Search Engine Optimization Tips Blog

As a webmaster or as a business owner with a website you might like to know how building online trust is important for your website to get good ranking. It is not an area that is normally considered by SEO companies nor by website owners. However, if you want to have an edge over your competitors, you must be armed with every little advantage that you can get.

Right from day one you must make efforts to build your website’s trust so that search engine can rank and rate you accordingly. It is very difficult for search engines to consider all the websites online equally, they use various parameters to trust a site. One of the factors that is consider to help in building trust is your domain age. Domains that have been around for a while with good standing are trusted by search engines. Aged domains indicate to search engines that you are not there to spam the internet but you mean serious business. On this count new websites may face problems as they cannot expect the search engines to trust them based on their age.

However, you can deal with this problem by increasing your domain registration duration. If you register your domain for just one year hoping to renew your domain name every year, then you need to rethink this approach and try to get your domain registered for a longer period. If you register your domain just for one year, search engines do not have enough reason to trust you. On the other hand if you register your domain for 10 years you are more likely to win the trust of the search engines. Longer domain registration will tell the search engines that you are not here to just spam and close out once you are done. However, there is no official word on this from any of the search engines. This is just an observation by SEO experts and their industry knowledge. This is more of a common sense view. You will certainly not lose anything by registering your domain for multiple years. You will lock the price to today’s value, which will be of advantage to you cost wise. If the domain registration period has to be taken in to consideration by the search engines then you will lose out unnecessarily. On this factor, you actually could have saved yourself and enjoyed the trust.

The next important factor is do not link your site to other websites that do not have good standing just because you are getting your permanent link. If the site that you are linking is questionable then your site too will have problems in winning the trust of the search engines. So, to whom you are linking your website is more important than who is linking to you when it comes to building trust.

At one time or the other in the history of our website, we will need to use PPC campaigns to bolster our traffic. Though organic SEO is the best way to drive traffic, occasionally we will need to tap the potential of PPC campaigns as well to enhance our website’s online performance. Remember when you are using your PPC campaign you are spending money of every little click you get out of your ad irrespective of the fact whether that click is converting into a sale or not. If each click is of high value then you might like to have decent conversion ratio to ensure some reasonable ROI for your business.

Most of the times we enthusiastically set up our PPC campaign and check every morning for the total number of clicks that our ads received and start our day happily without really calculating what kind of conversions we have got through those leads. Soon we even forget about our campaign as our credit card is billed every month automatically. This can be one of the costliest marketing mistakes that you can make. When you set up your PPC campaign, you need to have a system in place to ensure that the performance of your ads are tracked. You should have your own PPC goals over a period of time after careful study you will be able to assess the performance of your PPC campaign. To acquire this level of understanding you need to spend time daily to check the statistics and interpret them prudently. This may be highly time consuming and not all of us have the luxury of having that kind of time to spare.

Moreover, we need to be proficient enough to interpret the numbers. Our goal should be to close the gulf between the click through rates and the conversions. We need to constantly optimize our campaigns to get the maximum results. Therefore, it is better to take advantage of the skills of PPC experts in this field. By hiring a reliable PPC management service, we can have our PPC campaign regularly monitored and make the required changes to improve the performance. We do not have to do anything except to find the right service provider. Once you sign up with a PPC management service, they will take care of everything. This will be a worthwhile investment that you will make on your website’s online promotion. Some people who consider that this is an unnecessary expense and try to save on this investment end up losing a lot of money month after month on clicks that do not really matter. So hire PPC campaign management service and make your PPC campaigns bring the desired ROI.

When you use XHTML and CSS your web page’s readability will be enhanced. Search engine spiders will be able to parse through your web pages much more easily. Using XHTML and CSS will help you get good ration on content vs code. If your pages have too much of coding and the effective content very little in your web pages then you may have problems with your search engine ranking. Search engine spiders like web pages that maintain good code and content ratio in the web pages.

If your web pages have too much of coding, then the file size too will exceed. When the files are too huge then the loading time will increase. Search engines love fast loading web pages as opposed to heavily laden websites. All these are just basics that we need to take in to consideration and using XHTML and CSS will help us in getting better web pages in terms of content to code ratio and in term of page loading time.
When you set out to optimize your pages first make sure the entire page and the codes can be parsed by the search engines. By throwing in too much of coding in the beginning the spiders will not be able to readily categorize your web page on any of the common categories. Different search engines will have different levels of tolerance to the content to code ratio issues. To be on the safest site, it is better to have your coding separated into your CSS files. This will leave your pages neat with the active content.

The above approach will leave your pages more organized and the search engines will be able to drill down to the end of the page and index the entire content. If you have all the codes on top, then the spiders will index your pages only partially.

XHTML clearly defines the elements of your web page for instance, using the h1 and h2 tags will tell the spiders that it is the title of the page rather than using just HTML formatting to make the text look like the title. You can define how exactly your title or the h1 line will look in your css file. This is just one aspect of your web page. If you similarly remove all the other elements using XHTML and css stylesheet, your page will look clean and uncluttered.

You can also use your CSS styling to create some special effects such as rollovers while retaining lower file size. You should make use of every little help that you can get to achieve your ranking in the search engines. You cannot afford to miss the finer details because these finer details will cost you a great deal.

Finding good, free links is the chore every webmaster agonizes over. Simply asking works sometimes, but not for the huge authority sites that really count! So what should you do? Yopy your competitors and try the same places they have links from? Or strike out on your own and find your own good sources?

A possible danger you encounter by following others is also that you end up with a basic set of sites all linking to the same people and here comes Google’s anti-spam team. Realtors networks have been wiped out, then ticketing network, al because they inadvertently used the same sites to link from.

Lateral, creative thinking is needed to get strong editorial links. A great strategy is to do things offline that you know will have some effect online. You can still offer products to bloggers to review - just be careful and don’t abuse this old and tested method! First, identify the regular bloggers in your vertical, then offer them something to review for your own market research purposes. Make sure to let them know you aren’t ‘payiong’ or ‘bribing’ them for a good review - you want brutal honesty in their review.

Do NOT ask for a link when you ask for the review. That way any links will be all on their side, adn you are not required to ‘no-follow’ them - plus, reverse psychology comes into play. Thsi sounds kind of at cross purposes from your real needs and wants, but the actual result will be that they review your product, they  generally try and be nice with constructive feedback (free tips on how to improve! no need to hire a consulting team!) - and often they fill out space by covering your other products.

On the other hand, if you go in asking for a link you’re more likely to get a blah post with a single link, because the blogger doesn’t think you really like their blog or style so why bother - you just want a link! Blogging works well in many B2C and B2B verticals to boost your profile.

Guess where the biggest and most powerful links come from? You get them from traditional media. Being newsworthy is the number one most powerful link building method there is, and this concept should heavily impact your lead generation process.

All the links won’t be keyword targeted - but quality can be through the roof when it comes to authority. Consider running your own news aggregator, and getting others to link to yo9u. Tie in social networks, and maybe you’ll go viral!

Twitter is the exploding social network everyone is - well, tweeting about! How effective is it, really? Is Twitter actually a tool to be taken seriously?

The idea behind Twitter is that less is more - and boy, is less more! When it comes to the enormous followings some individuals and companies have, the one hundred and forty character count limit makes brevity a virtue. Recently, internet marketers and SEOs have been discovering even more ways the power of a tweet can help their business.

Twitter asks ‘what are you doing right now’ - but really, no-one wants to hear you just took your Metamucil or are going out for a jog. The people who know what and when to post present them selves as highly interesting on twitter, and can develop a following of thousands of people who actively track what they say.

 Ashton and Demi, Oprah, Ellen and various other celebshave cracked the Twitter barrioer, nearly crashing the social app at times, as when Ashtone requested an ‘I love you’ sent to his wife from all his followers.

The four secrets to marketing with Twitter are as follows:

1. Seriously, we said it above, and will repeat it - don’t post everything you do! Stick with just the things that are interesting to others, and stuff you want others to see. News you want to spread the word about, info about an event that is happening, an alert for an offer you are presenting – things that will benefit and not bore your followers are best! Ask the question “is this beneficial information for my followers?” and don’t post if the answer isn’t yes.

2. Search twitter for others who have similar interests, or that you find fascinating, and follow them. When you follow another Twitterer, everything they post will go into your personal timeline. Youc an also retweet stuff they tweet and get it out to your own followers.  

3. Search for stuff posted on twitter through the free website Quotably. This site will show tweets in conversation mode and you can reply to people by logging in with your Twitter details.

4. Use a twitter agent and keep your essential twitter information close to hand and also plug your other social networks into Twitter - many have plugins that allow you to Tweet really important stuff automatically. The almighty Tweet is a powerful tool, and you can learn how to use it to develop your own contacts and business.

 Subscribe in a reader

• Email Subscription by Feedburner