Archive for category Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
What to Look for in an Internet Marketing Company – 7 Methods of Link Building
Posted by Kayla in 101, Link Building, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) on March 26, 2011
This is the 3rd part of a 4 part series on search engine optimization.
Part 1 is on Keyword Analysis for Search Engine Optimization
Part 2 is on On-Page Search Engine Optimization
Why Link Building is Needed for Search Engine Optimization
Hierarchy of Needs for Search Engine Optimization
Link building is the next step on the Search Engine Hierarchy of needs. Google and other search engines determine the usefulness and quality of your site to make determine how high you should appear in search engine results when someone looks for terms that are relevant to your site.
Why does Google perceive inbound links as quality indicators?
If someone chooses to link to your site, it means that they have found something valuable there. It may be something they feel helps their web audience, information they find valuable, or information they want to find again.
Types of InBound Links
- Organic in-bound links – someone likes your site and decides to bookmark it or reference it in one of their web pages. You, the site owner, do nothing to develop these links other than provide quality information that people find valuable.
- These are the links Google really wants to see, but until your site is getting found, you have a circular problem of not being able to get people to create these links.
- Bookmarked in-bound links - there are many social bookmarking sites that allow users to share bookmarks and also allow you to have access to your bookmarks from any device or computer.
- There are many automated systems for bookmarking, but they can get you in trouble with the search engines. It’s better to do this manually.
- Don’t just bookmark your own site or you may find your ip address blocked as a spammer. Bookmark other things you find interesting.
- Article Marketing for inbound links – write high quality content for high authority and high ranked websites like Ezinearticles.com.
- Search engines are looking for high quality, original content. Don’t submit the identical article to numerous search engines. Rewrite the article if you want to do multiple submissions. There is automated software to help with this, but it usually creates a low quality mess. Research “article spinning” if you’re interested. But be careful. If you create a bunch of junk, you’re not going to help your cause.
- Articles should be 400-800 words though you can be a bit high or low on word count. But short articles will often be rejected by article sites and long articles should be broken up into multiple articles.
- Guest Blogging for inbound links – if you can find blogs that are related to your business, often they will love it if you write original, fresh content for them. If you can find contact information for them, drop a note, let them know why you like their blog and what you have to offer in terms of content. Point them to your own blog so that they can see the quality of your content.
- If the blog has low page rank, your links in your guest blogs won’t count for much.
- Commenting for inbound links – You can comment in forums, BBSs, other people’s blogs, and a variety of other places to create links back to your own site.
- Mostly, these are nofollow links. Nofollow is an HTML attribute that was designed to reduce comment spam. It tells search engines who honor it, to not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine index. Despite this, nofollow links are still good because if the site has high traffic, you may get clickthroughs. Also, if you only have normal links, search engines may see that as a sign that you are trying to spam them, and penalize your site.
- Links in .signature files – if you use a signature in your email, that includes a link to your site, it may end up out on the indexable web and help create additional links to your site. This takes virtually no energy once you set it up, but the payoff may be small.
- Q&A Sites for links – sites such as Yahoo! Answers allow people to provide answers to public questions. You need to get to a certain level on Yahoo for your links to be live. These links are also nofollow. There are other Q&A sites like Yahoo Answers.
Link building is a marathon, not a sprint. It takes hard work and anyone who tells you differently is likely to get your site into trouble with the search engines. But if you work on link building on a daily basis, the fruits will pay off.
There is much more that can be written on this topic, so stay tuned for other related posts.
20 Social Bookmarking Sites for Link Building Campaigns
Posted by Kayla in Link Building, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) on March 26, 2011
Social Bookmarking Sites for Link Building Campaigns
Social bookmarking sites can be a powerful way to create link building campaigns. Social bookmarking began as a way to maintain bookmarks from one computer to another. Keeping your bookmarks online instead of on your computer, means you can access your bookmarks from work, home, or anywhere else.
Other advantages of social bookmarking are that you can easily share recommendations with your friends and browse other people’s bookmarks to find interesting information.
Most bookmarking sites also let you create tags for your bookmarks, which provides a mechanism for other people to find information. These tags are often called metadata.
Site Map From the list below, you might realize that social bookmarking can be an extremely time consuming way of building links. There are some automated submission sites out there, but there is great reason for caution in using them. Google penalizes duplicate content and most of the automated submission sites will just post the same thing over and over. Social bookmarking sites can pick up on this, especially when repeat posts come from the same ip address. Further, if Google sees you doing this, you will be downgraded in their rankings.
Some of the list below create nofollow links, but your site needs a mix of follow and nofollow to show an organic pattern of link building.
- Digg
- Diigo
- LinkaGoGo
- OneView
- Bookmark4You
- Bookmark Buddy
- MySiteVote
- Multiply
- Kirtsy
- BlinkList
- Faves
- Delicious
- Connotea
- GiveALink
- folkd
- Jim’s Free Links
- Tagza
- Planet eBlog
- eTop
- Net Vouz
This is the first article in a multipart series on resources for link building. Future articles in this series will include sites for article marketing.
What to look for in an internet marketing company – Keyword Analysis
Posted by Kayla in 101, DIY, internet marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) on March 12, 2011
Evaluating an Internet Marketing Company for your Business
There is so much snake oil in the Search Engine Optimization SEO industry and there are also many people who don’t know what they’re doing. Unfortunately, many of these unethical SEO companies can easily take advantage of their clients by either not providing sufficient service to deliver results, or by using black hat or grey hat techniques to provide results that could end up penalized by the search engine companies.
Search Engine Marketing is complicated and has many different aspects to it. Some of it seems easy. Some of it is easy to do wrong and not even know it. And to add to the difficulties, it’s constantly shifting and changing.
Some people try to do it themselves and get caught in a morass of both information overload and too little quality information.
Hierarchy of Needs for Marketing Your Business on the Internet
Hierarchy of Needs for Search Engine Optimization
You need to ask any Search Engine Optimization company, whether, and how they are addressing each layer of the pyramid.
Many companies will provide on-page SEO and then tell you that they have done search engine optimization for you. But this isn’t nearly enough to bring you results.
Keyword Analysis for Small Business Internet Marketing
If you’re an accountant, you might think you want your keyword to be “accountant.”
But if someone searches for the word “accountant”, they will get about 228,000,000 results on Google. How could you possibly get to the top of that many results?
You probably can’t! At least not this year!
The secret to finding great keywords is to find those that are low competition and yet, still have enough searches.
Finding Low Competition and High Search Volume Keywords
If you have the time, the patience, and the creativity, you can find your own keywords by using a variety of tools. One of the best tools for this is a product called Market Samurai because it has tutorials to step you through each part of the process and you can easily do-it-yourself keyword analysis.
DIY keyword analysis can work out for people who are good with words and exploring market niches with words.
Marketing and Research Services provides an Internet marketing keyword analysis delivers 100′s of effective keywords for you to work with to get your site found by your potential customers. Keyword analysis is just $299 and includes your keyword spreadsheet and a report on what to do with your keyword list.
Step-by-Step Local SEO and Local Internet Marketing
Posted by Kayla in 101, DIY, internet marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) on February 25, 2011
Local Internet Marketing and local Search Engine Optimization can be done more efficiently than optimizing for a country or the whole world.
This article will give you 10 ways to get started doing search engine optimization for your local business website and get you started marketing your business on the Internet.
- List your business on Google Maps and Google Places. It’s free. Follow the local business instructions at Google.
- Add special offers to your Google Maps local business web listing.
- Add your city name to the <title> pages of your web site. If you’re in a small suburb, consider adding the nearest major city name, depending on the geographical region you want to bring business in from.
- Make sure that your web site has contact information with your address. Consider adding it to every page of your web site.
- “Claim” your profile on Merchant Circle, Yahoo Local, local.com, and anywhere else you can find.
- See if you can get links from your local Chamber of Commerce, local business groups, local business directories, local newspapers, and see if you can get links from your vendors.
- There are many yellow pages-like sites that let you update or add your business information for free. These sites get a lot of traffic and tend to rank well. So at the very least, visit all you can find, claim your profile and make sure they are linking to your business web site. Here’s a list of sites that will let you claim your business on the Internet.
- See if you can exchange links with businesses that serve the same market as you do, but don’t compete with you. Don’t like to sites that are entirely irrelevant to your site!
- Start a blog! Nowadays, content is king. And if you can develop your web site into a trusted resource, potential customers will seek you out. You can establish yourself as an authority and at the same time, you will be optimizing your site for search engines. Your blog can be part of your main site, or can be a separate link.
- Make a video! You don’t need a big budget or a video production house to do it for you. If you have a video camera, point it at yourself and just talk. Tell people what you do. Express your passion for your business. Mention your website a few times. Then put the video on Youtube and also insert it into your own website. If you want a more polished video, look into services like www.spotzer.com, walkonsite.com, www.mixpo.com, www.turnhere.com
If you prefer to outsource your internet marketing and have someone else do your local search engine optimization, contact us at 702.530.9393 or by emailing us at kblock
Don’t Build Your Website in Flash
Posted by Kayla in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), user interface design on February 24, 2011
Flash can make web sites look beautiful. Many businesses that don’t know a lot about technology, get sucked into having Flash-based web sites, because they look cool. But there are major problems with Flash and unless you provide an alternative, you may be locking out your customers.
The Problems with Flash
- The iPad and iPhone do not handle Flash, and support for other cellphones is limited or non-existent. If your website visitors ever use mobile devices to access your web site, you don’t want to lock them out.
A typical scenario: a customer is on their way to your office. They forgot your address. They look for your web site on their phone and they get nothing. Don’t let this happen! - Flash is not accessible. Blind people browse the web using screen readers. These screen readers cannot interpret Flash content.
- If you want to be found on Google and other search engines, Flash will be hugely detrimental. Googlebot can’t read your Flash files, and neither can any other search engine spider. You cannot do Search Engine Optimization (SEO) on a site that is built in Flash.
- Flash will not generally let anyone bookmark a specific page on your web site. Most Flash sites have one url. There are some workarounds to this but many sites don’t implement them. Again, this is one of the many ways that Flash interferes with Search Engine Optimization.
- Someone trying to search for something on your page, won’t find anything. Ctrl-f (on Windows), can’t find anything on your Flash based page.
- Flash is slow! Have you ever visited a web site and seen the flashing words, “loading…” You’re waiting for Flash to load and so are your customers. Not everyone is patient enough to wait for your Flash based web site to load.
- Your web site visitors have no control over text size. If you’re under 40, you may not have ever realized that with HTML based web sites, you can adjust the font size. For those with failing closeup vision, this may be mandatory in order to view your site. There is no way for your website visitor to change font sizes if your site is Flash-based.
If you love the look of Flash, HTML5 can give you similar functionality and appearance with full compatibility for Apple devices and friendly Search Engine Optimization. Check out the portfolio of sample HTML5 designs.
In sum, Flash is great for games. It can be great for small widgets. But if you want your web site to be usable, you want it to be findable, and you want people to be able to access it, tell your web site developer that you don’t want your site built in Flash!
Help New Customers Find You
Posted by Kayla in 101, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), social media on February 22, 2011
In the US alone, about 15.5 billion searches are conducted every month.
People search for information. 42% of them use search engines every day!
They search for solutions to their problems. They search for food. They search for products. They search for phone numbers. And they just might be searching for YOU!
But can they find you?
People are rarely using phone directories anymore. To find information, they are using search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, or they are using specialized information services like Yelp.
If you can’t be found on these search engines, you are missing out on significant business.
You need to think about what people are searching for when you want them to find you. They’re not looking for your company name. They are looking for the name of the products and services you carry.
If your company name is “New Horizons”, but you carry “green building supplies”, you will bring in new business and new customers, if people can find you by searching for “green building supplies.”
You can get found by paying for advertising. If your keywords (“green building supplies”) are popular, you may spend a fortune to get your ad seen.
Or you can build up your web site through “white hat” search engine optimization techniques that will get you found by potential customers.
Techniques to get you found go beyond just search engine marketing. People look for information on Social Media web sites such as Facebook. They may look for information on Youtube. The nature of your business and customers will determine how your potential customers are trying to find you.
How Do Search Engines Work?
Posted by Kayla in 101, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) on February 22, 2011
Crawling the Web
Search engines use a “robot” or “bot” to crawl the web. The robot is sometimes referred to as a “spider.” The robot will look at the words on a site, minus words like, “the”, “a”, “and”, and create an index of what it finds. The spider will also follow the links it finds on a site to build the index even further.
Determining Relevancy
When someone enters a query into a search engine, the search engine needs to figure out what results go to the first page and what order to display the results in.
On most search engines, at the top of the results page, you will find Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising as shown below.
Just under the paid search engine results, or Pay-Per-Click results, you will find what are called “organic search results.” Organic means that the results were not paid for, but obtained by the page having enough influence for the “keywords” that were selected, to show at the top of the results list.
So how do search engines determine what to show at the top? How do they determine relevancy?
Every search engine has its own unique algorithms or unique ways of calculating what to put at the top. That’s why searching on Google may give you different results than searching on Bing.
But there are things we know will factor in:
- How many other pages link into the site? If other pages think this page is important enough to link to, it must be important!
- Are the keywords that someone searched for, highly relevant to the page? Remember the spiders have crawled the site and they are looking at things on the page like how often the keyword is repeated on the page (keyword density), whether the page has optimized metatags (HTML markup that is seen by the spiders, but not seen on the page), and look for the names of images, page title, and even the domain of the name itself.
In the image below, the user has searched for “makeup deals.”
Above, you can see that practicing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques, brings www.MakeupDealOfTheDay.com to third place when someone searches for “makeup deals” on Google.
MARS utilized SEO techniques to get Makeup Deal of the Day to the top and we can do the same for you.
Getting to the Top: Page Rank
Some things to build page rank include:
- Having quality content that people want to read (and don’t forget the content will also be indexed by search engines!)
- Having links to the pages of the site from other sites that are related. (So a link from a page about automotive parts to a makeup site won’t do the makeup site much good. But a link from a page about eyeshadow would increase the page rank.)
- Keep pages relatively short and stick to one or two topics.
- Include words on the page that might be linked to a user search
- Make sure each page is accessible by at least one text link or url.
- Images are not as well indexed as text. Though you can use some additional HTML to help, important words should be in text for ease of indexing by the spiders.
Marketing and Research Services understands how search engines work and we understand how to get you found on the Internet. Let us work with you to create and implement a strategic Internet marketing plan for your business.