How To Protect Your Search Engine Rankings
Your website’s ranking in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) is a vital element of your overall marketing campaign, and there are ways to improve your link popularity through legitimate methods. Unfortunately, the Internet is populated by bands of dishonest webmasters seeking to improve their link popularity by fooling search engines.
The good news is that search engines have figured this out, and are now on guard for “spam” pages and sites that have increased their rankings by synthetic strategies. When a search engines tracks down such a site, that site is demoted in ranking or fully removed from the search engine’s index.
The bad news is that some top quality, absolutely above-board sites are being mistaken for these Internet page bad guys. Your page may be in peril of being mixed up in the “spam” net and tossed from a search engine’s index, although you have done nothing to merit such harsh treatment. But there are things you can do – and things you should be sure NOT to do – which will stop this type of misconception. Link recognition is typically based totally on the standard of sites you are linked to.
Google pioneered the standards for allotting site ranking, and nearly all search engines on the web now use it. Google often imposes penalties on sites that have linked to other sites only for the point of artificially boosting their link recognition.
But you should check, and double-check, all of the links that are active on your links page to ensure you haven’t linked to a bad neighborhood.
The very first thing to test out is if the pages you have linked to have once been penalized. You can then see that most pages are given a “PageRank” which is represented by a sliding green scale on the Google toolbar. This is particularly critical when the scale is totally gray. It is likely that these pages have been penalized.
If you are linked to these pages, you can catch their penalty, and like the influenza, it could be troublesome to get over the infection. There’s no have to be fearful of linking to sites whose scale shows only a little sliver of green on their scale. However, do ensure that you closely watch these sort of links to discern that at some point they don’t sustain a penalty when you have linked up to them from your links page.
You can’t see these words with the human eye – but the eye of search engine spider can spot them simply. A spider is the program search engines use to index Internet pages, and when it sees these invisible words, it is going back and boosts that page’s link ranking. As quickly as a search engine understand the employment of hidden text – splat. The disadvantage of this is that infrequently the spider is a bit overzealous and will penalize a page by mistake.
As an example, if the background color of your page is gray, and you have placed gray text within a black box, the spider will only pay attention to the gray text and think you are employing hidden text. A search engine uses what’s called “Keyphrase Density” to figure out if a site is attempting to artificially boost their ranking. The final potential risk factor is perceived as “cloaking.”
Cloaking is when the server directs a visitor to one page and a search engine spider to a different page.
A cloaked page attempts to feed the spider everything it must rocket that page’s ranking to the top of the list. It is normal that search engines have answered to this act of deception with extraordinary enmity, imposing steep penalties on these sites.
The difficulty on your end is that often pages are cloaked for bonafide reasons, for example prevention against the burglary of code, regularly called “page jacking.” this type of shielding is pointless these days because of the use of “off page” elements, for example link recognition, that can’t be thieved. Just as you have to be diligent in inflating your link recognition and your ranking, you have to be similarly diligent to prevent being unfairly punished. So be certain to watch your site closely and duck any appearance of artificially boosting your rankings.
This article was written by Dallas’ TexasSEO.com – Texas SEO is a Dallas-based web marketing and consulting company. We can help you improve your on-site and off-site optimization so that your website not only looks good to visitors but rank well for the keywords you need. Let us increase your business by first requesting a free analysis.
Okay, Erik Bledsoe of Surf Your Name Paid Up
Well, Erik Bledsoe of SurfYourName or Surf Your Name sent me an email on the 23rd with an email with the subject “LOL” and a message saying “You are so funny.” I responded and told him about this particular blog entry… and then realized how well ranked it is after just 6 hours.
Here’s his response: Read more
Erik Bledsoe At SurfYourName.com, I Hope You Read This
Erik Bledsoe of SurfYourName.com, this is a review of how you’ve been running your business. Not sure if this is even libel or not, but it’s the truth. I mean, what do you call it when you’re asked to work on something by someone and after you’ve done it, they don’t pay you?
Since getting out from the Navy, I’ve been doing quite a bit of freelancing both for income and for fun. On December 7th, I started talking to a guy named Erik Bledsoe of SurfYourName or SurfYourName.com. He seemed to be a pretty decent guy. He basically has a lot of clients to work with and I’d just be on the sidelines to take over some busy work. You know, a simple 5-7 pages that I can do in about an hour to 4 hours and be paid $75-$150. Read more
Create Search Engine Friendly Pages
A search engine friendly page is actually a user-friendly page. By designing a search engine friendly site, you will be able to rank better in search engines and obtain more targeted visitors. There are a lot of key elements in doing just that, but we will touch base on some of the basics.
First and foremost, embrace the use of <h1>, <h2>, <h3> tags and so on.
If you know a bit of HTML already, you should also know about the importance of a precise title, description and list of keywords that your corresponding page should have.
I.E. If your web PAGE is about computer monitors. Your title should have the words “computer monitors”, your description should have the words “computer monitors” and your meta keyword should also have “computer monitors”. Pretty simple, right?
I’m sure you also use images on your web pages. Be sure to utilize the “alt” and “title” tags.
Here’s an example:
<img src=”URL_To_File” alt=”Descriptive text about image” title “SAME descriptive text about image” border=”0″ />
Of course, if you’re using CSS, you wouldn’t have to enter border=”0″ every time. With CSS you can command it to apply the zero border automatically on every image. The purpose of this is so that no borders actually show up when you turn them into a clickable image to open up another page or website.
What else do you need to do to have a search engine friendly page?
One huge thing is to use the keywords you’re targeting in the actual content itself. If your title, description and meta keyword has “computer monitors”, you’d better make sure that the content of that page also includes “computer monitors.”
There’s no real magic number of how many times you’ll mention it, but don’t go overboard. Doing so may result in search engines thinking that you’re trying to spam them. What we do for our clients is to mention the keyword every other paragraph or 2 paragraphs.
Of course, this isn’t always the case. It just depends on what is needed to be said. Just be sure to flow naturally. Remember, the most important thing you can do is reach out to the reader, not the search engine. As long as the visitors are happy, you’ll benefit more in the long run.
This article was written by Dallas’ TexasSEO.com – Texas SEO is a Dallas-based web marketing and consulting company. We can help you improve your on-site and off-site optimization so that your website not only looks good to visitors but rank well for the keywords you need. Let us increase your business by first giving you a free analysis.
How To Increase Your Link Popularity
Search engines are the gateway to the Internet ; they are the first tool that people use to find the products and services they need. This is the reason why link popularity is so imperative.
There are a couple of things you should be aware of.
The first is that just linking up with a big number of other Internet sites will not achieve link popularity.
In reality, it might have quite the reverse effect. This is very true when applying to web sites that are nothing less than “link farms” – pages containing line after line of indiscriminate links. The next thing to be aware of is the standard of the site you are linking to. Linking to sites of poor quality will only reduce your link recognition, if not fully destroy it. So let’s get to what you want to do to gain ultimate link recognition and enhance your rankings to stellar standing on all of the preferred search engines.
The first step, and the quickest way to get your foot in the doorway, is to get a listing in a favored directory, like Open Directory Project and Yahoo. If your Internet site is business-related, you may need to be mentioned on Yahoo, and regardless of the fact that it’ll cost around $300 a year, it’ll be cash spent well. If your site is non-commercial, the listing will be free, but it’ll take time and follow-up to essentially get it listed.
Open Directory gives you a free listing if you are business-related or non-commercial, but be ready to make a large amount of follow-up investigations before you see your website listed. You are trying to get listed in the top level of acceptable category, and this just takes some commonsense. All you need to do is look a little deeper – and submit your listing to the “Fine Alpaca Wool” category. You won’t only associate yourself with culture and quality, but you’ll be listed in a state category. The following step after you have reached directory listings is to find other quality sites that may raise your link recognition.
Attempt to find sites that are in some form related to yours, so not only will your link recognition increase, but your purchaser base may also be expanded. You need to dodge your competition and look for sites that are useful to your internet site’s visitors.
Let us take a look at the Alpaca Wool site example. Linking up to a site that sells knitting supplies would be useful to your visitors, and the probabilities of the knitting supply site desiring to link up to your website are also larger.
Google is a good beginning place for your search.
Don’t forget, your factors are quality, highly ranked, non-competing internet sites having a links or resources page.
Study the quality of the product, the graphics, and the simplicity of use. Then take a look at the other sites they are linked to, and identify if your own site would fit in with the bunch. When you decide you have found a good prospect, you need to set out to woo them. The very first thing to do is to add a link on your own links page to their site. This is a necessary primary step ; it shows good religion, and ups your possibilities seriously of their reciprocity. A hook like this nearly always insures the reader will read on.
Next, be certain to be flattering and tell them how much you appreciate their web site. Ensure you stress that you have essentially visited their site, and that their site isn’t just a random pick. Give them the address of your links page, and ask them to try the link for themselves.
Momentarily , say why link recognition is so necessary, but do this in a sentence or 2 so you don’t sound like a professor.
Go through this process with as many acceptable sites as you’ll find, bearing in mind the criteria of quality and non-competitiveness. Then give it another month, and if your website is still absent from their links page, it’s time to remove their link from your own links page. The single time you wish to pursue a link further than this is if you think a site is vital to your link recognition and your business desires. Then set up a schedule to test your ranking in search engines often to work out if your link recognition has improved. This is not achievable in the blinking of an eye. It’ll take some time and a fair deal of work.
There’s no way round the labor-intensive quality of improving your link popularity, which is the reason why search engines regard it with such significance. In reality – ensure you have a gorgeous, streamlined site or you may never convince anybody to link up to you. Be ready to keep plugging away at this process, so long as it takes, till you achieve link popularity and super stardom.
This article was written by Dallas’ TexasSEO.com – Texas SEO is a Dallas-based web marketing and consulting company. We can help you improve your on-site and off-site optimization so that your website not only looks good to visitors but rank well for the keywords you need. Let us increase your business by first giving you a free analysis.
Perfect Example of Bad Business
I don’t use Twitter much. Yeah, I know, I should since it’s suppose to be a really good source of marketing. Well, that’s not the “bad business part.” I’ll explain more in just a moment.
This problem really can be in any niche and any website. This problem is something I’ve pointed out to people for years and I guess no matter the years and no matter how much they know, they think everyone else doesn’t know.
Drum roll please… Read more
Increasing Your Search Engine Ranking
The strategies employed to enhance your search engine rankings could appear to be rocket science to you, so you have potentially evaded working with this issue. At least 85% of folks looking for products and services on the web find sites thru search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN. The idea of optimizing your pages for high search engine rankings is to draw in focused purchasers to your internet site who will be certain to make a purchase. That is what search engine optimization is about.
You can dunk yourself in all of the technical info available on the net to work out a way to optimize your net pages to reach higher rankings.
Or you can look at a few straightforward items on your pages, make some tiny adjustments, and most likely see improved rankings quite quickly. The 1st item you need to inspect is the title bar on your homepage. The title bar is the coloured bar at the apex of the page. Look at the words that appear there when you access your index page.
Try to have around 250 words on each page, but if this isn’t fascinating due to your design, target for no less than a hundred conscientiously selected words. If you need to realize a high ranking on search engines, this text is necessary. If the text will not highlight, it is maybe in graphic form. I know this sounds like something out of Sci Fi, but it is actually just straightforward code.
Many folks believe that meta tags are the key to high search engine rankings, but in fact, they only have a limited effect. Still, it’s worth adding them in the event a search engine will use meta tags in their ranking formula.
To discover if your page is set up with meta tags, you need to access the code. If there are meta tags, they often appear near the apex of the window. This can not do much for your search engine rankings, but any small boost helps. Lastly, we come to the issue of link recognition. This may be a factor that is very vital re search engine rankings. Link recognition is predicated on the standard of the sites you have linked to from your links page. If you type in “free link recognition check” in a favored search engine, the search engine will then show you what sites are linked to your website.
In the case that there aren’t a lot of sites linked up to yours, or the sites that are linked up have low search engine rankings, consider launching a link recognition campaign. Essentially, this comprises contacting quality sites and demanding that they exchange links with your internet site. Naturally, this needs checking out the rankings of the internet sites you would like to link up with.
Search engine rankings are very crucial for a successful web marketing campaign. Before you start out and hire a search engine optimization company, try taking some of the straightforward steps noted above, and see if you can not turbo-charge your rankings yourself. Don’t ever ignore this crucial factor in online marketing. Don’t forget, the higher your search engine ranking, the more quality shoppers will be directed your way.
This article was written by Dallas’ TexasSEO.com – Texas SEO is a Dallas-based web marketing and consulting company. We can help you improve your on-site and off-site optimization so that your website not only looks good to visitors but rank well for the keywords you need. Let us increase your business by first giving you a free analysis.
Search Engine Keywords Selection
Search engines are the vehicles that drive potential customers to your websites. But in order for visitors to reach their destination – your website – you need to provide them with specific and effective signs that will direct them right to your site. You do this by creating carefully chosen keywords.
Think of the right keywords as the Open Sesame! of the Internet. Find the exactly right words or phrases, and presto! hoards of traffic will be pulling up to your front door. But if your keywords are too general or too over-used, the possibility of visitors actually making it all the way to your site – or of seeing any real profits from the visitors that do arrive – decreases dramatically.
Your keywords serve as the foundation of your marketing strategy. If they are not chosen with great precision, no matter how aggressive your marketing campaign may be, the right people may never get the chance to find out about it. So your first step in plotting your strategy is to gather and evaluate keywords and phrases.
You probably think you already know EXACTLY the right words for your search phrases. Unfortunately, if you haven’t followed certain specific steps, you are probably WRONG. It’s hard to be objective when you are right in the center of your business network, which is the reason that you may not be able to choose the most efficient keywords from the inside. You need to be able to think like your customers. And since you are a business owner and not the consumer, your best bet is to go directly to the source.
Instead of plunging in and scribbling down a list of potential search words and phrases yourself, ask for words from as many potential customers as you can. You will most likely find out that your understanding of your business and your customers’ understanding is significantly different.
The consumer is an invaluable resource. You will find the words you accumulate from them are words and phrases you probably never would have considered from deep inside the trenches of your business.
Only after you have gathered as many words and phrases from outside resources should you add your own keyword to the list. Once you have this list in hand, you are ready for the next step: evaluation.
The aim of evaluation is to narrow down your list to a small number of words and phrases that will direct the highest number of quality visitors to your website. By “quality visitors” I mean those consumers who are most likely to make a purchase rather than just cruise around your site and take off for greener pastures. In evaluating the effectiveness of keywords, bear in mind three elements: popularity, specificity, and motivation.
Popularity is the easiest to evaluate because it is an objective quality. The more popular your keyword is, the more likely the chances are that it will be typed into a search engine which will then bring up your URL.
You can now purchase software that will rate the popularity of keywords and phrases by giving words a number rating based on real search engine activity. Software such as WordTracker will even suggest variations of your words and phrases. The higher the number this software assigns to a given keyword, the more traffic you can logically expect to be directed to your site. The only fallacy with this concept is the more popular the keyword is, the greater the search engine position you will need to obtain. If you are down at the bottom of the search results, the consumer will probably never scroll down to find you.
Popularity isn’t enough to declare a keyword a good choice. You must move on to the next criteria, which is specificity. The more specific your keyword is, the greater the likelihood that the consumer who is ready to purchase your goods or services will find you.
Let’s look at a hypothetical example. Imagine that you have obtained popularity rankings for the keyword “automobile companies.” However, you company specializes in bodywork only. The keyword “automobile body shops” would rank lower on the popularity scale than “automobile companies,” but it would nevertheless serve you much better. Instead of getting a slew of people interested in everything from buying a car to changing their oil filters, you will get only those consumers with trashed front ends or crumpled fenders being directed to your site. In other words, consumers ready to buy your services are the ones who will immediately find you. Not only that, but the greater the specificity of your keyword is, the less competition you will face.
The third factor is consumer motivation. Once again, this requires putting yourself inside the mind of the customer rather than the seller to figure out what motivation prompts a person looking for a service or product to type in a particular word or phrase. Let’s look at another example, such as a consumer who is searching for a job as an IT manager in a new city. If you have to choose between “Seattle job listings” and “Seattle IT recruiters” which do you think will benefit the consumer more? If you were looking for this type of specific job, which keyword would you type in?
The second one, of course! Using the second keyword targets people who have decided on their career, have the necessary experience, and are ready to enlist you as their recruiter, rather than someone just out of school who is casually trying to figure out what to do with his or her life in between beer parties. You want to find people who are ready to act or make a purchase, and this requires subtle tinkering of your keywords until your find the most specific and directly targeted phrases to bring the most motivated traffic to you site.
Once you have chosen your keywords, your work is not done. You must continually evaluate performance across a variety of search engines, bearing in mind that times and trends change, as does popular lingo. You cannot rely on your log traffic analysis alone because it will not tell you how many of your visitors actually made a purchase.
Luckily, some new tools have been invented to help you judge the effectiveness of your keywords in individual search engines. There is now software available that analyzes consumer behavior in relation to consumer traffic. This allows you to discern which keywords are bringing you the most valuable customers.
This is an essential concept: numbers alone do not make a good keyword; profits per visitor do. You need to find keywords that direct consumers to your site who actually buy your product, fill out your forms, or download your product. This is the most important factor in evaluating the efficacy of a keyword or phrase, and should be the sword you wield when discarding and replacing ineffective or inefficient keywords with keywords that bring in better profits.
Ongoing analysis of tested keywords is the formula for search engine success. This may sound like a lot of work – and it is! But the amount of informed effort you put into your keyword campaign is what will ultimately generate your business’ rewards.
This article was written by Dallas’ TexasSEO.com – Texas SEO is a Dallas-based web marketing and consulting company. We can help you improve your on-site and off-site optimization so that your website not only looks good to visitors but rank well for the keywords you need. Let us increase your business by first giving you a free analysis.
The Family Project: FAILED
Several months ago I started a “family project.” It was project where I conducted to see if my siblings could learn Internet marketing and make some money off of the Internet. I’m sure it’s pretty clear by now that the family project was a total failure. It’s just not as easy as I had hoped. You really can’t push them around as much as you would a friend or someone you hardly know.
You can try and motivate them, but all they see is “if you’re doing it, why should I?” If it was a friend or someone I hardly know, the mentality would be “if you’re doing it, I’d better be doing it too!” Read more
How To Get Paid URL Inclusion
Advertising your services or products on the Internet is both extremely effective and extremely competitive. There are several ways to go about attracting traffic to your website; Pay-Per-Click is one of the options you can choose from, along with developing an SEO, or search engine optimization campaign. Both pay-per-click and SEO are targeted to get your website placed as close to the top of search engine results as possible. One of the differences is that it takes minutes to set up a pay-per-click campaign versus months for a good SEO campaign.
Pay-Per-Click is a simple type of paid advertising that most search engines, including some of the largest ones, now offer. It requires a bid for a “per-click” basis, which translates to your company paying the bid amount every time the search engine directs a visitor to your site. There is the added bonus that when a per-click site sends your website traffic, your site often appears in the results of other prevalent search engines.
As with all marketing campaigns, there are advantages and disadvantages. If you understand the process and monitor your pay-per-click campaign frequently, it can be very effective. One of the greatest advantages is that you never have to tweak your web pages to change your position in search engine results, as you must do in a typical SEO campaign. What you do have to do in a pay-per-click campaign is pay a fee.
Another advantage is the simplicity of the pay-per-click process. You just bid and you’re up and running. It doesn’t demand any specific technical knowledge, though the more you know about search engines and keywords, the easier – and more effective – the process will be.
The downside is that pay-per-click is essentially a bidding war. A higher bid than yours will lower your position on search engine results. This means that you will have to raise your bid to regain your position – which can obviously become quite expensive, especially if you are bidding on a popular keyword.
In order to determine if pay-per-click is a cost effective form of marketing for your business, you must do some computing to figure out how much each visitor to your site is worth. You can compute this value by dividing the profit you make on your website over a given period of time by the total number of visitors for that same time period. For example, if your site made $5,000 in profits and there were 2,500 hits, each visitor would be theoretically worth 50 cents. The basic formula is profits divided by visitors.
The figure of 50 cents per visitor is the point at which your business breaks even. The idea, of course, is to show a profit, not to merely cover your costs. Therefore, you are aiming at a figure less than 50 cents per click.
Be aware that the most popular keywords often cost considerably more than 50 cents a click. The only way around this is to bid less for these phrases or you will be paying too much for each individual hit.
The key (pun intended) to success is to learn everything you can about search engine keyword research. The good news is there isn’t a limit to the amount of keywords you can add to your bid because additional keywords do not add additional cost. This translates into a lot less hassle for you because there is no need to optimize your site to index a particular set of keywords.
Obviously, some keywords are much more effective than others are, but they will not cost you anything except time to set-up your account in your pay-per-click bid. Of the popular search engines that offer pay-per-click, one called Overture provides an online tool that will give you the data on how often particular keywords are entered into their search engine. They also offer suggestions for keywords after you enter a description of your site.
In pay-per-click, this written description is crucial. You must understand that the object of your description is not to generally attract visitors, but to be as specific as possible so that only those visitors who are likely to buy your service or product go to your site. You must use expert marketing copy to guarantee that your description is both precise and enticing to attract the most ideal candidates to your site. This description is your most powerful tool to insure that your bid is profitable.
Another essential element of pay-per-click advertising is that you constantly monitor your bid. It is very important that you bear in mind that the results of the top search engines providing pay-per-click advertising, which are Overture and Adwords Select, usually appear on other popular search engines. Because of this, the competition for top ranking is intense, and very often you will find that the bidding price balloons too high for pay-per-click to yield a profit.
If this happens, it is advisable to withdraw your bid on that particular keyword and try another one. Remember: when you pay too much per click to make a profit, you are in essence losing the bidding war.
Since losing is not acceptable, you must have a plan in place to closely track the effectiveness of your keyword. It is advisable to monitor your keywords on at least a monthly basis.
Not only is careful monitoring important, but the analysis of visitor behavior can produce invaluable knowledge about consumer motivation, habits, and trends. Expert monitoring and consumer analysis is essential to your overall business needs, and will also insure that your pay-per-click campaign is a success.
This article was written by Dallas’ TexasSEO.com – Texas SEO is a Dallas-based web marketing and consulting company. We can help you improve your on-site and off-site optimization so that your website not only looks good to visitors but rank well for the keywords you need. Let us increase your business by first giving you a free analysis.
