Optimizing your Optimization: SEO

When you were shopping around for your SEO, you probably got a lot of fuzzy quotes. Some companies are vague about what they are actually going to do because one, they may not want to be liable for something that they said they were going to do and didn’t, or two, they don’t want you to take their valuable research that determined what needed to be done.

Each web site needs an individualized plan for search engine optimization. This is really the main reason for vagary throughout the industry. Sure, there may be some obvious things that need to be done, but other things could take hours of research to figure out. There is no “one size fits all” approach in SEO.

When you are determining which company has the best plan in mind, think about what you really want. Do you only want your site optimized so that the browser spiders can more easily see you and rank you? Do you want extensive work done on keyword research, keyword density and link building? Before you sign on the dotted line, check around to make sure that you are getting what you’re paying for.

Ideally, you want your site to be improved by every means possible. This can include title tags, headlines, text quality and quantity, links, 301 redirects, and more. These things may need to be periodically updated as things change in your rankings, keyword focus or your industry. So, many people find themselves paying for these things by the year. Not a bad idea, but it isn’t all that needs to be considered.

What if this work is all done in the first week and then nothing ever needs to be changed? Your site may be perfectly optimized, but does that mean that you are done? Will this really keep you climbing in the rankings? Not necessarily. Yes, these things help a lot and are totally necessary, but what else needs to be done to increase your chances of success?

Browsers use more information than “how well your site is laid out” to determine your worth. Are you active in your industry community? Do you provide valuable information about your industry? Are you doing more than putting a product on the market? This is where copywriting and blogs come in. Your SEO will hopefully offer article writing services, along with posting to a blog, including relevant links to your site, and syndicating those articles so that they can be spread around the web. The articles should not sound like sales copy or they will not be taken seriously by the public or the browsers. Generic, relevant, interesting information should be provided in your articles.

Social media efforts are next. Social media is becoming more and more important to rankings. Bookmarking, social site posts and networking are the last piece of the services puzzle.

Make sure that you are getting all that you paid for. Going with a cheaper SEO that offers fewer services may put you waiting in line behind your competitors indefinitely.

About the Author: Stacy Pessoney is a Project Manager for ArteWorks SEO, one of the top search engine marketing companies in the world. A graduate of the University of Alabama, she implements and manages comprehensive SEO strategies and serve as an organizational liaison among company executives, clients and colleagues.

Understanding Your Search Engine Ranking

If you’ve been checking your keyword rankings over the last few months or years, you may have noticed some changes in the results that are coming up. Keyword search results have evolved. You will need to adjust your strategy to keep up.
You may expect that your site should come up with your competitors’ sites. This may not necessarily be the case. Think about it from the search engine’s perspective. When someone searches, for example, lawn mowers, do you just want to bring up companies that sell lawn mowers? Not necessarily. Your results pool would be saturated with company names, when that may not be what the user was looking for at all.
Search engines have become more and more sophisticated over time. They are not looking to help anyone sell anything. Therefore, the search results, you’ll notice, now include a lot of blog discussions, books, videos and web casts, customer comments and articles about the keyword that you enter. This gives a more rich, diverse result for the search engine users.
Companies that sell are not excluded, but they are no longer the primary ranking holders that they used to be. Furthermore, sites that incorporate all of these other aspects of social media will be the companies that end up ranking higher and higher in the search. For example, you may have a wonderful, user friendly, search engine friendly site about lawn mowers. You may offer more and give better prices and customer service than your competitor. But, your competitor that has kept a current blog, released relevant information about lawn mowers, and sparked discussions and bookmarking among the public will rank higher than you anyway.
This gives everyone a fair advantage. It gives users a more complex picture of the rankings. I know that when I click on those first page results, I am going to get up to date information from companies and consumers like myself, not just the site of the company that pays the most for advertising and sells the most merchandise.
This gives smaller sites the unique ability to get visibility over the huge billion dollar budget companies. That is, if you play your cards wisely. Keeping your online reputation current, your visibility high and keeping up with the changes in the search engine world will require you to work with a world class search engine optimization company. Long gone are the days where spending the most money on advertising gets you the most customers. Money is probably better spent on Search Engine Optimization.

About the Author: Stacy Pessoney is a Project Manager for ArteWorks SEO, one of the top search engine marketing companies in the world. A graduate of the University of Alabama, she implements and manages comprehensive SEO strategies and serve as an organizational liaison among company executives, clients and colleagues.

Google Penalties

Google can impose penalties on sites that try to abuse the system. This is why it is crucial to hire a professional, reputable, organically driven Search Engine Optimization (SEO) company to optimize your site. Optimizing a site can take time. Rushing things could be detrimental to your success.
For example, SEO is built around building quality links that bring attention to your site. If you try to be tricky and just get a bunch of shotty links out there, you might just catch the eye of the Google-nators. Building a bunch of links really fast will send up a red flag and you could incur some penalties.
If you continue to abuse Google, you could be banned. This could mean a swift death for most companies. We depend so heavily on search engines to drive business to our sites that we really have to be careful.
Hiring the right people to optimize is key to avoiding penalty. Penalties are passed out freely by Google to those who violate their terms. Creating a bunch of links really fast to move up in the rankings could cause Google to push you down a few pages. Another thing that they penalize for is trying to hide text links on your page.
For example, I want people searching for “fuzzy kitties” to be directed to my site. I believe that I sell the best fuzzy kitties in the world. I can’t come up with a good way for fuzzy kitties to fit in the text of my home page, so I decide to make the text the same color as my homepage background. This way, I can type “fuzzy kitties” all over my site without anyone ever knowing the difference. Little tricks like this one can quickly bring on a penalty.
The same goes for using your keywords over and over again in the text copy of your pages. For example, “Fuzzy kitties are great. I love fuzzy kitties. Fuzzy kitties beget fuzzy kitties.” This type of action is not tolerated either. You do want to use your keywords early on in the text of your homepage, but it has to be naturally occurring. You can’t force it in and expect to be indexed for it. Google looks at all of your content. If it is totally relevant to have your keywords, even repeatedly, then you could be rewarded for it.
The bottom line is to follow the terms of service provided by Google. Hire a GOOD SEO company that utilizes organic social media to boost your ratings.

What Is Social Media and Does My Site Need It?

Social media refers to an electronic means for people to share your information. People visiting your site or blog can make comments, e-mail links to their friends, or post information on their personal blogs linking to your site. All of these things help to build your social media reputation.
Social media is also referred to as social networking. As more and more people comment about you or pass your site around, you build a reputation online. Search engines weigh the opinions of others heavily when giving you your ranking. This is the main reason that social networking has become such an iatrical part of Search Engine Optimization.
Social media is not just comments on your blog. Social media can consist of video, pictures, reviews, articles or any other form of electronic communication. Blogs and other user driven forums, such as discussion boards, FAQ’s and comment sections of your own web site can help build your social media reputation.
Google does not care what you say about yourself. Actual users must be able to find your content and then it needs to be interesting or informative enough for them to want to pass it on or link back to it in some way. Social bookmarking is an effective tool when optimizing your site. Including links to social bookmarking sites on your blog or discussion forum can help you to encourage your users to spread the word, so to speak. Once bookmarked, you will suddenly become more visible to people looking for information on the subject that you are discussing. This should hopefully drive more web traffic to your site.
When your social efforts start to pay off, then you have a stronghold over search engines. Blogs and other user driven media are heavily weighted by the search engines and this side of search engine optimization should not be ignored. Developing a social reputation can take some time. You can help it along by utilizing a blog or other social media outlet.
The more varied your social media network the better. Make sure that all of your forums are relevant, especially if they are linking back to your site. The higher the quality, the higher the rankings can get. This is something that you should really spend the time and money to make sure that your site is getting all of the exposure that it needs to compete in today’s SEO market.

What is My Deep Link Ratio? (DLR)

A deep link is a link that points to a page on your site other than the homepage. When optimizing your site, you will be working with backlinks. Backlinks are links that point to your site from other web sites. As you progress and get deeper into your optimization, you may begin working with deep links.
Dividing deep links by your total number of backlinks will give you your Deep Link Ratio (DLR). This number is expressed as a percentage. You can have deep links on your actual site pointing to different pages on your site. You can also have external deep links that point to specific page topics. A high DLR percentage can be helpful in getting you good positioning on Google searches.
If you are interested in getting some deep links to compliment your efforts with your normal backlinks, make sure that you are not pushing links that are irrelevant or not directly related to the content. You need a natural progression of conversation or information leading up to and following the link.
For example, if you are selling furniture and would like to create a link that points to your page about dining room sets, then you will need to include the link in a relevant paragraph or article. If you put it in a list of other furniture, then Google may not see it as a link that is directly related to dining room sets. If you write about the different styles of dining room furniture and point it to your dining room page, then Google will see it as relevant. You cannot just throw a link into any random text and expect Google not to catch it. They analyze all of the information on the page before considering it relevant.
You do not want to add too many links too fast, either. A natural way for a website to grow is for links to be created over time. These links need to be included with quality content and should not appear to be a spam-o-rama of links that you threw out on the web. Google will ignore it if you do an onslaught of deep linking all at once.
Keep the keywords and links varied and allow nature to take its course. Do not get impatient and expect to see some great rankings right away. You are really building a case for your site to be ranked high when you are optimizing a site. Make sure that you hire a reputable organic Search Engine Optimization company that will not abuse links and you should see results slowly over time.

Building Backlinks for SEO

When optimizing your site for Search Engine Optimization, you had better have Google in mind. Google is by far the most trusted and used Search Engine out there. We could go on for months about the algorithms that Google uses to rank your page, but usually it is best to start with the basics. Here we will talk about the importance of backlinks on your site.
Google is very good at detecting links that are irrelevant to your site content or that lead the clicker to a spam site. It is crucial that you go organic with your site building and your SEO efforts. You do not want to get into a manual audit by Google, or worse. Your links need to be natural and make sense. This is the bottom line when it comes to effective link building on your site.
Backlinks are considered to be one of the most important things to work on when optimizing a site. Backlinks are also known as inbound links. Inbound links or backlinks are simply links that lead people to your site. Google will see backlinks to your site and rate them. Google is able to determine if the links are relevant to your site. The number of links leading to your site can also be important, if you do not over do it.
Google wants to know if the links are relevant. Therefore, they will not only look at the link, but also analyze the content around the link. If the content is presented in a logical order, has no misspellings or grammatical errors, and is part of a discussion about something pertaining to your site, then Google will most likely see this as a quality link. Google also considers the quality of the site that has a link to your site on it. Get enough of these quality backlinks directing people to you, and you could be on your way to a highly ranking site.
You must be careful and never try to trick Google. Google will disregard non-quality links. This prevents people from simply creating web pages with inbound links to the site they want to optimize, or simply throwing a whole lot of links to their site all over the web. Google is very good at catching little tricky moves like this and they will not tolerate it. Try to trick Google and you will eventually get burned. Google will not hesitate to ban you from their searches and then you are a lot worse off than you originally were.
Google ranks higher for backlinks that are all naturally occurring on quality sites that are related to yours. Getting these links takes time. You have to be patient because Google is. If a lot of backlinks show up at once, they will simply be disregarded by Google. You have to have them slowly appear over time and they have to all be quality links.
The keywords used to link back to your site need to be varied so that it is not obvious that you are planting all of these links. The goal is to not "plant" all of the links yourself, but to provide readers with interesting content that will make them want to bookmark or forward the articles with the links to other people. This is where you get into the importance of social bookmarking, so we will stop here. Just remember that backlinking is the backbone of SEO and you need to keep it organic when getting your backlinks.

Five Steps to Better Search Rankings

Want advice on how to make a few quick changes to your site that will propel it to top search engine rankings? Join the club! Unfortunately, you will not find any such advice here. Long gone are the days when adding a few key phrases to the code of a site would affect search engine visibility for those phrases. Search engines utilize a complex array of variables to rank web pages, and competition for top placement in their result pages is fierce. What you will find here are five steps which, used in conjunction, secure a strong foundation for search engine success:

1. Determine a focused set of key phrases. Key phrases are the roots of search engine optimization. Not only do you want search engines to crawl and understand the subject of your site, you want them to deliver it to users who are already searching for your offerings. Key phrase selection should occur prior to any other SEO effort. Ideally, each page of your site will be optimized for the single key phrase most relevant to its content.

2. Ensure Site Code is Relevant and Accessible to the Search Engines. Search engines cannot interpret text that is contained within a graphic, nor are they awed by the elaborate Flash animation you have created to captivate visitors. Search engines interpret text, and that includes both the body content visible to site users as well as the unseen text comprising the code of the site. While users’ goals and desires should be considered in site development, search engine friendliness should not be overlooked.

Search engines utilize numerous factors to determine the relevance of a page to a particular search query. Some of these factors are aspects of the site code itself, giving you complete control over their content. Incorporating the most relevant key phrase for each page of your site into the following areas will help signal to the engines what each page is all about, thus improving the chance that your site will be ranked for the desired phrase:

-Title tag: The inclusion of a page and key phrase specific TITLE tag on each page of your site is simple yet extremely important for search engine relevance.

-Section headings: H1 header tags provide additional opportunity to convey the theme or subject of a page, and should not be ignored. The purpose of an H1 tag is to describe the contents of a page or individual sections or subsections of a page. Incorporating the most relevant key phrase for each page into its H1 tag is another simple modification that can contribute to improved relevance to a particular phrase.

-Image ALT attributes. Image ALT text describes the content of an image, and is also used by the engines to ascertain the contents of a page. Utilizing descriptive image ALT attributes can be helpful in conveying the theme of a page. On a page informing users about the efficacy of purple widgets, an image ALT attribute containing the phrase “purple widgets” would convey to the search engines more information than would an image ALT attribute containing the phrase “company logo image.”

3. Regularly publish unique content that is valuable to users. While incorporating major key phrases into the code of a site can increase relevance and lay a foundation for improved rankings, code modifications alone are insufficient to achieve desirable results for targeted key phrases. Search engines utilize a number of variables to determine how to rank web pages, and among them is the presence of unique, valuable content.

Providing unique web content is not only important for search rankings, but the types of content contributing to search engine visibility are also becoming increasingly robust. Content resident to your site may take the form of traditional body text, but may also be in the form of blog entries, videos, images and interactive tools. The incorporation of video and other multimedia content is becoming increasingly beneficial to sites that strive to remain on the cutting edge of web technology. Ideally, your site content will be useful and engaging to your target audience while upholding a quality standard that will attract links from relevant sites.

4. Get the word out. The Web is no longer a means of passively receiving information from the people and companies with sufficient resources to invest in sophisticated websites. Social media has transformed the Web into a two way avenue of communication, empowering individual users to obtain and share information via peer to peer social networks. Social media provides users access to the content deemed to be the most interesting or helpful by their peers, and offers one outlet through which you can get the word out about a particularly interesting piece of content such as a blog article or a video you have published. Social media involvement is essential to success in modern SEO.

Press release distribution represents a traditional means of generating publicity that has adapted easily to the Web. Regular press release distribution combined with involvement in social media can arouse interest and attract beneficial inbound linkage to your site, an important goal of any effective search engine optimization project.

5. Keep it up. As you have figured out by this point, there is nothing quick and easy about an effective search engine optimization strategy. Longevity is essential to improving your site’s positioning within the search engine results.

Competition within the search engines is an important dynamic that cannot be ignored. After all, if your site was the only one targeting the phrase “purple widgets,” it would be comfortably positioned at the top of the search engine result pages raking in profits. Even if you were lucky enough to be in this position, Web savvy entrepreneurs would quickly identify the opportunity and start up their own, bigger and better widget websites.

Targeted key phrase selection is one means of circumventing mass competition for popular key phrases. Consider using the geographic location (“purple widgets Austin”) or be more specific in key phrase selection (“residential purple widgets”). Rather than a means to an end, consider search engine optimization as a race in which you must be consistent to win.

About the Author: Pamela Westbrook is a Project Manager for a premiere search engine optimization firm based in Austin, Texas. Pamela is a graduate of the University of Alabama Culverhouse College of Commerce and Business Administration with a degree in Consumer and Industrial Marketing. For more information about search marketing and PPC management, please visit http://www.arteworks.biz

SEO for Beginners: Don’t get taken to the Cleaners

Misconceptions abound in the realm of search engine optimization, due in part to the fact that the industry is unregulated and widely misconstrued. Like the discipline of medicine or law, there are SEOs who remain firmly dedicated to providing genuine, ethical services, and there are inevitably those seeking to make a quick buck capitalizing on the naiveté of others. Gaining a practical understanding of what to expect from search engine optimization can help you make a better long term investment in your website by avoiding SEO firms that fall into the latter group.

True search engine optimization encompasses more than the presence of key phrases on your home page. It even extends beyond Meta tags, inbound links and quality content. To be included in search engine result pages, a site must exude the essence of what search engines and users alike are seeking—authoritative, intuitive, valuable and informative, meanwhile adhering to World Wide Web best practices and current navigability protocols. Effective search engine optimization involves at minimum ensuring that search engine spiders are able to fully index each page of a site and that they can identify the major theme or subject associated with each—signified by the inclusion of the most relevant key phrases. Some site owners are under the delusion that Google has some sort of obligation to find and deliver their site to users. Google, like other search engines and site owners, aims to deliver a top quality user experience, and that includes indexing and providing access to reputable web pages relevant to the topics for which its users are searching. In implementing an SEO strategy to improve a site’s search engine visibility, remember: you are the one who wants your site to appear in the search results generated by Google, not the other way around. Search engine visibility requires that a web page first and foremost be up to the quality standards the engines prefer, and that means having a navigable site structure and original, updated content. Websites should be structured such that they are navigable by search engines while preserving an emphasis on providing a positive user experience. Some code and content modifications to better comply with search engine preferences may be helpful to maximize a site’s search engine appeal.

Another misguided perception that will inevitably lead to disappointment is the expectation of instant gratification from search engine optimization efforts. Even with the benefits of having regularly updated, fresh content, establishing a site as a leader takes time, particularly if it has been launched in recent months. SEO involves a longer time investment to achieve results as compared to pay per click and other forms of advertising that provide fairly immediate exposure. In purchasing a television spot to promote your products, you are purchasing a concrete block of time during which to convey your message to your audience. But establishing your website as a premiere resource in your industry is not such a cut and dry undertaking. Search engine optimization is an art and a science influenced by many factors, and making a few simple changes to a site is not enough to affect significant improvement in search engine visibility. Many pertinent issues must be evaluated in determining the best course of action for a particular site, and the issues to be addressed vary from site to site.

It is important for site owners seeking SEO services to understand that the practice of search engine optimization is one characterized by constant change. Firms providing SEO services must remain actively engaged with a network of industry experts and stay up to date on changes in order to achieve and maintain results. In selecting an SEO firm, be wary of any company promising to boost rankings by making a few quick site modifications or pledging to “SEO” your site in one shot. Guaranteed top search engine placement and other over the top promises should signal a red flag. As the adage goes, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

About the Author: Pamela Westbrook is a Project Manager for a premiere search engine optimization firm based in Austin, Texas. Pamela is a graduate of the University of Alabama Culverhouse College of Commerce and Business Administration with a degree in Consumer and Industrial Marketing. For more information about search marketing and PPC management, please visit http://www.arteworks.biz