Thursday, February 10, 2011
When dealing with seo, there are two things you must take into consideration. Your page needs to be properly optimized for the keywords you're targeting, and your page needs to have links pointing to it from related pages. In addition, to maximize the worth of your link, make sure the text portion of the link is related.
For more information, check out the article I wrote that explains how links affect search engines as well as this article on link strategy.
Without knowing the basics, you can spend a lot of time with very little ROI. Happy Link Building!
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
When putting together an seo campaign, a link strategy is extremely important. In addition to having unique content that is a benefit to your readers, it is also important to have authority sites linking to your pages.
When most people first get into their link building campaign, they focus mainly on the home page. This seems reasonable, the home page is your main entrance to your site. This is the way you would like most people to come to your site, but if you stop at just building links to your home page, you are doing yourself a disservice.
What I would like to talk about is the value of deep links. Deep links are links from other pages on the web that link to your internal pages, not your home page. They can be more difficult to obtain, but the rewards are tremendous.
Typically, your internal pages are going to target the lower traffic, lower competetion keywords. Many times these keywords do not take as much to get ranked well in the search engines than the more competetive ones you may have chosen for your home page. With a good complete link building campaign, you are going to have a deep link element to it.
One place to start your deep link campaign is with a deep link directory. There are a number of deep link directories out there, you just need to do some research. Some are paid, others are free, and yet others require a link back to their site in exchange for your deep link. If you are looking to get started, you can take a look at this list of deep link directories.
Check back in, I will be looking at more internet marketing tactics in the coming weeks.
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Search Engine Optimization is an important marketing strategy because it can deliver inexpensive targeted leads. It's a long term process where a company will attempt to create a site that is viewed by the search engines as the authoritative source for that term and will be displayed first.
Over time, a company active in SEO marketing will determine which phrases result in the highest conversion. For truly valuable phrases, it's often not enough to claim the top spot. Instead, the company will work to box out their competitors on the first page. In other words, the company will promote additional pages so that they will also be listed on the first page causing others to be pushed to page 2. Since search engines will only list 1-2 pages per domain per search, the company would need to have other domains that are relevant to that keyword phrase. This doesn't have to always be their domain. They might have a listing in a directory, a page on another site such as Squidoo or Wikipedia, or an article on somebody else's site.
For a while, people used sub-domains to box out their competitors, but there's talk that the search engines are going to start looking at sub-domains as folders, which limits it down to the 1-2 links per search. Because of this, the only reliable method is to promote pages on several sites.
The more you own a keyword phrase, the better. Repetition is a powerful selling tool. The more somebody sees references to a particular business related to what they're looking for, the more credible that company becomes in their mind.
Thursday, February 12, 2009
A web site is a location on the internet comprised of multiple web pages. The pages link together creating the site. Web pages (hereafter "pages") should be specific, providing mass to a web site.
Well written pages (and tools) give true value to the web site. In the end, well written pages will convert looky-lou users into clients and draw search engines as they demonstrate good SEO practices. A well written page will have a focus. We see sites all the time that have two dozen topics on the home page and then another dozen on each page thereafter. Pages like these are confusing to users and to search engines. When writing a page the author should first choose a great page title (thesis) about one topic. Add that title to the top of the page and then write about it, and it only. A home page is a little different. It is OK to lay out the scope of the site with A FEW topics. It should contain the thesis of your site. Each page thereafter should have the narrow thesis in the title and describe that topic in its content. They should all relate in one way or another to the main site thesis.
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Having the right domain name is very important. A domain name is the name of your web site. For example, "Yahoo" is the domain name in www.yahoo.com and "ebay" is the domain name for www.ebay.com. Search engines give a lot of weight to web sites with the right keywords in them. In fact, some web sites have a hold on a top search engine spot simply because their domain name has the right words. Granted, in competitive markets the domain name is only a small factor in the overall SEO game. Some site owners pay huge amounts of money to companies specialized in making a site popular.
Search engines prefer authority sites. Over time, an authority site is given significant preference over any other sites.
To learn more about choosing your domain name, visit us "SEO and Domain Name Importance"
Monday, January 5, 2009
SEO stands for search engine optimization. It is the technical ways of saying, "get good search engine results." SEO is a science the every web geek tries to master. It is the reason that many of us use well designed web tools. SEO drives people to our web sites, which may be an online brochure, application, or some other web presentation. Optimization makes the text on pages stand out to engines so a site surfaces to the top.
There are two key concepts to web site SEO as far as search engines are concerned: popularity and relevance. Imagine your just wrote a book. It becomes very popular and well cited and becomes a best selling novel. Distributors make the most money by selling books people want to read. So, they advertise those books at the top of their lists and in the front shelves. Your web site is the same. Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. want sites that are cited on other sites and they want the site's content to be relevant to what the searcher is looking for.
Relevance: write great quality content for your users. Figure out what key words you want to use in each page and write about that topic. Don't have less than 4 solid paragraphs with at least 2 descriptive sentences each. Engines crave content. They don't care about design (your users do but we'll talk about that later) and will likely discard most images, flash, and other fancy stuff. They want words to chew on. A few well written pages is much better than many with a couple of sentences each. Some site designers will get pages out there just so engines can see them with the intent to flesh out the pages later. That is OK as long as the "later" doesn't take too long. Poor pages can penalize a good site. We'll get into search engine timing later too.
Popularity: get others to link to you. If Ghandi recommends a book many people read it. If President Hinckley recommends a book many people read it. If the Pope recommends a book many people read it. Search engines are built to judge how many people are recommending other web sites and they know how popular the site doing the recommending is. The key is to get as many high ranked and relevant web sites to link to you as possible.
We will talk much more about SEO as we go. It is a very important topic in your web site's success.
