SEO News

The title tag plays a vital role in attaining high search engine rankings. Google uses page titles to help determine what your web page is about. If you want google to decide that your page is about “Search Engine Optimization”, then “Search Engine Optimization” should be in the page title. If you are serious about getting more clickthroughs on the search engine results page, the words of your title tags can do wonders for you as they appear on the clickable link of the SERP. Of late, title tags have been considered as an effective search engine marketing tool and are one of the big three factors of algorithmic optimization of the search engine. A well written title tag can make a fast as well as considerable difference to your page rank.

The knack of effective title tag writing is to incorporate the keyword on which your content is based. However, make sure it doesn’t look contrived or contorted. The ideal way to utilize your keywords and key phrases in the title tags is in synchronization with the visible body text. This will solve two goals. Firstly, it will increase your website ranking. Secondly, it will generate a link between the visible text and alt text of the page. Not every search engines optimizer considers it as a potential technique. But, those who do will vouch for its success! Just make sure not to repeat the keywords in title tags. Also remember to restrict the title tag of your page within 90 characters else you will have to face penalization from Search engine.

Tips for Better Search Engine Ranks

If you own a website, you probably want people to see it. If you want people to see it, then you better be high up on google for some popular keywords. In today’s competitive world, higher search engine ranks are considered to be the holy grail of internet marketing. It’s actually not as hard as you might think to get placed high on Search Engine Results Pages ( SERP). The problem is many of us have no idea how to begin.

It’s not necessary to know about search engine optimization inside out to be successful. However, certain basic tricks definately help. Here are a few tips to help you get higher rankings and boost traffic for your website on major search engine rankings.

Optimize your site on an extensively researched keyword phrase

Do extensive research while selecting your keyword phrases. Ideally, the phrases should be popular, and the websites that turn up in Google when you type in the keyword shouldn’t be very good (they should have a low Pagerank). Always take into account what the niche viewers are might be looking for. For better search engine traffic, long-tail keyword phrases are the way to go. It’s good for sales too as you get highly targeted traffic searching exactly what you are offering them. You can take the help of some advanced research tools such as Wordtracker, KeywordDiscovery, or even Google’s Keyword Tool to find the optimal phrases for your site.

Well managed Links guarantee higher rank

The tremendous importance of linking can be understood when you realize that todays major search engines use the quality and quantity of incoming links in their ranking algorithms. Simply put, if your site has more inbound links, search engines would give a ranking boost to your site based on the links. Search engines consider only those links that are from quality sites having relevant content. Don’t worry if your site doesn’t have many links. You can start link building and get some. Participating in blogs and forums with your signature link to your web site is a great way to have serious link building. However, don’t opt for ‘link farms’ as it will have an adverse effect on your search engine ranks.

Title bar can be used to optimize the keywords

Title bar is an effective and yet often the most overlooked feature of any page. Most of the time you would observe when the browser opens your home page or any other page for that matter, it generally displays either untitled or your site’s name. But it can be used to contain your most important keywords on your homepage. But make sure to use distinct keywords, and the length should be restricted within six words. Also avoid using very long keyword strings.

Build your site as “crawler-friendly.”

It doesn’t matter what scripts you have used for links and menus of your site, but it’s a good idea to have some form of HTML links in the main navigation on every page which link to the top-level pages of your site. This alternative means of navigation is helpful for the search engine crawlers to pick the relevant links.

Hope the tips discussed above will be helpful in boosting traffic for your site. Remember, a properly optimized site having high search engine ranking for every page helps it to attract many highly targeted visitors who may eventually become serious prospects!

An interview with Matt Cutts, a software engineer for Google, was recently released onto youtube. Though the interview talks about the best way to promote hotels online, there is some good information here.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaKBU3EuTCs - part 1.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=meo3kUZuhCY - part 2.

They began the interview by asking Cutts what initiatives a small company should take to gain exposure.

He responded with “Content is King” implying that in order to build a reputable, credible and easily found site, you must have content!

They shortly after began discussing how getting a website up is an essential and integral part of developing a client base. Everyone uses the internet, and if you want to increase your exposure, a website is one of the easiest and best ways to do so. Next, after getting a site up, is getting a blog up, Cutts says. Blogs allow you to gather relevant back-links for your site earning you a higher page rank in Google’s index. When it comes to naming your site, avoid multiple domains, (i.e. Plurals, misspellings, etc. etc.) keep it simple or people will get confused and forget the domain name.

Near the end of the interview Cutts was asked what part of developing a successful site is most important. Is it the research, content, design, or marketing?

Well if you do everything properly they will all flow together nicely. Research comes first, you want your articles to be well informed, and stuffed with valuable information that users will find useful. If your site is a good source of information, then people will tell their friends and before you know it you’ll have a successful website. Once the research and content aspect is done, work on promoting your site through a blog, or through other highly credible, highly relevant sites. Links for sites that are related to yours are very valuable.

The interview ended shortly after but not before providing us with some great info. Be sure to check it out!

Link-bait is a well known and well utilized tool that many webmasters use frequently in order to pull more traffic into a link. One popular method of link-baiting is controversial debate; start up a heated topic and watch the people come.

A few other methods of link baiting:

• General discussion - Entice users to add their two cents to the topic at hand, discussion can be about current events, controversial articles, or anything in between.
• Offers - Offer users something in return for visiting your site, a joke, a fun game you enjoy playing on the net, or some cooking tips.
• Images - Putting up a few cute, funny, or scary images can bring users in, who doesn’t like taking a minute out of their day to check out some photos

Now, Link-baiting sounds like a deceptive trick used by malicious webmasters in an attempt to suck hits from unsuspecting users, but really, Link-baiting can be a fun or informative experience for both parties.

Consider Link-baiting in your next project, see if you can find any useful strategies. Just don’t fool people or deceive them, they usually get pretty angry when they’ve been had.

Chances are you’ve heard about Keyword Density, but what exactly is it? Well, an articles keyword density is a measurement (most often expressed in the form of a percentage {%}) conveying the abundance of a specific word or phrase (the keywords/key phrase). A simple example shows this nicely, If your webpage is about learning how to horseback ride then a sample keyword would be something like “Horse Riding” or “Horseback Lessons” even something as simple as “riding lessons” could suffice as long as you word the article appropriately. Google offers several tools to help you understand Keyword Density, simply type “‘Keyword Density” into the Google search bar. One tool is expressed as an easy to read chart, as seen below.

Notice how certain tools secure a higher prominence rating than if they were not used. Titles, Meta-tags, and Sub-headings all score higher ratings.

Why does keyword density matter? Well, Popular search engines like Google and Yahoo use keyword Density (amongst other things) to determine the ranking of each site in their index. The right keyword density can help you achieve a higher rank. However, this does not mean that cramming as many keywords in as possible is going to put you up top. They have security features to ensure this doesn’t happen, the spiders that crawl your page will instead recognize your page as spam and ignore it. It has been rumoured that Google has a Golden % for keyword density. But instead of writing for the search engine, write for your audience, your articles and pages will flow more naturally and have more relevant content.

ogs are popular on the net today; chances are that if you don’t have one, someone you know does. Blogs are incredibly useful tools when it comes to creating back-links for a website, and anyone that can, should take full advantage of this capability.

It is well known that the best place to post your blog is on a content thin site, one where your articles will generally attract a fair bit of interest, this way your back links will be more active

Blog readers are read blogs because they enjoy being entertained, or informed by other, regular people. Blogs are a great way to get information fast and if your blog is credible and reliable, your readers will tell friends eventually earning you back links

A good strategy for using a blog to collect back-links is to write a blog that is highly relevant to your original site, the higher the relevance, the more valuable the site is to Page Rank

Consider finding a template for your blog to keep your links organized together, and separate from your main text. A template can also help users navigate more easily. Here are some basics of promoting your blog:

Fundamentals of Promoting.

1) Find other relevant blogs and link back to each other.
2) Contact highly relevant, highly credible sites and ask them to link your site
3) Link-bait your blog with a teaser for cool info.

What benefits does linking to other blogs provide you with? Well you are spreading exposure, earning a higher page rank, and gathering important back-links!

If possible, Ping your blog entry, that way every time there is an update, the hosting site will be informed and will re-crawl for the updates keeping you current.

On top of Pinging your blog, submit your blog to as many directories as possible, often times these directories will take care of the pinging for you.

It’s very important that your site has a blog to gather back-links for it. As any SEO firm knows, back-links are an immensely important factor in gaining page rank.

Every year, companies around the world are discovering that their business’ website is serving little to no purpose. Often times, the sites haven’t pulled in any profit for the companies, simply because they aren’t generating any traffic. And why should they?

These sites are often poorly made, and jam packed full of useless information making it difficult for Google to categorize the site properly. This leaves the site with a low ranking in Google’s index, causing the business to lose potential customers.

Immediately after realizing the error of their ways, marketing personnel will scramble to get a hold of an SEO company in order to solve their problems.

What some people don’t know is that your average, traditional SEO firm focuses primarily on Text Optimization, often pushing Image Optimization to the back of the bus if not right out the door. Image optimization is an entire corner of the SEO industry, why not take full advantage?

Core Principles of Image Optimization

Image Optimization is a useful tool that has been utilized in web design for several years. Optimizers are aware that by incorporating the use of relevant images into their web pages, they are accessible not only to the text engine search, but image search as well.

In order to understand how Image Optimization works, and to successfully apply it in web design, you should first understand that not every pixel will require optimization.

Here are a few fundamentals to consider when optimizing images.

Four Basics:

1) Quality - Is the image of acceptable quality?
2) Relevance - Is the image relevant to the content surrounding it?
3) Appropriate labelling - Is the label relevant to the image?
4) Image Format - Consider adopting a template for strategic placement.

Its true that a Picture is worth a thousand words, so be sure to find an SEO agency that fully utilizes every tool at its disposal!

Writing your own articles can be a challenging task, not everyone is a proficient and skilled writer, believe me, I know. There’s a nifty trick out there that can save you time if you are hoping to generate your own content. Summarizing and re-writing or editing someone else’s articles can be a great way to quickly compile loads of content, just be sure to have the original authors permission!

There are a several ways to get content that you wish to modify. For instance, two sample methods are:

Tracking down some nice articles on the net and contacting the author to ask for permission.

The second way is to higher writers for you, generally writers are cheap and will often sell you the rights to their work.

Avoid, at all costs, infringing on copyrighted material, you will be sued!

Here is a list of very useful, very practical places to find content.

• Websites - Just be sure to ask for permission if borrowing content.
• Guest Generated Content - Create a Forums section on your website, or a small Q & A section, this will allow guests to generate content for you unknowingly!
• Content Syndication Sites - these sites contain free content for you to borrow, the only catch is you must provide a back-link to the home site.
• Government - Any content produced by the American Government is free, this is not to be confused with material produced FOR the American Government. Exclusions include the postal service and the national technical information service
• Hire a Writer - Consider hiring a University student as a part or full time writer to generate original content for you, this is often a cheap and effective solution to your content problems.
• Open Content - Content that falls under this category is free to re-use and modify as long as you do not claim original ownership. For more information, conduct a Google search on “copyleft content”

Whether finding content in order to modify it, or generating your own, be sure to keep the content relevant to your site, this is SEO! Also I cannot stress this enough, do not forget to ask permission from original authors!

In the beginning, Search Engine Optimization was a simple task. One could just throw in as many keywords and phrases as possible and create a relevant tag and Google’s index would give it a high ranking. Unfortunately for us, things have changed a bit; Google has wizened up, and learnt that they must rely on more than just keyword density to determine Page Rank. Today, Google uses over 200 determining factors to decide a websites position in its indexes.

Shortly after Google adopted new defences from keyword spamming, a new form of “cheating the system” was being utilized by the masses. Webmasters began buying and trading links in large amounts. Back-links were the new key to success and there was no shortage of willing webmasters awaiting a trade.

Google was forced to adapt again, they wanted to create a system that would apply value to every link on your page, if the link was relevant to the information on your page, it would score higher, if it was a useless link acquired in trade or from a quick purchase, it would score much lower if anything at all. Of course the more valuable links you have, the higher your Page ranking in the index.

Every year Google invests more and more money into their algorithms in order to protect their functionality. They want to ensure that relevance remains a top priority when indexing websites.

When Google employed its “Big Daddy” update, sites that had been swapping links and webmasters that had been purchasing them excessively were punished. Some were even banned from the search engines for their actions

The key to scoring a high ranking in Google’s index is to essentially write for your audience, not for the search engine. If you write naturally your website will be recognized by Google for that and will score higher.

Here are a few more tips to help you out:

• Flash and JavaScript sites are un crawl able by search engines! Avoid them!
• Predict what phrases or words your audience will use when looking for you in Google’s search bar, incorporate them into your articles.
• Contact other sites closely related to yours and share links. These related links will score you points ( Avoid excessiveness )

When utilizing SEO strategies, do try to avoid confrontation with marketing strategies!

The two have a past of not blending well. Instead try to apply them into each other, find a comfortable median in which you can advertise your site while collecting back-links at the same time. Sites like Digg, Reddit, and community forums are fantastic promotional tools.

Remember these key points and you’ll be fine!

• Design your site for your audience, not your favorite search engine.
• Stay away from irrelevant links; they may harm you in the long run.
• Explore popular relevant sites and inquire about a partnership or shared link.

Trying to fool search engines is just that; foolish. Instead of trying to earn a higher page rank by “beating the system” just earn it; collect, build, or write quality content and you will success will find you.

The following guidelines, specifically the “Quality Guidelines”, are intended to help your site rank higher in Google’s search index. This article will also outline specific illicit material which may have your site removed from Google and their partner sites indexes.

Once Your Site is Ready:

Procure as many back-links as physically possibly. ( have sites link back to yours ) Use http://www.google.com/addurl.html to submit your site to Google. Double check, and be sure that every site that should know about you, does.

Guidelines for Content

• Frequently scan your site for dead links and broken links as well as HTML.
• Your site should have a clearly presented hierarchy with links to route users through each page.
• Ensure that your sites Title and other headings are descriptive and practical.
• An easily accessible site map will help users navigate your site.
• Be sure to populate your site with rich content that directly relates to your product service, or message. Skip the jabberwocky and stay focussed!
• Be reasonable, having over 100 links on one page is to cluttered and confusing, consider dividing the load between a few pages.
• Include Key Phrases and Words throughout your site that people would search for in Google. ( i.e. if you are a potter from Toronto, spread the phrase “Toronto Pottery” throughout your site )
• The Google Crawler wont pick up images so avoid important bytes of info in picture form, text is best.

Tech Guide

• Take full advantage of the robots.txt file your web server offers, this will tell spiders what they can and cannot scan, keep it up to date, you wouldn’t want to block the Googlebot Spider. To learn how to direct the bots when they find your site check out the following link: http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/faq.html
• If possible, using a text browser to examine your site can be a real plus, simply because most users see your site just as the browser would. Search Engine Crawlers might have difficulty scanning your site if certain features like JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep are in place.
• Be sure that your server supports “If-Modified-Since HTTP” header. Doing so will inform Google that a change has been made since the last scan.
• Investing in a Search Engine Optimization Content Management system such as Bergstrom Solutions might be a good idea, as they usually take care of much of this stuff.

Quality guidelines

• Firstly, DO NOT assume that just because we have not specified a certain manipulative technique that Google or any other popular search engine will necessarily approve of it.
• These are merely guidelines or, suggestions if you will.
• Spending time following the core principles relayed in these guidelines will reward you with a higher ranking than those who simply cheat the system by exploiting loopholes.

Core Principles - A Guideline

• When creating pages, know your audience, don’t forget that you are writing for people, not Google’s Spider Bot. Avoid “cloaking” your site by deceiving Google’s Bots. People don’t appreciate when their time is wasted.
• Don’t manipulate the Crawler Bots to improve your rankings. If you can’t reveal your secrets to your competitors, then chances are you shouldn’t be utilizing these secrets.
• Don’t fall prey to the many schemes out there that claim to improve your site ranking, these gimmicks can often permanently brand your site as a bad apple.
• Unauthorized programs submitting pages are a big no-no as they violate Google’s terms of Service. Google Typically frowns upon the use of automated submitting programs

Specific guidelines -

• Never create a site with malicious intent, creating Virus’s, worms, file cracks etc. are illegal
• Cloaking and manipulative techniques are frowned upon
• Avoid irrelevant keywords, there is no sense wasting space.
• Avoid duplicating text, pages, files, documents, etc. again, there’s no sense in wasting space.
• Stray away from hidden text/ links.
• If your site is in collaboration with another site, or maybe even several other sites, be sure to add relevant and useful content. Give people a reason to visit you!

If your site meets and/or exceeds these guidelines congratulations, if not, don’t worry, you can always make the appropriate alterations and re-submit your site to Google!