22
12
2007
Title tags are one of the most important aspects of on-page search engine optimization. While there are a lot of aspects of a web page that help it to rank well for keywords, the title tag is undoubtedly one of the most important.
The title tag is the html code that looks like this: <title>
Title Goes Here</title>
It is contained within the <head></head> section of the html document and shows up at the top of the web browser. It is also the link that shows up at the top of your site’s listing in the search results. Here are some important considerations that will make your use of title tags more effective.
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Categories : Search Engine Optimization
18
12
2007
I do a lot of pay-per-click management for the firm I work for, and I think I’m pretty good at it. I can build out good ad groups and ads, lower click costs, improve clickthrough rates, build good content match campaigns etc., etc., etc., but every now and then I do a consult for a client that’s thinking about using us for SEO. Here’s where I shine. SEO is my one of my favorite topics, and I have been doing it with success for many years now. These are the top 5 reasons I think SEO is one of the best investments you can make in your website:
- Improvements to the way you organize your site and it’s content, will help the Search Engines to find and index your site better for the rest of its life. Best of all, it should help visitors as well.
- The suggestions that your SEO gives you will be “best practice” standards that you and your designers can use for any future work you do.
- New, original content that you add will be yours forever, and you can bring in search traffic from it for as long as it’s there.
- Many links that you get will be permanent links, that will continue to exist, drive traffic, and help your search results for as long as the linking site remains online.
- Most importantly, you never pay a cent for showing up for keywords that you aren’t targeting. In fact, long-tail searches that weren’t planned for can bring in a lot of converting traffic as well.
SEO is a great long term investment in your website. I like to look at a website as a piece of property, and SEO is not only home-improvement, but it also puts you in a better neighborhood.
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Categories : Search Engine Optimization
9
12
2007
For those of you that don’t know who
PayPerPost is, they are probably the biggest paid blog posting service on the web. They have a network of (according to them) around 80,000 bloggers, and anyone can sign up to create an “offer” for paid posts from the bloggers. Advertisers can request links from the blog posts, and specify PageRank requirements from the bloggers as well.
This has put PayPerPost in a position to get a LOT of business from SEO’s looking for relevant links. At the same time, it’s put a target on the backs of all of their paid blogging network that Google is aiming at sharply. Last month,
Google dropped the axe on many PayPerPost bloggers, reducing their PageRank considerably. If you didn’t see it coming, you don’t know much about SEO.
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Categories : Search Engine Optimization
14
11
2007
How much per month do you spend on SEO, not including on-page stuff like content and changes to your site? Is it enough? How much would you need to spend to be comfortable with the SEO effort?
I do SEO for a bunch of sites, some for other people, some for myself. I think I spend around $700 / mo. on link building for my own sites. Although I’m really not happy with that. I would like to spend $1000. If I spent $1k / mo. on link building I think I could totally dominate the keyword phrases I want. But I do have top rankings for like 7 out of 10 kw phrases I want (see the correlation there?) :)
Without going into details that would help my competition devour me (I think they probably spend twice as much for not nearly as great results), my budget breaks down to about an even split of several different forms of link building. Including the occasional email from yours truly to the more exceptional websites I want links from.
For my clients, I find I can hit moderately competitive keyword phrases for around $600 / mo., given about 6 months time if they were no where on the charts before I start. By “moderately competitive,” I mean the top results have some well optimized PR4 sites, maybe a PR5 or two. It seems like a PR5 is more difficult to attain these days than it was a year ago.
What do you guys spend on link building, and how competitive is your market?
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Categories : Search Engine Optimization
25
10
2007
This morning I ordered a new battery for my digital camera through a company called
MemorySuppliers.com, they have a really good online store where you can buy all kinds of memory, batteries, etc. I got an email an hour later stating that my order had already been shipped! Great service!
Then I get this email from them, and it says:
We have a special money saving offer for you today: If you would like to receive a $15.00 credit back on your credit card for this order, simply post a link to MemorySuppliers.com on your website, blog, personal profile page (i.e. myspace) with a short one or two line description of our website and products. When finished, email us the web address where the link is posted and we will give you a $15.00 credit back on to your credit card.
This is a great idea, that I have actually tried in the past. The only problem was that I tried it on my
marriage counseling directory, for new therapists who signed up to advertise. That population is not very tech savvy, and I got so many questions about how and what to do in the first few weeks, that I abandoned the campaign completely. It wasn’t worth the time it took.
Still, a great idea if you’re in an industry that deals with tech-savvy people. Try it out!
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Categories : Search Engine Optimization
9
09
2007
Here are a few popular article publishing websites. The first one, Squidoo, is a little more than just an article publishing site. On Squidoo, you create a page, or “lens,” where you can add different types of content like graphics, rss feeds, affiliate links and more. Articles submitted to many others typically rank well themselves in search results.
http://www.squidoo.com
http://www.ezinearticles.com
http://www.articledashboard.com
http://www.e-topic.com
http://www.goarticles.com
http://www.articlecity.com Read the rest of this entry »
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Categories : Marketing Resources, Search Engine Optimization
8
09
2007
There are many article directories on the web these days, and many websites that accept free article submissions as well. But how do articles help your website rank for keywords?
Ok, here’s an example: I have a website about cats, and I know that building quality relevant links to my website will help it in the search results. But most of the time, that’s eaiser said than done. Writing articles about your topic is one way that you can accomplish this. Here are some ideas for keyword rich articles for my “cats” website-
- Caring for Your Cat
- Feeding Cats: What’s the Healthiest Cat Food?
- Grooming Your Cat
I have a list of general article directories I will publish in my next post, but most are free, and they all accept articles that are allowed to have an outbound link near the bottom (the Author Bio). It will be even better for my “cat” articles if I can find niche websites about cats that accept article submissions. If you’re considering a website for submitting an article, make sure they allow a link to your site, and make sure that the link doesn’t contain the “rel=’nofollow’” attribute. That attribute tells Google not to pass PR down to the site that is linked to.
Some people will submit the same article or slight variations to hundreds of article directories… I don’t think that helps much. Search engines today are very aware of “duplicate content,” and work hard to weed it out. They try to determine the original source of the content, and then copies get penalized in the search results. So I say, submit your articles once to the most appropriate website. Quite often, the articles themselves will achieve decent search engine rankings, and can bring in natural traffic to your site that way as well.
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Categories : Search Engine Optimization
10
06
2007
There was a front page thread on WebmasterWorld about this recently, and it’s something that’s frequently asked. Probably because it’s so infrequent that someone gives a good answer. I posted on the thread, but I’ll go into more detail here.
So what’s the good answer? “Maybe,” is the best answer.
This is what I consider when I’m thinking of listing a site in Yahoo!
- How deep is the category where the site will be listed?
Is it a deep category like this?
Regional > U.S. States > Louisiana > Cities > New Orleans > Business and Shopping > Business to Business > Communications and Networking > Internet and World Wide Web > Web Site Designers
If so, it will have much less value than the upper level categories that get more traffic and have higher PageRank.
- Is the category relative to the keywords you want to show up for?
In most cases, the category will be relative to the keywords you’re targeting. If it’s not, you should consider changing or adding content to your site that represents those topics.
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Categories : Search Engine Optimization
27
04
2007
Link building has long been a source of success and frustration when doing SEO. When it first became known that links form other sites affected search engine rankings, immediately FFA (Free For All) sites appeared that allowed users to add their links for free. There was no editorial discretion in the placement of these links and commonly, they were all thrown together on one page with no relevance between them.
This is when the search engines became charged with the task of determining link quality. I’ve long said that “a link to your site is like a vote for your site, but all links are not created equal.” Obviously, Google and other search engines found a way to devalue FFA links over time. So much so, that FFA sites are virtually non-existent today. Then came link exchanges, which are also not nearly as effective these days.
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Categories : Search Engine Optimization
14
04
2007
What is PageRank?
If you’re completely new to search engine optimization, then you may not even know what PageRank is. Start by downloading the
Google Toolbar. You may have to enable the PageRank display in the settings. Below are some examples of what PageRank indicators look like on a page form the Google Directory, viewed through a web browser with the Google Toolbar.
PageRank is displayed on the toolbar as a scale from 0 - 10, with “10″ being the “most important” pages on the web, and “0″ being the “least important” pages on the web. On the toolbar, PageRank is only displayed as an integer; however, in reality, PageRank is an infinite scale from 0 - 10. It is important to differentiate between “Toolbar” pagerank, and “actual” pagerank.
Actual PageRank is the factor that is computed by Google’s algorithm to determine the “importance” of a web page. While the toolbar PageRank is only updated about once every 4 - 5 months, actual PageRank is dynamically updated as changes occurr in Google’s index.
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Categories : Search Engine Optimization
12
04
2007
Not all Web Directories are Created Equal.These are a few I know about, as well as some links to other lists. Getting your site listed in web directories is a small way to help your site’s relevance and link popularity in the search engines.
Most Important:
- Yahoo! Directory
- ODP - Open Directory Project
-
Best of the Web Directory
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Categories : Marketing Resources, Search Engine Optimization
8
04
2007
People ask me how to get their web site to show up in search engines once a week. Then there’s the question about the spam email they got that guarantees to submit their site to over 1000 search engines! Or, “I keep submitting the site to Google, once every day, and I’m still not listed.”
Let the truth be known….submitting your site to Google is a waste of time. If that’s all you’re going to do in order to get your site listed, then I guess it’s better than nothing. And if your site is about some really obscure topic that no one else talks about on the internet, you
might show up
eventually. And that’s
if your on-page factors are well optimized for the search engines.
With that being said, there are some very basic ways to get our websites to rank well in the search results. They’re not as easy as typing in the URL and clicking “Submit,” but if you’re going through the trouble of designing a site, you can certainly pay attention to these details along the way.
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Categories : Search Engine Optimization
