When it comes to running an SEO campaign, having good data is key. A successful SEO campaign will deliver traffic from a wide range of keywords, including terms and phrases you didn’t expect. With an analytics account, you are able to more accurately gauge implementation strategies and will gain a better understanding of how the target audience searches and browses a site for desired information.
What is web analytics and why do I need it? Simply put, web analytics is the analysis of your visitors, the who, what, when and where of each visitor to your site. What pages visitors landed on, how long they looked at a page, and where they left your site. Being able to understand your site’s top entry pages will help strengthen your SEO efforts and will better your chances at conversion.
One of the best analytics tools out there is Googles’ Analytics tracking software which Google offers free of charge to all its users. You can check it out here: www.google.com/analytics/ . Make sure to ask your SEOP representative to see if we have not already created an account for you as in most cases we have.
Popularity: 81% [?]
admin @ April 14, 2008
Grow your business Comments (0)
As a business owner, you are always looking to attract more business. Projections for 2008 indicate that small to medium-sized businesses are continuing to drive the growth in local online advertising. To ensure that you get listed in Google and attract your “geo targeted” areas, you need to add your business to the Google Local Business Center. Once you have added your business, make sure your business is listed under the appropriate geographic location category and that your business name, address and phone number appear on your website so that all of your information is accessible to search engines.
The best way to ensure that your website comes up in a local search is to optimize your site for terms that include the city name and the business name. In addition to this, clearly listing your business hours, local phone number, driving directions via Google Maps, product images, coupons, promotions, and any additional information to help searchers determine whether your business meets their needs, all can greatly improve your chances for converting a sale or lead.
Check out the Google local business center for more information and make sure to ask your SEOP representative if you are interested in finding out more.
Popularity: 82% [?]
admin @ April 14, 2008
Now you can look at the universe in a whole new way! Google has launched its latest project: Google Sky. With this new tool, you can explore the universe right from your computer. Similar to Google Earth, all you have to do is enter a name or coordinates and Google will display a current image of that constellation, galaxy, planet, etc. From there you can pan, zoom, or refine your search. You can even look at the sky with different wavelengths including x-ray, infrared, and microwave to see how different areas light up at different wavelengths.
These images come from some of the largest astronomical surveys and even the Hubble Space Telescope. To top it off, you can get access to podcasts about upcoming astronomical events and you can take an even closer look at mars and the moon with mars.google.com and moon.google.com. So no matter the weather or distance, now you can enjoy the beauty of the stars whenever you want. Check it out at www.google.com/sky/
Popularity: 87% [?]
admin @ April 4, 2008
Google has finally permitted users to go into Google Maps and edit the location, phone number and address of a place or business. The user will also be able to create new locations, even if they are not the owner of that location. The user must have a Google account to create a location. This is very exciting because now there is a greater opportunity for better user edited information. This means that there is now going to be more accurate information available to all those who browse through Google Maps.
For those who are concerned about malicious and fraudulent information or behavior, Google allows any business owner to claim their business location. The Google Map location is then locked from editing, except by the business owner who claims ownership of that location. Also, Google has a waiting period for any location that is moved more than 200 meters for moderation.
Yahoo has been allowing editors to modify its maps for some time now, and has not seen any issues or problems arise yet. Google has ensured that it tracks all changes and will be quick to update any information.
Popularity: 83% [?]
admin @ April 2, 2008
When performing a search on Google, you may have noticed subpage links located directly below the main URL. These are called “sitelinks” and they exist to help users navigate your site. Basically, Google’s algorithm, or spider, crawls your website and determines the most relevant links based on your content and site architecture; links will only be displayed if they are beneficial for the user.
There are certain criteria that a link must have in order to be chosen as a sitelink.
Based on these criteria, the spider will choose anywhere from 2-8 links to display below your URL. If it happens to choose a page that you feel is irrelevant, you can use your Google sitemaps account to block that particular page. However, sitelinks will only be displayed if your URL is ranked number one for the searched keyword.
Ultimately, sitelinks are helpful to you for one big reason: trust. Having sitelinks listed below the URL gives the site more weight for the user, as well as giving them additional information about what’s on the site before clicking on it. Anything that makes your site easier to navigate is a plus for the user and is likely to draw more traffic to you, which of course is the overall goal.
Popularity: 100% [?]
admin @ April 1, 2008
With all of the talk about bots and spiders, don’t you ever wonder who’s crawling your site and how often? The answers are in your website’s visitor log reports, which you can easily access from your site’s control panel.
Your log file reports the search engine bots that have visited your site and when they visited, but you might not recognize the search engines’ visits, because their “user-agent” names are often different from their name.
Below are the agent names of the major search engines:
Ask User-agent: Teoma
Google User-agent: Googlebot
Google Mobile User-agent: Googlebot-Mobile
Google Images User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Google Adsense User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
LookSmart User-agent: ZyBorg
Microsoft/MSN User-agent: MSNBot
Yahoo User-agent: Slurp
If you have a lot of search engine bot visitors, this is good, and it probably results from keeping your website updated on a regular basis, adding new links to internal pages, and obtaining new inbound links or backlinks.
If it appears your site is not being crawled on a regular and frequent basis, then you may want to consult your system administrator or SEOP consultant.
Popularity: 98% [?]
admin @ March 27, 2008
Just the other day I was reviewing a website. I typed “site:www.thedomain.com” into Google, and it showed 80 pages had been indexed. Good! Then I typed in “site:thedomain.com”, and only 4 pages had been indexed! Why the discrepancy?
Search engines may index two versions of a site (the www version and non-www version), and then penalize the site for duplicate content!
How can such a thing happen? Well, if the bot hits a link that it indexes the page without the “www” and site’s internal linking structure uses relative links instead of absolute links, Google now has two copies of the site in the index and views them as separate sites with duplicate content.
Because Google hates duplicate content so much, since it uses room on their servers, they will downgrade or penalize pages that are essentially duplicates of others it has already indexed. Even though Google may perceive the sites as being different, because they originate from the same domain, Google discounts both versions, and rankings suffer because of this. In fact, some webmasters have called this phenomenon the “Slow Site Death.”
The good news is there is an easy fix to this internal duplicate content problem. All you need to do is a 301 permanent redirect from the non-www version of your domain to the www version. If your site is on a Linux server, this is fairly simple to accomplish. First of all, call your webhost and make sure the Apache Rewrite Module is turned on. Then put the following code into your .htaccess file. Be sure to change “thedomain.com” to your domain name.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^thedomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.thedomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]
If your site is on a Windows server, you do not have an .htaccess file, so we suggest that you contact your hosting provider and request they make the change for you. Basically, they need to add the following ASP code to the default home page for “http://thedomain.com” (your domain name).
< %@ Language=VBScript %>
< %
Response.Status=”301 Moved Permanently”
Response.AddHeader “Location”, http://www.thedomain.com
%>
In either case, to test whether your non-www URL is redirecting to your www URL, just type “yourdomain.com” into your browser without the “www” and it should redirect to “www.yourdomain.com”.
Popularity: 89% [?]
admin @ March 27, 2008
Below are 8 SEO tips that can come in useful to any webmaster:
Popularity: 87% [?]
admin @ March 13, 2008
Internal Linking, SEO Menu Comments (0)
Suppose you had a non-fiction book with no table of contents? Would you just start reading on page one clear through to end with no idea what is in the book?
Search engines have absolutely no patience with websites that do not provide a “table of contents” and easy navigation to all pages within the website. If you do not provide a logical menu system from the index page to category pages and then to subcategory pages and finally to detailed information pages, you could be inadvertently hiding major areas of your website from search engines and losing out on a lot of search engine rankings.
If you want to test your menu system, see if you can get to EVERY page on your website from index page links to subsequently linked pages. If there are any orphaned pages, they have little chance of being indexed.
So how does one create a great menu or internal linking system for their website? Firstly, take your website subject and divide it into at least 4 but less than 8 “silos” or categories. On your index page provide links to these silo pages and then from them to their subcategory levels and then to the lowest levels, but try to stay at four levels or less. This is really just like outlining that you learned in school.
On each page should be links to the next lower category pages, as well as links upwards for good user experience, but right now we’re talking about search engine spiders, so let’s concentrate on how spiders crawl. Typically, they find your index page first and then “crawl” from it to the pages it links to and from there to the subsequent links, until hopefully they find every page in your site.
When creating internal linking, be sure to name the categories, subcategories, and individual pages with appropriate keywords separated by hyphens, for example, keyword1-keyword2-keyword3.html, trying to keep the title on the shorter rather than longer end of the spectrum, so that each keyword will have appropriate weight and won’t get watered down.
Next, use anchor text for each link that displays the appropriate keywords consistent with the page names. For example, instead of the well-worn “About Us” anchor text often found in menus linking to an about-us.html page, why not use your keywords instead, as in “About Our Horse Training” linking to about-our-horse-training.html. Get the idea?
Be sure your links are text links if you want the search engine spiders to be able to follow your internal linking structure. However, if you already have implemented your menus in Javascript or Flash, which search engines skip over, don’t fret. You can put the text links at the bottom of each page. This will enable the search engines spider the links, and it will be useful for visitors who don’t like to run scripts and Flash in their browsers.
With a solid internal link structure and menus, every page in your website has a good opportunity to be indexed and gain high rankings. If you are at all uncertain whether your menu is search engine friendly, be sure to take the extra precaution of including text menus in the footer of your pages with keyword-appropriate anchor text.
Popularity: 97% [?]
admin @ March 5, 2008
While content management systems have made it simple to add new products to your ecommerce store, they create such long and complicated URLs for each product that search engines sometimes have trouble spidering them.
For example, if you are on a Linux server, your product URLs might look like this:
http://www.example.com/catalog.php?cat=keyword&product_id=3458
If you are on a Windows server, your URLs could look like this:
http://www.example.com/Product.aspx?ProductID=3458
In reality, dynamic URLs are often much longer and more complicated than those examples above, and search engine spiders sometimes consider these addresses too complicated to index.
However, there is a solution. If you are on a Linux server, you can use mod_Rewrite rules in the Apache .htaccess file to perform 301 (permanent) redirects from the old, complicated URLs to simple ones, in which the product keyword is apparent.
For example, here is an example of a shortened, static, search-engine friendly URL that can be created for each product using rewrite rules:
http://example.com/products/keyword-3458.html
If you are using a Windows server, there is a similar procedure using ISAPI_Rewrite, which acts very much like Apache’s mod_Rewrite, but is designed specifically for Microsoft’s Internet Information Server (IIS).
For more information about constructing rewrite rules on your server to shorten your dynamic URLs into static URLs, contact your system administrator or SEOP representative.
Popularity: 89% [?]
admin @ March 5, 2008
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