If You Build It
But popularity isn’t easy. Oh, you’ll get spam that tells you it is- “We’ll submit your site to thousands of search engines and your web counter will go BALLISTIC!!” and so on. Or you may be advised that you need to pay Yahoo a whole bunch of money to get your site “indexed”. Under some circumstances, you might consider paying Yahoo or Google for context based advertising, but most of us don’t need to. The only folks who should even consider paying for site promotion are those who need to come up to speed extremely quickly. Even if you do pay, don’t ignore the techniques discussed here- paying is only going to give you a jump start; it won’t keep you in the game. (more…)
Having a Web site that gets found in Google isn’t hard to do, but it can be difficult to know where to begin. Here are ten tips to get you started.
1. Start out slowly. If possible, begin with a new site that has never been submitted to the search engines or directories. Choose an appropriate domain name, and start out by optimizing just the home page.
2. Learn basic HTML. Many search engine optimization techniques involve editing the behind the scenes HTML code. Your high rankings can depend on knowing which codes are necessary, and which aren’t.
3. Choose keywords wisely. The keywords you think might be perfect for your site may not be what people are actually searching for. To find the optimal keywords for your site, use tools such as WordTracker. Choose two or three highly targeted phrases for each page of your site. Never shoot for general keywords such as “travel” or “vacation.” (more…)
Improving the keyword density on your web site is one of the fastest and simplest ways to increase your site’s visibility in the search engine results pages. To better explain this reasoning, we will refer to a “keyword” as a word that your typical web surfer will input in the search box when searching for specific information about a product or service. The true definition of keyword density is the ratio of the word that is being searched for, ie the keyword, against the total number of words appearing on a given web page. If your keyword occurs only once or twice in a page of 500 or more words, obviously it has a lower keyword density than a keyword that would occur six or seven times in a page of similar length.
As far as search engines are concerned, if a particular keyword has a higher density on that particular web page, then the chances of that page obtaining a much better search engine ranking increases almost exponentially. Not all search engines compute or evaluate keyword density in the same way and most have their own proprietary algorithm for calculating the average density of a keyword. Nevertheless, the basic principles described in this article are general enough to help any website greatly increase its rankings in the major search engines. Note that today, they all take keyword density into account. (more…)
When a company or individual needs to rank high in the major search engines, a number of important steps are necessary in planning a good content strategy. To be really efficient, a good corporate web site needs to effectively communicate the content it offers its visitors. That content should describe the topic, information sections and the purpose of the site. Visitors will want to come to a company’s web site more than once if the content it offers exactly matches the topic or subject of their initial search query.
Experience has taught us that good, relevant content always prompts users to visit time and time again, thereby generating additional, quality traffic. Traffic isn’t everything- you also need targeted traffic to be really effective in your optimization campaign. Good, detailed content that is on-topic and relevant to search is the actual heart of any good corporate web site. Studies have shown that visitors leave a site if the vital and essential information they are looking for is not available. (more…)
From: Carol
Hi Jill,
I emailed you before and you made me understand what was going on. I have another question if you don’t mind.
In one of your recent newsletters, you talked about keywords. If I understand correctly, your keywords should be used within your text,
on the main page, right?
Here is my situation: I am selling microfiber towels, I want to be in the top-10 for car accessories, car care products, but nothing is in text on my main page. So, I noticed the search engines have not picked it up yet. I need more keywords for more exposure for my website, but with microfiber towels, there isn’t too much to deal with. (more…)
In the process of my day-to-day job optimizing and positioning corporate web sites for my clients, I often get emails and correspondence similar to the one you are about to read. The field of search engine optimization is littered with so-called “SEO experts” and people that promise you high search engine rankings with techniques that are forbidden by most search engines. The following is a true story.
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Hello Serge!
Just wanted you to know that I diligently read all your articles that you write on search engine optimization and I have learned so much from you since. I’m writing you regarding an article you wrote on your website about doorway and gateway pages. After listening to a number of people around me, I had planned on getting increased visibility from search engines to my site and some have told me that making a mirror of my existing site or a few “duplicates” might help me in the engines. They also told me each site should have a new, unique URL and unique domain name, a unique title and description tag, and body text “slightly” modified to focus on different keywords and key phrases might be a splendid idea. While I am at it, I also taught of a newer, fresher “look” with different background colour and font. (more…)
For the past several months now, there has been a new development used more and more by businesses and companies of all sizes: Business Blogs. First, for those of you who may be wondering what “blogs” actually are, they are an abbreviation for “web logs”. First popularized by journalists, tech geeks and by teenagers, “blogs” are now increasingly in use by the business community and Fortune 500 companies.
If you have new ideas or a new product your company would like to promote, business blogs are a good, inexpensive vehicle. And there are many other advantages to using blogs too: major search directories and search engines such as Yahoo, Google Alta-Vista and most of the others crave on fresh and new information that is frequently updated, sometimes many times a day. Business Blogs consist of many links, written with fresh content that is propagated everywhere on the web. (more…)
As highlighted a couple of weeks ago, I have decided that with the growth of the search engine optimization (SEO) industry, it is important to ensure that we don’t forget the many newcomers. With many new business owners and webmasters exploring SEO for the first time, this series of articles looks to assist with the basic information needed to start a search engine marketing campaign.
In the first part of the series, I wish to ensure we discuss the importance of a solid foundation. When starting any SEO campaign it is tempting to leap straight in and start tweaking meta tags and changing text. However, like any successful marketing strategy, it is vital to ensure that you know whom your audience is and how to reach them. In the same way traditional advertising agencies survey their demographic audience, search engine marketers must ensure that their SEO campaign targets the correct keywords or search phrases. Target the wrong search phrase and you could end up with great search engine rankings for keywords that have no search requests. A few hours now spent ensuring that the correct search phrases are targeted, can save months of useless optimization. (more…)
Today more than ever, in the field of search engine optimization (SEO), there is a very important step that needs to be taken in order to help a website’s visibility in the major search engines. That important step is to submit it to DMOZ, or sometimes called the Open Directory Project or ODP. DMOZ provides a lot of search results for a good percentage of the most important search engines and directories, including Google. First, DMOZ is NOT a robot-driven crawler but rather a large, human-edited directory of the Web. For any submission to be successful, a few important points need to be taken ahead of time:
Step A)
Your full contact information needs to be there. Make certain that your full contact information is easily accessible, preferably with the help of a clearly identified contact button. An e-mail address is certainly not enough. Many ODP editors will tell you if they don’t see a real physical or postal address or telephone number, then that website in its particular category is usually tossed away and probably will never make it inside the directory. Most importantly, if you are wishing to sell anything, you need to build credibility and honesty with your clients. In such a case, giving proper and full contact information on the site is imperative. (more…)
When I first started this site, it was “APLAWRENCE.COM”. That’s the name of my company, it’s not overly long or hard to spell, so it seemed to be a good choice. However, later on I registered “PCUNIX.COM” thinking that that name is more related to what I do, is shorter and easier to type, and perhaps is more memorable.
Both domains point to the exact same content. The Apache configuration file at my web server just treated them both as virtual domains having the same filesystem location. There was no difference: no matter what domain name you used, you’d get the same pages. These are just duplicate domains.
For several years I flopped around, using the names inconsistently. When I’d refer people to my site, sometimes I’d send them to pcunix.com and sometimes to aplawrence.com, depending on my mood. Of course other sites that made link references to pages on my site were just as inconsistent: some of them point to pcunix.com, some to aplawrence.com, depending upon their whim or how they happened to find me. (more…)
