If you involved in search engine optimization, you may already know basic terms such as algorithm and page rank, but do you really know what they mean and how they affect your search results? You may hear them on a daily basis, but it’s important to fully understand them in order to better develop your SEO efforts.
1) Algorithm
An algorithm is a fancy word for “formula.” In this case, an algorithm is used by search engines to rank your site, by determining how relevant your site is for the people using the search engine. Factors including your web site’s content, keywords, and links pointing towards your site (aka inbound links or backlinks) are all used in the algorithm to calculate your location on the results page of the search. The more relevant the algorithm determines your site to be, the higher your site will be placed on the results page.
2) Page Rank
The value of your site is a calculation made by Google known as Page Rank. To calculate your Page Rank, which is measured on a scale of 0 to 10 with the average being 3 or 4, several factors are used. One of the most important factors in your Page Rank is the amount of one-way links (again, aka inbound links or backlinks) pointing to your site. A high number of links shows that other sites consider your web site to be a quality, relevant resource, and therefore Google should too. You can download the Google Toolbar to see your Page Rank by clicking on the link.
3) Link Popularity
It is not very well known that some types of links can help your search engine placement while others may actually hurt it. For example, a “reciprocal link,” which is when you link to a site and that site links back to you, is frowned upon by search engines. This is because people used to try and cheat the system by adding as many links as possible to improve their ranking. Search engines have become more intelligent, and their algorithms are able to ignore reciprocal links. The best kind of link today is the “one-way link” that I covered above under the Page Rank subheading.
4) Keyword Phrase
You could say “keyword phrases” are the new “keywords.” Because the internet has been around for awhile, most single word “keywords” have been used so much that they lose value. For example, if I wanted to learn how to poach an egg, I would search for the keyword phrase “how to poach an egg” rather than just the keyword “egg.” Searching for “egg” would produce thousands of irrelevant results. By using keyword phrases you can be much more specific about what your pages are about and cater to specific audiences. For more on choosing relevant keywords for your website, please click on the link to see my most recent post.
5) Site Structure
The way your website is organized, such as how the pages are linked together and the way your menu works, is referred to as site structure. Good site structure helps visitors move freely and easily through the pages and effortlessly find relevant and related content. The better your site structure, the higher your search engine ranking.
A few extra comments on Site Structure
Before I build a website, I typically try to outline the site structure. This involves determining what topics will be covered and how, whether there will be subtopics, how my readers will be able to access/view these topics, and what it will all look like upon first glance at my site.
For example, let’s say I want to build a site promoting a rock band. I may want to have a “home" page (or landing page), an “about" page featuring the band’s members, an “upcoming shows” page, a “downloads" page, and perhaps a “contact us” page. These pages may or may not have subheadings, and that is what I try to think about before I actually start working on the site. Then I think about whether the individual pages will link to each other and whether the individual pages will look different than one another. Adding a "blog" page may be another consideration. These are just examples of things to think about when thinking about site structure. After all, getting people to your site using the methods mentioned above is one thing, but getting them to stay is another. You want to make the visiting experience as intuitive as possible if you want great results.
Filed under Content pages, Keyword research, Linking strategies, Search engine optimization by 
While you may be thinking that you are tricking search engines like Google into noticing your website through tactics such as cramming your website with irrelevant keywords and content, you may actually get penalized or ignored. The only foolproof strategy to boost rankings is to figure out what kind of quality, relevant information your audience wants and provide it for them. And once you determine the content you are going to provide, choose keywords wisely (i.e. use relevant keywords). The internet is simply jam-packed with low-quality articles, scams, and useless information; it is important to not make the same mistakes made by so many employing these tactics if you truly want your site to succeed.
While search engines no longer care as much about keyword meta tags, it is still important to make yours are well-written and relevant – or your site could get penalized. Keyword meta tags are used to quickly and easily identify the relevance of your site. These days, Google's algorithm, which is used to figure out where to rank pages on the search results, is much more complex due to years of dealing with people trying to cheat the system. Google’s algorithm will not respond to outdated tricks such as typing keywords multiple times or using “invisible” keywords (white text on a white background). If you attempt these tricks, your site will not only be frowned upon, but may get banned from Google altogether.
Another big mistake is including keywords that are irrelevant to your site to attract more traffic. By including a hot-topic article on your website that is irrelevant to your subject matter, you will loose your credibility and your audience. Once a visitor to your site realizes your trick; they’ll leave immediately. Why would anyone bother visiting your site if it is filled with incohesive, random content?
Since navigating the internet for quality information is already difficult, it’s important to stand out from the sites that are created for no other reason than to get better rankings. You can do this by providing useful content and keep from making typical mistakes such as trying to trick search engines via the methods mentioned above.
Tips on choosing relevant keywords
So you have determined what your site’s content will be about but now you are at a loss as to what keywords to choose and begin using. A good place to start is Google’s keyword tool. There, you can simply type in the keyword (or search term) that you think the people who you want to visit your site would theoretically be searching for. Then, this useful tool will tell you how many searches people make per month on that particular keyword, what the competition is for that keyword, and will even provide similar keywords which may be more effective and that you hadn’t thought of. For example, say you are trying to make a website all about old outlaw ballads. Well, according to the Google Keyword tool, people rarely search for the keyword “outlaw ballads.” However, it will tell you that the keywords “outlaw songs” and “outlaw music” are far more popular and will show roughly how many others are trying to use those same keywords to market their sites.
For more on how to use the Google keyword tool, I recommend checking out this handy video on how to use articles to build SEO found at IdeaMarketers.com. There is a section of this 20-minute video devoted to the topic of using Google’s keyword tool – I recommend you check it out for more tips on using it and finding the right keywords for your site.
Filed under Keyword research, Marketing resources, Stuff you should not do by
How to Use a Blog to Attract Traffic to your Website
With a massive audience of blog readers and 175,000 new blogs launching every day on the internet, this new global phenomenon can be used as a great
way to drive traffic to your site.
By design, blogs quickly and easily attract traffic. The instant you publish a blog on the internet, search engines automatically search for keywords and update the public for you. Here are some great ways that you can use your blogs to attract traffic.
Long Tail Keywords are specific words or phrases related to the topic of your blog post. It is important to keep from using generic or broad terms that will put you in direct competition with larger businesses. For example, if you are writing a post about wine tasting in Florence, Italy, using a keyword such as “travel” would bring up large travel sites such as Travelocity.com. Rather, use a whole phrase that is more specific to your topic – something like “wine tasting in Florence.” With long tail keywords, your post is more likely to show up in a search.
Onlywire is a service that lets you automatically bookmark your blog post on multiple sites that generate a lot of traffic. Once you subscribe to the free service, click a button on your browser, enter in some keywords, and submit. Your content and articles will be distributed to the web's top social networking sites and available for millions of readers to view.
Leave Blog Comments with your link on other blogs in your niche that receive high traffic. To find these high traffic blogs in your niche, simply run a Google search on your topic. When you leave a comment, use an enticing name or keyword so that people are inclined to click. Make sure your comment is both useful and thoughtful, and not just “spam” so that you aren’t blocked from leaving comments in the future.
Press Releases made up of valuable content can be great for generating traffic. If you fill your press release with information that is actually of importance to people, then it can spread around the internet rapidly. The best way to find valuable content is to poll your readers on what they want to see and then compile the data.
Filed under Blogging, Web Site traffic by
The explosion of social media sites in the last few years has changed the way consumers learn about businesses. Let’s face it – today if your business is not a member of Facebook or Yelp, it is likely to be overlooked by many potential consumers. And if your business is without a website, you might as well be non-existent.
Fortunately, most of these popular social media websites are free to use and are a sure way to help you increase your traffic, get a better search engine ranking, build a name for yourself, and promote interactivity while maintaining customer relations.
I compiled a list of 7 popular social media sites that I suggest you look into if you want to market your business on the web more effectively. I have used these to market my own law practice, and the benefits are hard to ignore.
1) Facebook – Facebook is the world's biggest social networking site. The best way to market your business on Facebook is to create a “Fan Page” and encourage your customers to join. This way you can easily notify them when you have updates to share such as specials or important news about your business.
2) Yelp – Yelp is one of the most popular review sites for local businesses written by customers. It is important to have your local business reviewed on Yelp, as these reviews are used by customers to make decisions on what businesses are the best for them.
3) Twitter – Twitter is a “micro-blogging” social networking site where members send each other short messages and status updates. It is gaining popularity by the minute. Members can see what other members are “tweeting about,” follow these other members if they find their “tweets” interesting, and share their own messages on this micro-blogging platform.
4) YouTube – YouTube is the number one video-sharing website where members can share and comment on each other’s videos. You Tube can be used to establish yourself as an expert in your industry by creating “how-to” videos that show your specialization. To direct traffic to your website, you can even link the videos you upload to your website.
5) LinkedIn – LinkedIn is the most popular business-oriented social networking site with over 400,000 registered users. This is a great website to find potential business partners as well as customers who may be interested in what your business has to offer.
6) Digg – Digg is a popular news-sharing website where members post links to their favorite news article and make comments. If you receive a good rating on an article that includes a link to your site, it will result in a large increase in your traffic.
7) Delicious – Delicious is a popular bookmarking site in which members save links to their favorite websites or articles and share them with other people. When members write comments, it links to their personal profile where they can include a link to their website. The more comments you write, the more you promote your site, resulting in increased traffic.
By joining these sites, you will be able to introduce yourself to new customers and learn more about what consumers are looking for. You can also potentially build a network of loyal customers who may be likely spread the word about your business in various locations all over the Internet. As you may know, word-of-mouth advertising from a trusted source is the most effective type of advertising.
Filed under Marketing resources, Public Relations, social networking by
*The following is a guest post by Stacey Cavanagh, an online marketer with Tecmark SEO Manchester.
Whatever our reasons for blogging – whether it be for hobby, to give advice, or a way of earning an income – we all need one core thing in order for our blogs to succeed: readers. Without them, what’s the point? Twitter is a potential source of massive numbers of new readers, based on them seeing links to your blog from other members. But how can you get people to Tweet
links to your blog? Quite simply, it all comes down to whether or not your readers feel that your content is worth passing on to people they know. Creating a Tweet-worthy post means you essentially have to give something to your readers, whether this is new information, a good old fashioned laugh, or a talking point. Here are a few hints on creating a blog post that’s worth Tweeting.
Give it a Good Title
The title is the first thing your regular readers will see. If your article is a witty one, make your title witty. If it’s going to tell your readers something new, make sure they know through the title that by reading it they’ll get some information. Include a word or two that gives a clear indication of what it’s all about. Take this post’s title, for example. The post is about writing blog posts that people will want to share on Twitter. The title gives an indication of this. However, an overly long title can be off-putting. Keep it snappy.
When Blogging the News, Have Something Special to Say
Plenty of us blog on the news or current events. Or we may blog on issues being covered on a good number of other blogs and sites. That in itself is fine, providing you add a new dimension to it. If you just post a link to another news article on some other site and say “Here, read this,” why would your readers then link to your site? Why would they not just link directly to the original site from which you sourced the story? You need to add a new spin to material like this. Add your own opinion or commentary. Make it more valuable to the reader. There should be something they can gain or find out from your site, whether it’s an opinion or analysis, that they could not gain just from reading the original story.
Unique Content
Whether you’re discussing a news article that’s doing the rounds on millions of sites or you’re writing your own piece completely from your own head, your content should be unique. Having word-for-word copies of something else online will do you no SEO favors and will do your readers no favors. It comes back down to the big, “Why would I share this?” question. Why, if ten sites are showing exactly the same piece, would people share yours? Keeping it unique means that your blog is the only place your regular readers can send new readers to to access that very article.
Be Human
Let your personality shine through in your blog posts. More personable posts are generally more reader friendly, and it’s the more reader friendly of your posts that will receive the most benefit from people passing on your link through Twitter. Being human in your blog lets your readers feel as though they know you to an extent. If they know you and like you, they are more likely to want to share your content with their own contacts. While business blogs obviously require a level of professionalism, you can easily maintain this without being almost sterile about your posts.
Keep to your Niche
It’s something of a pet peeve of mine to go onto blogs I follow almost religiously and find frequent off topic posts. We all wander from topic from time to time. But as an example, I used to follow a blog about personal 
finance. And then over the course of a week the blog author had made 4 separate posts about entirely unrelated items, such as gadget related posts. I wasn’t following his blog for gadget information, and so after the 4th post, I un-followed and was done with it. The people who are most likely to Tweet your posts are your regular readers. They’re regular readers because they’re interested in your subject matter. If you go off topic, you risk losing their interest altogether.
Read Before You Post
Once you’ve completed an article it, read it. And then reread it. Ask yourself, ‘what do my readers gain by reading this?’ Do you give them hints? Do you make them laugh? Do you cause them to stop and think? If you can’t identify anything your readers gain, consider rewriting before posting. There has to be a reason for someone to Tweet your blog post.
As I’ve mentioned already, Twitter is a phenomenal way in which you can reach out and attract new readers. While your own Twitter account is good means of publicizing your posts, you ideally want your readers to feel compelled to share it too, thus extending your network of readers. Taking a bit of time to perfect your posts can grant massive reward in this way.
Filed under Blogging, social networking by
Just the other day, I was in attendance at a meeting with one of my consulting clients, his paid advertising rep, and a rep from his web design vendor. I was there as the content consultant and provider – when I came on board, my client already had established relationships with a web design company and other vendors.
My client (who is the owner of a thriving personal services law firm) expressed his frustration at the lengthy delays in getting sites created and online – he noted that the production of his most recent site has taken almost 6 months. It seems that every revision takes at least a week to get implemented. In fact, I suspect that it was this delay that prompted him to call me – as an attorney I can prepare content about legal topics. By contrast, his web design company was using writers who were not lawyers, nor were they knowledgeable about the legal issues addressed by the web site. As such, they would produce content that contained factual errors, someone from my client's office would review and point out the mistakes, then it would go back to a writer for revision, more mistakes would be made and the process would repeat itself over and over. Because our client's web site was being developed in a proprietary development environment, the web site designer was the only person who could make any updates.
Just a note, by the way, for those of you who want to outsource content about a technical topic or one where unique knowledge is necessary, you will need to be involved in the content creation process – otherwise you will face ongoing frustrations.
During this conversation, the paid advertising rep and I looked at each other and almost simultaneously asked "why are you not using Wordpress to produce this site?
Wordpress, as you may know, is an "open source" blogging platform that is widely used and very flexible. Open source means that there is no cost whatsoever to download the software and there are a plethora of "plug-ins" that add flexibility to the base software's functionality. The site you are now reading is a Wordpress site.
Because it is open source software that has reached critical mass in terms of its use and popularity, the software is regularly updated and upgraded. Anyone is free to suggest proposed changes to the software – the supervising engineers review these suggestions and incorporate the best of them into the production updates. I suspect that for many of the volunteer programmers, a development credit on the Wordpress site would be valuable resume fodder as well as positive publicity within that developer community.
I first started using Wordpress around 2 years ago. At that time, Wordpress was primarily a blogging platform. Since that time, the software has been significantly upgraded to the point where it can function as the backbone to a more traditional looking web site. In fact, I have seen Wordpress used as the structure for a multi-user membership site, a storefront site for selling multiple items and just about any other application you could imagine.
More recently, I have been using Wordpress to create web sites, rather than my previous site authoring tool – a program called NetObjects Fusion. Other common web authoring tools include FrontPage (a Microsoft product that has now been discontinued), and Dreamweaver.More on Wordpress vs. Local Website Authoring Tool – Which Makes More Sense
Filed under Essential applications, Tools by
When you decide to publish a new website or blog, one of your first decisions will have to do with the domain name or URL of the site. If I am not involved from the outset, there may not be much I can do about this decision, although I certainly wish that I could change many of the URL's I see.
In my consulting practice I regularly work with lawyers, although I see the same issues in many businesses. Law firms usually contain the name of the partners, i.e. Engulf, Devour, Cheatham & Howe. A firm like this is likely to choose a URL that reads something like this: www.edch-law.com.
In my view, a URL like edch-law.com is a poor choice. Firstly, it is not something that most people will remember and given the many images and impressions foisted upon each of us every day, it is certainly better to choose an easy to remember name. I have a bankruptcy domain name called "moneylawyer.com" – wouldn't you agree that moneylawyer is much easier to remember and spell than some random series of letters with a dash.More on What Name Should You Choose for Your New Website or Blog?
Filed under Domain names, Keyword research, Search engine optimization by
Peter Cashmore of Mashable.com reports that a spoof email is circulating around the Internet inviting users to connect via Twitter. Instead of containing a link, the spoof asks users to download a zip file which contains a nasty email harvesting worm.
Here is a photo of the fake email:
As Peter notes, this spoof capitalizes on the fact that Twitter has become very well known, meaning that people who don't know much about it might still be inclined to download a file. A legitimate Twitter invite, of course, contains a link to the inviter's Twitter page where you can click to follow or block.
I suspect that some hacker will soon corrupt this process, meaning that like PayPal, you will want to avoid directly clicking a link in an email – instead you will want to head directly to your Twitter account and deal with followers directly from your home base.
Filed under social networking by
Those vacation or other personal photos that you upload to Flickr, SmugMug, Picasa or other picture repository sites may not remain private. England's Guardian newspaper reports on its web site that a Missouri family's Christmas card photo ended up in a grocery store ad for a company in Prague, Czech Republic. A family friend of Jeff and Danielle Smith spotted the photo on a billboard advertising the grocery store's home delivery service.
The Smiths, to their credit, have leveraged the free exposure. Danielle Smith's blog, ExtraordinaryMommy.com has received thousands of visitors and hundreds of incoming links (like this one) as this story circulates around the web.
The lesson: do not post any photo onto a photo sharing site that you do not want appearing on a billboard in an eastern European country, and leverage web traffic any way you can!
Filed under social networking by
Often, you will want to include your contact information – including your email – in articles or blog posts that you write. Many programs automatically convert email addresses in to clickable links that open your pre-set email client.
For example, if I am reading an article on a blog about a doctor or lawyer and that professional's email address is hyperlinked, all I need to is click on the link to open my email program (in my case Gmail, but it could be Outlook or Yahoo Mail or any one of several).
By contrast, if the email address is not a link, I will have to manually open my email program, past the address and then send the email.
In my first web sites, I intentionally made my contact email addresses hyperlinks so colleagues and potential clients could easily contact me.
Big mistake.
Spammers use programs called "bots" to troll the web and harvest these clickable email addresses. Within a few months, my firm email address was (and is) essentially useless because of all the junk that arrives daily. I still keep it active because a lot of people over the years use that email address and I am reluctant to close it.
For years I have recommended to my clients that they use email forms (like the one on this site) rather than live, clickable email addresses. If you do not want to devote the real estate to a form on your site, you can put the form on a separate page, then use a link shortening service like tinyurl.com or cli.gs and post that address.
I recently learned about another solution called HideText.net. This free service takes any line of text, such as emails and converts it into a graphic. Here is an example:
This email address a graphic and thus not currently readable by spambots. A nice and elegant tool.
Filed under Decent applications, Email, Stuff you should not do by
