages. The clock was ticking and I could sense the anticipation. Rik and I were monitoring the situation closely and patiently waiting to see if there were any gains. Then we had a little wobble; which I now know to be called a ‘Google Dance’. There were some erratic fluctuations with our rankings across the board. Google had its knickers in a twist, how powerful is this website and more importantly where to rank it? When the sun rose on morning of 15th February, the dust had settled and Google seemed to have it knickers on the right way round. I was on the phone with Rik and we were laughing out loud with joy. Not only had SEOLinkWheelers delivered, they had delivered in a supreme fashion.

As of 15th February 2011 Rik Pennnington ranked as follows in Brittan and USA

Google.co.uk – For the generic search term ‘Wedding Photographer’ Rik is #No.2 and holding steady
Google.com – For the generic search term ‘Wedding Photographer’ Rik is #No.2 but bouncing between #No.2 & #No.3

SEOLinkWheelers have helped us to make the gains and put us on what I refer to as ‘Google Summit’; in the top 3 positions on both sides of the Atlantic for the term ‘Wedding photographer’. This means big traffic, we are chuffed to bits with the gains and can only thank SEOLinkWheelers for their professionalism and project execution. In my opinion a very serious and proven contender delivering the results we all hunger. If you are serious about hiring a firm to boost your rankings and maybe conquer ‘Google’s Summit’ then SEOLinkWheelers should be on list. Money very well spent!

We have two weeks to go till the final installment of this story. Will we achieve the ultimate holy grail of #No.1 spot in the UK and maybe in the US? It’s a tall ask; let’s see when I next report in!

Oh and I almost forgot to mention our recent foray into SEO domination Down Under! Ahead of a planned trip to New Zealand next year, Rik wanted to know if it be worth having a punt a bit of New Zealand traffic and to create some awareness that one of London’s leading wedding photographers will be in the country for a month and available for hire! You really want to see what happened next, it amazed us both and it will amaze you if not make you a little envious. When you have true leverage and power, the worlds the limit when it comes to ranking for your desired keywords.

Next we plan to go Intergalactic! Well maybe, who knows? :)
Thanks for reading

Till next time peeps!

SEO Daddy

The SEO Daddy is a very successful professional SEO Consultant. He runs http://www.frame13.com an SEO Company in the UK. He covers every industry online and specializes in Wedding Business SEO. Follow the SEO Daddy on Twitter. This article covered the use of SeoLinkWheelers on Rik Pennington’s meteoric rise and sustaining his presence at to the top of Google for the generic term ‘Wedding Photographer’. Source data for this article from Agent SEO

By Gabriel Meriwether in SE Optimization

SEOptimizationIf you’re just starting out in SEO, you’re going to need authority linking to get you in the game. An authoritative site can leverage anchor text links much more than a site without much authority. In other words, if an authoritative site has 100 external links and the non-authoritative site has the same 100 external links, Google will favor the authoritative site. Depending on the degree of authority, Google may even place the authoritative site higher even if it has only 10 anchor text links opposed to the other site’s 100.

The most effective technique I’ve found to get authority is guest blogging using leads found on MyBlogGuest.com. Here you can find a large quantity of high quality sites interested in accepting guest blogs. It’s really quite simple. MyBlogGuest is a platform that connects blogs that want guest content with bloggers who want to post guest content in exchange for a few links to their site.

Cold Calling Blogs

Cold calling (emailing) blogs is another tactic you can use. This method can work, but it’s so inefficient that it may not be worth your time. However, I recently tried a tool called Ontolo which takes a lot of the grunt work out of finding good blogs in the first place. Ontolo takes keywords that you would use to search for websites, and then produces thousands of sites that can all be ranked according to the site’s authority. Then, the program provides email addresses, twitter accounts, contact pages and more, taking out the time consuming process of finding all that information on your own.

While it’s an excellent tool that saves a lot of time, I’ve personally found that my cold calling response rate doesn’t justify the cost of the program. It may be different in your market. Even if you don’t use the program, you can find some outsources to do Ontolo’s work for you. Use Google blog search or preferably, Technorati, because you can search by authority. Also, when comparing sites side by side, I’d suggest using the MOZ score. Google tool bar page rank is a poor indicator of ranking because it is so rarely updated.

Anchor Text Linking

Authority is good, but without specific anchor text links pointing to your site you’re going to have a hard time ranking for your chosen keywords. The best thing you can do a get a high quality syndication list. Find your partners you use for authority and ask them if they’d be interested in receiving syndicated articles. Also, you can use more traditional methods such as ezinearticles.com or Buzzle, but you may have to wait a long time before good sites pick them up. Over time though, ezinearticle and Buzzle can be beneficial.

Gabriel Meriwether is a guest author for www.brooksidepatiofurniture.com which specializes in outdoor chaise lounge chairs.

By Peter Nisbet in SE Optimization

SEOptimizationCheck out the title of this article: ‘High Search Engine Ranking Optimization’, then a colon followed by ‘Top Google Website Ranking’. When I first used the term ‘ranking’ with reference to search engine listing positions, I was cried down by those ‘in the know’ because ‘ranking’ and ‘listing’ do not mean the same thing. Know what? I didn’t care because the people using the terms didn’t know that and it’s those I want to read my articles.

I found that stating the titles of my articles as I have done above gets me better listings for them on Google than if I focused only on the first or second part of that title. That benefits both me and the article directory. The title is legal and acceptable to article directories, and enables me to make good use of the best keywords I have found through my keyword research. If you find the two best, why use only one? Lesson #1: You should do the same!

The point is that not too long after these know-alls made their comments, my website was listed higher on Google and Yahoo than theirs were. So let them bleat and shout, but what counts for me are results and not claims or complaints about doing things right. I am going to give you some insight here into why you should not just do what others tell you to do, but should do what you find works for you. This is all legal, and no ‘black hat.’

Googlebot is Google’s ‘spider’ and it works by requesting the URL of the page it is to scan. It finds that URL from links on other web pages (websites, article directories, social networking, forums, etc), from URLs submitted via Google Webmaster Tools, or from a link on your own website.

Google lists web ‘pages’, not web ‘sites’ or domains.

When it reaches a web page it first removes the links on that page for further scanning. The page is then sent to Google’s indexing software that indexes it according to a large number of specific factors. There are algorithms that check semantic relevance to the search term used by Google’s user (LSI algorithm), Google PageRank (based on links back to the web page) and all the other factors that lead to high search engine optimization.

You will find it more difficult to get a top Google website ranking if you don’t understand how Google works, and how to take advantage of your knowledge. Knowledge is king, as they say, and knowing how Google works is one major step to that throne.

The links may then be scanned to find more pages either within your website for internal links, or within other websites for external links. By arranging for your links to be seen ‘last’ by Googlebot, it can focus on the text of your page first. Many have berated and ridiculed me for arranging my web pages and links that way, but it works!

Visitors see the links in my left hand navigation, but Googlebot finds them at the end of the page HTML. I have a trick to achieve that.

I have been ridiculed for more of my ideas, such as that the Google ‘nofollow’ attribute stops search engines visiting links. They all claim that it means only that the search engine algorithm will not give PageRank points to such pages. So much is obvious, because that was the intention of Matt Cutts who designed the attribute. However, Google Webmaster Central states:

“In general, we don’t follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using nofollow causes us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web. However, the target pages may still appear in our index if other sites link to them without using nofollow, or if the URLs are submitted to Google in a Sitemap.”

In other words, if you want Google to see your text rather than links, by adding the ‘nofollow’ attribute to these links you can stop Google following them, and focus instead on your content. There are situations where this is a very useful attribute to use to enable you to get a top search engine ranking. You can also use this attribute to maximize the Google PageRank measurement for any page you want – I generally focus on my Home Page. Get a high listing with that and visitors will easily find the other pages.

There are many other ways in which you can manipulate the way Google works for high search engine ranking optimization and a consequent top Google website ranking.

These are only two of dozens of white hat legal SEO tricks you can use to take advantage of the way Googlebot works in practice rather than what others will claim.

It is always best to carry out your own testing and acting on the basis of your results. Perhaps equally high listings on Google can be attained without doing these things, but these are what my tests have shown me to work, and I have yet to read about Google stating definitively that they are wrong.

More information on how Pete used his knowledge of how Google works to get a top Google website ranking for pages on his first three websites can be found on www.onlinenetincome.com/how-google-works.html where you also find out how you can achieve high search engine ranking optimization for your web pages.

By SEO Daddy in SE Optimization

googlelogoOk, let’s recap to date what we have covered: basic link building skills and strategy at Local, Regional Level (Wedding Photographer Greenwich, Wedding Photographer London). We have covered reciprocal links, back-links, Blogrolls, Blog commenting, and Directories/Forums.

Now it’s time for the ‘Big Guns’ to come out to play, time to up our game and start our assault on the summit. We want to focus our SEO attention on the generic keyword ‘Wedding Photographer’ and thus gain the kudos of Google Top Ten listings giving us national and international traffic we strive for.

The ‘Big Guns’ in the link arsenal I am going to cover are: Link Management Software, Linking Analysis, Link strategy. Without using the ‘Big Guns’, achieving a Google Top Ten listing is nigh on impossible in my opinion, unless you forgot about that PR5+ domain just hanging around on your web-server not being utilized. And let’s face it, that’s never the case!

Also, I mentioned in Part 2 of this series of articles that Rik Pennington Photography had lost his #No.1 ranking for ‘Wedding Photographer London’ in Google.co.uk. I have addressed the issue and we are back to #No.1 spot! Nice work from the SEO Daddy.

Link Management Software

It’s an absolute must for me as an SEO professional; there are plenty of unscrupulous link exchangers out there. Exchange links with you one day and next week your link has gone from their website trying to get one over on you with a one-way link. Software can mange, monitor and react accordingly and slap ‘no follows’ on or auto-delete Link Dodgers and Link Jackers! Thus, keeping your link strategy streamlined, focused and running at full capacity, increasing the link juice you thirst. Quality link management software can take a lot of the laborious frustrating aspects of link building off your hands and frees up valuable time to get on with more productive and rewarding tasks within the SEO arena. Most have tools to help you find related websites for link exchanges, blogs for commenting on and posting to, also quality directories for listing in. All this can come with detailed PageRank, Alexa, BackLink statistics assisting you to make the right decisions on a link by link basis, strengthening your authority every step of the way.

You are not going to get penalized for using link management software; use it sensibly, with progressive, controlled and targeted link growth in relevant market sectors with diverse link themes. If you want to know more about Link Management Software, contact me and I can let you know what’s out there and what would best suit your online needs.

Linking Analysis

Ok, now we are talking. We need to know how the websites listed in Google’s Top Ten for the term ‘wedding photographer’ got there? Every website has left a forensic trail of its success. You just need the tools and skills to sniff it out. Once on the scent, let a clever application do the hard work for you and all you need to do is analyze the data. Strategize according and marry the results with your developing assault plan for conquering the summit. A crew of German chaps has recently released SEOprofiler and they have hit the nail on head with this set of SEO Tools. It’s yet another example of precision German engineering at its best! The strapline ‘Vorsprung Durch Technik’ comes to mind. For our friends over the pond who don’t indulge in foreign linguistics or own an Audi TT, I’ll translate for you. This German phrase is usually translated into English as ‘progress through technology’. A literal translation would be ‘advancement through technology’. There’s no single English word which is an exact English equivalent of ‘vorsprung’; ‘to leap ahead’ comes close and SEOprofiler is definitely a leap ahead of rest.

The boffins from Deutschland have done it again! If you are determined to get your website into Google’s Top Ten then you need to enter the more advanced and complex world of link analysis. I would strongly suggest you look at SEOprofiler. This is a heavy weight web based set of tools that delivers to its clients some of the most in-depth link analysis I have seen out there. But don’t be put off if you’re a beginner. It’s easy to use, very informative and will enlighten you as to the link status of your website and the in-depth status of your competitors for a keyword phrase. All in all, a remarkable set of tools and up there in the SEO Software market. A must if you are serious about outranking your competitors on Google. I wouldn’t have achieved Rik Pennington’s Google page one ranking without referencing with this set of SEO tools.

Link strategy

Based on the conclusions gained from the link analysis of competitors in Google’s Top ten for the keyword we are homing in on, we now have all the knowledge to stage an assault and gain a Google Top Ten listing for a generic keyword, the Holy Grail for most SEO professionals. Generic keywords are big traffic drivers and the kudos that goes with listing at the top Google’s organic ranking mountain means oodles of traffic. Oodles of traffic means throwing everyman and his dog into the top of the hopper and seeing what comes out. Admittedly there are plenty of discards but this is of no consequence to our overall strategy. Profile is everything; we have done local and regional domination. But we need the national generic listings to increase the market penetration and cement our authority as one of the top dogs in our market. If they don’t find you, you can’t do business with them. Simple SEO marketing philosophy – blanket assault on Google page one listings and cherry pick the jobs you want, taking the cream of crop!

So, we have done all of the above, the plans in place, the strategy is robust, aspects of the plan are already operational and yielding results. We have established our authority as a player within our market sector (neighborhood), now it’s time to cement it. We now need more, many more back links, continuing to add to our ever bulging link pot. We are looking for a constant flow of new quality links. How are we going to get them? Well, I’ll tell you next time.

Next week we will cover Article Submission, Anonymous Blog Post Publication, the murky word of Copy Spinning, Rewrite Percentages and controlled Article propagation across the global network.

Till next time, peeps……
Thanks for reading.

The SEO Daddy is a very successful professional SEO Consultant. He runs www.Frame13.com a SEO Company in the UK. He covers every industry online and specializes in Wedding Business SEO. This article covered the use of SEOprofiler. Twitter ID: SEODADDY_UK

By Ray Whittaker in SE Optimization

SEOptimizationWhen it comes to onpage SEO, it’s estimated that Google checks up to 200 onpage SEO parameters. And since Google keeps its ranking algorithms a secret, nobody really knows what these checks are or even if the estimate is anywhere near correct. But none of that matters when it comes down to it. As long as you can apply a handful of the top onpage SEO strategies, you can get your web pages to rank and draw traffic.

Choose the Right Key Phrase for Onpage SEO

If you want a web page in one of the top ten search engine positions, you need to perform your SEO on a keyword or key phrase that does not have too much competition. You don’t want to take on keywords that the big guys are throwing a lot of money at or ones that too many people are competing for. It’s not that you couldn’t get to page one for these keywords, but achieving, and maintaining, your ranking would be more difficult. First, you want to get to page one, then you want a good chance of staying there.

There is one method of analyzing key phrases that is not foolproof but may give you an edge. Choose keywords and key phrases that match the following criteria::

1. Find key phrases that get more than 1000 searches per month on Google. You can check this using the Google keyword tool.

2. Go to the Google search page and search on your key phrase with the word ‘allintitle:’ in front of it (remember to include the colon). So for the key phrase of ‘yoga poses’ you would use the following search command: allintitle: yoga poses.

3. When the search is entered, look at the top of the Google search screen to see how many pages are returned for that search. The number of pages must be less than 100,000.

This method of keyword analysis is simple and free but suffers from one major drawback. It assesses the competition by finding the number of pages that the search finds. This gives a guideline to the amount of competition for that search term but doesn’t give any indication of the strength of the competition. I don’t know of a simple free way to do that, but there are tools available that can provide that information for a reasonable cost.

Seven Onpage SEO Techniques

Once you have chosen the key phrase that you want your page to rank for, you need to apply some onpage SEO techniques to it. The search engines will look for the pages that best match the search term that the user enters. Hence the need for 1000 searches a month or more. It’s no good optimizing for a search term that nobody searches on. Once you know that a fair number of people are searching for your chosen key phrase, you need to make sure your web page makes good use of that key phrase. Here are seven onpage SEO techniques you can use to make sure the search engines take notice of your page for that search term.

1. Buy a domain name that matches your key phrase. For example, if your key phrase is ‘yoga poses’, the ideal domain name would be yogaposes.com. If you can’t get an exact match, try using hyphens to separate words or add a word as a suffix such as yogaposesexplained.com. You could add a prefix word but suffix words tend to rank better with the search engines.

2. Get your key phrase into the URL of the page. This is already taken care of if your key phrase is in the domain name but you can perform onpage SEO on sub-pages as well. So for instance you might have a URL like yourdomain.com/yoga-poses.

3. Make sure the keyword appears in the title of the web page and in the meta keywords tag. If you don’t know what this means, you need to make sure your web developer understands your requirement for this. The keywords tag is not as important as it used to be, but it’s still worth using as part of your onpage SEO strategy.

4. Put your keyword into headings. If you can place your keyword into heading text such as heading 1, heading 2, etc, this will highlight it for the search engines. Ideally get your keyword into level 1, level 2 and level 3 headers.

5. Make the keyword stand out. Identify your keyword to search engines by putting it in bold, underline or italic. Search engines regard words with special formatting as important.

6. If you have an image on your web page, put your keyword into the ‘alt’ tag of the image. If you don’t have an image on your web page, it might be worth finding a relevant image for the subject. Not only can you use it for your onpage SEO but it can add interest for the reader.

7. Make your keyword prominent in the first sentence and the last sentence of the text on your web page. Apparently, the search engines often pay more attention to the beginning and end of the content on your page.

Keyword Density for Onpage SEO

You will want to scatter your key phrase throughout your web page’s content. Keyword density is usually measured as a percentage of the total words on a page. So, if your web page contains 100 words and your key phrase appears three times, your keyword density should be three percent (assuming your key phrase is just one word). You might assume that the higher the keyword density, the better it is for onpage SEO, but this is not necessarily the case. Too high a keyword density will get your page penalized by the search engines. Besides, overloading your content with your key phrase will make your content less readable and therefore less appealing to your readers. There’s no point getting people to your web page just to see them leave again out of boredom or frustration.

A keyword density of around three percent is ideal, but a density anywhere between one and five percent is fine. The caveat to all this is that it should read sensibly so don’t get too hung up on getting exactly three percent. It’s far more important to keep your visitor’s interest so they keep reading. Onpage SEO is there to serve the needs of your website. Don’t make your website a slave to onpage SEO.

Ray Whittaker is an Internet Marketer, coach and mentor. He is a member of the Six Figure Mentors. If you want to read more articles on Internet Marketing, visit his blog at raywhittaker.com/blog. Get a 7-day video bootcamp to get you started with your own on-line marketing business – absolutely free at online-income-system.com

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