Archive for the ‘SEO Tips’ Category
The Ethics of SEO
Tuesday, April 5th, 2005I was reading Eric Ward’s website the other day and I’m really intrigued by what he does and the way he goes about it. He’s pretty well knonw as an SEO/linking guru and on his site he talks about his philosophy of linking, how it should not be automated and should reall invovle a lot of thought and personalization for each inidvidual site.
I am just getting into SEO and I’m trying to study and work at the same time, but I think this is a really interesting site and something all of us should think about as we embark on or carry out search engine optimization. There are so many quick-fix “solutions” out there, but nothing beats the quality of links searched for and built by hand.
His articles run the gamut from the legality of links to how to select sites to send link requests to pay-per-click, RSS and tons more. If you’re an SEO novice like I am or a more seasoned pro, there’s probably something useful for you on this site, even if it’s just a reminder that building links the right way can almost be an art form.
Incorporating Meta Tags
Friday, April 1st, 2005How to Incorporate Meta-Tags Into Your Site
By Tom Baurley
Meta-tags seem to be an item of debate these days. I still recommend using them and will go the extra distance for my web site clients by including them. Meta Tags are those embedded tags within the Header of your html page script. These pages were created to help index your web site and web page information on search engines so that they can be found easily. Some coders say that today, many major search engines overlook the meta-tags. I disagree, because its still and edge that is built into search engine spiders, but certain parameters should be paid attention to such as # of keywords, particular words, and order of importance.
In HTML you don’t end the <meta> tags. In XHTML you have to. The <meta> tags go inbeween the <head> and </head> tags of your html script.
The keywords are a list of keywords you should list in order of importance, that your site should be found under. The description is a description of your site. Author is the author of the web page. A meta refresh is a meta tag you can use to automatically refresh or transfer your page to another page to load. Though be careful of meta refreshes, they are a quick way to get your page removed from a search engine listing.
Examples:
<HEAD>
<TITLE> SEO Updates </TITLE>
<Meta name=”author” content=”Tom Baurley”>
<Meta name=”description” content=”An article about Meta tags and coding them into your html document.”>
<meta name=”keywords” content=”meta name, metaname, meta tag, metatag, keywords, author, descriptions, search engine optimization, SEO, advertising, search engine, search engines, optimization”>
<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”5″ /> <!— Refreshes page every 5 seconds —>
</HEAD>
Good luck!
Three Big Tips for Small Business SEO
Wednesday, March 30th, 2005Business Week published a piece by Sherry Alpert on March 28, 2005 entitled ‘Let Search Engines Do the Walking.’
Here’s an excerpt or two…
Because of cost effectiveness and the ability to target very specific markets, more small businesses are making an online strategy at least one part of their overall campaigns. With that comes a whole different set of challenges, but to get moving in the right direction, ask yourself a couple of easy questions: Are you selling a service or a product? And, more importantly, what is the benefit to people finding you online?
These are the main points:
1. IT’S NOT ABOUT FLASH.
“Do you need eye-popping graphics and Flash animations — and the cost and complexity that come with them? Probably not.” “You want to lace your Web site with as much relevant, informative description about your company and services, so that the search engines will pick it up.”
2. THINK KEYWORDS.
“…People can post a beautifully designed Web site with all the bells and whistles, but unless it draws results on search engines, what will it all that work matter if the masses will never see it? Search engines see only words on your Web site, and keywords are, well, key. Without the right ones in page titles, meta tags, and copy, your Web site will be so far down the list that few will ever find it.”
3. POWER LEADS.
“Let’s say you’re selling a service that is driven by reputation and referrals.” “Many service businesses… get significant leads and new clients from optimized Web sites.” Prospective clients want to see that you have a “substantial” site, or else they might consider you “an amateur or a neophyte with nothing worth posting.”
The conclusion of the article?
For small businesses still reluctant to embrace the Internet — and there are plenty — no matter your industry, you would be well-advised to have a well-designed, well-written, but not overly jazzed-up, Web site. It will bolster your credibility, and just as important, your accessibility. Today, it’s a virtual necessity.
PPC Trax Combats Pay-Per-Click Fraud
Sunday, March 27th, 2005A service that can be used to help limit the fraud that seems to be growing in the Pay-Per-Click world.
New Service Helps Stop Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Click Fraud
PPC Trax released to the general public to help track and stop PPC click fraud, improve PPC advertisers’ conversion rates and improve PPC Return-On-Investment (ROI).
[ClickPress, Mon Feb 21 2005] Chandler, AZ - February 21, 2005 - PPC Trax has announced the beta release of it’s highly anticipated Pay-Per-Click (PPC) tracking and auditing service at http://www.ppctrax.com/ .
With the billion dollar PPC industry still growing at 20% per year, new advertisers come into the market daily. New and long-time PPC advertisers with ad spend budgets from $200 to thousands
per day are being systematically defrauded of their marketing budgets.
Both groups of marketers and advertisers are clamoring for a solution to help prevent affiliates, publishers and competitors from stealing their ad budgets in the growing scheme.
PPC Trax is a monthly service that offers detailed click fraud tracking and reporting starting as low as $29.00 per month.
For a limited time, PPC Trax is offering free 30 day trial accounts to PPC advertisers.
“Clients and colleagues have been begging us to develop a simple to use but highly effective PPC tracking solution that can help detect and stop PPC click fraud as well as serve as the basis for
recovering refunds from pay-per-click search engines and media properties”, said Skip Pratt, General
Manager of PPC Trax.
“We decided to invest the capital and manpower realizing this gap in the market exists and there is a pent-up demand from marketers to make more effective use of their advertising budgets and to
cease fraud from occurring to them” Pratt continued.
Since the vendors who offer pay-per-click advertising have an inherent conflict of interest in preventing click fraud, advertisers are now turning to third party click auditors such as PPC Trax.
PPC marketers and advertisers benefit from using the PPC Trax service by:
- Improving website lead generation and PPC sales conversion rates
- Maximizing profitable PPC ads faster
- Eliminating costly, non-performing PPC advertising
- Developing the perfect advertising mix for their website
- Identifying the most profitable keywords for their PPC campaign
- Eliminating failed PPC ads faster
- Detecting and document PPC click fraud
- Recoup fraudulent PC expenses from PPC search engines
- Identifying PPC competitors who may be draining their PPC budget
- Identifying IP addresses that are frequent clickers or fraudsters
- Monitoring click spikes that indicate fraudsters are on the march
The service offers each subscriber, whether small home-based businesses or large corporations:
- Track any filetype - .php, .html, .htm, .asp, .cfm, .cgi, .pl,
- Generous transactions per URL
- Transactions can be aggregated among URL’s
- IP address capture
- IP address geographic location
- User Agent (browser, bot etc.)
- Date and Time stamp
- Referring URL
- Email alerts
- IP address history
- Custom reports
In addition, PPC Trax is offering “recovery based” click fraud services using it’s online and staff services. PPC Trax shoulders the risk of refunds from the PPC search engine and performs all the labor to prepare and submit refund requests. This service has certain requirements. Contact the company at the website below for more information.
PPC Trax is offering a limited-time, free 30 day PPC click fraud tracking account. The free trial offer is a full function account. There are no further commitments required.
To improve your PPC sales conversion ratios and improve PPC return-on-investment, visit www.ppctrax.com
About PPC Trax
PPC Trax provides real-time click fraud and web advertising tracking, auditing and recovery services for it’s small, medium and large corporate clients. For more information, see the company website at:
www.ppctrax.com
Search Engine Optimization for MSN Search
Sunday, March 27th, 2005Here are a few guidelines suggested by MSN to help you out. First and foremost, MSN readily admits that MSNbot will actively be using Meta tags for part of its web site analysis. Yes, meta tags are still relevant pieces of code (despite all the nay sayers out there), and with this new Bot they seem to play a very important role within the indexing algorithm. Similar to other search engines, the ‘title tag’ again appears to be the most heavily weighted within the algorithm, followed closely by the Meta Description Tag and if you read between the lines, it is suggested that your best ‘keywords’ should be included in both places. MSN does not come straight out and say that the “keywords meta tag” will be utilized, but by reading between the guidelines it strongly suggests the keywords in all areas (title, description and keyword tag and content) should adhere to each other.
Content of course is still king when it comes to MSNbot’s ability to put the entire puzzle together. Apparently, at this stage, the Bot does not read text within a graphic, so if you have important keywords contained within a graphic (especially on your main page), they strongly suggest you move those keywords into plain old text format. And here’s a tip; the closer to the top of the page, the better.
MSN Search calls for pages to be under 150K in size, suggesting the Bot will either simply stop reading after this point or in a worse case scenario, may measure/weigh the page size before reading and simply skip the page all together. This point is not made entirely clear, but it should be of enough concern to have every SEO firm scampering to measure their clients web site’s index pages, just in case. In actuality, a page size of 150k could contain a lot of relevant text content, but add a few fancy graphics in there and the total can add up quickly.
An interesting point within the guidelines suggests that words (even keywords) within headers, footers and tables will not be read. Again, simple text is the rule of thumb. This may cause some web sites to need a complete redesign. Graphics with long or non-content supported ALT tags will also be dismissed. This is very similar to the rules from other major search engines, as it provides somewhat of a safeguard against sites that stuff keywords in an attempt to fool or “spam” the engines into thinking they are something they are not. Redirects will not be read either.
Linking, as per usual, will be an important part of MSNBot’s equation. They offer two suggestions as to which links will be deemed the most important: links from the main page and links no more than three levels deep. This means all hyperlinks on your site should be accessible within three clicks or less from each other for maximum effectiveness. Very interesting. Larger web sites may have a problem adhering to this rule, but it should be kept in mind that the MSNBot is still feeling its way through the web. A three deep scenario is probably the beginning of the parameter. It will surely offer a deeper crawl as it becomes more sophisticated.
Welcome to SEO Updates!
Sunday, March 20th, 2005SEO Updates is a new weblog devoted to the sometimes bizarre, sometimes insanely profitable, and other times just a bit too shady, world of Search Engine Optimization.
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