On-Page vs. Off-Page Search Engine Optimization

Written by on March 7, 2012 in Search Engine Optimization - No Comments

Of all the different aspects of internet marketing one of the topics which is both most important and most often misunderstood is that of Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. SEO is a broad term used to describe any action taken to attempt to get a web page to be at the top of the search engine results pages for engines such as Google, Bing or Yahoo. Of course, Google gets the majority of all searches so that is the primary area where people doing SEO focus.

There are two major sub-categories of SEO which are “On-Page SEO” and “Off-Page SEO”. They are just as they sound like they would be. On page SEO is any action taken on your own web page to attempt to make it rank as good as possible for Google and other search engines for the keywords you are targeting. There are many strategies to on-page SEO and using them all properly is the best way to ensure proper ranking. Things like having the HTML tags set properly with your keywords in them (including H1, H2 and H3 tags and the Title Tag).

Using these tools helps Google to understand which types of keywords you are attempting to target. In the past, setting some of these tags was all that was required to get a good ranking in the search engines but that is not the case anymore. Today you also need to have excellent off-page SEO strategies in place to compliment your on-page efforts.

Off-Page SEO has many different strategies involved, all of which are important. One of the most important pieces of this type of SEO is link building. To put it simply, link building is any effort put into getting other web pages to have a link back to your site. The quality of the links back to your site has a huge effect on how much they will improve your position in the search engines.

Using a contextual back link, for example will help not only get Google to see your page but also will help Google understand that your page is seen as an authority in the subject since other sites are linking back to it. Having a large number of well rounded links is the ideal strategy because it makes the links look like they were built more naturally which is what Google prefers compared to attempting to manipulate their system.

Black Hat SEO Will Get You Blacklisted

Written by on May 16, 2011 in Search Engine Optimization - No Comments

Black hat SEO embraces manipulative or deceptive techniques to game the search-engine system. Search engines work hard to keep these techniques from succeeding, so they are seldom effective for long and could even get you blacklisted. Here are a few strategies you’re best off avoiding.

Cloaking

Presenting two different versions of the same page, one to search engines and one to the user.

Keyword Stuffing / Spamming

Loading up the meta tags with popular search terms that have no substantive connection with the page.

Duplicating Content

Copying a significant amount of content from another website in an effort to increase rankings.

Hidden Links and Keywords

Concealing them in the background color, outside the visible margins or in other code.

Page Swapping

Get a page indexed and ranked high, then change the page content entirely.

These are just a few of the bad techniques used in an attempt to better rankings of a page. Ethics should play a large role in avoiding these practices. If you choose to use these techniques you are at risk of damaging your reputation, getting blacklisted and possibly getting yourself in a lawsuit.

There are plenty of ways to increase your page rage ethically. It may take some time to build your page’s popularity, but in the long run it’s worth the effort.

Search Engine Optimization Tips (Part 1)

Written by on May 12, 2011 in Advertising & Marketing, Search Engine Optimization - No Comments

The following article is a part 1 of a series on search engine optimization (seo) tips. Since this is a vast area where hundreds of articles related to this topic can be found across the web, we thought we would deliver it in bite size portions making it more digestable. Released in no specific order, these tips are meant to assist those interested in bettering their rank with search engines such as Google and Yahoo.

Backlinks From Other High Quality Websites

Search engines count the amount of sites that link to your website. This is one of the most important steps to acquiring a higher ranking. There are multiple ways to gain links from popular sites back to yours including writing guest articles, leaving valuable comments and creating great content that people want to link back to. Be creative and don’t be shy to ask for exchanging links as well.

Increase Your Domain Name Registration Time

Google and Yahoo take into consideration how long your domain has been registered, as well as how long it has until it expires. They see a website that is registered for a longer period of time as being more legitimate and assume you provide useful content to go along with your site.

Keyword Rich Page Title Tag

Title tags look like the following snippet:

<title>Your Title Here</title>

The text content should be present between the <title> and </title> tags on every page of your website. This title appears at the top of your browser window and is also used as the clickable link in search results. It’s important that the content in the title tag is both readable and relevant to the content on the page.

Try to optimize the title tags for each page on your site. By doing so, you should notice a greater range of results on your search queries.

Anchor Text Within Links

Whenever you have a link on your site, either external or internal, you want to contain the key words for which you are trying to rank well.

For example, if you wish to rank well for the term hot dogs you don’t want to create a link that says click here for hot dogs. Search engines assume you are trying to rank high for the term click here. Ideally, you want a link that references the topic you are linking to . . . so something like the world’s best hot dogs would be much better. You are then viewed as having content that is more relevant and will achieve a higher rank.

Also, the name of the page which you’re linking to should be logical as well. A properly created link should look like the following example:

<a href="/the-worlds-best-hot-dogs">the world's best hot dogs</a>

Use H1, H2 & H3 Heading Tags

Heading tags play two important roles. By placing the heading of an article within an <h1> tag, you can easily style them globally within your CSS. More importantly, search engines give more weight to the text within properly coded headings than other text on your site.

The hierarchy of the heading tag is important as well. An <h1> tag is seen to be more important that an <h2> tag. An <h2> tag is seen to be more important that an <h3> tag. You should also strategically place your keywords inside your heading tags. Google will be able to analyze your site’s content better and hopefully index your site with a higher page rank.

SEO for Starters

Written by on May 5, 2011 in Advertising & Marketing, Search Engine Optimization - No Comments

Every now and again clients approach us about how to better their rankings on Google and other search engines. Usually these are the folks that are relatively new to the process. I seem to always start off by giving them a heads up that search engine optimization (SEO) efforts take a lot of focus and hard work. With a little patience and know how you can better your rankings and hopefully increase your business while you’re at it.

I thought I would post a little of what’s involved so others could take advantage of what we’ve learned over the years. This is just a start, but it’s a good base to having better knowledge of SEO efforts.

Define Your Target Audience

The most important step is to define your target audience. If you sell multi-purpose kitchen tools, then the audience is fairly obvious. Anyone who has an interest in cooking should be your target. Once you solidify this you can begin to develop your content.

Develop Your Content

If you have an e-commerce website then you’ll need to create great photos for every product on your site, write clear descriptions in your copy using keywords related to your subject. More information about keywords can be found on our 12 Search Engine Optimization Tips page.

Ultimately you want to have very relevant and good information related to the multi-purpose kitchen tools you’re selling. This content is key in communicating not only to your customers but also to the search engines so they can determine how to best rank your pages.

Set Analytics In Place

You’ll need a way to measure your site’s traffic. This is where your site’s analytic tools come into play. There are a lot of tools available on the web. One that is easy to integrate and costs nothing is Google Analytics. You can set up a new account in a few minutes, add your site’s URL, grab the supplied code snippet and paste into all the pages on your site that you wish to track. After Google verifies your site you’ll have access to information like how many people accessed your site and from what location on any specific date. You’ll also be able to see what URLs your visitors entered by.

You can find many other analytics tools with a few quick searches online. Some give you more information than others. Ultimately, which one you use depends on what type of information you’re in need of and what your budget will allow.

Wait For Indexing, Measure and Analyze

Now that you’ve made changes to your site’s content you’ll need to wait for your site to be indexed by search engines again. Once this has happened, they will re-index your site and hopefully better your rankings. You’ll need to let your analytics tool of choice do its job as well. You should notice a positive difference in traffic on your site if you’ve done a good job. If the results are not as good as what you would like after you review your analytics data then you’ll need to make some educated decisions on how to proceed with additional changes. Then repeat the process.

With search engine marketing there is no finite answer on how to get results. The web is very fluid. Its dynamic nature is always in flux and you’ll have to work hard at getting results. Better results are definitely possible, but you’ll have to make educated and smart decisions to get the results you desire.

12 SEO Tips

Written by on April 29, 2011 in Search Engine Optimization - No Comments

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results. Typically, the higher a site’s “page rank” (i.e, the earlier it comes in the search results list), the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO can also target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines. Below are a list of what we consider to be important SEO tips.

  1. Find The Best Keywords

    Invest some energy into finding the best keywords that meet your needs. Developing a list and plan of attack should be your first step to optimizing your website. There are several SEO tools available online to help you find the best keywords. When using any SEO tool for doing keyword research, start by keeping your searches ambiguous. The results will usually return suggestions, sometimes surprising ones that you may not have thought of.

  2. Discover Your Competitors

    Search engines analyze incoming links to your website as part of their ranking criteria. Knowing how many incoming links your competitors have will give you a fantastic edge. Of course, you still have to discover your competitors before you can analyze them.

  3. Optimize Your Title

    The Title and META tags should be different on every page of your website if you wish for most search engines to store and list them in the search results. SEO Expert’s have experimented with these two pieces of code to help reach an accepted conclusion about how best to use them.

  4. Optimizing Your Website Page’s Title

    There are different theories about how long your Title should be. Since Google only displays the first 66 or so characters (with spaces), it is best to keep the title under 66 characters and relevant to the content on the page.

  5. Optimize Your META Tags

    META tags are hidden code snippets read only by search engine web crawlers. They live within the HEAD section of a web page. There are actually 2 very important META tags you need to worry about: description and keywords. Meta tags summarize what the site is about, and despite some SEO controversy, they still play an instrumental role in meta-based search engines. The META tags you need to be the most concerned about are Meta and Description Sequencing of these tags is extremely important. Even though the W3C states that tag attributes do not have to be in any particular sequence, a significant difference has been noticed when one has the tags and attributes in the order described here. The only deviation from the list above is that the Title tag should come before the META description. The description META tag is the text that will be displayed under your title on the results page. There’s also a lot of controversy about the number of characters you should have in this tag. If you want your listing to look clear and to the point, a tip for this META tag would be to keep it under 150 characters and to not repeat your keywords more than 3 times. Here’s the syntax:

    <meta name="description" content="your_keywords_here followed by a statement about your product or service." />

    The last important META tag is the keywords META tag, which some time ago lost a lot of points in Google’s search engine algorithm. Based on experience with this tag, you can have approximately 800 characters in the tag (including spaces). If you repeat your keywords more than 3 times it’s usually a good indication to the search engine that you are trying to spam their search results. Also, don’t waste your time including keywords that aren’t used in the BODY section of your website, that could be seen as another spam technique. Here’s the syntax:

    <meta name="keywords" content="fishing flies, fly fishing flies, fly fishing, fly fishing accessories" />

  6. Use Headings

    Headings play an important role in organizing information, so be sure to include at least H1 and H3 tags when assembling your page. Using cascading style sheets (CSS), you can make your H1 at the top of your page more appealing.

  7. Use TITLE & ALT Attributes

    Using the TITLE attribute in your HTML tags is a direct method of telling the search engines about the relevance of the link. It’s also a W3C standard for making your page accessible to disabled people. In other words, blind folks can navigate through your website using a special browser that reads TITLE and ALT attributes. An example of the syntax is as follows:

    <a href="http://www.blueflycafe.com" title="Fly Fishing Flies">Fly Fishing Flies</a>

    The ALT Attribute is used for the same reasons as the TITLE Attribute, but is specifically for describing an image to the search engine and to the visually disabled. Here’s how you would use ALT in an IMG tag:

    <img src="http://www.blueflycafe.com/images/featured-fishing-fly.jpg" title="Featured Fishing Fly">

  8. Use Nomenclatures

    Whenever possible, you should save your images, media, and web pages with the keywords in the file names. For example, if your keyword phrase is “fishing flies” you’ll want to save the images used on that page as

    fishing-flies-01.jpg

    -or-

    fishing_flies_01.jpg

    It’s not confirmed, but many have experienced improvement in ranking by renaming images and media. More important is your web page’s filename. Your filename for the fishing flies page could be

    fishing-flies.html

    -or-

    fishing_flies.html

    for content management platforms using search results for building pages. Anytime there is an opportunity to display or present content, do your best to ensure the content has the keywords in the filename.

  9. Create A Site Map Page

    Page Rank is relative and shared throughout a website by a unique voting system created by Google. What it comes down to is having efficient navigation throughout your site. That’s where a site map page comes in. Since every page on the website will be linked to the sitemap, it allows webcrawlers (and users) to quickly and easily find content.

  10. Include A robots.txt File

    One of the easiest search engine optimization tips you will ever do is to include a robots.txt file at the root of your website. Open up your favorite text editor and type User-agent: *. Then save the file as robots.txt and upload it to your root directory on your website. This one command will tell any spider that hits your website to crawl every page of your website. Because search engines analyze everything it indexes to determine what your website is about, it may be a good idea to block folders and files that have nothing to do with the content we want to be analyzed. You can disallow unrelated files to be read by adding Disallow: /folder_name/-or- Disallow: /filename.htmlin your robots.txt file.

  11. Install A sitemap.xml File For Google

    Google wants to insure that their viewers get the most relevant results possible. They’ve even created a program just for webmasters to help insure that your pages get cached in their index as quickly as possible. They call the program Google Sitemaps. In this tool, you’ll also find a great new linking tool to help discover who is linking to your website. A great tool for creating your sitemap.xml file can be found at
    http://www.xml-sitemaps.com. Simply create your sitemap.xml file, upload to your websites root directory and submit it to Google Sitemaps.

  12. Validate Your Code

    There are several ways to validate the accuracy of your website’s source code. The four most important are validating your search engine optimization, HTML, CSS and insuring that you have no broken links or images.

    Check for broken links at: http://validator.w3.org/checklink

    Check for valid HTML at: http://validator.w3.org

    Check for valid CSS at: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator