Posts Tagged ‘optimized’

Search engine optimization-The History Of Your Web Pages

Friday, July 18th, 2008

The history of your website and in fact, the individual pages within it are playing an increasingly important role in your site’s ability to rank well. The longer your site has been online the better your chances of ranking highly. Further, the longer a specific internal page has been live the better it will rank for additional phrases.

What this means to you is that you will have to take into account the length of time your domain has been around when you set your expectations regarding which phrases you should be ranking for. In the beginning of a promotion you will not want to target an intensely competitive phrase with hopes of attaining it on Google; rather you will want to select less competitive secondary phrases that contain the primary phrase (”seo services” vs. “guaranteed seo services” for example) and optimize for that. What you will accomplish is rankings on Google for at least a relevant phrase while at the same time building links with relevancy for your primary phrase which you will rank well for once your website has gained history.

The less competitive the phrase, the more weight the other factors will have on your ability to rank highly. History is only one factor among many. For highly competitive phrases where you are competing with sites that have history and have also addressed the other factors noted below you will find it extremely difficult to outrank them, however for less competitive phrases the other factors will hold more weight in that the other sites will likely not be optimized as strongly for them and thus, your site stands a much better chance of beating them out.

What is the role of search engine optimization in media relations?

Tuesday, July 15th, 2008

It’s a strategic decision. The keyword insight that comes from keyword analysis that you might do with a SEO campaign, where you can tap in to tools that monitor what people are searching on can be very useful in optimizing news related content.

The result of the keyword research is to create a glossary of phrases with metrics like popularity, relevance and competitiveness. You can then leverage the glossary across corporate communications. Try to get any digital asset that’s created whether its press releases, web pages, product pages or announcements to use phrases from the glossary. Get people responsible for creating the content to use the glossaries and find out what variations of phrases are in demand so that they’re using language that’s both relevant and popular.

Often times, people like to be creative in PR and direct marketing and that does not always bode well for search. Copywriters or content producers try to be clever or ironic or funny and those ways of communicating are not as meaningful to a machine or an algorithm as being literal in your word usage. That is a practical application of search for media relations. You optimize content according to what people are looking for.

Let’s say you’re conducting media relations for a client for an interview and the company web site and press releases are already optimized for certain keywords. You can coach the client to use those keywords in the interview. What happens a lot of times is that when that interview goes to print or even online, people remember the topics of the article but not necessarily the names of the companies involved. They’ll go to Google and search for those topics and when the company web site is properly optimized, it ranks highly for search phrases gleaned from the article.

Search engine Optimization-Some last remarks

Tuesday, July 15th, 2008

Google simply puts a 30 days block upon sites that use trivial keyword tricks (hidden text/div or text in the same color as a background), so don’t bother trying this kind of stuff. Detecting and catching a robot with javascript or IP cloacing or using linkfarms to boost your Pagerank are considered even more illegal. They could get you put out of the ranking for good.

Just remember that a robot will be optimized over and over to be able to judge webpages the way a human does. In the end, if you make sure your site is clean and accessible and your content is good and relevant, websurfers will find you and bytes will flow.

Of course this article only covers the rough basics of search engine optimization. If you feel like I have missed out on something, or you’ve got an excellent hint to share, please feel free to post them in the forum! The diagnostics guide from GoogleRankings.com is a great resource for more information (there’s a list of issues at the left side).

Writing a SEO Optimized Blog Posts:

Thursday, June 26th, 2008

Title: SEO starts with the title of the post. You main keyword needs to be incorporated into your posts title to have the most effect. A great tool already part of WordPress is the slug. You will find the slug in the right hand side column of your WordPress editor (where you write your blog posts.) By using your keyword in your slug, it will read better for SEO purposes but nevertheless you won’t loose your nice post title.

Just take a peek at this posts title and then take a look at the actual URL of this posts. The end behind the blogs URL (seo-optimization) is the actual post slug I chose to use.

Blog Post: The next part of your SEO optimized blog post is the actual blog post. You will need to use your keyword in the very first sentence of the post and either use the bold, italic, or underline feature ( please note that in the default WordPress editor you can only underline whilst going to the code view and then place the <u>keyword</u> tags around your keyword like this. I’ve used this example throughout the whole blog posts here to give you a better idea on what I mean.

Note: Please be careful on not to overdo this otherwise the search engine bots will mark you as a spam blog and instead of ranking well, you will be buried.

Your first paragraph also needs to contain your keyword in the last sentence. Ideally you will use the keyword twice or three times in the first paragraph, depending on length.

Throughout your posts sprinkle your keyword further. It is very important, that the very last paragraph also contains your keyword since the search engine bots often spider the beginning and the last bit of every blog post.

Tags: Tags are also an often overlooked part of the whole SEO optimization process. Please USE them at all times if you try for SEO. It helps to use your main keyword as a tag first and then some variations. Ideally you want around 5-10 tags.

Hyperlinks: If your posts contains hyperlinks to other pages in your blog, or to affiliate programs that are related to the topic, then use the keyword to hyperlink to them. It will carry more weight for SEO optimization purposes.

Images: Images need to be tagged with the keyword to have the highest possible effect for SEO. You should use images in your blog posts since a picture often speaks a thousand words and by tagging it the right way it will give you SE juice.

All in One SEO Pack Plugin: An absolute must to have, if you are working at SEO optimization. You can download this Plugin on the developers website and read all about why you need this.

How to Make Your Blog Posts SEO Friendly

Thursday, June 26th, 2008

To make blog post more optimized for SEO and more SEO friendly bloggers can do several things. The reason we should do this, is to allow us to attain better search engine positions naturally (organically). With SEO optimized posts the changes for this to happen is actually a lot more possible.

But SEO optimized posts alone won’t get you to the top position of Google. Initially when your posts gets indexed and cached it is very much possible to snatch a number 1 ranking. But this ranking is only temporarily. Great for niche marketing, SEO optimized posts can bring you targeted traffic fast. If your niche site is optimized to sell Adsense, then you might be able to earn a bit of short term income the moment your SEO optimized posts hits the front page.

To keep that SEO optimized post in the tops of the SERPS, we need good quality incoming links. The higher the PR (Page Rank) of the incoming links are, the better our own PR will fare. This process of building incoming links is often long term and boring. In the bigger scheme of things however, it is essential if you want to dominate Google and/or your niches.