Non-SEO ways to get your website ranked

5:13 am11:19 pmM. Shifley 2 Comments

Search engine optimization involves getting lots of moving pieces coming together in the right way to achieve better search results for your website. But are their non-SEO ways to get your website ranked? According to the folks at searchenginewatch.com there are five ways to improve your rankings beyond best SEO practices.

1. Enhance Web Site Usability – Dr. Jakob Nielsen is considered to be a foremost authority of site usability factors, and he also has a knack for SEO. In his book “Designing Web Usability” (which many consider to be the “Bible” of usability), he writes that “site design must be aimed with simplicity above all else, with as few distractions as possible and with very clear information architecture and matching navigation tools.” From an SEO perspective, this is preaching to the choir. If sites aren’t human-friendly, they are usually even more unfriendly to search engine spiders.

Typically, enhancing usability also involves improving the information architecture of a site, which of course will help the site to be more easily spidered, and will often increase the potential for solid anchor text-rich internal linking.

2. Work with Other Marketing Teams – Many SEO projects fall victim to “marketing-in-a-vacuum.” SEO teams should work together with other marketing teams to ensure the same message being delivered offline is incorporating its way into the site’s visible text. Also, not combining efforts with the paid search team is a top way to miss out on search ranking opportunities.

It often takes extra “pushing” to become involved in other marketing efforts, or at least well informed of future planning. Fortunately, many of our clients have bought into the idea that we’re their partners in a mutual effort to gain visibility and traffic. Typically, the stronger the in-house SEO team is, the more clout they already have in their organizations, which certainly helps this effort. Every year, Super Bowl advertising gives us insight into how many top companies are combining these two forms of marketing.

3. Incorporate Traditional PR Efforts into the SEO Plan – Press releases should be optimized to help the company’s site perform better within search results. Again, this calls for involvement by the SEO team, especially in the distribution of the article and in the placement of properly structured hypertext links within the article to relevant pages on the site.
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4. Monitoring and Leveraging Communities – Every industry has an online community of some size. Some industries — such as travel in particular — have literally thousands of forums and blogs talking about deals and experiences. Savvy marketers can leverage these platforms by becoming an active participant — without being “spammy” or invasive — and gain traction within rankings as a direct result of this community participation strategy. Additionally, there’s lots of user-generated content about products and services in these communities, providing both invaluable feedback for refinement of current offerings and services, as well as an excellent base for R&D efforts.

5. Keep Content Fresh by Updating it Regularly – For some organizations, content is hard to update on a regular basis. For example, a company that sells one type of widget that never becomes obsolete may seemingly have no reason to update its content. However, the majority of sites on the Internet could benefit from occasionally “sprucing up the place.” Bottom line: if the content seems like it’s “getting stale” from your human perspective, imagine what a search engine that crawls it every month may feel.

Even if you’ve never done SEO, chances are that improving and updating your content can help you to gain rankings for terms that will drive traffic. Although this can be argued — especially for competitive industries — the core of the belief is certainly sound. There are sites out there that have simply followed best practices by including important content in tags, and maintained rankings and traffic simply due to keeping the content fresh.

Keeping these five factors in mind when thinking beyond traditional SEO best practices will likely yield long-term success in terms of driving organic traffic.

Please give me a call today at 208.598.0084 or contact me at matt.shifley@yahoo.com for more information to discuss how I can help you or your company with its search engine optimization, online marketing, or copywriting needs.

Search Engine Optimization Tools

5:04 amM. Shifley Leave a comment

Those new to the world of search engine optimization (SEO) may feel a little overwhelmed with all of the tactics that are needed to achieve higher rankings. But here are a few tools that you need to help you get started.

Keyword Tools – Employing the right keywords can really make a difference in your SEO campaign. If you begin your campaign without taking the time to find, analyze, and validate your keyword set, then you run the risk of using keywords that won’t perform well for you. It takes considerable time for your SEO efforts to reach your ranking goals, so it might be months before you realize you needed to use different keywords. That would be a waste of time and money. A good place to start is SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool. It links to most of the other existing keyword tools, such as Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery, and tools from Google, MSN, and Yahoo. This one tool lets you explore many others.

SEO Site Grader Tools – If you have an existing site and would like to take a pulse on the SEO effectiveness, then these tools will help. They will analyze your site against specific criteria and produce a report, or even give you a grade. You can even use these tools on your competition to see how you stack up against them. Website Grader is a great tool for running a health check of your site. Then it will provide a score that incorporates elements such as Web site traffic, SEO, social popularity, and other technical factors. It will also provide advice on how your Web site can be improved from a marketing perspective. Another SEO site grading tool is Quarkbase. This tool provides a great way to find your site information, including social bookmarking statistics, Alexa ranking, and related sites and domain information.

Linking Tools – You should be aware by now that the number and quality of external links that come to your site are an important factor in achieving good rankings. You need to be able to see how many URLs have links to your site and their quality, which is measured by its PageRank. A PageRank of 10 is the highest and rarest. You’re looking for PR 3-4 and above. SEO Pro’s Link Checker will report all backlinks to your site. Be patient, it will take time to run this report. This tool will show the PageRank of the pages your URL is on. It will also tell you the number of links on the page and the anchor text for the link. You also have the ability to check the number of backlinks for all of the pages on your site, or just the top domain. Another important factor in SEO is analyzing your internal links and identifying bad links. You’ll need to isolate any that you have and fix them.

Google Webmaster Tools – A free service that provides a wealth of information about your site. After you’ve verified your site, you’ll be able to check for errors, analyze your HTML tags important for SEO, identify top search queries, enhance 404 error pages, and much more.

To Tweet or Not to Tweet …

6:30 pm4:55 amM. Shifley Leave a comment

that is indeed a question some of you may have been asking yourself since it seems like everyone and their third cousin from their Mother’s side is on Twitter. But is this social networking phenomenon right for you? Well ultimately it is up to you and how you want to leverage Twitter. Do you want to meet new people? Follow businesses or columnists? Increase the exposure of your business? Or just want to be part of the in crowd? Whatever you decide here are some reasons that a lot of the experts think Twitter should matter to you and can be an effective online marking tool:

1. Personal Branding. Twitter is a social media platform you can use to build your personal brand. It has the primary benefit of developing a casual persona and establishes you as a social personality that is connected and approachable.

2. Get Feedback. Need an alternative perspective on how a website looks or the right course of action to take? Blast out a message asking for advice and you’ll receive replies from other users. This collective intelligence can be used as fodder for articles or projects.

3. Hire People. Need a good logo designer, marketer or programmer? Send out a message asking for recommendations. This is a very quick and easy way to hire freelancers or even companies based on familiar recommendations.

4. Direct traffic. Twitter can be used to get traffic to your websites or the sites of friends. If you ask your friends to tweet about it, the message will spread faster and further as other active users pick it up. There is a viral nature to all types of news, even on a site like Twitter.

5. Read News. Twitter users often link to useful sites or articles and can be a source of scoops and alternative news. You can also subscribe to Twitter feeds for specific websites/conferences, which allows you to receive and view content quickly. This is very useful for active social news participants.

6. Make New Friends. Like any other social network, Twitter has a built-in function for you to befriend and track the messages of other users. This is an easy way for you connect with people outside of your usual circle. Make an effort to add active users you find interesting. A Twitter acquaintance can be developed into a long lasting friendship.

7. Network for benefits. Twitter can be used as a socializing platform for you to interact with other like-minded people, especially those in the same industry. It can be used to establish consistent and deeper relationships for future benefits such as testimonials or peer recommendations.

8. Business Management. Twitter can be used as a company intranet that connects employees to one another. Workers can liaise with each other when working on group projects. Particularly useful when certain workers go out often in the field. Updates could be set to private for security reasons.

9. Notify Your Customers. Set up a Twitter feed for the specific purpose of notifying customers when new products come in. Customers can subscribe via mobile or RSS for instant notification. Twitter can also be used to provide mini-updates for one-on-one clients.

10. Event Updates. Businesses can use Twitter as a means to inform event participants and latest event happenings/changes. This is a hassle-free way of disseminating information, especially when you don’t have the means to set up a direct mobile link between you and the audience

11. Find Prospects. Twitter can be used as a means to find potential customers or clients online. Do a search for keywords related to your product on Twitter Search and then follow users. Tweet about topics parallel to your product and close prospects away from public channels by using direct messages or offline communications. Discretion and skill is needed in this area.

12. Provide Live coverage. Twitter’s message size limit prevents detailed coverage of events but it can allow you to provide real-time commentary which may help to spark further discussion or interest on the event as other Twitter users spread the message. Very useful for citizen journalism.

13. Set Up Meetings. Twitter can help you organize impromptu meetups. For example, you can twitter a message while at a cafe, event or art gallery and arrange to meet fellow users at a specific spot. It’s an informal and casual way of arranging a meeting.

Social Networking Strategies

4:28 am4:32 amM. Shifley 1 Comment

The purpose of creating social networks basically began as places where people could have access to other known members and share information, thoughts and experiences on different subjects. For online marketing strategies, social networks are great sites to promote products, services or brands, approaching customers in a direct way, without any intervention of thirds in the process. Directly hitting the market segment your company is aiming at.

Its constant mutation has generated new features and ways of operating, making usability on these communities necessary for personal and work related issues, increasing the number of online social users significantly. Entering a network where you know your potential market segment is present may radically increase the chances of reaching a broader, more specific segment in the same market place. If used wisely you may have an army of followers that are faithful to your products and name brand.

Know how to operate among these communities. Depending on your target audience choose where your marketing efforts will be present. Research, know where your audience is logging in and be a part of that community too. Begin by knowing what the social network you are working with offers, what features and characteristic are available to work with. Know how to use them in your favor to attract potential customers. Know the communication channels available in social networks such as:

• E-mail for marketing campaigns
• Instant message boards
• Multimedia availability
• Ways of promotion available in the social network

Have a marketing strategy for your social communities ready. Know how you are going to reach your potential customers. How are you going to be known in that specific network and what are the options to reach a broader audience. Be constant; work on your communities and build a relation with your members. Answer questions if asked, support people in any way possible, and add value to your corporate concept by attending people’s needs.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Mistakes to Avoid

4:27 am4:31 amM. Shifley Leave a comment

The process of optimizing your website has to be a carefully thought out process. Each space of your site has to be designed and structured to reach your objectives. Here are some search engine optimization (SEO) mistakes you must avoid.

1. Many pages include a beautiful but useless graphic as a header. The upper part is very valuable for SEO. Don’t turn important texts into images; less if you use keywords, because a search engine cannot read a graphic, so you will be losing opportunities to be indexed by search engines and to reach top positions.

2. Now, let’s talk about the menu. As we just read, using graphic elements can be attractive but not effective: the description, words and links you use in the menu and content must include keywords. It doesn’t mean that is necessary to avoid graphics or pictures; they can accompany the text or be used in sections of lower relevance to search engines. Even better, make your images into code, that way search engines would be able to index whatever text you include in them.

3. Graphics cannot be read by Search Engines but let me give you a trick: including ALT attributes on each images become legible. So, never let your graphics alone.

4. Experts suggest as a good strategy to include a register format for users. In this way, each time he or she visit your website there is an ID session which helps webmaster collect information, create statistics and discover his/her behavior while explore your page. All data can be used for optimization.

5. If you can avoid it, never redirect your site. If you do it, search engine robots will get confused and it will be difficult for them take your web page and index it.

6. Don’t forget to write a title tag and meta tag descriptions on each page of your site.

7. Flash allows huge possibilities of a dynamic page, full of color and animations, but too much is a big error. It might be attractive but not for search engines, they don’t like Flash pages because they can’t read the content. Never use a Flash website without HTML alternative.

Alright Five More SEO Tips …

4:14 am4:15 amM. Shifley Leave a comment

1. If your site content doesn’t change often, your site needs a blog because search spiders like fresh text. Blog at least three time a week with good, fresh content to feed those little crawlers.

2. When link building, think quality, not quantity. One single, good, authoritative link can do a lot more for you than a dozen poor quality links, which can actually hurt you.

3. Search engines want natural language content. Don’t try to stuff your text with keywords. It will not work. Search engines look at how many times a term is in your content and if it is abnormally high, this will count against you rather than for you.

4. Not only should your links use keyword anchor text, but the text around the links should also be related to your keywords. In other words, surround the link with descriptive text and use those keywords.

5. If you are on a shared server, do a blacklist check to be sure you’re not on a proxy with a spammer or banned site. Their negative notoriety could affect your own rankings and that would be most unsavory.

How about 5 more Search Engine Optimization and Online Marketing Tips?

3:14 am3:17 amM. Shifley 1 Comment

1. Check for canonization issues – www and non-www domains. Decide which you want to use and 301 redirect the other to it. In other words, if http://www.domain.com is your preference, then http://domain.com should redirect to your preferred website.

2. Check the link to your home page throughout your site. Is index.html appended to your domain name? If so, you’re splitting your links. Outside links go to http://www.domain.com and internal links go to http://www.domain.com/index.html. Ditch the index.html or default.php or whatever the page is and always link back to your domain.

3. Frames, flash and AJAX all share a common problem – you can’t link to a single page. It’s either all or nothing. Don’t use frames at all and use flash and AJAX sparingly for best search engine optimization (SEO) results. If you are determined to go with Flash, make sure you have an awesome blog so your content can be found by the spiders.

4. Your URL file extension doesn’t matter. You can use .html, .htm, .asp, .php, etc. and it won’t make a difference as far as your SEO is concerned.

5. Got a new web site you want spidered? Submitting through Google’s regular submission form can take weeks. The quickest way to get your site spidered is by getting a link to it through another quality site.

Five more Search Engine Optimization and Online Marketing Tips

3:09 am3:18 amM. Shifley Leave a comment

1. Fresh content can help improve your rankings. Add new, useful content to your pages on a regular basis. Content freshness such as a blog adds relevancy to your site in the eyes of the search engines.

2. Be sure the links to your site and within your site use your keyword phrases. In other words, if your target is “fat bassets” then link to “fat bassets” instead of a “Click here” link.

3. Focus on search phrases, not single keywords, and put your location in your text (“our Boise store” not “our store”) to help you get found in local searches.

4. Don’t design your website without considering search engine optimization (SEO). Make sure your web designer understands your expectations for organic SEO. Doing a retrofit on your shiny new Flash-based site after it is built won’t cut it. Spiders can crawl text, not Flash or images.

5. Use keywords and keyword phrases appropriately in text links, image ALT attributes and even in your domain name.

Five Search Engine Optimization and Online Marketing Tips

3:48 am3:19 amM. Shifley Leave a comment

1. If you absolutely MUST use Java script drop down menus, image maps or image links, be sure to put text links somewhere on the page for the spiders to follow.

2. Content is king, so be sure to have good, well-written and unique content that will focus on your primary keyword or keyword phrase.

3. If content is king, then links are queen. Build a network of quality back links using your keyword phrase as the link. Remember, if there is no good, logical reason for that site to link to you, you don’t want the link.

4. Don’t be obsessed with PageRank. It is just one isty bitsy part of the ranking algorithm. A site with lower PR can actually outrank one with a higher PR.

5. Be sure you have a unique, keyword focused title tag on every page of your site. And, if you MUST have the name of your company in it, put it at the end. Unless you are a major brand name that is a household name, your business name will probably get few searches.

Avoid these Search Engine Optimization (SEO) mistakes

6:01 am3:19 amM. Shifley 3 Comments

The art of effective search engine optimization (SEO) is filled with many variables, and although you can search SEO on a search engine and find literally thousands of results on the subject with tips, tricks, and strategies until you remove all unfriendly code your site is doomed in gaining prominent placement on the search engine results page.

1. Avoid the use of flash, DHTML, and internal java script. These coding practices offer slick visual enhancements, but are some of the biggest SEO killers. Search engine spiders see flash objects as big chunks of empty web space because there isn’t an effective SEO method to tag them to be crawled by the spiders. If you are using flash for photo slideshows then convert them into pop-up pages and reinforce them with keyword rich content and anchor text.

DHTML and link roll over effects bloat the html coding of your website and remove the important “alt” and image “title” tags which help to further weaken your SEO ranking potential. The best menu linking method is “text” based links with keyword rich anchor text. The same goes for internal java scripting this coding just pushes your relevant content down further into your code and slows the search engine spiders crawling your site. Convert your internal scripts into external .js applets and drop them in a folder in your site.

2. Non-unique, duplicate, or non-relevant content. Your websites content should be fresh and always match and relate to your sites niche. If you are selling party supplies then it would be a bad idea to have pages or content about bowling balls. Duplicate or redundant content is a big no-no as well; part of the Google PR algorithm is based on fresh relevant content.

3. Keyword stuffing and hidden text. Google and the other major search engines view these practices as spamming and can get your sites sandboxed (dropped so low on the SERPs that no one will ever find it!) or banned altogether. Keep your keyword density to no more than 5%, and never use hidden text.

4. Poor Meta data. Your Meta data is the information that tells the search engine spiders what each page of your site is about and how it relates to your content. Research your keywords and phrases and always a unique keyword rich tile for each page, avoiding stop words like “and, or, the, if, it, were”. Keep you title to 57 characters or less. Your description tag should be short and no longer than a sentence or two. Your keyword tag should always have your primary keyword first, and that keyword should also be in the first sentence on your page content. Don’t bloat this tag with dozens of keywords; this will only hurt your ranking potential. Use no more than 10-12 per page and build landing or gateway pages to promote additional keywords.

5. Always use “alt”, link, and header (H1, H2, Etc) tags. Each image and hyperlink on your site is meaning less to the search engine spiders if it isn’t tagged with relevant keyword descriptive phrases. When tagging your menu links never use tags like “click here” etc. always be descriptive. Your content needs to be user-friendly first then SEO friendly. Avoid long paragraphs. Use bullets and numbering to summarize and break up long text. This will make your key points stand out to your web visitors and to the search engine spiders as well. Always use header tags to highlight important information. A trick I always us is I start of using the H2 tag at the top of my pages and use the H1 tag further down. It seems that almost every SEO tech starts off with the H1 tag and this has caused the major search engines to give less weight to the H1 tag as a result. This doesn’t mean it is useless, but when used second or third I have noticed better results.

There are so many important strategies in achieving top ranking on Google and the other search engines, but by getting back to basics and making your site SEO and user friendly, you will have a clean web site to work with and build upon.

Matt Shifley: Marketing Specialist

Services include copywriting, copy editing, graphic design, SEO, SEM, PPC and much more.

Matt Shifely