In today's online world search engine rankings can make your business succeed, and while rankings in Yahoo and MSN are very valuable, their combined market value is still less than that of Google. This makes achieving top rankings in Google that much more important.
THE RIGHT KEYWORDS
This article is not about keyword research so I will not spend too much time on this topic, however, I felt it was important to at least brush on this slightly.
Make sure that your targets are achievable. If you select the wrong keywords it can make your entire optimisation experience essentially a waste or time. Choose keywords that are attainable but yet still offer a reasonable search frequency for your industry. Your phrase selection should also be targeted to bring qualified traffic to your site.
Using the travel industry as an example, targeting the word "travel" would make very little sense but by narrowing it down to "New York travel" for example, you now have less competition, and a more qualified audience. Keep your targets in perspective and go after the obtainable rankings.
WEBSITE OPTIMIZATION
There are many on-site factors that play a role in your search engine rankings. Here are a number of those factors, and what you can do to increase your chances of success.
Title Tag
The title tag plays one of the most important roles in search results at Google, and is almost always the heading Google chooses for each of its listings. Placement of your target phrase is best used near the start of the tag and repeated again in the middle or near the end. Three uses of your target phrase may be helpful in some instances, as long as it is not too overwhelming. For best results each page on your site should have a totally unique title tag.
It is also important to remember that because Google will use this title as the main heading for your listing, you will want to keep it attractive to potential searchers. Try to also add a call to action, or other wording to help make your listing appear attractive to searchers.
To help illustrate the fact Google takes this tag into consideration, simply do a search for your target phrase and take a look at the titles of the top 10. I tried a search for a rather broad term "travel" and saw that all 10/10 listings had it in the title tag, and 6/10 had it as the very first word. A quick scan showed that the entire top 30 either had the word travel, or travels in their title tags.
If you do only one thing to your website, make sure that all your title tags are relevant, unique, and contain your target phrase for each page.
Meta Description Tag
The Meta Description tag is still occasionally used by Google as the description which appears in the search results themselves. While this used to be a more common practice Google tends to use it most often on sites with very limited content, or those which are flash based. I have seen it still used for content rich sites, however this is less common.
The Meta Description tag still has an impact on search rankings. Your best bet when using this tag is to keep it short and sweet with your target phrase close to the start and never repeated more than 3 times. Like the title tag, each page on you site should have its own unique description tag.
Meta Keyword Tag
When it comes to Google this tag is useless, and won't influence your rankings. There is some speculation as to whether a spammy keyword tag can however, have a negative effect on Google rankings. As a result, if you do utilize a keyword Meta tag for the smaller engines, it is best to keep it clean and play it safe.
Keyword Density
Keyword density plays a role in overall rankings; however, it is not as cut and dry as it once was. Once upon a time there was a magic number that when used could almost guarantee top rankings. This is no longer the case. Today the ideal density varies from industry to industry, phrase to phrase. To find out what density you should aim for, take the top 10 or 20 search results and see what percentage those sites are using. In most cases you will find that the majority of these sites have a very similar density to one another, and this average density is a good estimation of what you should aim for.
Body Text and Keyword Placement
The location of relevant text on your site will help establish the overall importance of your target phrase. While you do not want to overwhelm the engines and site visitors with a bombardment of target phrases at the top of the page, try to sprinkle in some instances as close to the top of the page as possible.
Synonyms
Be sure to include various synonyms for your target phrases within your body text on your site. Google will use these synonyms to tie in the overall relevance of the page for your main target phrases, which in turn can improve your odds. To find possible synonyms you can use a thesaurus, but the best way is to search Google itself and see exactly what they consider to be similar. Simply search in Google for your target phrase preceded with a title, such as "travel". Next scan through the search results for any text Google has bolded. These are all words that Google considers to be related. Using the "travel" example Google brings up phrases such as 'travel', 'tourism', 'accommodation', as well as various other travel related terms.
Keywords in Domain
There is still some speculation if having a target phrase as part of your top level domain (TLD) is of use to search rankings. From my experience, yes, there is value here, although, nothing like it was several years ago. If you are starting off in the online world and are contemplating which domain to go for, consider one that uses your target phrase, assuming that it is both relevant to your business name, and uses no more than a single hyphen. While multiple hyphens in a domain can be successful, they are very common with highly spammy websites, so it is best to not take that route if possible.
While having a keyword located within your domain can offer some ranking juice, I would not suggest heading out and doing a domain swap. In most cases you would be better off working on your existing site than starting from scratch with a new domain.
Keywords in page specific URL
Using keywords for specific page URL's can also help add a little bit of value to your site, providing you use them responsibly. Consider using a keyword as a directory name and as part of a file name where it naturally makes sense to do so.
Heading Tags
Placement of target phrases within heading tags helps to establish the importance of those given phrases. That said do not over do it, or abuse it. Only place target phrases within a heading tag if it makes sense to do so, and don't flood a page with numerous tags. Heading tags are not as critical as they once were, but still a good contribution to a well optimized page.
Link Anchor Text
This is the actual text you click on as part of a link. When full or partial target phrases are used within your text links they help pass on some value to the linked page for those phrases. This is also true when considering surrounding text. When the content around the link is also relevant, the link holds slightly more value.
While a link that simply states "click here" or "www.domainname" does have its place, they provide considerably less value than a link that would use "discount travel" as its anchor.
Image Alt Text
While image alt text still plays a minor role, its biggest part is within the use of image based navigation. If you have an image linked to another page, the alt text will be attributed much the same way as standard link anchor text is.
Image Alt text should always be short and to the point and should accurately describe either the image itself, or the page the image is linking to. Do not use alt tags as a place to stuff keywords.
Inline Links
These are links that are found mid sentence or mid paragraph as opposed to a simple listing of links as found in a menu or possibly on a sitemap. Links found mid paragraph tend to pass on a little more value from the surrounding text and can offer more relevance to the linked page.
Site Navigation
It is absolutely imperative that your website be fully spiderable by the search engines. This may seem obvious, but often webmasters overlook Google's ability to crawl a website. Google has become very advanced in what links it can follow and how it can spider a website, but there are still some things that can cause significant roadblocks.
- Flash: One of the most commonly made mistakes is the use of flash. If flash is used as a sole means of site navigation then you can count on Google not viewing your internal pages, and having a significant disadvantage in terms of site rankings.
- Java Script / DHTML: These days most Java Script and even DHTML menus can be spidered by Google, however, this is not always the case. If your site utilizes any kind of fancy navigation and you are wondering why Google has not indexed your internal pages, check out Google's Cached Text version of your page. If you do not see any text links, then your navigation may be invisible to Google.
- Images: Image based navigation has been safe for many years now, but if your site uses this form of navigation it is essential to have brief, relevant alt text on all your buttons. This alt text will act much like standard anchor text for text based links. This is not only for the purpose of search ranking value, but take a look at Google's cached text version of your page. If you have image based links that do not have alt text, those links do not appear. This doesn't mean Google won't follow them, but for anyone viewing your site on a text based browser, your links will be invisible to them.
URL Structure
Avoid long elaborate URL's with extraneous characters. While Google has reached a point where they can index massive URL strings, it is best to avoid them if at all possible. For dynamic sites consider utilizing mod rewrites to significantly clean up the URL to not only make it more search engine friendly, but more user friendly as well.
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Friday, April 11, 2008
Identify SEO Problems
When You Aren't Getting the Results You Expected.
After a thorough Search Engine Optimization (SEO) campaign has been completed, it can be incredibly frustrating to find you aren't getting any rankings on your selected keywords.
You can't ask the search engines why your site isn't ranked; they won't respond to specific questions about lack of rankings from website owners.
Whether you have handled your SEO yourself, or hired an SEO Firm, this can happen. No one controls the engines, and the results aren't always what you would expect.
The good news is the search engines are logical - they are based on a very specific algorithm, and with a little more effort and attention to the details to make sure it isn't a minor mistake holding things up - you should be able to enhance your site and fix the problems to get the results you are looking for.
Back to the Basics.
The first place to start depends on whether you are handling your SEO yourself, or have outsourced it to an SEO Firm. If you have outsourced your SEO, you need to contact the Firm and ask them to explain what they are doing to address the situation and what their theory is for the lack of results.
If you are handling your own SEO, then you need to take a step back and look at the basics - make sure you haven't left anything out - or worse still, made an error that could be preventing the results you are looking for.
What are the Basics?
As with most SEO issues, it all comes down to knowledge and time. You need to have the information to ensure you are handling things correctly - and you need to have the time to implement the steps properly.
Here is a list of items to consider and some potential problems. These are all reasons your site may not be getting the rankings you are looking for.
Start at the top of the list and work your way through each item, making sure that you look at the details and specifics.
Index Time: The amount of time before the engine indexes your site should be listed on the search engine's submission page, but these aren't always accurate or may be out of date. On average, index times range from one to eight weeks, depending on the engine.
Already Indexed: The major engines won't tell you if you're listed; it's up to you to find out. The method to discover if a page or domain has been indexed varies from one engine to another. Never assume you're not indexed just because you searched through keywords and you never came up in the first few pages of results. You could still be indexed and end up at the bottom of the heap.
Site Map From Home Page: Some engines have been known to drop pages that cannot be traveled to from the home page. Hot Bot has been rumored to do this. Think of your site links as a series of roads from one page to another. If there's no road from your home page to the page you want indexed, a search engine may decide the page is unnecessary.
External Links: Some search engines may index your home page but refuse to index any other pages unless there are links from another domain. Or, they may index you for a while but then "prune" their database later because you didn't achieve any external links after a certain period of time.
Free Sites: Because of all the "junk" submissions from free websites like Geo cities, many engines choose not to index sites from such domains or limit the number of pages they accept.
Frames: Content inside of HTML frames can cause problems with submissions because the search engine may index the main content of the page, but not the surrounding menu frame. Visitors to your site find some information but miss the associated menu. It's generally better to create non-framed versions of your pages.
Spider Blocks: Search engine spiders cannot index sites that require a registration or password, and they can't fill out forms. This also applies to indexing of content from a search able database. The solution is to create static pages that the engines can find and index without performing a special action on your site. Depending on your database system, there are both utility programs and companies that can assist you with this.
Guilt Through Association: If your website shares the same IP address as other websites on your host's web server, you may find your IP quietly banned because of something someone else did. Ask your hosting service if your domain name has its own unique IP assigned to it. If not, ask them to move it to its own IP to avoid being penalized because of someone else.
Non-Index able Content: Most engines cannot index text embedded in images or multimedia files (audio and video). Most engines also cannot index information that is generated by Java applets.
Large Pages: If your site has a slow connection or the pages are very complex and take a long time to load, it might time out before the spider finishes indexing. To avoid this, limit your page size to 50K or less. A good rule of thumb is that:page size + cumulative image sizes on the page = 50K-70K If it is greater than that amount, visitors with dial-up connections will leave before the page fully loads.
Unreliable Hosts: It pays to have a reliable hosting service. If your website doesn't respond when the search engine spider visits, you won't be indexed. Even worse, if you are indexed and they pay a visit when your site is down, you could be removed from the database.
Proper Directory Submissions: When submitting to a directory site like Yahoo, Open Directory, Look Smart, and others, a live person reviews your site. They decide if the site is of sufficient "quality" before they list it. These directories can help you get listed with other engines, so make sure you give your directory submissions the attention they need.
Spam: If you use questionable techniques that might be considered an overt attempt at spamming (i.e., excessive repetition of keywords, same color text as background) an engine may ignore or reject your submissions.
Redirects: Redirects or Meta refresh tags sometimes cause the engines to have trouble indexing your site. If the engines think you are trying to "trick" them by using "cloaking" or IP redirection technology, they may not index the site at all.
Index Times Can Fluctuate: A major engine will not typically go more than three to four months without refreshing its index, but sometimes they'll index sites every 30 days consistently, and then suddenly stop indexing most sites for several months. It can be frustrating, but it happens.
Page Limits: Search engines will only spider so many pages of your Website. This could be a few dozen or three or four hundred depending on the engine. Google is one engine that tends to crawl deeper into your site. How deep they go may depend on factors like your link popularity. Sites with higher link popularity are deemed "worthier" of more thorough indexing.
Random Errors: Sometimes the engines simply lose submissions at random because of bugs and technical errors. Mistakes happen - remember, they're managing a database containing hundreds of millions of pages.
After a thorough Search Engine Optimization (SEO) campaign has been completed, it can be incredibly frustrating to find you aren't getting any rankings on your selected keywords.
You can't ask the search engines why your site isn't ranked; they won't respond to specific questions about lack of rankings from website owners.
Whether you have handled your SEO yourself, or hired an SEO Firm, this can happen. No one controls the engines, and the results aren't always what you would expect.
The good news is the search engines are logical - they are based on a very specific algorithm, and with a little more effort and attention to the details to make sure it isn't a minor mistake holding things up - you should be able to enhance your site and fix the problems to get the results you are looking for.
Back to the Basics.
The first place to start depends on whether you are handling your SEO yourself, or have outsourced it to an SEO Firm. If you have outsourced your SEO, you need to contact the Firm and ask them to explain what they are doing to address the situation and what their theory is for the lack of results.
If you are handling your own SEO, then you need to take a step back and look at the basics - make sure you haven't left anything out - or worse still, made an error that could be preventing the results you are looking for.
What are the Basics?
As with most SEO issues, it all comes down to knowledge and time. You need to have the information to ensure you are handling things correctly - and you need to have the time to implement the steps properly.
Here is a list of items to consider and some potential problems. These are all reasons your site may not be getting the rankings you are looking for.
Start at the top of the list and work your way through each item, making sure that you look at the details and specifics.
Index Time: The amount of time before the engine indexes your site should be listed on the search engine's submission page, but these aren't always accurate or may be out of date. On average, index times range from one to eight weeks, depending on the engine.
Already Indexed: The major engines won't tell you if you're listed; it's up to you to find out. The method to discover if a page or domain has been indexed varies from one engine to another. Never assume you're not indexed just because you searched through keywords and you never came up in the first few pages of results. You could still be indexed and end up at the bottom of the heap.
Site Map From Home Page: Some engines have been known to drop pages that cannot be traveled to from the home page. Hot Bot has been rumored to do this. Think of your site links as a series of roads from one page to another. If there's no road from your home page to the page you want indexed, a search engine may decide the page is unnecessary.
External Links: Some search engines may index your home page but refuse to index any other pages unless there are links from another domain. Or, they may index you for a while but then "prune" their database later because you didn't achieve any external links after a certain period of time.
Free Sites: Because of all the "junk" submissions from free websites like Geo cities, many engines choose not to index sites from such domains or limit the number of pages they accept.
Frames: Content inside of HTML frames can cause problems with submissions because the search engine may index the main content of the page, but not the surrounding menu frame. Visitors to your site find some information but miss the associated menu. It's generally better to create non-framed versions of your pages.
Spider Blocks: Search engine spiders cannot index sites that require a registration or password, and they can't fill out forms. This also applies to indexing of content from a search able database. The solution is to create static pages that the engines can find and index without performing a special action on your site. Depending on your database system, there are both utility programs and companies that can assist you with this.
Guilt Through Association: If your website shares the same IP address as other websites on your host's web server, you may find your IP quietly banned because of something someone else did. Ask your hosting service if your domain name has its own unique IP assigned to it. If not, ask them to move it to its own IP to avoid being penalized because of someone else.
Non-Index able Content: Most engines cannot index text embedded in images or multimedia files (audio and video). Most engines also cannot index information that is generated by Java applets.
Large Pages: If your site has a slow connection or the pages are very complex and take a long time to load, it might time out before the spider finishes indexing. To avoid this, limit your page size to 50K or less. A good rule of thumb is that:page size + cumulative image sizes on the page = 50K-70K If it is greater than that amount, visitors with dial-up connections will leave before the page fully loads.
Unreliable Hosts: It pays to have a reliable hosting service. If your website doesn't respond when the search engine spider visits, you won't be indexed. Even worse, if you are indexed and they pay a visit when your site is down, you could be removed from the database.
Proper Directory Submissions: When submitting to a directory site like Yahoo, Open Directory, Look Smart, and others, a live person reviews your site. They decide if the site is of sufficient "quality" before they list it. These directories can help you get listed with other engines, so make sure you give your directory submissions the attention they need.
Spam: If you use questionable techniques that might be considered an overt attempt at spamming (i.e., excessive repetition of keywords, same color text as background) an engine may ignore or reject your submissions.
Redirects: Redirects or Meta refresh tags sometimes cause the engines to have trouble indexing your site. If the engines think you are trying to "trick" them by using "cloaking" or IP redirection technology, they may not index the site at all.
Index Times Can Fluctuate: A major engine will not typically go more than three to four months without refreshing its index, but sometimes they'll index sites every 30 days consistently, and then suddenly stop indexing most sites for several months. It can be frustrating, but it happens.
Page Limits: Search engines will only spider so many pages of your Website. This could be a few dozen or three or four hundred depending on the engine. Google is one engine that tends to crawl deeper into your site. How deep they go may depend on factors like your link popularity. Sites with higher link popularity are deemed "worthier" of more thorough indexing.
Random Errors: Sometimes the engines simply lose submissions at random because of bugs and technical errors. Mistakes happen - remember, they're managing a database containing hundreds of millions of pages.
Monday, April 7, 2008
Blog Promotion Using RSS Feeds And Blog Submission Software
It happens to everyone at some point in time. You have a great idea for a blog, on a new niche topic. You create the blog; you post interesting and creative posts to it each day, and then nothing. You post your brilliant and original thoughts for everyone online to read, but no one is coming around to read your blog. And, because no one can find your blog to read it, you are not generating any links or improvement in your search engine rankings either. What is a blogger to do?
Promoting your blog is essential to its success. You need to promote your blog so that you become recognized as an expert in your chosen niche and can monetize your blog. However, you also want to promote your blog to increase the traffic to your site, reach a new reading audience, and most importantly to create as many inbound links as possible. Creating inbound links ensures that your website rankings and search engine optimization efforts pay off for you in the biggest ways possible. You want to promote your blog to as many people in your niche market as you possibly can. And, you want to do it as often as you possibly can.
Some people believe that the best way to promote a blog is through comments on other popular blogs with a link to your own blog, comments on UseNet or other Internet message boards or forums, posting press releases and articles, etc.. However, the easiest and most time efficient way to promote your blog is through RSS feed and blog submissions to directories hands down.
The issue with using a manual feed submitter, or using an individual RSS submitter, is that it is very time consuming to deal with on a consistent basis. Most bloggers want to write their posts and be done with their work for the day. They do not want to spend a half-hour writing a post and then three more hours trying to submit their RSS feed and content to directories in hopes of bringing in some readers and sneaking up their search engine rankings. The good news is that today programmers have developed some great semi-automatic RSS feed submit tools which you can now choose from to help submit your RSS feed and blog to directories without it being so time consuming.
Feed submitter software programs allow you to simultaneously submit your blog and RSS feeds to literally thousands of directories, and to do it all with only a couple quick clicks of your mouse. Setting up the RSS feed submission software is simple to do and the submission process takes very little time to complete. Using RSS feed submitters is much easier and quicker than attempting manual RSS submits.
If you are a blogger interested in publishing RSS feeds, XML feeds, and getting your feed out into the RSS databases of the world, I would highly suggest that you check out some of the amazing new RSS software tools available to you today on the market. Choose a tool that is easy to use and one which will allow you to reach the maximum amount of directories possible for the least amount of work.
Writing your blog posts should be the hardest part of blogging, not trying to get noticed and dealing with SEO. Thankfully, the advent of semi-automatic feed submitters allows you to spend your time doing your writing and not dealing as much with promotion.
Promoting your blog is essential to its success. You need to promote your blog so that you become recognized as an expert in your chosen niche and can monetize your blog. However, you also want to promote your blog to increase the traffic to your site, reach a new reading audience, and most importantly to create as many inbound links as possible. Creating inbound links ensures that your website rankings and search engine optimization efforts pay off for you in the biggest ways possible. You want to promote your blog to as many people in your niche market as you possibly can. And, you want to do it as often as you possibly can.
Some people believe that the best way to promote a blog is through comments on other popular blogs with a link to your own blog, comments on UseNet or other Internet message boards or forums, posting press releases and articles, etc.. However, the easiest and most time efficient way to promote your blog is through RSS feed and blog submissions to directories hands down.
The issue with using a manual feed submitter, or using an individual RSS submitter, is that it is very time consuming to deal with on a consistent basis. Most bloggers want to write their posts and be done with their work for the day. They do not want to spend a half-hour writing a post and then three more hours trying to submit their RSS feed and content to directories in hopes of bringing in some readers and sneaking up their search engine rankings. The good news is that today programmers have developed some great semi-automatic RSS feed submit tools which you can now choose from to help submit your RSS feed and blog to directories without it being so time consuming.
Feed submitter software programs allow you to simultaneously submit your blog and RSS feeds to literally thousands of directories, and to do it all with only a couple quick clicks of your mouse. Setting up the RSS feed submission software is simple to do and the submission process takes very little time to complete. Using RSS feed submitters is much easier and quicker than attempting manual RSS submits.
If you are a blogger interested in publishing RSS feeds, XML feeds, and getting your feed out into the RSS databases of the world, I would highly suggest that you check out some of the amazing new RSS software tools available to you today on the market. Choose a tool that is easy to use and one which will allow you to reach the maximum amount of directories possible for the least amount of work.
Writing your blog posts should be the hardest part of blogging, not trying to get noticed and dealing with SEO. Thankfully, the advent of semi-automatic feed submitters allows you to spend your time doing your writing and not dealing as much with promotion.
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