If you are new to the realm of owning or managing a website, it can be a daunting task to begin your SEO.  Where do you start?  Here are some basics for getting the ball rolling:

-Content, content, and content:  Well written content containing your specific keywords is what is ultimately going to get/increase/keep your rankings.  Just don’t go overboard with your keyword placement.

-Title tags, also know as page titles:  This is the first thing a search engine sees when it finds your page, and is what lets them know what the page, or your site is about.  Make sure every page on your site has a unique title whenever possible.

-Relevant backlinks:  Links to your site from other sites is a very important part of any online marketing campaign.  The more relevant the site, and the link, the better it will be for your site.  Avoid link farms at all costs.  The search engines can/will ding you for using them, especially if you suddely have a ton of links to your site in a very short period of time.

That should be good to get you started.  For more on these and other things you can and should be doing, check out our other posts.

Never Stop Improving!

Still have questions about what contributes to your website’s search engine rankings? Here is an article that covers some big factors:  SEO Ranking Factors.  Check it out and let us know if you have any questions!

Never Stop Improving!

Everyone wants to be at the top of Google’s results, but let’s take a look at Google for a moment to see what that actually means.

When you do a search on Google, you type in your search term in the search box and hit “submit”. Then you get the results and some information telling you exactly how many results it has pulled up for you, but most people only care about the first page… some, if not finding exactly what they’re looking for, will search back several pages deep to try to find whatever they are looking for. However, let’s focus on the first page, as that seems to be what most people want to be on.

The very top listings on your results page are contained in a shaded rectangle and there is a light gray label on it letting you know that it is part of Google’s paid search advertising network. This means that someone has paid Google to let their listings be at the top for the search phrases they want to be listed for. At this point you may be thinking that all you need to do is put up a website, give Google some money and you’ll be good to go with lots of traffic and purchases! There is more to it than that, however so please read on.

Paid listings are fantastic for generating traffic right away. However, many of the techniques required for running a good paid listings campaign are also good for natural SEO.

“Natural listings” are those that appear under the paid listing box. They are listed for free by the search engine for being popular and relevant to the search term you entered. You may wonder why anyone would choose to pay for listings when they could get listed for free, but consider that most paid listings are listed in a day or two, while natural results could take a year or more to properly cultivate! Natural listings get more attention from searchers, however, as most searchers know that natural listings are typically more relevant to what they want to find out, and that the website is established and trustworthy.

Really, the best SEO campaigns are those that combine a paid search element with natural SEO efforts. With the two working together, you can get better relevancy to your paid ad campaigns (which, on Google, will lower the cost and increase the traffic conversion of your ads), and your SEO specialist can use the results from the paid campaign to help target the natural efforts. To succeed, a website will need the combined efforts of the owner, the web master and the SEO professional to help guide their efforts.

The natural listings should be the goal of websites that sell just one type of product that never changes. For instance, if you were to specialize in the sale of flowers and seeds all year, you would want to get to the top of the listings for flowers and seeds of various types. However, if you sell random items that you can offer for a very good price, then paid listings will be your friend to help you liquidate inventory more quickly!

People use the paid ad spaces for items that they won’t hang on to for very long, but strive for the natural listings for information and products that will be around for long enough for the search engines to pick them up. Learn to use the tools the search engines (like Google) give you to succeed!

Never Stop Improving!

We have mentioned the importance of establishing your site as an Authority Site in various postings here. Here is an article that discusses this further: Write SEO Copy Like an Authority.  It focuses on the topic of Link Bait, which is the practice of writing good content that makes people want to link to your page or site.  Take a look at the article and let us know your thoughts, or if you have any questions.

Never Stop Improving!

With more and more people viewing video online every day, we thought we’d point you to an article on video search optimization.  Click Here to check it out.  You’ll find that the basics of SEO hold true for video search optimization as well.  Let us know what you think!

 Never Stop Improving!

Building a website is one thing, but getting people to visit it is another thing entirely. When you’ve built a website, what is your next step? Send an e-mail to all your friends and relatives with a link? Post it on your Myspace? Well, those are a couple of steps that will get you some initial traffic, but is it the type of targeted traffic you’re looking for?

Let’s have a discussion about targeted traffic. Let’s say you sell bananas online, direct from the island of Oahu in Hawaii. You ship them fresh-picked, and they take approximately three days to get to their destinations. We’ll call them “gourmet bananas”. The people you’ll want to attract to your website will find your site how? Ideally, they’ll already be looking for bananas, or information about bananas. At a stretch, they’ll be looking for gourmet or fresh-picked or organic fruit. Possibly even Fruit from Hawaii. People who find you that are looking for this kind of product or information are what we call “targeted traffic”. Conversely, someone looking for ski resorts is probably not going to be wanting to buy bananas - well, not at the moment anyway.

So, how do you get this targeted traffic to your site? Well, first, you need to figure out how your customers are looking for your website, and get in front of them. The majority of websites are found through search engines. Most people use search engines to find information, goods and services online. Now that you know this, you need to get your website in front of these searchers!

There are a couple of ways to get in front of searchers on the search engines. You can either work on your rankings the “natural” way through SEO, or you can tweak keywords and pay for placement on the search engines.

Now, there are pros and cons to each approach.

The first factor is Time.

Natural optimization has the big disadvantage of taking a lot of time to get working correctly. Not only does the site itself need to be optimized, but relationships across the web need to be created and maintained. A level of trust needs to be built with the search engines and with other websites, and a lot of that takes time to accrue.

Paid Search results can typically be on the top of the search engines within a day. That’s a fantastic turnaround!

The second factor is cost.

Natural optimization is typically a lot cheaper than Paid results. With paid results, you’re paying every time someone clicks on a link to your site. The more competitive the keyword, the more each click is going to cost you. Some paid listings will charge you for a number of “impressions” instead of clicks - meaning you get charged every time someone even looks for your keyword phrase and your link is displayed in the listings. This can either work for or against you. If your link is not compelling enough to make someone want to click on it, then you will lose money, but if your link is worded very well, you could potentially save a lot of money using the number of impressions route.

With natural optimization, you do not pay per click. You pay for the time of an SEO person or team of persons to take care of your site’s SEO for you. (If you are the one doing the optimization, consider that you are paying yourself an hourly wage. Don’t sell yourself short and pay yourself minimum wage, when you’re doing your cost calculations! Your time is more valuable than that.)

A third factor is longevity.

While paid advertising is up on the search engines that very day, the cost is that as soon as you decide to stop paying for it, those positions are gone. With natural rankings, your site should increase in rankings over time, and you gain the advantage of people on the internet paying attention to you, and possibly linking to you on their own. What happens is that your site’s popularity will grow almost on its own, even if you stop doing anything to it yourself. However, if you stop updating and stop paying attention to your SEO, your site will start to fall in rankings. But SEO is normally done on a month to month basis, and being a little late with the payment isn’t going to make your site drop off the rankings right away. That is a big advantage over the paid listings.

Yet a fourth factor is Perception.

Customer perceptions. It was once thought that no one ever looked at the paid advertising. Then it was discovered that almost half the searchers out there didn’t even realize there was a difference between paid and natural listings. If you look at Google, it is clearly stated that the ones on top in the grey box are actually paid listings, but not everyone bothers to read that information.

Of the fifty percent of people who can tell the difference between paid and natural listings, about half of them are actually annoyed by the presence of paid listings and will not click on them. This leaves you with still 75% of the market willing to click on paid listings. What about that last quarter of the searchers? Well, you won’t get them with paid listings, but paid listings are still valuable.

What is the best way to get conversions?

Well, there is no best way to get conversions. Every market is its own situation! Someone selling aftermarket tickets to sold out shows might prefer paid listings because their listings change too quickly for natural SEO to catch up. A local gardening store might prefer natural results because their services are going to be unchanging for years to come, and they have a lot of information to put on their site. Still others prefer a mix of Paid search and Natural SEO - paid search has the advantage of letting you test out your keywords and giving you an idea of what to work towards with Natural seo, and also getting your website out in front of searcher’s eyes right away, instead of waiting for natural results to put you there. Brand recognition is a powerful tool on the web and in advertising in general.

Natural rankings and building the reputation of your site are always going to be important, but if you are forced to choose between paid results or natural, make sure you take into account the factors discussed here. You may wish to ask a professional their opinion, but try to find someone who is not biased for paid or natural search to review your situation individually.  Every site is different and cookie cutter solutions don’t do well in today’s competitive markets.

Back in 1994, when the internet was young and search engines were new, the developers working for the search engines were trying to figure out an easy way to help their “bots” spider the web and index pages found on the web. They petitioned for “meta tags” to be accepted, and people started adding them to their websites.

The point of meta tags was that it was something you could add to your site that summarized your site without having to have it showing for the viewer. They were supposed to act like a card catalogue at the library in that they provide a good method of locating the information you are seeking.

This was a great idea, and webmasters around the world started adding keywords and descriptions to their web pages. Very soon, however, people noticed that their sites would get indexed depending on how many keywords they had in their meta tags, and how often they were repeated, thus, if your entire description, title and keyword tag was just “shoes,shoes,shoes,shoes,shoes,shoes,shoes…” etc, then you should rightly get placed on top of the search engines for the term “shoes”. Another thing people were doing, was adding terms in their keyword tag that had nothing to do with their site at all. They would notice that a lot of people would type in “sex” as a search term, and so stuff their keyword and description metas with that - even though they might be selling only shoes. The thought process was to try to trick the user into clicking on your website.

Obviously, if you’re looking for something specific, and you end up on a page that has nothing to do with what you were looking for, you’re going to be pretty angry. It seems like a rediculous strategy now, but we’ve grown up as a society online quite a bit since then.

Why would they do that? Well, the mentality grew from a few concepts. The idea is, if you get a million visitors, and 1% of them convert into a sale, then you’re making 10,000 sales. It also stemmed from the food court in the mall concept. You have an almost captive audience. They’re already in the mall, probably not done shopping, so they’ll want to come over and spend money on your food selections as well as being in the mall for whatever they’re looking for.

There are some problems with these outdated ideas. Generally, if you’re looking for something online, you are only annoyed by not finding exactly what you’re looking for. The mid-90s idea of “surfing the web” is all but dead. This is 2008. You want to know election predictions? Go online. You want to know what the weather’s going to be like today? Go online. Better yet? Google it.

So. By 1998, search engine companies were phasing out the use of the keyword meta as far as a classification of a a site. Google, reportedly, has never used the keyword meta for anything at all. The meta description is used by many search engines (including Google) as the display description in your listing. In other words, while it does not show up on your site, it does show on the search engine display, and is usually the determining factor on whether or not someone will actually click on your link. So, the description tag is very important, but only for conversion, and not for rankings.

Without using the much-abused keyword tag, how are search engines deciding what your site is about?

They look at your site’s content, for one. If your site is about shoes, then you would want to have text descriptions about your shoes. Since this is what search engines now read, it’s tempting to stuff it full of keywords, but remember that we’ve all grown up, and keyword stuffing is now considered an offense by most of the major search engines.

Something rather striking today, however, is the fact that Yahoo seems to have started supporting the keyword tag again. This is one of the reasons why Yahoo’s search results are actually different from Google’s. This means you can’t actually leave your meta keywords off your website. Yahoo itself recommends that you only add keywords that actually pertain to the page they are located on, and to not put a blanket set of keywords that affect every page of your site. Is this a revival of the keyword tag? We’ll see. It’s definitely not got much weight as far as determining what the site is about, however.

Today, we use the page Title, meta Description and meta Keywords. The page Title is still considered one of the best resources for telling the search engines what your site is about. The meta Description should be thoughtfully laid out as a lure for people making searches online for your keywords. The meta Keywords should only reflect the keywords you actually have listed on the page. You can use them as a reminder of what keywords to use when writing content for your page.

It is important to have your metas laid out correctly, even though they don’t carry much weight at the moment. They are used by search engines for various applications, and thus that makes it worthwhile to make sure they’re up to date and customized. However, it is not advised to work solely on your meta tags and nothing else. That is a surefire way to see your site’s rankings never move. There a lot of other tricks to use when working on website rankings. More on that later.