Great Tips for your PC » Optimization

SEO:Off-page Optimization

admin — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 06:14:36 +0000

Secret #1: Get other sites to link to you. Each time another website links to you, they are in essence sending a vote to the search engines indicating your importance. This is especially important to Google who puts a significant amount of weight on the value of links from other websites. The more sites that “vote” for you, the more popular your site becomes.

The most effective way to identify the “right” sites to get links from should be based on who is linking to your competition. Better yet, you should be evaluating who links to the #1 search result in Google for the keywords or keyword phrases you’re optimizing for.
If you get the same sites to link to your site, you’ll be in the top position. This strategy is simple but not all that easy to do. It’s very time consuming and requires consistent evaluation and review. I spent year’s trying to do this only my own but didn’t see any results until I acquired SEO Elite to identify which sites to target. In less than 30 seconds SEO Elite tells me exactly which sites are linking to the #1 positioned website and gives me the information I need to contact them and request a link.

Additionally, you also want to identify Authority Websites. These are sites that link to 2 or more of your competitors, other websites optimized for a particular keyword. Again, SEO Elite does all this work for you saving you literally dozens of hours of research. Even if you were to search for these sites yourself, without the proper SEO tool, you may never find the top authoritative websites for your niche.

Another way to build a significant number of links to your website . almost immediately. is through Article Marketing. Article marketing is the practice of writing informational article about your area of expertise and distributing these articles to information hungry websites across the web. The beauty of this strategy is the inclusion of an Author Box. This is a small section at the end of your article that provides information about you, the author, and a link to your website. I have personally used Article Submitter Pro to help distribute my articles to hundreds of article directories, valuable content sites, and article feeds.

Article marketing has created thousands of links back to my website. In fact if you Google my name Michael Fleischner, you’ll find more than 72,000 references. Most of these references are directly associated to my article marketing using Article Submitter Pro. I use this software to virtually automate my article development and distribution. Articles are posted to content sites that repurpose and redistribute my articles across the web including those all important links back to MarketingScoop.com in the Author Box. This tool builds external links and increases my Google results.

Secret #2: Anchor text must include your keyword phrase. When other sites link to you, make sure the link back to your site includes your keyword phrase. Sites that link to your domain can help with overall page rank and popularity, but websites who link to you using your keyword phrase (in the anchor text) are what get you to the top of search engine result lists.

Too often I see clients who claim, “We have hundreds of links to our website but we’re still not ranked”. Ten times out of ten, I find that the link text (the words used in the link) has their company name only. As a result, when I do a search for “XYZcompany” they come up high on the search results. This is great if they are a well known company and people are typing their name into search engines. However, this is not very effective most of the time because their company name is not well known or is not the phrase people are using to search for a particular product or service being offered.

Rather, the link text should include the keyword or keyword phrase they’re optimizing for. For example, if you are selling widgets and you want to optimize for Low Cost Widgets, then the link on other sites should look like this “Low Cost Widgets”. The code would probably look something like this:

Low Cost Widgets

Secret #3: Give people a reason to link to your website. This can be accomplished in a variety of ways including free content such as news or articles, white papers, free tools, etc. Ultimately, it comes down to offering something of value. If you do, other websites will provide one way links which are incredibly valuable for search engine result placement.

Personally, I like to create article directories which provide a wealth of information to website browsers seeking information. For example, I’ve developed a posting of marketing related articles that I have written during my professional career – placing them in a special free articles area of my website. There are a number of other web sites linking to this resource. I make sure to add new articles on a regular basis to keep the content fresh. Doing so encourages other sites to create links to the content from their own web sites.

SEO: On-page Optimization

admin — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 05:52:39 +0000

What you do on your web pages can have a positive or negative impact on your search results. However, as we’ll discuss later in this report, off-page optimization is even more powerful when it comes to increasing your search engine results.
Some of the most important on-page optimization techniques begin with choosing a key word to optimize your web page for. There are a number of free tools available on the Internet that can help you find a keyword that is popular but not overly competitive. Keywords that are highly competitive, meaning that many other sites are optimizing for the same keyword, are often very difficult to place well for on the major search engines.

Regardless of which tool you use, free or purchased, I recommend using the Keyword Selector Tool (inventory.overture.com) offered by Overture. This free search will provide you with a count of the number of times the keyword or keyword phrase is searched on each month. If the keyword or phrase gets few searches, it’s not worth optimizing for.

On the other hand, if your keyword phrase is highly searched, it may also be competitive – meaning that many websites are optimizing for that term. The ratio of searches to the number of websites containing a particular keyword or keyword phrase is called KEI. The challenge is to find a keyword phrase that is popular (a lot of people search for it) but isn’t all that competitive (i.e. not a whole lot of sites are competing for it). There are a ton of “keyword suggestion” tools available online for free. Just use Google and take your pick.

Once you’ve selected a keyword or keyword phrase, you’re ready to learn the 7 Secrets of Search Engine Optimization. Each of these secrets will increase your search engine results. Used together, you’ll find yourself rising through the search engines more quickly than you thought possible.

Secret #1: Don’t optimize for a single keyword, optimize for a keyword phrase. When you optimize for a single keyword, more often than not, that word is highly competitive and your chances of coming out on top are minimal. Where you gain a significant advantage is by focusing on a keyword phrase. This actually increases your chances of ranking well and helps you towards ranking well for the single word you originally chose as your ideal keyword.
A keyword phrase is usually less competitive than a single word and gives search engines a variety of choices when displaying your site. One of the best secrets I’ve learned over the past few years is to use a ‘post’ to separate your keywords. You can find the post symbol, usually over the backslash key, located near your Enter button. Be sure to hold the shift key down and viola! Keep in mind that your keyword phrase(s), in addition to appearing on your web page should also appear in your page title (ex: Marketing Tips | Internet Marketing Secrets).

Secret #2: Place your keyword phrase within the first 25 words of text, and the last 25 words of text on your web page. Proximity to the beginning and ending of your website are paramount. This tells the search engines that the keyword phrase is important to the content of your web site..

Additionally, place the keyword phrase through out your page – being sure to bold the phrase once, italicize the phrase once, and underline the phrase once. Mention your keyword phrase every paragraph or so. Just make sure that it appears as natural. If you stuff the page with keywords, you’ll potentially turn off browsers who would otherwise find your page valuable. Additionally, search engines can tell when your stuffing your pages with keyword, having a negative impact on your search engine results.

Some of the client’s I’ve worked with have struggled to find an appropriate place to include their keyword phrase. One technique you can use is to include your keyword phrase just after your copyright notice on the bottom of your webpage. This ensures that it appears within the last 25 words of your page. An example would be, © 2007. MarketingScoop.com Marketing Experts.

Secret #3: In addition to where your keyword is placed, it’s also important how it appears. Place your keywords in an h1 tag towards the top of your webpage. An h1 tag, also known as a headline tag, is the code you use to display your headline in large type. Although this may seem awkward depending on your website layout, it is one of the most powerful secrets you can use to boost your search engine results. Additionally, you can change the display of your h1 tags using a cascading style sheet.

If possible add a number of sub-headings using an /h1
h2 and/or /h2 h3 tag. Smaller than an h1, but still significant, using your keyword phrase in these tags is also very valuable to search engines. They also help to organize your content in a meaningful way.

Secret #4: Be sure to place your keyword phrase in your meta tags (the HTML code that appears at the beginning of your webpage) – specifically your page title and description. Try to repeat your keyword phrase twice in your description tag. Your meta tags should look like this (this is only a sample):

[Keyword Phrase1] | [Keyword Phrase2]

The last tag, the Robots tag, lets the search engine know that it should be crawling your entire website. There are other things you can do to improve the search-ability of your website such as a sitemap and on-page linking, a bit too detailed for this report but worthy of doing further online research.

Now that we’ve covered the first four secrets, most of them having to do with on-page optimization, let’s focus on what you can do outside of you website to increase your search engine results. We call these techniques Off-Page Optimization.