Tag Archives: seo

Top 5 Reasons You’re Invisible on Google

Posted on by

It’s incredibly frustrating to put all the time and energy that you have into starting a local small business only to find out that no one can even find you on Google. Before you throw in the towel and start investing your hard earned money on pay per click (PPC), here’s a tip on affordable SEO for small business; Investigate if these are some reasons you’re not ranking and fix them.

1. Under Optimizing Your Website

There are some simple things Google looks for on your site. Find out what your main goal is for your business, find your keywords and implement them in good content. Google will see that you may be useful for someone looking up those key words and rank you higher for them. Avoid a lot of flash, images with content you want read, or dynamic pages because Google can’t physically see them. Make sure your main content is in text so that a search engine robot can actually use it.

2. Over Optimizing Your Website

Now that you’ve found your keywords there are a few things to avoid. One of the biggest concerns is keyword stuffing. Your keywords should be in good content and fit with the page. If you’re putting every keyword you can find into every title, description, and alt tag you have on your page you’re doing more harm than good. Keep it short and direct.

3. Not Enough Incoming Links

The more links that lead to you from other websites the higher your rank will be; your keywords should come from good, relevant content as well as pages that already have a high rank. Many websites were hurt by Google’s new Panda Update because of keyword spamming, spammy link building strategies, and links from unnatural or irrelevant content. Avoid these practices like the plague.

4. No Longevity

The longer your content has been around, the longer your links have stayed alive, and the less your main page changes dramatically the better. Basically, don’t go around changing your title, href’s or alt tags every other day or any other major structure of your website and you’ll be golden. You wouldn’t change the underlying structure and direction of your house everyday; don’t do it on your website either.

5. Not Enough Fresh Content

Yes you shouldn’t make any major changes to your existing content, but you should have new and relevant content for Google to index. Google re-indexes your site regularly so you should try to add at least 1-2 fresh pieces of relevant content a week. The more fresh your site, the better. Most websites do this by creating a blog on their domain which is probably the easiest way to add content that people can share which of course makes more links back to you. This is what makes WordPress and other blogging platforms so great for SEO.

Original Author: Masters of SEO

Why Corporate Blogging Matters

Posted on by
Reply

Why Corporate Blogging Matters


Companies that have added a corporate blog to their online marketing strategy have noticed that it has an immense positive effect on their business. Corporate blogging allows companies to build a strong presence on the Web and achieve greater online visibility. Compared to traditional communication channels such as news letters, advertisements and press releases, corporate blog allows companies to reach larger audience of potential customers and partners and deliver their business’ message in a highly informative and less formal way.

Corporate blog is a great platform for companies to interact with current and potential customers and partners, share their expertise, give tips and advice, talk about their products/services, and comment on the current market and industry trends. Due to the nature of blogs that are usually updated on a daily bases, companies can craft their message to their target audience just in time.

Creating brand awareness and loyalty through corporate blog is just one of its many business enhancing capabilities. Through corporate blog, organizations are able to show a human face to their customers and build quality relationships. Blogs are good not only for disseminating information, but also for receiving a valuable customer feedback that can be used for product development, customer service improvement, etc. If written well, blog can serve as a subtle advertising tool for company’s products and services.

Here are some of the ways a company can benefit from corporate blogging:

Corporate blog is a powerful SEO tool

Corporate blog is the best tool a company can use to secure higher ranking on the major search engines such as Google and Yahoo! As new content is usually produced and published daily, in a very short time a company can build up a large archive of keyword rich articles. Blogs that are constantly updated with fresh content with properly placed keywords and links are quickly picked up by search engines.

Position yourself as a thought leader in your industry

Writing about current trends in your industry or niche, commenting on the latest news and industry events, providing valuable insight to your customers and partners, all this will prove your market knowledge and industry expertise and give you a reputation of a thought leader in your industry. This kind of reputation is priceless, as it builds trust among customers who would rather do business with companies that are in-tuned and well informed about all the newest happenings in the industry they operate in.

Blogs are fantastic for dealing with crisis

A corporate blog allows you to publish content at a heart beat. Most companies have found themselves in a situation where somebody tried to tarnish their brand and their reputation and they needed to respond quickly and refute the false claim. Unlike other methods to publish a contra claim, blog does not require an approval period of 24 or more hours, you can instantly publish the response to the false claim and disseminate positive information to prevent losing customers and consequently the revenue. This is why having a corporate blog makes for great update tool for crisis handling.

Corporate Blog promotes transparency

People like to do business with companies who openly discuss the way they operate their business, produce and market their products, bring innovations to the industry, and so forth. A corporate blog allows your customers, partners and potential prospects to see that one of your company’s policies is to be transparent to customers. This is certainly a way to build trust and engage your customers through less formal conversations about your specific niche, your products and services, or whichever topic you choose.

Potential customers will favor your company over your competitors if they are provided with enough information explaining how they can benefit from doing business with you. Corporate blog can provide readers with just the right dose of info on the way your company operates to brake down the barriers your potential customers may have in trusting your product/service. Corporate blog keeps company transparency that is highly valued by existing and potential customers and business partners.

Receive valuable customer feedback

Corporate blog is used for direct communication with customers and it is a way for your company to solicit feedback from customers in order to better understand their needs and requirements. Whether your blog describes your products and services or talks about company culture, it gives your customers the opportunity to express their opinions. Your company can use a corporate blog to discover the strengths and weaknesses of products/services without having to spend a large amount of money on customer and market analysis.

Measure the results of your Corporate Blog

The good thing about blogs is that you can measure the results to learn what is working and what is not. There are free online tools, such as Google Analytics that can provide you with different metrics to show you for example what pages visitors enter and exit, how many visitors come to your blog and leave instantly, where your blog traffic is coming from, etc. The only way to make your corporate blog more successful is to know the strong and weak points of your blog.

10 SEO tips for Drupal Development

Posted on by
Reply

With Drupal-based websites becoming more and more popular, you may be wondering how to make the CMS-generated pages more search engine friendly. Below are 10 tips to help you get started.

(1) Rewrite CSS and reduce code size
(2) Design layout using XHTML and make it lighter for SEO
(3) Creating Clean URL’s, optional using .htaccess
(4) Enable Path module
(5) Configure Meta tag Module
(6) Remove content duplication in URL’s using a robots.txt File
(7) Enable XML sitemap
(8) Add Custom breadcrumb Module
(9) Enable related links
(10) Global redirects

Should You Still Use Nofollow?

Posted on by
Reply

Eric Enge delves into how changes in the processing of nofollow attributions have caused concern among publishers. He details the impact of the changes, how they will affect your business, and ways to adapt your SEO strategy.

Enge believes that it may make sense to remove any onsite nofollows. “For example, if you nofollow all the links to your ‘About Us’ page, the link juice in those links is discarded,” he writes. It’s also important to remember that while Google took a new position and policy on nofollows, Yahoo and Microsoft haven’t moved forward and joined in.

http://searchenginewatch.com/3634387

Top SEO Tips

Posted on by
Reply




Different META tags per page
META tags, keywords, description, and most specifically title – must be unique on each page and describe the content on the page.

Canonical URLs
Use a consistent URL scheme across the site – don’t mix http://domain.com with http://www.domain.com/ and never use a link to index.php or index.php?page=home. In the latter three cases, a link back to the web root is preferential eg. http://www.domain.com.

Search friendly URLs and absolute URLs
Using URL rewriting, create URLs that make sense to the human eye, eg. http://www.domain.com/products/sofas/big-brown-sofa.html. NOTE: NEVER use underscores in URLs or for file naming, always use hyphens. Use absolute links throughout the site eg. include the http://www.domain.com in every A HREF. When linking to a page, as opposed to an index, always suffix “.html” onto the URL. All URLs should end with “/” or “.html”.

Proper use of H1 tags
The H1 should be the main heading of the page, semantically proceeded by H2, H3 etc. Do not use H1 for the logo, use an alternative tag. Your H1 should also be reflected in the META Title of the page.

Logo naming
Don’t name your logo image Logo.jpg. Instead name it something relevant to the site – for example for a jewelry site, name it jewellery.jpg

NoFollow links
The rel=”nofollow” attribute prevents search engines from leaking page rank to useless pages, for example, for terms and conditions, privacy policy and in most cases contact pages (unless they include a physical address for example).

XML Sitemap
There is a Google sitemap generator available that will create an XML sitemap and update it on the fly, informing Google of any new pages. All sites should contain an XML sitemap as well as a XHTML one. Show both sitemaps in the footer like this:

Contact | Privacy | Terms | Sitemap (XML Version)

Images with ALT attributes
All images should have ALT attributes, primarily to describe the image for screenreaders, but they can have an SEO benefit by including site keywords.

301 redirects
Especially important when redeveloping an old site – ensure old URLs are 301 back to the homepage. A 301 redirect tells search engines “This content has moved permanently”.

Don’t use frames
We’re sure you don’t use them.. do you? Well don’t because amongst other things the content within a frame isn’t accessible to search engines. Same applies to iframes.

Check for W3C compliance
This is part of best practice and has a positive benefit for SEO.
Don’t call links page “links”
This has negative connotations to link farms, reciprocal linking etc. Instead, use a term like “Resources”, “Related Sites” etc. You should preferably come up with a term which is unique to the site, whilst still describing the page accurately.

Keep CSS and JS external
The less clutter there is in the page, the less markup search engines have to sift through. Also, avoid inline styles and inline javascript for the same reason.

What ads do your competitors buy on Google?

Posted on by
Reply

Check out SpyFu (spyfoo.com). SpyFu allows you to type in a keyword and see how many Google Adword advertisers are on that particular keyword. It also gives you a breakdown of the following:

  • Cost/Click Range
  • Cost/Day Range
  • A listing of the current adword ads for that keyword
  • Other keywords the competition purchased
 Spy Fu

The free service is limited to the Top 10 or 20 result set in most cases. Monthly subscriptions are $59.95.

www.spyfu.com

Top 10 SEO Mistakes

Posted on by
Reply

One of the most common questions I’m asked is how to get a web site to the top of Google or any other search engine. While there is no simple answer without spending a bunch of money, the following list should help you avoid some of the common mistakes made.

1. Using Wrong Keywords – Keywords are extremely important. You should figure out what keyword phrases mean the most to your website or offering, and to the people who are searching for your site. Try to focus on a small group of the most important keywords that customers may actually be searching for, and not every keyword combination under the sun.

2. No Smart or Solid Navigation Structure – Most optimal URL’s contain relevant keywords with minimal slashes and dynamic characters. Keep the pages and names true to the content, and the engines will appreciate it.

3. Incorrect Title Tags – Thinking that one title tag will work throughout your site won’t work. Each page should have a unique title tag to explain what the page is about. These titles show up in the Search Engine Results and help persuade visitors.

4. Splash Pages – Splash pages can sometimes leave your home page empty without much focus. If you insist on keeping a splash page, be sure to add relevant content and some form of navigation to keep search engines spidering through your site.

5. Balancing Code and Graphics – Your site should consist of a healthy balance between code (HTML) and graphics. This is key both to search engine visibility and conversions.

6. Lack of Keywords in Content – Once you focus on your keywords, modify your content and put the keywords wherever it makes sense. It is even better to make them bold or highlight them.

7. Images for Headings – Many people think that an image looks better than text for headings and menus. Yes, an image can make your site look more distinctive but in terms of SEO images for headings and menus are a big mistake because h2, h2, etc. tags and menu links are important SEO items. If you are afraid that your h1 h2, etc. tags look horrible, try modifying them in a stylesheet.

8. Using JavaScript Menus – Using JavaScript for navigation is not bad as long as you understand that search engines do not read JavaScript and build your web pages accordingly. So if you have JavaScript menus you can’t do without, you should consider building a sitemap (or putting the links in a noscript tag) so that all your links will be crawlable.

9. Not using Sitemaps – Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site. Almost all the major search engines support sitemaps.

10. Not Keeping Content Fresh – If you want to be successful, you need to permanently optimize your site, keep an eye on the competition and – changes in the ranking algorithms of search engines