What is SEO?

March 30, 2010 By View Comments

SEO or Search Engine Optimization may sound complicated – and it is – but in a nutshell what it does is it get’s web sites found on the internet in higher positions in the results than sites that have not been optimized.

SEO – Search Engine Optimization involves various aspects of web architecture but boiled down to what anyone can understand – SEO is using various techniques in optimizing a web site so that the search engines are able to classify it in their directories and the easier you make it for them – the higher you get.

How do Search Engines place your site in their listings ?

They do it in two ways:

1 – Search Engines send bots, spiders and crawlers to your website. These are analysis
programs which are sent on a regular basis through the web to get all the information available.
If a bot arrives at your website to find that it has not been optimized correctly it will either:
ignore the site completely or categorize you in the wrong section in the search engine directory
or place your site in position 50.000 on page nr. 5.000 of that category’s search results.

2 – Search Engines receive manual site submissions -
ie. you go to a particular search engine and manually insert the website.
This in itself is no joke at all and if you’ve ever tried to insert a site into the
google directory (not the add url google page )- you’ll know why.
Once done the search engine either sends it’s bot to your site, or they
get a human being to look at your site. Sometimes they do both.
In both cases – if the site does not conform to both bot acceptance standards or human eyeball
acceptance standards the same will happen as above and your site will either be ignored or
categorized in the wrong section in the search engine directory or placed in position 50.000
on page nr. 5.000 of that category’s search results.
Bad news if your site is on page 5.000 of a search engine result since 99.9% of the people who use search engines only look at the first 3 pages of the generated results.

What must be done to optimize a site correctly ?
Many many things.
Metaname description and keywords ?
Well – although most seo experts maintain that for example google ignores these completely – this is false, but if you only have metaname keywords or even a meta description then you won’t get far on any search engine.
The structure of the pages must be set up according to various SEO principles, the body text of some pages must be analyzed time and time again using special web tools to sort out the keyword density, keyword prominence, keyword weight and proximity and many other gobbledegook factors.
Page file names (/myindex.html) must be named in a particular format, images must be named and optimized following certain criteria, links must be placed in special positions and a lot of messing around must be done under the hood – inside the html code.
Yeah…. that’s why companies like us exist.
We do all this astronomical work for your site and you concentrate on your business.

Can I optimize my business website myself ?
Sure you can.
The best way to do this is to get versed in SEO technology and to study the ins and outs via SEO forums, newsletters, personal experimentation, back to the drawing board situations and then spend 3 years getting top results in positioning international websites on international search engines by trying and trying and trying.
After you’ve gone through all of this, you’ll be able to set up your own SEO business and even forget about your actual existing site that you now want to have optimized.

If on the other hand you decide that this is probably something
people who specialize in seo should do for you – please get in touch with us.

Guaranteed top 3 positions in 1 million results ?
Haw haw haw … do yourself a favor … don’t believe everything you read.

Many search engine optimization services will tell you that they will guarantee you top listings in the search engines.
If you believe this then you deserve to be throwing away your hard earned money for smoke and mirrors.

I don’t guarantee anything of the sort.

What I do guarantee is that if we optimize your website and insert it correctly
into the search engines – your traffic will increase by 300% to 1000% within three months.

If it doesn’t – you get your money back. See costs estimates section

Paying a one time fee for getting your website found by thousands more people for the next two to three years is cheap compared to pay per click programs, banner advertising and sponsor plans which last for short periods or for how long you pay.

Contact me for an price quote.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,

One Simple Tactic That Will Dramatically Improve Your Search Engine Results

March 25, 2010 By View Comments

This has been the one lesson I try to drive home to all my clients. This is also why it is crucial to have a website with a blog built in. This is also why I build all of my websites using WordPress. It’s not only the best platform for blogging, it has extremely robust SEO capabilities at your disposal.

Written by John Jantsch, Founder of Duct Tape Marketing

While there are hundreds of evolving strategies and tactics used by SEO firms to help your web pages rise to the top of the results for your most coveted search terms, it all pretty much comes down to focusing on three things.

1. Properly formatted HTML
2. Education based, frequently changing content, lots of it
3. Authoritative links from other sites back to that content

That’s why I can’t help recommending blogging as a killer SEO tool.

In this post, however, I want to focus on the one tactic that will help you dominate your competition in the search engine battle: guest blog posting.

Guest posting is pretty much what it sounds like – writing blog posts as a guest author for another blog. For this post, I’m going to assume you’re already blogging on your own site.

Here’s why this is so powerful

The hardest part of the SEO triad I described above is getting high quality, organic (not purchased of swapped) links back to your site. Google, Bing and Yahoo all place high stock in those links. That’s why you see SEO firms promoting linking campaigns as a primary tool.

When you seek out and court relevant blogs (more on that in a bit) and publish high value content, with a link back to your site in the body of that content, you have likely produced one of the most valuable links you can acquire and the search engines will reward you for it.

Search engines like blogs because they tend to offer education and feed the search spiders before they even leave the house. Search engines put a higher value on links that reside inside the body of a post because they figure the author of the blog wanted them to follow that link and it wasn’t place there accidentally. (Comment links, site wide links, blogroll links all get marked down as a lesser or no follow value link.)

In addition, having your content appear on other blogs should allow you to reap the benefit of additional traffic to your blog and a bump in readership from the exposure your host provides. All good things!

How to get started

Network first – If you’re just getting started one of the first things you need to do is start reading, commenting and participating in the world of blogging. Go to Bloglines and subscribe to as many blogs as you can find that seem relevant to your subject. You want to build some credibility before you start pitching. If you’ve done that then you can start to build a target list.

Find the right blogs to pitch

In a perfect world you want the highest traffic, well known, high-ranking blog you can find to run your post, right? Well, get in line! Unless you to are all of the above yourself you’ll need to find a group of bloggers that are looking for guest content and that you can convince to want your content.

Let’s say you are a life coach. You can start by doing a search on Google for something like “life coaching: guest blog post” to find blogs on life coaching that offer guest posts. Or you might try a tool like placeblogger to find local blogs or a service like MyBlogGuest that matches blogs and guest bloggers by subject.

Show a reason why

Don’t just offer to write a post of some unspecificed nature. Like a good PR pitch you’ll want to sell why the very specific idea you have for a blog post will be found useful by a blog’s readers. This is where networking and building relationships with bloggers can make your job a bit easier. If a blogger is already familiar with the quality of your content, then they may readily accept the offer.

This is a place where you want to offer up highly relevant and original ideas. Few things will slow your guest blogging link strategy faster than republishing your old posts to a number of blogs.

Promote your host

Once you post content on another blog, go to work amplifying it. Tweet about it, write a little something about it on your own blog, post it to your Facebook Fan Page, bookmark it, StumbleIt, and Digg it.

All of this activity may actually get a few more eyeballs on your content, but it will also go a long way towards showing your appreciation to your host. This is how you get asked back and it’s certainly a good way to get other bloggers to invite you to post.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,

Keyword Rich Domain Names Still Strong

March 22, 2010 By View Comments

Most aspects of SEO work on “equal” ground.

No matter how exclusive and high quality a backlink is, your competitor can always get a backlink of equal value.

No matter how relevant an article is, your competitor can always write an article of similar keyword relevance.

Almost every aspect of SEO can be duplicated by your opposition.

So when you find an aspect of SEO that is entirely unbalanced – and effective enough that it can tip the scales against the sites of multi-million dollar companies – it’s worth knowing how to use this aspect to your advantage.

Take a look at the SEO Competition matrix for “Credit Cards”.

You’ll see 10 results that look a lot like this:

Notice anything strange?

It might be something that you’ve seen in your own niche. You might even notice it practically every time you do a Google search.

These 10 results reveal important story about one of Google’s great biases.

Let’s start looking at the 2nd result, and continue through the results immediately below it.

Visa, MasterCard, American Express – all huge names, synonymous with the term “credit cards”.

In terms of search engine relevance – these sites (synonymous with the term “credit cards” itself) are some of the most relevant credit card sites online.

Below those, there are some credit card comparison services, and smaller credit card providers such as Discover Card, Citi and Chase – the sort of “mix” of sites that you’d typically expect to find on a search engine results page… All relevant sites, but with lower levels of authority and relevance.

But the first result…

Here’s where things get interesting…

The first result on the page is www.creditcards.com

It sits ahead of Visa, MasterCard, and American Express – all multi-billion dollar companies with marketing budgets that could buy a small country…

Their names are synonymous with the words “credit cards”…

They have plenty of high PageRank links, including links from some of the largest and most reputable sites online…

And 100,000’s more links than their smaller rival…

…And yet they’ve been beaten to the punch – they’ve met a real David versus Goliath scenario with this “creditcards.com”.

This story repeats itself…

It’s something you can see in practically any keyword niche you analyze.

Smaller sites with keyword-optimized domains are seeing their SEO efforts magnified over time – giving them an unfair advantage that allows them to outrank competitors who boast more links, better content, higher PageRanks and more.

Let’s look deeper into the SEO analysis to see it in action…

Here are the off-page results again from Market Samurai’s SEO Competition module.

www.creditcards.com has lowest PageRank (PR) of all domains on the first page of results, and fewer Backlinks to the Page (BLP) and Backlinks to the Domain (BLD) than most of its competitors.

Its domain age is roughly on par with most of the domains there (some are higher, some are lower).

But it has one clear feature almost exclusively absent from the competition – it has the keyword “credit cards” in the domain name.

This demonstrates just how valuable it can be to get a good keyword-optimized domain.

Good domain names make SEO a whole lot easier.

They leverage or magnify your SEO efforts – so that each link you build, or article you create, counts more heavily towards your rankings – so you can put in less work than your competitors and still get the same (or better) effect.

This gives you a strong advantage over your opponents.

Think about the value of getting better results, with less time and effort.

Could it mean you have more time on your hands to devote to improving your site in other ways? Could it mean you get more visitors? Could it mean more sales? Could it mean bigger profits?

These opportunities to leverage your results in SEO are rare.

Using keyword optimized domains is one of the few “ninja” SEO techniques that still remain effective, allowing you to use the search engines’ heavy bias towards keyword optimized domains to your advantage.

So what should you do now?

4 Action Points for Using Domains Effectively

1. Use Keyword Domains for SEO – Obviously if you’re setting up a new site, and you aim to invest in SEO to attract visitors, get a keyword optimized domain.
2. Consider Moving to a Keyword Domain – If you’ve just set up a site, and it’s still in its early phase, consider moving to a keyword optimized domain. If you have an older site, the decision might not be so clear-cut though, because moving to a new domain name usually means starting afresh in the eyes of the search engines.
3. Keep Your Competitiors Out – Check for, and get, any high-value keyword domains in your market. Remember: no matter how successful you come to be you can always be unseated by a competitor bearing a keyword.com domain – so even if you don’t use the domains immediately yourself, protect yourself and keep potential competitors out of your niche by holding onto dangerous domains yourself.
4. Just Wait For What’s Up Next… – Over the next week, we’re going to drill deeper and deeper into how to find, select and utilize domains effectively for SEO, and look at some of the advanced techniques that professional domainers use to secure dynamite domains, and outrank established high-PageRank competitors like they were taking candy from babies.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,