1 Hour To Great Results with Sycara

The Sycara SEO tool is great for quick site audits and the results for the time invested are outstanding. The steps for a quick one hour audit are:

1. Login to your Sycara account.
2. Add your site to the Sycara system using the ‘Add Site’ menu option – supply the site name and site URL and hit save.
3. When the ‘Next Steps’ options appear click ‘Visit Site Dashboard’
4. Gather your list of top keywords and turn them in a CSV format on one line i.e. diamond watch, gold ring.
5. Under ‘Site Settings’ -> ‘Map Keywords’ click the down arrow on the blue bar and select ‘Add Keywords’ – cut and paste your CSV keyword string here.
6. To the left of each keyword click the down arrow and ‘Best Page’ option and select a URL to map this keyword to.
7. From the menu bar select ‘Reports’ -> ‘Report Scheduler’
8. Click the ‘Create Report’ button, select ‘Keyword Ranking’ and click the ‘Run’ button.
9. Click the ‘Create Report’ button, select ‘Site Audit’ and click the ‘Run’ button.
10. Click the ‘Create Report’ button, select ‘SEO Optimization’ and click the ‘Run’ button.

The reports will be complete in about 15 minutes… have a coffee while you wait…

Go to ‘Reports’ -> ‘Report History’

1. When the ranking report arrives check your site’s rankings – this is your baseline.
2. When the Site Audit Report is available, click the report and scan down it – any time you see any numbers in the ‘Alert’ or ‘High’ columns click the number and view the recommendations. Correct all the Alerts and as many highs as you can.
3. When the SEO Optimization Report is available, click the report and scan down it – any time you see any numbers in the ‘Alert’ or ‘High’ columns click the number and view the recommendations. Correct all the Alerts and as many highs as you can.
4. If you have time left from the one hour allocated correct as many normal issues as you can too.

If this is work destined for another person to implement:

1. Open up Word or the equivalent.
2. Screen capture the ranking report and paste into the Word Document.
   For each Keyword add a headline with the keyword – URL combination.
   For each issue in the site audit cut and paste the text into the word document.
   For each issue in the SEO optimization report cut and paste the text into the word document.
3. For non-keyword mapped URL issues shown in the site audit add these under a section called ‘Other Pages’

All completed in around 30 minutes.

It is recommended these reports are scheduled every two weeks to fully optimize your site in the organic search results.

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Who Can Benefit from SEO?

The information super highway. The World Wide Web. Cyberspace. While there are many different names, it all boils down to one thing — �the Internet. It is through all of these names that we begin to realize what a large part the Internet plays in our lives. Most of us in Western culture use it on a daily basis for correspondence, information, and entertainment. We would be disoriented and disconnected if the Internet were suddenly unavailable.

One of the key components of the Internet is search engines. Search engines can provide answers to nearly every question in a matter of seconds, from fashion and trivia to weather and services. An important part of what makes search engines effective is search engine optimization , or SEO. SEO is a process of understanding the ranking and visibility of a given webpage. Some companies and website administrators go to great lengths and use an SEO tool to help them monitor and assess their website’s position and ensure that they stay within a certain range. SEO is important to businesses and organizations because it allows them to be more accessible to current and potential clients. The more visible the site is, the more likely they are to receive visitors.

Businesses, however, are not the only ones to benefit from good SEO . As a Web surfer you want to be sure that when you search for something you are getting the most relevant results. The more websites that understand and utilize SEO, the more competitive the sites will be, and the more relevant the results will be.

The Internet is constantly growing and changing. What worked one day may not work the next day. When businesses stay on top of the changes, they not only receive the benefit of additional visitors but the customers receive the benefit of finding the website quickly and easily. It is a winning situation for everyone.

Posted in Search Engine Optimization | 2 Comments »

Making a Career of Online Reputation Management

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.

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Page Load Speed Part of Google’s Algorithm

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 »

Robots.txt validator

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.

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SEO Site Review – http://www.silvaheeren.com

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 »

Return of Pages Indexed and Link Quality Tool

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 »

How to Get More Traffic to Your Site

This post is not about ‘how to get more traffic to your site’ its about how to get the right traffic to your site.

Posted in Search Engine Optimization | 1 Comment »

Why Do You Need SEO?

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:

1. Define the keyword terms people are using to find your site and products
2. Make sure your meta tags and site content reflect these terms
3. Build up quality links from other sites using these terms

Posted in Linking and Publicity, Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »

The Importance of Online Branding

When was the last time you bought a can of cola online?

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