Do You Know the Secret formula?
Ok, so you’ve gone through the long process of getting your website to the top of Google. Now you sit and wait for the hits to start REALLY REALLY picking up – right? Wrong! Don’t bother thinking that low traffic sites are going to send you a ton of clients. That is a myth used by people who really don’t know anything about SEO. What it means is that even if you rank number one in certain keywords that doesn’t mean you will continue to do well in the SERPS. I have had campaigns where I got a number one position for a keyword and it was the only campaign I had where I actually got a click. Once I realized that it wasn’t me it was the whole SEO world that I had to impress, so I adjusted my efforts in various ways to get number one rankings.
One of the things you need to understand is that it takes time for Google to index your site again. What does this mean? It means that it needs time for the Big G to recognize that it is YOUR website and not Ounce-O good! It is actually better toistentently work on getting backlinks pointed at your site.
What is a backlink? It is a link to your website from another site. Many people play around with formulas and obsess over them. The thing that is played around with is the anchor text. Anchor text is the text that surrounds your link.
Many SEO experts say that there are a certain percentage of keywords that you need to get repeated in anchor texts to rank well. For example if you were trying to rank for cat toys then you would want the anchor text to read “cat toys” or “dog toys”. Then when Google crawls a site and the text around the link on the page is either the same or similar to the keyword, then that would say that the site is relevant to that keyword and would improve your SERPS.
Many SEO Professionals make it their business to devise systems and formulas and claim that they have the secret formulas that can bring you fast results. So how do you know if they are really the secret formula?
Here are some things you can do to check if the SEO Professional is in fact giving you fast results:
-Go to their site; choose a relevant category to look at their sites
-Look at how quickly the site loads
-Look at the title
-Most importantly look at the content of the site
-Look at how relevant the site is to your keywords
-Do not get caught up in the ways they may make you believe, that is why it is important to look at a few things.
There are a few things you can truly expect from a top SEO Professional. In this day and age, you need to really look at what they are offering for what you are paying. You need to go beyond the quick headlines and fast talking and listen to what they have to say.
Take your time to check on their claims and give them a call to talk to about their methods and proven results.
Remember, you are putting your business at risk here so you need to be very careful about who you hire for your business. There are many so-called professionals out there that will put your business at risk for the sake of profit.
They will literally go through the unscrupulous tactics that they know will get you results but the ones they use in their own sites may not be on your radar.
Remember, there are many variables that go into ranking well on Google. You can’t sign a contract and be ranked number one across the country.
You need to be realistic about your business’ goals. If you are in a highly competitive market, it will take longer and cost more to get results that will repay you.
Google Local Listing is a free service from Google that will handle giving you results by giving you results based on your geographical location.
Google also offer a useful Technical alerts service to give you useful information regarding your website such as broken links or 404 errors.
In conclusion, choosing the right SEO Specialist for whatever your ecommerce business is whether you sell hats or do Classic Auto Inspections it is critical to your online success.
Search Engine Optimization – The Basics
I have heard it said that your Page Rank is the most important aspect of your website SEO optimisation that gets you a high listing in the Search Engines. That gives me a problem!
The first problem I have with that is why should Yahoo, MSN and ASK care about Google PageRank. PageRank is correctly written since it is a trademarked term. These search engines do not use Google PageRank as part of their listing criteria, or if they do, they are keeping it close to their chest. Google has published guidelines regarding how PageRank is displayed in the search results, but as of this writing, they have not published a document detailing the criteria for use.
The second problem I have with that is that I know, but cannot prove, that I have had websites listed in the top 10 in the Google listings for competitive keywords without any links other than those received through one channel. The reason my web pages (not websites, since true search engines do not list domains) earned such a high listing is that they were optimized for the keywords that each page was built upon, taking into account the fact that a high listing is the result of the culmination of many SEO techniques used on each page.
Keep in mind that Googlebot, Yahoo Slurp and MSNBot use a large number of different aspects of your web page in determining the position of your page in the index for any particular search term a customer has used. The way to get a high listing is to pay attention to every one of these. If you ignore even one, you will probably not rank as highly in relevance for that search term as web pages like mine that ignore nothing.
Don’t believe them when they tell you that Meta tags don’t count, because they could. It does you no harm to use them, so use them! In fact, use every aspect of SEO that you can, and do not take notice of anybody that tells you not to. I use to listen to others who knew best until I noticed that my web pages were listed higher that theirs for their keywords. I am just a simple article ghost writer, yet I can get my websites listed immediately on Google, and listed higher that many SEO experts who write and publish articles.
I don’t care if your website is listed high or not, or if it is listed within 2 days or 2 months. However, if YOU care, then you should listen to people who have done it for years, instead of blindly following the fads and secrets of the SEO world. What I have discovered is that by writing good clean content, and by implementing SEO techniques that are existent and appropriate, you will not be fooled by the next “out-of-the-box” SEO trick that “gurus” will come up with in order to sell you something. You will find that what is actually the best search engine optimization trick available is actually derived from old and time tested optimization techniques.
In other words, the things that make you rank well on a search engine for a particular keyword is not so different from the things that make you rank well in the search engines. In fact, the things that make you rank well on a search engine are very easy to understand and very easy to implement. Good solid optimization which is sound and applicable technique based on the understanding of the search engines can make your website rank well. This is why it is so important to understand the basics of SEO and implementation of the right SEO techniques.
Below are some basic tips:
1. Good solid content. Not just a site with a Site Map! A site with good solid content is one that will not only please the search engines and your visitors, but will also be pleasing to your visitors. Remember – you have a short time to please the search engines and your visitors. If you satisfy both, you will rank well.
2. Optimize the use of HTML. HTML is a special code that is used to make sure the display of an item is coordinated with its appearance on your site. Simply said – do not skimp on HTML. If you have to pay someone to do this for you – make sure they use functions of HTML to their advantage as search engines cannot read functions of graphics.
3. Avoid dynamic URLs. Dynamic URLs are just URLs with keywords in the file names instead of random numbers. For example – if you have a domain with the words “marketing” in it, do not have your URL as “marketing.com/homepage.html”. With a URL like that your site is more likely to be found on Google.
Keyword Research
There has been a lot of debate on the Internet over the past few years about using a keyword tool for keyword research. Some people say that they spend hours and hours doing keyword research and some say that its not needed. In this article I hope to clear up a lot of doubt and doubt. Keyword research is not a big deal. You can do it in a couple of minutes and in most cases you can get more valuable information from your keywords research than you will from spending hours and hours.
But first we must look at what a keyword is. By typing in a search term into Google you get back a list of web sites that contain that word or subject. That’s your first step in keyword research. scope out those sites and see how they are optimized for the keyword you are looking for. You will soon know what areas of their web site are optimized for what keywords.
Next you have to scale up. Why? If you go to Google and type in a word or phrase and hit enter you get back a whole alternate universe of possibilities. Look through them and see if you can find any real sites that are optimized for the term you are looking for. If you do you now have a second universe to look at and determine if it is usable or not.
Now you have finally got your primary universe. Good Luck figuring out what to do with it. You can create a web site, make a Squidoo lens, write an article theses all be useful to you in the end. You will find that you may be able to create multiple lenses or series of articles that will be useful depending on what it is that you are promoting.
Examine your results. You will discover the strength of your keyword pretty quickly. Look through all of the sites in your universe and see if you can analyze each web site. See what their linking methods are and where they use keywords on their sites. After you have examined all of the sites you will have the information you need to begin your next phase of the SEO campaign.
Keyword Density is not what it was but it was a widely used method. It’s no longer counted in the algorithm. That’s not what it used to be. You will have to get creative with your link building. Now its all about creativity. You must make sure that you are getting quality links instead ofQuantity. Quality links are in the top ten websites for your search term.
Content is still king and no matter what sites you use that are linking to yoursater boxcars will use links to your site. Article marketing and press releases are two great ways to get quality links used in the algorithms.
Getting your links on sites that don’t link back to you may work. I have seen some sites get host base links on sites that do not link back to them. But if you have your link on their site the outgoing links count to your links so you are actually increasing your links. Its possible to get a great deal of links in a short amount of time.
The age of the site that links to you has some bearing on your sites ranking. Older sites carry more weight and have more credibility. You can payoff by having older, high pr links linking to your site as well.
Click through rates and time spent on site are some factors. Click through rates are the amount of times your link was clicked on. Time spent is the amount of time that visitor spends on your site. This can affect how your site ranks as well, if you go on a site for 20 minutes and they click on your link 6 times in that time, they are more likely to click on your link than an equal number of times from a similar site that does not talk about your product. You can use tool like Google toolbar which can examine the click through rates and time spent from each web site.
I hope this info is a good way to get you started! In the next article we will talk about some of the advanced tools you will need to use to run a successful search engine optimization campaign!