Organic Search Rankings » SEO Tips

How to Learn Search Engine Optimization

admin — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 20:55:53 +0000

Learn SEO

Every business wants to be found. Figuring out how to get your business to show up in the rankings when a potential customer uses a search engine is an art form.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is fast becoming a must-have body of knowledge for business owners. Nearly 91 percent of all Internet users resort to a search engine to find information, according to a recent survey by the non-profit Pew Internet and American Life Project. The question is: how easily can they find your business?

You already could be making costly mistakes, such as a home page that is almost all images and little text, causing your site to have unnecessarily low rankings and little traffic. Or worse, you could be using hidden text and winding up with an every more onerous problem because some search engines ban sites that use tricks to improve rankings.

Whether you are a do-it-yourselfer or you use an outside SEO firm, the more you know the more effective and successful your business can be online. I’ve assembled the five best categories of resources for business owners to learn about SEO and search marketing. To help with this article, I interviewed Jennifer Laycock, editor-in-chief of Search Engine Guide, a website designed specifically for business owners and entrepreneurs.

Conferences and seminars

Attending search engine conferences is the fastest way to learn because it immerses you in the subject. When you are starting out, choose events designed to give well-rounded instruction in basic principles, such as Jill Whalen’s High Rankings seminars.

Don’t go to advanced events intended for industry experts until you first learn the basics — trust me, you will just feel frustrated. However, there is one good reason for a newbie to attend events targeting industry professionals, such as Search Engine Strategies conferences. That’s to find and interview SEO vendors. At no other venue will you find so many search professionals in one place at one time.

Books

There are a few excellent eBooks — downloadable PDF documents — suitable for beginners. The best eBooks typically come with a package of extras, such as lifetime updates, private forums, sometimes even money-back guarantees.

Aaron Wall’s SEO Book is widely acknowledged as one of the best.

Laycock’s own Small Business Guide to Search Engine Marketing is another I would recommend, because it focuses on SEO from the perspective of a business owner who is not a search expert.

Printed books, another possibility, are less expensive ($15 -$30 for printed books versus $75 – $100 for eBooks). The disadvantage is that printed books can get out of date quickly because search constantly changes. Tactics accepted several years ago, such as doorway pages, today may get your site dropped by search engines. If you opt for a printed book, make sure it is reasonably recent.

Newsletters and blogs

One of the great things about the Web today is that we are lucky to have so many excellent free newsletters and blogs on search. Among newsletters, Jill Whalen’s High Rankings is notable, because she answers real-life questions from readers.

Among blogs designed for business owners, a particularly helpful one is Small Business SEM. Carston Cumbrowski also has a helpful page of resources for SEO beginners.

Search Engine Land featuring search guru Danny Sullivan, is a good one to add to your reading list later on as your knowledge builds. It is industry focused, but has the advantage of experts who write on specific topics such as link-building and contextual advertising — not to mention its excellent blogroll of search sites to explore.

Discussion forums

As you begin to learn some of the basics of SEO, you will have questions. Head to discussion forums to get answers. Discussion forums are excellent sounding boards to bounce ideas off of others. Try Webmaster World and Digital Point Forums.

When you first approach a new discussion forum, read and observe for a while before jumping in to participate. Every forum has a “personality” all its own — make sure you feel comfortable. Observing also helps you learn which participants’ advice to trust. Some participants are more knowledgeable than others.

Interactive tools

No article on search for newbies would be complete without mentioning some of the excellent free or low-cost tools available. I have learned a great deal simply through using tools such as:

WordTracker keyword tool — Using relevant keywords in your site content and when purchasing search ads can make all the difference in attracting visitors who actually buy. You may already know the obvious keywords, but WordTracker helps you broaden your choices to identify non-obvious terms. A free trial or a single day’s subscription costs around $8.
Analytics programs — These help you understand which parts of your site visitors use most, such as which navigation links they click on most. Armed with that knowledge, you can make changes to your site to emphasize the most important elements to increase sales and newsletter signups. Google Analytics is a robust free analytics tool. For those who run Google AdWords campaigns and do not like the idea of giving sensitive site data to the same company you purchase ads from, ClickTracks is an alternative. ClickTracks offers a free version called ClickTracks Appetizer.
SEO Moz page strength tool — This interactive tool gives you a quick snapshot of some of the factors search engines consider when determining site rankings. Don’t take it as the complete word on ranking factors, but do have fun with it.

Anita Campbell is a writer, speaker and radio talk show host who closely follows trends in the small business market at her site, Small Business Trends.

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SEO for Blogs: If You Build It, Will They Come?

admin — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 20:48:52 +0000

Search for Blogs

Blogs can be effective tools for raising the profile of your product or service — but only if your target audience find them. Search engine optimization (SEO) can be effective for raising the profile of your blog.

Printable Promotions has only had a blog on its site for a month or so. But it’s already made an impact on the company’s search engine rankings. “I did a Google search on ‘reusable folding grocery bag,’” says Stacie Long, the company’s operations manager. “The YouTube video of our product that we posted on our blog came up third or fourth.”

For many small business leaders, blogging can engender feelings of envy and frustration — envy over legendary blogs that draw thousands of daily page views and frustration from the sneaking suspicion that no one out there is reading their own postings. Search engine optimization (SEO) can change that.

“Blogging is a great way to drive users to a site,” says Kelly Cutler, CEO of Internet marketing firm Marcel Media. “It can also help with stickiness, which is an important goal these days. It’s too easy for users to bounce away from your site before they’ve done something valuable like sign up for your newsletter or fill out a form.”

How can you improve your blog’s ranking on search engines? SEO is a complex science, but here are some principles that will help:

Make it crawler-friendly

Search engines dispatch software called crawlers (or sometimes “spiders”) to roam the World Wide Web in search of sites that might be of interest to searchers. One important SEO strategy is to have your blog be easy for the crawlers to find.

“Make sure the software is set up so that posts don’t get buried ten levels deep in your site,” advises Jill Whalen, CEO of High Rankings, an SEO service. “They should be easy to reach so search engines can crawl them.” Whalen also advises using SEO-friendly blog software. “WordPress is probably one of the best for that,” she says.

It’s also smart idea to include links in your posts, both to your own website’s product pages or other information, and to outside websites as well. Why? It’s links to your site, not from your site, that drive search engine rankings — but, Whalen notes, one often begets the other. “It’s a good way to get linking back and forth,” she says. “Other site owners usually check who’s linking to them, so they get to know who you are.” When linking to outside sites, make sure the links open in a new window or tab so that users don’t automatically leave your site whenever they click on a link.

To keyword or not to keyword

Since all searches start with keywords, it seems obvious that including the pertinent keyword as many times as you can in a blog entry should help bring traffic. Not so fast, experts say. “Don’t force keywords into content where they wouldn’t normally be,” Cutler cautions. “That creates a bad user experience, which means people won’t use your blog, and then Google won’t index your blog.” In fact, Marcel Media usually refrains from even telling client bloggers what the top keywords are for their sites. “Blogs are usually better done without that kind of research in mind,” Cutler says.

Instead, she tries to identify blog topics where preferred terms come up naturally. “One of our clients is a hospital and we’ve identified specific areas they want to focus on. We’ve invited doctors who specialize in those areas to participate in blogging. We’re not trying to build content around keywords, but because those doctors work in those areas, we know the keywords will be used.”

If you do decide to do keyword research, Whalen recommends Keyword Discovery or Wordtracker to find what keywords your customers are searching. She also notes that Google’s AdWords offers information on keyword searches that is free to use, even if you’re not an AdWords customer.

But, she advises, don’t just go for the top terms. “Very competitive phrases probably have many sites optimizing for them,” she says. “So you want a phrase that’s less competitive, but still has some people searching it.” If that phrase is specific to your business’s unique value proposition, optimizing on it can be a very powerful tool.

Content is king

“A mistake I’ve seen a lot is that companies think Web 2.0 is like regular advertising space,” Long says. “They treat it like a billboard.”

Instead, make sure you’re providing content that will entertain, amuse, or inform your readers. One way to build traffic is to comment or react to the news of the day as it affects your particular business. “If you’re a bookseller, you might blog about the current lawsuit by J.K. Rowling to block publication of a Harry Potter Lexicon,” Cutler says. If you use this strategy, she adds, “Keep it short, to the point, and keep it opinionated. Don’t just republish news.”

Understanding the connection between blogging and search rankings can inspire busy executives to take the time to blog, Cutler notes. “What I like about blogging is that it stays in the spirit of the Internet, but lets you accomplish SEO goals in the background,” she says. “Content and linking are two of the most powerful Internet marketing tools –and blogging lets you use both in a non-advertising way.”

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How to Hire an SEO Consultant

admin — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 20:45:24 +0000

Find and SEO Consultant

Companies that can’t afford a full-time SEO specialist can hire a part-time consultant — but finding one that’s a good fit takes time and effort.

In four and a half years since Sarah Shaoul started a website for BlackWagon, her children’s boutique in Portland, Oregon’s trendy Mississippi Avenue neighborhood, she’s worked with four search-engine optimization consultants. Believe her when she says a search engine optimization (SEO) specialist that’s a good fit for a small business is hard to find.

The first SEO expert Shaoul used was her business partner at the time and didn’t know as much as he claimed. The second SEO consultant did some great work but never really grasped her store’s high-end business concept, and after he raised his rates she couldn’t afford him any more anyway. Then there was the guy who stopped returning phone calls — he checked in eventually to say he’d changed his business’ direction and no longer did SEO work.

Shaoul is happy with her current SEO advisor, but only because they spent considerable time up front hammering out exactly what the specialist was going to do. Says Shaoul: “Every time we hire someone we gain a little more insight.”

According to Internet marketing experts, Shaoul’s experience is par for the course for small businesses looking to hire outside SEO help to promote an online store or just improve their standing in Google searches.

In many cases, small businesses don’t know where to look for SEO specialists, or once they find candidates, don’t ask the right questions to separate the good from the bad. “A lot of people approach it like it’s magic,” says Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Land, an SEO industry news website. “But really it’s like finding a dentist or plumber. You’re hiring another service professional, someone to do a very specific job.”

Where to find SEO candidates

Small businesses like Shaoul’s are barraged by cold calls or e-mails from consultants promising to improve their rankings in organic or paid searches. “99.9 percent of the time you should ignore them,” Sullivan says. “Those kinds of pitches tend to be from low-cost, low-quality people.” Good people are too busy working they don’t need to make cold calls, he says. Instead:

Ask business acquaintances who they use, or get referrals from your professional network on LinkedIn, Sullivan says.
If they recommend someone who’s too busy or pricey, ask that person to recommend someone. “They may know someone who’s starting to build a client base” who’d be willing to work for less, he says.
Look up SEO consultants through a local or national SEO trade group, such as theSearch Engine Marketing Professional Organization. The national group has a searchable database of members on its Website that can be used to find SEO contractors by their specialty.

Once you’ve identified prospective candidates, check out testimonials or case studies on their website. If there aren’t any or if they’re very old, stay away, says Kent Lewis, president at Anvil Media, a Portland, Ore. interactive marketing agency. Ask for three references, then ask for three more to get an even broader perspective, Lewis says.

Proposals and fees

When you find someone who clicks, work up a proposal. SEO and search engine marketing specialists offer a broad range of services, everything from performing website assessments to optimizing sites for keyword searches to undertaking an extensive paid search campaign. It also helps to have a budget in mind going into negotiations, Sullivan says. Being as specific as possible about both will help an advisor come up with a game plan, he says.

While overall SEO fees depend on the kind of work that’s done, fee structures can be all over the map. SEO professionals may charge by the website page, hour or project, or ask for a set monthly retainer to cover a pre-determined amount of work. Some even take a small percentage of whatever revenues are generated from their work, according to Lewis, the Anvil Media executive.

Other advice from the pros:

Beware of guarantees — Anyone who guarantees your website’s position in paid or unpaid search engine keyword rankings. If they make guarantees, they may be using “black hat” methods to bend or break generally accepted SEO practices to get those results, methods businesses should steer clear of, Lewis says. Guarantees “are smoke and mirrors and most of the time if they don’t make it they won’t make good on their promise,” he says.
Use a local — Hiring a hometown SEO specialist could be helpful if it makes you comfortable, but it’s not necessary, according to SEO experts. Regardless of where they’re located, it’s smart to check with the Better Business Bureau in the consultant’s home town to see if they’ve received any complaints.
Find someone who understands your business – Share what you’ve accomplished so they’re not suggesting things you’ve already done, says BlackWagon’s Shaoul, who learned those lessons the hard way. Have your company’s Webmaster or Website developer sit in on meetings with the SEO consultant to translate jargon, Shaoul says, “so you can focus on what you do well.”

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Search Engine Secrets Revealed

admin — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 19:44:56 +0000

Here is another article I thought you would enjoy. It is written by David Montalvo, Senior SEO and Director of Business Development at Active Web Group.

While often very complex in their calculations and data processing, the critical operations performed by the major search engines in order to rank websites isn’t as lengthy as one might think. The processes they use to provide relevant results when a web search is undergone can best be described in the following four steps.

1. Send out the Web Crawlers
Search engines use invisible “bots” or “spiders,” which are really programs or automated scripts, that browse (or “crawl”) the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner. Search engines use spidering as a means of providing up-to-date data. This type of technology is necessary because the rate at which people create new Internet documents greatly exceeds any manual indexing capacity. In fact, an estimated 20 billion web pages exist, and search engines have crawled about half of them.
2. Index the Pages
After a spider crawls a web page, it makes a copy of it and adds it to its database. This process is known as indexing. With so many search queries submitted each minute, it is very important that search engines are steadfast in their index management so that they can search and sort billions of documents in fractions of a second.
3. Process Queries
Search engines process hundreds of millions of search queries every day. When someone keys in a search term and clicks “Search,” the engine retrieves from its index all of the documents that match the query. It determines a match by finding the same terms or phrase entered into the search bar. Entering a multi-word phrase by itself can return literally millions of results, but entering that same phrase in quotes can greatly narrow the results, giving the user a more accurate listing of websites that relate to their particular search.
4. Rank Pages
A very closely guarded mathematical equation, called an algorithm, is employed by each search engine to determine how to sort and rank search query results. This algorithm allows the engine to rank the most relevant web pages first, and the rest in descending order of importance to the user.

What You Can Do for Your Website: Avoid Speed Bumps & Walls

You may not know it, but you could be hindering or preventing your website from being crawled by search engine spiders. As spiders crawl the web, they rely on the architecture of hyperlinks to find new web pages and revisit those that may have changed. Complex links and deep site structures with little unique content may act as “speed bumps” in the process by slowing down the spiders. Even worse, data that cannot be accessed by web crawlers are really like “walls” in that they completely prevent your web pages from being ranked.

Beware of the Following “Speed Bumps”:

* URLs with 2+ dynamic parameters; i.e. http://www.url.com/page.php?id=4&CK=34rr&User=%Tom% (spiders may be reluctant to crawl complex URLs like this because they often result in errors with non-human visitors)
* Pages with more than 100 unique links to other pages on the site (spiders may not follow each one)
* Pages buried more than 3 clicks/links from the home page of a website (unless there are many other external links pointing to the site, spiders will often ignore deep pages)
* Pages requiring a “Session ID” or Cookie to enable navigation (spiders may not be able to retain these elements as a browser user can)
* Pages that are split into “frames” can hinder crawling and cause confusion about which pages to rank in the results.

Beware of the Following “Walls”:

* Pages accessible only via a select form and submit button
* Pages requiring a drop down menu (HTML attribute) to access them
* Documents accessible only via a search box
* Documents blocked purposefully (via a robot meta tag or robots.txt file)
* Pages requiring a login
* Pages that re-direct before showing content (search engines call this cloaking or bait-and-switch and may actually ban sites that use this tactic)

In order to avoid the above pitfalls and ensure that your website’s contents are fully crawlable, be sure to provide direct, HTML links to each page you want the search engine spiders to index. Remember to make every page of your site accessible from the home page, since the home page is usually the place spiders begin their crawl. It’s also a good idea to add a sitemap to your website in order to increase its navigation.

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Small Businesses SEO

admin — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 18:51:24 +0000

SEO for Small Business

It seems like times are always tough for small businesses, but no time is worse than during a recession. During a recession, many businesses try to cut back on as much as possible, but when does cutting back start to hurt the company? One of the places this question is most often applied is to the question of SEO. Should a small business pay for SEO when money is tight?

Unfortunately, many small businesses axe their advertising budget first. While this can be a good place to save a little bit of money, if businesses completely cut their advertising, they will not be able to attract new clients. Without new clients, there’s little they can do to make more money. While word of mouth may help somewhat, it’s not as effective as a marketing blitz.

While web marketing is cheaper than doing offline marketing, there are still costs involved. However, you may get a much higher return on your investment since you’re able to more deeply analyze how well your marketing is doing. Since websites allow users to track where their traffic comes from, it’s easier to identify and cut any online marketing that is not working. To this end, small businesses should not immediately cut their SEO budget when times get tight.

Some small businesses may not have even invested in SEO yet, and these businesses may be asking why they should spend the money. However, those small business owners may not recognize just how great a return they can get on their SEO. A huge return on investment is everything in a recession, and doing SEO is ranked as one of the top ROI solutions.

By selecting specific keywords and phrases, you’re very specifically targeting your audience. While ads in magazines may get a lot of attention, you never really know if your target audience is viewing the ad or if it is being viewed by someone who will never purchase your product. SEO, however, makes certain your website is being viewed by those who are looking for what you offer. It brings in more than just quantity; it brings in quality visitors and provides them with information about your website right away.

When it comes to dealing with SEO, small businesses have a few choices. They can either handle the SEO themselves or they can hire a professional SEO company. The first is obviously the most budget-friendly; however, if you and your employees don’t understand the basics of doing SEO, you may end up wasting your time. Fortunately, you can learn the basics of SEO fairly quickly.

Paying a company to do SEO, especially if the company is thorough and completely redesigns your website from the ground up to be fully optimized, may be out of your price range. Many small businesses simply can’t afford this. However, having an expert in SEO look at your pages can be helpful. Outsourcing only part of the SEO process can be helpful. For example, you may want to hire a professional SEO writer to create content for your website after you determine the keywords yourself.

SEOSapien is a SEO Company. Find all our Services and SEO Pricing at http://www.seosapien.com.

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