SEO Hosting Blog

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is one of the most important things you can do to help customers find you online. For an online business this is crucial, but even their brick-and-mortar counterparts can benefit from this relatively new form of marketing.

Search Engine Optimization defined is an online marketing strategy. By employing certain keywords and keyword phrases at the correct density, you can bump your website’s listing to the top of someone’s search results, increasing your business. Entire advertising agencies have spring up around this fast-growing marketing method. (more…)

Typically, a splash page is designed to catch the attention of a human visitor through use of a large graphic, a Flash movie, or some other technological item.  While this may indeed attract the attention of your human visitors, visiting search engine spiders won’t be impressed, and ultimately your human visitors will not get all the benefit they could from visiting your site.

Search Engine Spiders and Splash
Search engine spiders rely on text and links to get their work done. In the past when there has been virtually no text on an entry page, images or a Flash movie, the content of the web page has not been read and indexed by the search engine spiders. Graphic images and Flash were lost on the spiders beyond ALT attribute text for the images. Until recently Flash was unreadable to the search engine spiders. (more…)

Have metatags totally outgrown they’re welcome?  In the early days of SEO, metatags were part of the marketing goldrush.  But that was back in the days when you could actually fool a search engine spider with ridiculous amounts of keyword jamming or adding a long list of keyphrases at the bottom of a page.  Amazing to think that these tactics ever worked.  Metatags worked in a similar fashion: instead of creating a list of links, you could “hide” these words within metatags.

This practice worked for a time – even after keyword jamming got a site instantly banned.    But metatags were used and abused much like keyphrases in content.  Website owners thought they were being sly by adding unrelated keywords in metatags.  Metatag spam became popular with some site owners.  Some even added adult-themed tags that might be flagged if they were contained in on-page content.  These practices basically ruined metatags for everybody because metatags are no longer an effective SEO tool.

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I have to consider that there are many people who don’t know what a robots.txt file is. In this article I am going to explain what a robots.txt file is, how to use it and why it is important. I am sure that there are many have heard about a robots.txt file is but might not know exactly what does it do and how will it benefit you? So let’s see if we can answer a few questions for you regarding the in’s and out’s of a robots.txt file.

The Simple Explanation

A robots.txt is a very small file that resides on your server that gives specific instructions to webcrawlers such as the famous Googlebot on which directories and files are allowed to be crawled and indexed. It is important to use a robots.txt file because it puts you (the publisher/webmaster) in total control of where webcrawlers are allow to visit on your website. A more detailed explanation can be found here on Wikipedia, at www.robotstxt.org, and here at Matt Cutt’s blog. (more…)

Recently, I launched a new website to promote my SEO copywriting services. Anyway, let’s just say that I’m not the savviest person when it comes to web design. I’m an SEO copywriter- not a graphic designer. However, I do know of the importance of SEO planning for a new website. Performing SEO on your website before it goes live can save a lot of time and energy down the road.

Do Your Research

Before you launch your website, you should conduct thorough keyword research for your industry. First, I like to brainstorm a list of words and phrases that people would type if they were searching for my services. After creating this list, I then enter these phrases into a keyword suggestion tool. Personally, I find the free Google Adwords tool to be sufficient for this preliminary task. I try to target words that (a) have decent search volume; (b) have low competition (one way I check is by doing an allintitle search in Google- it shows how many sites have that keyword in its title; and (c) are worded to where they can easily be fit into my content. (more…)