Archive for the ‘search engine optimization’ category
Two Little Things that Can Ruin Your Search Rankings
There are many factors that go into how Google or any other search engine will choose to rank your website. If you’ve ever read much about SEO, then you probably already know the importance of optimizing the pages of your website and creating links to your website. If not, feel free to read any of the hundreds of blog posts on this site to learn more about that stuff. What I want to talk to you about today are two little things that you probably haven’t spent much time thinking about that can greatly damage your search rankings. They are:
Bad hosting
and
Bad pages
By bad hosting, I mean hosting that goes down often. Here is the problem: if Google visits your website and it is down, that is a black mark against you. The first time it happens, it may not hurt you. But if it happens repeatedly, Google is going to greatly downgrade its opinion of your website. As a result, your rankings in Google will plummet. If you have no idea if and when your website goes down, you should use a website monitoring service that will tell you when your site goes down. One that we have used is www.freewebmonitoring.com. There are many other services that do the same thing. Some are paid, so they may be more advanced, but a free service will do you just fine.
If you find that your website goes down often, my advice is to change hosting companies. It is a pain moving your website, especially if it is connected to a database, but the short-term pain will be your long-term gain in terms of improved search engine rankings. And I hate to say it, but with hosting, sometimes you get what you pay for. That cheap $6 per month hosting plan may work just fine, but there is just as good a chance that it will be a piece of crap. Work Media uses cloud hosting. We like it because it is as reliable as having our own server, but as easy to use as shared hosting (well, almost as easy). It is more expensive than shared hosting, but you will find that your website almost never goes down. Another similar consideration is how quickly your website loads. If you find that your site loads very slowly, that is another ready to upgrade to something better.
By bad pages, I really mean missing pages. If your website has gone through various changes over the years (especially as related to changing content management systems or platforms) then the URLs to your pages may have changed, or some pages just may not exist at all any more. This is a problem because Google HATES it when pages that it has indexed disappear. What you need to do is set up 301 permanent redirects from old pages to their newer counter parts (or even just to your home page). This is a pretty simple thing to do, but exactly how to do it depends on your Web server, what technology your website uses, and things of that nature. If you’re not sure how to go about it, contact someone (like us, for example) who can help you with it.
Work Media is here to take care of all your problems. If your search engine rankings are poor and you just don’t know what the problem is, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email info@workmedia.net.
What Are Your Competitors Doing? Using Emulation to Improve Search Rankings
Experienced search engine marketing companies like us have a pretty well-defined formula for how to do what we do. On-page optimization, link building, local search optimization…whatever it is, we have a good idea of how to do it within the confines of how Google and other search engines like to work.
However…
Sometimes playing by the strict rules just doesn’t get it done. If you find yourself in a situation where you just can’t seem to get the kind of visibility you are after for one or more particular keywords, then it might be time to take a hard look at what the top-ranked websites for those keywords are doing. You may be surprised.
We have a client in a very specific segment of the jewelry industry who wanted to get on the first page of Google for one specific keyword. Now, depending on the keyword, that can be a very tough situation. We like to spread things out and target a bucket of keywords. In a given week, some will go up and some will go down, but we always see a general rise in rankings overall. But when you are dealing with a single keyword, it’s either up or down, and that’s all there is to it.
We had optimized our client’s site in such a way as to not disturb the existing design (which is quite attractive) and went to work creating a ton of links. Our client’s site started bouncing around Google for the keyword, which is normal, but it just wouldn’t crack the first page. After a while, we decided to take a step back and take a hard look at what our client’s top-ranked competitors were doing. What we saw surprised us…sort-of. Many of them were quite ugly sites, filled with text. No surprises there. But what we noticed was a LOT of repetition of our target keyword. Much more than we like to use.
What this told us was that in this instance we were being too conservative. We needed to increase the frequency of our keyword in the text on our client’s website home page. Even though this was going to result in a keyword density that we are not really all that comfortable with, in this instance that is what Google wants to see.
The process of examining what your top-ranked competitors are doing is a very valuable exercise. You may be shocked at some of the things they are doing. Now, I should advise some caution here. If your clients are doing things that border on ban-worthy, then do not follow them over the cliff. But if it’s something like we are talking about in this case, where you just need more instances of your keyword, then do what they are doing…and then improve it!
The Dirty Little Wiki Secret
Wiki’s are basically like online encyclopedias that are publicly edited. It’s a collective knowledge tool. You’ve probably heard of the most famous once, Wikipedia. If you can get your business listed in Wikipedia, then that is very, very helpful. But it’s also very difficult to get a listing devoted to a business unless you are a big, nationwide company.
However, Wikipedia is only one wiki-style website. There are LOTS of those things. If you research your competitions’ back links and notice that they have lots of wiki links, then chances are they are working with an internet marketing company that is setting up wiki’s as a source of links. Many of these wiki’s are open, meaning anyone can edit them. So you know what you can do? You can change those links to point to your website. In cases where a marketing company is setting up lots of those things for links, they are probably not going to bother ever working on them again. Chances of your link staying intact are quite good.
This is somewhat of a borderline tactic because we’re not dealing with real high quality link sources in most cases. But if you see that these links are helping drive up your competition’s rankings, and they are open wiki’s, you have an opportunity to literally steal links from your competition.
Don’t spend all your time trying to hunt down these types of links. I’m really talking about a very specific situation where your competitors are driving up their ranking by using low quality wiki’s as a source of links. These sites really aren’t benefiting society at large, so you’re not hurting anyone…except your competition.
20 Top Article Directories to Target for Your SEO Campaign
Following are twenty of the top article directories, roughly ranked by recent Alexa ratings. These directories all have a reasonably high PageRank, a low Alexa rating (lower is better), and allow Do Follow links. This is a good list to use for your SEO campaign.
- Ezinearticles.com. The king of article directories.
- Buzzle.com.
- Goarticles.com.
- Gather.com.
- Ezinemark.com.
- Infobarrel.com.
- Ideamarketers.com.
- Thefreelibrary.com.
- Amazines.com.
- Sooperarticles.com.
- Pubarticles.com.
- Articlerich.com.
- Triond.com.
- Articledashboard.com.
- Articlecity.com.
- Isnare.com.
- Submityourarticle.com.
- Articletrader.com.
- Articleblast.com.
- Articleclick.com.
How to Become a Google Recognized Authority in Four Easy Steps
It is becoming increasingly more important for you to establish to Google that you are a real person creating legitimate content in order to get more leverage from the content that you create for your search engine marketing. There are a lot of little details for doing this, but what follows is a quick and dirty four step plan for becoming a Google authority.
1. First set up for yourself a high quality profile on Google +. Add a photo, and take advantage of any opportunity Google presents to give more information. And go ahead and follow some other people to start forming your circles.
2. Then create an account for yourself at www.ezinearticles.com, the top article directory. Go ahead and fill out all the information, including a photo. Add your Google + profile link to your Ezinearticles.com account by clicking the Social Media dropdown on the main menu and then selecting Google +.
3. Add your ezinearticles.com profile link to your Google + account. Click on Profile, then the Contributor to link. Add your Ezinearticles.com profile page link as a public link.
4. Begin publishing articles with your ezinearticles.com account. Place at most two keyword links to your website in the resource boxes for your articles.
This is a super simplification, but that’s it in a nutshell. You’re basically forming a chain that Google can follow to establish that you are a real person and a legitimate creator of content. If you do this over time, Google will consider you more of an authority, thus showing favoritism toward your published articles, and possibly increasing the likelihood of favoring your website in search rankings.
Google’s New Instant Search
You may have noticed something odd about Google all of a sudden – rather than waiting until you click the button, Google now starts returning search results while you are still typing out your query. This feature can be turned off, and it is too early to know if this will affect people’s search behavior. IF the feature remains and people use it, I think there are a couple of things you are going to need to keep in mind that relate directly to your site’s search engine optimization.
First, it is going to be more important than every to focus on higher volume keywords. Example: let’s say you have a store in Madison, Wisconsin that sells cheese and you are trying to decide between focusing on the keyword “Madison cheese shop” or “Madison cheese store.” Well, if Google is now displaying dynamic, predictive results, it is going to fill in the search based on which of “shop” or “store” is most widely used. So you will want to optimize for the higher traffic variation.
Another issue may be that the new predictive search will lesson the use of long-tail keywords. Since Google is supplying results while the person types, the searcher may see what he is looking for before he even finishes his query. So rather than finishing the keyword “Atlanta used car dealership,” he may stop at “Atlanta used car.” IF this is what actually ends up happening, then you may have to change the focus of your optimization to more broad keywords. It will be more competitive, but if search engine traffic is important to your business, then it will have to be done.
These are just a couple of examples. And none of this may even happen. It may very well be that people don’t like the feature, or that Google removes the feature, as it has a tendency to do. The main thing for the time being is to watch your stats so you are aware if your traffic changes for the worse because of the change to Google.
Focus
I wanted to take a few minutes today and discuss something that is CRITICAL to success in the world of search engine optimization: FOCUS.
Focus is a requirement for success in anything in life, and search marketing is certainly no different. If you want your website to rank highly in Google or any other search engine, you have to decide what keywords you want the site to rank for. You must avoid the temptation to take some wishy washy, half-ass approach where your sort-of optimized for this keyword, sort-of optimized for that keyword, etc. You must decide on specific keywords (with those decisions being based on proper keyword research) and then map those keywords to different pages of your site. Forget about trying to get your homepage to rank for all your keywords. Pick two keywords for the major pages of your site and optimize each one of those pages individually and specifically for those keywords.
This is kind-of like the concept of picking a niche to target in your business (a very good idea). If you present yourself as a generalist in your field, there are likely way too many potential prospects to do a decent job of marketing to, and you are going to face price difficulties. Generalists cannot charge the same premium as specialists. You should pick a specific market and go after it hard. The same is true with your search engine optimization. Pick a set of keywords that matches the criteria explained below and there will be much more congruity between your keywords and your website.
Keyword Criteria
1. It is highly relevant to your business.
2. It generates some traffic.
3. It is in a reasonable competitive situation.
In addition, any keyword for which you are currently in the top 50 is a good candidate, unless the competition is so competitive that it will take a very long time to reach the front page.
Another thing to remember is that the links you create in your link building campaign should contain your target keywords or close variations and that they should link to the specific pages of your site that are optimized for those keywords. Again…focus.
If you need help focusing your search engine optimization campaign, please call Work Media today at 888-299-4837 or email info@workmedia.net.
Getting Started with Spanish SEO
The market for your products or services among those who speak Spanish is potentially massive. And chances are very good that you are completely missing out on that market. This is somewhat of a complex subject, but I am going to give you a bare-bones strategy for promoting your business to the Hispanic market.
1. It goes without saying, but if you are going to promote your business in Spanish, you need to be prepared to speak to someone in that language. So you are going to need someone on your staff who can do that.
2. Use Google’s external keyword research tool to perform keyword research, but set the language preference to Spanish. The seed keywords should also be in Spanish:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
3. Create content for your web site, or create a new web site altogether, written in Spanish and optimized for the keywords from step 2. However, you should avoid any kind of automated translation software or web site. You need to hire a real human being to do the translation work. If you’re going to do it, do it right.
4. Generate keyword links to your Spanish language pages just like you would your English pages.
That’s it! Easy, right?…
Well, not really. English language SEO is time consuming and has many moving parts. But doing it in a language that you are not familiar with adds a whole ‘nother level of difficulty. If you are already fluent in Spanish, then you’ve got a big advantage over the rest of us.
Another consideration is whether you are promoting to a broad, global Spanish-speaking market or to markets in particular countries or to specific groups of people. There are many variations of the Spanish language, and what works and is acceptable language to one group may not be understood or considered rude by another group. In general, the best strategy is probably to take a high level, global perspective and try to avoid using language that is specific to any particular group.
So preparing yourself to do business with Spanish-speaking people will require some effort and resources, but it will open you up to a whole new market.
Google Search Options You Should Try Out
There are many things about Google that I dislike. I dislike many of the things about the Google AdWords program, such as the change recently preventing advertisers from split-testing different domain names in their ads within an ad group. I dislike the way Google constantly throws out new technology, and then provides little in the way of support for it (for example, sometimes Blogger will publish to an external web server, and sometimes it won’t, yet Google has shown very little interest in dealing with the problem or providing any guidance).
But the fact is, despite the many things I dislike about Google, I pound on the Google search ,engine non-stop. It is a fantastic research tool. There are a couple of Google search options that I recently started using that aid in the research process. If you write articles or use Google as a marketing tool (and you probably wouldn’t be reading this if you didn’t), then you should try these out.
To start, do any search in Google. The search I am using as an example while I type this out is “law firm internet marketing.” Hey, there’s my law firm internet marketing site at number six, and the Amazon.com page for our book on the subject at number nine. Neat. Anyway, now click the Show options link next to the plus sign at the top left above where the search results start.
Now you should see lots of links along the left-hand side of the screen. Some of them let you focus in on specific types of search results, such as images or blogs or whatever. But the two that I want to discuss here are Related searches and Wonder wheel.
Clicking the Related searches link shows a number of other searches that are, obviously, related to your first search. I think it is safe to assume that these are search queries that people have actually used because some of them are way too specific to just be synonyms or whatever. Clicking on one of those related search query links brings up a new page of search results, just as if you had types that keyword into the search box. Doing this process repeatedly will expose you to all kinds of search terms that you may not have thought of that might be applicable to your business. If you are purely engaging in the process for research purposes, it may lead you to some web sites or resources you would not have found by using your own search terms.
The Wonder wheel option is similar to related terms but more dynamic. Clicking that option displays a circle (or “wheel”) with your keyword in the middle and spokes coming out that point at related search terms. Clicking on one of the outside search terms draws another wheel with the second search term with a long spoke that connects to the first wheel, as well as its own set of spokes pointing to a new set of keywords. Really, this tool does the same thing that the Related searches link does, but it presents the information in a “mind mapping” kind of way and lets you see the path you followed to arrive at a search term.
Gain an edge on your competition by putting these tools to use today in your research and online marketing activities.
Blog Comment Linking: Good or Bad?
Recently, in its Google Webmaster blog (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com), Google posted about spam links in blog comments, and how using these links will damage your positioning. This is a strategy that Work Media sometimes employs, so we wanted to address this subject.
First off, you have to take these things with a grain of salt. Google likes to keep things secretive, and we believe it often does and says things just to create confusion about how its algorithm works. And the Web is built on links. Google uses links to find web sites and as a measure of a site’s worth in assigning it a ranking. So, in general, you still have to get links to your site if you want high search engine rankings.
For another thing, we don’t think it really makes sense to PUNISH sites for having links to it. That’s not to say Google doesn’t do it, and it seems to have done it in the past, but think about this: if Google is going to punish a web site for having links to it contained in blog comments, why wouldn’t I use this against my competitors? What is to stop me from going around to blogs and submitting spammy comments with links to my competitors’ web sites?
Google says this: “…it’s useless to think of harming your competitor’s ranking by spamming comments with their name, since it usually won’t affect their ranking if their sites are complying with Google Webmaster Guidelines.”
Ah, there’s the rub. If you do things the right way, you will be fine. Here is our approach to blog commenting:
1. Use a keyword for the name field.
2. Type a URL in the appropriate field.
3. Type out a well-written, well-thought-out comment that relates directly to the content of the blog post.
The difference between this approach and what Google is talking about is that we are making legitimate comments, while also taking advantage of the opportunity to get the link.
Here’s another thing: don’t rely solely on this or any other SEO strategy to get links. Mix it up. And be credible.
Here’s another thing that we find odd: one of Google’s suggestions is that a way to prevent this is to set comment links in your blog to no follow. However, it was recently revealed that doing that reduces the value of your own internal-pointing or other do follow links. The reason is that PageRank leaks out of your page from the no follow links, even though the pages the links point to do not get credited with the PageRank. So setting your links to no follow is now damaging to your own SEO efforts.
So what should you do? Don’t worry about it. Do your blog commenting like we suggest above and you will be fine.