Search Engine Optimization

The entire process of search engine optimization and internet marketing can be very frustrating. As a Denver SEO professional, I hear from customers frequently wanting to know the progress of their project. We document all of the work that we are completing on a constant basis, and we have many tools to mark their progression through the search engines. This got me to thinking about those that do not have access to the same tools that we do, as a matter of fact many who are marketing their websites will often give up as they don’t see immediate results from the many hours they have sat in front of the computer trying to obtain a page one ranking. Read the rest of this entry »

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

By: Cade Lee

You might be surprised to learn that Matt Cutts, who works for the Search Quality group at Google has most recently come out with comments about meta tags or more specifically “keyword” meta tags and stated “Google does not use keyword meta tags” in their rankings. For the longest time many SEO professionals pounded the desk suggesting that keyword meta tags were critical for any SEO campaign. Read the rest of this entry »

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Written by: Grayson Thrush

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) entails a maelstrom of techniques and tactics with the end goal being to improve the ranking of a particular website in the search results of major search engines. Denver SEO can be broken down into two main categories, on site SEO and off site SEO.

On site SEO relies upon excellent content first and foremost. Content must be on topic, relevant, and contain a 5% – 8% keyword (words or phrases) density. This means that for every 100 words of content, five to eight keywords should be used. The keywords that will be used must be carefully researched using tools such as the free Google AdWords keyword tool. When choosing keywords, it is important to remember to think like the customer. What will they be searching for? These same keywords should also be embedded into the website source code via Meta, Title and Heading tags. This will help ensure a high page ranking for these search terms.

Also, the website should be organized with a clear hierarchical structure. Creating a site map will significantly enhance site structure and ability to be scanned by search engines. This will allow search engines to more efficiently scan the target website. The most important information on a given website should be placed at or near the top of the page. This will make it easier for search engines to find the content that you want them to find. Use text instead of images; search engines can only scan text, so all important information must be included in text. This should be done even if the message(s) being conveyed are duplicated in images, banners, etc.

Of even greater importance is off site SEO. This includes back linking to highly ranked sites. For example, you can submit articles to free online repositories with links to your target website embedded in the text. The Google search engine will interpret a page with many back links to highly ranked pages as being of greater importance, and will therefore increase its page ranking. Another tactic is to submit entries to a highly ranked online blog, with excellent content, important keywords and back links where possible. Furthermore, you can join appropriate, and highly ranked, online forums and post useful content with a signature containing a back link to the target website. You should submit your website to the major search engines’ web indices. This will speed up and enhance the optimization process greatly.

SEO is a multifaceted endeavor, and requires ongoing maintenance and tuning. There are many competent companies that are dedicated to carrying out SEO campaigns. If page ranking is extremely important to you, consider outsourcing the project to a professional Denver SEO company.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Written by: Grayson Thrush

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can serve as the linchpin to your overall marketing plan for your business.  Gone are the days when all you needed was an ad in the local phone book.  The most efficient way to drive leads to your business is through Internet marketing.  You need more than just a website, though.

A website that has not been optimized for search engine results pages (SERPs) will only serve as a digital business card.  Nobody will find it unless they know about it and where to look.  Your competition will quickly surpass such an outmoded approach.  You need to hire a Denver SEO consultant to help get your website seen by those searching for the products and/or services that your business offers.

A competent SEO company will offer a full-service approach to Internet marketing, in order to ensure that your SEO campaign is in fact successful.  You will need to start out by looking for a Denver SEO company on the Internet.  Read the rest of this entry »

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

By: Cade Lee

Your Search Engine Optimization plan needs to be written down with attainable goals. Most companies that we speak with about search engine optimization in Denver do not have actual SEO plans written down. Many companies get online and have the best of intentions; all they know is that they want to get on the 1^st page. They don’t know what getting on the 1^st page of Google would do for them, but they know they want it. No matter what, they want to get on the 1^st page. The problem with this is, they have not defined why they want to get on the 1^st page, the keywords that they want to get on the 1^st page for and often times they even lack the initial keyword research to make certain that the keywords they have selected are even worth focusing on.

Here are a couple of tips in developing an SEO plan that will produce results:

#1.) Set a Mission Statement: This is not huge and this plan should not take days, let’s make certain that we have a purpose though. Let’s start off with what you want to accomplish by bringing your website, blog or other property to the 1^st page of Google.

#2.) Set attainable Milestones: Set attainable goals, such as “obtain a page 3 ranking for Denver SEO by week 8 of campaign” and “Obtain a page one ranking for main site www.thisisiniquitous.com for keyword Denver Internet Marketing by week 12″.

#3.) Set up a base of checklists that will help accomplish the milestones: Now you want to start planning your campaign, what steps are you going to complete in order to start advancing on the milestones you had set in the beginning. Make certain that define each action that you are to take with great detail so that there is no question what you should be working on every day, every week and month.

#4.) Actually execute the plan: A plan is a fantastic attempt in getting started and you are already ahead of 98% of your competition with a written plan. Execution is the next biggest obstacle to actually achieving the milestones set which then get you to the overall completion of your mission. We always recommend “an hour a day”, so when writing your checklist try and accommodate an hour per day for your search engine marketing campaign.

This SEO plan should only take you 2 hours maximum if you utilize the tools that we have explained in our previous posts. Once you have your SEO plan written down, the only thing left is execution. With this road map to success you are certain to actually make monumental changes to your presence online!

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

By Cade Lee

Search Engine Optimization is much more than just optimizing for the first page of Google. If you have read through our previous posts than you already understand this concept. As a matter of fact when I go to review my monthly analytics a good 26% to 30% of my traffic comes from other sources than the search engines. Granted a good 54.44% of the traffic we obtain comes from search engines but I definitely would not want to give up 26%! In order to get the referral traffic we are exposed through various social networks online as well as several different social bookmarking sites. The whole goal of Guerrilla SEO or Guerilla search engine marketing is to bring traffic to your site without blaring a direct commercial for your services or product.

A good example of Guerilla SEO tactics would be marketing through article marketing to the major article repositories like Ezine Articles. By obtaining an “Expert Author” status you are allowing Ezine Articles to publish your content which in turn allows other users to use your content as long as they post the article “as is” with the links in the resources box. Those links of course (you are usually allowed to links within the resource box) are directed to your website or URL. By establishing yourself as an Expert Author you are accomplishing two things. First you are establishing yourself as a credible source for your service or product and secondly you are not directly selling your services. In this “shared planet” paradigm it is almost forbidden to come right out and ask for business. So by giving you information away without any expectation of reciprocity you are showing your dedication to your profession and opinion on the matter that you are writing about. A good example of this would be an article that I most recently published on SEO vs. PPC vs. Social Networking. This article has generated a fair amount of hits already (100 views in the last 60 days). I know that is not groundbreaking; however, if I have 20 of these articles generating the same amount of interest as this article than the math is pretty easy, I would be looking at 2,000 views on my articles every month! The conversion of that traffic is at about 2% meaning that I am getting almost 2% of the viewers of this article clicking through to my site, so that is an additional 40 visitors that I am obtaining. If you search for “SEO vs. PPC vs. Social Networking” you will see that my article is at the top of the rankings for this search term. There are not enough searches for this search term to obtain any kind of data from Google, at the same time obtaining that number one page rank for the search term took little or no effort at all. This is a small added bonus for the article; most of the traffic definitely comes through the article repositories.

Review your competitors “SEO Strategy“, you are usually able to determine which of the links your competition has working for them. You can find your competitors highest page rank link by simply visiting www.seochat.com and going to their “PageRank Search” Page. Once you are on the page rank search page simply type in your competitor’s site www.yourcompetitor.com, select to sort the results by page rank and change the results to show 100 listings per page. Now you have a list of links that your competitor shows up on in order of importance. From here all you need do is copy your competition’s actions on these pages. You can post on a comment section, offer a link exchange or even work on a strategic alliance with some of the webmasters from these pages. The possibilities are sincerely unlimited.

If we use our site as an example, for the keyword “Denver SEO” today’s top player is a site www.denver seo.net, who has most recently obtained a #1 listing in Google for the search term. I can see the various directories that this site has been submitted to and start listing my site for the anchor text “Denver SEO” just as my competitor has done. By doing this and then adding more links to my site I will be able to create more popularity for my domain and get ahead in the rankings!

So what are you waiting for, find out your competitors blueprint to SEO now!

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

I found this good article on another SEO blog and thought it was valuable to our readers, enjoy!

A search engine is basically an information finding system in a computer that helps one find out information they are trying to find. They dramatically cut down the time needed to find the information one is looking for.

The concept of optimizing a website for the search engines began in the mid 1990s when webmasters saw the benefit on high ranking of their sites.

In earlier years webmasters were able to manipulate their websites with the result of them being able to get high ranking in the search engines regardless of whether the content of their web page was actually relevant to the targeted keyword or not.

Over time the search engine computations of the relevance of a particular web page to a particular keyword or set of keywords became more sophisticated so that the search engine could tell what web pages were relevant to a keyword being searched for and what web pages had just been manipulated just to gain traffic. This was done by those computing by being able to determine the quality and strength of incoming or inbound links to a web page. This system however was still not foolproof as webmasters were still able to manipulate by exchanging, buying or selling for the higher quality links to their sites. From that point on other factors were entered in to the computations the search engines use in ranking pages. This information is not available to webmasters and the public at large.

There are companies that are search engine optimization companies. The service they sell to the public is to optimize their website to give it the best possibility of higher ranking with the search engines. If their techniques are too aggressive the effect may be detrimental to their clients to a point where their websites could be banned from search results. Not something you would want to pay someone for.

Some of the search engines have made efforts to communicate with the search engine optimization companies to get their efforts aligned for everyones benefit. There are those who use search engine optimization (SEO) to conform with the desires and wishes of the search engines and there are those who seek to get around the search engine rules and guidelines to get what traffic they can until they are caught.

It is a good practice to mix a campaign using search engine optimization with one of a good paying campaign. The reason for this is that the computations that the search engines use do change and one may see a drop in unpaid traffic due to this factor. It is also a good practice to avoid search engine optimization companies that make false promises they can not deliver, that guarantee a top rank with Google, that are secretive, that are nondescript about where your money goes, etc.

(Source: www.denverseoinfo.wordpress.com)

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

By: Cade Lee

 So by now, if you’re learning about SEO (search engine optimization/search engine marketing), you’ve probably heard of Black Hat SEO. What exactly is spamming as far as SEO is concerned? Ultimately search engines like Google, Yahoo, ask and MSN want to provide the most accurate and complete research results that they can to their target market. At the end of the day, a search engine is only as good as the results that it delivers to those that use it. If their audience does not have faith in their search capability, the traffic will dry out and so will the sponsored listing fees as well, and any other advertising fees that they’re able to obtain.

It wasn’t all that long ago (1994) that Internet marketers used various techniques to trick search engines into positioning their sites high in the search results for search terms that didn’t apply to their site. This was very prominent in the adult entertainment world as a matter of fact. It’s in my opinion; the inception of search engine optimization came from the adult entertainment industry.

Today, these techniques do not work for long-term search engine optimization campaigns. It’s true that you can obtain quick rankings in a very short period using “Black Hat SEO” ; however, usually it takes a great deal of work, and the results do not last very long. Once the search engines discover that you are trying to “Duke” their search engine, many of them may not list your domain at all. Search engines are programmed through their algorithms and robots to detect many of the techniques used in “Black hat SEO.” A few of the search engine tricks that used to work, especially pertaining to website design are:

• Keyword stuffing — several websites repeat the same keywords over and over again on both the home page, and even places that you can’t see. They do this by hiding the keywords in invisible layers such as <No Frames> tag, and in meta-tags. Also, spammers will repeat those keywords over and over again at the bottom of the document. For example:
  

  “Denver attorney, best attorney in Denver, attorneys in Colorado, Denver attorneys, attorneys for Denver, criminal attorney in Denver, bankruptcy attorney in Denver, attorney Denver, Denver attorneys.” There’s been much talk as to what is an acceptable amount of keyword stuffing, or keyword placement within the text of the document. As a rule of thumb I have heard that Google does not like to see more than 7% saturation, while MSN and Yahoo! Do not want to see more than 5% keyword density within any given page.
  

• Hidden Text and Links – another tactic used by spammers has been hidden text and links. What they are doing here is simply hiding keywords from human eyes. By making the text the same color as the background of the website. There is no fooling Google, Yahoo or MSN with these old tricks as the “Google bots” have been able to spot these tricks. Another example of this might be hiding keywords in areas which are not visible, such as placing these keywords in style sheets.
  
• Content duplication — I know that there are several other search engine optimization professionals that are completely against duplicate content, I do think it has its place. Why would I say such a thing? We should probably start as to why search engines do not like content duplication. Take for example a website that you already own, it ranks very well. You decide that you would like to have two sites on the first page of Google so you simply duplicate your first and post it under a different domain. Search engines want to provide unique content to their searchers; they do not want to provide duplicate content again and again. I should probably explain why I think duplicate content does make sense from time to time. If you’ve written an excellent article and published it with E-zine articles for example, I think it is completely within reason to go ahead and post that on your own blog or website as well.
• Page swapping or cloaking — this is where the website owner has taken content from a top ranking site and placed it on their page to achieve the top ranking. Once they have achieved that ranking they replace that page with completely different content. Cloaking is very similar to page swapping. The intent of cloaking is to serve search engines one page while the end-user is served in other, not a good move!
• Misleading Title Changes — making regular title changes so the indexing bots believe that your site is a new site. The desired effect from this is so that the site is listed again and again, this is considered misleading.
• Domain Spam (Mirrored Sites) — this is very close to content duplication. Ultimately this is why the search engine’s do not like content duplication. Some web owners have duplicated their entire website or maybe even slightly modified their site and target under a different domain or URL. Usually the intention was to obtain more than one listing on the first page. In the end all this does is get you banned from practicing this type of technique, once again it is misleading.
• Refresh Meta-Tag — I am certain that you have visited a website and automatically you were brought to a different page within the site, this is the result of a “refresh meta- tag”. At the end of the day you do not want to use a redirect unless it is absolutely necessary and I strongly recommend using a “permanent redirect” (301) which tells the search engines that the page they are looking for has a different home now. The preferred way to use a refresh meta-tag is to use a delay of at least 15 seconds or more and provide a link on the new page back to the page that they were taken from. Often times a website will use a redirect or refresh meta-tag to take visitors from a page that is obsolete and is no longer being used.
• Cyber Squatting — this refers to taking traffic from legitimate websites. So for example let’s pretend that somebody was to operate a website called www.ebey.com it would be hoping to obtain traffic by visitors that have misspelled the domain that they were truly looking for. Usually when companies are doing this they are promoting completely unrelated contents to that of the site that they are trying to obtain traffic from. Google very much dislikes the cyber squatting.

So even if you do not understand anything about search engine optimization or search engine marketing, it is easy to see that none of the search engines tolerate misrepresentation, misleading searchers or tricky techniques. If the technique you are using on your website does not offer value to the end-user and it is done solely for SEO it is very likely that Google, Yahoo or MSN will take notice. Trying to avoid the hard work of real
search engine optimization is practically impossible. Certainly you can avoid the hard work and go with a technique or strategy that will get you listed with Google rapidly, eventually that domain will get you delisted. At the end of the day it is twice the amount of work to optimize two websites quickly vs. optimizing one website in a nice slow and steady manner.

Cade Lee is a Search Engine Optimization Professional in Denver | Denver SEO

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Denver Search Engine Optimization Professional, Nick Hantge

Written by: Nick Hantge

LinkedIn is one of the social networking sites that are growing popularity in the business world.  Although it is not as “fun” as some of the other networking sites such as Facebook or twitter, LinkedIn is becoming a necessity.  I’ve even noticed seniors in college starting to create a page in hopes to open a door into the business world through a friend or relative.  If you would like more information on the basics of LinkedIn, check out my previous post: Exploring LinkedIn.

When creating and updating your profile, you need to keep in mind that your LinkedIn page is really a website.  Google will still index (scan) your page for content and links pointing to and from just like every other site on the web.  This is where we can take advantage of the huge page rank LinkedIn has already established. 

Think about a keyword or keyword phrase you would like internet searches to find you under.  Maybe you are an attorney in Phoenix who specializes in traffic law so it would be beneficial to have searchers find your page when they type in “Phoenix DUI attorney”.  If this is the case, you are going to want to have that keyword phrase highly on your LinkedIn page several times.  You can do this under summary, specialties, daily posts, location, job title and so on. When people recommend you on LinkedIn, they will publish to your site.  Make sure they use some of the keywords you are going for as well!

Another optimization strategy is changing the “public profile” for your page.  Changing your public profile will allow you to edit the URL of your page.  In the case of the Phoenix attorney, you would want to change the URL to linkedin.com/phoenixduiattorney to help pull your page up on the search engines. 

The number of “connections” you have on LinkedIn can also help with optimizing your LinkedIn page.  The more contacts you have simply means the more people you are able to reach out to which ultimately converts to viewers of your page.  The whole purpose of LinkedIn was to create a networking site amongst business professionals to reach out to others. 

Hopefully with these tips will help you in the search engines and come in contact with more prospective customers.  Remember to change the keep in mind the keyword phrase you are going for as well the public profile URL.

Join my on LinkedIn and become one of my “Connections”: CLICK HERE

Bookmark It

Hide Sites