What’s the big deal about search engine optimization? Isn’t it enough that you’ve put up a website, purchased some Google AdWords, and sent out an email to everyone you know announcing your site? In short, no. There is an art and science to search engine optimization (SEO), and it is critical for web-based businesses to know, understand and utilize if they want to drive quality traffic to their website via the Internet.
Where do you begin, though? How can you possibly know whom to trust or what to do first with so much information out there on SEO? Do you buy links or not? Pay per click or go organic? And what about those SEO companies who are aggressively promising #1 rankings? When it comes to search engine ranking, there are a lot of rumors and myths about what will increase your rankings and what won’t.
Debunking Some Popular Search Engine Ranking Myths
- Pay per click (PPC) ads will either help or hurt organic rankings. (Organic simply means the process by which web users find websites having unpaid search engine listings.)
Debunked: PPC is categorized differently than organic listings. There is no effect, one way or the other, on ranking.
- Websites are banned if they ignore Google guidelines.
Debunked: While it’s a good idea to read Google Webmaster Guidelines or Google 101: How Google Crawls, Indexes and Serves the Web, you are not banned if you ignore their guidelines.
- Websites are banned if they buy links.
Debunked: Sites are not banned. The links just aren’t counted.
- Copy must be a certain number of words, use a specific keyword density, and contain bold or italicized keywords.
Debunked: It used to be thought that there was a magic number of words used or certain times a keyword or keyword phrase should be repeated. Not so. Same with bolding and italicizing. They don’t do anything for ranking.
- Duplicate content will get your website penalized.
Debunked: It will just get filtered out and not counted.
- Reciprocal links won’t count.
Debunked: Every link counts, to a certain extent.
- SEO companies can increase your rankings without doing any on-page work.
Debunked: Run if an SEO company tells you this.
According to SEO expert Jill Whalen, SEO isn’t magic and isn’t a crap-shoot. “SEO is about making your website the best it can be for your site visitors and the search engines.” Want to help the right kind of people find your website? Then you need to design your site so search engines can find, crawl and index your pages.
Seven Ways to Get Your Website Crawled
- It’s better to have one main website with numerous domains pointing to the main domain, than to have mini-sites or multiple sites with similar content. Mini-sites and multiple sites with similar content do not increase search engine listings and are frequently viewed by search engines as SPAM.
- If you do have several stand-alone websites, make sure each serves a different target audience and has unique content with different domain or sub-domain URLs.
- Search engines need to be able to follow internal links. To make that happen, use tags, text links, image links, and CSS menus. Spiders have difficulty with JavaScript menus, pop-up windows, drop-down menus, and flash navigation.
- Choose keyword phrases that are most relevant and specific to what your web page is about. Think from the perspective of someone searching for what you are offering on your site. Ask, as if you were they: What would I search for if I am looking for something on your page?
- Validate your keyword phrases through either paid or free services, such as Keyword Discovery, Wordtracker, or Google AdWords.
- Check for keyword competitiveness. Take into consideration the size of your business. In this case, size does matter. If you are a major player with a major brand, you can play in a larger competitive pond than a smaller company just starting out. Know what size pond is right for you, and check for competitiveness by putting: allintitle: “keyword phrase” in your browser and check the number count.
- Once you have your keyword phrases validated and checked for competitiveness, use them in anchor texts, clickable image alt tags, headlines, body text copy, title tags, and meta descriptions. Meta tags aren’t all that important for crawling.
SEO can be both intimidating and exhilarating. Intimidating because it seems as if just about everyone has an opinion on what it takes to get a high ranking in Google, so it’s hard to know what to believe. Exhilarating because, once you understand the method behind the madness of SEO, you see the art and science of it. Then it becomes fun and easy to come up with a strategic plan about where to place keyword phrases, how to write copy, and what size pond is best for your company to compete in. Optimize your website, and they will come.
Business Coach & Consultant for entrepreneurial women starting up small businesses, Dr. Susan L. Reid is the Award-winning author of “Discovering Your Inner Samurai: The Entrepreneurial Woman’s Journey to Business Success.” For ideas, tips, and support for your business journey, sign up here for our free e-Zine.
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Optimize Your Website and They Will Come
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SEO blog posts are one of the best ways to get your links out there on the Internet. Search Engines love them and people can follow them easily to your site.
As an example I will link this keyword ”Ghost Writers” here. Notice the link takes you to a site that offers the service related to it. I could have linked any word here but I choose to link one that is relevant and that will help improve keyword traffic.
The big problem for most is how to make the most of their blog. I have found tons of articles about how to seo your blog software, but not much on the topic of optimizing your blog posts.
I will give a few simple things to consider when adding your blog posts:
Post Slugs or Permalinks
Post slugs are how your URL is displayed for each post. In most WordPress Accounts there is a setting for Permalinks. If you login to your admin and click “settings” and then “Permalinks” look for the words “Custom Structure” and put this line of code in:
/%category%/%postname%/
There are many ways to do this, but this way allows the category name and title of your blog appear in your post. If my category was Ghost Writers then the link would be: /ghost-writers/optimize-your-blog-post/
Now, that you have your permalinks in place, click on “write” to add your post now. Depending on your version of WordPress you will either see the words “Post Slug” or “permalink”. Post slug is on the right column and “permalinks” is under the title bar. Either way you can change the way your post URL title will appear.
This is important to follow because some times people use character in their titles like:
How To Optimize Your Blog Posts!
The (!) character will cause your URL to show funny, or if you use (- , “) or any number of characters. So in your post slug or permalink, make sure you remove those characters. Play around with this a bit and see how the URL reads after you change the Permalink or post slug portion.
Keyword linking
This one is simple but very often over looked. Don’t go crazy here with this, but make sure to link 2 or 3 of your keywords to your websites home page and inner pages as well.
The keyword “SEO content” is not very effective if not linked properly. Notice that I linked the word “seo content” to my site. I also added a title tag to the URL for better keyword positioning. In your word press when you highlight a word or phrase you can click on the link icon and it will give you an option for the URL and Title. The title is for your keyword. Since I linked “seo content” I then used that word as my title tag as well. Notice that if you put the mouse over the link a title appears.
Proper Credit where credit is due!
Since many people are not truly inspired writers, many will find content out there and copy and paste it into their WordPress program and revise the words around to make it more original. Though using someone else’s content does not require creative thought, it can help if you convert over 50% of the content around and put them in your own words.
However, it is not professional of you if done without giving credit to the original writer. In your article you don’t have to say this came from some site, etc… You simply choose a keyword in your blog post and link it to the source where you got it from. Don’t be greedy, it looks better anyway when you do this properly and helps with SEO as well. If you are not willing to give up a link, then come up with your own content.
Add a Picture
Very simple, add a photo to your post. Upload a photos, add an alt text and a title tag, it is all provided for you in wordpress. It not only makes your post look more attractive but it again helps with SEO.
Give you photo a file name that is keyword based as well. Download your image, rename it and upload it.
If you hire a ghost writer to write your content, make sure they provide you with the original source and a photo to match the blog content and upload the post yourself or train your writer to do this for you. You will find this is very effective for online marketing.
Credit:
Optimize Your Blog Posts!
Lately there has been a big rouse on the net about the latest and greatest way to promote a website. People are calling this the Web 2.0 phenomenon.
Now before I get into how you can make this work for your business, I really want to dispel some misconceptions about Web 2.0 and how the so-called leaders are using it.
First Things First
There are no leaders in Web 2.0 advertising because it is something that we have been using for a number of years to get visitors to our websites.
For example: We have been using blogs, social marketing, article writing, press releases and bookmarking for a number of years. The only thing that is different about how it is being done now is “how it is being applied to raise the rank of a particular website on the internet search engines.
Here is a simplified approach to using Web 2.0 and how you can start receiving no cost traffic visiting your company website immediately. SO LET’S BEGIN.
Step 1: Make a blog. Blogs are free to use and they most definitely receive high search engine ranking on all of the major search engines.
When making a blog, I recommend adding 1 post a week on your blog to keep it current. (It would be even more beneficial to have 2 blogs, both with a slightly different advertising campaign on them.
Step 2: Set up a social bookmark site on Squidoo, Facebook, and MySpace. The number of people that visit each of the sites above per day is astronomical. (You can find these sites by simple typing in their name on Google for example).
Step 3: Open an account at 4 of the free movie sites. I recommend using YouTube, Daily Motion, AOL video and Metcafe. All of these receive very high traffic ratings.
The process THAT you need to follow.
With your 2 BLOGS, ensure that you post a new entry or 2 on each of these every week.
NOW, update your MySpace, Facebook, and Squidoo sites by putting in the domain name of your BLOGS above. (And vice versa, you will put your MySpace, Facebook and Squidoo domain name on your Blogs as well).
Next, make 2 to 3 movies each week that promote your product on the above mentioned movie sites. BE sure to put all of your movie urls on your blogs as well as your social networking sites.
The idea behind doing this is to let the search engines spiders start see the links to your sites which are now creating back links to all of your sites. This creates a higher search engine ranking.
The methodology is simple. Repeat the above process a every week, and you will begin to see a lot more traffic visiting your site.
I did not mention yet about Article writing and Press Releases. These methods are both free and they work well by creating back links to all of your websites,blogs and social networking sites.
Create and submit 2 articles per week and submit 2 free press released per week.
Does this work? The answer is yes. I have used this simplified approach for the last 7 months and I do not pay for advertising anymore.
Paul LaDouceur - To see a solution where we are using Web 2.0 to receive over 14,000 a month a see how our business if affected by this please SEE HOW HERE.No longer do we pay for advertising and THIS IS working very well.
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Web 2.0 The Easiest and Most Effective Method
With an article title like this, it almost seems like I am playing the fool, by telling you something doesn’t exist and then telling you that I will show you how to beat that thing I said does not exist. Maybe I am the fool, or maybe, I have something valuable to share with you today. You be the judge.
I Don’t Believe In The Google Sandbox, Dragons or Unicorns…
I was browsing the Digital Point forums earlier, when I came across this quote:
“The Google Sandbox is something that people either believe or don’t believe. It usually means that within the first 6 months - 1 year you won’t get a lot of love from Google.” - http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?p=8286280
I saw the quote shown above and I had a good laugh. Yes, many people believe in the existence of the Google Sandbox, and I am not one of those people. I place the “Google Sandbox” in the same category as the leprechaun… they both make a neat children’s story, but I see no truth in either.
What Is Google Love?
Google love is the imaginary “feeling” that Google has for the websites in its index. The more Google loves a website, the higher that website will rank in the Google search results.
No matter how many search results Google shows for a particular search term, Google will only show a maximum of 1,000 website listing in its search engine result pages (SERPs). However, few people, except nuts like me know that as you go to each consecutive page in Google’s SERPs, the actual number that Google is willing to show you gets smaller with each additional page visited.
For example, I just did a search on the keyword phrase “Google Love”. My default Google settings are set to 100 results. When I first typed the search phrase, Google showed 68,300,000 results, and Google shows me that I can look at ten pages of results. But, when I get to the tenth page in Google’s results, there are only three listings. Google only loves 903 web pages for the search term “Google Love”.
Google has told us that they attribute value to a web page, based on the number of inbound links that page might have. Google Love primarily comes from link popularity, which is derived from inbound links.
The Suggested Lifespan Of The Google Sandbox
I see the “sandbox” as being a term that some person working in SEO derived to explain why so many of his client’s new pages appeared in Google’s search results for about one month, before the pages disappeared into the deep recesses of the Google index.
In absence of a better explanation, some SEO person coined the term “Google Sandbox” to explain to his or her customers why a page disappears from the Google index and stays missing for months or years.
According to those who preach the Google Sandbox theory, the lifespan of the Sandbox is six months to one year. That is a lifetime when you are running an online business.
The Life Curve Of A Web Page
Google’s algorithms rely heavily on inbound links to determine the value of a web page. But a brand new web page has not had the opportunity to attract any inbound links, because after all, it is a brand new web page. So Google gives new web pages the benefit of a doubt.
News stories are a good example of web pages that may very well be important to the world-at-large, but its importance cannot be determined by the number of inbound links available to that page.
As a result, all brand new web pages on the Internet are given an intrinsic value by Google, as if the pages housed a news story. But what was important thirty days ago, will not necessarily be important today. So news stories are given early value and then their value fades with time.
Once the news cycle is completed, the web page will slide down to where it deserves to be according to the normal Google algorithms. This often means that a new web page will disappear into Google oblivion (or the theoretical Google Sandbox), if after 30 days the page has not generated any link popularity of its own.
After The News Cycle, All Normal Rules Apply
We have all heard it before. The way to get a web page to rank in Google is to build link popularity for the web page.
And how do you build link popularity for a web page? Build inbound links to that web page, of course.
Once the news cycle is done, a new web page must compete with every other web page, based on Google’s normal algorithm.
What If A Page Could Develop Link Popularity In 30 Days?
What if you were able to build inbound links and therefore link popularity for a web page, before the news cycle runs out? That would be a twist, wouldn’t it?
Personally, I know for a fact that if you can build link popularity on a page, within the news cycle window, that this new page will not fall into the dreaded and mythical Google Sandbox. The page will not fall into the Google Sandbox at the end of the news cycle, because the page will have already accrued some link popularity within Google’s primary algorithm.
You Are The Master Of Your Own Domain
As the master of your domain, you get to choose how long a page is sandboxed. Most people don’t realize they have that kind of control, but with smart link building, one can prevent a web page from entering the sandbox. Or, if the web page does slip into the sandbox, the smart online marketer can bring a web page out of the mythical sandbox in days or weeks, instead of months or years. The beauty of this truth is that you define the time line for when a web page exits the sandbox, not Google.
I Boast That I Can Prove It To You
I built a new page 16 days ago (June 10th, 2008) that is holding page one results in Google against 200,000+ websites, with my Blackhat Fish SEO Contest entry.
Now, one could argue that I am still in the news cycle for this web page, so in another two weeks, my page could disappear from the Google results. But, I have built so many inbound links to this page that I fully expect that when the news cycle is done, my page will remain outside of Google’s mythical sandbox.
I Challenge You To Test My Results
Test my proof by checking back here in a couple weeks, or even in four weeks or six. If I am right, you will be able to click this link to Google’s search results for the keyword phrase Blackhat Fish, and you will be able to see my page title on page one or two of Google’s search results: “Whitehat vs. Blackhat: Fish For Links or Die Trying”.
I say page one or page two of Google’s search results, because I would be surprised if I actually won the competition. However, if I am still in the top20 results for the search key term after July 10, 2008, then I will have proved to you that anyone can beat the sandbox, if only they exercised the right strategy for escaping the sandbox ahead of the end of the news cycle.
I have actually pulled this off with three web pages in the last 60 days. The above listed example is just one of many examples I could show you as proof of concept here. But for brevity’s sake, I am only including the one example here.
In Conclusion…
You can accept my analysis as sound, or you can call me the fool. It does not matter to me which you choose. If you want to believe that the Google Sandbox really exists to thwart your online business, then more power to your fears.
For those of you who have found my words worthwhile, let’s meet next Saint Patrick’s’ Day to share a green beer and a laugh.
Bill Platt has been providing article marketing help to his clients since 2001 at: http://www.thephantomwriters.com/ He offers ghost writing and article distribution services. With lots of experience writing articles that attract publishers, readers, traffic and sales to his website, Bill wrote an ebook to share the secrets of his article marketing strategies at: http://thephantomwriters.com/ebooks/article-marketing-traffic.html
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The Mythical Google Sandbox And How To Escape It
So, you are the marketing manager of your firm, and you’ve finally decided to pull the trigger and hire the search engine optimization company that you’ve been talking to for months. The budget has been cleared, the SEO firm is ready to start, and it should be just a matter of time before you start seeing a huge uptick in business. Right?
Not so fast.
An experienced search engine optimization company will tell you that an ill-planned campaign can be a non-starter from day one. This usually happens when there is no clear understanding of what will be required of the client to make the project run smoothly. (more…)
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Are You Ready to Outsource to a Search Engine Optimization Company?