Search Engine Optimization Tips Blog

There is widely touted and available emailing software that can send out millions of emails in one vast ‘blast’. EBooks and articles and courses are being offered by ‘gurus’ who promise that you can gain millions of visitors from email marketing. In fact, over the past three months, there was an explosion of such behaviour as  people became convinced that bulk emailing was a holiday best selling strategy.

Hold your horses. An email ‘blast’ is really not a healthy thing for your website. It will not only affect your server reputation, it could label you as a spammer.  This can adversely affect your overall website health.

Now, we know it may be highly tempting to engage in such practices to drive quick traffic to your website. This method is promoted and marketed under a number of terms including ‘email marketing’, ‘email blasts’ or ‘bulk emailing’. and many believe it is a legitimate marketing campaign you can use to contact people through emails telling them about your products and services. Irrespective of how it presented, it can and will damage your online reputation.

Bottom line: no one likes to get unsolicited mails in their inbox — especially when they are using internet connection that has volume based tariff. Every email you send to them is costing them money, and they will quickly become irritated and shut you down – or worse, report you for spam.  This means that the effect your emails have on people will be exactly the opposite effect than you hoped for your target audience.

Instead of introducing your products and services to them on request and building a good rapport, email blasts are impersonal and annoying, and will only make people resent you. It’s not that your services or products are bad – you are just choosing a pushy, annoying way to promote them!  Sending out mass emails is like dropping into their house at dinnertime without an invitation or crashing their office during a meeting without an appointment.

Once your website and your server are flagged by disgruntled recipients for sending spam mails, you will lose your ranking in the search engines – and maybe even end up getting your website banned. Your server may dump you because you have given the entire server a spammy reputation.

Does this mean never to email people about your services and products? No, it means  you should build an opt-in list of people who have provided their contact information and agreed to receive your emails or news letters. As they have opted to receive your emails, they cannot complain about spam mails. Even in these cases, however, there are certain guidelines to be followed to ensure your marketing mails comply with local laws and regulations!  Do your homework, be respectful, and don’t spam – then you can market your services safely through email marketing without getting your site banned or your server blacklisted.

Beware! Selling links is shady, shady territory, and you can sink yourself fast by following black hat tactics!

The world of SEO is a dangerous place know only a tiny bit about! You can read a few blog posts, understand the basics and go to work on your website. The mistakes that can be made in this situation are many, especially in the world of link exchanges. Generally speaking, the more relevant inbound links a website has, the better its ranking will be.

Unfortunately, some people have twisted this by leaving out the all important word ‘relevant’  and the  link-exchange industry has boomed. Link exchanges are not as simple or straightforward as they appear.

A link is a nod of approval between websites. When you link your site to another website, search engines count it as a recommendation of that site by you.  Page rank is calculated from a complicated algorithm ; it boils down to high is good. If you spend lots of time on your website adding pages and pages of unique keyword rich content, it is updated frequently, and other high-page-rank sites link to you, then Google is going to rate your site higher as far as PageRank goes, and you’ll probably rank well for SERPs as well assuming you’ve done your keyword targeting properly.

How do you get high PageRank?

• Make sure that the site you are linking to has good content that will add value to your own visitors’ experiences. A client should follow a link off your page and not land on a bogus website. If a recommendation by your site leads people to trust your opinion, they’ll come back to you!
• Also be aware if a reciprocal link from this other site will do you any good. Low PageRank sites should only be linked out to in cases of extreme value and relevancy.

Link building should only be undertaken if you understand the ramifications, utilize the tools that are available to you and make sure that your decisions are based on data.

You can be accused of being a link spammer even if you think you haven’t done anything wrong. Watch out for unscrupulous link directories and sites Use the techniques above to make sure you’re posting to relevant sites/directories/ articles/ blogs or wherever you choose to submit your content and links.

Linking software creators claim that you can get thousands of back links with the press of a button or for only “$89″. The only way to get good quality back links is to do the research yourself and hand-submit every single link, or sue an SEO firm that does the work manually and gives you a list of where your links are coming from and the PR of each site.

If you avoid these two traps, you’ll be well on your way to getting the links you need to get your website placed higher in search results and, as a result, generate more sales.

You can’t simply start using advertising online without setting some boundaries concerning words you do NOT want your ads to appear for.

Keyword targeting

When you look into advertising your website online, you will probably be dealing with one of the major search engine companies and their specialized ad targeted programs. You’ll be paying for every time your ad is shown or clicked on, depending on your plan. The most common forms involve purchasing specific keywords that you wish your ad to appear in response to.

If you wish to market a particular product, such as a natural cure for sinusitis, you will want to target words like sinusitis cure, sinus remedy, etc. However, perhaps you don’t want people feeding the cure to their children for legal reasons, so exclude words such as ‘kids cold’  ‘kid sinus infection’, baby cold, etc. Once you start to receive response to your ads you can refine your keyword list to maximize your traffic.

Think about how consumers search when choosing your keywords. Ask yourself what you would type in if you were searching for a product like the one you sell. begin by writing down a list of all the different categories your product could fit into, and then add sales words like best, natural, organic, favorite, cheap and affordable.

Geo-targeting is also a good idea if you have a physical store location and want to advertise it as well. Simply add  keywords such as NY, Seattle, South Side or the Bay area to your list.

One of the most common ways to pay for advertising is based on CPM, or ‘cost-per-thousand impressions’. (M is the Roman numeral for a thousand) An impression is the showing of your ad in response to a searcher using one or more of the keywords you specified. A rate of $30 CPM would mean you are charged $30 for every thousand times your ad is shown. Getting the most sales out of your impressions is what keyword targeting is all about. (Some also use pay per click, which we will deal with in the next blog post as the approach is slightly different- you don’t pay every time it’s shown, but every time it is clicked on.)

How Negative Keywords can be a Positive for Your Business

Negative (or excluded) keywords are a way for website owners to prevent their site from showing up on keyword searches. Remember, many websites still pay CPM instead of pay per click, meaning they are charged for advertising based on how many times their ad appears in response to searches by consumers.

If you run a website that sells exclusively women’s shoes, you probably want your ad to pop up in responses to searches that include combinations of the keywords shoes, boots, women, female, and a multitude of variations.

But what if some-one runs a search for ‘men’s shoes’? If your ad pops every time shoes is input, this search will produce your ad as well. You will pay for these views, and have a slim to none chance of making a sale.

Good news, though – you can exclude certain keywords, which will help you narrow your audience to those who are interested in your product. By making men, men’s, male, masculine and other variations of the word ‘negative’ for appearances of your ads on search, you can reduce the number of wasted views considerably. (While Google uses the term ‘negative’ for these keywords, Yahoo refers to them as ‘excluded’. These mean the same thing).

Now you will still get views from consumers searching for shoes, women’s shoes, and woman’s boots, but any search with the word men or a variation thereof will not show your ad. This should increase your conversion rate and ROI substantially.

As always,  trial and error will be the norm until you figure out the proper balance of keywords to include or exclude so you get the most out of your advertising budget.

You always want to improve your site, but you should be aware that some changes can impact your ratings and be careful.

So, what exactly will impact your website if you start making changes to site content, or structure?  Well, making changes in the site’s structure, or changing around the content of the site too often, can and will impact the site’s ranking, since every change you make prompts Google to reassess your ranking.

When you are building  your site and first getting it indexed, this is a good thing.  Google stores a copy of your website on its server; and whenever there is a change in the structure, content or any other aspect of the site, Google will swiftly detect the change.

Once the change is popping up on their radar, Google will recalculate your ranking based on the new pages it has indexed. If they like the changes, your ranking might go up; if they feel you diminished the value of your site,  it might go down. Expecting nothing at all to happen is naive, though- there will usually be some ramification, Your job is to ensure all changes make a positive difference, since the probability that your ranking will be completely unaffected is low.

If you change the structure of your website sand significantly reduce the amount of content, or switch to flash pages so there is very little text content left, you may be in trouble.

Likewise, if you have added more content that is not optimized, you have effectiveness dragged down the overall keyword density of your content. This  will often adversely effect your ranking.  In the same vein, if you tamper with you web design, frequently make changes and shift around the structure of your links on a regular basis, you you culsd also harm your web rankings.

Of course, not all change is negative! If you have made changes to the text and structure of your web page that improves them, you should see a corresponding  improvement in your site ranking.

Also, when you make a change to your website, remember that Google indexing happens regularly Depending on the spacing of your improvements, chnages can reflect quickly or slowly. If your site is indexed once a month, you should try to make changes in batches, so the changes all fall before the indexing and will be reflected in a fell swoop.

If you keep making changes in fist and starts, it will amke your site look erratic and will end up harming your ranking more than anything else. Attempt to keep original content and site structure intact. Even popular news sites have a set pattern of displaying data; you’ll notice that only their content changes on a daily basi. They know to control variables.

When revamping your site, keep in mind – plan ahead to get all changes done before the next indexing, and ensure that all changes come off as genuine improvements to get better rankings

What do you do when you kind of end up with links you’d rather not have on your site, but can’t really get rid of? You know what I’m talking about. You set up your site, hit all you buddies and relatives up for links, and now those non-relevant, off topic, zero PageRank links from blogs and little personal sites are dragging you down.

We’ve talked a lot about what sites to link to, what backlinks will be worth the most,  and how to avoid links that will hurt you. But what if you jumped into link building the wrong way when you first set up your site, and you have some links that are sitting there like an elephant in the room?

Good news! You don’t have to hurt feelings or make enemies by ditching those links. You can instead smoothly direct search engine spiders to discount links, pages and even whole directories if needed. Do try to spend time fixing the problems as soon as possible, but don’t be afraid to block crawlers from indexing stuff they don’t need to see. ‘Disallow’, ‘no-index’ and ‘no-follow’ are useful tools to keep ‘bad links’ or junk pages from hurting you so much.  Eventually you’ll have to clean house, but if you are short on man-hours this is a temporary fix.

Add a ‘no-follow’ attribute to ‘bad’ links and ‘disallow’ spiders to access those awful pages. You can add a no-follow to a link simply by adding it to the HTML like this:

You can put a page disallow in your root folder added to the robots.txt file.

User-agent: *

Disallow: /bad-page/keep/out.html

You should also link very specifically to each page for the highest relevance. Categorizing your links carefully and matching them to the best pages in your site will help strengthen your website from within – you need strong internial site architecture to be competitive in a consumer satisfaction driven environment!

As for those reciprocal links from family and friends, consider a ‘Friends of (your sitename)’ page,  and have the less relevant links listed there. You can no-follow each link, or simply disallow the whole page. This also lends a little extra ‘testimonial’ style to your site for visitors as well; it’s like seeing your ‘followers’ . Just another step to the socialization of the web!

 Subscribe in a reader

• Email Subscription by Feedburner