Utilizing SEO for a local website

April 27th, 2010
Local SEO

Local SEO

Local SEO is one of the most important search marketing strategies for local businesses. The main idea behind employing an SEO campaign is to rank highly in the search engines and therefore drive more business to your website. The coveted position in the search engines is in the top 20 listings, because most searchers do not go beyond page 2 of the organic listings.

 Local SEO is mainly for businesses that sell products or services to a localized geographical area. So finding the right keywords that people use in searching for local services is crucial.

Examples of businesses that should be utilizing local SEO are dentists, plumbers, lawyers, childminders and any other businesses that have a customer base in a localized area.

Knowing your target audience and where they live will be important before undertaking an SEO campaign: Are they young or old? ; Are they single parents? ; Are they families with young children? ; Do they live in a city or village? ; Or do they live in a particular region of the country? ; And so on. Once you have this information, you can begin your SEO work.

No SEO campaign is complete without thorough keyword research. In fact, it is one of the most important tasks to undertaken before building your website. There are many valuable keyword tools, like the Google Keyword Suggestion tool that will inform you what keywords that prospective customers use when searching for your products/services. With this information, you can begin to build your selected keywords in your website content, title and header tags and your Google Business Listings.

Google business listings are local Google maps results which appear at the top of the Organic listings. Targeting with Google maps is simple because results are only shown to surfers in your local area based on your postcode. You can provide your full address and telephone number in Google maps, with directions to your business premises. A major advantage of Google maps is that you can sign up without a website: all that is required is a home or business address and a telephone number; and many businesses use this service successfully without a website.

Local directories like Yell.com can be a good source of traffic, business and link building for your website. Many of these directories rank well in the search engines and are frequently crawled by the search engine bots. Some might not help to boost your ranking, but the volume of traffic they send can mean more business.

It goes without saying that your website should be well constructed, with a clear navigation for your visitors and search engines.

  • Make sure your most important links are in appropriate places, preferably at the top of the website.
  •  Navigation should be clear and consistent throughout the website and all major links should be on all pages.
  • Don’t confuse your visitors by putting navigation links in different places in different pages.
  • Page load times should be fast and 5 seconds should be the maximum time for pages to load

Search engines like to rank sites that perform well with users, so building your site with your visitors in mind is a must.

Following these simple rules will ensure that your local website will perform well in the search engines and enable a continuous stream of activity for your business.

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Posted in Google, Link Building, SEO | 2 Comments »

Is Keyword density still relevant?

March 7th, 2010

Keyword density is still relevant and anyone who says otherwise is mistaken. Aiming for a 6% keyword density for your chosen keyword in your content should be just about right.

Anything above 8% can be flagged as spamming and could get your site penalized in the search engines. Your main goal when writing content should be for your website visitors and not primarily search engine ranking.

If your content reads well with your visitors then it is highly likely to be good enough for the search engines too.

Keyword positioning is placing your targeted keyword in the title and header tags and content of your site strategically. So this entails maintaining an average keyword density of about 6% and avoiding keyword stuffing and spamming.

Keyword stuffing is considered an unethical SEO technique and a black hat method. To avoid it you should use keywords reasonably and only when necessary.

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How to emphasize the relevance of keywords?

February 6th, 2010

It is very important to emphasize on the relevance of keywords while doing the search engine optimization. It can prove to be a tough task, but following some little things can make it easy. Here, is a look at some tips to emphasize the relevance of keywords in a webpage with regards to each other as well as the other content from the entire page.

  • Ever page needs to have a specific theme or should have content related to a specific topic. It obviously does not apply to the homepage.
  • It is important to utilize a broad spectrum of keywords. The keywords can be both generic as well as more specific. Also the keywords can be highly competitive as well as the even more obscure ones.
  • The words should be in a jumbled up pattern within the various phrases in a bid to accommodate the different search patterns for the various users.
  • The page title and headings are really important; hence they should be designed to contain the important keywords.
  • The sections or the paragraphs have to be organized in a way that the relevant words are place very close to each other. This is very important as the close proximity of the various related terms can easily help to increase the apparent relevance of the search term with regards to the contents of a webpage.
  • It has to be remembered that the search engines are smart and they are becoming even smarter with the passing time. It is of no use to try and fool them by placing some hidden unrelated text. It is of no use, period. It is usually done to con the visitors in visiting the irrelevant page which is not at all related to the term being searched by the visitors. The fact is that it still works, but the search engines are fast catching up with this con and hence it is dangerous territory.
  • The owners should remember to put a keyword or a set of keywords on the anchor text of the links. Also they should make sure that they should only link to pages tackling the same/similar topic.
  • It is no use spending time in finding the words with the same spelling but different meanings. This is because the search engines can now most of the times determine what a webpage’s content is looking forward to want to convey.
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Some tips for feed optimization

February 2nd, 2010

It is very important to optimize the feeds and it not only involves using the Feed Burner ‘activate’ buttons. There are a number of things that can be done to optimize the feed

Some of these things are the same that are used to optimize any normal web pages. They include:

* The use of keywords – the keywords should necessarily be used in the various feed items and the channel titles, anchor text for external as well as internal links, blog posts as well as channel description.

* Properly working links – it is important to make sure that the links work properly. For the purpose it is important to use the full path while linking to make sure that the links are rendered in a proper way.

* The use of H1 and H2 tags – The use of heading tags for channel and feed titles is very helpful in feed optimization. They help to emphasize the titles’ importance. However, if the key items are not inserted in the title then it will simply lead to the emphasis on words which are not meant to be used for the purpose of optimization.

There are some other “feed specific” tips for feed optimization:

* The submission of feeds to the right type of directories.

* Feeds have to be offered for a number of different categories. This is especially important if the website is designed to cover a wide range of topics. In case your blog/website is very specialized, it may not be required. This proves useful for the subscribers who avoid being deluged by the unwanted blog entries but. It is also useful for the syndication entities, interested in certain specific topics.

* Using MyMSN and MyYahoo – In order to get the feeds indexed in a faster way and to make sure that it is frequently crawled by the two major search engines, Yahoo! and MSN, the RSS feed has to be added on the owners’ MyYahoo and MyMSN pages. According to Yahoo, this helps the feed to be indexed approximately within a period of just 48 hours! This tactic may also be used on iGoogle. The simple way to add the feed to iGoogle, one has to just click on Add Stuff and click on the Add feed or gadget link, which is located at the bottom left sidebar, then the feed URL has to be pasted on the box.

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Posted in Blogging, Google, SEO, Social Media, Twitter, Yahoo | 3 Comments »

How to reap Search Engine Optimization benefits using images?

January 29th, 2010

Images, like textual contents can contribute a lot to the search engine optimization of the web pages. Not many people know how to do it. Here are some tips on how to reap search engine optimization benefits usingimages.

The first and the foremost tip to be followed, is to use only those images that are relevant to the website’s content.

Alt tags should always be used to help the search engine spiders. These tags help the spiders to understand what the image is about. The tags should necessarily contain the keywords.

The size of the image should be paid due attention. The size here does not mean the file size but the actual dimensions of the image and the actual space on the page that it occupies. This space is to be measured in terms of percentage. The bigger an image is the greater importance or relevance it should have with the page’s content.

The images used on the webpage should be of a good quality. The quality is measured in terms of contrast and blurriness.

Choosing the right image is important but it is not of much use, if the image is not placed on the webpage in a proper manner. The image’s placement is of a lot of importance. There indeed is a difference if the image is put on the top, in the middle or at the bottom of the page. Also when the image is put on the left, in the center, or on the right side of the page, it serves different purposes and offer different benefits. Another thing that has to be remembered about the placement is that the text surrounding the image is also of an utmost importance. Hence, it is important to place the image near the relevant text.

There are a number of images which do not contain any key content. Such images have to be repeatedly used throughout the website. However, it has to be made sure that the different images are placed on different pages.

People often worry about the images’ borders. Well, they are not to be worried of, unless they are really huge. This is because the too small images are simply filtered out by the search engines and do not factor a lot in the determination of page rank.

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Posted in Google, SEO, Social Media, Yahoo | 4 Comments »

Preparing your website for mobile web

January 25th, 2010

With the increasing use of smart phones to browse the web, to send emails, to indulge in social networking as well as for shopping, these phones have emerged as a sort of portable computers for people who want to use the internet while on the move. Still a lot of websites are not optimized enough to be used with smart phones.

Preparing you website for mobile web requires two things, customizing your web site’s design and deciding the way the visitors will locate the website using mobile search.

When it comes to web design, all you need to attach a cascading style sheet (CSS) to your website which can feed up specific instructions to a particular mobile browser. While designing the CSS for the various handheld web browsers, one has to consider a number of things beforehand:

The mobile browser has a limited screen real estate, which is close to just 2×3 inches. Also all the fonts used for mobile web should be used in their most basic form, you do not have to worry about color or typography. It is important to stripe out the images.

All the advertisements have to be removed to completely utilize the limited screen space. Any online application that is not required should be kept hidden. It is important to completely focus on the content.

The background colors also have to be removed with only a basic black text appearing on a white background. Any flash, java or plug-in content has to be necessarily removed. The basic motto is to simplify everything.

Now you have to tackle the problem of making sure that your website is easily located with the help of mobile search. The best way to do that is to that the website is included in all the local search directories with completely accurate profiles. The popular search engines like Google Local and Yahoo local are designed to receive a higher amount of traffic from users who wish to locate a business in a certain area. A lot of people when use their phones to search the web are actually looking forward to visit certain businesses. Another way to be noticed in mobile web is to utilize social networking based links in order to drive web site traffic. In fact the mobile web traffic is going to be highly dependent on a potent combination of search engines and social networking.

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Posted in Google, SEO, Social Media, Yahoo | 22 Comments »

The effect of a website’s layout on SEO

January 21st, 2010

Search Engine optimization or SEO as it is popularly known can easily be affected by the layout of a website and its various pages. The search engines find the required stuff on a full HTML code page by simply bypassing the useless content.

Here is a look at the things that the usual search engines look for in a website’s layout.

• The way the content appears on the webpage with regards to size and color.

• The geometric layout of the various page elements like the relative and absolute placement.

• A page’s visually significant region that is probably containing the main content.

A search engine never wastes too much time and attention on a particular section of a webpage which may prove to be noisy like targeted ads, banner ads as well as navigation bars, when it extracts information from a particular webpage.

The search engines also do not pay much attention to the footer part of a particular page that houses information like a copyright notice. They also do not pay that much attention to the header of a page with the website’s logo that is repeated on all the web pages.

The search engine estimates the most significant element of the web page by following a visual layout process that tries to find the element containing the most amount of meaningful content on the particular webpage.

The most significant elements of the page are usually judged on the basis of the amount of the weighted content elements and the position of the various elements within the page as a part of the visual layout process.

There are a number of useful applications that go into a lot of details on a way to estimate the layout of a certain page, and to understand the positions of the various elements within a certain page, as well as identifying the most significant element of the web pages.

If you build some new web pages from scratch, then you can use an idea of how a search engine might looking at those and weigh the content of those pages, you can be benefited a lot by one of these applications.

At present, Google and Microsoft have come up with some methods to segment the contents of web pages, in this scenario it certainly helps to understand how they judge a certain page. Once you understand their selection process, you will be able to come up with a layout that certainly impresses them.

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Posted in Google, SEO | 24 Comments »

Tips to help avoid your emails being identified as spam

January 19th, 2010

Email marketing is truly a popular form of publicizing your products or services. However, there are cases where your emails can be wrongly identified as spam and hence may affect your email marketing in a negative way.

Here is a look at some tips that can help you avoid being identified as spam:

* You should make sure that you follow your CAN-SPAM Act. This is an act which was passed in 2003 and allows you to send as many unsolicited emails as you want to. It only requires you to follow certain guidelines, like:

* labeling the email, because the emails that do not mention a subject are not allowed

* avoid using any deceptive subject lines

* including the various opt-out instructions in the emails to be sent out

* including the sending company’s physical address

* Opt for a good title. When it comes to email used for marketing the magic lies in the title. Most of the people delete emails from unknown senders. The only thing that may stop the receiver from deleting the email is a good title. However you should avoid doing some things with the title like:

* The title shouldn’t entirely be in CAPS

* There should not be a lot of punctuation marks in the title

* The words like Viagra, Pharmacy, Credit Card automatically are counted among the span emails. Many titles with such words are also caught in the spa filters and they are automatically taken away from the inbox, hence not coming in front of the eyes of the recipients.

* The title should not contain any words with an incorrect spellings as well as a senseless usage of words.

* You should not use the free email services. It makes much more sense to make an investment in a paid mail service. This is because the spammers generally use the various free email services. Hence, the people are more wary of getting messages from unknown senders using the various free email provider services like AOL, Hotmail. Hence, using the free email services can actually go against your emails that you are using for marketing your product or services.

* You should test your emails to see if they go through the various spam filters or detectors. For the purpose you can utilize the various services like SpamCheck. It will tell you whether your emails will be regarded as spam.

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Posted in Affiliate, Google, SEO | 6 Comments »

Things to do in search engine optimization

January 3rd, 2010

SEO is a complex process; hence it is very important for you to understand it completely before embarking on it. There is something which plays an essential role in search engine optimization and if they are not done properly or are avoided they can negate the whole process of doing the search engine optimization for a website.

Here is a look at a list of things that are very essential in search engine optimization:

* Thorough keywords research

You should be very clear about the keywords that you are going to use on your website. This is because choosing wrong keywords can take the entire SEO process off the tracks and in a disastrous direction. Hence, you should research your keywords thoroughly. There are many internet based tools that can help you find the right keywords to be used on your website.

* Keep the long tail keywords in focus

The vague expressions are commonly used by people to search for particular products or services instead of simply using the targeted keywords. You should target some expressions that sound like sentences, because people use these longer expressions to easily search for the various products and services.

* Use unique titles

All of the pages on your website should sport your unique titles. The title should not be just a play on your company names.

* Lots of relevant content

Relevant content is an essential par of a good website. The content should have an overall good keyword density. It should help you attract good links as well as a large number of visitors.

* Description for every page

Describing your pages in the description meta tag in one or two sentences. This way you can easily use your keywords in an efficient way.

* Keep the important stuff near the top

You should not keep a big gap between the keyword-rich important content and the top of the page. This is because this content is the only thing that matters for the search engine crawlers.

* Use search engine friendly URLs

Use URLs that can easily inform the search engine crawlers as to what the particular webpage is all about. Use a contemporary content management system for the purpose.

* Maintain a sitemap

Maintaining a sitemap is very important for the success of your website. Similarly, a good navigation system to direct the visitors as well as the search engine crawlers is very important.

* Submit the website to various online directories

Submitting the website to the various directories like Yahoo! and DMOZ can give a boost to its rankings with the various search engines.

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The relation between SEO and user habits

December 29th, 2009

Keyword selection is thought to be an important part of the search engine optimization (SEO) process. Still many people do not understand the relationship between the user habits and the search engine optimization process of selecting the keywords. Here is shedding some light on this important relationship.

The first thing that has to be understood clearly is that when it comes to the internet users there habits tend to evolve rapidly. Hence internet has to keep up with this evolution. So how does it actually affect the search engine optimization process when it comes to selecting the keywords?

Well, to state the obvious the user habits do affect the SEO this is because the website owners have to actually take the various user habits into account while choosing the best keywords to optimize the website with.

According to recent finding the user habits are changing when it comes to search. The findings state that the users are learning fast that it is possible to get much more accurate results when the much more specific keywords are typed into the search window rather than simply using the various generic terms, to run a search. It is still a fact that the generic terms are still able to generate a large search volume. However with times more and more users have started to enter specific keywords to find the desired information on a subject.

This simply means that niche keyword phrases have become much more valuable when it comes to using them in the search engine optimization process. With keyword competitiveness coming into the fray the increase in the number of searches as well as a lower competition ratio generates a better ranking in the search engine results page as well as more traffic.

Apart from simply optimizing for the niche keywords, the websites have now started to consider the common misspellings of the various key terms while optimizing their pages. Even the regular typists can suffer from the problem of misspelling the commonly used terms. Well the fact is that the common misspellings can send a lot of extra traffic towards a particular website.

It is important that a website does not primarily optimize for the incorrect spellings, as it will lend the website with an amateurish appearance. However, it is important that a website actually gets itself ranked for the various misspelled words. After all taking advantage of the common spelling mistakes can be very fruitful.

Hence it is important to identify the various common user habits and plan the search engine optimization process accordingly

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