Posts Tagged ‘search engine optimization’
Why you need more than just a Website
Although a website is the first step to succeed online, succeeding online don’t only rely on having a good site. It’s simply the first plan of action you need to implement before launching your site in the World Wide Web. Needless to say, it will be your store front to establish your online presence.
Before you start with the design, consider the fact that you need your site to work for Search Engines and end-users. You have to balance between the two, both are equally important for a website. You need more than just a website to launch an effective online campaign. Consider researching for keywords to use as your meta-tags, titles, description etc., learn the art of creating a navigation system that both users and spiders understand, create an XML site map etc. Visit this page on how to create an SEO Website Design Friendly.
Another thing, when I say more than just a website, it means worthy to be bookmarked as reference. Other site owners create a blog to share relevant information about the products and services they offer, while others provide a section for resources. You really don’t have to create a blog just to say you have one. You need to ask yourself this:
• Do I have passion for writing?
• Can I really maintain it?
These are just two of the questions you have to think over before launching your own blog (this will be discussed further on my next blog).
If what you have is more than just a website, then you don’t have to worry about on-site optimization. The next action you need to do is market your website doing off-site optimization. If you worked from the ground up, optimizing your site for Search Engine will not be as hard as it seems – less effort, more savings. Work from the ground up, learn the basics and avoid unnecessary processes to optimize a site. When the site is ready, you only need a good plan for your link building activities.
Scamming SEO Companies
There are scammers everywhere when it comes to the field of business and scammers won’t let the SEO services get away. Yes, there are also SEO companies who are nothing but scammers. Unfortunately, they still get to be successful in luring innocent people into their bait. Here are a few tips that you should know to avoid being one of the victims of SEO scammers.
Impossible Promises
Come on, we should get real here. There’s no way that a certain SEO company could give you a number one rank on Google in a matter of days. SEO is a continuous step-by-step process which helps your site to get up higher one at a time. Don’t fall for promises saying that they could get your site to page one of a search engine even if you’re beyond page ten. Keep in mind that SEO is not something that could be rushed. To be successful, patience is needed. It’s better to pay for a service that requires you to wait for a while but is sure to give you results than to pay for a service that promises fast results then leaving you with nothing.
Using Email for Marketing
If it’s a reliable SEO company that you want, you won’t find them in your e-mail’s Inbox or Spam folder. The best thing that you could do is to search for them in search engines. Companies with high page ranks are most probably trustworthy companies. Because if they offer SEO services then they should also be able to get their own sites have a higher page rank. Never fall for those who would email you saying “Your site is not listed in search engines” then would start offering services to get your site listed and even give you a high page rank.
Get Famous in Thousands of Search Engines
Sure this will really be pleasing to the ears of someone who wants their site to be as popular as they want. But thousands of search engines are just useless if you would think of it. The ones you should be concerned of are the big players such as Yahoo, Google, Bing, etc. Fraud SEO companies will just spread your site everywhere and that would do no good to you. It will just send minimal or worse, no traffic at all to your site and worse than that, your site could get penalized for spamming the web.
Research
Always look at the company’s background. Search for satisfied clients. Review their history and note any suspicious acts and information. Be vigilant. It’s better to be extra careful than be a victim of scammers. You will surely lose money if you rush into things without doing your research.
Being a victim of a scammer can always be avoided. Make sure you take all of these things into consideration when choosing the company for SEO services. Because when it’s too late, it’s impossible to get your money back and your site will be left to rot. These scammers are fast and smart. The key is to outsmart them by being careful.
SEO Friendly Web Design
Designs of a website can really entice people. Most web designers also think that their skills could be measured by the looks of the website they created. They think that a good looking website will be enough to attract visitors. But what if you’re in the marketing field? A good looking website will surely not be enough to attract people to visit your site.
Since people would tend to use search engines to look for what they need or want, a web designer should design the website wherein the search engine can recognize the site easily. So showing off of skills by creating a site full of graphics is a big no-no. Remember that search engines don’t have eyes like humans to see those graphics jammed in your site. Your site would not be recognized for what it is about in that way.
The job of search engines is to give relevant results for visitors as to what they’re looking for. Therefore, your site should have a theme beginning with your META tags, your page content and the H1 tag that contains the on-page title.
Web designers should avoid putting in a lot of code into your design. If the client’s field is marketing then the web designer should forget about bragging on his skills in design and focus on content instead. Excessive amounts of codes will hinder the search engines in getting to the content because as mentioned above, search engines don’t recognize graphics so no matter how beautiful the site is, it’s useless if it has a crappy content.
Again, an all image or all Flash site will not help you on your way up in search engines. Because as mentioned above, search engines give consideration into content so if there are way too many unnecessary codes then you won’t end up successful in getting your site indexed.
All in all, a good web designer is not just about having excellent artistic skills. He should know the technique of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) combined with building up a web site. If you’re looking for someone to design your site make sure that your designer knows SEO. This would be truly beneficial for those who are into marketing and would like their web site to look good and at the same time have a high page rank.
You can also tell you web designer about what you want be done specifically with your site. It is better to discuss things with your designer so that he could tell you which ones are possible and which ones are not. This way you would also be aware of the advantage and disadvantage of a certain design and what would be its effect on your web site’s ranking.
So do not settle for a web designer with good designing skills. Look for the one who can design your site nicely and give you a high page rank in search engines at the same time. If your web designer knows nothing of how SEO is incorporated in web design then look for another one.
Link Wheel Building – Will it Wheel for You?
Yes, definitely, link wheels are an excellent way to generate more traffic to your site. Some may not be familiar with it since people tend to focus on what’s talked about with regards to link building. We always hear the same old approach of getting back links, and jump start right with it without proper planning.
I am not saying that this don’t work, of course it does, blog commenting works provided that you post comments on relevant site, else it will not give any PR boost to your site. Directory submission is an excellent way to establish your site. Article marketing is another way to build back links. What I am actually saying is a strategy or an approach you could implement to build links.
First let me define what is a link wheel, basically, it is a set of links interconnected with one another and pointing towards your main website. Link wheel building therefore is creating interlinked pages pointing in one direction.
This is Web 2.0 properties comes in handy, such as Squidoo and Hubpages. The idea here is to create unique article for each high PR site. This article then has an anchor text pointing back to one of the pages created.
For example your site offers website design, web development and search engine optimization (SEO) services. You then build article pertaining to website design like “How to Create SEO Website Design Friendly”, create an anchor text, your strong keyword that you want to rank and submit it to Ezine or other high PR article directories (the resource box is the great place to place your anchor text). Next create another hub or lens on Squidoo or whichever you choose pertaining to SEO, with another anchor text pointing to the article you just created and another to the main website. The same will step will follow until you have created 6 spoke, preferably unique article – every spoke has two links, one pointing to the main website and the other pointing to the other sites you have created.
If you try to visualize the basic steps on link wheel building, it’s actually like a wheel in motion. When done properly, it could generate huge traffic to your site. It may be time consuming preparing articles and creating accounts but it’s a proven and tested way to boost your chances on appearing on Search Engine Result Page (SeRP).
How to Create SEO Website Design Friendly
A website should be eye catching to attract visitors. It should also be very search engine friendly. What matters aside from being user friendly is that it’s searchable on the web, otherwise, your website is useless.
How do we create an SEO friendly web design?
If you use flash on the entire website, you will have to put double the work to make it search engine firendly. Search Engine (SE’s) ignores Flash, therefore, you will also need a non-flash version of your website. If you really need to use flash, make sure that you have an alternative textual description that can be understood by SE spiders. Otherwise, you can also use web 2.0 technology to put your content first before your flash designs.
When using images, be sure to fill-in “name” and “alt” tags. The graphical image itself cannot be seen by SE spider, it is through this tags that SE spider interpret your website. Use relevant description only and do not try to deceive SE spider.
Avoid using frames, SE spiders have no way to interpret content on a frame.
Use CSS navigation and style sheets, doing so makes your navigational menu crawl-able and indexable by SE spider. Using Javascript and Flash do not have the same result – it is unseen by SE spiders. So if you have javascript or flash on your site, you also need to have simple texts of the same message you put in Javascript or flash.
Though it’s not a requirement to use CSS stylesheets, it will help your site to load faster.
Conduct a Keyword Research to use on your meta tags and contents but also avoid keyword stuffing, suggested keyword density is 3-5%. For the title tag, characters should be at lest 70 and 150 for the description. Have at least 5-8 important keywords listed in your keyword tag.
Also, use keyword researched on your anchor text, H1, H2 and H3 as much as possible. This will help you rank in Search Engine Result Page (SeRP).
Create SEO friendly URL, incorporate your keyword related to your web page. Use dashes to separate words.
Structure your site up to 3 levels deep; Google only sees three-levels deep.
Provide useful content and make sure to have at least 250 words each web page since some SE spiders requires at least 250 to analyze your site. Make it a point as well that content on your site coincide with keywords used, else, SE spider will find it of little value.
Lastly, provide a site map.
Having an optimized site works well with your SEO campaign, the second step now depends on you.
If you like this article you may want to read 10 Tips on Search Engine Optimization
10 Link Building Strategies
Various link building strategies can be implemented. To name a few, I listed down 10 common strategies that are use by most SEO experts. And before implementing your link building strategy make sure to analyze your competition. This could help you decide how to go about it.
1. Directory submission – make sure to submit your website to various website directory. Include paid listing such as Yahoo Directory, Yellowpages and Best of the Web, it would cost a bit but it pays to be more credible on the web.
2. You probably have an idea where your competitors are linking if you’ve analyzed your competition, from here try to get hold of any links linking back to your competitor site. You can send in a letter of intent to have your link included on their page, perhaps through link exchange or paid inclusion.
To make your job easier, Firefox offers various plug-ins like Foxy SEO tool to easily identify your competitor’s backlinks.
3. Write a Press Release. A well written Press Release could dramatically increase your sales and expose your company to the public.
4. Create a blog and actively read and write comments on other blogs.
5. Join online communities and actively participate in Forums.
6. Article Submission – this is a good and proven method that will ensure that your links will last for years. Listed down are some of the few article directories available on the web:
- Ezine Articles – Submit Your Best Quality Original Articles For Massive Exposure.
- Go Articles.com – Free content search engine and article directory.
- ArticlesBase.com – Submit articles for distribution, publication and promotion.
- Artcle Dashboard – Submit articles to the Article Dashboard directory, search and find free website and ezine content, and open an author submission management account.
- Article Alley - Submit articles to Article Alley for free syndication
7. Write a product or service review.
8. Link Baiting – natural method of link building. The key here is writing a buzz worthy content or providing free online tools. Read more information on Link Baiting
9. Resort to Pay Per Click (PPC)
10. Buy ads space.
In link building a combination of method is used to improve Search Engine position. This should be done regularly. There’s no sure way or a guaranteed combination of method and span of time to get your website ranked in Search Engines, it’s how you implement your strategies that will spell out your success.
10 Tips on Search Engine Optimization
There are so many ways to optimize a site but the key is to plan ahead and know exactly where to start before pushing through with your campaign. Below are some tips to help you optimize your website.
1. Choose the right keyword, you must first decide on what keyword you want to get higher ranking. Website owners would typically bid for a keyword to get higher ranking, you should optimize your site the best way you could to beat the competition. How? Analyze your competitors’ website, keywords they use, incoming links etc, in summary analysis of how they made it to no. 1 of Google or other Major Search Engines (SE’s). It will be your benchmark regardless of how old the site is.
2. Optimize your meta-tags using keywords
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Title that you would like to appear on SeRP</TITLE>
<META CONTENT=”description of the content”>
<META CONTENT=”keywords separated by comma”>
</HEAD>
Do not repeat your keywords on each tag and do not resort to unethical practices such as keyword stuffing. Suggested keyword density is 3-5 it’s the percentage of times a keyword or phrase appears on a web page compared to the total number of words on the page, according to Wikipedia.
Develop content that is unique, again, this should include your keywords with suggested keyword density.
3. Build SEO friendly URLs
4. Create Sitemap
5. Establish your site by submitting to trusted directories like Open Directory Project, Yahoo Directory and Yellowpages.
6. Submit to Web Directories and Search Engines
7. Build Links
8. Know when and how to use Social Media
9. Use Analytics to monitor progress and know which works best
To add to the list, don’t be afraid to experiment and be patient. SEO is a continuous process what works today may not work tomorrow.
How to Promote your Blog?
I’ve read a lot of blogs lately and analyzed how this blogs really caught my attention. First things first, before you promote your blog, make sure you know your target audience is and create blogs relevant to your niche market. And second, before you go out promoting your blog, which everybody would want to do, try asking yourself if your content is worth reading. Are you really giving out something that your readers expect from you, not that you have to stick on a certain topic – just stick on the relevant ones. Create a brand for your blog and deliver that message. This is really helpful if you are just starting-up –attract visitors in your niche first before diving for the big fish. Your content is why you develop huge list of followers and try to give what they expect from you, and be consistent.
So how are you to promote your site? First Submit your blog to blog directories like:
There are tools to automate the process, it’s in your discretion to use it or not or should I say to trust a software to do the job for you like the Blog Planter. You can also submit your blog to general directories if you wish.
The next thing is to post a Press Release to online resources about your new blog. This could attract new visitors to your site. There are sites that allow free Press Release posting such as http://www.clickpress.com/releases/
Create Link Bait, it means naturally attracting backlinks for your page. How? There are in fact various ways to do it, like interviewing a prominent personality and publishing it, writing something funny or embarrassing, disagree with authority, anything that will caught a readers attention and would definitely share it with others or talked about it in forums and communities.
Also comment on blogs your niche, including actively commenting on do-follow blogs.
Another is to participate in Blog Carnivals, it’s a Blog community where you could submit your blog to a certain topic. It’s some sort of a magazine only that it’s in the form of a blog article. You can also participate in other blog communities like bloglog.
Use social media as well, like StumbleUpon, Reddit, del.icio.us and Facebook.
There are various ways to promote your site, what I mentioned are just one of the common way to promote blogs. The best thing to do is plan ahead before jumping in to promote your blog, with so many ways to do it; chances are you may not know what really works for you. Establish your blog first the rest of the ways are geared more on active participation on communities. And of course, you must always provide fresh content to your reader. It doesn’t have to be everyday or every week, what matters is the quality of the content you have. Relevant and meaningful content could help you develop loyal list of followers, and as always, give them what they expect from you.
Link Baiting – Has it Vanished?
Link baiting is a white hat technique which has been around since 2006. It has not vanished, it’s in fact one the safest method of link building. It’s a natural method of having viewers to link on your site perhaps because they find it interesting or worth the buzz. Although I personally no longer read a blog regarding link bait, successful companies usually implement this strategy, viewers are just not aware of the term with what they do when they link to other sites.
According to Wikipedia:
“Link bait is any content or feature within a website that somehow baits viewers to place links to it from other websites. Attempts to create link bait are frequently employed in the overall task of search engine optimization. Matt Cutts defines link bait as anything “… interesting enough to catch people’s attention.”
So how are you going to create link bait? There are actually dozens of ways to do it, it’s not that easy, in fact you have to keep experimenting, same way as catching a fish – use the right hook and drop it at the right place. But when you succeed on this, you could make even millions of dollars. What do you think readers do when they link to a certain article on ezine to their site, or simply sharing it with others? Its link baiting, Search Engines prefer it because it’s “organic” – meaning natural, its quality vs. quantity when it comes to link popularity.
Some ideas on creating a link bait
- Writing something controversial (works all the time)
- Write a review (new gadgets, establishment or service)
- Oppose someone’s idea
- Write entertaining articles
- Provide useful list of resources
- Conduct a research on something
- Be up-to-date with what’s going on, technology, celebrity, economy etc. and share your opinion
There are far more than I can imagine, you just have to be creative and ask yourself what is your goal for creating link bait? Is it only for the link popularity or to attract a certain niche? You always have to start with something before preparing your bait to catch a big fish.
Why would you Outsource SEO?
Every business of today knows how important Internet is as a gateway to play the international arena. Almost all industry sectors has their own website, because having a website means your business or company will have an edge over your competitor. Though lately, having a website alone is not enough to leverage yourself with your competitor, the crucial step is to appear on Search Engine Result Page (SeRP) and that is what Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is all about. It’s all about optimizing your website to appear on SeRP. It may sound simple but it’s very time consuming and requires timely knowledge of SEO guidelines as this change frequently.
So why would you outsource when it can be done in-house? SEO is really a delicate part of the business strategy since it could potentially damage a company’s’ reputation. But, having an effective SEO could bring your business to the next level – higher traffic, higher conversion and a strong web presence. It has been a necessity for companies to incorporate SEO into their marketing plan. Others do it in-house thinking it would be cheaper but SEO is a continuous process of learning. Think about knowledge vs. time, SEO requires someone knowledgeable and could adapt to ever changing rules of Search Engines, it requires time to learn all this processes. Think of what could be lost during this time of learning everything about SEO when you can focus on the core of your business. In fact, in-house staff could probably be just engaged or more focus on implementing SEO strategies but totally lost on what’s going on outside - are they still focusing on the right direction? Possibly it works with other companies, but are they really getting the likelihood of dominating major Search Engines or getting the highest traffic with highest conversion rate possible.
Outsourcing SEO could be risky perhaps, but is your company’s growth not worth investing?. Company should focus on its core competence and leave SEO to the experts. It could be successful if it’s taken care of and could be cost-effective in the end. You do not have to worry about implementing SEO strategies or worry about implementing new guidelines, SEO Service Company could provide all options available to utilize and optimize your website.
Why would you outsource SEO would really depend on what make sense to you. Both involve risk, but before you decide ask yourself, is it not worth to invest on company’s growth?