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Archive for the ‘Search Engine Optimization’ Category

SEO & Web Traffic

Can SEO bring more web traffic to your website?

There are many online businesses today which are not making any money at all from the web. There may be a hundred reasons for that and the reasons may vary from case to case. But there are some general reasons for failure of most online businesses. Most common reasons include the lack of web traffic and the poor website. Both of them are actually interrelated. If you do not have a good website, you are not going to get a lot of web traffic. This means that you will have to work on your website to initiate the things. If you will work on your website, you will be working on search engine optimization in a way as well. You will have to make sure that you are optimizing your website for the search engines.

Design
Search engine optimization will help you to increase the traffic a lot. You will have to use various search engine optimization techniques in order to get more web traffic. You will have to make sure that your website is well designed and it has easy navigation. The visitors must find it really easy to locate the content on the website that they are trying to find.

Link Building
You can start by working on the website and making it a great looking website to get more traffic. But you will also have to do other things. You will have to build links as well. You will have to work on the content and the Meta tags as well. There are many other things which you will have to work on as well. The links will play a very important role. Remember that the links will play a very important role. You will have to pay special attention to the link building. Even if you have to dedicate budget to the link building, you should. It would help you in the long run. You will get better ranking on the search engines and you will get more traffic as well. You can write the articles and can post them to the article directories. You can include the links in those articles. They will serve as back links and will count as your votes. The search engines will look at these links as your votes and will give you better ranking.

Site Map
Also remember to add a site map on your website as well. If you will not have a site map, the search engine crawlers will not find it easy to look through your website resulting in low ranking and hence low traffic. So make sure that you take this factor into account as well when working on the traffic building and the search engine optimization.

Conclusion
Remember that SEO is not an easy thing and you might not succeed if you are not willing to work real hard. You can lose a lot of visitors during this time if your techniques are not well worked on. So make sure that you are either hiring a proper search engine optimization team or you are willing to give it everything. You are not going to get web traffic if you are doing none of these two.

Posted by Admin on May 8th, 2010

SEO Patience

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Every website has its potential to become the next big thing. Everyone starts off equal and its what you do after, which makes a final difference.

Its how you approach your optimization which is a key factor in how your site ranks, in the long term. It might be great that you are ranked first after a few weeks, but after a few years, will you still be ranked first? Google being a prime example of patience.

Google was merely a made up word, and really had no international, let alone national stance. How did it become the biggest thing on the Internet? Patience, and many hours of dedicated, hard work from its creators and the team they formed. Your site needs to develop and mature and this can only be done over time. Realizing that your site needs this, or needs that will only come over time.

You may know everything there is to know about SEO, but I can assure you there is someone equivalent to you, developing their site, and probably of a similar niche. Applying this over many years will get you a top spot and a spot which may not be affected for many years to come.

To break things up, you must really focus on on-page SEO. This is vital in getting spiders to stay on your site, and indexing content which is related to your niche. On-page SEO requires time as you need to see which keywords get your site noticed. On-page SEO requires you to research and keep track of your data and statistics over time to see trends, glitches and the wider audience’s approach to your niche.

Off-page SEO is the most time consuming but can have overwhelming positive results. Take your time to achieve 50 extra backlinks each day. Over time, you have consistently gathered backlinks and this will accumulate to a large figure, yet it has all been done without suspicion. Posting on forums, adding your site to topsites, submitting your RSS feeds and commenting on blogs will seem like a never ending task, but it is this which will get your site up there in a few years time.

Sites don’t need to be greatly ranked in their first year or so. It doesn’t matter so long as you are providing quality content. If you are able to consistently provide quality content over time, then you will have a bigger impact then some site which has only been at it for a few days. Also, over time, there is a greater chance that more people have came to your site then for a site that has only been up for a short time.

Posted by Admin on May 7th, 2010

Custom 404 Error Page

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Error pages (specifically the 404 page) usually aren’t given much appreciation. You will most likely see a generic page with “Error 404 – Page Not Found” and that’s pretty much it. What you may not know is that these pages do receive a large portion of your traffic, and with sites having dynamic pages, 404 pages will be even more looked at.

As a part of SEO, internal linking is quite important. It is not only there to increase weight on other small pages, but to keep readers reading and not be bored of your website. This can be applied to 404 pages and so what we do is to keep it simple, but user friendly.

Error pages should tell visitors that what they are looking for isn’t there, or they may have mistyped in the link. The audience are real people, so user-friendly language to tell users is essential. These pages should navigate through the site. You may find ways to integrate a sitemap or a simple contents and really, should look like another normal page of your website.

To keep people reading, adding things such as the latest news, Twitter update, top page or post could be used to fill a whole heap of white space. You can also add a place to report a dead link and a simple search for your website can help keep users reading.

As more and more pages are being made for your website, the 404 page can also be a big money making tool. Advertisers do want pages that are being read or visited and so the 404 page is usually visited for large forums, big blogs or search engines. Getting that page noticed by advertisers will potentially get you quite a bit of money in the long run.

So even the dullest page can be a major hit for your site, and a deciding factor in how you market your site.

Posted by Admin on May 5th, 2010

Link Optimization

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This is a little sequel to the image optimization article. Optimizing links are really easy and will make a difference in the long run.

To optimize your link, you should set it out as follows:

<a href=”URL” title=”Hover Text”>Anchor Text</a>

Explanation

URL: Basically the site’s domain you are linking to.
Hover Text: Text which when you mouseover the link, will display a short message stating the purpose of the site.
Anchor Text: Text which you want Google to see your site as. This is important for SERP ranking and keywords.

Example:

<a href=”http://www.semreach.com” title=”Search Engine Marketing Blog”>Search Engine Marketing</a>

Result

Search Engine Marketing

Note how I used “Search Engine Marketing” instead of the site’s name, SEM Reach. I want when people to search “Search Engine Marketing” to see SEM Reach and optimizing links to show that Search Engine Marketing = SEM Reach will be beneficial, and when thousands of people link so, you will be thoroughly rewarded.

Target

If you want to link to another site, its best to add target="_blank" between the URL and Title. This means it will open in a new tab or window. You want users to stay of your site the longest, and so linking to another site, but having it open up/closing your site, will mean people will stay on another and possibly forget yours.

Forums

One other thing which should be considered. On forums, sometimes they do not allow title text for links. For images, they don’t let alternative text. What can you do now? Its best to first add the optimized link (with anchor text) before any image links. This is due to the weighting of un-optimized links vs. un-optimized images.

Posted by Admin on April 30th, 2010

Image Optimization

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After a few quick Google searches for the term “image optimization”, I noticed that the top 5 sites didn’t even have relevant “image optimization” information for SEO. I wondered how people new to “image optimization” would cope (and frankly, I though Google was there to make lives a tad more easier) and so here is how you should do it:

<img src="Website URL" border="Image Border width in Pixels" alt="Alternative Text" width="Image Width in Pixels" height="Image Height in Pixels" />

Explanation

Website URL: Simple your domain, ie. http://www.semreach.com (Be sure to include the http://)
Image Border width in Pixels: Border going the whole way around the image, ie. 0 for no border, 1 for a thing border and so on.
Alternative Text: Some people may use text browsers, or disable images, so in replacement, some text should be used to distinguish image from image. This usually includes one or two keywords for optimization along with a descriptive word, ie. SEM Reach Logo
Image Width in Pixels: What is the width of the image?
Image Height in Pixels: What is the height of the image?

As a whole, this is one example of an optimized image:

<img src="http://www.semreach.com/images/affiliate.png" border="0" alt="Search Engine Marketing" width="88" height="31" />

Result:

Posted by Admin on April 29th, 2010

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