Administrator on March 17th, 2008
Does SEO really work? The truth can be found on this very site. We don’t pay a penny for advertising. The thousands of visitors we receive are all derived from SEO efforts in one way or another.
SEO is simply a lazy persons way of saying search engine optimization. It is the procedural and artistic effort to manipulate the pages of a website in such a way that search engines such as Google and Yahoo fall in love with the pages. What happens when it is love at first sight? You go to the top of the rankings for the keyword phrases detailed on the pages of your site. If you pick keyword phrases that people use to search for things, you should get free traffic. As you are reading this text, you should be realizing you constitute just such a visitor to our site!
This site receives about 30,000 to 50,000 visitors a month. Our cost in “getting” these visitors is $0. The only other way we could effectively produce this much traffic would be to run a pay-per-click campaign on Google Adwords or Yahoo. As you can imagine, internet marketing services tend to be competitive, so the average cost per hit on these platforms would be around $3. Assuming we generated 30,000 visitors, our cost would be $90,000 a month [$3 x 30,000 visitors]. Does SEO really work? $0 or $90,000 – you do the math!
In all honesty, this example is a bit of a half truth. With your site, you are going to need to hire a firm such as ours unless you want to spend a couple years learning SEO for yourself. Most businesses don’t have the time, but it is an option.
SEO professionals are not the cheapest. You can expect to pay thousands each month for a good company, which is still a lot less than most PPC campaigns. Where you really start to make hay, however, is in the long run. There is a secret about SEO. The longer your site is up, the higher you will rank if you make an effort to SEO it. Ultimately, this leads to a situation where your site just sits in the top rankings and pulls in free traffic day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year. Sound nice? It is! It’s like owning the hen that lays the golden egg each morning!
Administrator on March 17th, 2008
Search engine optimization, “seo”, is a much-debated topic and there is a lot of misinformation on the net. Let’s cut through the muck and discuss seo dos and donts.
SEO Dos and Donts
Before blasting into the dos and donts, we need to define seo. Seo simply refers to the manipulation of a site to gain top rankings on the three search engines that dominate the search traffic on the net – Yahoo, Google and MSN. If you do a search on Google, the seo listings are found in the large section on the left hand side of the page. Top rankings through seo are often called “organic rankings.”
The first seo do is to the most basic and the one we find the biggest mistakes in. Pick the correct keywords for your site! The correct keywords are not what you personally think based on your knowledge of your service or product. They are not the phrases returned in the Overture inventory tool, an inaccurate tool if ever there was one. The only place you will find the exact keyword phrases you should use are in Wordtracker. The site gives you an analytical tool that provides the exact keyword phrases being used by your prospects, how often they are being used and which are easiest to get high rankings on. It costs a whopping $8 for a single session, but you’ll want to get a year subscription so you can pick up different cycles of keywords. Your prospects will search for different things in summer compared to winter.
Word Tracker
The second seo do is the isolation keyword strategy. Many people will try to cram as many keywords into a page as possible. Many seo gurus suggest a keyword total of 10 to 15 words. This is an old approach that works, but it will take much longer to get high rankings. Instead, you should develop a list of as many keyword phrases as possible. A single page should be made for each keyword phrase. For instance, the keyword phrase for this page is “seo dos and donts”. The page is devoted solely to this phrase, as are the meta tags. You should never have to pick one keyword phrase instead of another for your site. Instead, you should make individual pages for each phrase.
A third seo do is the structure of the top and bottom of the page. The page should always start off with your keyword phrase as a heading. The first paragraph of text should incorporate your keyword phrase and the paragraph should also be your meta description. Following the first paragraph, you should list a bold subtitle of the exact keyword. Finally, the last paragraph of text on the page should also incorporate your keyword phrase as Yahoo tends to read it for some bizarre reason. You can see an example of this approach by analyzing this page.
A major fourth seo do is interlinking. The links from one page of your site to another matter a lot. When you create a link, make sure the link is the anchor text for the page the prospect will be going to. Anchor text is simply the keyword phrase on that page. If you look at the bottom of this page, you will see such a link going to our “search engine optimization” page.
Seo donts are a dime a dozen. Don’t put your site name in your meta title, the search engines will list you high without it. Don’t skimp on text, you need at least 250 words per page. Don’t put database parameters in your urls because spiders have problems reading them. Stay away from flash as much as possible for the same reason. Stick to a single subject per page, don’t wonder around like a drunken web designer! For the love of God, don’t use frames. Finally, keep your html code streamlined so search engines can read it with ease.
The list of seo dos and donts is nearly endless. Follow these simple steps, however, and you will see marked improvement in your seo rankings.
Administrator on March 17th, 2008
Link building simply refers to an issue in seo known as relevancy. When ranking sites in search engine results, Google tends to list the site that is the most relevant. There are a lot of factors that go into determining relevancy, but the number of other sites linking to yours is one of them. This is why a site like the one for the IRS is high in search results for tax issues even though it does not trade links per se.
Ideally, you want only inbound links from other sites that are relevant to the subject of your site. If you have a plumbing site, you want links from other plumbing or home improvement sites. Despite all the junk email you receive, links from casino and pharmacy sites are not going to help the rankings for your plumbing site. They will hurt the rankings because they are not relevant. This is one of the key, but most misunderstood, seo tips for link building.
When building links to your site, Google favors a slow, steady increase in links. If you want top rankings on Google, you should follow this mantra with one exception. If you have a new site, you need not be a slave to this approach.
As you probably know, new sites are not ranked by Google. Instead, your site will sit for six months or so in the much discussed Google sandbox. Given this fact, you really don’t need to worry about Google for the same period of time when it comes to link building. Google isn’t going to rank you anyway, so picking up the pace when link building isn’t really a problem.
With a brand new site, I prefer to create as many legitimate, relevant links as possible as soon as possible. The reason is I find it beneficial to start aging the links as soon as possible. Links to your site tend to grow in value the longer they exist on another site. From my point of view, why not maximize the number as quickly as possible? It isn’t like it is going to hurt your rankings on Google. You aren’t going to have any!
In taking this approach, I am not suggesting that you purchase links, use link farms or so on. I am just suggesting that you maximize your link trading efforts immediately to build up as many links as possible and get the aging process rolling. As you approach month four in the sandbox, you can start scaling back your efforts to a more slow and steady approach. Among the various seo tips for link building, this approach has worked over and over.
