5 On Page #SEO Tips You Might Not Know

Here are 5 on page SEO tips that you might not know…

1. Place your keywords at the front of your title tag. 

Not only do search engines consider the title tag to be one of the most important places to identify your keywords, research has shown that placing your target keywords at the beginning of your page title can also help your page rank higher in the search results.

2. “Nofollow” unimportant links.

Every time you link to another page, whether it’s on or away from your site, you’re passing “pagerank”. Consider pagerank like “SEO points”. When you link to a Wikipedia article, for example, unless you add “rel=nofollow” to that link, you’re giving that page some of your pagerank for free. Get into the habit of passing pagerank only to pages on your site that you want to rank in the search results. Also be sure to use textual links that contain your keyword.

3. Avoid excessive linking on a given page.

The pagerank that a given page passes on through it’s links is divided by the number of dofollow links on that page. If you have a blog footer that links to 50 other pages on your website, you’ll dilute your pagerank almost immediately. Stay away from those “mega footers” that contain links all over your site. The same goes for blog sidebars. If you must have them, place them inside iFrames. When styled correctly, the search engines won’t consider those links while it looks exactly the same to your visitors.

4. Use strong tags for keywords instead of bold tags.

Most people think they’re the same thing but they are not. Bold tags are simply esthetic. They are meant to highlight text for the user. While strong tags do that as well, they also tell search engines that those words or phrases are more important than others.

5. Make good use of your keywords within the first 200 words of your page.

The search engines are getting smarter. One of the things they are starting to do is place more relevance on the content found at the beginning of the page. If you think about it, it makes perfect sense. Content above the page fold is generally more important and thus should carry more weight. That doesn’t mean stuff your keywords in the first 200 words. That’s a quick route to an SEO penalty. Just make sure your keywords are used prominently but naturally towards the top of your page.

While this is not an all-inclusive list. They are things I see done incorrectly more often than not. 

Like what you've read? Comment and let me know what else your interested in reading. I take comments VERY seriously and want to write about, well, what people want to read about in the digital space.

4 SEO Marketing Strategies for New Websites

1. Use Web Analytics From Day 

One Web analytics are a powerful tool for tracking and measuring traffic to your website. Many companies will have someone who manages web analytics over time and makes sure that your content marketing efforts are indeed pushing traffic to your site. However, it is important to have analytics in place from the very start in order to effectively track and understand your SEO ranking. Make sure to set some clear goals about what you’d like to accomplish and the measures you intend to use to help you do so. This will make it much easier for you to implement software to help you understand which of your strategies are actually working and which ones might not be that productive. There are many helpful tools that can help you measure analytics, such as Google Analytics, Coremetrics, Websphere, Hubspot and Raven Tools. It’s important to pay attention to certain components of these analytics, such as which keywords are driving traffic to your site, where organic traffic is coming from, what traffic is being driven by blogs, etc.

2. Avoid writing content for SEO purposes 

Many companies are tempted to create keyword-heavy blogs that fill their site up with keywords and phrases that will increase their search rankings, but these can often be clumsy and difficult to read. Your clients come to your site in search of useful, relevant information and if they find lots of meaningless content, that will only damage your reputation, and over time, your rankings. Develop a reputation for offering unique and interesting content that your users will actually find compelling, i.e. write to benefit your target audience, not for SEO purposes. When it fits, you should include the keywords you have researched that drive traffic to your site. Start a blog and keep it filled with smart, important and timely info – you’ll soon develop a following and a great reputation for being a thought-leader in your industry.

3. Take advantage of page titles and meta descriptions 

Page titles and meta descriptions are great opportunities to help you optimize your search rankings. Surprisingly, many web design companies, and therefore their clients skip this valuable step. 

Important: just because Google doesn't use meta data in their algorithm today doesn't mean they never will again! Plus, Bing, ask.com and other search engines still use the data. 

Page titles are an incredibly important and often underused opportunity to boost rankings. Page titles have to be 70 characters or less and should make sure that the words you are trying to rank for are listed here. For example, if you want to rank for keywords related to a pet store, make sure to title each page with targeted relevant words such as “organic dog food”  or “cat toys”, etc. Make sure that the keyword that you are using is hyper-relevant to the content on that page. Also, keep the titles short as longer ones also won’t rank as highly in searches. Meta descriptions are the descriptions that appear below a result in a search query. They must be 150 characters or less and they should offer a concise, informative blurb about exactly what people can expect to find on your site. If the meta description includes the keyword that was searched, it will appear in bold in the result.

4. Plan to expand 

Search engines are getting better and better at determining the “quality” of a website based on the value of its content. The more value your content actually has for your customers, the higher it will appear in search engines – this means that you want to fill your site with information that provides valuable insights that people will want to read and share. From day one you need to have a plan that includes the type of content you plan to produce, how often you will produce it, where it will be placed, how it will be shared, and how your success will be measured. Including a continuing content plan will save you time and money by ensuring that any needed elements (e.g. a blog, social media inclusion on the website, etc.) are accounted for and integrated from day one. SEO trends are leaning toward developing content that is informative, concise and that encourages people to share. By keeping a close eye on analytics, you can better understand what content is keeping your customers interested and engaged. Content that has more of a purpose than boosting SEO or driving a sale will, over time, contribute to both of those goals. 

Follow these tips and you’ll have your new website ranking higher in searches from the start!

Like what you've read? Comment and let me know what else your interested in reading. I take comments VERY seriously and want to write about, well, what people want to read about in the digital space.

5 Basic SEO Strategies You Can Implement...Fairly Easily

1. SEO Links

It used to be that getting backlinks to high-ranking sites was the magic bullet for SEO. Now, not so much. Sure, backlinks still help traffic and Earning backlinks should still be part of your strategy, but buying, swapping, or other tactics should not be part of a sound SEO strategy for getting found online.

Instead, we now talk about content marketing as the magic bullet. Google, in its efforts to give searchers exactly what they were searching for, finally realized what the rest of us already knew — content is king. When I search online, I don’t want some spammy article full of black-hat SEO tricks, like buying backlinks, I want answers to my query. So, providing fresh, valuable content on a consistent basis is the best SEO strategy for getting found online.

2. Google authorship

You wouldn’t BELIEVE the number of folks who figured they didn’t have time to spend on Google+ or debated whether Google+ would fail. It’s GOOGLE — You can’t ignore the company’s social media platform when they account for 60-80% of your website traffic!!!! And, all those +1′s (the Google+ equivalent of a “Like”) add to better SERPs.

Getting Google authorship used to be kinda hard — you had to insert a piece of Javascript into your pages identifying the Google+ account for the author. Now, it’s much easier. Just create a Google+ account if you don’t already have one. Then, go to this link to associate your profile with your website. Some SEO plugins (for WordPress) also take care of this task for you. Don’t worry if you don’t see results right away — adding your image to posts you’ve written — it takes a little while for this to populate.

3. Canonical URL

Canonical URLs are a way of specifying links to your content when you have several ways to reach a particular piece of content. The example used in the linked post is one where there are multiple ways (URLs) to reach the same product. But, this can also happen with other types of content. For instance, some analytics tracking software requires a tracking code in your posts and this can create duplicate content when a piece of content is shared multiple times with slight variations in the URL for tracking. And, Google now punishes duplicate content pretty severely. Using a canonical URL reduces the chance the Google Bot will find you guilty of posting duplicate content in these situations. Again, many SEO plugins resolve this problem for you by letting you designate the canonical URL.

4. Microdata and schema

In the old days, you placed keywords in your metatags so search engines knew what your page was about. Black hat SEO junkies would seed their metatags with high-value keywords even when their content didn’t deliver on this promise. Google fixed this a few versions back, but putting appropriate keywords in your metatags is still important as part of your SEO strategy for getting found online.

I use WordPress SEO by Joast to take care of this for me. Just be sure to fill out the necessary information each time you create new content.

5. Responsive design.

Your content should appear in a usable format regardless of whether the users is on a desktop, laptop, tablet, or smartphone. That’s responsive design — where the website automatically detects which screen size you’re using and adapts to the limitations of that screen. As more folks opt for tablets and smartphones, being responsive is important for more than just good SEO strategy for getting found online.

Like what you've read? Comment and let me know what else your interested in reading. I take comments VERY seriously and want to write about, well, what people want to read about in the digital space.

4 SEO Things Everybody Should Be Doing But Nobody Is Taking Seriously

SEO Strategy Tips for the CEO Trying to keep pace with SEO developments can feel like running on a treadmill — no matter how fast you go, you never gain any ground. Nevertheless, there are simple things a company can do to get a competitive SEO advantage.

1. Develop an Internal Writing Team More and more - SEO results hinge on a firm’s ability to create a steady stream of authoritative, useful and relevant content. To meet that standard, writers must have an intimate understanding of the firm’s industry, products, services, customers, sales process and competitors. Agencies and freelancers can contribute, but without in-house writers, effectiveness will be limited. Don’t believe it? Keep in mind you’re hearing this from a writer who works for an agency.

2. Participate in Google Authorship - Not only should a firm have writers, those writers should actively participate in the new Google Authorship program. By participating, onsite and offsite content will gain organic search visibility and, because author thumbnails appear next to links on search engine results pages (SERPs), click-throughs increase, leading to more traffic and leads. Beyond SEO, Authorship enhances credibility and thought leadership status. People are drawn to links that display author thumbnails.

3. Produce Visual Content - Search engine users aren’t just looking for textual content anymore. People have an enormous appetite for visual content: slide presentations, video, infographics, etc. And in most B2B niches, demand far exceeds supply. While the cost of producing visual content can be high, its impact on lead generation and sales can also be high. In the first place, it’s easier to gain prominent visibility in the less crowded arenas of image search and video search. Second, visual content opens up gigantic new search platforms such as YouTube and SlideShare. Third, visual content is extremely persuasive and enables firms to get across complex product and service benefits with tremendous clarity.

4. Don’t Be a “Rank” Amateur - Rankings used to be crucially important for SEO. I don’t think the world has figured out this is no longer the case. Because Google now serves up results based on a user’s geographic location and search history, a web page’s rank varies depending on the user. Also, because of social media sharing and segmented search — video search, news search, etc. — overall visibility is more important than narrow rankings for particular keyword phrases (with some exceptions). But even if rankings could be determined and reliably tracked, they would still not be as important as lead generation in terms of evaluating SEO performance. For instance, if you rank #1 for a keyword that generates zero leads and rank #20 for a keyword that generates 100 leads per month, which would you focus on?

Like what you've read? Comment and let me know what else your interested in reading. I take comments VERY seriously and want to write about, well, what people want to read about in the digital space.

#SEO Drives #Traffic Not #Conversion

Not only should every business today have a website, but every business should have a website that serves a purpose. A business website functions as a sales and promotional tool that provides visitors with all of the information that they need to know about the company and should include some sort of conversion element. For an e-commerce site the visitor is prompted to make a direct purchase. For a lead generation business, the visitor is prompted to fill out a lead form that will send their information to the sales team to follow up or the website functions as a way to get subscribers to a newsletter. For some businesses, the conversion happens offline as the website prompts the visitor to call the business to make an appointment. Of course in order to generate conversions on the site, the site needs to generate visitors which is where SEO comes into play.

The purpose of an SEO campaign is to deliver targeted traffic to a website from the search engines. The process involves keyword research, on site optimization, and ongoing link building, social media activity, and content marketing. Unlike paid search advertising there is no direct cost with the search engines, but SEO certainly isn’t free either. It requires an investment to be paid either to an in house SEO team or an outsourced team that is responsible for ongoing SEO work. If a company is spending money for SEO, they want to make sure that they are getting something out of it.

An accurate way to measure SEO success is whether there is an increase in visitors from the search engines over time. If the trend is upwards, however gradual it might be, that means that the SEO campaign is working. However, sometimes this isn’t good enough for the business/website owner and it doesn’t justify the cost of SEO work. To the business owner, visitors are worthless unless they are converting on the site, and eventually becoming profitable.

This is where a struggle often exists between an SEO team and upper management of the company website. As long as visitors have improved for relevant keywords, the SEO team is doing its job. An SEO team isn’t responsible for the conversion rate of the site, that is determined by outside factors that aren’t SEO related. An SEO professional can control the SEO portion of the online marketing campaign but likely didn’t have a say in how the website navigation was set up and can’t control the level of interest in the product or service that is provided.

When there is a conversion problem with a website it’s often the way that the website is structured or even the business model of the company that could be the issue. On an e-commerce site it should be easy to figure out what the return/exchange policy is. If it’s not listed or if you don’t allow returns, that could be enough reason not to buy. On a lead generation site, do you offer a free consultation? If not, the visitor might opt for a competitor. The best SEO efforts won’t result in conversions on a site that isn’t user friendly or doesn’t have a clear call to action or the pricing appears to be too expensive or too cheap.

SEO is essential in driving visitors to the site, but it’s ultimately the quality of the website and what’s offered that will generate conversions.

Like what you've read? Comment and let me know what else your interested in reading. I take comments VERY seriously and want to write about, well, what people want to read about in the digital space.