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 »

Written by: Nick Hantge

A few years back, web developers or SEO experts only needed to focus their efforts to “On-Site optimization”.  This means they needed to have appropriate Meta tags, create a sitemap, they needed their pictures to be labeled and correctly link their pages throughout the site.  Only 5-7 years ago, this would get them on the front end of the searches related with their website content. 

Today is a completely different story.  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; the search engine optimization (SEO) you do off your site is more important than the SEO you do onsite now days.  What I mean here is because of the sophistication of search engines today, there are many more factors that go into the SEO equation to achieve “Above the fold” placement organically.  I feel the more powerful factors have to do with “Off-Site optimization”  Don’t get me wrong, if you’re content is not relative to the searches you are going for, it will be much more difficult to obtain those results but it is possible.

So what is off-site optimization anyway?  Off site optimization is all of the work you can do to promote your website without actually doing anything to the site itself.   Things like building relevant backlinks, using social networking to increase traffic, and video submissions are just a few examples of off-site optimization.

Backlinks:  Think of search engines judging every website like it’s a popularity contest.  Every backlink to a website counts as a vote.  As a search is submitted to a search engine, they gather which sites have relevant content and of those they rank them accordingly to the votes they receive (number of backlinks).  Now anchor text adds even more madness to the equation.  If you have anchor text pointed at your domain with the keyword or phrase you are trying to be found in, that vote has more weight than a regular backlink.  At the end of the day, if you had a million backlinks with anchor text reading “BMW parts”, it’s a pretty good chance you would be in the top three results for that search term regardless of the page content. 

Tip: Join a Forum or a discussion board related to your services or product and start adding useful posts.  Link to your website in your post or signature.

Social Networking:  With all of the buzz with Twitter and other social networking sites, now is the time to take advantage of the traffic that can be developed.  Just creating an account and writing a few posts is not going to do the trick.  You need to be creative just like anything else in your campaign and create excitement about your service or project.  Offer discounts, link to blog posts which then link to your site or some bigger companies even use the social networking sites as a form of customer service.  Everyone has a technique or social networking, many are bad but there are a few that are good and working excellent. 

Tip: Create a LinkedIn page and add as many business professional in your area and send them all a message about your services and offer a discount.

Video Submissions: You might be wondering what creating, editing and submitting a video would have to do with search engine optimization but there are many benefits.  First of all, a video is a good way to connect with potential customers.  A client testimonial will give you credibility while a message from an employee or owner will create a sense of trust.

There are great video repositories out there, maybe you’ve heard of YouTube.com or Viddler.com?  More and more people are using these sites to host videos, create commercials for the business and increase the traffic to their web site.  Recently, YouTube.com just passed the 100 billion viewed videos in one month, pretty dang impressive.  Geek.com reports YouTube.com overcoming Yahoo© taking the number 2 search engine.  Don’t you think it’s time you start taking advantage of the traffic?  Make sure you have a YouTube.com video that points to your website.

 

Tip: When you create a video to YouTube, you have the ability to put in keywords.  Use this to your advantage and attrack more viewers looking for your services

Hopefully you now understand the importance of off site optimization and have picked up a few techniques to try yourself.  Remember, SEO is not something that happens overnight and certainly is very time consuming.

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SEO Tips For You

These 10 SEO Tactics Bring Me Over 2000 Visitors Daily

Copyright © 2008 Titus Hoskins

 

No matter how hard some people try to mystify SEO, it is not as complicated as many would lead you to believe. Despite all the techno jargon that many in the field will throw at you: SERPs, SEM, PageRank, Keyword Density, Vertical Search, Algorithms… SEO is really simple to do if you understand some basic concepts and follow some easy steps.

 

Search Engine Optimization is getting your content listed in all the top positions in Google, Yahoo and MSN for your targeted keywords. When someone does a keyword search in a search engine for your particular subject or niche – you want your site or content to be at the top of the list.

 

Here are 10 SEO tactics that have worked and are working for me at this moment in time. I make this clarification because you must understand search

engines, especially Google, are constantly redefining how they rank pages. Here are my favorite SEO tips, tactics and strategies:

 

 

1. Quality Content is and always will be your number one factor for getting high rankings and keeping them. You must understand search engines are simply businesses who supply a product like any other company. That product is information. They must offer quality results to anyone using their service to solve a problem, answer a question or to buy a product. The more relevant, the more targeted the search solution they return, the higher the overall quality of their product and the more popular their search engine will become. Providing quality content is vital for SEO success.

 

2. Keywords are your number one tools for achieving high rankings. You must understand keywords and how they work on the web. You must know how many searches are made each day for your chosen keywords. Sites like Wordtracker and Seobook will give you a rudimentary number of searches.

Design your pages around your targeted keywords and don’t forget to do some deep-linking to these pages on your site. Find and build backlinks to these interior keyword pages and not just to your home page or domain URL. Picking keywords with medium to low competition has worked out well for me. So too has using the more targeted and higher converting “long-tail” keywords been very beneficial for me.

 

3. Onpage Factors and site design will play a major role in the spidering and indexing of your site/content. Make sure all your pages are SEO friendly, made sure all your pages can be reached from your homepage and no pages should be no more than three levels away from it – keeping

a sitemap listing all your major pages makes the search engines happy. Make sure you have all your meta tags such as title, description, keywords… are all optimized. (Title = around 65 characters, Description = around 160 characters) Remember, your title and description should not only be

keyword targeted but these are the first contact/impression anyone will see of your site – make sure you use them to draw and entice interested visitors to your site and content. Also make sure your title and URL are keyword matched for maximum effect. Having your major keyword in your Domain Name

also helps, using a pike | to separate different elements of your title has helped my rankings, so too does having your keyword in the first and last 25 words on your pages.

 

4. Google will send you the most qualified traffic so concentrate the majority of your SEO efforts on Google. Don’t ignore Yahoo! or MSN but Google is king of search so give it the respect it deserves. With its new browser, Google’s influence will only grow stronger so you must optimize your pages for Google. Use Google’s Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics to fine-tune your pages/content for Google. I also use Google Alerts to keep up on my

niche keywords and for comment link-building on the newly created pages Google is indexing.

 

5. Link Building is still the most effective way to boost your search rankings. Make sure you get backlinks from relevant sites related to your niche market and make sure the ‘anchor text’ is related to your keywords but don’t ignore the text and overall quality of the content linking to you. The anchor text is the underlined/clickable portion of a link. Don’t forget linking is a two-way street, make sure you link out to high quality, high ranked relevant

sites in your niche.

 

6. Article Marketing is a well established method of getting quality backlinks and it still works. Writing short 500 – 700 word informative and helpful articles with your backlinks in the resource box is still very effective for getting targeted traffic and backlinks. Longer articles have also worked for me and I use an extensive network of distribution including SubmitYourArticle, Isnare, Thephantomwriters… plus other major online sites. Don’t forget the whole element of blogging and RSS feeds in your article distribution. And always remember you’re also using these articles to pre-sale your content or products. Don’t forget to leverage sites like Squidoo, Hubpages… to increase your rankings and traffic.

 

7. Onsite Traffic Hubs have worked extremely well for me. These traffic hubs are whole sections of your site devoted to one sub-division of your major theme. For example, if you have a site on Gifts, then wedding gifts could be a separate section. This would be fully fleshed out with extensive pages covering everything dealing with wedding gifts – a self-contained keyword rich portion of your site on wedding gifts.  Works similar as a sub-domain

but I prefer using a directory to divide it up, such as yourdomain/wedding_gifts. (Most experts suggest always using a hyphen in your urls but underscores have worked fine for me.) Search engines love these keyword/content rich hubs but keep in mind you’re creating content to first satisfy your visitors.

 

8. WordPress Blog Software is extremely effective for SEO purposes. WordPress software is easy to install on your site even if you have no experience with installing server-side scripts. Besides search engines love these highly SEO friendly blogs with their well structured content and keyword tagging. I have at least one of these on all my sites to draw in the search engines and get my content indexed and ranked. I also use Blogger (owned by Google), Bloglines and other free blogs to help distribute my content.

 

9. Social Bookmark/Media Sites are becoming very important on the web. These include a whole range of social sites like MySpace, FaceBook, Twitter… media news sites like Digg, SlashDot, Technorati… you must get your content into this whole mix if you want to take full SEO advantage of Web 2.0 sites. You should be joining these sites and using them. It’s time consuming but it will keep you in the swing of things. One simple thing you must do is to put social bookmark buttons on all your pages so that your visitors can easily bookmark your content for you. You can use a

WordPress plug-in or I like using a simple free site/service from Addthis.com which gives me a simple button to put on

all my content.

 

10. Masterplan! Many webmasters and site owners forget to develop or have an overall masterplan/strategy when it comes to SEO. You must have an understanding of what SEO is and what it can do for you and your site. More importantly, you just don’t want SEO – you want effective SEO. In order

to achieve effective SEO you must have three things: Relevance, Authority and Conversions.

 

First, your content/site must be relevant to the topic or niche area you’re pursuing – your content must fit in and be related to all the other sites in your niche. That’s why closely themed sites do so well in the search engines, they give only relevant content to what’s been searched for or discussed.

 

Second, your content/site must be perceived as an authority site on your subject or niche. Establish this authority position and the search engines will love you and your content. One way is to develop this authority, besides offering superior content, is to form links/partnerships with other perceived

authority sites in your field. Always strive to make your site an authority site – tops in your niche – the one site everyone has to check before drawing or forming a conclusion.

 

Third, conversions should be your main goal of any SEO efforts because you want to convert your targeted traffic into site members, subscribers, buyers or just repeat visitors. If you’re into online marketing, conversions will be the most important element of the whole SEO process because you want buyers, not just visitors coming to your site.

 

Most of all, you must convince yourself Search Engine Optimization is not difficult, nor is it the equivalent of the online bogeyman as many would like you to believe. Used effectively, SEO can give you the targeted traffic you’re seeking, just follow some of the outlined steps/tactics listed above and you will have SEO working for you and your site in no time at all.

 

 

…

The author is a full-time online marketer who has numerous websites. For the latest web marketing tools try: Internet Marketing Tools If you liked the SEO tips above, why not try the Free 7 Day Traffic course here: Internet Marketing Course Copyright © 2008 Titus Hoskins. This article may be freely distributed if this resource box stays attached.

 

BY Titus Hoskins (c) 2009

Perhaps one of the biggest misconceptions, perpetuated by industry SEO experts, is that a website must follow perfect SEO strategies to get top rankings. While adhering to simple common SEO standards does help the search engines both find and index your site more quickly, it doesn’t guarantee by any stretch of the imagination that following those SEO guidelines will propel your site to the top of the rankings.

If only search engine optimization was that easy!

No doubt, there are some SEO faux pas that will do harm to your site’s rankings, especially in Google, the ultimate hall-monitor all puffed up and ready to pounce on any misbehaving webmaster. Things such as keyword stuffing, keyword spamming or linking out to bad neighborhoods such as link farms, pharmaceutical or gambling sites may get you blacklisted.

But how much SEO do you need? How much search engine optimization do you need to get top rankings? Do you need a whole lot or do you need very little SEO?

Actually, after 10 years of marketing online, the answer to that question varies depending upon what you’re trying to accomplish with your SEO efforts? If you’re operating an online business in a very competitive (read lucrative) market, SEO will be high on your agenda as you go about annihilating your competition.

Even if you’re an ordinary webmaster or website owner you’re probably fussing over your rankings in the search engines. The higher the rankings you achieve for your chosen keywords; the more traffíc you will get. Good quality traffic that converts well into loyal subscribers and fans of your site.

Many webmasters and companies spend thousands of dollars each month in order to get their keywords and sites up to the top of the líst. If you’re into affiliate marketing, your daily income will rise and fall almost parallel to your rankings. Now, if my earnings go up, I know automatically my rankings have gone up, usually in Google. If my earnings go down, I know my rankings have gone south. Some times even a drop or rise of one place on the first page SERPs will affect how much you earn.

Obviously, because of this fact, SEO or how well I am optimized for the search engines is extremely important to me. I am constantly building quality links and quality content for my sites. Some keyword battles you win, some battles you lose. I have been fighting some keyword battles for over 3 or 4 years now!

But how much SEO is enough? How much SEO should you do with your sites? Many webmasters make sure all their on page set-up or lay-out is done exactly to what the SEO experts say you should do. This is not a bad idea. Make sure your Title, URL, Headlines, Keyword Density… are all laid out right. These are things we can control and adjust to meet the SEO standards.

Other SEO or ranking factors are much harder to predict, many of them are simply out of our control. How other sites link to us, what they put in the anchor text, what they say about us… simply things we can’t control.

I believe the over-riding reason why your site is listed at the top of any rankings has to do with the number, the quality and the quantity of sites linking back to your page. The higher the number of related quality one-way links you have flowing back to your site, the higher it will perform in the rankings. Your anchor text is very important (underlined part of a link); it must contain your keywords or variations of it. The content on the linking page should also be related to your chosen keywords.www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/internet/google-ranking-factors.htm

Get this part right and you will get high rankings.

Or at least this has been my experience – all the other ranking factors do count but this is the over-riding factor in my opinion.

Another major ranking factor lately, has been the importance Google is placing on social media links. Get your content to the first page of Digg with lots of diggs and it will rank high in Google. This is not surprising when you consider the nature of these social bookmarking sites… it really is an actual “vote” for the quality of your content. Getting Delicious bookmarks has a similar positive effect.

Another prominent factor, from my observations, is having your major keyword in your Domain Name. Use hyphens if you want but having those keywords in there, does help rather than hinder your rankings.

Now if you’re wondering about how Google ranks pages or your keywords…. Google has around 200 ranking factors (with filters and penalties thrown in to make all our lives interesting) which it uses to rank your keywords/pages. This is still the best online resource that lists all of Google’s ranking factors:

Now the question still remains, how much SEO do you need? How much time should you spend at optimizing, building links, worrying your head off over the latest Google Itch?

The answer always comes back to quality content. Create a site that has quality content and the SEO will take care of itself. People will link to your site, you will get bookmarks in all the social media sites, Google will find your content and rank it. Your SEO will grow naturally as your site grows. Keep building more pages, keep targeting more and more related keywords in your niche or subject area and you will get higher rankings.1. Download SEOquake and place this free SEO toolbar plug-in on your Firefox (or I.E.) browser.2. Go to Google and type in the keyword or keyword phrase you’re targeting with your site or content.3. Select the number one ranking and observe how many pages it has indexed, PageRank, how many backlinks it has, age of the site… and so on.4. Then use the page info button and study all the on-page factors this site has and notice what it’s doing with its page and keyword density lay-out.5. Check all the backlinks this site has in the different search engines. Copy or try to get the same backlinks for your site that your competitor has acquired. Then get more backlinks and/or higher quality backlinks than your competitor.6. Watch your rankings rise…

Now, of course, some webmasters are a little more aggressive in how quickly they want their rankings to rise to the top of the search engines. Here’s something you can do if you want to go into the SEO battle full-force.

Just a few more words of wisdom and we’re done. Some battles will be too tough to fight, the competition will be so stiff you just can’t compete. Other battles will take a long time; months, even years before you rise to the top. Your best bet is to choose long-tail (multi-worded) keywords that have little or no competition. You can rise to the top within days, even hours. The sweet thing is this: long-tail keywords are often the most lucrative and bring in the most sales. For in the final analysis, you just don’t want SEO, you want smart SEO. And you will quickly learn, most times you can often out-smart your competition, even if you can’t out-rank them.

About The Author
These 10 SEO Tactics Bring Me Over 2000 Visitors Daily: SEO Tips To learn more Internet Marketing Tactics try: Marketing Tools Copyright © 2009 Titus Hoskins. This article may be freely distributed if this resource box stays attached.