SEO and SEM are taking the online community by storm and many people are packing in the day jobs to make a real go of online marketing and advertising income. Many of these people also fail at this opportunity because of one fundamental problem they all face. Many of these people have not fully formed a proper in depth and well researched business plan. They spend a small fortune on advertising, sponsorship, marketing schemes and more without planning out how their business will grow, develop, utilize advertising and effectively use SEO. Many businesses start out with little to no research on their niche, keywords, organic SEO methods, budget plans and social networking. Whilst some do indeed have business plans the large majority of these consists of poorly thought out basic run downs and aims without any real thought processes behind making money and a clear plan towards their goals.

Unfortunately, you can’t just stick an advert on a website and wait for the money to roll in, because it won’t and you could be waiting a very long time before you even receive one conversion. In fact, without the right SEO marketing plan and budget methods you could receive no conversions at all whether you are after advertising income, services or customers. You do not need expensive business software to create an effective business plan; you can create a proper business plan with charts, color graphs and Ajax websites or on the back of a pub beer coaster. What matters most about a business plan is the research and testing of it.

Ask yourself how the website will be monetized. What will be the main source of income, how will you create that income source? How much capital do you have to invest in the enterprise marketing and building of the website in general? What can you achieve from this budget? How long can you keep the website going before you need to have made a certain amount of profit to sustain it?

Essentially these questions and more can be lumped into three main areas of concern, income method, capital and time. Testing out this business plan is as vital as getting it down on paper (or digitally if you prefer). You need to ensure that you can make enough money to cover your expenses for the project and maybe accommodate for a little profit on the side. Realistically you should assume you are not going to turn out any profit at all in the first 6 months of business and like any other business that has just started up, the first two years will be the hardest and the most turbulent. In fact, if your business plan requires you to turn out a profit in the first 6 months of the business you should not be looking to start up your plan just yet because the likelihood is that it just will not happen.

In order to effectively test out your plan make sure you do the research thoroughly. This includes finding the right niche, researching the niche, researching the keywords, the most effective ones and the content required, and the traffic generated from keywords versus competition on keywords. Find a keyword rich domain to use for your business that is relevant and inexpensive. Start off small with a simple and functional website. You can always upgrade your website at a later date when you are more financially stable and sure of the business.

Make sure your new, simple website is monitored using analytics and webmaster tools. This will mean you can look at traffic in more details including referrals, keywords used in searches, ranking positions of your website in these searches, what the Google bots see on your website, possible coding or duplicate content problems and much more. Test the advertising waters slowly; don’t just plug money into PPC campaigns straight away. Invest small amounts in more permanent advertising that is not PPC and see how it affects your traffic and income. Find out which areas and advertising methods are more effective for your website and try to get involved with higher PR websites if you can.

Labels: seo_services, website_development

The advice and information about SEO found around today cover a great variety of different areas of a website but can be generally grouped into three main categories. These three categories are technical SEO, content SEO or linking SEO. It may surprise you to learn that the way in which a website handles 404 pages can have a negative impact on search engine rankings. Although the full effects of inconsistent or customized 404 pages are not fully known, there is clearly some degree of negative weight involved. In a couple of cases particular themes pass off 200 OK codes from 404 pages and this can mean Google listed error pages which includes the many mistyped URLS returning as 200 OK.

In addition to this, people are also generating 302/301 redirects to a home page or custom error page that provides a 200 OK response code. This means a great many website error pages are being listed in Google search engines including mistyping.
Ideally you do still want to create custom 404 pages so that users can still continue following the links and find the area in your website where they want to be. Providing the customer with options and not just a blank error page will help them to find your website more easily when they mistype your URL so in this respect custom 404 pages are ideal. What you need to remember in these cases, is if you are creating a custom 404 page you need to ensure that the codes it sends out are still 404 error codes and not 200 OK. This will tell Google it is not a real page and the mistyped URL will not be listed in the search engine. It is also important to remember that indexed custom 404 pages will lead to Google identifying duplicate content and this will damage your organic SEO efforts. This is also true of home page redirects where multiple version of the same home page will be indexed in Google but with varying URLs.

There are many things to consider when you encounter the issue of how to handle a 404 error page.

1. Large quantities of 404 error pages can reduce search engine rankings as Google will deem the site “under construction”.

2. When a nonexistent page is requested by the user, the error page you have in pace should have a header response of 404 Page Not Found. This can be followed with custom content such as suggested links. Error pages that return 200 OK will have a negative impact on your search engine rankings and will create duplicate indexed content.

3. Without a custom error page the user or robot is faced with only two possible options. Click the back button or abandon their search altogether. Neither of these options is beneficial to you or the user which is why a correctly configured custom 404 page is more beneficial.

Labels: on_site_seo, seo_guide, seo_tips

Yahoo now has a new CEO known as Carol Bartz who is more than ready to take on the challenge and turbulent ride of the Yahoo search engine. While it seems to be losing more than it gains on the stock market these days, it certainly is bobbing up and down quite frantically and Carol Bartz is poised for action as the favorite pick of Ray Bostock for the job.

Despite its prominent position, Yahoo has certainly taken a backseat ride in the search engine market, bowing in the presence of Google like so many others have had to do. Carol Bartz has a significantly healthy past in the industry of computing and has had a successful time increasing revenues for the company Autodesk, which enjoyed a ten times increment in their share price during her tenure. Yahoo is undoubtedly looking for the same dedication and improvement upon their own company from their new CEO.

Despite a glorious background and healthy past experience in the industry that Carol Bartz proudly displays, there is one aspect of this position she does not fulfill and which has been the talk of many blogs and press releases to date. Carol Bartz unfortunately has no real direct experience in the media industry which means that despite her technological executive background, she has never worked at a business like Yahoo before. Whether or not this will be a hindrance or a blessing is something that is yet to be seen but we are sure to see some interesting changes made during the course of her employment.

She has also made a point of her capability to learn media attributes and simultaneously identified a problem within Yahoo which just goes to show how dedicated she is to the job. While still facing personal experience questions about her new appointment, Carol Bartz has not only reassured us of her capabilities but resolved that Yahoo is to no longer heed advice from external sources and have the opportunity to “breathe”. After all, Carol Bartz has some hefty problems facing her and the Yahoo team including Google and Microsoft, which tend to be very large problems indeed. Carol Bartz is facing a demoralized, reduced and frantic company in desperate need of good management so can she provide the structure, organization and uplift this company needs?

Labels: search_engines, yahoo

The internet has become an incredible resource for marketing and advertising as well as a means for direct sales and customer support. Everything that was once handled with a real tangible shop front is now handled through various sections of a business website and even the customer support can be completely taken of online. The numbers of internet use and sales are increasing day by day and it is therefore vital that online businesses compete for an online presence in the marketing world.

Keywords are vital to ensuring your website gets noticed online. Keywords will help to Search Engine Optimize (SEO) your website content. The aim of utilizing keywords in your website content is to ensure that people searching for those keywords find your website and not someone else’s. There are three different types of keywords to choose from and each has their own problems and benefits. The trick is to know which keywords are going to help your business succeed online. You need to be able to ensure your business is on the first page of Google search results for at least one commonly used keyword. You should also include all the common buying keywords but make sure you are targeting the comparison keywords too. If the keywords are too general you will be competing against thousands of other similar businesses for the first page ranking. If you are not on the first page, the chances are you will not get any traffic; many people will not look at websites that are more than a page deep into the Google search. In fact you will receive a share of just 1% of the clicks.

The harsh reality of it all is, that without the right and professional SEO marketing for your website it will be lost in the miasma of other online service providers all struggling to make the top. In order to make your SEO marketing campaign successful, you need to be able to spend a little money first which is true to the old adage of “You have to spend money to make money”. This is because of the way in which Google operates its search engine.

There are two different types of links created when performing a Google search. These are sponsored links and organic links. The sponsored links are paid for by the company the advert belongs to and are displayed in a prominent position above the search results. Sponsored links do not require extensive SEO content; they will always be displayed on the front page of results at the top in rotation with other sponsored adverts. Organic links are those which have been submitted to Google for free and are ordered according to the Google algorithm that determines the importance of websites. Google is the important search engine you need to accommodate for when considering SEO. That is because Google holds a massive 70% of the population performing internet searches. Of the remaining 30%, only 5% use alternative search engines and the rest use alternative methods for finding a website including direct links.

The sponsored links you see above Google searches may have a prominent position but they only receive approximately 25% of the clicks earned by Google. The other 75% are on the organic links found below and are more likely to be the average consumer. Unfortunately Google cannot monitor competition activity for you and competing companies may try to click your ads frequently to cost you money. Additionally, PPC advertising is not always successful because of this and the clicks obtained could be much more expensive than the sales obtained through this advertising method. The alternative is a high quality SEO marketing campaign where you have complete control over what you spend the money on for your marketing. With SEO, you can direct traffic without additional PPC expenses so you know the competition isn’t damaging your budget. You can also be a part of the 75% of Google search engine clicks that take place on organic listings.

Labels: seo_guide, seo_services

Despite the credit crisis, carefully handled SEO websites are seeing a rise in the number of location specific and keyword targeted traffic thanks to a successful SEO marketing campaign. While other companies have been pulling the purse strings tightly and reducing their SEO budget in light of the recession, others have been utilizing the maximum of their SEO potential and reaping the benefits.

The marketplace now thrives with companies that have benefitted from their SEO investment and obtained higher page rankings, more traffic and thus a larger percentage of the marketplace for their industry. This is only made possible by the fact that these companies have utilized SEO services to their full potential despite facing the promises of poverty and self destruction that the recession brings.

It has been shown that the companies who have pulled back their SEO budget have seen a definite decrease in traffic caused by a loss of page rankings and a targeted audience. This in turn leads to a reduction in sales and the company really does start to feel the credit crunch at its core. Rather than be intimidated by a possible recession, other companies have invested both time and money into SEO services and have been rewarded with consistent sales and growth despite the recession warnings. It is obviously even more imperative to today’s online entrepreneur that SEO be maintained and even increased during this economic crisis to get the most out of the online market and survive the recession that is laying other non SEO focused companies to waste.

In fact, despite the recession rumors it seems that the internet is thriving more so than ever before with a 16% increase in sales online this year. This is because the internet is the best place to get what you want for less than high street prices and shoppers are turning to the electronic world to survive the credit crunch and get what they need. It’s never been a more perfect time for online businesses to thrive so it would be a fatal mistake not to capitalize on this and invest in SEO marketing. There are definitely a larger percentage of shoppers online now so make sure you take advantage of this fact and direct them to your own businesses with SEO.

SEO websites are pulling customers in directly to the website through a comprehensive SEO marketing campaign that ensures high page rankings and targeted business. With a company that not only builds your website but also builds your SEO content, marketing and linking your business will gain a prominent place on the internet and on customer searches.

Labels: search_engines, seo_guide, seo_services

Generally speaking, when we consider SEO for websites we will only examine the English elements of SEO. We target websites to include English search strings mainly targeting British or American users. There are a variety of different keyword suggestion tools to help with this and every SEO expert has their own favorite tool for the job. These tools are commonly used for English language websites and are very helpful for this particular location SEO marketing.

If you are really stuck for keyword tools for a foreign language website you can always take some time out offline to ask people in the area about what kind of words they will search for when looking for a website like this. You should keep in mind your target audience and also to ensure the survey is as random as possible. This means gathering statistical information from as many people as possible, and ensuring that everyone has an equal chance to be asked. It is important to bear in mind your target audience when evaluating this information because it will help you determine which keywords are actually going to benefit the website. If you are making an adult website for example, it is no good (and not morally proper) asking children or even the elderly what they would search for to find this website. In fact, those are likely to be keywords you want to avoid to stop them finding it at all.

You can also do this type of research online by utilizing forums and online communities or news groups. By doing this you can contact everyday people directly. Using a service like Yahoo Questions will ensure you get your question answered more effectively but this does require some small grasp of the language in question. To help remedy this dilemma you can use a translation tool like Babel Fish or enlist the services of a professional translator. The same considerations you need to make for offline surveying need to be applied to online surveying as well.

Finally you can still use online keyword research tools to find out what the common keywords are for your particular website in the required language although there are not a great many to help you. You can merely translate the keywords you find in English into the language you require again using either a translation tool or a professional translator. Your best bet for finding direct foreign language keyword tools is to investigate Google which has a wealth of different tools and AdSense help aids.

Labels: on_site_seo, seo_services, website_development

You may think you know the answer to this question already, but have you really thought about how a sitemaps affect crawls? Most of us will just submit a sitemap out of habit and because they have been popularized over the years as a valuable SEO tool. There are certain automatic sitemap tools you can obtain that can track the progress of sites that utilize blogging software such as WordPress sites. Because these sites are ever changing and expanding you need an additional program that will track these changes and resubmit more accurate sitemaps.

Well you need not be so concerned, sitemaps really do help with website access and every time a website sitemap is submitted it makes bots that much quicker to visit you. Manual crawling versus sitemap crawling has shown that bots armed with sitemaps are more efficient and responsive than those armed with nothing but an index page.

In fact, site “crawlability” has been shown to have little to no affect on search engine bot response times. SE bots have been found to be slow and delayed when crawling sites that have no sitemap and it takes a considerable amount of time for new pages to be indexed. On the other hand, websites with sitemaps can expect a speedy response and indexing within the hour. This seems to be irrelevant of how easy the urls are to find. Even if your website is optimized to be search engine friendly and easily laid out you can expect large delays in crawling. This leads us to believe that the crawls are only delayed because websites with included sitemaps get priority on crawls. Whether this is the case or not it is clear that sitemaps are essential for building an up to date website index online.

It is actually only beneficial for you to not submit your sitemap if you have not yet evaluated how “crawl friendly” your website is. This will therefore alert you to the problems in your website once you have verified your website to Google and you can evaluate these with the Google WebMaster Tools. Once these problems are fixed it is essential to submit your sitemap as per normal to ensure you get the most out of the search engine bots and get the best up to date indexing in search engines.

Labels: on_site_seo, seo_guide, website_development

If you are considering social networking as a part of your SEO marketing, you will need to ensure whether yourself or the person in charge of the networking task is passionate about this type of work. It’s takes a hard working social individual to tackle the social networking market and effectively redirect traffic to your own main website.

If you are trying to expand your social community then it is best to investigate what you will need to achieve before hand to make the project worthwhile. Set up goals and targets for growth and work accordingly to these timelines. It’s not just about SEO though, you could be interested in social networking in order to market your products or services to the younger generation which social networking websites are dominantly used by. As with all marketing campaigns you will need to draw up a carefully considered plan that accommodates problems, targets and alternative methods before you dive in at the deep end.

Social networking is not a new concept; it’s been in use for generation’s offline as a highly effective marketing tool. The right network can equate to a successful business overnight and many businesses are well aware of the power of networking and word of mouth. These days when we talk about social networking, we are often referring to the online version of this age old marketing too. Creating the right network of websites, people, friends and social communities allows us to dominate the SEO website market and increase the page rankings of our websites.
There are lots of benefits to joining up with a social networking website in order to promote your own website.

These include:

1. They are free to use so are an effective marketing tool with none of the associated marketing costs.

2. They are user friendly so no training is required to get stuck in.

3. Allows a quick and easy gateway to not just other likeminded businesses but also to customers and potential customers.

4. Advertising is 24/7 and your website is accessible 24/7 so like wise your social networking advertising and targeting never shuts down.

5. You can find customers and clients in your local area using a location specific network so your advertising is more relevant and customer targeted. You can also build a network of existing customers and increase customer retention.

Labels: link_building, social_media

One of the most crucial aspects of SEO marketing is ensuring your website is socially active. No, your website doesn’t have to wine and dine the big wigs, hangout in clubs and pubs or even go out shopping and talk to people in the queue. What we mean by website socializing is building your online presence through the use of social networking websites in order to promote your own website. You can effectively “borrow” traffic from other websites by being active and helpful on them. Think about it as “you scratch my back I’ll scratch yours”.

The most popular method to do this and often the first stepping stone to ensuring high SEO content and extra traffic is building your own blog. This is particularly useful if your website is minimalistic and SEO content does not really have a place on your main website. You therefore need to get people to your website somehow through SEO content elsewhere. Making a blog that is linked to your website will ensure you get even more SEO content online and you can divert the traffic to your blog directly to your main website. Your blog needs to be relevant in order to ensure traffic flows freely through it to make sure it is about the same topics as your main website.

Next you need to build up your blog and get some people interested in it. There are a number of ways in which you can do this. Firstly you need to get your blog listed on as many blog directories as possible. Doing this will ensure other people looking to socialize so to speak will comment on your blog, become followers and so forth. It will also help you with Google rankings and general traffic generation.
Secondly, make sure you have enough content that is well written, useful, informative, interesting and search engine optimized. This ensures that the people who find your blog will stay on your blog and possibly move on to your main website because your content is interesting enough to read.

Make sure you are just as social to other people as they are to you. Comment on other people’s blogs, add friends and generally just build up your network as much as possible. You can use the following blog communities to help you with this:

Mybloglog
Bumpzee
Blogcatalog
BlogRush
ScratchBack

You should also try to get involved with various forum communities and place a link to your blog and/or website in your profile and signature. Talk to people on the forums and get to know them, provide useful information on the topics relevant to your website and people will naturally fell over to your website in return. It also means you get an extra back link online for Google to see.

It’s not just about search engines; there are also a number of alternative services such as social bookmarking services. Submit your blog to these social bookmarking websites to ensure your blog gets seen:

Digg.com
Technorati.com
Stumbleupon.com
Mixx.com
Del.icio.us
Propeller.com
Plugim.com
SEOyak.com
Sphinn.com
Reddit.com
76newsalways.com
scoop.isedb.com
marktd.com
onlineadvertizingnews.net
Gooruze.com

Not all of these will be suitable for your website as some of these are specifically for the SEO topic. You can also build up a list of community websites and again, build up your friends, socializing and write on people’s walls.

Facebook.com
MySpace.com
Orkut.com
Friendster.com
Hi5.com
Tagged.com
Netlog.com
Linkedin.com
Xing.com
Bebo.com
Mashable.com
Hyves.nl
Yahoo 360
Windows Spaces Live
Twitter.com

These are just a few of the websites you need to look at to promote your website in the social world but it should give you a great head start.

Labels: link_building, seo_tips, social_media

When it comes to doing SEO for your website, one of the major concerns you may have is how much time and money you’ll need to spend on it. If you’re hiring an SEO firm, then time IS money, and you’ll want to know a rough estimate of how much time the SEO firm will put in and, therefore, charge you for.

You can break down the steps necessary for SEO work, making it easier to judge how much time you or your SEO company will need to spend on each. The estimates given here do not take into account any major issues or technical problems that may arise. You may want to add in a few extra hours to each step to account for any problems that you may have to deal with. If your website is exceptionally large (a thousand pages or more), you may also want to add more time into your estimate.

Step 1: Domain/URL Issues – Two hours to a day

The first thing to do is to go through your website manually and make certain that everything is consistent. You also want to look for things that will cause a search engine robot to have difficulty navigating through your site. If you have a large, dynamic site or a site that brings in a lot of content from other sites that may change often, it may take you more than a couple of hours for this step. Once you’ve completed this step, expect it to take two to four more hours to create and test all of your 301-redirect links. It may also take between two and fifteen hours to rename or re-code any filenames depending on how your site is assessed.

Step 2: – Design issues – two to four hours plus 30 minutes per page

It’s easy to see many design issues, but it can be difficult to make certain that your design is consistent from page to page across your entire website. It may take a few hours to note down every design issue, but it shouldn’t take more than four or five hours. You can often note down these issues while you’re doing your domain/URL assessment, saving a bit of time. How long it takes to implement all of the changes you need to make at this step depends on how many pages you have. At most, you may end up spending half an hour on each page. If you’ve got a huge site, this can add days to your SEO.

Step 3: – Architectural Issues – 125 hours

The most important aspect of your webpage to a search engine is its architecture. While building a list of your architectural concerns can be done while making your other lists, the actual implementation of these changes may take days or weeks. Much of this depends on how dynamic your site is and just how much re-coding is necessary.

Step 4: – Content – half an hour / 250 words

Creating content that is search engine optimized can take a good amount of time, especially if you have a lot of content on your site. One way to save time and money on this step is to do the writing yourself; however, before you jump on that idea, make certain you understand how SEO works. Otherwise, you may do more harm that good. You can also purchase licensed content or rewrite your own content to include keywords.

Labels: on_site_seo

One way of getting traffic to your website is to advertise on forums. Using forum posts to bring in traffic does so in ways that other methods don’t. It’s also a great way of marketing your website on a budget since it costs nothing but your time and effort. However, there are some things you need to keep in mind when you’re promoting your site on a forum.

While the internet provides a great way for companies, especially small businesses, to market their products and their services to millions at little cost, if you don’t know how to best use the internet for marketing, you may find yourself wasting time at best and actually driving away business at worst. There are so many different websites out there that you have to market your site in some way - you can’t just expect visitors to find your website on their own - but you’ve got to be careful you don’t market your site in the wrong way.

Forums, also known as message boards, are one of the places where you have to be careful about how you market your site. Forums are more or less discussions on a general or specific topic. Unlike chat rooms, you don’t have to be logged in to read the messages - you can read posts from any day at any time.

One of the best ways to advertise your site on a forum is to find a forum that is in some way related to your service or business. Create a profile, and in the signature area, put a link to your site. Your signature, like an email signature, will appear at the bottom of every post you make on the forum. All you have to do is join the discussion and you’ll be advertising your site with every post you make. Since you’re posting on a forum that is relevant to your website’s product or service, everyone who reads your post can be considered a part of your target audience. Many will probably be interested in your site and will click on your link.

You can also actually post a link to your site in your actual message. However, this is tricky. If you can legitimately discuss your business within the conversation on the forum, it’s OK. However, if you simply post a message with a link to your site that does not really relate to the topic at hand, many will see your message as spam. This can get your message deleted, and your forum account may even be banned if you do it too often. However, you may get even more visitors from this type of post because your link is more prominently displayed and visitors have a better idea of what you’re offering.

Just be very careful when posting forum messages that aggressively push your website and your business. It’s very easy to get a negative reputation for spamming on message boards, and once you’re banned, it’s hard to get people to take you seriously, even if you do open a new account. If you don’t contribute to the discussion, people will consider you another forum spammer and will ignore your posts and your website.

Labels: link_building, seo_services, social_media

In the past, web developers often had a choice: they could have a website that was fully search engine optimized and ranked near the top in search engine results, or they could have a site done in Flash that didn’t appear in search results at all. Why was this the case? Many old search engine robots were not able to read any keywords or even content used on a Flash site. However, new advances in search robots are changing this.

Search engine robots must crawl through a website and examine the contents, metadata, tags, ALT text, title text, and more to determine how relevant to certain topics the website is. With a Flash site, however, all these older robots saw was the code to load the Flash plug-in. They could not read any of the actual content. While there were some ways that got partially around this problem, Flash sites never ranked as high as non-Flash sites, even when the Flash site was more relevant.

One thing that is changing this is the creation of Adobe Flash Player. Adobe Systems is actively working with search engines like Yahoo and Google to integrate Flash Player with their search engines. Once a business or individual submits their Flash site to the search engine, it will be ranked more or less where it would be if it were a non-Flash site. This allows search engines to rank fully dynamic websites better.

Google is already using Flash Player to rank Flash sites, and they have even been working to fine-tune the program to index content found in various Flash banners, buttons, and other parts of a Flash site. Their new search engine robot can store text found in these files and read them like it would read a standard HTML text, giving the site more content on which to be evaluated and ranked in search results. Google will read and index Flash files automatically once the content is added to your website. There’s nothing special you have to do.

However, Google still cannot read images that include text, nor does it read and index FLV files (the main type of file used for videos on sites like YouTube). These files do not contain any true text elements, and therefore have nothing for a search engine robot to “read.” Google’s search robots also can’t read some types of Java. If your website loads your Flash through a Java Script, for example, the Flash files may not be read due to the robot’s inability to handle Java.

Google may also not index any file within the Flash file that is considered an external resource. If the Flash file has an embedded SWF, XML, or HTML file, they will all be indexed separately, not as part of the Flash file. On the other hand, if the Flash file is contained within an HTML page, the entire page will be treated as one page, and the Flash file will be treated as a part of that page.

The final consideration regarding search engines and Flash is that most search bots have some difficulty handling Flash text that is written in a language that is bidirectional, like Hebrew.

Labels: search_engines, seo_guide, website_development

Link building is a fairly time consuming task, and much of is spent in looking at various websites for links that could be linked back to your website. In fact, it’s possible to spend hours looking at search results for a site that links to sites similar to yours. However, there are some tips that can help speed up the search for sites to link to. The idea behind these tips is to maximize your results while minimizing your time and effort.

Google typically returns ten results per every page in a search. However, if you put in a search and then go up to the address bar and add “&num=100” at the end of the URL, you’ll get a Google search result page with 100 results listed instead of ten. This allows you to more quickly search the list of returned pages. You won’t have to click next over and over, and you can more easily compare

Don’t be afraid to use Boolean search functions. You may want to look for sites that are in the same field as your site and have a specific phrase or keyword in them. For this, use the AND operator. You can search for “London” AND “Angora sweaters” to find websites that sell angora sweaters in London. This allows you to quickly narrow down your search results to only those who fit your topic. You can use Boolean searches to search for specific keyword phrases or to eliminate specific keywords that continue to come up in searches.

It’s also possible to search by TLD domain type and by the page title. This also allows you to narrow down your search results. You can use this to search text in the page title and the domain. For example, if you only want to see .edu results that include specific keywords, you can use the “inurl” command.

Searching for links by using keywords is another option. You can use the “intitle” search command to see what pages use specific phrases and file extensions. Using this search, you can narrow down your search results to only .html pages that feature the term “SEO marketing.” You can even use this type of search structure to eliminate specific sites from your results page. All you need to do is add “-site:www.URL.com” at the end of the query.

These different search tips can help you quickly and easily get a list of URLs that may be perfect for link building. While you will still have to invest some time in your link building searches, you will be able to shift through sites much more quickly. By narrowing your search results down to only those that fit your criteria and then viewing more of them at once, you won’t spend as much time clicking through results. It may not seem like much, but cutting out even a few minutes from each search will save you a lot of time in the long run.

Labels: google, link_building, seo_services

It seems like times are always tough for small businesses, but no time is worse than during a recession. During a recession, many businesses try to cut back on as much as possible, but when does cutting back start to hurt the company? One of the places this question is most often applied is to the question of SEO. Should a small business pay for SEO when money is tight?

Unfortunately, many small businesses axe their advertising budget first. While this can be a good place to save a little bit of money, if businesses completely cut their advertising, they will not be able to attract new clients. Without new clients, there’s little they can do to make more money. While word of mouth may help somewhat, it’s not as effective as a marketing blitz.

While web marketing is cheaper than doing offline marketing, there are still costs involved. However, you may get a much higher return on your investment since you’re able to more deeply analyze how well your marketing is doing. Since websites allow users to track where their traffic comes from, it’s easier to identify and cut any online marketing that is not working. To this end, small businesses should not immediately cut their SEO budget when times get tight.

Some small businesses may not have even invested in SEO yet, and these businesses may be asking why they should spend the money. However, those small business owners may not recognize just how great a return they can get on their SEO. A huge return on investment is everything in a recession, and doing SEO is ranked as one of the top ROI solutions.

By selecting specific keywords and phrases, you’re very specifically targeting your audience. While ads in magazines may get a lot of attention, you never really know if your target audience is viewing the ad or if it is being viewed by someone who will never purchase your product. SEO, however, makes certain your website is being viewed by those who are looking for what you offer. It brings in more than just quantity; it brings in quality visitors and provides them with information about your website right away.

When it comes to dealing with SEO, small businesses have a few choices. They can either handle the SEO themselves or they can hire a professional SEO company. The first is obviously the most budget-friendly; however, if you and your employees don’t understand the basics of doing SEO, you may end up wasting your time. Fortunately, you can learn the basics of SEO fairly quickly.

Paying a company to do SEO, especially if the company is thorough and completely redesigns your website from the ground up to be fully optimized, may be out of your price range. Many small businesses simply can’t afford this. However, having an expert in SEO look at your pages can be helpful. Outsourcing only part of the SEO process can be helpful. For example, you may want to hire a professional SEO writer to create content for your website after you determine the keywords yourself.

Labels: seo_guide, seo_services, seo_tips

Everyone wants their websites to be search engine optimized, or SEO-friendly. However, there are some common errors that people make when they’re doing SEO work on their site, and these errors can actually cost them that highly coveted top ten ranking that everyone wants. Here are some things to avoid when doing SEO work on your website.

Remember the ALT tags! Almost every image on your website (not including the background and any images that serve as buttons and the like) needs to have ALT text. This is the text that shows up if the image doesn’t load. More importantly, however, it’s the text that tells search engines what the image is since the programs can’t actually see the picture. A good ALT tag will include two or three of your keywords, and it’s a great place to stick in extra keywords that the viewer will (hopefully, unless your image is missing) never see.

Don’t use the same title tag on every page of your site. While it may be easy to simply write one title for your homepage and then leave it on every page, this is another place where you’re losing out on a place to stick keywords. Vary the title for each page so that search engines will notice the difference, and try to include different keywords for different pages.

Avoid scripts! While Flash and the like are becoming more compatible with search engines, it’s still difficult for more search engines to see inside Flash objects. This means you’re losing places to put meta tags, ALT tags, and more.

Don’t just write for robots. While writing articles with a high keyword density might get your page ranked higher by the search engine, it’s going to send actual human readers away. They don’t want to read anything redundant or clumsy. “Our furniture store in London provides great furniture for London residents looking for furniture designed specifically for London” is going to either annoy readers or make them laugh at the horrible writing. Be sure your SEO phrases and such can be integrated into the text seamlessly so they don’t stand out and don’t over-use them.

Also, actually write your website text yourself (or hire someone to write it). Don’t plagiarize - don’t copy and paste text off of one website and put it on yours without making it clear where the text came from. Too much duplicate text on your page will be flagged by search engines.

Likewise, avoid any bad SEO practices like hidden text or keyword stuffing. Hidden text refers to adding a ton of keywords at the bottom of a website and then making them the same color as the background, effectively hiding them from viewers. Search engines still see them, however. In the past, this was a technique that did actually make search engines rank sites higher, but today’s robots are smart enough to recognize this technique and ignore it. Likewise, keyword stuffing, or making a webpage that’s almost nothing but keywords, raises a number of flags in search engine robots and may actually get your pages ranked lower.

Finally, make certain all of your links describe where they’re going. No one likes to click links that aren’t clearly described by the surrounding text or give a good idea of their target. Plus, links are another factor a search engine uses to determine site relevancy, so not clearly marking them is detrimental in several ways.

Labels: seo_guide, seo_services

Every website out there is aimed at an audience of some sort. While some are aimed at the entire world, others are targeting a specific city or region. There may be specific marketing strategies that work in that area. Also, since businesses in a specific area probably only serve the customers in that area, customers aren’t going to want to see any of these companies in their search results. To accommodate both businesses and customers, the concept of Geo Targeting needs to be included in your marketing and website development strategy.

Some paid advertising programs like AdWords actually create dynamic advertising on a website. The ads on a website for a company in New York, for example, would all be about New York businesses or at least New York related in some way. Prior to SEO, of course, this was nearly impossible to do. Now, thanks to the fact that many keywords are embedded in websites and in website metadata, it’s much easier to target a specific region instead of using generic ads that, while somewhat useful, may not be appropriate for some areas.

Aren’t most people searching the internet because they can’t find what they want locally? Actually, most findings show that individuals generally search for things that are local. While shopping may be the exception, many other searches - airfare, homes for sale/rent, specific information about local news events - are usually focused on the region in which the searcher lives. Since search engines now allow searches based on location and rank sites by relevance to a searcher’s location, it only makes sense to start making websites and web advertising target a specific regional audience as well.

So what tells a search engine where your business is located? There are several things. A domain with a .uk in its name, obviously, means that the website is designed for a UK audience. This is why web designers may want to get a specific country website domain instead of a neutral .com or .net address.

The location of the web server is also a clue, although some sites are hosted in other regions or countries. However, many search engines see a .com hosted on a UK server as being the same as a .uk site, which can be helpful. While finding cheap web hosting on a server abroad may seem like a good business decision, it may be worth a little extra money to have your site hosted on a local server.

Search engines will also analyze where your web traffic is coming from. If most of it comes from a specific region or country, that will be taken into consideration. Likewise, the language your website is written in will also contribute to determining its correct region. For SEO purposes, including a specific city or country name in the text may also help the search engine focus on a region.

Google also includes several features specific to their search engine that help it determine the correct region. The address on the website can be pulled and referenced by Google Maps to help determine location, and Google includes a specific tool for webmasters to use that verifies the correct region for a specific website.

All of these factors can help a search engine determine what region your website should be listed in and help direct dynamic ads as to what kind of content they should display.

Labels: on_site_seo, seo_services

Yahoo was once the be-all, end-all of search engines, and it was really the first big search engine to become a household name. However, Yahoo has come a long way from the days of $118 shares. In fact, thirteen years after it burst onto the internet scene, its CEO has been fired, thousands of employees have lost their jobs, and Yahoo’s shares have dropped. In fact, the site has been so over-shadowed by Google that it has been in major talks with several companies regarding a take-over.

What has caused all of this? There are several reasons. The first is that more competitors have appeared on the scene. Besides Google’s sudden domination of the search engine world, MSN, AOL, and Ask.com have all fought Yahoo for users’ attention. What’s more, Google’s emergence seemed to only really detract from Yahoo’s client base—the other three search engines have actually remained steady in recent years.

Yahoo has gotten away from its roots—the search market. That’s what they were originally known for, and it’s what they really do best. Searching the internet was once Yahoo’s entire reason for being, and it’s this purpose that they need to refocus on, especially now that sites like Google are expanding (and possibly repeating the mistakes of Yahoo’s past? Only time will tell on that one).

Yahoo also needs strong, new leadership to help give its employees a new sense of direction and purpose. This leader needs to be able to bring new ideas to the table while at the same time focusing the company. Yahoo is trying to be everywhere, and that strategy simply isn’t working. They’re running Yahoo Music, Yahoo 360, Yahoo Greetings, Yahoo Personals, Flickr, and much more. With the exception of Flickr, all of these sites have been done and have been done better. Yahoo 360, for example, is a social networking site, but it doesn’t enjoy anywhere near the popularity of sites like MySpace of Facebook. Yahoo Personals, likewise, has nowhere near the users that use dating sites like eHarmony.

If Yahoo is truly to survive, these services may need to be dumped. They don’t bring much to Yahoo’s resource pool and are, in fact, financial drains on the company. While Google spread out, too, they’ve actually spent some time revitalizing their search engine capabilities. They’re not spread thin, and they tend to dump anything that doesn’t work out like they expect it to.

Google has also worked on integrating its many services, something Yahoo has not yet done or has done poorly. Yahoo is trying to be known for so many things that it’s no longer really known for anything. They also need to stop spending money on Web 2.0 services. This puts them in direct competition with hundred of other companies, and it’s simply not needed. Yahoo should have two rivals, MSN and Google. They’re fighting a war on so many fronts that it’s hard to count them all.

Overall, if Yahoo wants to survive in the coming years, they need strong leadership that isn’t afraid to cut and run when services start to fail. They have many services that aren’t bringing in nearly as much as they’re costing the company, and these services need to go. Yahoo basically needs to embrace the idea of getting back to their roots. They’re a search engine. If they remember that and refocus themselves on doing what they do best, they can stage a come-back. If they can’t, the future of Yahoo may be grim.

Labels: search_engines, yahoo

Most people know how to do SEO for Google’s main search function, but doing SEO for Google Image Search is a bit different. If you’ve got a lot of images you want to make certain Google Image Search picks up, here are some tips to make those images attract Google’s attention. Many of these tips also work with MSN’s and Yahoo’s image search functions.

Google’s Image Search is done by the Google Image bot. This little web spider goes out and indexes images, much like the main search bot indexes web pages. However, the image bot doesn’t visit pages nearly as frequently. In fact, it might hit a website once every six months or so. This means if you put up new images the day after the bot visits, those images may not be indexed for half a year!

So how can you make certain your images are picked up and ranked well? By knowing how to appeal to this little image bot, that’s how. First, remember that the Google bot doesn’t actually see your image - it doesn’t know the visual different between a black square and the Mona Lisa. What it does see is your description of the image, so you have to make certain that description is incredibly well done. There are four things to work on here.

The first is your ALT text. This is the text that appears on your site if, for whatever reason, your image does not load. Basically, you want it to describe your image in detail. Be sure to get several keywords into the ALT text. For example, a floral site may describe a bouquet of red roses with ALT text similar to “This beautiful bouquet of red roses can be delivered to anyone in San Francisco, CA, from Amy’s Flowers.” This gets the city and name of the flower store into the text.

The image filename is also important. Don’t simply name that image of the red roses as roses1.gif or something similar. Name it something a bit more descriptive like red-rose-bouquet-1. No, it may not seem that much different, but its actually does help.

The surrounding text of an image can also help Google learn what the image is about. Add captions below your images to give the search bots yet another line of text to read, and try to work in something about the image into the nearby text if possible.

Finally, Google will take a look at your overall page theme too. If you add some Google AdSense ads to your site, you’ll see exactly what Google thinks of your site, including its main focus and its location. If these ads don’t seem to fit with your services or products, it may be a sign that you need to re-evaluate your keywords.

A few other things relevant to images:

Google won’t count images done in slide shows or shown via any sort of script. Try to avoid using these if possible.

Put all of your images in one folder on your website, and don’t change that folder name. If you do, Google may not know where your images have moved to.

Don’t do optimization work on template images or on images you use as a background. These aren’t really useful to searchers, and there’s no point in doing work on them. Do the same for any images you use for buttons and other background items. Do, however, do SEO work on your company logo and on your banners since users may search for them.

Labels: google, on_site_seo, search_engines, seo_guide

Everyone seems to have a Smartphone these days, and more and more focus is being put on mobile devices that call, do email, allow you to browse the web, and more. With that, however, come some interesting changes to the world of website design and website marketing. Mobile devices don’t see websites the same as computers do, mainly because the viewing area is so much smaller. To that end, many sites have created alternative websites aimed specifically at mobile users.

While this is great, there are a few challenges that come with it. First, you have to decide what content to include on the mobile page, how that content will be split up, and more. You also have to understand that these mobile sites aren’t going to be anywhere near as detailed or complex as your standard web site. Most mobile users want something specific, and since many have only a limited amount of bandwidth they can use each month, they want that specific information as quickly as possible and by downloading as little as possible. This means no large images, no big blocks of text, and no fancy menus.

What this also means, however, is that a lot of the traditional SEO techniques aren’t going to be viable. Writing large articles that incorporate keywords, for example, is counter-productive when it comes to a mobile site. So is it possible to make your mobile site stand out and get the attention of mobile search engines? Of course it is, but you have to know how mobile searching works and how it’s different from standard searching.

First, mobile users typically don’t want a huge variety of options. As stated above, they want to go straight to the content they’re looking for. Often, they actually write their searches so that they’re more specific. Rather than searching for “ringtones” for example, they often search for a specific ringtone or ringtones by a specific artist. They’re also often searching for local results, especially phone numbers or addresses. Quick answers to trivia questions are also popular.

Another thing to take into consideration is that your webpage is going to be split up into several different mini-pages on a mobile device, and most users don’t continuously click next to see the entire site. In fact, most will only click through two or three of these pages before giving up and either going to a different site or rephrasing their search.

The standard search result page generally includes ten results, which is why so many companies aim at getting their sites into the top ten. However, a mobile search result page may feature fewer results, so now instead of top ten you need to get your mobile page into the top five.

Finally, mobile searches, while often more specific, are also often shorter than PC searches. This is because people don’t want to use their tiny keyboards to type in anything too long. According to a study, around 85% of all mobile searches contain only two words.

So what does all of this mean for your mobile website? It means that you’ve got to have it very, very focused on exactly what it’s about. Instead of a wide variety of keywords like you’d use on a standard website, in fact, many say you need to narrow down your mobile site to exactly one keyword. Do that and you’ll find your site getting much more mobile traffic than it did before.

Labels: seo_guide, website_development