Archive for the ‘SEO’ 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.
What Makes a Good Keyword for SEO?
When Work Media is conducting keyword research for one of our SEO clients, we look for keywords that meet three primary criteria:
They are highly relevant. This seems obvious, but many business owners tend to stretch the meaning of “relevant.” If you own a used car dealership in Memphis, “cars” is not an appropriate keyword. “used cars” is slightly more relevant; “Memphis used cars” is even more relevant.
They generate adequate traffic. Regardless of how relevant a keyword, if it represents a search phrase that is NEVER used, you’re not really accomplishing anything. Don’t forget the reason for doing all of this in the first place – to generate traffic to your website, and then leads for your business. No traffic, no leads. But a warning: don’t get greedy. You have to balance the potential traffic against the amount of effort required to achieve high search rankings.
They are in a reasonable competitive situation. If I do a search for “social security lawyer,” Google returns 21 million results – astronomical, but not a true representation of competition. If we do an “allintitle:” search for the same thing, we get 395 thousand results. That is a much more realistic measure of competition. But still a very large number of websites to compete against. If I do an “allintitle” search for “Baltimore social security lawyer,” I get 322 results. Now that is a number we can deal with!
BONUS Criteria: if you have search engine rankings for any keywords that meet the traffic criteria, then those are excellent candidates for optimization. Any good keyword for which you are in the top 30 or 40 should be targeted.
To put it another way:
| Low | High | |
| Relevance | X | |
| Traffic | X | |
| Competition | X |
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.
An Introduction to Local SEO
If your business operates at a local level, or has a geographically-defined market area, then it is important that you engage in local SEO. This process should probably start with Google Places.
Google Places is Google’s online business directory, similar to Yellow Pages listings, with the listings appearing on pinned onto a local map. So if I am in Savannah, and I search Google for “carpet cleaner,” Google will likely show me a few local carpet cleaning businesses. Or I may have to click on Maps to view those listings. Then Google will show me a list of businesses, along with little pins showing where they are on a map of Savannah. Obviously, you would like your carpet cleaning business to appear high up on this list.
Go to www.google.com/lbc and provide very complete information about your business. Don’t play games here. It can be a real pain to “fix” your local business listing in Google, so give your exact business address and don’t try to trick Google into thinking your office location is somewhere it isn’t. Give a detailed description of your business and include your major keywords. You have 200 characters, so make every character count. Include any other relevant information such as your hours of operation, if you have parking available, awards you have won, etc. This is not time to be modest.
Also add some multimedia. Add images and videos. In fact, add as many images and videos as Google will allow. If you don’t have videos, create some! This is the 21st century! Go get a cheap video camera and have someone record you sitting at your desk explaining how you have helped your customers. Or create an informational video explaining how you do what you do. This ain’t Hollywood. Just think of something to talk about, comb your hair, and press record.
Here are few tips:
- Use your exact business name for the titles.
- Use your search keywords in the description.
- Use your proper street address (a P.O. box defeats the whole point).
- Use your local phone number.
- If you have more than one location, fill out a profile for each location.
For local businesses, local search optimization is extremely important for generating search engine traffic to your website, so follow the above steps and you will greatly increase your odds of making this happen.
SEO Ain’t What It Used to Be
Search engine optimization ain’t what it used to be. Back in the good old days (pre-Google) all you had to do was use your keywords in your meta-tags, title and copy. You had a very good chance of ranking in search engines for the keywords. Then Google came along the with the idea that the number and quality of links pointing to your website, as well as the text content of those links, was a good indicator of your websites relevance. And thus was born the linking campaign. Now, it’s a lot more difficult than that.
Google remains the leader in the search engine race, still owning a large percentage of all search engine traffic. So it makes the most sense to optimize for Google, and work down from there. So what is Google looking at these days? Increasingly, Google is taking social media into consideration. In a way, they are sort-of forcing your hand into using Google Plus. Although other social media platforms certainly come into play as well.
Google is now looking for links to websites or social media profiles contained in social media accounts. Want to have your website appear highly ranked to your prospects? Then become social media friends with them. This will increase the likelihood that those individual see your website prominently in Google.
And ultimately, aren’t you most concerned with your website being found by those most likely to purchase your products or service?
And putting aside the idea of improving your visibility to your social media friends, it is very likely that this process will improve your rankings to anyone. If Google sees that lots of people promote your website in their social media accounts, then that will likely have a similar effect to having lots of external links from other websites.
So now you need to think of SEO in a couple of areas. Certainly, you still need to continue the process of optimizing your website in the traditional way. In other words, make sure that your web pages use your keywords in the correct way. And make sure that you have a catalog of high quality external links pointing to your website, especially links that contain your primary keywords.
A much newer area of optimization is concerned with the visibility of your website in the local portion of Google search results. This is called local SEO. I’m not going to go into the details, but there are a number of things you need to do to improve the chances of your website appearing prominently to those searching for your business in your market area.
And of course the newest area involves using social media to influence search results. Regardless of your opinion on the effectiveness of social media as a lead or sales generation tool, it cannot be denied because of its effect on your search rankings.
So regardless of your comfort level being social online, it now must be a part of your overall Internet marketing strategy
Need some help? Work media would be glad to assist with this process. It is time consuming and not necessarily all that intuitive. Call us today at 615-375-8793. Or e-mail us at info@workmedia.net.
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.