Helping You Rock Out Your Site Like A Rockstar!

Optimizing your site is definitely a necessity, but overdoing it will hurt your site. All this talk on SEO dying is hogwash. If it were, then there would be no search engines. SEO is not dying.

The issue that some people are hurt over is the fact that they actually have to write great content AND engage with others out on the social networks. Come on, this should have been a no brainer a long time ago. If you have gone shopping, been a business owner of a store, or actually have worked in the retail or service industry, it takes engagement.

It works the same online. People could care less about who you are unless you show them that you care about what they want to know. This still applies even in the case that you are a blogger who makes money off of advertising, sponsored reviews, and such. You still have to connect with others, and share your articles on the social networks as well as others. Its a give and take relationship… I know, such a cliché, but it is true.

You want people to trust you, right? You want to build an authority in your niche? You want to make money, right? (At least for those reading this and are building a business with their site.)

Then you know what you need to do – get social! It is a necessary investment.

What is a 404 page? It is a page that tells your visitors when they go to a specific page that it no longer exists.

Using a custom page for this is a benefit, especially to search engines like Google. The search engines index websites and all of their pages, including the 404 page.

One way is to redirect, but this is not highly encourageable. You could make a redirect, but the search engine (ex. Google) would index the page and your site when searched could read “Page not found” instead of your homepage. In doing this procedure, you could accidentally have the search engine alter the indexing by removing non-existent pages. So, in other words, that same re-direct could get your homepage de-indexed by accident.

The other way, is the custom page. You can do this through your content management (ex. CMS software like WordPress) or your regular html pages. Instead of just posting “404, page not found” or “you have reached this page out of error”, here are some suggestions:

1. Make your page informative. You can add “Sorry, this page does not exist”, but do not stop there. Add a way to contact you whether it be an email address posted or a contact form.
2. Add a few special links to the page that might interest your visitors. Four or five links might be nice.
3. Conform your page to match your site. A plain 404 is an annoyance to deal with already and having little information will make the visitor give up and go elsewhere.
4. Make sure to add your sidebar/ navigation to the page. It is as usefull as the special interest links and widens the possibilities that your visitor will stay and surf your site.
5. Verify that your 404 page actually returns a 404 error. You can do this by using Google Webmaster Tools.

I know, I know, it really sucks! All that effort you put into optimizing your site for search engines might actually come back to bite you in the butt. At SWSW 2012 (South by Southwest conference), Matt Cutts, and several others spoke about search engine optimization in their panel “Dear Google & Bing: Help Me Rank Better!”

I have been talking about not over-optimizing for some time. So, perhaps I need to first address how people do over-optimize on SEO.

• Heavy Keyword density in articles. You may want to keep your keyword density under 1.4%, which is normally 3 or 4 times within a 400 to 500 word article.
• Too many link exchanges, especially with links not relevant to their site’s content. Blogrolls are fine, but are they all going out to sites that have no relevancy to your site? It is important to make sure that you create a specific relevant list for your sitewide blog roll, and maybe a separate page with links to other sites. Giving all your friends some link juice might not be a great idea.
• Unintelligible heavy keyword density throughout site. The biggest thing I see is writing specifically for the search engine, especially for local optimization. For example, “your keyword, your city” is used constantly throughout each article. Perhaps try “Your keyword in your city.” This makes far more sense grammatically. Write for humans!
• Too many links above the fold that have no strong conversion (weak content). If you are linking to pages that may not have content that you are trying to rank for or that your visitors have no interest in visiting, it might be a good idea to pull the link from the top.
• Too many ads, even if they are relevant to their site above the fold (this includes text links.)
• Too many scripts. Sometimes those extra SEO scripts in those plugins might be slowing your site down. Better yet, maybe you have quite a few plugins installed to your site that are injecting a lot of code to execute and slow your site down. Keep it simple.
• A slow site. It might be your host. It might be a website with heavy graphics. It might be too many plugins loading to make your site work. Site speed is important to a lot of people. 4 seconds or faster is a good rule of thumbs when aiming to have a faster site.

The search engines ARE gearing more toward social search engines where people who are visiting your site, liking, sharing, and recommending your site will rank you better than that site that is over-optimized and not socially connected. While for some, this might suck, it really levels the playing field with people honestly ranking locally or globally and actually engaging with others.

Oh, and as the panel at SXSW 2012 covered- you are NOT guaranteed top ranking just because you optimized. There are many SEO companies that guarantee top ranking and they should not be, especially if your site is usually a very popular and competitive niche.

It is okay to write with keyword density in mind and some optimizing. However, it is better to be natural, keep it simple, and of course, share and engage with your readers.

What do you do when you optimize your site for SEO?

I wrote Mastering Pretty Permalinks in WordPress with the intention to introduce the concept of the best permalink structure for WordPress powered websites. This was a call to try to encourage people to organize their website, but beware of how the permalink structure might be overrode if you have a file folder name the same as a post and you are using the post name permalink structure.

It is obvious that I am going to say that the post name (formerly known as pretty permalink) structure or the /%postname%/ option in your WordPress Permalink General settings is the best structure.

However, I am going to go a step further. Search Engine Optimization is fun to play with in regards to your domain’s URL structure. It can be a way to optimize what your article is, other than just organization.

What we know in basic WordPress use for structure purposes are as the following:

Permalink Structure for Posts

We can control how our permalink structure can look whether by post ID, month and date and more. We can even designate tags and categories to these posts and call them to pages using custom WordPress queries. For example you can call a category and show only tags and a certain number of many posts.

The reason why the post name structure (/%postname%/) works best for a post is because it shows the post title closest to the domain, showing how important it is to the site. The structure within the web page itself will also emphasize this using heading tags (h1, h2, h3, h4, and so on.) Now, if you listed by category (and I have seen people recommend that), depending on how your category is labeled, you are telling the search engine that the category is far more important to crawl than the actual title of the post.

WordPress naturally has the base “category” as a name and you can group posts under those categories. It is okay to display your posts on your site in a category. Most people believe including categories makes your posts duplicate content. NO! It is only if you are posting the same thing again on your site or the same exact thing on another site (like if you do guest blogging.) The search engines are not dumb.

Now, here is the fun part as well as the tricky part. What if you do use the category structure? How can you make it clever enough to draw more attention to your title. WPCandy actually exercises this clever way by naming the category’s slug an action. Yes, just the slug as you can designate a different name pointing to a different slug.

Just some examples:

News is reports
Opinion is thinks
Tutorials is teaches

Pretty cool, huh? As a note, the posts do group under the general “category/category-name”.

In this, we are telling (using the WPCandy example) that WPCandy.com reports such and such title, giving it an actual sentence. And you know, it nearly makes this former English major cry happy tears. (Oh I am such a geek!)

Permalink Structure for Pages

Pages are kind of fun and since WordPress 3.0′s menu addition, your control over pages has increased with several options. You can use the older hierarchy structure with parent and child pages. Remember, pages in WordPress are normally known for being used for static content.

The older hierarchy structure adds the slug of the parent page into the URL structure. SO, if you have like a parent page and then three deep into children and grandchildren, your URL structure might get a bit long. That might not be a good idea for search engine optimizing as it takes away the importance of that page.

However, the hierarchy structure is not the only way. You can use the WordPress menu option in your WordPress administration (Under Appearance>Menus) to organize your website and keep your URL structure for your pages simple. You can publish a page without using the hierarchy and use the WordPress 3.0 menu to organize your website without adding more length to your page’s URL structure.

Now, both methods can be used and Google will pick up and group areas of your site that have been optimized as a group. For example, if you have defined that your main sections of your website are your ‘About’, ‘Contact’, and maybe… as an example say ‘Resources’, like I have here in Blondish.net, Google will pick up that structure if you do have a set up pages that are relevant to that main area.

As a note, We can also apply these techniques to custom posts types since WordPress 3.0.

In Summary

Your permalink structure is both a way to organize and help search engines, but can also be great in helping your visitors navigate your website. The best permalink structure to use in WordPress is one that is the most coherent for search engines to deliver the best results to potential visitors. Play around with your site and see what is best for you.

Google+ quite recently launched a new feature called Google+ brand pages. This was quite similar to the Facebook pages. The feature also provided certain other perks to the companies as their profile could be searched directly from the Google search bar by adding a ‘+’ before the brand name. Also, the brands can use the Google+ brand badge, which can be put up at the main site to directly connect to the brand page.

Though these are still early days, these brand pages have already had some impact on the search engine’s result pages. Here is quick look at how companies have used these brand pages and how it has affected their internet marketing campaign.

Brands present on Google+

Brightedge recently conducted a research and found out that the number of companies present on Google+ through brand pages was 77 in December 2011 and this number has increased from 61 in November 2011. The number of people who add these brand pages circles has also been increasing considerable at the rate of 50% per month. As of December 2011, there were 222,000 people who had added at least a single brand to their pages.

The picture is a bit bleak when you compare it with Facebook but that is due to the fact that Google+ has not had enough time in the market. When all the top brands were compared on both Facebook and Google+ it was found that Facebook brands had 300 million fans, and the same brands on Google+ had 148,000 people who had added these brands to their circles. There were a few companies like Google, IBM, and Vodafone that were not present on Facebook but had their page on Google+.

Combining the social and search elements

When Facebook launched the Open Graph, its main aim was to combine sites, search and social networks. Google is trying to do the same thing by incorporating various features of its social networking platform into its other services. Many of the brands have realized that Google in fact may offer them something completely different in terms of internet marketing as it has control over internet search like no other company.

The impact is visible already, as a lot of Google+ brand pages have started coming up in the search engine result pages because of search engine optimization. One such example is T-mobile. This gives companies an extra incentive to join Google+ and spend more time on making the brand pages. The move also makes a lot of sense when you consider the fact that 34% of Facebook’s traffic comes from Google, Bing and Yahoo searches.

Legal aspects

Some people are of the opinion that by including the brand pages in search engines Google is acting a bit like Microsoft when they included Internet Explorer in Windows during the 90′s. In fact, two US senators have asked the Federal trade Commission (FTC) to carry out an investigation on Google as they believe the company is taking unfair advantage of the dominant position it has on the web today.

What are your thoughts on Google+ Brand Pages?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) refers to the process of enhancing the visibility of a website. There will be more visitors to your website if your site tops in the search engine listings. In order to make your website top in the search results, it is important that you write attractive and relevant content and incorporate the right keywords in the content. Here are a few tips that will assist you to strategically place the keywords in your piece.

The headline

Place the keywords in the headlines because the search engines look for the headlines to classify a piece. Simple, straightforward headlines with keywords can easily grab the attention of readers too.

Place them in the first paragraph 

If possible try to place the keywords in the very first paragraph itself. If relevant keywords appear in the first paragraph, your piece will be easily picked up by the search engine. Make sure your first paragraph is well-written in order to fetch the attention of the readers.

Subheads

Another place to incorporate the keywords is the subheads of the article. Search engine do not scan the text word by word. They tend to pick up the articles that have keywords in their subheads. Moreover, bolded headlines assist the search engines to spot the keywords easily as they make the search engines to stay on a particular page for a longer period of time. So, if you can place the keywords in the bolded subheads, your piece will be top in the search rankings.

Since the search engine scan the pages, looking for the keywords, it is not good to have a dense web copy. Break the piece using subheads and keep the paragraphs relatively short. Such pieces are easy to read too.

If you can write humorous and catchy subheads, you can easily make your site rank in the search list and can grab the attention of the readers.

The final paragraph

The main keywords should appear in the last paragraph of the piece too. If possible try to place them in the last sentence of the piece. Your piece will have more visibility if the keywords are located in the last paragraph too.

Website body

The keywords should be present in the body of the article. If you can, try to place them after every 100 words, depending on your keyword density. When you place the keywords, make sure that the sentences make perfect sense.

URL

Try to position your keywords in the URL of your website. Use hyphens to separate the text in the URL.  Do not use underscores to separate the text.

If you can find the right keywords and place them in your articles well, your website will easily top in the search list. It is important to have fresh content too as the search engines tend to pick up fresh pieces. The readers too will be interested to read fresh articles. Make your piece new, entertaining and informative to attract the readers.

In a matter of a few years, search engine optimization has grown into a big industry. Many articles and blogs are written dedicated to spreading knowledge about SEO, and covering aspects like identifying the right keywords, social media marketing and link building. Yet there is one aspect that is not very well looked into- how do you know the value of a link? Since building inbound links will be a critical part of your SEO strategy, this is a question that cannot be ignored.

The basic rule of thumb in finding out whether to link from a certain site or not depends on the potential of that site to deliver relevant visitors through the link. Relevant sites with high traffic will not only send you targeted traffic, they will also prove to be more valuable in terms of improving your search engine ranking for certain keywords. Here are a few factors that determine whether a site will prove to be useful or not.

Geographical location

The geographical location of the site you are linking on will be a factor worth considering. For instance, if you run a hardware store in the UK and want to build links to draw traffic to your site, then linking from a site that is also UK based would be a better idea.

Audience of the site

You create a link on another website in the hope that the link will draw enough amount of traffic to your site. So you must make sure that the site on which you are creating a link must have some sort of following in terms of visitors. You can find visitor figures of certain sites in the “about us” pages. Most websites these days also have plugins from social media sites like Facebook where people can “like” a particular page. Such figures will also let you know the following of the website.

Thematic similarity of the site

This is one of the most important factors that an SEO firm must consider while executing a campaign. Before you create a link on a particular site, you must make sure that the site deals with themes that are relevant to yours thematically. For instance, if you deal in computer equipment, creating links at an electronic equipment based site will drive more traffic to your site than linking from a site that deals with apparel. Regional relevance and thematic relevance are factors that go hand in hand in link building.

Reliability of Page Rank

Another useful piece of advice would be not to rely heavily on tools like PageRank to judge whether a link is good or not. In most cases, they may not be up to date or the number can be inflated.

Along with all these factors, you should also consider the reputation of the site, its age, and its authority in the field. And do not forget that simply building inbound links is not enough to make your online business a success. You should also ensure that you offer the users real value through your products and a great user experience on your site.

Right after creating their official website, the next thing businesses do is to look for SEO advice to make their site more searchable on Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines. As innumerable websites share space on the internet, creating your mark will require some effort. It is essential that you follow a meticulous plan for your website to be optimized and drive in a steady stream of traffic. There are three important factors which you will need to consider if you want to improve your SEO results.

Content effectiveness

The effectiveness of your content is a very important factor that needs to be considered. Your success on search engines depends to a large extent on the quality of the content and the positioning of the keywords. There are a number of tools that give information about the most popular keywords related to a certain business. Carefully insert the keywords into the text so that it does not look contrived. When inserting the keywords, you must strictly consider the keyword density of the article. Overuse of keywords may result in the website being marked as spam. They have to be inserted in such a way that they appear natural, and you should also take care to see that the sentences are grammatically correct.

Reaching out

Once you finish writing the content for your site, the next target should be to let people know about your website. This can be best done by submitting your webpage link along with your content in as many forums and article directories as you can. Search engines are bound to index your content this way and very soon your site could be popular in the internet. It gives your site greater exposure and can generate traffic to it as well. You can approach professionals for SEO advice on further ways to promote your webpages online.

Social bookmarking

A very effective SEO tactic is social bookmarking. You can add bookmarks to your webpage on bookmarking sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, delicious etc. using the right keywords for search tags. This will help users find your site more easily and if they like it, they will recommend it to other users as well. This is another great way to get search engines to crawl your site frequently and to enhance your visibility online. There are bookmarking sites that are focused on more niche topics. You can find one that is related to your business for reaching out more effectively to your target market.

Though these methods are effective, do not rely only on them for your website optimization. There are many other techniques that can help your site climb up the PageRank ladder, pay per click advertising and link building being a few of them. Social networking websites are another very effective way of promoting your company and website online. To achieve the best results, it is a good idea to consult an experienced professional for valuable SEO advice for improving your site’s ranking on search engines.