| Monday, 20 June 2011 13:00 | When you are done optimizing your web page for a certain keyword, you still have a lot of work left to do. You will need to continue monitoring your search engine phrases and their progress, to track how each of them is performing, to test and evaluate. If, for a certain length of time, your chosen key phrase does not perform as you expected, namely does not bring traffic or new conversions, you should definitely modify it or change it altogether. In this process, it will help you to analyze your competition and see how they are handling their key phrases. There is no use to sit and wait for your keyword to start performing if it already has not. Search engine optimization is not an exact science, it will require you to constantly tweak, test and apply modifications to your current solutions. If some keyword is not producing desired results, it may be a good idea to try with its synonyms. If your key phrases are attracting traffic but make n conversions, it is a sign that it needs additional fine-tuning. You need to determine whether a high traffic keyword worth is keeping if it does not make any conversions and is there a possibility to find a related keyword within your niche that will perform better. Adjusting your keyword as you go will eventually bring desired results, as opposed to sitting with your first selection of keywords and doing nothing. You can compare several keywords, see how they perform, keep the winners and discard the poor performing ones. For some reason people are reluctant to discard non-working keywords, hoping they will miraculously, some day, produce desired results. It is not going to happen and if some word is not working for you, you should definitely replace it. The sooner you do that, the sooner you will come up with a well performing key phrase that is going to do wonders for your business. It requires your action and active approach to search engine optimization. Do not be afraid to make changes. Adjustments and modifications are natural factors in this business. Keywords require constant monitoring. You will discover that same keywords perform differently in different seasons and you cannot expect that one keyword keeps bringing high traffic and conversions forever. The popularity of key phrases is something that fluctuates and in order to keep your business on top of the process, you will have to keep constantly an eye on your selection list and keep researching. If you wish to submit your articles to a well-established and popular Article Directory, choose our Free Article Directory and get published within 24 hours! Article Source:http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Una_Page Source: Ezine | | Thursday, 16 June 2011 13:00 | It is good to be aware that there are many factors that contribute when determining where a website ranks in search engines such as Google. Don't stop in just wondering why your site doesn't rank well and don't be contented on the obvious reasons. People finding your site in Google and other major sites would look into the content you are providing. They do search for it and this is the best opportunity to start directing/ pulling people to actively search for your content, creating significant traffic. As these extensive factors could determine website rankings it is equally important to get factors correctly applied to keep the ball rolling further and not just find yourself spinning your wheels. There are a good number of Google SEO factors that had been identified and posted, studying and applying them properly is incredible useful in the rankings of your site. The longer that your website has been online, the more established it has become; this is how the age of URL or domain helps for this builds trust. Using a reputable hosting company can play a large role in search rankings, thus it pays to spend a reasonable amount for hosting and not just settling on the cheapest ones. Making sure that on all your important pages you have good text consists of your targeted keywords is a critical factor, this makes content essential. The content of your website should be first and foremost be for humans not for the sole purpose of search engine ranking aiming to be user-friendly, provide value to visitors for them to keep coming back. Making sure that internal link structure is correct and easy made pathways connecting other pages from every page in your website can lead to easy navigation. Making it easy to use and interlinked correctly can help the user experience. Providing contact information, phone numbers or mailing address on each page of your website would make it easier and convenient for people to do business with you. This could be a great help to build trust to your target possible clients and beneficial to your rankings. Recreating or making changes and knowing what proper tracking could be applied to get visitors absorbed in your site could increase and improve your bounce rate over time and to avoid possible ranking in the long run. You'll know what websites are worth to be linked to that are the ones that are significantly relevant to your business and industry; this factor could send away your visitors and prospective clients. Examining these factors against your own efforts and finding ways to improve content and how to present your website or blog. It is good and beneficial to remember that as the Google algorithm (set of rules) changes there are always new ranking factors that could affect, always be updated and on the watch. What if you can't get more website traffic? Here's a "secret snowball traffic system" that has generated over 1,175,000 visitors for my tiny websites. Click Here Now to get this free video that will show you how to make it happen for your sites. http://www.jasonnyback.com/ezine Article Source:http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Jason_Nyback Source: Ezine | | Monday, 13 June 2011 13:00 | Every once in a while you come across a situation in which you must move your company's website to a new domain name. But if you move the site to a new domain name, you have to ensure that the search engines can find the new location, and that you hit as few ranking/traffic dips as possible. Why You May Need a New Domain Name The reasons for your new domain name can vary, ranging from the need to correct file names to create SEO friendly URLs to the need to establish your online identity as a part of your re-branding efforts. Here are a few examples of situations we've come across: You manage a hotel that was once part of a chain (Best Western, Marriott, etc.). But now, you're no longer a part of that chain becoming an independent property. If you old domain was something like city-best-western.com or city-bw.com, then you may feel the need to change the domain name. This is especially the case if you've walked away from the chain to pursue a new strategy that involves re-branding yourself. There have been a few cases where we've had to redirect sites due to the purchase or merging of companies. Once the parent company has established its ownership, it's time to bring the online presence into the fold. We work with a lot of small businesses that have recently moved from a home-made or dated website to something a little more professional. Often times this means they moved to WordPress (or would like to so as to start blogging) or another CMS that creates pages with file names that are not similar to those of the old site. Whatever the reason may be (as long as you're not jumping to a new domain name for SEO reasons) you'll need to take a few steps to make the redirect go as smoothly as possible. Gather Website Information First things first, we need to make sure we completely understand the site(s) in question. It helps to create a spreadsheet containing information on all of the pages of the site with at least: - The navigation title of each page
- The URL to each page
- The content of the pages
- The meta information on each page
Depending on the scope of your redirect, you may need to note additional or less information. It's also a good idea to notate the structure of the site, understanding the hierarchy of pages and sub pages. If you've got a particularly large site, then doing this by hand will be a pain. Instead, you can use the Screaming Frog SEO Spider tool to get an exportable list of most of that information. While you're taking notes, log into your traffic analyzer of choice and try to familiarize yourself with the amount of traffic your site receives, where it comes from and where it goes to. This one step will serve several purposes: - After the redirect is complete, you'll want to know if your traffic is moving up or down, and you'll want to notice as quickly as possible
- Understanding what pages of your site get the most traffic, and from where will help you plan your redirects appropriately.
- After all this is done, you'll want to update as many inbound links to your site as you can, and the best links are the ones that drive traffic to your site.
- If you've been tracking any rankings progress get an updated report for that as well. This way you can keep an eye out for any sudden drops.
Planning Once you've gathered as much information as you can (it's never too much), then it's time to start planning your redirects. If you're simply moving your site from one domain to another, then your planning will be minimal, but if you're doing this to a site or sites with pages that number in the hundreds or thousands, then get your pencil (mouse) and paper pad (spreadsheet application) ready. If you're acquiring a site as a part of a purchase then you're probably going to redirecting the old site to only certain portions of the parent website. If you're updating your site as a part of a redesign, you'll want to map out the old structure and new structure of your site. The Redirect To learn a little more about the types of redirects you can check out a previous post on the subject. Suffice to say, the grand majority of your redirects are going to be of the 301 type. This basically tells Google and other search engines that the site has permanently moved to a new location and redirect visitors to the new site quickly. Depending on the size of your site, you may want to move sections of your site at a time to make sure everything is working properly. We don't run into situations where this must be done, normally being reserved for sites with hundreds or thousands of pages. When you're moving a website from one domain to another, you don't want to simply redirect the whole website to the new domain name; rather redirect the pages to pages with similar content. This will help to minimize ranking/traffic dips as well as provide a smooth transition for your visitors. Make sure you are constantly testing your redirects. If it's a small site, you can easily check each page. If it's larger, you can use the Screaming Fog tool again. It's a good idea to manually check at least a few pages from each level of the site (including sub folders, categories, etc.). Check for any broken links or 404 errors. After The Redirect Once your redirects are in place and you've ensure that they are working properly, it's time to keep a vigilant eye on the site's health. Make sure you have all the proper tracking and reporting tools setup, and check your site's performance daily for a few days. It's also a good idea to make sure both of the domains are setup in Google Webmaster Tools, with submitted sitemaps. This will help you catch crawl errors that Google may experience. You can also run the Screaming Frog tool to make sure you don't have any broken links. As for the search engine results pages, 301 redirects can take effect within a day, or over the period of a few weeks. Again, this depends on the size of the sites and the and how the old and new site currently rank, etc. It's important to know that redirects only transfer a portion of the link value through them. So, even if you minimize ranking losses as best as you can and implement your 301 redirects flawlessly, you may still see a few dips in rankings. Give it a few weeks to make sure you haven't seen any problems, then begin pursuing as many of the best websites that link to you that you can. You'll want to have them update their link to reflect the new domain name or page. If this redirect was part of a business merger/acquisition, then surely there are press opportunities. If there are, then it would be a good idea to include links to the new site if applicable. Josh Garner is the owner of SEO Factor, an SEO company with a primary focus on servicing small businesses; providing a range of services including custom SEO solutions and consulting. Josh's SEO experience spans back to 2005 having since worked with companies large and small, helping them to increase their website's rankings and traffic. Article Source:http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Josh_Garner Source: Ezine | | Friday, 10 June 2011 13:00 | All good SEO starts with good keyword research. Whether you are focusing on on-page or off-page SEO, you have to know which keywords you are targeting if you want to experience any degree of success. Here's a quick guide for beginners to effective keyword research. Buying Keywords If you are selling products or services, it is a good idea to focus your efforts on 'buying' keywords. Keywords which incorporate 'cheap', 'offer', 'best' and other similar permutations generally mean that the searcher is looking for something to buy, making them exactly the sort of person who you want to land on your website. This doesn't mean you should not focus on other keywords. Information keywords are also worth targeting because people will often search for information on a subject before they decide to buy. However, knowing the distinction and choosing your keywords accordingly will help you to focus your efforts more effectively. Longtail Keywords Longtail keywords consist of two or more words, and sometimes many more. There are fewer searches made on these than less-specific keywords, but there are some good reasons to target them in your SEO campaigns. Longtail keywords are generally used by people who are further along the sales process. These searchers have done their general searches and have not found what they are looking for. Now they know exactly what they are looking for and they have made their search more specific as a result. Longtail keywords are also easier to rank for because there is normally less competition. This means that you can actually bring in a large number of very high-quality leads through targeting numerous longtail keywords instead of struggling to get to the top of the rankings by targeting less-specific keywords. Factors when Determining a Good Keyword Before you start to target a particular keyword, you will want to find out how easy or difficult it will be to rank for. You can start by using a free tool such as the Google AdWords Tool which will tell you the amount of searches that are made on the keyword, but after this you will want to find out exactly how competitive the keyword is. There are a number of such tools that you can use, both free and bought. These will provide you with important information on the first 10 websites which show up in a search result (the only ones which matter for SEO purposes), including: The number of backlinks to the page
The number of backlinks to the domain
The PageRanks
The on-site optimisation for the URL, title, description and header tags All of this information will provide you with what you need to know to determine how easy it will be to rank for a particular keyword. Alternatively, hire an SEO professional to help analyse these keywords to help you decide which ones to focus on. Spend Time on Keyword Research Keyword research is crucial for the success of any SEO campaign. However, it can sometimes be a difficult area to get right, and many people hire an SEO expert at this stage to ensure they are starting off on the right track. Whether you go it alone or use the help of an expert, make sure that you take keyword research very seriously because if not you can end up wasting a lot of time and effort. Marcus Miller is a marketing and SEO practitioner with more than ten years experience of driving visitors and sales to your business through website expertise. He aims to get traffic to your site and drive this traffic into tangible custom. If you would like more information about SEO work in Birmingham and how it can help your business, get in touch. So many businesses miss out on the opportunities available to them on the internet. Contact MArcus today to discuss how to expand your customer-base and increase opportunity: marcus@bowlerhatsolutions.co.uk Article Source:http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Marcus_J_Miller Source: Ezine | | Saturday, 04 June 2011 13:00 | Search Engine Optimization has become an overpriced, and under reported sector of the internet marketing industry. Knowing which company to trust, the big ones, or the one man operations is a tough call. This is largely because of the huge number of SEO companies that claim to be great, but who are really just American sales companies of Indian, or Filipino labor. There should be an easy solution to problem; buy directly from the people doing the work. Unfortunately it is usually very difficult to do that, and that is why big SEO firms can charge so much money to do it for us. Let's talk about why it's difficult, and how you can overcome the obstacles to save money on Search Engine Optimization. The first, perhaps, most obvious obstacle is that most people don't speak the language that people overseas speak. In the Philippines people speak Tagalog, and one of 170 other dialects, and English. Some people are surprised by this, and to others, it is not a surprise. In fact, you would be hard pressed to find someone in most cities in the Philippines who does not speak English. The beauty of the situation for American companies looking for SEO Outsourcing help is that Filipinos are taught American English from elementary school through college. This is slightly different from Oxford English that is spoken in England, Australia, and many other places around the world including India. India was a British Colony, and they speak Oxford English. Great news for people in the UK who are looking for SEO Outsourcing! In reality, the difference in English is not big enough to impact your SEO efforts. Ok, great, they speak English, but how do you find someone who understands Search Engine Optimization enough to hire them? There are countless job boards that you can use to find your outsourced labor. Most of them require a fee, but it is well worth paying for services that connect you to qualified people. Beware of people who abuse the job boards, however. You will find that most job boards only require applicants to fill out a form where they describe their skills. This adds an important interviewing step to the process. Make sure to set up a Chat or Skype interview with your potential employee, before you hire them. Ask them questions about Search Engine Optimization tasks that you will be assigning to them. This will help you identify who will really be able to help your business, and who just needs a job. The next obvious challenge is managing someone once you find and interview them. If you are an expert with Excel or Google Docs, and you happen to find an SEO expert overseas who is too, you can probably give them assignments, and monitor their work in a couple hours every day. If you don't know how to use spreadsheets very well, however, this step is the most difficult to solve. There are many paid task management solutions available to help with this. Generally, you should expect to pay a monthly fee for your task management provider. The learning curve can be steep, if you try to do it alone, but it is doable and highly valuable. Big SEO firms wouldn't do it if it wasn't profitable. In fact, the standard for SEO fulfillment in the industry is about 10%. This means that 90% of what you are paying goes to pay the sales team, lead generation groups, spiffs, and advertising efforts for the company you are buying from. Then they pay the person doing the work 10%. Outsourcing your own SEO efforts can save you as much as 90%. To me that is worth the hurdles. Currently I manage a team of over 50 outsourced employees doing tasks such as content generation, AdWords management, video production, directory submissions, social bookmarking, and more. I use SEO Queue to clear all of the hurdles mentioned above. It's not the only service that will do it, but it is the only service that will clear them all. Source: Ezine | | Wednesday, 01 June 2011 13:00 | Permalinks are keys to your Internet success. How you choose to treat them will largely influence the success of your website. The beginner takes whatever the blog or site host automatically assigns. Usually this is a system of letters and numbers after the root name of the site. It is ugly, trashy, and unprofessional. Search engines think so, and so does the naked eye. Luckily, platforms such as WordPress have enabled site owners to take charge of their permalinks and incorporate the mastery of search engine optimization for a cleaner overall experience. If you are wanting to improve the grade of your site on the search engines, then pay close attention to your permalinks and make sure they are SEO ready. But to do that, you will have to start with the actual content. The content of a blog or site should have a solid, keyword heavy headline, and the body should follow closely what the headline promises to the reader. That means if you are going to write about "How to Fix a Leaky Toilet," your article needs to actually be about how to fix a leaky toilet. Use at least 10 keyword specific tags, such as "plumbing issues," "leaky toilet," and "fix toilet," as you work to build the page's notoriety. Once you have made certain the tags, text and headline are in agreement as to the main point of the post, give that headline one last look and decide whether or not you have made the best decisions with regards to the title. Once you've published, you can always go back in and try to fix the permalink, but it is far better if you take care of it the first time around and don't let the default take over. The purpose behind SEO readying your permalink is to make it as attractive as possible to readers and, in turn, search engines. The more pages that you have, whether they be posts or categories or anything else, the more relevant you will seem to places like Google, Bing, and Yahoo! Search engine optimization is not something that you can run from and expect to be successful. It is important that you learn how your hosting platform handles these, and that you make sure your pages are as descriptive as they can be with regard to the keywords people are using online to search for your information. Hosting companies that give this information to their users upfront are the ones to hold on to. It's important that you know how everything works ahead of time, so you don't waste a lot of quality effort on technical screw-ups that can set your site back for years. The little details can make a big difference. Source: Ezine | | Sunday, 29 May 2011 13:00 | Whether you like it or not, Google will have a say on the direction and the future profitability of your website. As of last count, Google is still the world' s leading search engine thus their Search Engine Results Pagers or the SERPs and their results still matters. And if you can score high up on their SERPs then that mean that you are doing well in terms of optimizing your site with SEO services. And this also means that you are not violating any guidelines that were set by the giant Google. Now the guidelines that were drafted by the site are highly comprehensive. But if you would like to get a sneak peak as to what the Google truly likes, then here is a listing of the quality guidelines as approved by the search engine. Get these quality guidelines into play, and you will be safe in the eyes of the spiders of Google. And you know what it means, right? It will only mean that you can compete well on the SERPs. · When developing the contents for the website, make sure that the web pages are generated and drafted not for the search engines but for the benefit of the users. It is recommended that users should not be deceived, or the users should not be presented with contents that were not displayed in the SERPs. Search engines call this as cloaking. In line with this, there are specific actions that you may want to avoid. For example, try avoiding the use of keywords that are not relevant to the content of the site. Some publishers use highly popular keywords simply for generating traffic yet these keywords are not linked and relevant to the content. · The quality guidelines also frown on tricks that can improve rankings. · Right now, link exchange is a popular option in order to increase the relevancy and the ranking of the website. There is nothing wrong in exchanging links, provided that the link exchange is done in a natural way. But when it comes to link schemes and practices that are questionable, then forget about this. Most search engines can tell if these are done through questionable link schemes. One good suggestion to be kept in mind is to avoid the links that come from web spammers or avoid links coming from bad neighborhoods. Links to these sites will undermine the relevancy and the integrity of your website. · It is also now common to find automated programs that submit pages and check rankings. The problem with this is that Google don't acknowledge this as a legitimate move. A check with the webmaster guidelines of Google reveal a number of specific tips, and it's wise that you are aware of these. The list further includes the need to avoid the hidden texts or hidden links, avoidance of sneaky redirects, the avoidance of automated queries to search engine and the loading of irrelevant keywords. From the guidelines, it may seem that this is all hard work. But if you are intent of doing well online and doing well on Google, then it pays to do SEO services along the line of the set guidelines. This will pay your site in the long run, and this is a wise investment. Source: Ezine | | Thursday, 26 May 2011 13:00 | With the discovery of online webpages as the ideal marketing tools for all types of businesses, the World Wide Web has turned into a market place not only for business or company websites but also for rising SEO marketing companies. As the latter offer services that will ensure higher online viewership or visibility for small scale and large scale businesses alike, companies remain in constant search for the best one that can provide their needs. Landing on the first page of major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing and MSN provides businesses easy access to their target markets as these are the places where people type away their searches for products or services that they need. However, these search engines update their algorithms every now and then. Along with other adjustments, they add more features too. With these, online rankings of company webpages are affected. As part of the online marketing strategy, SEO marketing companies target this problem with a variety of services that they provide. Once hired, they ensure their customer's websites are updated with the latest SEO guidelines and methodologies that will maintain them at top natural rankings on different search engines resulting to an increase in their return of investment. Although most of these companies promise top shelf promotion and strategies in getting any business website on the first page of search engine results, you, being a business and business website owner must be keen in observing which companies can really help you or can actually harm your webpage's online ranking. Before you go on to choosing the best one among a long list of SEO marketing service providers, do consider the pointers that follow. As these SEO marketing companies vow to put your website on top of the search engine rankings, you might first want to check if they implement their expertise in maintaining their websites on the first page of search engines. As the saying goes, "walk your talk". Conduct a simple relevant keyword search and see which of these companies grab the top spot in the search engine result pages. Seeing them there is a good testimony of the quality service that they provide. If you are not content with that, do some background check by searching for feedback from their past and current clients, experience in the industry and delivery schedule. Secondly, having an immediate access to search engine marketing specialists who are wealthy of knowledge and resources is another plus. There will not be any need to hire another team that would take care of some extra responsibilities since these specialists can take care of the complete process of web promotion. Given the fact that these companies offering almost the same services with a slight difference in the way they deliver, you can always see if they make use of the best SEO practices especially in the area of search engine optimization. Besides all the technical stuff, values or work ethics is another thing that you can take in consideration when choosing the ideal company that you are going to work with. Most SEO marketing companies, left and right are driven with the amount of money that they are to receive from a deal in expense of being untruthful to their clients regarding what is going to be attainable or unattainable from their demands. Make sure that the company that you are going to choose esteems objectives, timescales and targets so that achievements can be easily measured. Being assured that you will be provided with development reports all throughout the operation that you hired the company for is an advantage too. Source: Ezine | |
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