FTP File Transfer Protocol

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.

Put in the Time, Get the Results

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.

Should I Use Meta Keywords?

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.

Google AdWords Campaigns

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

1. Content Network, places you on relevant websites participating in the Google AdSense program
2. Google Search, for Google and their search partners
3. 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.

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 *

o It 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.

o Each 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.

Trademark Keywords?

There are lots of different opinions and different court cases even where the question of whether or not you can use trademark words in advertising campaigns such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. There was a few mentions in those articles about meta-keywords, which is very important when relating to your content. My general rule has always been to insert the keywords that really decide how the page should be optimized for are the ones that are in the content of the page. Sure Google and Yahoo are trademark names, and surely when someone was looking for your site they wouldn’t type in Google and necessarily want to land on your page. The content on your site is probably google related, but not Google itself, so you would need to target a phrase, like in seo case, “How to advertise on Google” would be a good phrase to compete for robotic knowledge from the mother ship or my site which I specialize in MAXIMIZING profitability while keeping cost down. This is a simple way from staying away from trademark infringement in your future.

Keep your description relevant to the content and if need be include the “possible trademark threat” include it. When in doubt, dont do it in SEO, to avoid the problems and possible banishment from search engine results.

Reference:

• http://www.ivanhoffman.com/keywords.html
• http://www.destinationcrm.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=42993
• http://tcattorney.typepad.com/ip/2008/06/use-of-trademar.html

Keywords 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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.