Posted: May 24th, 2009 | Author: admin | Filed under: Search Engine Optimization | Comments Off
A lot of people are calling for the death of the traditional SEO craft. We are moving towards a brave new world, they say, one where Google will increasingly be able to mine your dataset and carefully craft “custom” searches for you. Let’s paint a scenario that uses one of the many possible resources Google has access to. Consider it the simplistic “doomsday” scenario, one that renders moot all that keyword analysis and rank progress you’ve done. Scary I know, but read on.
Let’s say an unwitting end user named Barbara is preparing another chili dinner for her out of town friends. She does what she always does, hits up Google for a term like “great chili recipe.” First up, RecipeDonkey.com has worked their ass off to rank for that term, and is usually #1. SuperRecipes.com is a great site, almost considered an authority, and isn’t as good as is RecipeDonkey.com for that term, but is usually top 5.
However, Barbara has visited SuperRecipes.com hundreds of times and always leaves the page open for 40-60 minutes while she prepares the dish. She rarely has done this for RecipeDonkey.com. Because Google provides the analytics for both sites, they can see that Barbara hangs out at SuperRecipes.com a lot longer. So, Google customizes Barbara’s results for the sites she prefers. They put SuperRecipes.com number #1. Why are they number 1? Because Barbara thinks they have the best content, not Google.
The big question is if Google considers unconventional information like analytics? And the answer is… of course! How stupid would it be to ignore all that wonderful, wonderful data?
And what other information do they have access too? Think Google Checkouts, YouTube and Blogger. Think out further. With IP tracking, they can target geography (do southerners prefer recipe sites with extra spicy recipes?). Now imagine Google automatically uncovering connections and correlations (who cares about causal or effectual reactions, it exists is enough). With enough data and time, it will basically be a social black box. Perhaps it will eventually predict future trends about, well, anything people search for. HAL anyone?
Posted: March 13th, 2009 | Author: admin | Filed under: Search Engine Optimization | Tags: basics, overview, Search Engine Optimization, seo | Comments Off
Chances are, since you are exploring this site, you want to know what search engine optimization is all about. A basic definition: search engine optimization is all about getting your website listed at the top of the search results (predominantly in Google) in order to acquire relevant traffic of users interested in your services. There are many different methods employed by SEO professionals. They are most broadly split into two different sections, on-site and off-site. We’ll talk about both a little bit.
On-Site Search Engine Optimization
On-site SEO is exactly what you think it would be, it is a type of optimization that takes place entirely on your site. There are several common things being done here and a bunch of advanced concepts, but only a few that are worth talking about broadly.
Content: As they always say, content is king. A site with hundreds of well written pages of content that appears relevant and useful will beat out another site in the search engine rankings, all things being equal. Writing appropriate content means writing around your target keywords and phrases.
Page interlinking: This is an important section of your site. The first thing a search engine looks at is what you think your website is all about. When you link out to different pages with nicely descriptive phrases as an anchor (this is considered the visible text section of a link), a search engine will assume that it describes it well.
This is why it is considered bad to link pages like this: “click here to read my article” but good to link articles like this: “read my article about Russian poodles“.
Meta tags: Meta tags are little tags stuck in the <head> section of your HTML page with attributes like title, keywords, and description. These tags should closely reflect EACH pages content accurately, but should NEVER be site wide. The title tag should be an easily readable title for the page with the target keyword in there. The keywords meta tag usually contains about 5-10 keywords that were discussed in the article. Note: most search engines (like Google) disregard the keyword meta tag. Don’t use it unless you feel like giving your competition a list of your keywords. The description tag should be a concise one or two sentence description about the page and should feature the target keyword as well.
Off-Site Search Engine Optimization
After the base site has been heavily optimized, it is usually time to embark on a campaign of this sort. The bulk of high level search engine optimization is often thought to be off-site. There is one predominant aspect to this, and that is link-building.
Link building: This is an often monotonous and laborious process. It involves contacting relevant or related sites and convincing them to link to you. The anchor text for carrying specific keyword value and blooms with relevance, but the linking site’s strength is a trumping factor. Even the most well manicured links on an unpopular website will have marginal benefits in the end.
Tenacity and Growth
The absolute best way to go about search engine optimization is to get assistance in learning it yourself and then practice it tenaciously and repetitively. Target growth in content and back links and the search engine traffic will increase on its own accord. In the end, its all about a little elbow grease and the appropriate knowledge.
Using Proper Tools
Like most professionals, SEO’ers also have tools. SEO tools are a dime a dozen, but rank checkers are universally popular. There are also great sites like SEOmoz.org that charge a monthly fee to access useful and well made SEO tools. Just make sure you are using them if you are paying the price for them!
Posted: November 17th, 2008 | Author: admin | Filed under: Search Engine Optimization | Tags: 4 reasons, first step, seo, started, top | No Comments »
Dipping your feet into the sea that is SEO can be daunting at first. Keywords, back links, on-site, off-site, authority, satellite, organic, PPC, etc….. All these terms are vague and don’t represent the full value they carry for your situation. A good SEO provider will instill you with the knowledge to make the right decisions when regarding SEO, and not confuse you or hide their results.
But some may be curious about what exactly quality SEO can provide to their business and why they should get into it, so here is a short list about what to expect.
1. Overcome your real competition, local alternatives.
There is no reason to fight the big guys on a national level, and this need is already reflected in common localized ad campaigns in traditional media. This is a prime example of how targeted SEO has become, you no longer have to waste marketing dollars and can target only those who are within the area to purchase your products. For example, if you sell jewelry in central Missouri, we would initially target only cities within comfortable driving distance of your store.
2. Keep tabs on your ROI (return on investment).
Another great aspect of keyword based Search Engine Optimization is the statistics can show you exactly how each example performed for a given time period. This helps us further focus your advertising budget to give an even higher ROI. Many traditional advertising models have a “what you get is what you get” mentality. We have a different mentality, one that says you get more and more and more as time goes on.
3. Marketing and research in the first step, two for the price of one.
In many traditional advertising models, research can greatly improve it the performance of the campaign. However, it is costly and slow, slow, slow. In the online world, this has been turned on its head. With the Pay Per Click model, you can pick a couple dozen keywords you think your customers would find relevent to your business and then try them out.
Not only do you recieve traffic and sales from this first step, but we recieve great data about which keywords worked and which didn’t. Once we pick out the big winners, we focus traditional SEO on those keywords.
4. We don’t pump and dump here, we’re the real deal.
We also don’t discuss your online movements to anyone, for fear that we might lose the advantage right off the line. We customize our packages to fit the customer’s needs, and we don’t upsell. While there is a certain level of commitment we demand of our clients, we can guarentee that we will have an even higher level of commitment for results. Just give us a call.