SiteproNews July 20, 2010

Many webmasters complain about their website not ranking well in the SERPs. What they fail to realize is that their website is not search engine friendly. An SEO friendly website contains more than keyword filled Meta tags and content.

A website must be created and designed keeping the visitors in mind. Search engines can get your website in the top ranking; but a well crafted website ensures that the visitor gets converted into a customer. You need to ensure that your website is both search engine and visitor friendly.

Tips for Creating a Search Engine Friendly Website:

Fill the Meta tags: Search engines come across the Meta tags well before the content. A major part of the search result is picked up from the Meta tags. The title tag helps the search engines and visitors in understanding what the webpage is about. The Meta description gets listed as the snippet in the search result. Well formatted Meta tags play a major role in making the website SEO friendly.

Include Breadcrumbs in the website: Breadcrumbs are navigational links present in the inner pages of the website. They link a web page to its respective category and sub category. Breadcrumbs help in the even distribution of the page rank to the connected web pages. You must include keywords as the anchor text of the breadcrumbs. Remember to place the breadcrumbs before the main heading of the web page.

Perform the On Page Optimization Activities: SEO of a website mainly consists of on page optimization activities. Implement these tips:

• Add a heading tag to the web page.
• As search engines cannot read images, add an alt tag to the images.
• Name the image according to the selected keywords. Use hyphens to separate long keywords.
• Place a keyword as the anchor text of a link.
• Optimize the content of your web page. Make sure that the keyword density doesn’t exceed 2%.

Interlink all the important web pages: Interlinking web pages helps the search spiders to navigate the website. Web pages can be linked based on their category. E.g. an online book store can link their web pages based on the authors. It has been observed that a well linked website will always rank better than the non-linked websites. You can link to the important pages of your website from the homepage by using appropriate anchor text.

Use SEO Friendly URL Structure: Search engines do not understand the URL’s which contain the PHP / ASP code in them. A SEO friendly URL structure contains words separated by hyphens. You can rewrite your URL’s manually via the.htaccess file. Wordpress gives you an option to change your URL structure with one click.

Generate XML Sitemaps: Sitemaps help the engines discover all the pages in your website. There are a lot of free XML sitemap generator tools available online. You can include the “priority” and “change frequency” tags in your sitemap. The priority tag indicates the importance of the web page to the search engines. The Change frequency tag tells the search engines how frequently the page is likely to change.

A fully optimized site increases your chances of ranking well in the SERPs. Once in the top SERPs, your website has a good chance of converting its visitors into customers.

By Bill Platt in Linking Strategies

Everyday it seems, people are asking me the optimum numbers of inbound links they need to acquire for their website in order to rank well in Google.

My answer is going to seem a little flip, but it is the honest, best answer.

Answer: You need more inbound links – of equal or higher quality – than what your competitors have.

Albert Einstein argued that any mathematical formula that required pages of calculations did not contain within it “the mind of God”.

So when Albert Einstein developed E=mc2, then Einstein had fulfilled the promise of a simple formula that could encompass the brilliance of God.

When people wonder as to how many inbound links they might need to acquire in order to rank in the Top 4 of Google’s search results or even the Top 10 of Google’s SERPs, they are generally hoping that someone will be able to give them a numeric answer, so that they know whether they can afford to undertake the process or not.

I understand the WHY of the question, but there is no canned answer that will work for everyone.

Remember, your competitor may be asking the same question and undertaking the same processes as you are, trying to accomplish the same goal.

No one can truly begin to understand the answer to this question, until one has take the time to do an Inbound Link Comparison Analysis of all of your competitors in the Top 10 spots of Google’s SERPs.

• You need to look at the Top 10 listings in Google for a particular keyword.
• You need to do backlink checks for all ten URLs in Google’s search listings, and you need to check those numbers across a variety of sources, including Google, Yahoo and any other tool you can find to do a check. (Google and Yahoo both tend to understate the actual link counts. While Yahoo will show you more than what Google does, they also show a number of “no consequence” links in their results.)
• You need to look at the quality of a few of the pages that offer links to the URLs in the search results.

This is not an easy process to undertake. I have done it before, but the best you can hope for is a “snapshot” of what is out there, and therefore, what you need to accomplish.

Note: If Wikipedia turns up in your search query, few people with small budgets will ever be able to dislodge Wikipedia in the search results. What they make up for in a small number of inbound links, they more than make up for with links from dozens or hundreds of PR4, PR5 and PR6 pages. Wikipedia is the king of Internal Linking, and they use that to a great degree to rank extraordinarily high in Google’s search listings.

Your analysis should seek to uncover how many links a page has to it.

As a general rule of thumb, Google will show you less than 1% of the existing number of links for a web page. Yahoo will sometimes show closer to 5% of the existing number of links for a web page, but they will not show you the highest quality of those links.

So, as you strive to gain a “snapshot” picture of the playing field, you want to take Google’s Inbound Links number and multiply that by at least 100. Then you want to take Yahoo’s Inbound Links number and multiply that by at least 20, then cut the number in half to acknowledge the number of worthless crap links they have in their database. Once you have achieved these two numbers, then I tend to call the truth “somewhere in the middle”.

With your “somewhere in the middle” number in hand, then you need to look at the quality of links to a few of those search listings, to get an idea of whether those links exist on higher quality pages or simply junk pages.

If those links are on junk pages, then the goal could be achieved by just working the numbers. But if there are a lot of high PageRank pages in the mix, then whatever number is in your hand, should be multiplied, perhaps 100-fold, to overcome the quality of pages that link to your competitors.

If you get the idea that my simple formula leads to a complicated answer, then you are right.

All of the numbers that I have included in my sample formula are based on rough speculation, as the “snapshot” offers you your best hope of understanding the challenge in front of you.

While the number of inbound links may be relatively easy to determine, the link quality is a factor that is really hard to pin down.

• If you determine that you only need 300 inbound links to rank with the big boys, you may be right.
• Your 300 inbound links number should also be quantified against the number of links that Google will count worthy, so you may need 1200 links to get 300 links that Google will deem worthy. This calculation depends more on the “quality of your content”, rather than the “quantity of your content”.
• When all is said and done and your 300 Google-worthy links have not yet put you on page one, then you know that the quality of the links pointing at your competitors is greater than the quality of the links pointing to you.

If you were hoping for an easy answer, I am sorry that I could not help you with that.

But with this explanation of the challenge, you may be better prepared to answer the big question, the question that is really on your mind:

=== Are my hopes of achieving good rankings in Google within my reach?

I tend to throw “worry” to the wind and just start working. I don’t worry if I can afford to do it or not. I simply start doing, and I know that in one month, one year or five, I will have built enough value in my website that my competitors are going to be the ones who are trying to figure out if they can unseat me!

SitePro News

Happy St. Patricks Day to everyone.

Posted Feb 27, 2010

In this tough financial market businesses everywhere are watching their marketing dollars more closely making the internet the one of the newest methods for advertising among smaller and medium-sized companies.  However, once these companies pay for a new website and get it launched, the website just sits there. And sits there… And sits there.

Of course when they check their company on the search engines, they are nowhere to be found.  This outcome is not inevitable.  You can help your site climb in the search engines and drive business to your site.  However, remember there is no magic bullet.  It takes time , research and trial and error to get your site to reach its full potential.  Here are some tips to get you started:

1. Use keyword phrases at multiple points throughout each page of your website.  Don’t use these phrases indescriminately or it will count against you, but make sure that you have them peppered throughout the content as is appropriate.
2. Get a blog on your website and blog often and regularly about information relevant to your website’s content.  A blog that is relevant and fresh will garner more points than a stale, static page.
3. Make sure that your meta tags are filled out and are appropriate for the subject matter at hand. 
4. Submit your site for search engine review regularly.
5. And finally, be patient.

If you follow these steps and give it some time, then you should get the results you are looking for.

Orlando Web Concepts would like to congratulate The Ultimate Events Company for the launch of their new website. This website is a Custom CSS design with a custom blog, XML photo gallery and a payment interface. Please check out their company for any events related needs you may have.

Do you have a WordPress blog? If so, one of the best ways to increase the traffic to your blog is by applying search engine optimization (SEO) techniques. In this article we will go over 7 simple things that you can to do increase your traffic from the search engines.

Make sure that your permalinks are set up optimally for SEO – whenever you publish a blog post it will have a permanent URL known as a “permalink”. By default the WordPress permalink setting is not optimal but you can easily edit this by clicking on the Settings->Permalinks menu in the WordPress dashboard and then use a custom setting http://yourdomainname.com/category/postname. This will mean that your blog post category and title will appear in the URL rather than a number.
Install the All in One SEO Pack (or a another similar plugin) – the All in One SEO Pack plugin allows you to add a custom title, meta description and keyword tags for your home page and blog posts.
Optimize each blog post for a low competition long tail keyword phrase – before you make a blog post take some time to do a little keyword research. Visit the Google Adwords Keyword tool and use this to find a long tail keyword phrase that has a low amount of competition. Ideally this phrase will have just a few hundred monthly searches rather than a few thousand monthly searches. Use a different keyword phrase for every blog post that you make and put the keyword phrase in the blog post title and 2-3 times throughout the post.
Use Social Bookmarking services to bookmark each blog post – whenever you post to your blog use a social bookmarking service e.g. Digg or StumbleUpon. There are also services such as OnlyWire and SocialMarker that will let you submit your site to multiple bookmarking services at the same time. Social bookmarking can get you additional traffic to your blog and give you a backlink to your blog post.
Optimize the home page of your blog – it is normal for the home page of your blog to get more traffic then any of the other pages. You can increase the number of visitors even more by optimizing your home page. Choose one or two keyword phrases for the home page of your website using the free Google Adwords Keyword tool. If possible try to choose prases that are not too competitive, but still have a good few thousand monthly searches. Ensure that you include these keyword phrases are mentioned in the TITLE tag, meta description and throughout the permanent content of your blog home page.
Install the Google XML Sitemaps plugin – this won’t increase your search engine rank, but having a sitemap will help to ensure that the search engines index all the posts and pages of your blog. You can use the Google XML Sitemaps plugin to create a sitemap for your blog.
Build links to your blog – building links back to your website is the surest way to improve your ranking in the search engines. If you ignore this it will be very difficult to get a good level of visitors from the search engines. You can build links using article marketing, directory submission, forum posting, commenting on other blogs, press releases, link exchange and social bookmarking.
Site Pro News

Orlando Web Concepts welcomes The Ultimate Events Company to our family.

Article by Titus Hoskins in SE Optimization

Keywords are ground zero. They are essential to your online success. You must get your keywords right or it’s game over before you even get started. Mainly because keywords are the most important element of your online marketing.

It can’t be emphasized enough, especially to beginning online webmasters or marketers, choosing the right profitable keywords will largely determine whether or not you succeed with your online endeavors. You simply must get this element right or your marketing will be in big trouble.

What Are Keywords?

Lets start at the very beginning, keywords are the exact words someone types into a search engine to find what they’re looking for on the web. Some keywords are valuable/profitable, while others are virtually worthless.

Profitable keywords are the ones that convert into a sale, a lead or potential client/customer for your company or product. These are the words someone is searching in order to buy a product or hire a service. Someone searching for “honeymoon vacation packages” is probably in the market to book a honeymoon vacation and could turn out to be very profitable for the right website or business.

Profitable keywords are the ones where the searcher is in the right “mind-set” or frame of mind to buy what they’re searching for on the web. Tailor your online marketing to target these profitable keywords and it can spell success.

So what’s the whole process for finding or choosing profitable keywords to use in your marketing? Lets look at some ways to proceed…

Number of Keyword Searches Made?

You need to find out how many searches are made for your chosen keywords each month. Simply use WordTracker or a site like SEOBook. These will give you a preliminary number of searches made each month for your keyword. Highly popular, well-searched keywords with hundreds of thousands of searches each month will be extremely hard to rank for because you will have stiff competition from major companies with limitless resources.

I like to pick less popular keywords that get only a couple of hundred of searches each day because my chances of getting on the first page greatly increases. But don’t get fixated on the number of searches, some keyword phrases that only get four or five searches daily, can still be very profitable.

For serious keyword research in a particular niche market I like to use Brad Callen’s Keyword Elite which is professionally designed software that makes all your keyword research so much easier. But there are plenty of free keyword tools you can use. One handy keyword tool is Google Adwords external suggestion tool which will help you find valuable keywords.

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Commercial Intent of Keywords?

But how do you know if a keyword is profitable? Well, one convenient tool is from MSN which helps you with “Detecting Online Commercial Intention” of keywords. Just type in a keyword and it will give you a percentage or probability your keyword query has commercial benefit or intent.

http://adlab.msn.com/Online-Commercial-Intention/Default.aspx

Conversion Rate of Keywords?

Once you have your chosen keywords in place, next you want to have a landing page that converts those keywords or traffic from those keywords into buyers or leads for your online business. This is another crucial element of your online marketing - you must have a landing page or content/site that converts into a sale or you obviously won’t make any revenue.

Keep in mind, if you’re into affiliate marketing, you main goal is not to sell but to “pre-sell” your products or services. One effective way I have found to do this is to give potential customers/clients valuable information they can use in making their final purchasing choice. Comparison sites do well, as do review sites, top ten sites… potential customers use the Internet and keywords to not only find products but more so, to find information on those products. Your goal should be to provide this valuable information to make their task a little bit easier for them and they will reward you with a sale.

What are Long-Tail Keywords?

Long-Tail keywords are simply that: long three or four word phrases that searchers use to find what they’re looking for on the web. Because they are highly specific, long-tail keywords have proven to have better conversion rates than general keywords. This is also just common sense, someone searching for a “2005 ford mustang convertible” may just be in the right mind-set to buy such a vehicle; as compared to someone searching for a more general keyword phrase such as “sports cars.”

Study your website traffic logs religiously to find long-tail keywords that turn into a sale. Target these long-tail keywords in your marketing. Even buy PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising in the three major search engines - Google Adwords, Yahoo! Marketing and MicroSoft AdCenter - for these valuable/profitable keywords.

And build higher rankings in organic search for these long-tail keyword phrases. It’s really not that difficult for long phrases, especially if they’re related to your site; many times you can reach the top spot in a matter of days, especially in Google.

How To Rank High For Your Chosen Profitable Keywords?

Of course, the million dollar question is: HOW do you rank in the top spot for your chosen keywords? I believe the key to ranking high in the search engines (especially Google) is to be persistent in building your rankings for your keywords. Take a long-term view or approach, sometimes it may take months, even years, to rank in the top Five for your highly competitive keywords.

The best strategy is to “stick to it” and keep building relevant links to your keyword landing page. Create related blogs with valuable content linking back to your keywords. Write keyword related articles and distribute them all over the web. Create Google Alerts for your keywords and them place comments/links in the newly formed pages on the web that Google is indexing.

Be pro-active, download the SEOQuake toolbar and find your main keyword competitors. Check out their links and then go out and get the same links. Write better higher quality content than your main competitors because Google always rewards great content. Plus, use the free http://www.Addthis.com button and let your visitors bookmark your great content in all the social bookmark sites and build your keyword links for you.

Do keyworded Press Releases with your embedded links and spread them all over the web. Get these Press Releases into Google news and other important places on the web. http://www.PRWeb.com is really a great place for your press releases since you can embed your keywords in your links.

If you can try to get your most important keywords in your domain name. Many SEO experts argue the merits of this but from my own experience and marketing - it is much easier to rank high for your keywords if you have them in the domain name. Again, it is just common sense, if you have your main keyword in the domain, this keyword is obviously telling the search engines this is what your site is all about. I have even bought domains and created sites specifically around certain keywords just to rank high.

Always remember, you have to be persistent, I have been fighting some keyword battles for over four or five years! For really profitable keywords, it can be a constant struggle to remain on the first page, but the trick is not to give up, just keep fighting away at your competitors. Persistence usually pays off in the end and those profitable keywords will have your links in the top spot. Make ranking high for those profitable keywords your number one marketing strategy. Concentrate all your marketing efforts towards getting plenty of quality traffic for those keywords and you will succeed online.

Sitepronews.com