Optimize Me

Website Evaluation Tips - Part 2

2007-01-08T00:14:00.000Z

Eliminate Broken Links
One of the most common, and easily correctable maintenance tasks is identifying broken links in your website evaluation and fixing them. Working links may lead to other pages (either to your site, and other external sites) or to graphic images. Broken image links appear as either a little red "x" or a blank box representing where a graphic is supposed to appear. Broken page links will result in the dreaded "404 FILE NOT FOUND" error message. Hopefully, through the process of evaluating your website, you've already compiled a list of these annoying anomalies. If you'd like to double check for additional links you may have missed, you can use a variety of free tools available which will not only verify all of your links, but also check for spelling errors and perform other useful functions such as checking page load time and discovering browser compatibility issues.

Take an inventory
Set aside a time when you can browse the entire site, and try to conduct this visual website evaluation through the eyes of a new visitor. Click on every link and view every page. Hopefully, the site still accurately represents your organisation. Be on the lookout for content items that are inaccurate, out of date, or no longer important. Any such issues discovered while evaluating a website should be addressed and corrected as soon as possible.

Before the Click

2007-01-07T18:03:00.000Z

When people are searching for something online they have a specific intent. They are either looking for information or looking to purchase a product or service etc. When they see your ad or link and it conforms to their needs they will click on it. That is great, but have you prepared your site to the best of its abilities? One of the simplest ways in which to ensure that they don't immediately click out of your site is to take them where they want to be.

So many people still overlook this small, but very vital action. Don't take them to your site's home page. Although your home page might have loads of information about your company, product or service or may just be of very flattering design, this means nothing to your PPC visitor if it doesn't take them directly to where they want to be.

If your visitor was looking for "Marketing services" take them directly to your "Marketing services" page, not to "Email marketing" or "All Services", or "About Marketing", but directly to "Marketing services" this is simple and effective. Most retailers would use the "product page" as their primary landing page. Service providers would use the "service page".

There are two ways of going about your landing page strategy. You may choose to either send your traffic to a page within your existing website, or create landing pages specifically targeted towards your PPC campaign.

This provides you with more freedom to customise the design of your landing page.

Website Evaluation Tips - Part1

2007-01-07T18:00:00.000Z

Even if you or your company doesn't have a lot of time and resources to keep the site in good order, there are several things that evaluating your website can bring to your attention that may need slightly tweaking at little or no cost.

Review the Goals and Purpose of the Site
Hopefully you had a goal or purpose in mind when the site was originally designed and launched. It may have been to promote brand awareness, drive sales leads, sell more product, etc. As the first step of your website evaluation, confirm that these goals have not changed, and if they have changed, determine what your new goals and objectives are. Throughout the process of evaluating your website, continually ask yourself if each site element helps to meet the goals of the site.

Keep a 'to do' list
It's a good idea to keep a list for the website at all times. This list can be as simple as a Word document or as complex as a database, including (at the very least) each item to be modified (page, copy, graphic, link, etc), the desired action, (add, remove, update), and the priority (low or high). Then, if you happens to have a few minutes here or there, this list can be continually reduced in an efficient manner.

Information kept updated
If your site states that your 'next' event is 10 months ago, or your "coming soon" has "gone and went", bring the site back up to the current date by addressing these types of issues. Nothing can be worse for your visitors than serving them out of date information. If you don't have the time or resources to continually update your site, make sure you add as little time-sensitive information as possible.

Whats changing in 2007

2007-01-06T00:40:00.000Z

Firstly I would like to wish everyone a belated Happy New Year and hope of everyone had a great Christmas or Eid as the case maybe. I thought it would be a good idea to start the year by providing you guys with what we might expect from the world of Search Engine Marketing.

As the most complicated search engine Google usually sets the bar for best optimization practices so focusing on attaining results on Google usually nets favorable results on the other major engines. With that in mind I do not see any reason that ethical optimization tactics will be revised to any significant level in 2007.

I cannot stress enough the importance of the emerging 'Mobile Search' industry and I expect that the increase in R&D from Google and some effort from Yahoo and Microsoft in this area will produce an undeniable need for separate, mobile-friendly websites (i.e. .mobi sites designed entirely for mobile use). This market place will see significant growth this year as Internet marketing companies jump into action and begin offering mobile site creation, promotion and optimization.

Google Audio Ads

2006-12-10T17:32:00.000Z

Google is allowing some of its existing online marketers to use its automated advertising system to broadcast ads on radio stations around the United States.

The beta test of Google Audio Ads is the result of the integration of technology from Google's acquisition of radio advertising company dMarc Broadcasting nearly a year ago.

The system allows advertisers to see real-time reports on the ads and change settings, like geographical target or time of day, as well as hear the ad after it has played. Typically, the more targeted an ad campaign the higher the rates, according to Google.

Yahoo Instant Search

2006-12-09T17:24:00.000Z

For those of you that didn't know Yahoo! introduced a new search function to it's ever-growing tool base back in September. Having used it for a while I felt it was worth blogging about.

Yahoo! Instant Search displays results as you type your query. The results come from either Yahoo! Shortcuts to news, weather and other relevant information or from the No.1 results in it's index. Yahoo! Search also provides instant corrections for "select" misspellings. I emphasise select because it did not offer any corrections for misspellings that I enter.

If this becomes a popular tool which i predict, I see a lot of webmasters scrambling even more ferociously to get their web sites listed in the No.1 position at Yahoo!.

Keyword Optimization Definitions

2006-12-09T17:14:00.000Z

As a novice website owner, you may not be familiar with the technical definitions in today's search engine placement world. In this 2 part blog ill be explaining some key words that you should all know about.

Keyword proximity is how close your keywords are to one another. In most cases, the closer the keywords are, the more chance of getting a good search engine ranking.

Take these two sentences for example:

Beginner Keyword Definitions

Keyword Definitions for the Beginner

Using the example titles above, if a search was made for "beginner keyword definitions," a web page with the first sentence is more likely to rank higher than the second.

Keyword prominence refers to how prominent keywords are within a web page.

To achieve the best rankings, place your most important keywords at the start of the page, the end of the page, and in your H1, H2 and TITLE tags.

Keyword marketing is the process of targeting customers by keywords. In terms of advertising, keyword marketing involves purchasing ad units, typically banners and text links, on the search results page for particular keywords. In terms of search engine optimization, keyword marketing involves achieving top rankings in the actual (organic) search results themselves.

The new comers question:Do I have to invest in Link Building?

2006-12-03T20:06:00.000Z

A few of my friends who have recently started selling online have asked me this question so Im answering it for all to read. If anyone else has any other advice please feel free to leave a comment.

For successful SEO, you need support of links from other websites. It is possible to optimize a website for any number of keywords, but that doesn’t mean it would rank for all those keywords. Rankings are dependent on competition, which is different for different industries and different keywords. Some keywords have high competition and some have very little. Competition is dealt with not only the on-page optimization but also the off-page support that your website enjoys – links.

The more competitive the keyword, the more off-page support you would need in order to rank.
However, you don’t need to invest in links at the same time as SEO. The best option is to always choose a combination of competitive and easy to rank keywords so that while to invest in competitive keywords, you also start seeing results of the SEO through easy to rank keywords. It is always a good idea to keep your eyes on the search pattern as it keeps changing. Usually, the newer keywords are easier to rank with.

Kintish and Business Networking

2006-11-30T19:17:00.000Z

Following on from my last post I thought I would give some more information on Kintish and what they do.

Kintish specialise in Business networking, which is simply having a conversation, yet most business people miss out on valuable new business leads by not utilising business networking techniques effectively. Thats where Kintish can help you can become a confident and effective business networker and follow up all potential business leads and business opportunities in a professional manner.

For more information please check out the Kintish website

Also their blog Being Kintished

Kintish now on Myspace

2006-11-28T18:30:00.000Z

Will Kintish the business networking guru and client of ours has joined the world of Myspace.

Check out his website at http://www.myspace.com/kintish

Will Kintish qualified as a chartered accountant in 1971, aged 23 and stayed in practice for the next 30 years.

He ended his accountancy career as the senior partner on merger with a national firm on May 31 2000. The next day he set up Kintish to show people in the professional, financial and service-based communities how to attract more business and clients.

Avoiding Click Fraud

2006-11-27T02:17:00.000Z

Following on from my last post i thought id say a few words on how to avoid the ever increasing problem of click fraud.

Basically most click fraud comes from the popular keywords, where advertisers are paying top dollars just to be seen for that keyword. It's best to advertise on the smaller keywords, where there's not a lot of competitors advertising and not a lot of searches. Most people that commit click fraud focus on high paying keywords because that's where they will make the most money.

Stay away from PPC companies that don't monitor the clicks, these companies are prone to click fraud. Also stay away from the ones that are small, they most likely have a small or no staff at all that monitor their service, they are also known for committing click fraud their self. It's best to stay with PPC companies that are well known, such as Overture or Google.

Click Fraud Explained

2006-11-19T18:09:00.000Z

The term 'click fraud' has been creeping up more and more in news articles and blogs everywhere especially with the emergence of Google Custom Search Engine which some believe is just another tool for fraud. Heres how i view the impact of click fraud...

Click Fraud refers to any kind of click received from a CPC search engine that is generated artificially through human or technological means with the sole purpose of creating a debiting click, resulting in zero possibility for a conversion to occur.

It is estimated that over 15% of budget will go to click fraud – and in some highly competitive markets close to 50%.

Type 1 Click Fraud: If a competitor (or someone who doesn't like you) finds the ad and clicks on it, that would be considered click fraud. The person had no interest in your site whatsoever. They are trying to do you harm.

Type 2 Click Fraud: Someone (insane) re-clicks on the same ad repeatedly or is just plain confused. Or their keyboard or mouse goes berserk.

Type 3 Click Fraud: Someone creates a site with GoogleAds on it and participates in the Google AdSense program and clicks on the ads to generate revenue for themselves. (AdSense is the program where on your own site you display Google pay-per-click ads and when someone clicks on them, you get a part of the revenue.)

Amazon enter the world of Pay-Per-Click

2006-11-19T17:47:00.000Z

Amazon has always been well-known for the numerous items it sells in their vast marketplace. They have an amazing affiliate program as well. However, I would have never expected Amazon to come up with it’s very own Pay-Per-Click Service for other merchants!

Pay-Per-Click has been widely known through Google’s PPC Adwords service and Yahoo! has adopted it as well. Now Amazon has decided to enter the field and make some money!

Amazon is now offering a Pay-Per-Click Service for merchants who want to display their results in the Amazon Marketplace Listings. This service is provided through ClickRiver, which is powered by Amazon’s A9 Unit. The only part which I don’t like is they will be serving third party advertisements along with your paid listings.

Pushon Blog Moved

2006-11-16T18:56:00.000Z

Just a quick post to let everyone know My company Pushon has moved its blog site to http://blog.pushon.co.uk. Anyone interested in the World of SEO or SEM should have a quick look it will be worth your while.

Blog Page Rank Tricks 2

2006-10-31T17:29:00.000Z

Here are the next 4 tricks that can be used to help increase blog traffic.

5) Use keywords in your blog post titles - This is a given for SEO. Most blogging software uses the post title as the url so take advantage of it.

6) Optimize your blog categories - When you create categories for your blog, be sure to use keywords in the titles. When you post, be sure to default to a general category that is relevant no matter what the post is about. Choose multiple categories on each post when appropriate. This will create a "SEO-friendly" url for each post you make.

7) Submit your blog directories - Also submit the blog to regular directories such as (DMOZ, JoeAnt, GoGuides, Google Blog Search, etc) that have categories for blogs.

8) Offer RSS to email - Anywhere from 10% to 40% of your blog traffic can come from individuals that perfer to read blog posts via email. RSS readers and aggregators can be confusing. Adding email services to your blog isn't. There are several free services available for this including: FeedBlitz, Squeet, and Zookoda.

Blog Page Rank Tricks

2006-10-31T17:24:00.000Z

As fancy as the term "blog" sounds, it's actually just a website that uses a content management system. While most blog software is more search engine friendly out of the box than many web sites, the opportunities for blog optimization are readily available.

Here are the first 4 of 8 tricks that can increase your visibility in search engines and eventually drive more traffic to your blog.

1) Syndicate your blog - Make it easy for people to subscribe to your blog. Sign-up with a free service like Feedburner and then create a "syndication" area on your site.

2) Ping blog search engines - This can be configured with blog software such as Movable Type or WordPress to work automatically. If you're using Blogger.com, then you can do this manually with Pingomatic.com or Pingoat.com.

3) Make comments on other blogs - Your name will be linked to the blog url that you enter. Don’t make comments that offer no value to the blog post. Don't use keywords in the field for your name, use your name or blog name.

4) Use track backs - If there is a blog that you refer to or quote and it is highly relevant to your subject, leave a track back. It increases your link popularity and may even score a few interested readers from the linked site. A TrackBack is a mechanism used in a blog to show, around an entry, a list of other blogs that refer to it.

What is Blog Spam?

2006-10-20T21:21:00.000+01:00

Im sure most of us have either visited a blog full of random links or have been left a comment that contains many unrelated links.......welcome to the world of Blog Spam!

What exactly is blog spam? Blog spam is simply a blog that does not have very much content. A blog spam exists merely to drive traffic to certain sites. It is in fact used by many people as a SEO technique. Blog spamming is not acceptable to a wide range of sectors. With the main aim of generating traffic, blog spams do not really contribute anything relevant. They exist to provide links to their parent websites and nothing else.

How do you spam blogs? As already discussed above, blogs are normally used to publish information related to website content. Thus content is the most important thing. For blog spams, however, no such importance is placed on content. Blog spams may contain just about anything to increase traffic to the parent website, blog spams are normally filled with only links or classifieds (which actually point to another site). Another aspect of spam blogging is the comment feature. Programs are created to post spam as comments in different blogs. This is usually very irritating because spam posted as comments are generally unrelated to the blog topic.

How Search Engines Work

2006-10-19T21:21:00.000+01:00

Every engine has a different ranking algorithm, which simply means that they each consider different things important or not important when determining relevancy and ranking. Therefore, what works for one engine won' t necessarily work for another.

The engines like simplicity! You'll have much more success with your web page if you're not utilizing techniques like frames, JavaScript, dynamic pages, graphic-intense pages, etc.

As the engines like simplicity take it slowly, don't utilise every one of these techniques on your page. Instead, start with a few, remembering that the tags toward the top of the page are most important. If you need boosts in relevancy, then add a few more tags to see how that helps.

In most cases, you won't be able to optimize each page for more than one or two keywords. So, don't think that you'll be able to optimize your main page for 14 different keyword phrases. It just won't work! Fine tune each page for one or two keyword phrases only, and you'll be much more successful.

Advantages of Paid Links

2006-10-17T17:07:00.000+01:00

Paid links are links from other websites purchased solely for the value of the link rather than for direct clicks. Paid links have become so popular that auction sites have arisen up for just this purpose and they can even be bought on eBay now.

There is no particular problem with paid links, however I would recommend applying the same criteria that you would to reciprocal links. If you are going to purchase links, only purchase them from related sites and try to make sure the link is not buried down at the bottom of the page.

Run-of-site links (links that appear on every page) are not significantly more valuable than single links on the homepage other than for the traffic. If you’ve purchased a link in a good location and on a good site you’re likely to get some good traffic from it. This is the general rule that should be used when purchasing a link for traffic. If a link increases PageRank it’s a great bonus but if you have bought the link for the traffic and your getting it, then the link becomes secondary.

Keywords In Your Articles

2006-10-17T03:44:00.000+01:00

It is important to realise how to write a good article and one of the ways is to provide the article submission sites with a list of quality keywords...

One method of making sure that the readre followes your article back to your site is to write relevant articles. Writing what you know about will ensure that you provide quality work and that your article is easily traced. Stick with articles that are themed after the keywords in your website. This will provide an easy transition from your article on another site, to the keywords on your webpage.

By carefully crafting articles, it is very possible for a beginner, to establish enough links that you will essentially have free advertising across the web. By keeping a few things in mind, such as keyword relevance and linking to similar sites, you will guarantee that the pathway from the location of your article to your actual website is easy and worthwhile.

Can Search Engines Follow Your Site’s Link structure?

2006-10-10T20:05:00.000+01:00

This was a question put to me by my fellow colleague Jamie Clouting the other day, heres what we discussed...

If your site employs a drop-down menu that is run with java script, then search engines may find your main page, but they won’t follow the links to your interior pages. Similarly if your navigation area is an image map, a graphic with “hot spots” that link to your various internal pages then the search engines cannot and will not find the other pages of your site. To get maximum traffic it is imperative to have as many of your pages as possible indexed in the big search engines. You can accomplish this by adding a text-based navigation area at the bottom of your pages or a site-map page with text links to all your interior pages.

If you pay attention to small considerations like these, you can greatly improve your site’s chances of appearing near the top of search results.

What is an Email Marketing Solution?

2006-10-10T19:41:00.000+01:00

The free encyclopedia “Wikipedia” (en.wikipedia.org) gives such definition of email marketing solution: “A form of direct marketing which uses electronic mail as a means of communicating commercial or fundraising messages to an audience. In its broadest sense, every e-mail sent to a potential or current customer could be considered e-mail marketing”.
Email marketing solution is very similar to ordinary email, it’s just a kind of advertising. This solution is very effective, your message is directed to definite people, and you are sure they’ll receive it and will get to know it, because the first thing people do when they switch on the computer is check their email.
Email marketing solution can be irreplaceably useful for your business and your customers. If you provide some action or discounts it’s the best way to inform your customers. Also there are a large amount of different web resources, which offer deliveries of news and articles to their subscribers. In such cases email marketing solution is very convenient, because people don’t need to waste their time looking for information.

Directories and their function

2006-10-03T05:54:00.000+01:00

For those of you who dont know what the big deal with a directory is...

A directory is simply a web site that contains a categorised listing of links from around the web. They aid surfers to locate the 'best' and most informative links for a particular category. For example a category may be called 'Search engine optimisation' and in this category there is list of links about home PPC and SEM. Directories consist of a collection of categories into which links are seperated. Categories can have sub-categories to make the division of links more specific.

There are a multitude of varied directories on the web at present. They range from general directories that include categories for almost everything, to specific directories that contain categories to match specific areas of interest e.g. web sites about health. It is helpful to get your web site listed in as many directories as possible as this will help you beat the competition in rankings.

Getting your link listed varies between directories as each has their own different process. Some directories require a fee but most do not. A lot of directories offer a mixture between free and paid listing. When you pay to get your link listed in a directory it is normally added within a week and it is guaranteed to be added. On the otherside a directory that offers a free listing can take anywhere from a week to several months to add your link, and also there is no guarantee that the link will be added.

Building your link popularity

2006-09-29T20:53:00.000+01:00

We all know in order to build up link popularity many inbound, one-way links need to be created. This can be achieved in a number of different ways...

Directories
Directories are categorised listings of links from around the web. Many directories exist and vary in their methods of getting your link posted on them. They provide a great source of quality inbound, one-way links. Getting listed in quality directories such as DMOZ or Yahoo can be more beneficial for your link popularity than a lot of links from smaller, newer directories. (In my next post ill tell you which directories to post to.)

Great site content
The most powerful way to get inbound, one-way links is to have great site content that other web sites will want to link to. This allows you to get links from sites other than directories, which can definitely be better. The best thing about this is that it requires no communication on your part, it just happens naturally. If your site has poor content then others sites may not link, including the directories. Most of the top ranking web sites today got to the top because of great content. Writing interesting and informative articles for your web site is a good way of getting these kind of links.

Emailing web site owners
If you come across a listing of links on a web site other than a directory e.g. a links page on a somebody's personal web site, it can do no harm to write the web site owner a polite email requesting a link to your site from their page. They may request a reciprocal link in return but sometimes they do not and you can get a quality inbound, one-way link for your efforts. I have got many links in the past using this method. In my email I always ask them to visit the site in question before making a decision to link.

Complicated Menu System can affect your page rank

2006-09-27T21:38:00.000+01:00

A somewhat overlooked mistake that can reduce your page rank is that of using complicating menu systems. Heres my explanation as to why...

Search engines spiders that crawl through our pages are very basic. They find it hard to navigate complicated menu systems implemented for example in JavaScript or as a Java applet. Just because it can be easy for a human to navigate through a site never assume it will be as easy for a search engine spider. A menu system using simple textual links will be easier for a spider to understand and it will be able to successfully navigate your site. A lot of the time complicated menu systems can be replicated using textual links and CSS.

If you must use a complicated menu system be sure to provide a site map that is clearly accessible from the homepage of your site and contains only textual links to your pages. This ensures that even if the spider cannot understand your menu system that it will be able to find the pages on your site.

Marketing through your Website

2006-09-25T19:33:00.000+01:00

I believe websites should be constructed with the objective that they will be optimized and ranked higher by search engines. When constructing a website it is imprtant to remember that it must contain content with relevant words, that when your target audience or customers type related key words in a search engine, they find your website easily. Your website should give all the information about your company with details about the products or services that it offers. You can construct your website in such a way that your customers can order online or give feedback about a product they have purchased from your company.

Making Adsense of it all

2006-09-24T17:18:00.000+01:00

Google Adsense is a program in which websites may place javascript ads upon their site. Each time a vistor clicks upon a Adsense Ad and another site is shown, the webmaster or that website earns a percentage of the ad placement revenue. The adsense Ads are highly targeted toward the keyword density of your website. If your site is about Search Engine Marketing, addtional search engine marketing advertisments will be placed upon your site via the javascript code. Adsense is a fantastic program to earn passive income from your website or sites.

Google Adsense is a sister program to Google Adwords. AdWords is Google’s flagship advertising product, and main source of revenue. AdWords offers pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and site-targeted advertising for both text and banner ads. The AdWords program includes local, national, and international distribution. Google’s text advertisements are short, consisting of one title line and two content text lines.

Payout of Adsense is genrally 40-50% of the cost of the of the orginal Adwords cost.

Alternative ways to get into Google

2006-09-19T03:33:00.000+01:00

Everyone is concerned about their Google rankings however an algorithm change or an update can ochange all that. In this two part blog im goin to share some alternative ways to get into google which i think can be very useful.

Google Video

Google Video allows you to have your very own tv show on one of the largest search engines on the internet. This is a form of multimedia that is certainly gaining popularity online. Right now Google Video is in a growth stage and it’s one of the perfect times to get in and be one of the first to brand yourself in a particular market. Videos are also a great selling point if you have a product that can be demonstrated. With Google video, you can now have your very own infomercial indexed in the search engines. To check out this new technology, go to http://video.google.com

Google Base

Google Base was launched in November of 2005. Google base describes itself as “a place where you can add all types of information that we’ll host and make searchable online”. Now, that does sound like a webmaster’s dream.

Your item could be almost anything: your products, research papers, articles, press releases, etc. You can describe all of your items so that you can zone in on your targeted visitor.

Anyone with a Google account can use this service, you can find out more about Google Base, visit http://base.google.com/base/about.html

Google Local

Getting your products into Google local can put your items in front of some serious buyers. People often go to Google Local looking for a specific item or service in a particular geographic area. If you own a small business, Google Local is the perfect opportunity to increase your reach without spending lots of advertising cash.

Trageting those Ads

2006-09-19T03:10:00.000+01:00

I was reading quite along article on the emergence of ad targeting heres my summary and my thoughts on the topic.

Most of us are familiar with contextual targeting; it has been used in offline and online advertising for a long time. If you read a magazine article about home gardening the ads on the page will probably be for Miracle Grow or something. The same principle is applied to the web.

Behavioral targeting is relatively new but catching on fast. The Internet, with its ability to record behavior, is largely responsible for the increase in behavioral targeting. Marketers like targeted ads because they reach specific consumers, eliminating waste and increasing advertising efficiency.

As marketing shifts from traditional media to online media, today’s marketers are embracing search strategies such as SEO (search engine optimisation) and PPC (pay-per-click advertising), as well as contextual, demographic and behavioral targeting.

Quick optimization Tips

2006-09-12T03:17:00.000+01:00

The header tags in your page give the search engine spiders an idea of how your page is structured. Therefore, if you can put in important keywords that are relevant to your page´s content in the header tags, the search engine will then know that this particular page contains information on topics relating to those keywords – thus helping your page rank better for those keywords.

It´s actually simpler than it sounds, suppose you have a page that´s titled "How to optimize your website". Now, you might have two sections on that page – an article on website optimization and one on general optimization tips. Now instead of it all together, here´s what you could do:

• H1 tag for the page heading – including a variation of the Title tag

• H2 tags for both sections – "Website Optimization" and "Optimization tips" in this case.

Textual Tags

When a search engine spider is scanning a page, it´s looking for several factors to determine what is important and what´s not. In particular, it looks for text tags – bold, underline or italics, to help it rank the page. Why?

Simply, the search engine spider is programmed to “think’ that any text that is put in bold, italics or underlined is considered important information by the user, and therefore it “might’ be important. This is where bullet points come in handy as well.I said “might’ be important because search engine spiders have very sophisticated algorithms that look at hundreds of other factors, including the relevance of the surrounding text.

So if you concentrate on putting bold or italics tags around your core keywords (while maintaining a natural flow of content), you will be directly improving the chances of a search engine spider ranking that page higher for those keywords.

Similarly, if you have an important list of points that you want to emphasise, you could put them in an ordered (numbered) list or just a plain bulleted list on your page – this will set that portion of text apart and alert the search engine spider that this text is more important.

Increase traffic to your blogsite

2006-09-11T18:30:00.000+01:00

Being a relatively new blogger I've been doing some research into how I can increase the effectiveness of my blog. I thought i would share some of my findings.

Participate at Related Forums & Blogs whatever industry or niche you're in, there are bloggers, forums and an online community that's already active. Depending on your market, you may need to think one or two levels broader than your own content to find a large community, but with the size of the participatory web today, even the highly specialized content areas receive attention. A great way to find out who these people are is to use Technorati to conduct searches, then sort by number of links. Del.icio.us tags are also very useful in this process, as are straight searches at the engines (Ask.com's blog search in particular is of very good quality).

Intelligent linking when you link out in your blog posts, use convention where applicable and creativity when warranted, but be aware of how the links you serve are part of the content you provide. Not every issue you discuss or site you mention needs a link, but there's a fine line between overlinking and underlinking. The best advice I can give is to think of the post from the standpoint of a relatively uninformed reader. If you mention Wikipedia, everyone is familar and no link is required. If you mention a specific page at Wikipedia, a link is necessary and important. It's almost always better to be over-generous with links than under-generous.

Content tagging Technorati is the first place that you should be tagging posts. You may want to have the tags right on your page, pointing to the Technorati searches that you're targeting. There are other good places to ping - del.icio.us and Flickr being the two most obvious. Tagging content can also be valuable to help give you a "bump" towards getting traffic from big sites like Reddit, Digg.

2006-09-05T22:52:00.000+01:00

Optimize your use of RSS

RSS started out with the intent of distributing news related headlines. The potential for RSS is significantly larger. Consider using RSS for the following:

New Homes - realtors can provide updated feeds of new home listings on the market

Job Openings - placement firms and newspapers can provide a classifieds feed of job vacancies

Auction Items - auction vendors can provide feeds containing items that have been recently added to ebay or other auction sites

Forum Headlines - support forums can provide a listing of new forum threads

Product Sales or Specials - one look at Amazon opens the mind to the endless product sale potential using RSS. Currently Amazon delivering a headline-view of the top 10 bestsellers in that category or set of search results.

Airlines - report flight delays

Schools - schools can relay homework assignments and quickly announce school cancellations.

Entertainment - listings of the latest tv programs or movies at local theatres

Press Distribution - feed for press with new releases

News & Announcements - headlines, notices and any list of announcements

Document listings - lists of added or changed pages, so that people don't need to constantly check for updates

Bookmarks and other external links - perfect for sharing lists of external links

Calendars - listings of past or upcoming events, deadlines or holidays

Law Enforcement - let the community know of location and status of sex offenders as they move into a community.

Search results - to let people track changing or new results to their searches

RSS in the Government - Site details how RSS is used by various government agencies

If you are using RSS in an innovative way please leave a comment.

2006-09-05T22:48:00.000+01:00

Whats the RSS All About?

RSS seems to be getting very popular in the world of SEO so I thought I would explain what the fuss is all about.

RSS is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication and Rich Site Summary. RSS is an XML-based format for content distribution. Webmasters create an RSS file containing headlines and descriptions of specific information. While the majority of RSS feeds currently contain news headlines or breaking information the long term uses of RSS are broad.

RSS is a defined standard based on XML with the specific purpose of delivering updates to web-based content. Using this standard, webmasters provide headlines and fresh content in a succinct manner. Consumers use RSS readers and news aggregators to collect and monitor their favorite feeds in one centralized program or location. Content viewed in the RSS reader or news aggregator is place known as an RSS feed.

RSS is becoming increasing popular. RSS is a free and easy way to promote a site and its content without the need to advertise or create complicated content sharing partnerships.

2006-09-03T18:42:00.000+01:00

Search Engine Spiders

Search engine spiders or robots are the basis of how search engines work. Providing the right information to search engine spiders is what search engine optimisation is all about.

Search engines use software to gather information about your website. This software examines the code of your website, looks for links pointing to your site, and also at who you link to. This software is called by many names, usually search engine crawlers, robots, or most commonly, spiders because they crawl the "web".

These search engine spiders attempt to understand what is important about your website, and its place in the global market. The spiders remember how often they find links to your website. They try to work out what content of yours is relevant, and what content is important. As we all know content is king in that search engines need to find out what your site is about, and they do this by the search engine spiders being able to read your content easily and effectively.

2006-08-29T17:16:00.000+01:00

More about PushON UK

PushON offer a personal approach to search engine optimization, search engine marketing and website development solutions.

Many website owners think that the web development project is finished once a website has been created and published, but in reality, the real work is just beginning. In order to create a moneymaking site, traffic must be generated and driven to the website. There are several effective methods that can be implemented to create web traffic, maintain traffic and finally, grow traffic to your website with long-term, lasting results.

SEO & SEM solutions play a vital role in getting higher search engine placement. In short, to get traffic to your website, you need to apply SEO techniques to make your site search-engine-friendly and to grow and sustain traffic to your site we need to submit your site to Search Engines, directories, portals, etc. and also embark on link building campaigns. Another solution is to start a Pay Per Click (PPC) Campaign, which involves targeting potential customers by purchasing relevant keyword ads on search engines such as Google, Yahoo and AltaVista.

To do all of this, PushON focus mainly on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) solutions and will optimise your site for any period of time that suit your needs and budget. Using a comprehensive range of SEO techniques, there aim is to take your site higher in the Search Engine result pages.

2006-08-28T17:37:00.000+01:00

Driving traffic to your site

One of the certainties about having your own Internet business is that if no one knows that your site is there, you can be sure that no matter how good your site is, no one will be able to find it. So it is very important to think about how you might promote your new online business and drive traffic to your site. The best type of traffic to your site is the type of users who are interested in what you have to say or are selling.

There are a few ways to go about this, it largely depends on your budget and expectations. Since the majority of Internet users claim to use a search engine to find sites of interest, it would make sense to start there. Search engines offer you two solutions for you to be seen by your potential customers, one is the organic search engine and the other is the paid for listings.

The organic searches are the results provided to you after you perform a keyword search, as long as your sight is indexed by a search engine you have a chance to rank for certain keywords. Of course, depending on how competitive your main keywords are depends largely on where you will be found in the search engine. You should take the time to understand how to optimise your web site for both on page and off page functions, I recommend that you have a look at the Google guidelines for webmasters. Surprisingly, many web site owners have never read this very good document on how to rank well for Google. A well-optimised site has a much greater chance of ranking high in the search engines.

Many of you will know from your own web surfing experiences and habits that it is rare for someone to go beyond the top three results offered by a search engine, not less pages two, three and beyond. This means that if your site is not ranked well, you may be missing out on crucial targeted traffic, so you may want to consider a pay per click program which are offered by the main search engine vendors. Also companies such as PushON provide services which cover SEO and SEM at competitive prices.

Pay per click is exactly what is says, you bid an amount per click to have your site highlighted to the right of keyword searches. This is a great way to highlight your site and drive immediate qualified traffic, the great thing is that you only pay when a user clicks through to your site. So make sure that your site has quality content and a way for you to encourage your users to submit their details. Once you have a collection of your users data, it is much easier and cheaper to market to them directly.

2006-08-21T19:42:00.000+01:00

The Power of Article Writing

Every site on the Internet needs fresh, original content for their website. Writing articles for others to place on their website (as well as placing the articles on your own website) can not only increase your reputation with the larger search engines and directories, but if you simply add a link to the bottom of your article next to your name, you can get high quality traffic from hundreds of different sites with each article. Sites such as goarticles.com will publish your article on their site and make it available for others to copy to theirs for free. You will not only get the initial link from the article site, but also you get a link from each browser that adds it to their site.
The key to this is to write high quality articles with a specific topic in mind. For example if your site deals with SEM or SEO, write search engine marketing or optimization reviews, things to look for in SEO companies, which SEO companies are the most reputable, or other topics that relate directly to your area of the marketplace.

Well written and well thought out articles will get linked on a good amount of sites, and people will actually visit your website to read other articles by you.

Dialup vs Broadband heres my say...

2006-08-18T22:11:00.000+01:00

I was speaking to my colleague Jamie Clouting just the other day and we were debating whether Dial-up Internet had died a horrible death? I thought i would have my say here on my blog.

In this ongoing debate of dialup vs broadband I believe there isn't really a definitive correct answer. This question can only be answered by looking at your needs and resources and comparing them to what each option has to offer.
If you use the Internet to check email, stock quotes, and visit the occasional website, dialup will be sufficient. You can suppliment your connection with accelerator software such as Onspeed which can cause some improvement in page loading times.

We both agreed if you frequently download large media files, play games over the Internet, and view sites that are high in image content then you may be more satisfied with broadband service.

2006-08-15T04:34:00.000+01:00

Unethical SEO?

This post briefly discusses some of the most common forms of unethical search engine optimization.

Unethical search engine optimization techniques can be unlawful, however you would be surprised how many people use these methods. A lot of what is now called unethical SEO used to be accepted, until people went overboard and it started to have a negative affect on the web as a whole.

The most common form of this is keyword stuffing and is when your site consists of long lists of keywords and nothing else. There are ways to put keywords and phrases on your site without running the risk of getting banned.

You may have seen 'invisible text' if you've been selecting the text on a page and found words that are the same color as the background. This text is often lists of keywords put there in the hope of fooling search engine spiders while hiding the words from visitors. This is considered unethical, and should be avoided.

A doorway page is a page that isn't designed for real people to see - it's purely for the search engines and spiders, in an attempt to trick them into indexing the website in a higher position.

Even though unethical SEO is tempting, and does work, it should not be practiced as it is annoying to users, but more importantly can get you banned from search engines. Your sites' search engine rankings just aren't worth the risk. Use efficient SEO techniques to get your site ranked higher, and stay away from anything that even looks like unethical SEO.

2006-08-15T03:10:00.000+01:00

Google ranking exposed

In this first post relating to google ranking techniques i would like to explain the term 'click through rate' and the importance of this to your site.

The click through rate (CTR) of your site may play an important roll in adding up good points on your Google Search Engine score card. The CTR is the rate that people click “through” to your site. Referrer statistics are the numbers and methods visitors use to visit your site. This information tells the site administrator, and Google, from where did you arrive from to land on this site. Did you click through from a search engine (which one), directly, from another site (which site), or, as revealed in the patent, from the cache, temporary files, bookmarks, or favorites of your Internet browser.

The click through rate is also based on the CTR of the advertising on your site. The more ads which are clicked, the higher your score.

The CTR is also monitored for fresh or old content - in other words, are they visiting new content on your site or old posts or articles? Trends and seasons are also taken into account as certain subject matter gains precedence with the time of the year.

In some of my future posts i shall be explaining some of the other factors google takes into consideration when ranking your site.

2006-08-09T21:53:00.000+01:00

How not to optimize your title

Following on from my last post i thought i would provide a brief mention of the 'title tag' mistakes that should be avoided.

Do not leave your title tag blank, under any condition.
Do not write title tags that are unrelated to the content on the page.
Do not use 'Untitled' or default text in your title tag. Some web page editing applications may place some default text in the title tag. Make sure you check your title to ensure this does not happen.
Search engines compare text in the title tag against actual textual content on your page to rate relevancy, if the two are not related this will decrease your ranking. Also it is annoying for a person who visits your page when the title tag they saw going into your page is unrelated to the content on the page. This may result in a visitor never coming back to your site in the future.
Do not stuff your title tag with repeating keyword phrases.
This may be looked upon as spamming by most search engines and they may penalise your ranking.

This is one of the first things i learnt whilst working at PushON and have benefitted from the knowledge gained.

2006-08-09T20:53:00.000+01:00

Title it Right

Nothing could be simpler than the title you give to your web pages right?

Unfortunately, the vast majority of websites that you visit these days have really poor titles that hurt their online business. The title of your website is a very important part of getting good rankings on most of the major search engines. A good title also goes a long way towards getting your prospects to click on your listings.

If you go to Google and type in a search phrase, you get back a listing of web sites that match the keywords you entered in. If you look closely, you'll notice that each search listing hyperlink is also the title of that website. The title you choose needs to describe to your prospects what your website is all about. It needs to be able to entice your prospects to click on your listing over any other listing. If your title is simply your company name, you are most likely loosing lots of traffic. You will also find it difficult to rank highly on relevant keywords to your site.

2006-08-03T19:36:00.000+01:00

To link or not to link that is the question

Following on from my last post here is a brief guide on how and where you should be looking to link.

To begin with I would definitely advise choosing sites relevant to the subject of your site, you maintain the interest level of your visitors in the topic they have just been exploring with you.

With hundreds of thousands of sites out there, there is just no need to exchange links with everyone. “Focus is the key to attracting traffic; after all, how many people will click on a link to a genealogy site when reading about sheep shearing?”

If you are running a commercial site, you may not want to link to a competing site. For instance, if you are selling Dental Treatment you may not want to send your visitors to other Dental treatment sites.

It may also be healthy to offer links to competitors. Offline, people rarely make significant purchases before browsing a few alternatives. So by providing choice, you are indirectly stimulating people to buy more. And since your link is also on your competitor's site (these are reciprocal links, remember!) your own sales may see a boost from visitors coming from the competing site.

The best balance may lie in combining the two: provide links to similar sites, and provide links to related sites. That way, you maximise your exposure.

2006-08-03T19:31:00.000+01:00

What is reciprocal linking?

I thought I would answer this question, as it seems to be one of the techniques used by most companies to optimise their page rank.

Before beginning to answer such a question, it is important to define what a reciprocal link is, and perhaps more importantly, what it is not.

A reciprocal link is a text and/or banner link to a site that, somewhere in its pages, carries a similar text/banner link to your own site.

A reciprocal link is a commitment. This link basically says "The site at the other end of this link feels that my site is important enough to link to, and I feel that their site is important enough that I am willing to let visitors leave my site via this link."

A reciprocal link involves an element of trust. Few Webmasters have the time or patience to constantly monitor the sites that link back to them, so you are trusting the other site to maintain the link on their site, and not bury it under other information or delete it during a site upgrade.

A reciprocal link is not the quickest way to bring more traffic. I have seen sites with over 100 banner and text links on a single page -- now how much traffic do you think the sites featured on that page were getting from those links? I visited some of the linked sites, and most offered the same scenario: a collection of unorganised links and graphics, many of them broken or out of date, none benefiting the relevant sites.

Next time ill have a look at which sites you should submit to and ones to avoid.

2006-08-01T21:43:00.000+01:00

Whats it all about….

I found that in order to fully understand Online marketing and all the areas this covers there are some terms that come to mind. This is my personal list of common terms and meanings, hope you find them useful.

ALT TEXT - HTML attribute that provides alternative text for images. Search Engine spiders or robots can read ALT text but not the images.

DEEP LINKING - linking to a web page other than a site's index or main page.

DESCRIPTION TAG - A HTML tag used on the web page to provide a description for search engine listings.

DOORWAY PAGE - A page made specifically to rank well in search engines for particular keywords, serving as an entry point through which visitors pass to the main content. Usually dynamic pages are provided with a doorway page.

FFA - Free-for-all links list

INBOUND LINK - A link from a site outside of your site.

KEYWORD - A word used in a search engine to perform a search. It's necessary for the site content to be keyword heavy.

KEYWORD DENSITY - Keywords as a percentage of text words that can be indexed.

KEYWORDS TAG - META tag used to define the primary keywords of a Web page.

LINK POPULARITY - A measure of the quantity and quality of sites that link to your site.

MANUAL SUBMISSION - Adding a URL to the search engines individually by hand and not automatically.

META TAG GENERATOR - Tool that will output META tags based on input page information.

META TAGS - Tags to describe various aspects about a Web page.

OUTBOUND LINK - A link to a site outside of your site.

PAY PER CLICK SEARCH ENGINE - Search engine where results are ranked according to the bid amount, and advertisers are charged when a searcher clicks on the search listing.

RECIPROCAL LINKS - Links between two sites, often based on an agreement by the site owners to exchange links.

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION - The process of choosing targeted keyword phrases related to a site, and ensuring that the site places well when those keyword phrases are part of a Web search.

SEARCH ENGINE SPAM - Excessive manipulation to influence search engine rankings.

SEARCH ENGINE SUBMISSION - The act of supplying a URL to a search engine in an attempt to make a search engine aware of a site or page.

SERP – Search engine result page.

2006-08-01T21:16:00.000+01:00

Search Engine Optimization…the new Mantra!

The world of business is witnessing change every other day. The days of just simple competition are long gone, these days it is all cutthroat and the weaker is left way behind. Online marketing is no exception and so are the rules of Search Engine Optimization. In my early months of just researching this area I have found to just position your site in the right segment and attract potential customers is a tough task. It requires analysis of the existing scenario, setting milestones and complete planning to achieve results.

Im currently working in Manchester with a company called PushON who provide great SEO services and have learned a lot in a short time.

Me and my colleague Jamie Clouting are the newest recruits and have found our work to be very rewarding.

In my future posts I shall be aiming to help share my knowledge and discuss issues relating to search engine optimization and Online marketing.