SEO: A Process NOT a Project | SEJ

Posted on 23 February 2009 by Jeremy Hermanns

By: Steve Plunkett

Steve wrote a fantastic article about the cumulative and ongoing process that SEO is!!! Check it out below (then go to Search Engine Journal and read it all!):

Organic search engine optimization (SEO) is not a one time project, it’s a process. Similar to a garden, you must tend to it. Sometimes you have an existing garden where the weeds have grown over or nothing is growing. Sometimes you just have a section of yard you are going to rope off, till, then plant stuff in. Like a garden, organic SEO takes time and attention. It may be as simple as setting a timer to water or as complex as starting from scratch. Organic SEO is like a garden – if you don’t water it, it dies.

Soil Considerations

What is the history of the things that have been done to your website for SEO purposes?

Do you have pages chock full of links to websites unrelated to your company, where some of the website no longer exist or even some link to an “adult” website? Did someone hide a bunch of keywords the same color as your background at the bottom of the page? Maybe the site you are going to work on has commented out a bunch of keywords in the HTML code? (I know this is 2009, but some company, somewhere, has this on its Web site, right now.)

Sunlight, Rainfall and Other Factors

Traffic Analysis – Are there metrics on the company’s website? What kind of information can you gather from the statistics on what is going on with keywords, referrers, exit pages, entry pages, bounce rate, etc.? What metrics program does your company use?

We always ask our clients to install the website analytics program we use -

Hitslink – simply because it provides the measurements we need for our clients and also allows for consistent report formats for all clients.

What Plants shall we put in our garden?

Keyword Research – Gather the keywords out of the client’s current website metrics and obtain client input on what they think someone might type to search for them.

We usually use a method that I have used for many, many years. We ask the CEO, (get’s them involved at the top), the receptionist, the sales managers, the marketing director, the CFO and the COO (these two help get things done and also make sure you get paid) to provide five to 10 keywords each and not to share them with each other. This becomes statistically significant when you have different people come up with a keyword phrase more than once. Take these and put them into spreadsheets so we know what department wants what traffic and also to refer to later.

This is the primary keyword stage. You can also correlate what keyword terms got the most traffic and the lowest bounce rate to their Web site compared to what the client expects. Now obviously, you must factor in the fact that if the content doesn’t exist on their Web site right now, they won’t be found for it.

What kind of pesticides would be best to use to combat bugs?

Read the Entire Post: SEO – a Process NOT a Project at Search Engine Journal Now!

Is SEO Possible Without Inbound Links?

Posted on 30 January 2008 by Jeremy Hermanns

Hello SEO Experts,

I know most of the SEO techniques, but one important factor as we all know is pagerank, and to have a higher pagerank we should get inBound links to our site.
My question is, can we make our site appear in top Search Engine Results, without having any inBound links? even for challenging keywords?

Everything related to SEO seems very logical to me, but the most important thing is to have inBound links to your site. It’s really time consuming, to send emails to web masters and ask them for a link. I know a good website will result people to link to us without we ask for, but what if my site is a personal site for example, and it is a normal site, I don’t think people will link to me just like that in my case ! Does that mean I will never be in first page? (Note that I am now in page 10, but I’d like to be in page 1, for a challenging keyword).

By the way, I have submitted my site to some free directories, but I am not sure if this will help my pagerank (currently I am 0/10 and i published my website 4 months ago)

Please advice and let me know how should I go on from now, because concerning the content of my site, I assume it is * VERY WELL * optimized for Search Engines, the only thing remaining is the PageRank issue.

Best regards,
Wassim

Forum discussion continues at HighRankings Forum.
Is SEO Possible Without Inbound Links?

Manage the Articles for SEO in Professional way

Posted on 14 December 2007 by Neha

One of the best way to enhance your website’s such engine optimisation is writing high quality targeted, updated and relevant articles. Your website should provide complete information on all of the related topics or keywords. A volume of 300 – 400 articles on your site significantly improves your SEO but if your website comes across tough competition of ranking, then you will have to adapt some SEO techniques to manage the content of articles. Following are some suggestion that will help you to manage the content of your articles in a professional way.

Each and every article on your website is important. The title of the web page tells about the content of your articles. Hence you should select the title of your web page with utmost care. The title of your web page should be easy and meaningful. It should clearly define the motto of your articles. It is better if you use main keywords in your web page title. Your web page title contributes a lot in determining the ranking of page.

On search engine results, your web page title appears as hyperlink. People click on your page link if it seems interesting to them. These clicks determine the rank of your web page. Search engine crawlers find it easy to surf different pages through the interlinks provided in your articles. By this measure, they can still go to the missed pages. Use attractive phrases consisting keywords for the text of hyperlinks.

Always try to create search engine friendly URLs containing main keywords because such URLs are preferable over dynamically generated or oblique-sounding URLs. You should place your resource box at the end of the articles because this will help to attract web traffic to, your personal website.

It is also a good practice to organise your article content under main headings and subheadings containing keywords. Headings and subheadings of your article make the readers more interested in your article because they find the relevant information easily. By going through the headings and subheadings, readers can decide whether they should go through the entire article or not. Search engine crawlers too judge your page ranking through the headings and subheadings of the articles. It is better to use a main heading or subheading after one or two paragraphs.

To make your articles more attractive, prefer to use bullets to highlight your thoughts. This practice facilitates readers to go through the key features of your articles in one go.

Keywords Can Make or Break Your Websites’ SEO

Posted on 19 November 2007 by Neha

Some of the best web sites with extensive information and product listings do not even break the top 100 on search engine results pages due to the way the data is structured on the site. The titles and headers of the page may give little clue to the amount of information contained in the page, or its type and quality. There may be no description listed in the meta tags, and no keywords in the code. Important keywords that would lead interested users to the page are not present in the titles, or only found buried in the text deep into the many paragraphs on the page. Keywords can make or break your web site because they are what users actually type into the search engines to sift data. If your specialized keywords, main keywords, and synonym keywords are all present on every page, then there is much more of a chance that that page will be found by a user. Black Hat techniques have long used this trick to bury long lists of keywords in microscopic text sizes that match the color of the page background and are only read by browsers in search engines. White Hat techniques seek to redesign a web site based on SEO by doing keyword analysis, and subtly refining a site to optimally reflect user keyword queries.

The importance of keywords is further reflected in the prevalence and popularity of “cloud tags”. Cloud tags contain list of keywords arranged into small text boxes that reflect the type of information present on the site. Cloud tags may be static or evolving based upon user patterns, search queries, link choices, or other variables. Some have suggested that cloud tags are a re-branding of the most effective Black Hat SEO techniques with good design practices and user community base. Other ways that keywords can make or break a site relate to keyword density. Some sites such as Google will now also evaluate the keyword density of web pages as part of their analytic services or search ranking algorithms. Cloud tags have the effect of increasing keyword density throughout a site, making them popular with web masters, while users enjoy the expressive nature of the cloud tags and using keywords to attract members with similar interests to their home pages and blogs. Keywords in meta tags, titles, text, and cloud tags will ensure that search engines rank your sites pages in the right categories for users.

An Important Consideration Of PPC: Keywords Density

Posted on 16 November 2007 by Neha

Keyword Density is another factor that has begun to be used by search engines to sort and analyze data on the internet. How Keyword Density applies to Pay Per Click advertising is related not to the way the keywords are distributed on the page itself, but how often and in what combinations the keywords are used with search terms by users when looking for information on the web. Some keywords are very popular, but these same keywords are used with other words in innumerable variations by users to query an engine. Since PPC advertising involves bidding for keywords, the main and most popular keywords have very high rates. If you are looking for the most click-through per dollar in the advertising campaign, then you will need to seek out less popular PPC keywords to bid on. A good idea for this is phrases that include your main keyword, but are more specialized. You can use Google Keywords analytics or a similar 3rd party device to analyze user queries over time and determine keywords that you would like to relate your PPC ads to through the network.

A new and popular method to boost keyword density is “tag clouds”. These clusters of keywords are inserted into the web page as a design element, but are directly related to SEO practices. Other SEO campaigns involve a review of a site, and a re-writing of its text and titles to include more keywords. Web site owners may be surprised when creating a list of applicable keywords for the web site at hand and then finding that less than 50% of those keywords are present on any page. Often times it is assumed that the search engines will find the pages and link them with keywords, even if the keywords themselves are not present in the page text or meta tags. But this is incorrect. The search engine spiders actually need to record the keywords as actually present on each page to be effective. Keyword density is related to the amount of other text on a page. If the text is short and contains many versions of the keyword, related keyword phrases, and synonym keywords, it will rank higher in the search engine results pages as the algorithms may reward this. But keyword density needs to be balanced with other SEO techniques as well to be truly effective, and as such represents one aspect of a successful SEO campaign.

SEO: Does Your Website Require It?

Posted on 15 November 2007 by Neha

You can do a search with some basic keywords important to your web site or domain, and review the results at different search engines to see where your site returns. The page rank of your site will vary page to page, keyword to keyword, and you can draw the basic conclusions as to what needs to be done for SEO marketing. The top 10 sites on the search engine return pages may or may not have been using SEO techniques, but SEO techniques will certainly assist your website to rank higher if done properly and in accordance with White Hat methods. Only the Black Hat techniques such as cloaking or hiding keywords that do not apply to the site or page will really be likely to cause any penalty to your page ranks. Thus, even a little SEO work for a site can be important to building momentum and can also be a foundation for more promotion work.

Google, Yahoo, & Microsoft as well as many other smaller search engines and directory sites have PPC advertising campaign options for users. Combining PPC advertising and SEO work is the best way to generate more traffic to a web site quickly. Web masters should also include a program that submits an XML sitemap to the main search engines whenever content is updated. A site map including text links to every page on your site is not only hopeful for navigation, but also allows spiders to index all pages in a site easily from one page. These methods should increase SEO using only White Hat techniques.

You can list the basic keywords important to your web site or domain, and rewrite the titles and text for keyword density. The page rank of your site will improve if all the keywords are listed or in the domain and titles. You may also look to add tag clouds for keyword density and link calculation. There are some interesting keyword cloud applets, widgets, and plug ins that are easy to add an increase keyword density. SEO work for a site can be a way to build a better business through keyword density. Analyzing your web site to see if it includes these basic SEO techniques is a way to get started in planning a campaign. If the extent of it is too time consuming, then you can consider professional SEO or outsourcing through a group of freelancers for it.

Can PPC help SEO?

Posted on 13 November 2007 by Neha

PPC or Pay Per Click advertising can help Search Engine Optimization for a site if the two are undertake in accordance with appropriate keyword research and marketing. PPC advertising on some engines is done in a manner that your site will automatically appear first in the search results pages if you bid high enough for the keyword. It may be clear or unclear to what degree users distinguish it as a sponsored link. On these search engines, PPC is the only way to the top of the list in the rankings. However, other PPC ads may or may not be read and cached and taken as links by search engine spiders. If they appear on other web sites as content, then PPC ads can also assist SEO. If they only appear for a temporary time in iframes on a web site, widgets, or other plug-ins, then PPC ads may not be permanent enough to count for SEO. Search Engine Campaigns depend on permanent links, or at least links that last for years, rather than days to build page rank. But PPC may bring more traffic in one day than a site would receive otherwise in one year. This may take months for a similar effect through SEO practices and promotions.

Pay Per Click can also help SEO in keyword analysis. The PPC ads that are effective can be used ads as keywords in your site’s meta tags and titles. The effectiveness for PPC ads and keywords should be indicative of traffic patterns from search engines to your web site as well. The SEO techniques may vary, but the keyword analysis will be applicable for PPC as well as SEO. Search Engine Optimization campaigns may last longer than PPC campaigns, but the results will be interrelated to the same goals. For example, SEO campaigns and PPC will both increase traffic, PPC in the short term, and SEO over time. The results pages of search engines may also be shifting, with page rank determined by daily factors. Blog links can be used to route PPC traffic to a web site and also remain to benefit SEO purposes. The blog itself may also become a high PR site. Some campaigns will focus on PPC exclusively, and relate to affiliate SEO practices of larger web sites. Many more possibilities exist through SEO techniques than PPC however when it comes to templates, longer articles, descriptions, and so forth.

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