Category: Search Engine Optimization

While it’s true that there are many different strategies that can be used to optimize a web site for search engine success, one of the most overlooked methods for improving search engine placements is building up your web site’s credibility. When you provide your visitors with lots of useful, relevant information on your web site, you create professional credibility and establish your expertise in your industry. When your web site is credible, people will naturally want to link to all of your good information, and your pages will likely be loaded with the keywords and phrases that matter most to your company as well. In other words, a credible web site has many of the elements that impress Google the most!

Brownie Points From Google
One of the ways you can help build your web site’s credibility is to create an online glossary for your site and link to it from the rest of your pages. Think about it – we know that Google gives you points for using your keywords in the text of your links, so why not pick up some extra points by linking your key terms to a glossary that further explains them? This is also extremely helpful to visitors who are on your site to learn about your company, products, and services as well.

Credibility Through Repetition
Let’s say, for example, your business sells insurance, and that each type of insurance that you sell has its own web page. Now imagine that some of your important keywords like “auto insurance,” “life insurance,” and “renters insurance” are linked directly to a glossary page that contains these keywords, plus a short description of each. In this example, you’ve used your keywords as links, and repeated the keywords on the glossary page as well as on the product pages. All of this contributes to the credibility of your web site as Google sees it.

Thinking Like a Spider
A glossary page is inherently loaded with specific words and phrases that are relevant to your business. When a search engine “spider” visits your glossary, it sees these words and phrases and also sees that they are cross-linked and used throughout your other web pages as well. So what’s a spider to think? It would probably think that your site is very important, relevant, and credible. And credible web sites can lead to more web site traffic, increased inbound links, and ultimately improve your search engine placements in Google. Now that’s impressive!

Ever wonder how your competitors get such good rankings in Google and other search engines, or why they always seem to come up ahead of your company for common search terms? Or worse yet, how do they get listed in the search results when your company doesn’t get listed at all?

The First Page
This can be very frustrating for small businesses, especially those that want to improve their search engine rankings or pull ahead of the competition.  Most small businesses know that being listed on the first page of the search results can mean more web site traffic, better name recognition and visibility, and most importantly – big increases in qualified leads and sales! 

The Year In Review
This is the perfect time of year to do a quick check-up on the competition, to see what they have been up to over the past year and where they stand now, especially when compared with your company.  For instance, you may want to know:

• Where do they currently rank in the major search engines for certain keywords?
• How many inbound links do they have that “point” to their web site?
• Where are the inbound links coming from? (so you can also get inbound links from these sites)
• What types of meta data are they using on their web pages, and what keywords are they targeting?
• How many of their web pages are currently indexed in the major search engines?

This type of information can help you define a strategy to improve your own search engine rankings based on what the competition is already doing and what is working for them.  It can also show you how far you have to go to catch up or surpass them in the search engine rankings.

More Links = Better Rankings
Other information that may be helpful to know is if your competitors have been sending out press releases during the year, if they have published any articles or white papers, or if they are regularly posting to a company blog. All of these marketing activities are great ways to produce inbound links, which in turn can improve a web site’s rankings in the search engines.

By reviewing the competition, you can also gain valuable insight into new industry shifts or trends, major customer wins and losses, new competing products, and even the online reputation of your competitors. 

Check ‘Em Out!
Of course, you must always stay within legal and ethical bounds when looking at competitor information, but there’s nothing wrong with checking out the competing information that your customers see in the marketplace everyday.  After all, just as you are checking out your competitors, they are probably checking out what you’ve been up to this year, too!

Just when you thought you had figured out how to optimize your web site for the search engines, Google has come along to shake things up again! Google’s Universal Search is a new, comprehensive approach to searching that gives users results not only from web pages, but also from blogs, images, video, news, and other “verticals” that Google uses in its search results.

So what does this mean for your web site? It means that you can no longer rely on simply optimizing the text and keywords on your web pages, you now must think in broader terms. Since Google’s search results now include “alternative” media, your small business should follow suit. Tactics such as RSS feeds, web “widgets” (small, web-based applications on your site), and social media strategies that incorporate Wikis, article syndication, and blogging are quickly becoming the new standards in search engine optimization.

Because Google’s new algorithm is giving precedence to verticals like video, press releases, blogs, images, and news, we will likely see this influence on the search engine results pages over the next few months.

For small businesses, this is a great opportunity to implement a variety of additional SEO strategies that will help your web site thrive in this new world of Universal Search. The key to optimizing your web site is the same as it’s always been – develop lots of great, relevant content and build inbound links. But with the launch of Universal Search, you now have many, many more verticals available in which to build great content.

Hopefully, your search marketing strategy is part of an overall marketing plan that involves regular testing and measuring.  It’s like eating vegetables when you’re a kid….you gotta do it because it’s good for you, even though it’s not your favorite part of dinner.  The same is true for monitoring your search engine positions – you gotta do it to know if customers can find your business in the search engines, and to know when to act or react to the changes that are bound to occur from time to time. 

Consider these numbers:

• More than 74% of all consumers check the web FIRST before they make a purchase (either online or in a brick-and-mortar store), so the importance of being on the web is pretty clear.
• Reports also show that more than 80% of all web traffic comes from search engines, because that’s where most people begin the research/buying process.

So if your business can’t be found in the search engines, how will people know about you? And if you don’t monitor your positions in the search engines, how will you know if you are on page 1 or page 1001, or if you show up at all?

Of course, there are many ways to help build your search engine rankings, like publishing lots of good quality content on your site, regularly updating your site’s content, sending out press releases on the web (for inbound links), listing your business in quality online web directories or on industry-related sites, optimizing your web pages for the search engines, plus many others.  If you are already doing these things but not monitoring your rankings, how will you know if your efforts are working?  

Optimizing your web site for the search engines is only part of the job; you must also track and monitor your search engine positions in order to have a healthy, well-balanced search engine strategy.  Because it is so important, you should include search engine monitoring as part of your regular marketing activity each month.  By keeping tabs on your positions, you can watch the effectiveness of your current search marketing strategies, and also take the steps necessary to stop any negative trends that could threaten your hard-earned rankings.  So go ahead and eat your vegetables, monitor your search engine positions, and maybe you can have some dessert.

Although there are millions and millions of web sites on the internet today, of course you want your site to be found when a potential customer searches for the products or services that you offer. After all, isn’t that one of the reasons you got a web site in the first place? 

But what are you doing to make sure that your web site isn’t lost in cyberspace? Can your site be found by people who are looking for what you have to offer? If the answer is no, here are some tips you can use to improve your web site’s chances of being found by the search engines:

1. Use Meta Data – Meta data is used behind the scenes, in the html code of your web pages.  Most search engines use at least some types of meta data, especially meta titles and descriptions.  Make sure that your web pages have the appropriate meta data included, and try to write unique meta tag information for each page of your web site.

2. Add a Robots.txt file – a Robots.txt file is a special file on a web site that acts like an invitation to the search engine spiders that visit your site.  In this file, you can specify the pages of your site that you want the spiders to crawl, and also specify the areas of your site that should be kept private, such as employee areas, non-public directories, or areas with duplicate content that could hurt your rankings or get your site banned altogether. 

3. Create Site Maps – One of the newer technologies available to business web sites is XML sitemaps, used by Google and other search engines to provide additional information about your web pages and to help control the discovery of the web pages and links on your site.  XML sitemaps can be created using the Google Sitemap Generator tool, a third-party tool, or can be created manually.

4. Submit to Online Directories – Submitting your web site to a variety of quality online directories is a good way to promote your business and also build inbound links to your web site.  You can submit your site to both paid and free directories, but make sure that they are either related to your industry or your location. Avoid the FFA (Free-for-All) directories that are too general, since these are considered “link farms” by most search engines and can get your site banned completely.

5. Optimize for Search Engines – Of course, there is no substitute for complete search engine optimization of your web site, which incorporates keywords and keyword phrases (among other things) to help your site get better search engine positioning.  This can be a more expensive option, but is ultimately the most successful and productive strategy for making sure your site can be found by users searching for what you have to offer.

6. Build High-Quality Inbound Links – One of the best ways to be found in the search engines is to have plenty of high-quality inbound links that point to your web site. Sending out press releases (using free web outlets to help keep costs down), syndicating your original articles on the web, and submitting your site to online directories are all great ways to build inbound links to your web site.

You’ve probably invested a lot of time and/or money in building a web site for your business, so protect your investment.  Make sure you’re doing everything you can to prevent your site from becoming lost in cyberspace!

A diamond might be “forever”, but your search engine rankings certainly are not! With advancing technology, algorithm updates, and new web sites appearing every day, it can be challenge to keep your web site visible on the search results pages. So if you’ve noticed your rankings aren’t what they used to be, here are some tips you can use to give them a boost:

1. Fresh Content
Search engine “spiders” love fresh content. Adding new content to your web site attracts search engine spiders (or “bots”) and gives them new material to add to their databases. Even small updates matter – adding new FAQs, press releases, product updates, or even pricing updates will trigger the search engine spiders to pay a visit to your site.

2. RSS Feeds
Speaking of fresh content (above), RSS feeds are a great way to keep fresh content flowing to your web site every day. If you haven’t heard of RSS feeds, these are “Really Simple Syndication” feeds from other web sites that you can display on your own web site, usually for free. RSS feeds can contain information on just about any topic of interest to your visitors. News feeds, current industry information, or relevant publications are all good candidates for RSS feed topics.

3. Directory Submission
One of the quickest ways to gain visibility on the web is to add your site to top-performing online directories. The benefits are two-fold; first, your business gets listed and is exposed to more web users, and two, directory listings also serve as “inbound links” that can help your web site rank better in the search engines.

4. Local Search
It’s often easier for your business to get good rankings in local search results since they are focused on a specific geographic area (instead of competing with all web sites across the entire web). You get a two-fold benefit here as well; your business is more visible to web users, and the local listings create inbound links that help your placement in the larger search engines.

5. Blog Posts
If you don’t already have a blog or use a blog, you really should consider giving it a try! Try visiting blogs that are relevant to your business or industry, or that you think your visitors would be interested in. You can add posts, pass along links, or even advertise on some blogs. Blogs are typically very niche-focused, so by participating in a blog you are interacting with other bloggers who are already pre-qualified!

Having a local web strategy is an important part of your company’s overall search engine strategy, but don’t wait too long to take action. The web is already the tool of choice for most shoppers today, and your company needs to be where the customers are – on the web.

The latest trend in web search is called “Local Search,” which helps connect people and places in local communities. For businesses, it’s a great way to reach customers close to home.

Customers today use search engines, online business directories, review sites, online communities, and follow links from other web sites or click on ads in order to find local businesses. This means there are many opportunities available for you to advertise your business on the web and target the local shoppers in your own geographic area.

Older types of advertising such as newspapers and paper Yellow Pages books are losing popularity with consumers, while online advertising is growing very rapidly. A recent report by Borrell Associates predicts that by the end of 2007, local online advertising will grow by 31 percent to $7.7 billion, and local paid search will grow by 86 percent to $1.8 billion. If you want your business to be found locally by the people in your community, you need to be found online!

Many small businesses think that search engines like Google and Yahoo are the key to online success. But unless you have your web site professionally optimized to perform well in the search engines, it’s pretty unlikely that you will see much in the way of search engine results. Local search and local advertising, however, provide you with a variety of opportunities where you stand a much better chance of being found by the shoppers who are already looking for you – on the web.

Remember the phrase “Build it, and they will come…” ? Well, that may be true for baseball fields in the movies, but it’s certainly not the case for web sites! In order to bring traffic to your web site, you are going to need the help of the web’s most used resource – Search Engines – and their “itsy bitsy spiders.”

There are many search engines on the web, and they all use different methods of gathering and indexing web site information. The most important search engines, Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask, account for about 75% of all internet searches, while a handful of smaller search engines are responsible for the remaining 25%. The biggest obstacle to getting your site into a #1 position, though, is the sheer number of competing web sites out there. Think about it, of all the millions of web sites on the internet, how can you make your site come up first in the list? Or in some cases, the question may be how can you make your site show up at all?

Well, it’s not an exact science, but by understanding more about how search engines work, and understanding the importance of search engine spiders, you can improve your chances of getting noticed by the search engines.

Be Nice to Spiders
Search engines send out “spiders” (also called “bots”) that look for new information on the web, and they collect as much information as possible in the shortest amount of time possible. Since they are in such a hurry, your web site needs to be friendly and inviting, providing the spider with exactly what it is looking for, which is web site text (content), lots of links, and clean HTML code.

The search engine then takes all of the information the spider gathered and analyzes it to determine how “important” your web site is (in their opinion, of course). Then, when a visitor types in a search term, the search engine displays results in order of importance, based on the information gathered by the spider. Depending on how important the search engine thinks your site is, your web site may or may not be displayed in the search results.

Food for Thought - and Spiders
So you can see how important it is that your web site be spider-friendly in order to have any chance of showing up in the search engine results. To be successful, you must feed the spiders what they want the most – good content, abundant links, and clean code. The words people use when they search – often called keywords – ultimately determine which web sites are displayed when a search engine finds sites that match those keywords, and all of it is based on what those little spiders said about your web site!

So be very careful with what you “feed” the spiders, it could mean the difference between good search engine positions, and not showing up in the search results at all.