search engine optimization
On-Site SEO Optimization
Sunday, December 14th, 2008 | affiliate marketing, search engine optimization | 1 Comment
We learned from previous posts that SEO is split in two general parts: On-site and Off-site optimization. Todays article will cover the On-Site optimization and we will look into web site structure and HTML code.
Web Site URL Structure
The way a web site is build has a huge influence on its search engine optimization. When optimizing your site, take the following points as a construction guideline.
Use static URL’s instead of dynamic URL’s:
e.g. www.examplesite.com/example1/subcategory-of-example1.html
NOT
www.examplesite.com/articles.php?art_id=25&page=2%%true&ytg
This is very easy to implement when building a new website from scratch. Keep in mind that you want to use keywords in the URL instead of numbers or other irrelevant data. As well, use hyphens instead of other separators, like in my example above. To sum it up, keep the URL as short and descriptive as possible.
Web Site Structure
When setting up your site try to read the code like a search engine spider. Many web sites feature the link menu on the right instead of the left side. However, in order to let the search engine read the page content and paragraphs instead of sending it away to other pages, your menu should be located on the left side of the page.
Title & Meta Tags
Every page is a placeholder for different keywords on your page. Lets say you have a web site about cars. Title and meta tags for different pages could be about e.g. cars in general for your homepage. Sports cars for another page and maybe SUV s for yet another page. Below an example of a meta and title tag in your code:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”>
<html lang=”en” xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” xml:lang=”en”>
<head>
<title>My Car Site – All about cars</title>
<meta http-equiv=”content-type” content=”text/html; charset=utf-8″ />
<meta http-equiv=”content-language” content=”en” />
<meta content=”Find your car on this easy to use site” name=”description” />
<meta content=”cars, cars, vehicles,new cars, all cars” name=”keywords” />
</head>
An example for a title tag could look like this:
<li><a href=”http://www.my-example-cars.com/2009-SUV.html” title=”2009 SUV Models”></a></li>
Make sure you keep the keywords used in your title and meta tags relevant to the page content and construct title tags in a way that it will attract people to click and visit that page.
Internal Page Links and Sitemaps
All your pages should be interlinked so that it is easy for the search engine spider to find all pages on your website. As well you might want to have a site map that outlines the web site structure. You can either have a page with a site map on it or have a XML sitemap in the main root of your website like e.g.
www.my-example-site.com/sitemap.xml. There are many free tool on the internet that create a sitemap for you.
Duplicate Content
Avoid duplicate content as search engines will not credit this content to your site if it was published and indexed on another before.
H Tags
Your paragraphs should feature H tags like H1, H2, H3 etc. The first paragraph should be keyword rich and start with your main keyword in BOLD.
<h1>Cars</h1>
<p> We help you find all cars on the internet. Here, you can find information on price,sports car
features, family car reviews, and car financing etc.</p>
Structure of The Footer
The footer is another excellent opportunity to provide keyword content. The below example has proven to work just fine:
<p>my-example-cars.com is an independent information website about <a href=”/” title=”Cars”>Cars</a>,
not affiliated with any manufacturer or distributor.</p>
<p>Copyright © 2006-2008 <a href=”http://www.my-car-example.com/” title=”Cars”>My-car-example.com
</a> - All Rights Reserved.</p>
<p>Didn’t find what you’re looking for? - Search for <a href=”javascript:OpenAd(’http://dmoz.org/Shopping/cars/’);
” title=”Cars”>Cars</a> at Dmoz.</p>
You will see that your ranking will improve greatly just by having the above points implemented in your web site. Results may vary depending on the niche you are in and other factors discussed earlier.
Published by:
Director
Lasse Kubiack
49Above Marketing Inc.
lasse (at) 49above.com
office: 1.778.785.0080
Twitter: http://twitter.com/lassekubiack
The SERP’s - And How To Show Up
Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008 | search engine optimization | No Comments
SERP’s or Search Engine Ranking Pages are a vital piece to SEO. Why? Depending on where your web site shows up in the SERP’s, you might or might not get the qualified traffic to you want.
In general there are some features that almost all search engines have in common. They all feature so called sponsored links, related searches, natural search results and the search engines own content like videos, news, images etc.
Search Engines Ranking Pages example
Where should be your web site?
natural search results
Right here in the first position(s) of the natural search results!
Relevance is Key
Search Engines assign the positions based on relevancy. Let’s take the example screen shot above with “contact lenses” as the keyword. In our example 1800contacts.com shows up in the number position being the most relevant for the given keyword. Relevancy is in part given to your web site through its content. If the content is about “contact lenses” like in our example, and the searcher typed in “cars” the contact lens content is not considered relevant to the “car” keyword and our example search result will not show up in the SERP’s.
Every page on your web site should be representing different keywords as they all can be an entry page. Let’s stick with our contact lens example. The main page is optimized for the broad keywords contact lenses, contact lens and contacts. Category pages, linked from the home page are optimized for e.g. the keywords Acuvue, Acuvue contact lenses, Acuvues as these keywords represent a subcategory of the broad keyword contact lenses.
Earn Trust
Search engines differ in the way they operate and in our experience, Google is the most powerful, however also the most tricky search engine to optimize a web site for. In the search engine world your site needs to earn trust and you need to prove that it is a reliable, trusthworthy and accurate source of information. One of the trust parameters is time and this is the point where Google is a whole different animal than other search engines. Professional Search Engine Optimizers often speak about the “Google Sandbox”, referring to a time delay for a web site before it is able to score a high ranking position and has passed a certain time of “reliability test”. Opinions vary on this subject wether a “sandbox” really exists or not, however the fact is that there is a time delay caused by whatever. The time delay is not defaulted to a pre-set time and varies from niche to niche. In my work experience I have experienced delays from 3 months to 2 years.
Authorities Pointing to Your Site
Search engines are trying to determine which web site is the best representative for any given topic. To stick once again with our contact lens example, if the web site content is about contact lenses and other web sites from within the contact lens industry point to our example website identifying it as relevant to contact lenses, search engines consider the pointing sites authority sites.
The best possible way to achieve authority is to get links from other websites with few links which are either from within your niche or at least somewhat close related.
Published by:
Director
Lasse Kubiack
49Above Marketing Inc.
lasse (at) 49above.com
office: 1.778.785.0080
Twitter: http://twitter.com/lassekubiack
Getting in the Search Engines
Friday, November 28th, 2008 | search engine optimization | 1 Comment
After we figured out what SEO is and what it’s not in the last blog post, today we will learn the next piece of the SEO puzzle.
Since it is the ultimate goal of website owners to drive targeted traffic from search engines to their respective web sites, it is important to understand how search engines work.
Getting Indexed in the Search Engines
To get included in the SERP’s (search engine ranking pages) you do not need to pay any shady company that promises you will be included in 3,000 search engines for $250.00. I also found that using the “submit your site” function in the various engines does not get you the quick results you wish to achieve. So, to sum it up, don’t do it because its just a waste of your precious time and money.
To get included in search engines you need links. Google, MSN, Yahoo and the like use a piece of software called a “spider”, “crawler” or “bot”. All this software does is read web pages and following links from these web pages to other web pages. If the “spider” finds a URL (e.g. www.yoursite.com) which is not known to the search engine, it will report it back and the search engine will add it to its “index”. So, if your web site does get linked to from other web sites, Google and friends find you and get your web site indexed much faster.
What Sites to use to get Incoming Links
In order to get indexed quickly you want to find other sites that get “crawled” frequently by search engines. Crawling refers to the “spiders” coming and reading a web sites content. Ideally, you want to find web sites that get crawled daily or even multiple times a day, and have many other web sites linked to them. If a link to your web site from this kind of site exists, you will be indexed very soon.
Here are a few example sites:
- the Yahoo Directory is certainly one of the most important and effective places to be in, however Yahoo charges $299 per year for inclusion. Despite the stiff price tag, we still recommend using it.
- www.articlesbase.com
- www.ezinearticles.com
- Any popular blog
Published by:
Director
Lasse Kubiack
49Above Marketing Inc.
lasse (at) 49above.com
office: 1.778.785.0080
Twitter: http://twitter.com/lassekubiack
What SEO is and what it’s NOT
Wednesday, November 26th, 2008 | search engine optimization | 1 Comment
SEO or Search Engine Optimization often sounds like the magic word to online merchants and service providers, however when talking to clients there seems to be a misconception about what it really is.
In order to bring some clarification on this subject we will publish a number of articles about SEO, what it is, how it is done and what the benefits of proper SEO are.
What SEO is not:
- a quick fix solution sending unlimited free traffic
- a tool or program that sends traffic to your website
- paid advertising
- a scrupolous method to trick Search Engine algorithms to obtain a certain ranking
Although some SEO specialists utilize “scrupolous methods” to trick algorithms of Search Engines we strongly recommend to not use these tactics as they are only effective for a limited time and might get your site banned from search engines altogether in the end. This kind of method are called Black Hat SEO and we consider them search engine spam. None of these tactics will be explained in this blog as 49above Marketing strictly adheres to ethical SEO practices.
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization is a process designed to aid your search engine ranking and ultimately targeted traffic flow to your web site.
The first step in the process is to identify who you want to target. What kind of visitor you want to visit your web site and what action you want them to take. For example purchase goods, fill out forms, download something or read about your products.
The second step is to find out how many competitors you have in your niche, what they do to be successful and what you need to do in order to be better than them.
The third step is to achieve the highest possible search engine ranking for keywords, most likly to be used by your target audience. In order to make this happen you will need to do OFF and ON site optimization, which will be explained in later posts on our blog.
The fourth step is to ONGOINGLY monitor and adjust your SEO tactics, because search engines frequently change. Therefore, so does what needs to be done to keep your SEO effective!
Ongoing SEO changes
Because SEO requirements frequently change, you might find outdated information. However, we will do our best to keep the information provided on this blog up to date and relevant.
Published by:
Director
Lasse Kubiack
49Above Marketing Inc.
lasse (at) 49above.com
office: 1.778.785.0080
Twitter: http://twitter.com/lassekubiack
Welcome To Our Blog!
Monday, October 13th, 2008 | 49above Clients, 49above Updates, Industry Events, Industry Interviews, Website Usability and Analytics, affiliate marketing, email marketing, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, social network marketing | No Comments
Hello everyone and welcome to the 49above Marketing Inc. Blog!
We will be featuring all kinds of treats on these pages so please stay tuned to find out about program launches, industry updates, our thoughts and stories on Internet Marketing events and more!
Here you will learn all about our affiliate programs, affiliate marketing management, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, PPC, PPL, email marketing, social network marketing, tools and tips for conversions, website usability, analytics and pretty much anything you’ll want to know to be more effective in Internet Marketing.
We’re looking forward to having you visit our site. We’d love to hear your thoughts too so if you have any questions or comments, please feel free to post them on here. You can also check out our website at http://www.49above.com!
To your ongoing success!
_______________________________
Sarah Villeneuve Bundy
Leading Director and Co-Founder
49above Marketing Inc.
PH: 778.785.0080
sarah@49above.com
http://www.49above.com