Search Engine Optimization (SEO) 101 For Small Business Owners
June 5, 2012 by Lisa Santos · 1 Comment
Search Engine Optimization
Some business owners shy away from SEO thinking it’s some huge monster that’s going to eat them alive. However, SEO is something that can help them generate more leads, customers, and sales for a fraction of the cost of traditional advertising methods.
SEO is a process of optimizing a website to improve search engine rankings.
In a nutshell, this is the process of getting traffic to your website.
This is achieved through “on-site optimization” and “off-site optimization.”
On-site optimization should include the keywords that your business would like to rank for as well as a few other key components.
Keyword research is the most crucial part of the SEO process because the keywords you target mean everything. Get it right and you will see major results!! Get it wrong and it will be a waste of time, energy and money.
You can do keyword research in the Google Keyword Tool. Simply enter your main keywords into the tool and review the results.
The results will show what keywords people are searching for and how many times each keyword is searched for each month. This is powerful information for you because now you know what keywords to target in your SEO campaign.
Off-site optimization involves getting relevant backlinks to your website as well as establishing a strong presence spread out all over the Internet. This includes articles, press releases, videos, Facebook, Twitter, and any site other than yours. The more you have out there, the better. All of these sources will contain a link back to your website will help your website rank higher in the search engines as well as giving you stronger online visibility.
You can even create a network of “mini-sites” for your business that targets different keywords and link back to your main website.
SEO is one of the most important ways to improve your profits while reducing your advertising costs. While you can try to do SEO yourself, most businesses opt to hire a professional SEO firm to help them achieve faster results.
Whether you do it yourself or hire a professional like us, remember that your goal is to have a high-ranking site in the search engines. SEO is the key to online success!
16 Ecommerce SEO Tips to Keep Your Website Ahead in Rankings and Traffic
September 16, 2010 by Lisa Santos · 1 Comment
A typical Ecommerce website contains a few hundred pages. An Ecommerce giant like Amazon contains thousands of products and millions of web pages. Optimizing a website like Amazon is not tough; it just requires a strong SEO strategy.
Optimizing an Ecommerce site is slightly different from optimizing a static website. You need to plan and construct your optimization strategy well in advance. This will help save you a lot of time and effort in the future.
16 Ecommerce SEO Tips to Keep Your Website Ahead in Rankings and Traffic
1. Maintain a Uniform and Clean Website Structure: The home page of your website should reflect the product categories; while all the inner pages should follow a common webpage structure.
2. Use a Unique Title Tag: Every product page should have a unique title. An Ecommerce site can contain any number of web pages. You can ask the programmer to code the title from the page content and product name. This makes your SEO more dynamic.
3. Select an Appropriate Keyword: The keywords must be unique for every webpage. They must reflect the important phrases within the webpage content. For an Ecommerce site, you can ask the programmer to select keywords from the content and product name.
4. Create a Relevant Description Per Web Page: The description of a web page is the snippet which appears in the SERPS. Every visitor reads the snippet and then clicks on the search result. It is very important to include a description relevant to the webpage content.
5. Include Breadcrumbs for All Inner Pages: A breadcrumb is like a secondary navigation structure. It helps the visitor to navigate back to the main product category page. A breadcrumb also helps in the internal linking of the website. Overall, including a breadcrumb makes the website SEO friendly.
6. Use a Heading Tag: Searchbots assign a lot of importance to the heading tag. The heading tag is SEO friendly and can be used to format the title of the web page content.
7. Avoid Usage of Flash: Avoid using flash on every web page of your Ecommerce website. This will expand the site loading time. If the use of flash is inevitable, include textual content in the flash. Search engines are capable of reading the text in the flash file.
8. Optimize Images: Add the Alt tag to all the images of your website. Search engines cannot read images. The Alt tag is a means of ensuring that the search engines read the alternate text for images.
9. Optimize Anchor Text: Anchor text appears between the anchor opening and closing tag. It is good practice to use keywords as the anchor text.
10. Create an SEO Friendly URL Structure: The default URL structure of a dynamic website contains parameters. Search engines are not capable of understanding these parameters. A good URL structure must contain words separated by hyphens.
11. Generate a XML Sitemap: A XML sitemap contains all the URLs present in the website and makes it easy for searchbots to find and index all web pages. If the number of web pages on a site is large, you can create a number of XML sitemaps and then submit these sitemaps to Google via Webmaster Tools. E.g. sitemap1.xml, sitemap2.xml.
12. Limit the Number of Outbound Links: Always link to a safe and secure website. If you are not sure about the quality of the website you are linking out to, use the no follow attribute.
13. Submít to Search Directories: Forward your website URL to good quality search directories. Most of the search directories take a few weeks to link back to a site. Fill in the details of the submission form carefully, so that the administrator accepts the submission.
14. Submít to Article Directories and Social Bookmarking Sites: Article submission is the quickest way of obtaining high quality backlinks. You need to select the do follow bookmarking sites and submit the URL to them. Growth in traffic is a plus point of submitting to social bookmarking sites.
15. Integrate a Secure Payment Gateway: A secure payment gateway is the heart of an Ecommerce website. Get a trust seal from Verisign, TrustE, etc. Visitors will be more likely to trust your site and to make an online payment.
16. Track User Behavior with a Good Analytics Tool: You can track and analyze visitor behavior with a good analytics tool. You need to select an analytics tool based on your requirements. If your Ecommerce website operates on a large scale, you can opt for a paid analytics tool. Otherwise you can use a variety of free tools to obtain the best results.
It is very easy to rank well and get quality traffic with these tips. The trick is to maintain the balance of the site being SEO and user friendly.
What steps do you take to optimize your Ecommerce website?
About The Author
Debbie A. Everson, CEO SearchMar.com, experienced SEO Consultants and Search Engine Optimization Agency to over 2,000 small businesses. Learn about search engine marketing, pay-per-click, social bookmarking, and marketing at our SEO Blog. Follow us on Twitter @searchmar or call 866.885.6263 to speak to a SEO Consultant.
How to Build Valuable Backlinks
June 16, 2010 by Lisa Santos · Leave a Comment
Search engine optimization consists mainly of on page activity and off page optimization. Building backlinks is a part of off page optimization strategy. High quality backlinks have the potential to improve a website’s ranking in the SERPs.
Backlinks Are Considered Valuable When They:
a. are do follow
b. contain the appropriate anchor text,
c. are deep linked to the relevant inner pages,
d. are linked from high PR niche websites
5 Tips for Building Valuable Backlinks:
1. Perform A Competitive Intelligence Analysis.
Competitive intelligence analysis allows you to scrutinize the competitor’s backlinks and their link profiles. Run a Google search for your target keyword and list the top 20 competitors. Capitalize on the Yahoo! Search Explorer tool to determine the backlinks for each of the top competing websites. Use an Excel spreadsheet to make a list of all the backlink providing websites. The next step is to shortlist the do follow websites from the list. Arrange them in the descending order of their PR. At the end of this procedure, you will have a list of highly valuable do follow websites to link from.
2. Submit URLs to Search Directories. Search directories are of two types: general and niche directories. Backlinks from niche directories are normally considered more valuable than the backlinks from general directories. Most of the search directories take months to process your linking request. There are some directories which link back within a few days. Websites which build a high number of backlinks in a few days are looked upon suspiciously by Google. The best way to build backlinks is over a period of time to avoid getting tagged as a link spammer. Submitting a website’s URL to directories is a time consuming task but provides great results at the end.
3. Submit Articles to Article Directories. Submitting Articles to article directories is a very popular approach to link building. Most of the article directories allow you to include a link in the article. You can also add a link to the author description of the article with appropriate anchor text. Article directories are known to rank well in the search engine ranking pages. An added benefit of submitting to article directories is the traffic it drives to your website. There are a large number of high quality article directories which accept free article submission. Simply sign up, verify your account and start submitting articles.
4. Post in Forums. Forums initially served as a means of conversing and solving queries. Today forums are also used to obtain valuable backlinks to your website. A majority of forums allow a signature link at the bottom of every post. This signature link is a do-follow link. You can select the desired anchor text and link to any important inner page of your website. There are a few forums which allow you to enter more than one signature link. Just remember to participate in the conversation, ask questions and answer those of others.
5. Create Link Bait. Link bait involves creating compelling content on the website which makes others link to it. You should write frequently and consistently to develop a following. Keep tab on the latest happenings and news in your niche; be among the first few to break the news online. To create that perfect link bait, your articles should contain news, updates, a controversial topic or even some great resources. Keep the information quotient of your articles high and watch the link baits pour in.
If you want other websites and blogs to link to you, double check who you are linking to. Don’t be in a rush to get backlinks. A handful of good quality and authoritative backlinks are worth more than a hundred low quality, low PR backlinks.
About The Author
Debbie A. Everson is the CEO of SearchMar.com, experienced SEO Consultants and Search Engine Optimization Agency to over 2,000 small businesses. Read my SEO Blog for hints and tips. Follow me on Twitter@searchmar. Call 1.866.885.6263 to speak to one of our SEO Consultants and receive your free consultatíon.
Reverse SEO: Restoring Online Reputations
April 30, 2010 by Lisa Santos · Leave a Comment
Reverse SEO fits seamlessly within the context of your online
reputation management (ORM) program. It is the quickest, most
effective solution for dealing with bad press that has
surfaced on the search engines about you or your company. By
pushing negative listings from the front page of Google,
Yahoo, and Bing, reverse SEO shields you from the damaging
commentary of others.
Negative publicity online has become one of the most
frustrating challenges for companies. It is typically
anonymous. Names are often unattached to forum threads, blog
posts, and even entire websites. Therefore, it is difficult to
track and address the source of the complaint. Moreover, the
growing popularity of social networking platforms has made
it easier than ever for anyone with a mild grievance to give
weight to their grudge. If you or your company have been the
target of bad press online, it may be time to launch a
reverse SEO campaign.
In this article, we’ll clarify how negative publicity gains
traction within the search engines, and how it can lead to a
public relations nightmare. We’ll also provide a working
blueprint for executing a reverse SEO campaign and
controlling the damage.
Controlling Bad Publicity With Reverse Search Engine
Optimization
To appreciate why reverse SEO is effective, you should
understand how negative press takes root within the top
search listings in the first place. Google, Yahoo, and Bing
rank pages based on a large number of criteria. If a website
and its individual pages satisfy the most important of those
criteria, those pages will rank well.
A lot of the bad press that targets companies (possibly even
your own) is placed on websites that meet key ranking
parameters in the search algorithms. That means the negative
publicity can climb into the top positions and gain exposure.
When people search for you or your company, they’ll see the
bad press. That damages your reputation.
Reverse search engine optimization is an ORM strategy that
pushes negative publicity from the top search positions. By
moving the bad press off the first page of listings, reverse
SEO limits its exposure and stifles its impact.
Ingredients For An Effective Reverse SEO Campaign
Like search engine marketing, reverse SEO uses a methodical,
multi-pronged approach to protect your online reputation. The
first step is to identify the sites and pages that contain
negative publicity about your company and that are ranking for
important keywords. Those keywords might include your name,
that of your company, or key employees.
The second step of reverse SEO is to analyze those sites and
pages for their respective ranking authority. That will help
you determine the effort and tools you’ll need to use in
order to move them from the first page of listings within
Google, Yahoo, and Bing. A negative PR blitz that is
spreading across social networking sites is more difficult
to remove than a single blog post that is on a non-authoritative
domain.
The third step is to gather the necessary tools and execute
your reverse SEO campaign. Such tools might include
optimized press releases, a new network of competing sites
and blogs, social media profiles, and a social bookmarking
program. Reverse SEO may also include heavy content
syndication to build high-quality links. A search engine
marketing specialist will have these tools at their
disposal.
Reverse SEO Begins Before Negative Press Emerges
The best time to launch a reverse SEO campaign is before bad
publicity appears in the search engines. This is due to the
way that the pages link. A page will rank well within the
search engines if there are enough thematic links pointing
toward it. However, once it ranks, it will gain exposure.
That exacerbates the problem.
Negative press can spread rapidly as people attach the press
to their own blogs, sites, forums, and social media accounts.
That creates a growing portfolio of links pointing toward the
damaging press, cementing its position in the top listings.
It becomes more difficult to address. By launching a reverse
SEO campaign upfront, you can prevent the negative publicity
from gaining exposure in the first place.
Protect Your Online Reputation With Reverse SEO
Reverse SEO should play a key role in your online reputation
management program. It is far too easy for unsatisfied
customers, resentful employees, lazy journalists, and
malicious competitors to tarnish your name. And when it
happens, it is usually done under the cover of anonymity.
Anonymity makes the complaint or grievance impossible to
address in private.
Launch your reverse SEO campaign now – before trouble
strikes and the damage begins to gain momentum in the search
engines. In a year’s time, you’ll be glad you did.
================================================================
Each circumstance is unique and therefore a custom ORM
campaign will require a custom SEO quote. Rostin Ventures
principals have extensive experience in restoring
reputations online, using Reverse SEO among other tactics to
provide positive Online Reputation Management Services (ORM
Services). Rostin Ventures can help push the negative press
down and pull the positive content to the top of the
listings. http://www.RostinVentures.com
================================================================
Article printed from SiteProNews: http://www.sitepronews.com
HTML version available at: http://www.sitepronews.com/archives.html
Reverse SEO: Restoring Online Reputations
By Rostin Ventures (c) 2010
Copyright ? 2009 Jayde Online, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
SiteProNews is a registered service mark of Jayde Online, Inc.
The Google Duplicate Content Penalty: The Truth
April 26, 2010 by Lisa Santos · Leave a Comment
The truth of the Google duplicate content penalty is quite simply that there is none! If that confuses you, then you
have been reading too many misinformed forums or blogs where people get stuck on some popular term that they have no idea what it means, and then profess to be experts.
The only experts on the Google duplicate content penalty, and the only people who are qualified to define it, are Google, and in Google’s own words “There is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty”. This comes directly from
Google’s Webmaster Central Blog.
That should be the end of this article, at precisely 96 words excluding title as I define my word count. But it is
not. Why? Because even though this blog is operated by Google, and even though much the same has been stated by
Matt Cutts, Google’s main software engineer, and other Google experts, people still argue and complain about the
Google ‘duplicate content penalty’.
So here is the truth: you might ask who am I to know the truth, but I read all the Google blogs and their official
statements, and in applying what I learn, I achieve excellent results for my web pages on Google search engine listings:
and those of Yahoo, MSN and Bing. So I am coming from a sound base that my results can prove.
As a professional article writer whose customers trust to get them the best results from the articles I write, I have
to be very aware of the policies and the way the algorithms work of each of the major search engines, and so I am as
qualified as anybody to comment on myths such as this.
The Truth of the Google Duplicate Content Penalty
There is no duplicate content penalty. Google’s major search engine function is to offer a customer the best possible
results for a search, based upon the search term (keywords) that the customer has used in the Google search box.
Google’s customers are not:
1. You, who use it to get your web pages listed.
2. Adwords advertisers that use Adwords to advertise their products.
3. Corporations or individuals that use it to have their web pages listed.
4. Internet marketers who recommend others to use Google for advertising or searching.
Google’s customers are those seeking information, whether that is to solve a problem, where to purchase a
product at the cheapest price, find a sports result or to get directions to a specific location. Everybody that uses
Google uses a search term to find some information that they need. That search term is what you and I refer to as a
keyword.
If Google detects several web pages offering exactly the same content, its algorithms will select that which best
offers the information required and list that. It might also list one or two other pages offering exactly the same content
if there are good reasons for it doing so (e.g. more links to other relevant websites, more other relevant pages on the
domain, and so on).
So, not all duplicate content pages will be refused a listing. If these duplicates are articles, then the algorithms that the spiders carry on their backs will take the links from these articles into consideration, the authority of the directory on which it is published, and other factors, before deciding which should be listed. It is wrong to believe that this decision has a chronological factor, but, if you include a link in your article Resource section to your web page that contains the same article, then your page is liable to be listed above the others, partially because of a greater number of links back to it from the other copies, and partially because your entire site is liable to be more relevant than these others to information being sought by Google’s customer.
This is not because yours was created first, but because it better meets Google’s criterion for authoritative
back-links. However, if the rest of your website is not equally authoritative, your page might be listed behind
another with the same content or even not listed at all.
All of this is designed by Google so that its customer is offered the most relevant range of results to the keywords
they used. That is what Google is for, and is its ultimate objective. Google will not penalize any individual or any
website for publishing what you refer to as ‘duplicate content’, and it will take your version into consideration
for publication just as any other version.
What counts in the long run is which version Google’s algorithms believe to be most likely to offer the best
possible information to the person seeking it, and if that means not publishing a whole host of duplicate information,
then that is only fair, isn’t it? If you used Google to find some information, you wouldn’t want to find page after page
saying exactly the same thing, would you?
No, and neither does Google. A Google listing comes from its indexing of billions of web pages that contain the keywords used by the searcher: both in relation to the entire phrase and to the individual words used in the search term. If you want your copy to be different, make some minor changes and perhaps change the form of the keywords, but most importantly, change the title and the introductory paragraph to which the crawlers will take special notice.
You then have a better chance of your version being listed along with some of the others, but remember: the next time
you use the term ‘duplicate content’ you are using a term that does not exist in Google’s vocabulary for any reason
than to deny its existence. The Google Duplicate Content Penalty does not exist: the truth!
===========================================================
For more information on the mythical duplicate content penalty visit http://www.article-services.com/duplicatecontentpenalty.html where Pete will also explain how to make money using article
marketing.
The Google Duplicate Content Penalty: the Truth By Peter Nisbet
(c) 2010 Article printed from SiteProNews: http://www.sitepronews.com HTML version available at: http://www.sitepronews.com/archives.html
Copyright ? 2009 Jayde Online, Inc. All Rights Reserved. SiteProNews is a registered service mark of Jayde Online, Inc.
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