Archive for the ‘Search Engine Optimization’ Category
Tuesday, January 26th, 2010
If you enjoy computers and want to be part of the fast-paced internet-based world, perhaps a career in online reputation management and SEO would be just the job for you. There are several benefits to starting out on your own. One, you can work from home and have complete flexibility of your time and hours. And two, there is no special degree or certification required. And for many who are facing uncertainty in the job area, they are benefits you may not want to pass on.
But before you go and quit your day job, be warned there are many challenges should you decide enter this field. With the internet taking up a larger and larger portion of our lives it is natural that it would provide many jobs as well. As a result, there hundreds, perhaps thousands, of individuals claiming to do SEO. On the flip side there are many well established companies that control much of the market for online reputation management. Elixir Interactive is one such company. They offer many SEO and reputation management services and deliver what they promise.
Another important aspect in beginning such a career is experience. Understanding the way that search engines operate and the algorithms that they use is essential to any successful career. It is not something that you can just pick up over night. You must also stay on top of the constant updates and changes that the internet and search engines make. There is also the threat that SEO analyst could become obsolete as search engines become more refined and natural in their search patterns. Many companies, especially the larger ones, are deciding to move in-house for their marketing and SEO needs. Unfortunately there is not much room to move around, or up, with such a position.
Online reputation management and SEO is an important part of our internet based world; however, pursuing it as a career is not for the faint of heart.
Posted in Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »
Friday, December 18th, 2009
Following on from our post the other day (SwiftRank By Optimizing Page Speed) I was looking for more information on this. I found one post from Search Engine Land Site Speed, Google’s Next Ranking Factor which indicates that page load times will be a factor in the algorithm next year.
This makes sense from a user perspective. I have been advocating for a long time keeping the weight of your home page as low as possible, and have always recommended having less than 1MB in total downloads for the home page. This total number includes not only the page source, but also images, CSS, JS, and any other file that might be downloaded by the home page.
The problem is most web masters do not realize the size of their page as they’re on a fast T1, and they’ve got most of their site’s files in their browser cache. One of the most extreme examples I had of this was a client whose site would not download into our site analyzing tool because it was too big and the software refused to download any source code over 30 MB in size.
Another example was a client with a flash sidebar that was over 5MB to download.
To see how bad this is you can use a calculator such as this one to type in your page size and see how long it would take to download:
5MB at 56k would be 9 minutes, at 512k (DSL speed) it would be over 1 minute, and even on a T1 it would take over 30 seconds.
When was the last time you waited a minute or two for a site to download? If kept waiting most visitors would hit the back button and visit your competitor site listed next in the rankings.
So what about Google changing their mind on page download times? Myth busting: delays in page loading from Matt Cutts 2006 stated that download times were not a factor, and perhaps they still aren’t now, but in future, and from a usability point of view speed counts. Do your visitors a favor and optimize your pages now.
Posted in Search Engine Optimization | 3 Comments »
Wednesday, March 11th, 2009
Just added to our tools section the ability to validate your robots.txt file. There are tons of robots.txt validators available but this one is slightly different in that it looks at the file from an SEO perspective – looking to see if you’ve blocked too many pages from the spiders, whether there’a sn XML sitemap, etc. It validates not only the standard robots.txt syntax but also more modern additions that are not truely standardized yet, such as the commands ’sitemap’, and ‘allow’.
Give it a try and let me know if the validator finds any errors in your robots.txt file.
Posted in Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »
Wednesday, January 14th, 2009
Daniel Silva asked me to comment on the SEOing of his site http://www.silvaheeren.com.
First impressions:
- His home page is about his firm. Who cares? Remember the world’s favorite radio stations WII FM – what’s in it for me? I would totally swap the site around and put services first and foremost and the ‘about us’ page as a footer nav.
- Light gray text on white background is difficult to read, give that more contrast.
- Links into the content are grouped at the bottom and not in the text where you’d except.
- Terms and conditions looks to be a contract – I would remove this as its irrelevant to someone visiting your site.
- Your portfolio pages look nice, why not use Ajax to replace the screenshots instead of refreshing the screen? Shows you know how to do some of the more modern programming techniques.
- No Web 2.0 on this site – comments, blog, reviews, videos.
So far no SEO comments, and that’s deliberate. SEO is as much about usability of a site as about minor tweaks to rank it. If the site is unusable then even if you have people land on your site they will not convert, therefore your SEO effort is wasted.
So as for the SEO:
- Revisit your keyword research and found out what people are searching for. Your site links are ‘brochure’ which is vague and could mean anything. ‘Travel Brochure’ is more descriptive but probably not a good term either. How about ‘brochure design’.
- Your portfolio pages contain minimal text, as spiders do not read images you need to add text to tell them what is on the page.
I ran it through sitecara.com and got the following errors:
- Code:1265: Robots.txt – No XML sitemaps defined.
- Code:1831: Both www and non-www URLs returned http code 200 – page found. (http://www.silvaheeren.com/ — http://silvaheeren.com/).
- Code:1480: No H1 tag on home page
- Code:1501: Too little text on this page – below 300 words. (179).
In addition I ran it through CSE HTML Validator and it had a lot of HTML errors, none major but should be fixed anyway.
Next steps:
- Address usability
- Re do keyword research, pick 10 or 20 terms you want to rank for. Add a localization to it for now i.e. instead of ‘webdesign’ use ‘webdesign miami’, smaller set of searches but more chance to be #1.
- Re optimize your site.
- Download CSE HTML Validator trial edition and validate your HTML. http://www.htmlvalidator.com/
- Add your site to Site Cara and run the site audit, fix any issues found.
- Add your keywords to Site Cara see where you rank now.
- Go out and get some links (a whole article in itself). Most web designers gain links from their client sites in the footer, these can really help.
Posted in Search Engine Optimization | 1 Comment »
Thursday, August 14th, 2008
A popular tool on the old Eixir site was the pages indexed and link quality tool. When we changed sites we lost those tools but we have now recreated them with some more bells and whistles at http://www.semreportsonline.com/
This site is still in beta (or even alpha) but I wanted to open it up for people to play with and give feedback.
Main features:
- Link quality assessment including graphs and history functionality
- Pages indexed across all 3 major engines.
- Ranking reports including capability to go back in time and compare ranking reports including how the top 30 looked at the time.
- Response time checking for your site.
- Multiple sites per login/email.
- Multiple logins per site (this needs to be done by an admin behind the scenes).
- Whois history – whois info stored once a week and you can compare old whois with current to see how its changed.
Sign up and give it a try, let me know what you think. No credit card is required at this time I want to test the site before turning off the ‘trial account’ status. I might even add advertising to see if I can allow an ad supported limited version.
Future enhancements are already planned – mainly email alerts when reports have been run and perhaps an analysis of the report i.e. details of whois record changes. SEO Road blocks, etc.
Posted in Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »
Wednesday, July 9th, 2008
This post is not about ‘how to get more traffic to your site’ its about how to get the right traffic to your site. Once a site is properly optimized some people will see reduced traffic to their site and that’s a good thing overall. The problem with targeting ‘more traffic’ as a goal can be the traffic is the wrong kind of traffic. If you sell widgets and get ranked #1 for ‘viagra’ then the traffic you get will land on your site, see it’s not what they want, and quickly move on – you’ve had a bounce (single page visit) which has eaten your bandwidth and produced no results.
So how do you get the right kind of traffic. First of you need to know what search phrases (keywords) to target. Generally we recommend Wordtracker (free trial), or Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Using these tools you can find terms that are likely to drive targeted traffic.
A good way to test the keywords you find is to set up a PPC campaign around these keywords and see what the traffic does once it lands on your site. If it bounces you’ve got the wrong traffic, if it stays or even converts you’ve got a winner. The budget outlay for this can be small – less than $100 should do it in most cases.
So now you have your search phrase list – around 10 for a non-ecommerce site should suffice, and for an ecommerce site you’ll want at least one search phrase per category and one per product which can run into thousands.
So with these 10 words you decide which are your top priority, either their higher traffic, or lower traffic but convert well. Then run the command ’site:mysite.com searchphrase’ on one of the engines and let the engines tell you which page is most relevant for the keyword. If the page that shows at #1 is in your opinion the best page that’s ok, if it isn’t you need to find the best page and then optimize it.
So optimization. Keyword density checks are old hat. Put your keyword once in the meta title, once in the meta description, once in the meta keywords. Make the headline (h1 tag) include your phrase, then try to insert your phrase about 6 times on the page. You can use Firefox to highlight your search term on your page using the command ‘Ctrl-F’, a search box appears in the lower right, type in your phrase, and click ‘highlight all’
Linking is then key and I’ll hit on that another time.
Posted in Search Engine Optimization | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, June 17th, 2008
Web designers are expert at design. With that in mind most designers are not marketers and are unaware of the implications of online marketing. If you do not optimize your site it’s like designing a beautiful brochure and putting it in a drawer where no one can see it. Optimization opens your site up to search engine spiders and the people searching for your products and services.
Higher Rankings |Increased Traffic | More Sales
Internet marketing and search engine optimization are concerned with higher search engine rankings and increased traffic to your web site. If the traffic is targeted to your products and services it can increase your sales and business dramatically.
What is Special About Highly Ranked Sites?
Search engines such as Google use various criteria to determine which sites will rank highest for particular search terms. These include; the age of the domain, the meta tags, the site content and the links pointing to the site from other related sites. Therefore the highest ranking sites will be given to those that have been around for a while, have relevant meta tags and content relating to the search terms, and have links from other ranked sites with similar content. High ranking sites are deemed ‘authority’ sites.
To develop an authority site takes time. Google looks for lots of quality content on your site that is relevant to the topic of the site. To build great content you should analyze what search terms (keywords) people are using to find your site. Your money keywords are those that visitors who convert into customers use to find your site. Your meta tags and content should be written around those keywords. Update your content regularly. Also links pointing to your site should use these keywords (contextual links). All this tells the search engine spider what your site is about and how important is in regards to all the other sites relating to the keyword.
Therefore if you have a relatively new site (under 2 years old) with your company name as the meta tags, with poorly written content, and with no links pointing to your site it has little chance of being listed in the search engine results or viewed by searchers.
Essential 3 Steps in Search Engine Optimization:
- Define the keyword terms people are using to find your site and products
- Make sure your meta tags and site content reflect these terms
- Build up quality links from other sites using these terms
Posted in Linking and Publicity, Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »
Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008
When was the last time you bought a can of cola online? A television? Signed up for legal representation? While internet marketing is a great way to drive traffic to your website to generate sales or leads, there are still many people who either won’t or can’t purchase online. However, many of these people will do research online before going a bricks and mortar store to make their purchase or before picking up the phone to make an appointment. That is one reason why more and more businesses are actively using the internet to get their brand in front of a growing number of targeted eyeballs.
Branding helps because:
- It is your identity
- It communicates your message to others
- It builds reputation and trust
- It separates you from your competitors
Your online brand should be aimed at your target audience and be consistent with your offline brand profile.
Keep in mind that your brand is more than just your website. Consider all the other online avenues that your company and others use to publish information about your brand. Information within your control such as press releases, company blogs, articles, etc., can all find their way into search engine results. Information out of your control such as product reviews and customer opinions can also find their way into the results. Because there are external factors involved, many organizations are now monitoring what people are saying online about their brands.
A growing group of brand advocates – individuals who are inspired spokespersons on behalf of a brand, are rapidly gaining the attention and consideration of many businesses. Businesses are learning to nurture these advocates by feeding them the latest news, providing advance knowledge of updates, and most of all, listening to their opinions and ideas regarding products, services, advertising, and other aspects of the company-client relationship. These brand advocates can make or break the success of online brands.
The development of advocacy creates increased opportunities for the branding message to be passed on virally or by word-of-mouth. Web 2.0 or social networking sites play a pivotal role in the rapid spread of consumer related information about brands. These types of sites were developed so that individuals could communicate with others who shared similar tastes or outlooks.
Branding can no longer be thought of as something that can immediately be transferred from offline to online. Online branding in the Web 2.0 age requires a change of focus away from the company’s branding message towards the message formulated by the consumers of the brand. The strongest online brands are built on a foundation of brand advocacy coupled with a solid, consistent branding message from the parent company.
Posted in Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »
Friday, April 6th, 2007
Here is a way to build two useful and fee links to your site/sites
Linkedln
Naymz
Both of these sites enable you to include live links to your business site. They are also valuable as networking tools.
Posted in Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »
Friday, April 6th, 2007
Google Maps has a feature that allows for searches within a geographic location. You can see how these searches work by going to http://maps.google.com and clicking “find businesses” under the search box. This will divide the box into two: one for the business name or search term and the second for the location. As an example, type in “search engine optimization” and “Scottsdale, AZ” and click “Search Businesses.” Then click the balloon that corresponds to “Elixir Systems” and then “more info.”
This free feature allows businesses to provide as much information as they like: hours of operation, payments accepted, links to e-mail and website, etc. To add your business location to this feature, return to the main Google Maps page and click “Add/Edit Your Business” in the left-hand column. This will take you to Google’s “Local Business Center” where you can follow the instructions to create your listing. After you have registered, you will receive a postcard about a week later with a password for making future changes. This is to prevent anyone else from accessing your listing.
We suggest that any business with branches or franchises pass this information on to each location with instructions on how to register and coordinate your online branding. If you have only one office, it will be simple to enter your information and manage your listing.
Yahoo! has their local directory sign up at http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/local/lbl.php. They have a “Basic Listing” for free and “Enhanced” and “Featured” listings for a monthly fee.
Update: 3-12-2007
We want to advise you that Google has announced an update of these services. There are now more features available for you to use in listing your business.
If you visit the Local Business Center you can expand your listing by uploading photos, changing your address if you move, and choosing a category for your business. You can then provide “custom attributes” based on the category of your business.
Additionally Google is providing analytics of the Maps clicks you receive. This lets you see just how many people are viewing your listing.
We definitely recommend that all of our clients put this tool to good use. If you haven’t created your listing yet, do so today!
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