Ranking vs. Social Networking – Which Is Best To Focus On?

In the past if you wanted people to visit your blog, it was all about keyphrase SEO. If you had a blog about ‘floral design’, then that meant you needed to find ways to get the top results on Google for keywords relating to floral design. The landscape for SEO is changing, but how much of a change is actually occuring?

If you listen to the SEO experts around the internet, then you’ll find that most are starting to see the shift happening in the world of SEO. Looking into the past of SEO, it used to be a very dog-eat-dog system. It was a battle to try and obtain top results in certain keyword phrases. Bruce Clay, an expert in the field of SEO actually made the statement, “Ranking Is Dead” Read more

Top 10 SEO Tips

Having a great site means nothing…No really, having a great site means nothing at all. Seriously it doesn’t mean a thing…If no one ever gets to see it –

Having a great website definitely means a lot, but not if no one ever sees it, in this case it becomes “useless greatness.” As soon as people begin to view this “greatness” of a site, then it becomes of some use. So what can you do to get traffic to your site? Well a great and what I believe to be the BEST way to get traffic to your site would be organic traffic.

Why is this the best?

Well for one it’s FREE, and if you can manage to get on the first page of results for a popular keyword you can potentially get thousands of daily visitors all without paying a cent. Isn’t that great?

In all reality it is, but it’s a tough process to get yourself on the first page that requires a lot of search engine optimization. This is why I made this post breaking down the top 10 factors of search engine optimization.

1. Title and Meta tag – include the desired keyword in the title and meta tags of your website
or blog.

2. H1 tag – create a H1 tag and make sure to include the keyword in the
H1 tag as well.

3. Domain and URL – include the keyword in the domain and or URL of your website or blog – i.e
yourkeyword.com, yoursite.com/yourkeyword.

4. Body Text – keyword use in the body text of a page plays a major roles as well, the more
you have the keyword on the body of a page, the better that page will be ranked
for that keyword, however be sure not to over do it, or else it will have negative
consequences.

5. Link popularity - the link popularity or amount of incoming links that are relevant to your site
play a part in how you will rank as well.

6. Relevance – Quality of incoming links and how relevant the page is to your keyword.

7. Age of URL – new domains and or URL’s are not ranked as well as older domains and older
URL’s.

8. Weight/Authority – incoming links with authority or “weight,” such as sites with .gov or .edu
can give you a great ranking.

9. Anchor text - the describable text on a link also known as “anchor text” is a major player
in the SEO game. Make sure your incoming links are anchor text with your
keywords.

10. Quality Content - last but not least quality content. The actual text is not what’s ranked by the spider, It’s the consequences of having quality content that gives you better rankings. Providing quality
content ensures return visits, keeping traffic coming back. Not only this
but other webmasters that come across your site will find your site to be
worthwhile, and will naturally link to you. Thus giving your site a boost in
ranks.

If your looking to gain free, quality traffic, then optimizing your site for search engines like Google is the way to go. The top 10 factors above will help you get there, however search engines constantly change their algorithms (the factors that determine how they rank sites) and it’s important to keep up to date with all of them.

Currently these are the top 10 techniques, if used correctly and applied efficiently will get you the ranking you desire for your specific search term or keyword in Goggle’s SERP’s (search engine results.)

How Do Search Engines View Your Site?

One characteristic every great search engine optimization expert has is that he or she is able to look at a website or blog with the eyes of a search engine spider. In other words, they know (or find out) what the search engine spider does and or looks for when they visit your site. Once you can do this, then the process becomes much easier and you do not waste time doing unnecessary things you thought were good SEO. The first lesson to learn is that search engines do not give rank to a “website” they give rank to a web page.

Therefore trying to rank your homepage for 15 different phrases won’t work for you at all. Instead you can optimize other pages on your site for different terms individually. A good way to do this is with one off my favorite plugins which I included in yesterdays post 3 WordPress Plugins I Love called the All in One SEO Plugin, which allows you to individually optimize every page for your desired term.

If you can include your desired term in the domain you choose then great, if not then that’s okay too because search engines don’t just show you the homepage domain i.e

www.topbusinessreviews.com

they also show you specific page URL’S like

www.topbusinessreviews.com/2008/06/04/choosing-the-right-affiliate-programs/

so you should try including your keyword as the URL-slug (this part of the URL:/choosing-the-right-affiliate-programs/.) Doing this is very search engine friendly and will help the search engine spider rank your site better for that term.

Another thing you wanna keep in mind is that search engines bypass images and do not read them at all. So if you have an image saying “Exchange free links,” when the spider crawls it, it will have no knowledge of the “Exchange free links” therefore no rank will be passed onto it. The only way around this is to apply an alt attribute to the image

i.e

img_src=”…/images/exchange-free-links.png” width=”250″ height=”100″ class=”image”

Above is a normal img source that a spider would bypass and not know anything about.
Below is an img source that the search engine will stop and notice due to its “alt” attribute, that describes what the img is about.

img_src=”…/images/exchange-free-links.png” width=”250″ height=”100″ alt=”Free Link Exchange” class=”image”

So make sure you if your going to place any images on your site, that you apply the alt tribute so the spider will be able to read it. These are the first basic steps that are an absolute must in order to optimize your site properly for the search engines. These are just a few of the fundamentals of SEO and you definitely need to apply this to your site, if you already haven’t.

More tips on the subject coming soon, stay tuned!

Google’s Keyword Tool – Optimizing Keywords

Today I want to talk to you guys about something I mentioned in yesterdays post Optimizing Your Keywords by Long Tailing which is Google’s Keyword Tool . Now this is tool is very effective in determining the keywords that are best for your niche and website. When selecting the keywords you are going to use for your site you want to be as descriptive as possible.

You want to think like the audience you are targeting. If your site is about trying to make an income from the Internet, then what would be the most likely term someone interested in this would type into the search box?

This is very important if you choose the wrong keywords or keywords that are not as specific as they can be, that will affect how relevant and targeted your traffic will be. If this occurs chances are people who come across your site, won’t find what they were looking for.

Google’s Keyword Tool can help out a lot if your having difficulties with selecting your keywords. You can choose “descriptive words or phrases” or “website content”. If you select descriptive words or phrases and type in a keyword you feel is relevant to your niche and press the “get keyword ideas” button, the tool will generate even more specific terms for the keyword you chose and show you some very good stats such as…

1.) Advertiser competition - letting you know how much competition is in that keyword field. – This is measured by a green bar next to the keyword showing how much or how little competition the keyword has.

2.) Search volume for the previous month – This is very helpful as you can see how well the keywords were searched for in the previous month giving you something to compare to your first month of using the keyword, and of course determining if the keyword provides the amount of search volume desired.

3.) Average search volume – Last but not least it give your the average search volume for the keywords, the overall view of how popular the keyword is. This is very important because just looking at last months search volume is not enough information to determine if the keyword provides your desired search volume.

Now Let’s say you have a site and want to determine what keywords that site consists of. Well this tool has an awesome solution for this, if you select “website content” as opposed to “descriptive words or phrases” then instead of typing in a keyword, the tool will ask you to type in your websites URL.

When you do so the tool will automatically list the top keywords it finds for the URL. This can be a good way of checking to see if your optimizing your pages correctly with the keywords you want. As well as assuring you Google is picking them up too.

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