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Keywords where to use them how to use them.

February 11, 2009 @ 7:41 pm · Filed under Keywords, Meta Tags, Search Engine Optimization, SEO basics

dictionaryKeywords are probably the most valued feature of your SEO plan.  You should have already made a list of keywords, one word, two word, three word phrases that identify your page that you are optimizing.  Yes I said it, you are going to do all this work for ONE web page.

You usually want to use some sort of spreadsheet with your keywords listed in it, you are going to need the space.  In order to analyze  for the proper keywords, you need to understand the business, the location, the product(s)/service(s) to be able to have a good starting ground.  Take for example www.searchandrank.com, this site is about: SEO, SEM, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, Meta Tags, Keywords, Descriptions and much much more.  You would take these keywords and should have them spread in the content of the page, but make sure that the content makes sense with the keywords that you are using.  Do not add them sporadically throughout the page, include them in properly structured sentences, and try to use them in the first 200 words of the page, if the text content is more than 300 or so.  Using Google’s traffic estimator featured on the seobook tool bar this will allow you to see the value to the keywords you are targeting.  If your business is specific to a region or city, you should key that into you campaign, add it into phrases that you use within the site meta data and content if at all applicable.

Sometimes there will be an opportunity to add links to give additional information while browsing the content on any given page, the use of anchor text will allow those keywords that associate to a page within your site or another site, to have additional weight in your pages rankings.

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How do you track the success of your SEO/ campaign?

January 27, 2009 @ 8:51 pm · Filed under Bing.com, Google, Google AdSense, Google Adwords, Google Analytics, PPC (Pay-Per-Click), Search Engine Optimization, SEO basics, Yahoo

Alright you have your site, you performed your SEO plan to the best of your ability, how do you track the success?  Reading earlier you may have learned how to use Google Webmaster Tools and installed them on your site.  Now you may want to get more into the meat and potatoes of tracking SEO success.  Google Analytics is the easiest and most affordable way to track your results (its free!).

All you need is FTP (File Transfer Protocol) access and you can install a simple code and let the tracking begin.  Install the code between the <body> and <body/> tags in your site.  If you have no clue what you are doing you may want to contact your hosting provider to give them the code that google analytics provides to you after you sign up your site.  Just send them an email that you want them to add it to all the pages of your active site, 24 hours later you will have some data and going forward you will be able to track each visitor to your site.  You can track, IP, city, network, browser type and more!  You can even track when a searcher lands on your site and proceeds to a checkout or maybe even a contact form.  You can track your month to month results to show where you were last month and where you are today.  See how many visits you got today, yesterday, last week or last month.  Look to see what is your most popular page, what page gets the most hits, or how many pages the avg. site visitor views before leaving the site.

You can use Analytics to really gauge how well your SEO campaign is doing, or your PPC program.  Bounce rate is a very important statistic of your site.  This tells you how effective the web pages in your site are for what they are being found under.  Meaning if someone was to search for blue widgets, and found your green widgets page, chances are they are going to leave the page to find a blue widget, giving you a bounce. More to come with bounce rates and how to use Google Analytics.

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Submitting your site to Directories.

January 18, 2009 @ 7:35 pm · Filed under Search Engine Optimization, SEO basics

A search directory is usually associated with Search Engines as a place to query searches.  When its a database of websites that are associated strictly by categories.  Categories range from Autos to Zoos.  With a lot of other categories that may be minor categories within the major ones.

When you submit your site to the directories you have to make sure that you:

What User Based Directories may use to evaluate your site that you are attempting to list.

  1. Pick the proper category that your site will fit into.
  2. That you choose descriptive Titles and Descriptions for your listing.
  3. Title and Description are relevant to the content within your site and links you point them to.
  4. Make sure that your domain names match the site title to avoid your site from being listed. They are user based databases.
  5. Make sure your site is secured for online purchases, use Paypal if you don’t have proper online ordering capabilities.
  6. Proper contact information within the site, usually 1 click away or on the home page.
  7. If you are associated with any certs that you have a link on your home page to show security.
  8. Make sure that all the content on the site will show properly on all computers that may use a search engine or directory.
  9. Make sure all code is free of errors including all JavaScript.
  10. Make sure all internal links that are pointing to any internal pages work properly and have reasonable load times.

Here are some directories that you can use for free to get your site going:

Search Directories are a great starting ground for 2 things, links and possible searchers looking for more links or for a particular product or service.

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Using Webmaster Tools From Google.

January 17, 2009 @ 6:05 pm · Filed under Search Engine Optimization, SEO basics

wrenchAre you really looking to see what is happening with your site on a global level?  Using tracking within you site can do this.  You can see how many sites are linked to you and how many links you have to other sites. Google Webmaster Tools provides alot of information that can keep you informed on what you need to know for decent SEO.  If you have a commerce site with a lot of dynamic pages you may not know which of your pages that are cached in search engines that are dead links 404 pages so that you may be able to remove them from the search results to avoid affecting your search engine rankings.

You would need FTP (File Transfer Protocol) access in order to verify that you are the owner of the site.  Normally on a global include file which is templated to go over all pages that are and are already created.  This will let you see the good bad and the ugly within your site so that you may see what you can do to fix the problem and move on.

With the links, you see who is linking to what, which can let you figure out why.  Not to mention that you see if the sites you link to do exist and to make sure they are relevant to the content you are trying to provide in the first place.  Make sure that your internal links aren’t broken as well.  This can give you a better view of your link structure, which determines two things, that search engine spiders can find your pages easier, since they are scanning the content. Even the people that are reading the pages, they can get more info as they read the content.

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What are Meta-Keywords and how do they affect my SEO?

January 15, 2009 @ 3:37 pm · Filed under Keywords, Meta Tags, Search Engine Optimization, SEO basics

As soon as someone mentions the word “keywords” everyone associates them with their websites.  Which is great, because that is where you would use them, not to mention in advertising campaigns as a whole.  Your SEO campaigns start with keyword research and what people are using to get to your site, basically what they put into the search engine as a search query to get results generated for them.
After you get the keywords generated, you then should be starting to incorporate them within your site, in the Title, Content, anchor-text, you then can put them in your meta tags, aka meta-keywords.  This is the back end source code of your site that pretty much labels your site on how search engines should categorize it.  A very crucial part of the business but you have to keep in mind, putting down every single word in your content in the keywords is not going to get you found that way.  Careful choosing and experience will get you picking the correct terms, and remember even if you are listed at #1 you still may not be receiving traffic.

You can use the Google Keyword Tool, Keyword Discovery Tool or WordTracker for information on keywords if you cant decide what works.  Although this is half the battle, it is still a chunk of what needs to be done for the site, wash the keywords or take out duplicates and any other terms that may not work for the particular content of the site and than redo the process until you have about 7 unique keywords per page.  Yes per page, otherwise you will be competing with your own pages and cause a bit of an issue when attempting to rank all your pages.

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What is your Meta-Description?

January 12, 2009 @ 6:53 pm · Filed under Meta Tags, Search Engine Optimization, SEO basics

What is that line of text within your source of your web page that says  <meta name=“description” ? Very simply put, it is a brief summary of the content on the particular page.  Each page has it’s own meta-description, but most sites that have a meta-description already installed keep the same description for most to all pages of the site.  It makes life easy to just copy and paste something that works for a whole theme for your site, however having a unique meta-description for each page of your site will allow each page to compete evenly with each other.  When you have the same description for each page you are actually outranking yourself and pushing other pages of your site down the rankings of search results.

Take time and effort with this process because this is also what shows up in the search results, giving the searcher a little information about you page and will be in sync with the page <title> itself.

Meta-Description results from Source Code <meta content="description

Meta-Description results from Source Code on Google.com

If you don’t choose to put in anything in your meta-description, Google will extract a brief summary of the page and post that on search results until you put something in the description itself.  Then you have to wait until the search engines come back to the site and re-index the pages to update the meta’s if applicable.

Using keywords where ever possible is always a plus, but do not use this area to stuff more of your keywords, you are only going to harm your rankings and/or get banned from the results.

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What is your Page Title and what does it do for SEO?

January 12, 2009 @ 1:39 pm · Filed under Meta Tags, Search Engine Optimization, SEO basics

Page title these days is a big decider on search engines ranking your site.  If you have phrases or words in your title that are not spread through the content within that page, chances are your rankings are going to suffer.

Page Title

Page Title

An example of a page title shown above through a search results page on Google.  Most everyone makes their decision on whether or not to go to the page based on the information provided in that first line, your search usually has at least one of your search terms in the title, which is highlighted in bold giving you something to catch your attention.  Having a good keyword phrase will enhance the look of the search and increase the chances of someone clicking through to your site. You really want to keep it to about 50-70 characters in order to have all of the characters to appear in the result. You don’t want the important terms cut off from the results if those are the terms you want people to use to find you, keep them to the front of the title increasing the chances of someone landing on your page.

Your page title should be the most important keywords from that page’s content, ensuring that when someone searches on a search engine that those keywords will appear in the blue line letting potential surfers know that you are what they are looking for.  Just make sure you have content on the site to support the commitment to those keywords, or your efforts will be useless.

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Search engine Spiders and Crawlers

January 6, 2009 @ 5:57 pm · Filed under Meta Tags, Search Engine Optimization, SEO basics

Search engine spiders and crawlers are little workers that search engines send out to your site in order to see what you have on your site.  Content is usually scanned about 200-300 words deep depending on the size of your page.  Pictures and videos may not be scanned right away on the first visit.  Depending on how many pages your site has, the search engine may not get to all your pages on the first glance.  Having a lot of data or content on your site gives the search engine spiders and crawlers a lot of data and links to scan, and there are trillions of sites out there other than yours.  Don’t be worried that your site will never be fully scanned, it may be scanned throughout on the first pass, or it may not, but either way you need to focus on the SEO for each page one step at a time.  In fact if people are linking to the internal pages within your site, chances are when the search engine crawls the site linking in, they will make it to your site.  So be sure to link to relevant sites to what you do/provide this way the search engine spiders will find relevance to the content on your site and give you a better ranking than what you would get if it was an irrelevant site.  Don’t get me wrong you can still link to sites that are irrelevant, however if your site is filled with sites that have nothing to do with what you do, search engines may consider it “link farming” or a way to cheat the system in order to gain higher rankings.

A search engine spider and a crawler are really the same thing.  They both go out looking for new websites in order to provide the best search results for any given query at any given time.  You could even use code on your site’s source to set rates at which the crawler comes back to your site.  However this could backfire if you don’t change your content or your links on your site from time to time.  And not necessarily change the actual content, but if you were to add a page, or maybe post some news about the company.  Don’t allow the content on your site to get stale and outdated, unless what you are doing is never gonna change, you will be finding yourself lower and lower if you don’t give yourself some prominice over all the other sites that are out there.

So in short, give the search engine crawlers and spiders something to talk about when they come to your site, give them something they are looking for which is good, clean, informative content that allows their searchers to find what they are looking for when they want to find it causing the search engines to give you high rankings, only cause they are looking for the searchers best interest all the time, not the SEO specialist nor the website owner.

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Social Media’s Importance on SEO

January 4, 2009 @ 12:36 pm · Filed under Search Engine Optimization, SEO basics

Have you been hesitant to start up a facebook or a myspace page?  Linkedin is the “professional” social media website.  It’s really a way to stay connected with co-workers, industry leaders, business contacts and maybe even a long lost high school friend. 

These sites are also a free starting ground for getting your website name out there with your own name.  Just from people seeing your site as they visit your “homepage” might bring up some conversation, inquiries or ultimately, a useful incoming link to your site.  Word of mouth is still a very effective often overlooked source of free advertising.  Think of these sites as an online business card that you may use to point people at your hobby or even a specific skill set you may have.  Don’t go gungho and have your entire social site as an advertising portal for your new business or your new site, but more or less, “this is what I do, and how I do it”.

See more about website user tools, or widgets to build value to your site,  even something totally off topic of what your site is actually trying to accomplish.  Helpful tools, videos and instructions are a way to get people coming back to your site or to get them there in the first place.

So do what you normally should be doing about your site using these social media sites, make friends, and find people to come back to your site, link to your site or better yet, purchase your products or services.

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