Search Engine Optimization Tips Blog

Yesterday we compared SEO to a multiplayer game. Some of the other players can actually be your friends, if you play your cards right.

One of the best ways to build a large group of online contacts is to become a social butterfly. Find some highly respected forums that concentrate on your niche or field, and start chiming in – not too much too soon, but wait until you can add a relevant, pithy comment and wait for the nod of recognition. If you can be among the first commenter’s on a particularly good blog, you can start to get noticed.

Forums are a great place to spread your expertise. Make yourself known by offering sage advice, and helping other with things like finding links or troubleshooting problems. Once you become known for being a helping hand, people will start to pass your name around (pick a decent online handle, please, no-one will take ‘Blue Elf Warrior 7204’ seriously!!)

Start frequenting sites like Yahoo Answers, and providing solid helpful advice on topics related to your site. You can rack up quite a following, and eventually lure people to your site as you build up a reputation for expertise. There are several sites like this that will allow you to become an expert.

Write articles for publication in places like Knol, and various article directories. This is one of the fastest ways to build up an ’expert’ standing, and yields bonuses like Google Rankings and links back to your site of you search engine optimize properly.

Consider investing in an auto responder program, and preparing a newsletter for your clients with tips and helpful advice. You can get a lot of people willing to sign up for free stuff, and then you will be keeping yourself and your site at the front of people’s minds. Anything that gets them to come back for another visit is a good thing. Around the holidays, you can offer them a special discount and encourage them to indulge themselves by purchasing that special something you know they have been eying.

Don’t forget to look into affiliate programs, or better yet, start your own affiliate. This can be as simple as writing an eBook that spells out some of your tips. You can send out teasers through the auto responder to get people interested, and pre-sell it a week or so in advance.

It’s not hard to make friends that can refer others to you and even become customers themselves. You just have to figure out where the right place and when the right time is, and show up!

All of us supply our SEO firms with hundreds of keywords and keyword phrases. This clearly shows that how desperate we are to make sure not to let any traffic slip through missed out keywords. However, when we try to optimize our website for too many keywords, the overall effect of our SEO gets watered down. Ultimately, it stops bearing the results it should. On the other hand we should narrow down our keywords to the most crucial ones to ensure better results. How do we narrow down our keywords list because all of them look important how will we know the keyword phrase that people are likely to use. Besides that people from different geographic locations have different search patterns how do we the ones that we should keep and the ones to be knocked off.

We need to first of all analyze our own approach to keyword analysis. Do you use a keyword generation tool that spits out hundreds of keyword options that confuse us or do you sit with your business model trying to coin the keywords by becoming a user yourself? You are more likely to get better results if you avoid keyword generation tools because these tools tries to create the keyword phrases based on the preset formula that is fed into the program and gives combinations various keywords most of which are insensible phrases. So to avoid making your website copy look awkward, go the manual way.

You can target up to 3 keyword phrases falling under the main category and up to 3 more secondary phrases that are associated with the main keywords per page. If you increase this count then you are going to water down the effects. So when you are short listing the keywords first come up with a broader list by becoming the user yourself. Secondly, add to the list the keywords which you think the users should be actually using to search your services. Some of them may be technical terms and most users will not be using the technical terms so you must provide multiple options for such keywords. If your website is already online you might take a peek at the keywords that people are actually using to visit your site in the server control panel. You need to focus on those keywords and those are the keywords that are most likely used by other users too. So this should serve as the starting point if you are revamping your sites SEO.

After coming up with the initial list, you can add modifiers or qualifiers that will make your keyword phrase more targeted. However, this will make your keyword phrases longer. Sometimes these modifiers can be adjectives such as cheap, affordable etc., whereas at other situations it will be geographic qualifiers.  Geographic qualifiers are much more powerful than adjective qualifiers. After coming up with the list you can use free tools from Google and overture to see how frequently those terms are used in the search engines and based on the frequency you can give priority to the keywords. You should be constantly reviewing your priority list to ensure that your optimization efforts match the current trends.

I can’t believe I am going to use a video game comparison here, but SEO is exactly like a MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game). There are a hundred different players in each of the many sections of the game at one time, and you can move up levels and become a wizard!

There are many similarities between SEO and such a game. You have the playing arena, which includes basically the whole world. You have your character, (your website) who is a good guy struggling both against the forces of evil (black hatters) and all the other good guys trying to fight their way to the top of the pack (the # 1 spot on Google).

You can use your weapons (content, links) to climb up the levels (the SERPs). You can find special help along the way in the form of other secondary characters (bloggers, SEO experts, fans) and useful tools (keywords, deep links, advertising).

The main goal is to get to the top of the heap and stay there, so you have to keep learning new skills (SEO tactics), replenishing your life force (PageRank) and increasing your band of followers (customers). If you succeed, you win the most points (conversions) and your player ID goes to the top of the list!

Gamers should make great SEOs. They have the skills and the know-how, they just have to apply it in a slightly different setting. We could learn a lot from gamers’ dogged determination, and the willingness to retry a level over and over again refining their skills until they achieve victory.

As SEOs we have to have the same determination and resolution or we will be beaten out by some assassin kid in Akron who only sleeps two hours a night and subsists on chips and soda. (Wait, I just described my kid brother.) Most of the best SEOs are the ones who learn from their mistakes, try again and ask for help when necessary.

Fortunately, if you get stuck at the door to the fourth chamber of the palace in the sixteenth level, a code cheat book exists to tell you where the magic key is. Your SEO can walk you through the steps needed to chat up the Wizard hiding in his invisibility cloak outside the third chamber and trick him into giving up the key. See how simple it all is?

When you are trying to decide where to cut costs on your site, SEO is often the first place that gets the ax, with advertising a close second. It’s sad, because these are the two things that could effectively save your site.

Think about it. When the economy gets bad, does everyone stop buying puppy coats? No. Just the people who can’t afford them. There are still people buying plenty of puppy coats – in fact, they are probably buying puppy coats that cost ten times as much as the ones you usually sell.

Perhaps you just need to change your demographic, start targeting the higher classes. Upgrade your stock – not too much – upgrade the price – a lot – and start looking for bigger fish to fry.

Anyone who has done a lot of internet marketing knows to track the trends and control the ad spend. You can try to hit the hot markets, where the rich forty something’s with surrogate children troll for outfits for their little poochy poos.

If you could advertise to hit those markets, move the operation virtually uptown and start making a 500% profit on your stock, imagine what that could do to your bottom line?

OK, so that is a little tongue in cheek, but specializing for a niche market isn’t always a bad thing. Even if you have a generic type product, find a way to sell it to a niche demographic – single moms in the rural communities, business execs with disabilities, anything!

And do not, do NOT give up on SEO. SEO can make the difference between reaching ten thousands consumers of whom all but ten could care less or reaching fifty almost guaranteed conversions. Do the math. Makes sense, doesn’t it?

SEO is simply the easiest way to target your customers by getting both your site, your pages, your articles, press releases and blog ranking high on Google, and enabling your ads to be displayed appropriately. The amount of time and money you spend on SEO could truly mean the difference between success and failure, and you shouldn’t give up on it when times get hard but should figure out how to afford a booster shot!

If you can learn about SEO and do some of it yourself, great. If not, at east learn enough to be able to monitor whet your chosen company is doing for you – you don’t want to be paying out for outdated techniques, or worse, black hat methods that show initial success but leave you languishing in Google limbo forever.

SEO will never sink your site if done properly, and might just prove to be a life raft to carry you to safety.

Some of the websites that we see online make us wonder how thoughtless they have been with regard to SEO while developing their website. You do not need to be an SEO expert in identifying some of these websites that we come across online so often. The first thing that gets our attention is the absence of textual content in the home page. The entire homepage will be filled with blocks of graphics and images with skimpy lines of content. Added to that it will have a heavy Flash header that takes over 60 seconds to download the entire header.

Such a homepage may be visually pleasing. Website owners try to come up with captivating layouts so as to showcase their services and not all of them are SEO savvies and little do they know about the role of good keyword rich content in websites. Most companies keep SEO in the last leg of their project. If they involve the SEO company from the initial stages of their website development, they will be able to develop an SEO friendly website and certainly they will have some decent content in their homepage that will help their search engine ranking to a great extent.

Homepage is the gateway for the search engine spiders and hence it goes without saying that you need some keyword rich content in the homepage. The entire optimization effort should be supported by rich content. You need to have a minimum of 200 words content in your homepage that describes succinctly about your services and including all the major services as keywords. So your website will become more relevant to the searches made.

Some companies though have enough content in the homepage; it may not be SEO friendly. They use copywriters who do not have any SEO knowledge and fill their pages with content pertinent to their services and after the completion of the development of the entire website they will approach their SEO company. The SEO firm will review the website and one of the areas they suggest changes would be the content. When such changes are incorporated and keywords inserted, the text will lose its natural flavor and make an awkward reading. All these issues can be overcome if the copywriter you hire has some SEO knowledge so as to ensure that you get it done right the first time.

Most of the Ecommerce sites are anemic in terms of content because they fill the home page with the list of categories and a number of hosting companies too make this mistake by filling their homepage with graphic elements that announce the offers and package details.

If you do not have relevant content in the home page, then it does not give enough reason for the search engines to present your website for a search that is made. If your website is one such website whose homepage is content anemic, then it is high time that you do something about it.

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