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!
I frequently rant on Internet marketing and some of the gurus who try to bend your ear. Why? Because many of these so-called gurus trash everything that makes sense in this Internet world, especially when they realize that they cannot make money from the techniques being recommended.
I don’t preach marketing concepts solely for the purpose of selling my products and services. (If you happen to buy my products or services, then awesome, but that is not my point when I share information from my SEO and other marketing campaigns.) I preach the concepts that I have used for myself successfully. Either you can trust me and test the things I recommend, or you can listen to the gurus and drown yourself in pity, when you realize you are not finding the success you seek. (more…)
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How To Measure The Effectiveness Of Your Article Marketing Campaigns
by Stoney deGeyter
When providing SEO advice on the topic of website design, we often warn against placing important content into images. This is because search engines can’t read images like a person can. To them, an image with text is just an image. They really have no idea what the image is or if, in fact, it says anything at all. So when optimizing sites, anytime we are dealing with keyword optimized content, we want to make sure it’s standard HTML text. This includes headers, benefit lits, and even normal body copy.
While the search engines can’t read actual images, they can read what we say about the image. This information can be gleaned a few different ways:
- Image file name (image1234.jpg vs. mustang-gt.jpg)
- Text immediately surrounding the image
- The overall content of the page the image is on
- Image ALT attribute in the image tag
When trying to optimize images for image search, all of these can provide important indicators the search engines use to produce the best set of image results. In terms of traditional optimization and website usability, the ALT attribute plays an important role.
The ALT attribute should by no means be considered a substitute for regular text. ALT text doesn’t get weighted as heavily as body text so relying on it as a replacement for body text is like entering a Prius into the Indy 500. It doesn’t have a chance.
Ok, so that was a bit of an exaggeration, but you get my point. There are effective uses of the Image ALT attribute when it comes to SEO and usability. Let’s start by looking at an image tag with the ALT attribute:
<img src="images/image.jpg" alt="This is the ALT attribute" />
Almost universally, you should be using ALT text to describe each of your images. I say “almost” because if you are still using clear images for formatting, styling, or spacing (you shouldn’t be!) then those images don’t need any description. As a side note, if you want your HTML to validate properly then every image needs an ALT attribute, even if it’s left empty:
<img src="images/spacer.gif" alt="" />
In some cases, the ALT text can act as a replacement for the text in an image, such as a company name, tagline or some kind of special promotion, and in other cases the ALT text should actually describe the image. In either case, if the image contains text, then you will almost always want to put it in the ALT attribute as well.
For example, the logo in my company site is really nothing more than just the words “Pole Position Marketing” with my tagline.
I could go a couple of different ways with the the construction of the ALT attribute, depending on the context of how it’s used. Here, since I’m using the image as an example, it’s not important for me to use much more than a basic description:
alt="Pole Position Marketing logo and tagline"
But on my own website, since this isn’t jut an image in the body copy, but one of my key site indicators, I produce a much more complete description:
alt="Pole Position Marketing: Velocitize Your Website Marketing"
Now, if I wanted to be even more descriptive, and more accurate, I’d write my alt tag this way:
alt="Pole Position Marketing logo: Velocitize Your Website Marketing"
Again, I let the context be the guide for what I write in my ALT text. If the reader, with images turned off, won’t know that the image is a logo then I’d add that to the description. But since this image appears repeatedly at the top of the page, in the typical place that logos and/or other site indicators go, then I really don’t need the additional description.
Describe your image meaning
Let’s look at another example. Here is an screenshot of an image-heavy home page:
Now, when we look at this same page with the images turned off you can see how that by not using any image ALT attributes the site becomes unnavigable.
The only place you can see any ALT text is in the logo, which reads “Super 8 Taos”. The rest of the site is just a big jumble of images, some of them links and some not.
[Note: you can mouse over any of the images on this page to check out my ALT text usage for each.]
As you can see above, ALT text becomes even more important when navigating a site with images turned off when the navigation is all image based. Let’s add some ALT text to these images and see what we get:
The header and navigation are pretty obvious. Here we simply added the same words that are in the image. Again, since this is obviously navigation we really don’t need to describe the images, so much as just reiterate what they say. This allows the visitor to know where each link will take them, just as if images were turned on.
You can see that I didn’t bother adding ALT text to any images that didn’t serve a function beyond eye-candy. There really is no reason to attempt to describe them in any way, so in these cases I would just add an empty ALT attribute, as shown above, just so the code will validate.
In the center area I got a bit creative with my ALT text. Even for less image-heavy websites, this is a great example of how to use ALT attributes for images that attempt to convey meaning without words.
We could attempt to describe the pictures perfectly by saying something like, Picture of our room, picture of the bay, picture of downhill skier. While those are accurate descriptions they don’t convey the intended meaning that you get when you actually see the image. So in this case we’ll use the ALT attribute to try and get some of that intended meaning across:
alt="All of our rooms are comfortable and spacious with living room seating and ceiling fans."
alt="You can reserve a suite featuring breathtaking ocean views."
alt="We are only minutes from some of the worlds best ski resorts."
With images like this you can get a bit more or less flowery, depending on your needs. It also makes it easier to work keywords into the ALT text without looking junky. Instead of just throwing a keyword in every image, describe the image a bit and work the keyword in naturally. Just like you would with body text.
Considerations for SEO and usability
It’s easy when SEOing a website to just throw a quick word or two into your alt images, but that’s a mistake. Even in your navigation the ALT text can be used to expand on a links meaning when there is not enough image space to do so.
For example if the image reads “About Us” the ALT attribute can say “Learn more about our company.” If the image reads “Accommodations” the ALT text can read “Deluxe accommodations.” If your image reads “FAQs” then the ALT text can spell it out with “Frequently asked Questions.”
When dealing with navigation you want to be careful about how many words you use. Too much and you lose the ability to be effective, especially with quick scans. Always check what your page looks like with images turned off, ensuring that your ALT tags flow well with the rest of the site design. On my site I edited my ALT attributes specifically to provide better usability with images turned off. Here is what my site’s top navigation looks like with images:
The drop downs are all absolutely positioned so if I had made any of these ALT descriptions longer then the drop downs would have been been misaligned. By editing my ALT text properly, we keep proper alignment.
Just to provide one more example of good ALT attribute usage, I’ve added ALT text to the Better Business Bureau logo on our site. Instead of just saying “BBB Accredited Business” I added a more lengthy description that reads:
alt="We are a Better Business Bureau accredited business. Click here to check our BBB rating."
This text much more valuable to the reader that has images turned off.
I should also note that Internet Explorer will display the ALT attribute when you mouseover an image. FireFox, on the other hand will only display text that is in the image’s title attribute. If you are adding great descriptive text in your ALT attribute as I have shown here then it’s probably a good idea to also place that text in a title as well.
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Stop Wasting Your ALT Attributes and Make them Work for You