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!

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 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.

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.

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!

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!

If for some reason, wordpress won’t work for you, finding the right SEO Content Management System (CMS) for your business can significantly benefit your company, saving you both time and resources. The right SEO CMS can attract invaluable exposure from major search engines across the internet, so long as all prerequisites are met and basic requirements are satisfied.

How to procure a healthy SEO CMS investment that will continue to benefit your company. Before we get into specifics, you may want to compile an inventory of all the current issues you would like to see changed, resolved, enhanced, or eliminated and be sure that the company you are collaborating with is capable of handling and resolving all of your concerns.

Now, it’s obvious that there isn’t a system out there that knows your companies website better than you and your team, so clearly mapping out a hierarchy of the site in the early phases would be a great idea. Be sure to include all of the categories, listings, headings, sub-categories, pages etc, etc. Doing this will provide you with a clear image of your end goal and allow you to see if an SEO CMS is going to be required. Your SEO CMS should be able to accomplish all of the following features and functions:

• The capability of adding distinctive page headings on pages throughout the whole site
• The ability to produce URLs that are easily recognized by popular search engines by utilizing keywords from the home page within the URL.
• Complete access to the site’s chief navigation and the capability to influence and apply code changes if ever necessary
• The capability of easily adding distinct Meta’s such as Meta Keywords, Meta Description,
• Error redirection: Anytime site redirection is required, error 301/302 will appear your SEO CMS should be on top of this issue and have it resolved in minutes, no excuses. If a redirection is required, the problem must be addressed and resolved.
• Must be current and up to date with all W3C standards that can densely influence HTML validation. Watching HTML tags and cutting out lose rear code weight on pages. Not factoring in these basic requirements may not necessarily influence rankings negatively, but will considerably aid the website’s accessibility, if this process is completed correctly, document size should shrink significantly (100kb seems to be a desirable size). This system will improve the overall experience by slashing on site load times.

Their systems should dispense SEO statistics for virtually all pages.

Common used statistics usually consist of:

• All keyword rankings on popular search engines
• Inventory of all keywords on each page
• Keyword density for page next to each set
• Number of sub pages beneath primary page
• Overall Page Ranking
• Keyword rankings on major search engines if any

Templates and Blueprints

All of the Blueprints should be completely 100% customizable here are some basic factors that you should understand should your SEO CMS be taking advantage of template use. Your SEO CMS should adopt different template styles that can each be associated with different status directories SEO CMS should inquire to you about the preferred template for newly created pages. Though not necessarily directly related to the SEO part of CMS, the following are important features to look out for:

Tech support: Simple, when there’s a problem, you want to be able to contact your CMS to ensure that the problem will be resolved A.S.A.P. you are running a business here. A company with good tech support is definitely something you’re going to want to keep an eye out for.

Site back up: Is your CMS capable of website back-up? This feature is definitely something your going to want to look for because it can be a lifesaver should Murphy’s Law decide to step in, consider it an integral insurance policy for a rainy day.

Multiple User Access with varying levels of access? Having multiple user accounts is also a handy feature that definitely comes in handy if you hope to divide work loads amongst team members. Different levels of access ensure that you remain a top administrator with full control, while providing access and permission to other users. Over the course of your read I hope I was able to enlighten you on some core aspects and expectations of SEO CMS, by now, you are prepared enough to choose a CMS that will suit your business’ needs and fit all your requirements.

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!

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!

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.