MAHENDRA

According to the 1998 Georgia Tech GVU User Survey, 85 percent of respondents found Web pages from search engines. Since then, other studies have reported 50 to 80 percent of Web site traffic comes from search engines. Searching is second only to email as the most popular online activity.

Unfortunately, there are many marketers who simply do not put enough effort into preparing their web site for the search engines.

The following guidelines will help you to start seeing results in the search engines. Your first step is simply choosing the right keywords.

Choosing the Right Keywords

Often times, people make the mistake of optimizing for very general keywords like used cars or online marketing. Although these terms get lots of traffic, it is very unlikely that you will be able to rank highly for them. Then, even if you do, this type of traffic produces very low conversion rates because they are not targeted prospects.

For example, if you are selling hiking backpacks, it would be much more beneficial for you to target the phrase 'hiking backpacks' rather than the extremely competitive keyword 'backpacks'. It would be even better to target the phrase 'camelbak commander'. This is a specific type of backpack and therefore will attract more buyers than searchers.

In fact, according to Jupiter Media Metrix, 28 percent of searchers will type a product name into a search engine. Nine percent type in a brand name and 5 percent type in company names.

The more targeted your keyword phrase, the more likely they are to buy. A person who types in 'backpacks' may be looking for school backpacks or snowboard backpacks. This lends to useless, un-targeted traffic.

However, a person that searches for a specific brand of backpacks knows exactly what they want and they are much further along in the buying process.

Once you have determined the best possible keyword phrases to target, you must now optimize your page for those specific keywords.

Optimize Your Page for Targeted Keywords

There are many factors that will determine how your web pages rank. However, one of the most important ones is that of a good title. The title tag appears at the very top of the head section. The words in the title tag will appear in the clickable link on the search engine results page (SERP).

Your title tag should contain targeted keyword phrases that reflect the copy on the page. The most important keywords should appear near the beginning of the title tag. You must also keep in mind that this should be a compelling title that would attract searchers to want to know more.

Your title tag should focus on your primary keyword, but it should also deliver a message. Use your title to mention benefits, make an attention-grabbing statement, ask a compelling question, or anything else that would set you apart from all of the other pages competing against you. Your title should include the main keyword you are targeting on that page as well as entice visitors to click on your link.

Following the title tag are your Meta description and Meta keyword tags.

You have probably heard that meta tags are dead and for the most part that is true. However, you should still include them in your web site because they allow you to control the description of your listing in some of the search engines.

Your meta description can make the difference in someone clicking on your link or choosing your competitor.

The meta description tag should be used for marketing purposes, enticing people to click on your link as opposed to one of the other 9 search results.

Meta keywords tags are a different story. Google pays absolutely no attention to this tag: a result of spammers. As for the rest of the search engines, meta keywords may be taken into account, but they are still of very little importance.

I would advise that you use this tag for misspellings, technical acronyms and synonyms. Using this technique, you may be able to bring in some additional traffic for people looking for related, but less popular keywords.

Creating Quality Content

Next, you will want to focus on the visible content of your page. Many people online today are creating content that is written specifically for the search engines. However, I would advise you to optimize your content for your readers. Your readers are the most important.

To rank for your targeted keyword phrases, you must include them within your copy, but you must first ensure that your content is appealing to your visitors. After you do this, you can then weave your keywords into your copy.

You'll especially want to have your targeted keyword phrase in the very first paragraph of your text.

Some other places you will want to include your keywords are in the image alt attributes and within your heading tags. Place all of your subtitles into header tags with your targeted keyword phrases.

Internal Linking

Creating quality content for your visitors is crucial. However, proper navigation and site structure can be just as important.

The search engines cannot fully index your site if it is not properly linked together.

Every single page on your web site should be no more than 2 clicks away from the homepage.

Before you create your site, decide on which internal pages are the most important in terms of ranking. Once you have gathered 15-20 of your most important pages, you will need to place them at the side and bottom navigation of each one of your web pages. This will ensure that the most possible pagerank is transferred to those pages.

Each of these links should contain descriptive anchor text, preferably targeted keyword phrases that you are wanting to rank highly for. You should never make your web site visitors guess what's on the other end with a link that says, 'click here'. Be as descriptive as possible and your visitors will thank-you.

One of the best ways to structure your site is through the use of hub pages. This is very similar to hubs on a spoke. At the center is your homepage. On the homepage, you have a link to each of the hub pages. The hub pages are basically small site maps that are built into the navigation. Each hub includes a set of information on a particular keyword or phrase. This is often referred to as content layering. You can layer your site through the use of sub-folders.

Inbound Links

Once you have finished optimizing all of the on-page factors, you must focus on some crucial off-page factors.

To have a truly successful search engine optimization campaign, you have to go beyond on-page factors. Your overall link popularity is a crucial ranking factor.

Posted in Computers,Web promotion,SEO

In my previous life as a Programer and HTML developer I loved to have a folder/directory for everything. While I’m not a organized person. I did like keeping my files structured in clearly labeled directories. So nesting directories 4 or 5 levels deep was common practice.

When I transitioned to an SEO Professional my ideas on structuring files and site architecture began to change and here is why. A flat site offers quick access to all the pages within the site. A minimal number of clicks are needed to find all the pages within your site,

usually no more than three clicks is ideal. According to the views of the search engines (SEs), less clicks mean higher importance. The view of the SEs are that more important information will be easier to reach. Home page information is the most important, one click from the home page is secondary information and two clicks is tertiary information and so forth.

Think of it like bodies of water. Your home page is the ocean and off of the home page are large rivers and then smaller rivers, then streams, then creeks and brooks and finally the smallest trickle of water is all that is left. Don’t let you products, services or information be at the end of the trickle, drying up eventually. Closer to the ocean is always better and that is how the search engines will rank your pages too.

I’ve seen some site place everything in the root folder and this isn’t good practice either. Structure your sites as to what makes sense, but be aware that more clicks can mean less viewers, both for search engine traffic and visitors on your site.

Posted in Computers,Web promotion,SEO

When considering search engine optimization (SEO), links are an incredibly important element of a successful campaign, but all links are not the same.

Links are very important whether they are links within your own site, or links from other websites pointing to the various pages of your site. Search engines consider links when formulating their ranking algorithms. If a search engine’s spider does not follow a link, or cannot see a link, then it does not count as a link for SEO.

Determining the difference between good and bad links can be difficult to spot with the untrained eye. The reason: the links all accomplish the same basic task – they take you to a destination page. We will examine the differences between a few common links: normal, nofollow, redirect, javascript, and flash.

Normal HTML Links

To begin, let’s examine a normal link. The HTML code for a normal link would contain an opening and closing “A” Tag with text or an image inside of it:

    <a href=”http://www.yourdomain.com/page.html”>this text is a link</a>

This is the best kind of link to use because search engines precisely understand which page the link is pointing to, the page it’s pointing from, and the text contained within the link. These types of links pass along Google PageRank and add value to your SEO efforts. Nofollow Links Another type of link is a nofollow link. This is a normal link with code added to it that tells the search engines not to follow this link:

    <a href=”http://www.yourdomain.com/” rel=”nofollow”>link text</a>

This link adds no advantage to your page or rankings under normal circumstances and does not benefit SEO. You would only use this link if you had a reason that you didn’t want the search engine to follow it. Blogging software, for example, often uses nofollow links to combat comment spam.

Redirect Links

A redirect link points to a redirect script that runs code to ultimately redirect the user to the destination page. Some developers may use redirect links to track clicks, or run some other kind of programming code.

    <a href=”http://www.theirdomain.com/redirect.asp?destination=
    yourdomain.com/page.html”>link to your website</a>

This is also an undesirable link, as the link is pointing to a different page than the destination page. For SEO purposes, you want the link to point directly to the destination page to boost ranking results. In the example, the link is pointing to the page “redirect.asp” and not to the destination page – the search engine spiders will register the “redirect” page as the destination page.

JavaScript Links

Some developers may use JavaScript links to perform a function of code before sending the user to the destination page. This can produce a desirable or undesirable link depending on the way the link is coded.

Desirable Link:

    <a href=”http://www.yourdomain.com/page.html” onClick=”myfunction();”>link text</a>

Undesirable Link:

    <a href=”javascript:myfunction();”>link text</a>

The correct use of a JavaScript link is including your website as a normal link in the “href” portion of the tag. If the JavaScript link is used to replace your domain in the href, then the search engines won’t be able to recognize it as a link to your page.

Another way to create a JavaScript link is to embed it within JavaScript code. This is undesirable for SEO as the search engines will not be able to read it as a link:

    <script Languague="Javascript">
      document.write('<a href="http://www.yourdomain.com">link text</a>');
    </script>

These types of links do not benefit SEO. The only way this link would work is to exclude the link from the search engines’ spiders on purpose, although a nofollow link is preferable in that case.

Flash Links

While not as prevalent as they once were, some sites exclusively consist of flash content, or use flash navigation. Search engines have started to index flash content, although many flash pages often end up as omitted or supplemental results.

For SEO, Flash itself is acceptable on a page, as long as it is treated like a graphic. For best results, assume that the search engines will not index the flash content, and have normal HTML links to anything important on the page.

When building and optimizing a website, make sure that the links you use will be read and indexed by the search engines. Otherwise all your hard effort could be for naught. When link building from other websites, always check to make sure the link pointing to you is a worthwhile link. When you work with a search engine optimization company such as Big Oak, our expertise in link building will ensure you have the correct type of links that you need on your site for the search engines to be able to find you.

Posted in Computers,Web promotion,SEO

I’ve got a simple SEO tip today. As an SEO Company we are always doing competitive research. Many of our clients are astounded at the wealth of information that can be discovered using Yahoo’s Site Explorer especially for competitive link research. Site Explorer can help you track down the links pointing to your competition and allow you to contact those same sites and request or pay for a link to your site.

Yahoo’s search engine also provides information about competitor backlinks. You can find tools to do this for you but going to Yahoo! Search and typing in the following commands will work just as well.

    * If you are looking for web pages that link to multiple competitor, usually you will find good backlink pages like this, you would type in:
      linkdomain:competitor1.com, linkdomain:competitor2.com
    * We also should all know how important .edu and .gov links can be to our site. So why not look for competitors who have these links. I’ll give an example as if I was looking. I would type in a keyword such as “seo” and then do a search for only .edu domains. I would type in: seo site:.edu Replace the .edu with .gov for government backlinks.

Of course there are many other things you can do for research and seeing what advanced options are available can be a great catalyst so be sure to view the advance search options in Yahoo! for more ideas.

Google also has advanced search but I think Yahoo! does a better job with options and functionality, especially when it comes to researching backlinks.

Please send any suggestions or add them to the comments on this SEO tip. We are always looking for new ways to improve our SEO research methods.