Wednesday, September 27th, 2006
This guide has been written to help you get started in Google Adwords and save you time and effort on initial research.
You may already be familiar with the ins and outs of Google search results. However, just in case you aren’t familiar where ads appear, Google’s paid ads appear separately in the search results on the right hand side of the screen and in some instances at the top of the screen. For example let’s use one of the most competitive terms for paid ads, “search engine optimization”. As you can see below, the #1 ad pays the most for your click and #2 second most and so on to the last paid ad paying the least.
Google AdWords can provide an inexpensive advertising venue for you to increase your leads. However, you need to do your research to ensure you achieve a positive ROI
Posted in Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »
Wednesday, September 20th, 2006
SEO tools are useful and can help you to develop and refine your campaign. We offer a variety of free tools that can help you keep your SEO on track.
Link Popularity Checker and Link Quality Assessment
This is a great tool to help you analyze the links to your site. Links play a vital role in good organic search engine rankings. Not only is link popularity important, the quality of those links is also very important. Use the free Link Popularity Checker and Link Quality Checker tool to find out the necessary statistics on your links and your competitor’s links.
The tool includes information on inbound links, deep links, directory links, and your search engine indexing statistics.
Add a link to this useful tool from your own site by adding the following code:
<a href=”http://www.elixirsystems.com/tools/linkpopularity.php”>Link Popularity Checker and Link Quality Assessment Tool</a>
Use the tool to look at your current statistics and the statistics of your competitors now.
Social Tagging Tool
Social tagging is creating a buzz as a way to create publicity for your sites content and increase your inbound links. However submitting your information to these sites can be time consuming and hard work. We have made it easier for you! Use this tool to automatically submit your content.
Add a link to this useful tool from your own site by adding the following code:
<a href=”http://www.elixirsystems.com/tools/sociable/”>Social Tagging Tool</a>
Or even use the tool to allow users to tag your site:
<a href=”http://www.elixirsystems.com/tools/sociable/?URL=www.yoursitename.com”>Tag This Page</a>
Use the tool to submit your site to social tagging sites.
WhoIs Lookup and Monitor
Check on the current whois information for other sites. This will give you the owner of the domain name and contact information. It can also be used to compare current information with previous records.
Add a link to this useful tool from your own site by adding the following code:
<a href=”http://www.elixirsystems.com/tools/whois.php”>WhoIs Lookup and Monitor Tool</a>
Use the tool to look at whois information of your company and your competitors now.
Posted in Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »
Wednesday, September 13th, 2006
I was so excited to read his post! Google-icon Matt Cutts was blogging on August 21st and hit the nail on the head (as he does quite frequently). The title of the post was, “SEO Advice: Writing useful articles that readers will love.” That, in and of itself, says it all. Why is this such a thrilling post? Because it reinforces what I’ve been saying for years. Whether you’re writing content for a website, an article or any type of SEO copy, you must think of the reader first.
There is such a barrage of worthless articles floating around the ‘Net these days. Keyword stuffed, useless ramble that was obviously written with the sole intent of attempting to rank high. Striving for top rankings is not a bad thing, but the purpose of writing SEO articles is threefold not onefold:
provide information, rank high when used on your site and increase link popularity. That means the practice must follow the purpose.
Why Write an Article?
Let’s start at the beginning. Why write articles to begin with? While having SEO content on your site is a good thing, your first concern should be with offering useful information to your readers. Cutts agrees with this practice and makes a point to discuss why providing relevant, helpful information is vital.
If the information isn’t helpful, those who visit your site will have little interest in reading it. Yes, if the page ranks highly, it might bring in a bit of traffic. But if visitors take one look at your article then click away, what good have the high rankings done you?
Likewise, if you choose to distribute your article throughout the Internet, it is highly unlikely that others will elect to run your article on their sites. If your work doesn’t provide solid information and is poorly written, it will not be considered link-worthy.
Optimizing for the Engines
Once you’ve decided what information you want to provide, you can turn your focus to SEO. Copywriting for the engines requires balance. You never want to sacrifice the reader’s experience for the sake of rankings. Stuffing keywords into text is a method that will almost always backfire. Practically no one wants to read an article (or website page) that constantly repeats the same exact terms to the point of extremes.
Cutts also addressed this issue in his blog post, stating that he included keyphrases within his own article and also used similar terms. Cutts made a point of suggesting that we pay more attention to keyphrase use (and the use of variations of those keyphrases) than focusing on keyword density.
The Two Most Important Keys
The two “meta-issues” Cutts highlighted in his article were both related to user experience, not to the practice of SEO copywriting. First, pay attention to the content you offer.
Always impart useful, concrete knowledge to your reader.
Second, study your niche (a.k.a. know your target audience!) and write specifically for the purpose of helping them.
There is other great information included in Cutts’ post, and I encourage you to read it plus the comments that follow. You can find it here:http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-writing-useful-articles-that-readers-will-love.
These are things I (and other SEO pros) have been preaching for years. User first, search engines second. When you get the priority straight, the rest will fall into line without much hassle.
About the author:
Copy not getting results? Learn to write SEO and online copywriting that impresses the engines and your visitors at http://www.copywritingcourse.com. Be sure to also check out Karon’s report “How To Increase Keyword Saturation (Without Destroying the Flow of Your Copy)” at http://www.copywritingcourse.com/keyword.
Posted in Copywriting | No Comments »
