SEO Hosting Blog

SEO should be invisible: to Google and to the everyday user.  As soon as you’re looking for a way to “fool” Google you’re going to be writing content and preparing SEO in a way that doesn’t anything but.  In my experience, the best way to accomplish SEO is to try to rank naturally instead of forcing the issue.

Perhaps this is the way I work as a writer: but writing by attempting to add keyphrases to your paragraphs can make the writing – and reading – process awkward.  By all means, you can go through the content after it’s done and add targeted keyphrases, but having this be your sole intention for the content will come off as unnatural and may very well be regarded as spam by Google – if not now then in the future. (more…)

A sitemap is a file that allows for search engines to quickly and easily find newly published content on your web site or blog. The sitemap.xml file has been widely adopted as the industry standard among popular search engines including, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Live.

If you run a self-hosted WordPress blog, creating and maintaining a sitemap can’t be made easier. Arne Brachhold has provided the WordPress community with a wonderful WordPress Plugin called Google XML Sitemaps. This plugin is great because it does everything for you automatically. You don’t need to worry about having to learn how to make your own sitemap.xml file, which quite honestly can be very complicated to create and very difficult to maintain. (more…)

You may be at your wit’s end trying to get some decent visibility in search engines.  You’ve tried doing everything yourself: added the site to directories, written some useful and keyword-directed content, gotten some link trades with some relevant and high PR sites.  Still, you rank on the 20th page or more for a relevant keywords.  Maybe you’ve even poured some money into a PPC campaign, which has worked somewhat and led to some sales, but you’re paying out more than you’re taking in.  What are you going to do?

All of the above are pretty common scenarios, especially considering that the Internet is getting more and more crowded.  There’s good news and bad news that people can cheaply create a functional and well-designed website.  The good news is that anyone can do it.  The bad news is that anyone can do it.  These days everyone and their mother are clouding the internet with a web-based business or affiliate marketing site trying to cash in on the growing goldmine that is the internet.

So what’s this mean?  It means don’t get angry at your search engine professional, if you plan on outsourcing SEM.  You might be pouring in hard-earned money into outsourcing SEM and figure that because you’re paying for it you’re going to get instant results.  This often isn’t the case, no matter how pro an SEM outfit you choose to hire.  Search engine optimization takes time, and more time than it did a couple years ago, when SEO became an increasingly-screamed buzzword.

The SEO Process

With SEO you’re looking at two things: traffic and conversions.  While an SEO operator can definitely help with the former, the latter is a bit more difficult.  Really, a conversion rate depends on the quality of the product you’re selling.  And if you’re selling a sucky product (a professional SEO term) than there’s not much a SEO consultant can do about it.  You could get a million hits a day, but if you’re selling designer tinfoil hats, an SEO consultant can only do so much.  Come to think of it, designer tinfoil hats aren’t such a bad idea.  Note to self.  But you know what I’m saying.

So if you are selling a product to a very niche group, you should be happy with the amount of traffic and a 3 to 10% conversion rate is very good territory.  Just because you’re paying a search engine marketer doesn’t give you license to be greedy.  3%, though it seems like a low number, is actually pretty good.  In this world of the cluttered web, you’re actually lucky to be selling a niche product because you’ll probably have a higher conversion rate in relation to hits.

On the other hand, if you’ve devised a website of which there are a thousand others like it, you’re going to have a tough time bringing in visitors and converting those visits.  However, if an SEM is able to drive a fair amount of traffic to your site, this is a net positive (pun intended) because it can take a while to build an online brand.  People might not buy something from a site until the fifth time they visit, so increased traffic should eventually convert.  Just don’t expect conversions to happen overnight.

The Importance of a Site’s Longevity

But even that can be a longshot.  Truly, if you sign on with an search engine marketer who promises top-ten placement and then does nothing of the sort, it’s time to move on.  Generally, older sites index better.  Take a look: the sites that rank highly often were put online in the 90’s and early 0’s.  You’ve got to expect a few years of dedicating updating of content and link trades for a site’s ranking to take hold.  That’s years, not weeks, which is what some newbie site owners expect.

Age is an important part of ranking and there’s nothing a marketer can do to instantly make your site older.  I’ve written here before how Google can red-flag a site that gets too many links too quickly – which is why it’s not a good idea to blanket the web with new directory links; you should unload these a few at a time.  The age of your incoming links is as important as the age of your site itself.  Google just trusts a site that’s been around for a while.

What SEM Can Do

That said, there’s plenty a search engine optimizer can do: if you have a decently-designed website and a quality product:

1. Helps build backlinks in both directories and other sites, ensuring that none of the links you have coming in or going out are for tainted sites.
2. Provides fresh, relevant, and updated content and markets that content throughout the web, using Web 2.0 technologies.
3. Helps restructure content and layout so it’s better monetized.
4. Develops keyword lists that cast a wide net for potential queries.
5. Fixes metatag and title information for each and every page.
6. Tracks how the site is performing for each page on the site.

Basically, SEO is a mandatory part of running a website.  But a part of a marketer’s job is to manage expectations.  With this post, I’m trying to say there’s no get-rich-quick scheme for SEO.  Yes, there are stories of major overnight success, but you should really just be looking for steady progress.

Regardless of how much time a SEO spends optimizing a website, if they neglect to take care of the basics and smaller details, they can seriously impact a website’s ability to succeed. Sure, you may have spent several months testing the effects of NoFollow sculpting, but if you got too caught up on that one approach and didn’t ensure that other smaller details were getting implemented, you may have missed out on quite a bit of potential organic search engine traffic. So, while they may not be as exciting as some of the newer approaches in the world of SEO, the basics can be the difference between a website’s search engine success and failure. In the spirit of taking care of business on a basic level, let’s look at a handful of basic strategies you may be overlooking:

ALT Tags: In my opinion, ALT tags can be a more useful tool than META keywod tags. Why? Well, there are a couple of reasons. For one, although ALT tags aren’t the only element used by search engines for indexing images, they do play a role. By including a few descriptive (non-keyword stuffed) words that explain what the image is, you can give the search engine image crawlers a nudge in the right direction. Secondly, ALT tags can help you pick up some long-tail traffic. This can be especially true if you are using images that fit with your content but aren’t necessarily directly related to the topic of your website. Once again, ALT tags aren’t a place to stuff keywords, but when used properly, they provide an extra opportunity to pick up some additional long-tail traffic. Finally, the use of ALT tags is a good usability practice. Whether it’s for someone using an Internet accessibility tool such as a screenreader or just in case your page fails to load properly, having a concise, accurate description of what an image is can help ensure the best experience for your users.

Robots.txt: Although I have always seen the robots.txt file as a fundamental element of SEO, I’ve talked to countless people within this field that don’t use ever use this tool (and some that have never even really heard of robots.txt). In case you aren’t familiar with what a robots.txt file is, it’s a way to control what content you want search engines to index. Even if there’s nothing that you want to block the search engines from indexing, it’s still a good practice to create a robots.txt file. Here’s what a robots.txt file looks like if you want to allow the search engines to index all of your content:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

So, why would you want to use robots.txt to block certain content from being indexed? Well, WordPress is one of the best examples. If you are having duplicate content issues, you can use robots.txt to make the search engines index only one version of your content instead of multiple versions. With the help of robots.txt, you can tell search engine crawlers to only index your original posts instead of your archives, category pages, etc.

Source Code: If you have ever looked at the source code for a page that was designed during the 90s, the first thing you did was probably cringe. Unfortunately, there are still people designing websites using the same awful source code structure that has been around for over a decade. Whether it’s the result of design software or just bad habits, ugly source code not only creates an unattractive website for human visitors, but it can also create problems for search engine crawlers.

Although search engines would like you to think otherwise, their bots aren’t perfect. So, in order to ensure that they can properly crawl your website, you need to make life for them as easy as possible. This means cleaning up your source code and getting rid of all the messy elements that can cause them to have problems indexing your site. If you are still using tables to design your website, it’s time to learn the new principles of web design. Even if you are using CSS, make sure it’s stored in an external file. Finally, although most fail to do, I recommend using PHP files to store and call different elements (such as Javascript) that make up your website.

URL Canoncalization: Although the definition of URL canoncalization (“the process by which URLs are modified and standardized in a consistent manner”) sounds somewhat confusing, the concept is fairly easy to grasp. In regards to search engine optimization, URL canoncalization refers to search engines picking the best version of a URL to index (mysite.com, www.mysite.com, mysite.com/, etc). Even they do a good job of this, as I already mentioned, search engines aren’t perfect. This means that they can end up indexing multiple versions of your website, which then causes you to have a duplicate content issue on your hands.

This may sound like a difficult issue to tackle, but it’s actually not. With the use of a 301 redirect, you can ensure Google and other search engines index the www version of your website and not the non-www. To do this, simply create a file called .htaccess and paste the code below into that file (of course, you’ll want to replace sample.com with the name of your website):

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^sample.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.sample.com/$1 [R=301,L]

I’d say there’s too much emphasis put on keywords and search engines.  What?  How can this be?  Because if your SEO writing is housed in God-awful writing, it’s not going to make much of a dent.  You have to realize that web content writing is meant to attract two entirely different things:

1. Search engines
2. People

Search engines don’t care if you’re writing is poor.  I mean, they care if you jam in keywords indiscriminately, but if you supply a run-on sentence or a sentence that ends with a preposition, the search engine grammar police aren’t going to come and tell you that you need to get a copy of Strunk and White.  Regular people, on the other hand, can tell when a site has been poorly written.  It’s crazy: people spend hours designing a website so it looks crisp, then leave the content writing as an afterthought.  What’s written is just as important as any flashy web graphics you might be employing.

The trouble is a lot of site owners don’t take writing seriously.  They think, “I’ve been writing since I was five years old, this is nothing I can’t handle.”  This is sort of like picking up a guitar and thinking that you’ll be able to play it instantly.  OK, it’s a little different, but good writing isn’t going to come instantly.  This is especially true of web content writing: just because you’ve written some term papers for English 101 does not mean that the web content is going to flow as it should.  Web content writing has some specific requirement, beyond the issue of keywords and keyphrases.

What Makes Good Web Content

Remember that people are looking at a screen, which is a much different experience than reading a newspaper or magazine.  And if you thought men were bad about using the remote control and clicking station after station, everyone is even worse about clicking off of a website if the content is not immediately interesting.  That means you have to grab a reader’s attention within the first two paragraphs, if not the first two sentences.  By “grabbing,” I mean it should both be interesting as well as convey exactly what is comprised in the article.  In the information-rich world, people don’t want to take the time to figure out what content is about.

This is one of the major arguments for housing all types of different content on your site.  All types of people are going to be looking for all different types of information, so you’re going to reach the widest possible audience.  One important issue is to break up content into easy to read and digest small paragraphs.  Thos subheadings with an H2 tags aren’t just good for search engine placement, but for telling people exactly what to expect from the content and to minimize the strain of reading on a screen.

Generally, writing on the web should be more conversational than other types of non-fiction content.  Obviously this depends on the nature and purpose of the site, but this is a good general rule.  The reason that blogging is so popular is that it feels more like a conversation.  This conversational quality can go a long way in drawing people in, compared to dry, factual content.  You might think it sounds impressive to write like an information-rich robot, but you also run the risk of boring people to tears.

Actionable Content

Once you’ve drawn people in, you have a better chance that people will take actionable steps either within the content, around the content, or both.  The purpose of the content once people arrive on the site is to drive them towards a purchase or sign-up form.  Hard sells don’t work any better than real-life pushy salespeople.  You almost want to make it seem like people don’t realize they’re being sold to – like they’re clicking on the link naturally.  Again, this depends on the site, and some hard selling is useful and even necessary, but people are pretty savvy about a site that makes outrageous claims.

Really you want your content to be at a fairly remedial reading level.  This is not because your web surfers are ignoramusi, but because people tend to read so fast online that they want to read quickly.  At the same time, you want to have some authority.  You need to strike a balance between quickly-readable content, information value, and actionable items.  As I’ve said, this is no small task and the reason that web content is such a different artform.  When someone buys a magazine, the purchase has already been made.  Each page isn’t necessarily trying to get you to turn to the next one.  Yes, they want you to subscribe, but that’s a different issue than the fast-paced world of the Internet.  People surf the web like it’s a New York minute.