SEO News

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!

How important is your Landing Page to your online business? Very much. Brick Marketing, a respected online marketing solutions company with above 10 years of experience in the field of Search Engine Optimization, is pleased to declare a new, exciting category that is being added to their informative Search Engine Optimization Journal and the Brick Marketing blog network. This new category is all about Landing Page Optimization and how it can drive even more sales and visitors to your website.

Good landing pages can increase the conversion rates of any online business. Hence, it is important to know how it works. The Landing Page Optimization category is a huge addition to the Brick Marketing blog network. This will inform readers about the marketing tool aspects of landing pages, and how landing pages can work for them. One of the key things that the Landing Page Optimization category of the Search Engine Optimization Journal will cover is the makings of a good landing page. It will cover different topics about what makes a good landing page, such as:

• Keeping content simple but sufficiently sophisticated
• Working from a style sheet
• Including purchase buttons
• Image optimization
• Using sales-oriented material

However, the Landing Page Optimization category will not just discuss what makes a good landing page. It will also discuss other topics that can take your good landing page and make it into a spectacular one that draws in more clients and sells more products. Some of the topics that will also be discussed in the Landing Page Optimization category of the Search Engine Optimization Journal comprise:

• Photo optimization
• Using specific keyword phrases
• Making your landing page stand out
• Local search marketing
• Image optimization

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.

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.

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!

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!