If you want to learn SEO and expect to see immediate results you might want to check out some SEO Basics where you will learn SEO from the start.
Linking your site can produce very positive results or negative depending on how your link structure is set up. Link structure starts with the way your own website’s navigation is set, if you linked your site correctly, you will be able to get to any one page of your site with 1-click. From earlier articles on SEO Basics | Web Design, you will learn SEO on a web design level in where you have your main navigation, company information and so-on. Actual positioning of the navigation menu and what type of menu navigation makes a difference for the search engine crawlers and the people you are targeting that search for you. The search engine spiders and crawlers will follow all links, but will only associate links with text, nothing else. So make sure that your navigation “buttons” if any, have actual html text in them to alert the search engine spiders that “this link” is associated with “a service” or “a product”. People will associate links with what is presented to them, but if you don’t present it properly to the search engines they will never see it to click on it anyway. Text navigation menus help a lot when trying to apply SEO tactics to your website, a lot more then using just plain images with tags. If you use proper navigation, search engines see all your pages and so do the searchers.
Learn SEO | Linking Back to Your Website
After you have installed the snippet of code for Google Webmaster Tools, you will now be able to track incoming links to your site. Other websites, usually forums, blogs, facebook and other social media will have a link on their site going to yours just as if you were to link to another site relevant to the content on your website. You may start to get requests from other webmasters requesting to add a link on your site. Do this only if the content is relevant to the content on your site and the website or company appears to be a reputable company. If the content of the site you are linking to is questionable you may lose rankings for being associated with a “harmful website”, so be careful who you link with when linking. If they are linking to you, there is nothing you can do and you shouldn’t be penalized for this since you can’t control the content on a website other than yours.
Learn SEO | Linking Spam
If you were to add a bunch of links in a short period of time, it is evaluated for a spam check and I am not talking about the stuff in a can (although I guess it is equally as bad) this may negatively effect your linking thus having a negative impact on your SEO campaign. If you learn SEO properly, you can identify between the two and keep your link strategy spam free.
Many SEOs and clients performing their own SEO ask what they need in order to perform SEO. It is actually quite simple and you really don’t have to be that technical to implement on page and off page SEO.
First you need an FTP program, File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a standard network protocol used to copy a file from one host to another over a TCP/IP-based network, such as the Internet. FTP is built on a client-server architecture and utilizes separate control and data connections between the client and server applications, which solves the problem of different end host configurations (i.e., Operating Systems, file names).FTP is used with user-based password authentication or with anonymous user access. (via wiki-pedia)
I know this sounds complicated but all it does is allow you to transfer files from your computer to your web hosting server where your website is located. It is just as simple if you were copying files from a flash drive and putting them somewhere on your hard drive. The programming aspect of the website should be done by someone with extensive html coding experience, but you can add meta information and the proper html snippets of code to your website via FTP by just using a notepad application or a web developer software.
What Do I Need to Learn SEO
First off if you don’t have a computer and cable/dsl or better don’t bother reading any further, there is no reason for you to learn seo! Now that you have a computer, Internet access and an FTP program you are ready to perform SEO or search engine optimization. Anyone can sign up for a Google Account which then will give you access to all of their internet applications like AdWords, Analytics and AdSense. From their you can get the snippets of code to install into the HTML of your website. From here you will copy the code they give you and paste it into the HTML where they verify the code to give you access to:
Google Analytics– Analytical data compiled real time for you to view statistics of website traffic
Google Webmaster Tools– More analytical data which allows you to track links, set crawl rate, see what keywords are triggering your ads and even what pages aren’t working
Google AdWords– This will allow you advertise on Google search results pages for a CPC (cost-per-click)
Google AdSense– Adding this snippet of code will allow Google to show ads from websites using AdWords to share the CPC with you that the advertiser pays
These are just a few of the Google programs that will allow you to track the success as well as earn income or advertise using the Google Network of advertisers that you can use simply by having FTP access and very little html knowledge.
At the end of July 2010, Yahoo! announced the first part of the merger agreement between Yahoo! and Bing which means that starting in the Fall of 2010, Yahoo! search results will now be showing paid advertising from Bing Advertisers. What does this mean for Yahoo! advertising? As the spots fill up on the first page search results how does Yahoo! turn a profit? Last July I wrote an article on the Yahoo Microsoft Merger and in the article was discussed that this would happen, but Yahoo! would receive up to 88% of the profit on the advertising as part of the agreement. This is more then likely hike up the pricing for Bing advertising since the advertisers will now have access to both second and third place search engines via one advertising portal. This is going to improve ROI for both companies and get almost 20% of the search share to the advertisers that still advertise with the companies. In my eyes, Yahoo! just signed up for Microsoft Ad Sense, their new source of revenue! So is this merger a competition of search share, or revenue share. Concentrate on the user and worry about their needs in what they are looking for. Improve the already terrible algorithm to incorporate relevant search results at the top of search results rather then spamming the page with the highest paying advertiser. Thats how people get scammed!
Google’s Take on the Yahoo Bing Merger
Google has over 80% of the search market, which means they get 80% of the customers that are looking for something on the Internet. That is higher chance at success and failure for advertisers with a limited online marketing budget. Regardless, they have 80% which doesn’t really make them scared, they have done this before with the acquisition of Ask.com advertising rights and search results and AOL.
I must get about 10 emails a week from various companies telling me that for a nominal fee they can submit my URL for indexing to Search Engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing along with hundreds of other directories and search engines. What most website owners do not know when they get these emails, is that they can easily submit their URL to these Search Engines free of charge. Another thing is if 75% + of the search share is Google, 8%+ for Yahoo, and pretty much the same for Bing sitting at about 8% what else is there to submit to? Most of the smaller search engines get their search results from Google, Yahoo or Bing anyway.
Free URL Submission to Google
So I watched a video once where Matt Cutts was giving a lecture on proper setup of web pages to be indexed properly in Google. Matt Cutts himself gets these emails to submit his URL to Google for 29.99 or 99.99 for a bunch of other search engines.
A website URL submission is just a faster way to get you listed in Google as if you were to sit back and wait for Google to find it and index it on it’s own. By no means does this mean that immediately after your URL submission to Google you will start appearing at the top of search results, or that you will even be listed in Google at all let alone at the top. It takes some time before your website is approved for submission maybe a day or so, then you may see yourself if you were to type in www.YourDomain.com in the Google search bar depending on the competition for your name or a variation of it.
Free URL Submission to Yahoo VS. Paid Inclusion
So Yahoo has 2 different types of URL submission. The first being the free submission to the search engine waiting your turn to be indexed, or Paid Inclusion which you can pay to be included right away with maybe even some prime real estate on higher search engines results pages. Either way, its a big waste of money, you are only being promoted to less then 10% of the search market share at ridiculous prices. I am not saying that advertising in Yahoo is bad, just paying to have it grace the search engine with it’s presence. I never personally submit my websites to Yahoo or Bing, they just find it on their own usually before I even see myself on Google after I submitted to Google.
So take responsibility and don’t waste your money on something that takes less then a minute.
The newest form of the “original AOL Instant Messenger” and social media hotspot, Facebook is becoming more and more of a user interface for people everyday.
Facebook is a social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them. People use Facebook to keep up with friends, upload an unlimited number of photos, post links and videos, and learn more about the people they meet.
Facebook Meta Description Via Homepage
What it doesn’t say is that you can play video games, click on sponsored ads, allow different programs and companies access to your photos and friends list for advertising reasons unless you click otherwise when the default is automatic to allow. You can also start groups and fan sites which other people see you approving or dissaproving. This can be a useful tool when starting a variety of different things, including but not limited to a new website. Starting a group can allow followers the ease of everyday specials, events and news articles without the annoyance of emails, snail mail or even the dreaded phone call.
Facebook Pay-Per-Click
Facebook has a PPC system in place that allows businesses to advertise for a cost per click, but when you think about it do you ever click the ads on the side of your facebook page that you are on? People do love the different social media games that use your friends list as a catalyst for using them in the new game, so if you have a web based game that you created, facebook is a great place to start.
Recently Google has been providing a little more information on Google Analytics, allowing you to drill down to find exact searches and how many clicks you are missing out on. There are a lot of requests for SearchandRank to decipher the unknown on Google Analytics. The best part about it, is that you can’t screw anything up while clicking around, the only thing you do is enlighten yourself and learn from your mistakes. When you really can’t make mistakes while accessing Google Analytics Dashboard, which is really where the bulk of the important information can be stored. You can really set up your dashboard to display the information you feel as the most important to you analysis of your website traffic using Google Analytics. One of the most important factors of SEO is tracking the data that is at your fingertips and making changes on the fly to improve your rankings and be ready to make any changes back if the changes negatively affect your rankings.
Submit your email address to SearchandRank and we will send you a Google Analytics “breakdown guide” at no cost, which is trademarked information and can’t be resold!
SEO or Search Engine Optimization can be overlooked in the design of a website. Without proper planning these days, your newly designed website may not be search engine friendly and not provide you with the results you are looking for.
Proper Keyword Targeting
Without keyword research you shouldn’t even be this far in your website creation so at this point you should have the words you are targeting.
Your home page is going to be the most viewed page on your site if you are doing everything right. You want a lot of information (text information) on your home page, revolving around all the main keywords you have for your SEO campaign. This should not be any more then 7 if you want to have an effective SEO campaign. Keep in mind, you are going to need:
Links
Header tags
Page Title
Page Content
Images
All supporting the keywords you selected for your SEO campaign in order for those keywords to be effectively ranked. Once you target your market, use keywords associated with that market, then implement the keywords into the website on the home page and all corresponding pages within the site.
Design with SEO in Mind
Place your main header in the center of the page, give the user or website visitor something to look at, give the search engines a reason to believe you are the best result for the keywords used. If you are using a company or individual to code your website make sure they use text in their websites vs. using images for header tags. Some designers don’t use standard text for header tags only because they say it makes it look more like a document, however it is what the search engines look for in order to rank a web page. People are getting lazier and lazier and don’t like to scroll down, so have your most important information above the fold.
Business’s ask all the time if I can work for them full time rather than just to do the SEO as a consultant. It is not really worth the budget to hire a full time employee for SEO unless you are an Internet Marketing Company and have many websites to look after. Hire the full package, an IT webmaster/seo/web designer, the perfect employee has extensive programming experience in different languages but you are going to pay an arm and a leg for such expertise since the employee should have his or her own company with that much knowledge.
Learning to do SEO on your own could very well be the factor that determines your website performance as a small to medium business owner. Spending the time learning the basics to some of the more advanced techniques will greatly improve your chances of being ranked higher in search engine results page. Even having some of the basic SEO techniques down pat while operating your website will effect the rankings of your site. Depending on your keyword setup that may be in a bad way or a good way and how you apply the basic SEO techniques you will see different results. Which is one of the key ingredients in a successful SEO campaign, trial and error. This is what Search and Rank was founded on, using the best practices in different fashions.
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Benjamin Franklin
If you are doing the same thing over and over and you don’t see any positive changes, make some different adjustments and look for different results. So take the time to learn seo, even if you were to spend an hour a day, could make a huge difference, but like always if you don’t feel like putting in the time, let us handle it for you!
It has been awhile since the last post on the site. Not that there isn’t anything to write about, Search and Rank has been under going an overhaul of it’s existing website.
I want to say thank you to the regular viewers we have this year is already going to be a record year for us with over 21,000 New Visitors so far this year also bringing in a record 25 clients of SEO, Web Design and PPC clients so far this year.
If you haven’t already done so, submit your email information with your business name, industry and contact name(s) to be emailed with the Kick Off for 2010 June 1st Raffle for a Brand New Website Design with Full Initial SEO FREE!! Terms and Conditions Apply
If you want to learn how to do SEO, you really need to read. If you don’t plan on putting in the hours, don’t bother starting the project. A lot of times new website owners will go full board for a month or two, then stop what they are doing because it gets mundane and extremely boring. Well that is what SEO is, repetitive, mundane tasks that all together make a great and effective SEO campaign.
Pay to Learn SEO?
I cannot discredit things I have never myself experienced, but I probably wouldn’t waste my money on school for SEO only because of the nature of search engines and their ever changing algorithms. If something is a moving target, how could you teach on the past? Only to show bad habits that have been stopped, but if you never knew a bad habit, the times you do something that may effect your rankings negatively only in multiple examples or exploiting, not when you do it accidental or you just don’t think its wrong. My number one rule in SEO is if you don’t feel right doing it, don’t do it.
Anyone can do SEO
Learn to do SEO from the courtesy of your own home and for free, but if you don’t feel like doing it yourself, hire someone, hire someone reputable and has had some success. If you want really good results, let us handle your SEO, 33% of your revenue should be spent on advertising if you want to succeed. Internet marketing is taking over for all of marketing only because that is where the traffic is and that is where the traffic converts.
There was a post previously about long keyword phrases vs short keyword phrases and the differences and the pros and cons. Over time there has been patterns in my customer’s traffic showing that longer tail search queries are becoming more and more and people are staying on the site longer after the search.
Short Tail Search Query
When your website is envisioned on the web, you always have high expectations of what the website is going to accomplish. When placing your content on the site, you are thinking that you want to be indexed for one word search phrases and two word search phrases. When in essence the person performing the search is getting smarter and refining their search to find exactly what they want on the first search. Four, five and six word search phrases are becoming more common and providing more useful search results for the searcher thus two word search phrases are becoming obsolete and harder to rank for.
Long Tail Search Query
How do you tell what is a good search phrase is? Let the searcher tell you, check analytics regularly to see new search phrases that may have been used to find your site. Think of how you would search for your product or service if you had no idea other than what it was called. Many times search engine optimization specialists are told specific names of the product or services, so because they have no idea what they do or how they do it and go with what they are told. When come to find out, that product or service name given to the SEOS actually is only known amongst the specialists in the industry and the searcher doesn’t use the terminology and searches for something completely different not listed in the content on the site. This will result in your site not being under a search phrase that has a lot better chance of a conversion due to the specific nature in the long tail search query and the jargon is down to the consumers level increasing accuracy in what they are looking for and how well you provide the content they are looking for.
Every business comes to a crossroads where their website isn’t providing the web traffic and sales leads they believe their website is capable of providing. Just like every other aspect of business there are professionals that can provide the services at a much lower cost that of which an actual staffed employee can provide.
Freelance SEO Specialist
Obtaining the services of a freelance SEO has it’s pro’s and con’s and this little list should provide adequate information on what your choices really are.
A freelance SEO may not have all the same qualifications as a reputable Internet Marketing Company or the same work experience with various business industries. With a reputable Internet Marketing Company you may not get the same type of attention you would from a freelance SEO. In this comparison, you could get a lot more bang for your buck by hiring someone that is willing to work for you rather than working for their company. You may hire a big company, but only 1 or 2 people will be doing the work on the website for that company. Hiring a freelance SEO will allow you to get that 1 person to work on your site with no one else to report to allowing you to possibly get some small additions for no additional cost.
Internal SEO Specialist
Instead of hiring a company to take care of all of your internet marketing needs, you may venture into hiring someone with SEO/Internet Marketing experience and bringing them on your staff full time. This just like anything else has it’s pro’s and con’s, bringing on someone full time will ultimately bring more cost to your company. Providing insurance, payments into unemployment and normal full time staff requirements. Hiring may be a pain because you can’t find the right employee for the job, the person with the most experience or possibly even a proven track record of success. Also if you were to hire someone full time to help with your internet marketing they may have no idea what they are doing with SEO and provide you with some bad choices that ultimately hurt your search engine rankings and negatively impact your marketing campaign.
Whether or not you are looking to permanently improve your search engine rankings for your website (most people are looking for permanent) you make your choices carefully just like any other business decision. Remember there isn’t any matriculated programs in schools to teach SEO due to the constant changes in search engine algorithms, so its constantly a moving target.
One of the most widely used forms of paying an SEO or Internet Marketing Specialist, is a small fee for preliminary work being done to the site (mainly to protect the SEO) and a commission for sales on the website is a way to track success and to put value to the work of the SEO.
The Magento eCommerce CMS platform, is not only open source allowing you to tweak the programming, change the look and feel, get free updates from the forums and get profit building plug-ins from Magento masters.
Magento SMS Plugin Now Offered
Evangelizmo “provides messaging solutions for open source e-commerce platforms. We strive to make messaging simple, so that you can focus on making your business grow.” This enables you to send out text messages to your clients or potential clients at a low cost per text. Instead of sending out fliers in the mail, or phone calls for reminders for an order or for a service call. You can minimize your cost and time by sending out blast messages to multiple people in one single message. Pick what type of customer you want to send to by defining the demographics before sending out the messages by filtering out those you want to exclude.
How Can SMS Messaging Increase Profits?
SMS messaging can increase your profits on a lot of different levels. As any business that runs promotions, the cost for sending out text messages can replace anything besides emails. If you aren’t using anything besides emails, you probably aren’t doing well unless you started out some other way. Multiple marketing can increase your exposure thus increasing the amount of people you show your product or service and increasing your chances for a sale.
A dry cleaner could even ask for an additional dollar per dry cleaning order to alert the customer that the dry cleaning is finished. Get 10 people a day, do the math… An insurance agent can put the cost of the plug-in in the insurance premium to alert the policyholder of a possible lapse in coverage to protect against the “Oh I didn’t receive that notice in the mail, or my phone didn’t have reception.” Real estate agents can alert potential buyers of a new house that has become available or that an offer has been made. If the agent is dealing with multiple buyers for one house, the buyers could receive notification of a new bid or the possible new place with same standards.
The list goes on and on and if you don’t think so, how bout an optician that asks “Sir/Madam, would you like to be notified when your glasses are finished, that way if you are still in the area you don’t have to be just arriving back at your house and listen to your answering machine tell you that your glasses will be done? It is only $1 dollar extra for 2 text alerts.” Now you just got an extra dollar and a way to remind that person to come in for an exam to check up on the prescription.
As a developer that sells services, this would be a great addition to any arsenal of CMS that you may have. Evangelizmo has developer abilities to allow you to resell the service and not have to worry about any of the integration or service issues, that all lays on Evangelizmo.
As you play around with more websites and you try new tactics, you start to see different results from different SEO strategies. In recent research, the use of meta keywords in the search engine results algorithm are becoming less and less influential in ranking your website higher on search engine results.
What happens if I don’t use Meta Keywords?
If you choose to leave any pages without meta tags, choose specific product pages. Ones with less importance if you are testing for your own research. You will want meta-keywords for Yahoo and Bing search results, those search engines still show a lot of credit towards search engine rankings. Make sure that your pages are keyword content rich, make sense and link to other relevant pages within the site and other websites.
Can you use too many Keywords in the Meta?
There really isn’t a limit to how many keywords you use in the meta-keywords section of your web page. Really you should use as many keywords as you see fit with the content on the page that you are optimizing. The content is really what produces the keywords for your page. The more text content that you use on the page, the more keywords you could use within context of the content. If your page is all over the place you really don’t have a chance of ranking the page, however if you repeat keywords or stuff keywords on a page your rankings could suffer as well.
When choosing to advertise your website on Google AdWords you need to first start out with a campaign. A campaign is a complete advertising group or advertising campaign full of ad groups, keywords and ads. Each campaign you create on Google AdWords has it’s own settings which can include:
Geo-targets of countries, states and cities
Demographics from age, sex, gender, income etc.
Day-Parting or showing your ads at or within specific times
Languages the ads appear in
Max CPC (cost-per-click) across the entire campaign
Choose which networks
Content Network, places you on relevant websites participating in the Google AdSense program
Google Search, for Google and their search partners
Mobile Devices
Daily Budget
Scheduling
Position Preference
Ad Rotation
Ad Frequency
These settings for your campaign can be changed or modified at any time and over time you will probably change these settings multiple times.
Google AdWords Ad Groups
After you create the Google Ad Campaign, you are then prompted to make an Ad Group. The ad group is what consists of the keywords and the ads associated with those keywords. From here you can choose your keywords from a broad sense to an exact sense. The difference between broad match and exact match is simple.
Broad Keyword Match is any keyword search performed containing that particular word or words in the search. If you bid on the keyword “steak” any search performed with that word in it will show your ad as long as you meet the min. bid requirements and have enough of a budget and have met the Google Advertising Policy standards.
Exact Keyword Match is any keyword search performed with only the keyword or keyword phrase in the exact order you selected. If you bid on the keyword “buy steaks” your ad will appear when someone searches “buy steaks” onlyas long as you meet the min. bid requirements and have enough of a budget and have met the Google Advertising Policy standards., if they type “steaks buy” your ad will NOT appear.
Keyword Phrase Match is any keyword search performed with the keywords you selected only in any order.
During your SEO campaign set up you come to a point where you brainstorm on keywords to target giving search engines something to rank you for. Effective keyword research will allow you to find that broad search terms like “SEO” will receive more traffic due to the broad range of phrases that can be made using that one word. A long tail search phrase like “Learn How To Do SEO” which is more specific in what the searcher was looking for.
The challenge of broad search terms in any SEO campaigns is the amount of competition you will have trying to target the same term. Using long tail search phrases you will find a lot less competition and you will find a higher conversion rate on the searches that do find you. Keep in consideration Google and most search engines do not recognize certain words as search query words. “?” “if” “for” “a” are examples of words and grammar that they don’t recognize.
If your website has a product or service to offer chances are you can set your website with keywords getting more specific as a searcher clicks deeper into the site. On your home page should contain the most used search terms and the broadest of all the terms brainstormed by you.
Many friends ask me, what can I do to help with the optimization on my site, or their site. Since none of them are really technically savvy, I have them perform the off-page optimization, basically the stuff that doesn’t happen on the website.
Some off-page optimization can be:
Link Building (with minimal reports/adds for a developer to do after)
Website Promotion (getting the name out there, talk to people, emails)
The worst part about off-page optimization is that it all is dependent on the on-page optimization and page content being accurate enough to convey the correct message from the off-page optimization.
Off-page optimization can be done daily to improve search engine rankings. The process of link building should be a consistent process in order to build a habit of forming relative external links back to your site. Blogging can also increase visibility and diversity of the entire site allowing the spiders and crawlers to index the pages for various keywords. If you keep it informative and relative, you can come up with hundreds of keyword variations all supporting the content on the site, thus increasing your search engine visibility.
There is more things you could do for off-page optimization but if you came for the free tips, you obviously wanted to learn how you can do SEO without spending any money and these steps don’t cost you anything.
Every business with a website will at some point realize that they need to concentrate on optimizing their website. Chances are that no one in the company will have the skill set needed to accomplish the optimization plan. So the next course of action is finding a third party to optimize the website for a fee.
There are benefits to outsourcing the optimization of your website. First, you do not have to employ the company or person doing the work, saving you employee-related expenses. Second, your staff can concentrate on their assigned duties and everyday tasks. Selling to and/or servicing your customers will remain your team’s priority, while your optimization is managed by an expert.
A downside to outsourcing is coming across the company that says they can do it, but in reality cannot due to lack of know how. Conduct your own research on the companies you are considering. Visit their websites to see if theirs are optimized properly. If their website is not optimized properly, how will they successfully optimize yours?
A quick check to see if the company is an optimizer includes finding what you can identify, which are the title, keywords and description. These are a part of the source code for the pages. See if the page title aligns with the keywords and description.
<title> Web Design, Web Applications, Search Engine Optimization, Website Design : Buffalo,
NY : 360 PSG </title
<meta name=“Keywords” content=“website design, web developer, internet applications,
web hosting, content management system” />
<meta name=“Description” content=“Servicing web solutions including website design,
custom web applications, e-commerce and e-mail marketing campaigns in Buffalo, NY, across the
United States, and around the world.” />
The above is a perfect example of a non-optimized web page. Notice the title, keywords and description all reflect different services the company performs. A properly optimized website will have these all very similar, if not exactly the same, including the positioning of the keywords in the title, keywords and description.
<title>Learn how to do SEO :: Free Search Engine Optimization Tips :: SEO :: PPC :: SEM</title>
<meta name=“description” content=“Welcome to SearchandRank.com home for free SEO search engine
optimization tips on how to help improve your rankings. From what Meta-Descriptions, Keywords are
to (PPC) pay-per-click strategies. Learn how to SEO for free or have our experts do it for you!” />
<meta name=“keywords” content=“SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, SEM,
Free SEO Tips, PPC Strategies, Learn How To Do SEO, Online Marketing” />
The second example shows what the three sections of the source code should look like – an alignment of all 3 categories which will improve search engine rankings regardless of what else you do to the page. This is because you are improving the relevancy of the page in the back end, where the search engine spiders look. So, please be careful in choosing your SEO company. The ones that promise and don’t deliver are the ones giving companies like mine a bad reputation, probably because they are still in the infant stages of their studies about SEO.
What to look for in a CMS (content management system)
1.Be able to optimize page titles, meta-description, meta-keywords and text content on each and every page to obtain unique pages.
2.Be able to optimize each and every image (alt attributes).
3.Have a page for conversions (static “thank you” page for purchases) need to install tracking code on each conversion page.
4.Make sure pictures and images are smaller, the larger the page the slower the load time and the lower the rankings because of it.
5.Navigation rollover scripts, other JavaScript-based code, and all CSS scripts should be taken out of the code of each page and put into external files to which each page of the site is referenced. Doing this has several advantages, but one of the most beneficial is that any site’s keywords and content all move up in the code, communicating their importance to the search engines and boosting the site’s relevancy ratings. In other words, this can boost search engine rankings by improving the code to text ratio of the page. This is a simple and relatively inexpensive thing to do, depending on the total number of pages in the site.
* Important *
oIt can take a while for the search engines to index a site and the rankings to change for that site. For some search engines, the lag time between the work and seeing results can be as long as six months. Clients need to be patient and have realistic expectations (from sales) regarding the time frame involved with organic (the natural, non paid results) search engine rankings. If the business need for increased search engine prominence is greater than can be met with optimization alone, I recommend adding a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign to the marketing campaign mix to bridge the time. PPC campaigns such as Google’s AdWords can be set up in a matter of a few hours, allowing for immediate results.
Content Piece of the Puzzle (the design)
You get better results if you design with optimization in mind from the beginning. If you incorporate optimization into the very construction of your website, it is much more seamless and genuine than if you build your site and then try to tweak it for optimization. The most search engine friendly sites are straightforward sites built from basic, non-frame, non-Flash, HTML documents. Your site should also use basic HTML links (not links in dropdown flash menus or hidden in fancy animations) as these are most easily followed and indexed by search engines.
First, a site loaded with high-quality content of interest to site users will give them a reason to stay and a reason to come back. After all, the reason they came to the site was to find information. Second, you will receive the added benefit of serving up exactly what the search engines want – content. Search engines will have more information to store about the businesses and products; that information will translate directly into the ranking they give the site for related keyword phrases.
oEach page should contain about 200 words of text content increasing relevancy ratings and thus making optimization of the pages easier to monetize increasing the search engine rankings.
Prominence of Targeted Keyword Phrases – It is not enough to have your keyword phrase(s) somewhere on the web page, the placement and prominence given to them also affects your search engine placement. For example, leading off the site’s first paragraph with your keyword phrase gives it more weight than burying it half way down the page in the middle of a paragraph. Also, using larger font sizes and bolding the text can emphasize its importance and positively affect the page’s ranking for that phrase.
Using keyword phrase(s) in the <h> tags of the site will also improve search engine rankings. Specific use of just one type of header will not be as effective as using multiple <h> tags on the page.
Text-Based Navigation – Search engines cannot read images. If the site’s navigation system is done with images (most are), you will need a text-based navigation system that the search engines can follow to ensure that all the important service and product-related sub-pages of the sites are indexed by the search engines.
I have just spent the last few hours looking at posts from the past few years about bounce rates in Google Analytics and I think that there is a lot of information out there that Google must laugh at. In this post about bounce rates, he talks about how someone else says it better than he does and he passes on the torch to another useless post about bounce rates. At least one truth from both of the posts is that a low % is a better %, however breaking them down into what they are for and what they can tell you is completely off kilt.
Low bounce rate is telling you that people come to your site and at some point and time during their visit, go to another page. Meaning that a low percentage of the people that visit your site only visit the first page. This doesn’t mean your home page necessarily, it could be a product page if you are an commerce site, or another post within your huge blog.
High bounce rate means they came, they saw, they left. No clicks to anywhere else in your site, just viewed the landing page and left.
There is no time limit on how long a person can stay on the page before clicking to another page, if they click in and click out 2 hours later, it’s a bounce.
If your bounce rate is high, evaluate the type of site that you have, if its a blog, expect people to hit it and forget it. That is really what a blog is for, to provide available information quick and easy. That’s why you need to make sure that the content within the pages of your site are right to the point, don’t have too little or too much information. You don’t want to misinform or bore your site visitors.
Bounce Rates in Pay-Per-Click
There are a few things to think about when you are looking at the bounce rates of your ppc campaign, you have to look at the possibility that your price is too high, product wasn’t really what the searcher wanted, or your page itself doesn’t have enough stickiness to keep them on the page. When someone is shopping they are more likely to leave the site entirely to “shop around” rather than shop around the site that didn’t provide them with the content they were looking for. Make sure that your landing page supports the words you are paying for, because even if they click on your site and bounce off, it still costs YOU money! Knowing what to expect before hand does make it easier to swallow, it still doesn’t take away the costs you are going to incur. Good luck and happy bouncing.
