SEO-SiteDesign.com

Welcome Humor Writers!

seositedesign — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 18:39:05 +0000

Due to the overwhelming response to my post this morning on the group regarding blogs and a few marketing tips.

Instead of emailing you all individually with the checklist I will post it here. Please feel free to ask questions if you have any.

Customize blog look and feel templates – aka design.
Research keywords and develop a glossary – Optimize the blog:
- Template optimization – RSS subscription options, social bookmark links, HTML code, Unique title tags, URLs, Sitemap
- Add helper plugins specific to WordPress or MT
- Create keyword rich categories (reference your keyword glossary)
Enable automatic trackback and ping functionality.
Create Feedburner Pro account and enable feed tracking.
Setup a Google account for Sitemap, validate and prep for future submission.
Identify authoritative blogs, web sites and hubs for outbound resource links and blogroll.
Format archived posts, related posts.
Enable statistics for tracking – Google Analytics, ClickTracks.
Submit RSS feed and Blog URL to prominent RSS and Blog directories / search engines.
Engage in an ongoing link building campaign.
If podcast or video content are available, submit to Podcast and Vlog directories.
Submit blog url to paid directories with categories for blogs – Yahoo, BOTW, bCentral, WOW, JoeAnt.
Optimize and distribute a press release announcing blog.
Request feedback or reviews of your blog in relevant forums, discussion threads. If you have a resourceful post that will help others, point to it.
Research and comment on relevant industry related blogs and blogs with significant centers of influence.
Post regularly.It’s an authoritative blog, 3-5 times per week, but each post must be unique and high value.
Monitor inbound links, traffic, comments and mentions of your blog – Google Alerts, Technorati, Blogpulse, Yahoo News, Ask Blogs and Feeds.
Always respond to comments on your blog and if another blog, thank that blogger in the comments of the post.
Make contact with related bloggers on AND offline if possible.
When making blog posts always cite the source with a link and don’t be afraid to mention popular bloggers by name. Use keywords in the blog post title, in the body of the post and use anchor text when you link to previous posts you’ve made.
Use social networking services, forums and discussion threads to connect with other bloggers. If they like your stuff, they will link to you.
Remember when web sites were a new concept and the sage advice to print your web address everywhere you print your phone number? The same advice applies for your blog.
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Because the blog’s goal is to promote you as an authority, interview other prominent resources / bloggers in your industry. Your own credibility will improve by association.
Build out your online networks through services such as MyBlogLog, Twitter and Facebook and leverage them to promote particularly useful content on your blog.
Once your blog has 1000 or more subscribers, show your Feedburner badge
Host images with Flickr making sure to include an anchor text link in the image description back to the post where the image is used.
Use your blog to gain press/media credentials at relevant industry conferences and use the event to create content, connections and increase your knowledge.

12 Step SEO Programs

seositedesign — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 18:46:29 +0000

You may be on your first website. But more likely you’re faced with redesigning a website that isn’t functioning as well as it should.

I see 12 vital decisions involved with developing a website, and I want to explain them with you in mind:
• You’re the owner or marketing director of a small business and know that getting your website to pull its share of the load is vital for success. But your budget is severely limited!
• You’ve just been assigned the task of redoing your company’s website. Congratulations, now you can be blamed if things don’t work well.
• You’ve volunteered to take on your church or organization website and make some sense out of it — without offending the person who built it in the first place.
• This time around you’ve decided to outsource the job, but you have no idea of how to supervise a design company to make sure it does what you need. Good luck!
I want to help. When I built my first website in 1998 at the very beginning of the commercial Web, I didn’t have a clue how to proceed. In those days there was no one to guide me. I’ve made every mistake you can think of — some more than once, I hate to admit.
Since then I’ve built and assisted with dozens of online stores and hundreds of websites for all kinds of businesses and organizations, from mom and pops to major corporations and international organizations. I don’t design websites for others these days, but I actively develop and maintain my own site.
There are twelve critical places in building a website where you must make the right decision, or you’ll have to repeat this task again and again until you get it right. I won’t be talking about how to write HTML; I want to help you with the mindset, the
basic approach. I want to take you by the hand and lead you through the critical decisions. The better you grasp these essential points, the better your website will work and the happier camper you’ll be.

Title Tags- An introduction

seositedesign — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 16:37:03 +0000

This is a great introduction to the title tags, why they help and how to locate them to your benefit.

Title tags are often overlooked by business owners, but not to SEO experts! Please let me know what you think and thanks to Gareth Davies! Be sure and check out his website for more SEO 101 tutorials!

How do you test and measure results?

seositedesign — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 18:41:17 +0000

Testing and measuring for natural search is more difficult than it is for paid search, but it can still be performed well. Most agencies simply track rankings on key phrases. Some even talk about vague metrics such as
visibility and reach.
This is not good enough, in our opinion. We prefer to talk about tangible things like measurable traffic
(visitors) and conversion events (leads, sales, etc.).
SEO efforts must be tied to the specific goals of the website. If a website’s purpose is to generate leads, those leads must be able to be tied back to the specific key phrase and search engine. Similarly, if a website’s purpose
is to generate sales directly, the sales (and their value) must be able to be tied back to the organic listing from which they came.

Keyword Phrases- Organic SEO

seositedesign — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 16:05:18 +0000

- Unlike paid search advertising, where one can focus on thousands of key phrases, natural search requires focusing on a small number of key phrases. Also, with paid search there is no charge unless someone actually clicks on an advertisement, the effort and cost of natural search is expended simply to have the website listing shown. Ideally, the effectiveness of particular key phrases has been measured via a properly configured and managed paid search campaign. This provides both Click Through Rate (CTR) and Conversion Rate (CR) data on a key phrase by key phrase basis. This data can be then married with various metrics indicating the relative competitiveness of key phrases, so that the most important key phrases can be chosen.

Today’s Question (Organic vs. Paid)

seositedesign — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 22:37:12 +0000

Do you prefer to start with paid search or natural search?
There are some major differences between Paid Search and Organic Search. A notable difference is that with
Paid Search, one can (and should) advertise on a wide variety of key phrases (at least in the hundreds) and
track the results of their efforts on a key phrase by key phrase basis. With Organic Search, one should focus on
a small set of well trafficked, effective key phrases.
By starting with Paid Search, one can gain explicit data on which key phrases convert into leads and sales, and then use this data to target key phrases for a natural SEO campaign.
Unfortunately, most of our industry fails to lead with Paid Search, preferring instead to launch Organic Search
efforts first. Why is this? Two potential reasons present themselves. This could be due to simple incompetence,
but a less charitable interpretation of industry behavior could be that since Natural Search is typically
FAR more profitable for the search marketing firm. With Paid Search, most of the client’s money goes immediately
to Google and Yahoo in the form of media buys.
In our view, the only legitimate reason a business should focus on Organic Search before proving out keywords
on Paid Search is that the company is in an industry niche that is not hyper competitive and has fairly
obvious primary keywords with significant search volume.

Organic SEO Myths- Revealed

seositedesign — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 17:31:24 +0000

In a post in 2007- these were revealed as the top 10 SEO Myths. Oddly enough, 9 months later the tides have turned. Stay tuned!

http://searchengineland.com/070830-074852.php

SEO myths get crazier every year. Some are based partially in reality, and others have spread because it’s often difficult to prove what particular SEO action caused a resulting search engine reaction.

For example, you might make a change to something on a page of your site, and a few days later notice that your ranking in Google for a particular keyword phrase has changed. You might naturally assume that your page change is what caused the ranking change. But that’s not necessarily so. There are numerous reasons why your ranking may have changed, and in many cases they actually have nothing to do with anything that you did.

Mixing up cause and effect is one of the most common things new SEOs do. If it were affecting only their own work, it wouldn’t be so bad, but unfortunately, the clueless often spread their misinformation to other unsuspecting newbies on forums and blogs, which in turn creates new myths. It’s always interesting to see how people are so willing to believe anything they have read or heard without ever checking it out for themselves.

Here are 10 of the most common organic-SEO myths:

Myth 1: You should submit your URLs to search engines. This may have helped once upon a time, but it’s been at least 5 or 6 years since that’s been necessary.

Myth 2: You need a Google Sitemap. If your site was built correctly, i.e., it’s crawler-friendly, you certainly don’t need a Google Sitemap. It won’t hurt you to have one, and you may be interested in Google’s other Webmaster Central Tools, but having a Google Sitemap isn’t going to get you ranked better.

Myth 3: You need to update your site frequently. Frequent updates to your pages may increase the search engine crawl rate, but it won’t increase your rankings. If your site doesn’t need to change, don’t change it just because you think the search engines will like it better. They won’t. In fact, some of the highest ranking sites in Google haven’t been touched in years.

Myth 4: PPC ads will help/hurt rankings. This one is funny to me because about half the people who think that running Google AdWords will affect their organic rankings believe that they will bring them down; the other half believe they will bring them up. That alone should tell you that neither is true!

Myth 5: Your site will be banned if you ignore Google’s guidelines. There’s nothing in Google’s webmaster guidelines that isn’t common sense. You can read them if you’d like, but it’s not mandatory in order to be an SEO. Just don’t do anything strictly for search engines that you wouldn’t do anyway, and you’ll be fine. That said, the Google guidelines are much better than they used to be, and may even provide you with a few good tidbits of advice.

Myth 6: Your site will be banned if you buy links. This one does have some roots in reality, as Google (specifically Matt Cutts) likes to scare people about this. They rightly don’t want to count paid links as votes for a page if they can figure out that they are paid, but they often can’t. Even if they do figure it out, they simply won’t count them. It would be foolish of them to ban entire sites because they buy advertising on other sites.

Myth 7: H1 (or any header tags) must be used for high rankings. There’s very little (if any) evidence to suggest that keywords in H tags actually affect rankings, yet this myth continues to proliferate. My own tests don’t seem to show them making a difference, although it’s difficult to know for sure. Use H tags if it works with your design or content management system, and don’t if it doesn’t. It’s doubtful you’ll find it makes a difference one way or the other.

Myth 8: Words in your meta keyword tag have to be used on the page. I used to spread this silly myth myself many years ago. The truth is that the Meta keyword tag was actually designed to be used for keywords that were NOT already on the page, not the opposite! Since this tag is ignored by Google and used only for uncommon words in Yahoo, it makes little difference at this point anyway.

Myth 9: SEO copy must be 250 words in length. This one is interesting to me because I am actually the one who made up the 250 number back in the late ’90s. However, I never said that 250 was the exact number of words you should use, nor did I say it was an optimal number. It’s simply a good amount to be able to write a nice page of marketing copy that can be optimized for 3-5 keyword phrases. Shorter copy ranks just as well, as does longer copy. Use as many or as few words as you need to use to say what you need to say.

Myth 10: You need to optimize for the long tail. No, you don’t. By their very nature, long-tail keyword phrases are uncompetitive; meaning that not many pages are using those words, and not that many people are searching for them in the engines. Because of this, ranking for long-tail keywords is easy…simply include them somewhere in a blog post or an article, and you’ll rank for them. But that’s not optimization.

Before you go spreading these myths or any other SEO info that you believe is true, test it many times on many sites. Even if it appears to work, keep in mind that it may not always work, or that there could be other factors involved.

SEO-SiteDesign

seositedesign — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 17:19:17 +0000

This is the beginning of a 5 part series on SEO.

The importance of SEO optimization is often overlooked until its too late. In my 15 years experience with the Internet, the most common problem I see is simply the steps that company’s use after they build a beautiful website, set up email addresses and wait. What are they waiting for? Customers!

The phrase “if you build it they will come” even when spoken in a God like voice, just isn’t true. Read on for part one of my exclusive 5 part series.

Now What?!