SEO Eblog by SEO Advantage, Inc. » Site Architecture

Making Pretty Perfect Meta Tags for your Web Pages

admin — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 02:44:55 +0000

I often wonder about meta tags and how best to leverage them for better rankings. True, they’re not as important as they used to be but they are still an integral part of getting to the top of the search engines.

In the early days of SEO and the Internet, meta tags were a lot more important to accomplishing ranking goals…get as many keywords into the document as possible was the mantra. But with search engine’s evolving alongside other technologies, they’re not just looking at meta tags and keywords but whether you have original content that’s creative and compelling too.

But that doesn’t diminish the contribution meta tags can make to help you achieve high rankings.

Nevertheless, just what are the right ways to go about making meta tags? Before getting into that too far though, you need to know the different types of meta tags: title, description and keyword.

Each are pretty self-explanatory – the title tag is the title visitors will see in the top left of their browsers, description appears underneath the search results and describes what your page is about and keyword tags list all of the applicable keywords for the particular page.

Technically speaking, there is no limit to how many characters you can use for each of these meta tags…however, there is a limit to what Google will display so you will want to keep a few limits in mind…a good rule of thumb for the different tags is:

Title: 9-12 words max

Description: 3-4 sentences

Keyword: up to 10 keyword phrases

Besides these limits, simply try and integrate keywords into your meta tags without sacrificing the flow of anything too much (title and description tags). These are things people will read and the search engines will perhaps think you’re keyword stuffing penalize your site.

Take a look at a sample set of meta tags from one of SEO Advantage’s web pages below. Modeling your meta tags like these will help you get the most benefit from having them in the first place. This is how they will appear in your page’s HTML coding.

</em></strong><em>Search Engine Optimization & Search Engine Marketing Services Company: SEO Advantage, Inc<strong>.

=”Search engine optimization and search engine marketing services company: SEO Advantage, Inc.,offers online web site marketing and optimization services including search engine marketing and optimization, SEO Buzz Marketing, optimized press releases, and web site development.”>

<meta content=”search engine marketing company,search engine optimization services,SEO specialists,consultants,web site marketing,web site promotion,search engine promotion,search engine reporting,press release optimization,search engine marketing firm,florida search engine optimization.”>

Remember, meta tags aren’t as important as they once were but you can still harness them to improve your position in the search engines.

6 Web Design/SEO Tips your Developer Needs to Know

admin — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 21:31:53 +0000

Now that we’re halfway through 2010, many website owners are thinking it’s time for a re-design or are in the midst of one right now. If you’re in this position, one of the first things you need to do is be sure you hire a website design firm that knows how to build a site’s infrastructure properly – that is one that’s easily crawlable by the search engine spiders.

Before you start the redesign and all throughout the process, it’s important you make your SEO strategy a top priority. First, you don’t want to lose the rankings and traffic you’ve built up to now but you also will not want to miss the more targeted visitors you will get when your new and improved site is up and running.

Ignoring the following 6 steps when redesigning your site will put your online position in peril. So if you’re looking for quality web design services, be sure they understand the following before hiring them.

1. Keep content/keyword rich pages near the top of your site’s hierarchy

Search engines are quite meticulous when seeing how pages within your site are linked together. They use this form of internal link popularity to determine a particular page’s place within your site’s hierarchy. Pages linked from every other page are given more weight than one’s linked from only a few.

In light of this fact, you should be sure your content and keyword-rich pages are placed high within this hierarchy. If a particular page was bringing in a lot of traffic before, don’t bury it too deep within the site.

2. Categorize content by niche markets and avoid duplicate content

Online searchers generally ask questions when initially looking for solutions to their problems or answers to their questions. Therefore, the more ways you can categorize your information for these different issues – or target markets – the better.

Categorize all of your top-level pages to reflect this fact and make it clear your products and services can address their problem. And be sure – regardless of how someone finds a certain bit of information on your site, be sure they end up at the same URL to avoid any duplicate content issues. For example, if a specific product can be listed as both a product and a service, place the same URL in both categories so regardless of how someone views it, they will end up at the same place.

Courtesy of cool-photos.com

3. Stay on top of URLs if transitioning to a new content management system (CMS)

If you’re going to use a new content management system for your site to help better administer it, be sure you place 301 redirects for any URL you have to change. Since search engines will take some time to index new URLs, you want to be sure you maintain your position in the search engines and current traffic levels.

If you must, you should re-direct your top-level pages at minimum. Doing so will quickly pass the link popularity of the old URLs to the new ones – and prevent prior visitors from seeing a 404 error/not found message when they come back.

4. Code links with a navigation menu in a search friendly manner

It’s important you code all links within your navigation menus in a search friendly manner so they can be crawled and pass on those benefits to your rankings position. Many graphic designers don’t realize this – some Flash graphics and DHTML menus are invisible to the search engines, causing them to not receive the internal link popularity they should receive.

Therefore, make sure all navigation menu elements are coded with CSS that is visible to search engines. Avoid drop-down box links as the main form of navigation and ensure all content can be reached through their own dedicated links.

5. Be sure your new CMS system allows you to customize HTML elements

While automation may seem nice for HTML elements like titles, meta tags, headers, URLs and alt attributes for headers, it’s imperative your new CMS system allows you to customize these. There should ideally be no limit to the number of characters for each of these elements but do remember, the search engines have limits you should stay within.

6. Avoid session IDs and other tracking links

Tracking visitors on our websites gives us insight into what works and what doesn’t. For ranking purposes though, this can be a double-edges sword. It’s best to avoid these types of internal elements but if you must, be sure the clean URL is the only one given to the search engines. If not, the search engines will duplicate the same page over many URLs, splitting your link popularity.

If your new CMS system has tracking elements inherit within it, be sure you use a canonical link element to maintain one URL for every page of content.

Sharing these “secrets” with your potential developer may make them feel you’re usurping their knowledge and authority but heck, it’s your money, so be sure whoever your hire has all of the know-how to make your site work. Many professional graphic designers are not SEO experts per se.

They may create some very nice looking websites and marketing materials but it won’t matter too much if it can’t be found.

SEO Advantage’s New Pimped Out Press Room Landing Page – Optimizing for SEO and PR

admin — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 19:40:37 +0000

We’re always on the lookout for cutting edge SEO and online marketing techniques. Some things we find we test on our own sites to see how well they work before recommending them to clients.

Some techniques are more SEO related and “behind the scenes” (coding, tags, etc.) but other techniques are more in the layout of a page, its tone and how we communicate important things to know…our new press room page is an experiment to see how creating a more holistic press room can help site visitors – specifically editors, bloggers and journalists – find information more easily.

In fact, even if you never plan to issue any press releases, it’s important you have one place where people like this can learn more about your company and what you do…reaching out to journalists and bloggers is another way to help you get noticed by search engines and prospective customers.

In the past, most pressrooms simply listed a company’s news press releases. However, having a better understanding of what editors and bloggers are looking for in a pressroom allows you to build a more complete resource.

In fact, a main pressroom page can simply serve as a hub where you can link out to not only your press releases but knowledge center resources, blogs, case studies, testimonials and more as shown by this handy flowchart.

Check out SEO Advantage’s new pressroom and our guest blog post on SEO Site Reference for more insights on turning your pressroom into a powerful online marketing resource.

Reserving your Online Space is the First Step

admin — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 19:24:07 +0000

We spend a lot of time here at the search engine optimization e-blog talking about SEO and online marketing – strategies to help you maximize your online investment and bring in revenues.

However, before you even start thinking about that, you need to obtain a domain name for your site and reserve the online space that will be the home for your website.

Web hosting is how this is done. Hosting is essentially a service that provides storage for the content on your site, and then displays it on the Internet.

Before you even choose a hosting service like Pair Networks, Bluehost or Vodahost, you need to find a good domain name. Godaddy.com is one place you can go to check the availability of your preferred domain name. Remember, this is how many people will recognize your business online so be careful when choosing a domain name.

Once you have an available domain name, you can go to your chosen web hosting service and pay them a yearly fee for the use of that name. This generally costs anywhere from $8 to $20 per year.

Next, you will need to pay a yearly fee for hosting your website. Costs vary depending on how much space you require but in my experience, this cost around $100 per year. Most services charge on a yearly basis.

Some things you will want to look for in a hosting service:

Do they allow you to setup sub-domains? Is there a limit on how many domains you can register on an account?

Do they accept credit cards for easy payment?

Do they offer email and/or web email services?

Do they have the ability to include a blogging platform with their services so you can have your own dedicated domain for your blog?

Do they have dedicated IP addresses for each domain you include? Many low-cost providers will clump several domains on one IP address, which can spell disaster for your site in terms of SEO.

Quality hosting services is essential to being successful online. There are literally hundreds of thousands of providers out there so be careful…beware of low cost hosting services!

Google’s New Search Engine Index – Caffeine

admin — Fri, 07 May 2010 16:27:29 +0000

Google Caffeine was announced several months ago but it was uncertain how and when it would be implemented…our post from Monday speculates that it may be in effect now since webmasters and SEOs have been noticing some changes regarding long-tail keywords.

So what is Google Caffeine?

Caffeine was formerly kept secret by Google and only limited details were released to the public last August. The search engine characterizes it as the “next-generation architecture for Google’s web search.” It appears this new architecture includes crawling, indexing and ranking changes and that it’s not simply an addition or change to their existing infrastructure but rather a complete overhaul.

Based on Google’s announcements regarding Caffeine, we can best surmise that this new infrastructure may include ways of crawling the web more effectively, determining reputation and authority and returning relevant results quicker…however, Google’s spam chief Matt Cutts says the changes are “primarily in how we index.”

Most of these changes do not affect the user-interface (what you see) very much but you may have noticed some subtle changes in a search engine results page in the last few months. Take this search – “buffy the vampire slayer” for example – and how it returns video and news results midway down the page.

If we use the existing infrastructure, Google displays news results at top, video in the middle and images at the bottom.

Google’s new infrastructure has undoubtedly caused quite the stir in the online world, with webmasters and SEOs scrambling to try and understand how this will impact their rankings…along with many a speculative blog post about how to best optimize to the new changes.

In the end though, it still comes down to having the right foundational elements – a crawlable site infrastructure and compelling content – maintaining these will certainly keep you ahead of the curve.

We’ll keep you posted on Caffeine and its effects on optimizing websites for the search engines…in the mean time, keep creating compelling content for your target audience and be sure your site’s architecture is setup so search engine spiders can effectively crawl your site.

7 Ways Site Search Benefits your Online Marketing Efforts

admin — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 20:29:25 +0000

Many websites today contain lots of information on helping visitors educate themselves and answer questions without making contact. These sites though are increasingly complex…and with all the features jam packed into today’s websites, it can be difficult for visitors to even ascertain if the site has what they need, much less how to find it.

This is the central reason why installing a “site search” function on your website is a necessary investment for making your website a dependable lead generating tool.

Below are 7 advantages you can expect to see from installing a “site search” function on your website.

1. Satisfies customer’s “I want now” attitude

Time is money no doubt and many people who encounter a confusing site with lots of content won’t stick around long to dig through it. A site search gives someone the opportunity to quickly enter keyword phrases on what they’re looking for rather than sift through what they see as a confusing navigational structure.

2. Helps make your site more “customer-centric”

Successful websites must cater to a wide-range of Internet users – knowledge seekers, prospects, buyers and long-term customers. Site search helps you do this since it helps knowledge seekers find information on your site more easily…in essence, site search helps you transform your site from a “one size fits all” to a more “customer-centric” approach.

3. Appeals to the “searcher” type site visitor

People are different and prefer different ways of finding things. If someone uses a Google search to find you, they are more likely to rush to the search box to find information within your site.

4. Obtain valuable marketing data

With the right analytic tools, you can gather data from your site search function that gives you valuable information on who visits your site and how they navigate around it – their desires, intent and behavior. You can see exactly which pages they looked for and found and which ones they read and which ones prompted them to leave the site…this information can be tremendously helpful when planning your marketing strategy.

5. Site search provides insight into usability issues

Saving usage data and click path from real users through your site search function allows you to easily locate where users had difficulty, giving you clues as to places you need to update or expand. Adding typical searched on phrases can help you and your copywriters learn about who is using your site and plan content accordingly.

6. Get new product ideas

Looking at user’s searches can also help you identify new products. If a large number of customers search for something you don’t yet offer, you may want to consider offering a product that fills that void – especially if your site is already bringing in traffic for it.

7. Learn new keywords

Site search may also help you find keywords you weren’t aware, allowing you the opportunity to work those into your content. You may have pages you think are relevant to a specific topic that is missing the words people actually use to look for it. This information can help you refine your content and reach a wider audience.

To be successful online, you need to be mindful on new ways people are using to find and disseminate information online. Those looking to evolve their websites according to user demands could use a good site search function on their sites.

We recommend starting with Google custom search, which is readily adaptable to your needs.

Designing Landing Pages that Draw In and Convert Site Visitors

admin — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 18:47:42 +0000

As a web copywriter, I spend the bulk of my time trying to phrase information in a way that’s appealing to people who encounter it. But there’s one thing that many of us copywriters fail to acknowledge – good design helps support content.

If a site seems drab and visually unappealing, it’s to be expected that a person’s time on that page will be very short. That wonderful article or landing page you labored over for hours sits languishing online like a fish out of water.

Now if you’re exclusively a content developer like me, you don’t have to know all the ins and outs of good design. What you do have to understand are some basic fundamentals of what works and what doesn’t so you can be sure that great content you develop shines to its full potential. And knowing it helps when you’re working with a web designer either on your own team or with another company.

Continue reading for some good general guidelines of organization, formatting and designing your web pages. These tips were part of a whitepaper entitled Best Practices for Conversion: The New Engagement Funnel in 7 Steps.

1. Scrutinize your competition

Go through your competitor’s web pages and look at their copy and layout. Document places you feel stumped and then compare this page with yours. Revise or eliminate sections to make yours better.

2. Place most critical page elements within the first 300 pixels

According to usability research from many sources, over half of site visitors do not look “below the fold.” Therefore, get right to the point and keep your value proposition within your screen’s first view.

3. Keep your layout simple

Increase reader comprehension by using a one-column format with ample margins and white space. Limit paragraphs to five lines…dense copy discourages reading. Simple layouts are also more conducive to search engine crawlers and in turn, rankings.

4. Be obvious and use standard usage conventions

Site visitors shouldn’t have to think very much to understand your message and how to use your page. Be clear when describing links and use a standard underline format when linking to another page, like your shopping cart for example.

5. Make sure your page loads quickly

If a page isn’t loading quickly, most visitors will get frustrated and leave – and the more ‘junk’ you have on a page, the longer it will take to load. You should strive for no more than 8 seconds on a dial-up connection (yes, there are many people who still use dial-up to get online.)

Learn more about these and other elements to consider when designing your landing pages. Remember, your landing page is potentially the last place your visitors will see before purchasing. If your goal is lead generation, it’s step 2 in the process. It doesn’t matter if there are only a couple steps or many in your marketing funnel, your landing page needs to excite visitors and build confidence in your products/services and company.

Innovative SEO Engineer Discovers Potentially Cutting-Edge Strategy

admin — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 19:52:25 +0000

Recently, an innovative SEO engineer by the name of Errioxa claims he uncovered an odd way Google handles links. His testing confirms that using internal text anchors like the one shown below means Google will credit the unique anchor text for each unique anchor link.

#LINKANCHOR“> (Unique anchor text is underlined)

We’ll try our best to explain what’s going on here so beginners beware, this may seem a bit confusing.

Say you have a homepage and you want to link out to another page on your site that has information about cars and trucks. In the past, Google would typically only credit the first link on the page and ignore the other two. Meaning, if the first link has cars and second has trucks as its anchor text, Google would only use cars to define what the page is about and ignore the trucks (2^nd) link.

Errioxa discovered that if you have three links to your cars and trucks page like the ones shown below, Google will ignore the first and credit the other two. This observation lines up with Google’s recent interest in internal anchors, which are sometimes within the site’s URL you see displayed on a search engine results page.

carsandtrucks.html”>Cars & Trucks

.domain.com/page.html#DOGS”>Cars

.domain.com/page.html#CATS”>Trucks

In the above example, someone searching for cars would be taken directly to your specific page on the topic…this is a big help to users but also may be a way to get more unique anchor text attributed to your page that focuses on multiple topics.

More experimentation needs to be done to measure the true effectiveness of this approach. We hope to do this when and where we can and report back any results.

We could very well find this to be a good strategy for better control of a site’s links, which is why Google started paying attention to internal anchors in the first place since they provide their users with a streamlined way of accessing information on a website.

404 Redirects, Search Engine Rankings and Conversions

admin — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 16:43:59 +0000

Inevitably in the life time of a website, you’re going to have pages that are no longer relevant. Perhaps the information is simply outdated or you don’t offer that particular product or service anymore.

What’s a webmaster to do in this instance?

If you’ve spent any time online, there’s no doubt that you have encountered a webpage saying “Error 404” or something like that. Whether a URL was typed in wrong or you were simply looking for something that didn’t exist anymore, a 404 error message indicates to you and the search engines that this page no longer exists.

Having a lot of 404 redirects isn’t necessarily a bad thing in the eyes of Google and other search engines…however, 404 redirects should be setup in a way that’s inviting to the reader and encourages them to stay on your site.

According to Google employee John Mu, 404 redirects are not a problem for the search engine, especially if the page helps a user find related information within the site.

With respect to site visitors and conversions, static 404 redirects are very uninviting, breaking the conversion process much of the time. Let’s say you sell power tools and someone is looking for a particular model band saw but the product is obsolete and is no longer manufactured. If that prospective buyer finds a link to their preferred saw on your site clicks the link and comes to a static page that says “Error 404” and nothing else, they will most likely go elsewhere to find their saw.

Static 404 pages are also a problem for search engine spiders since they find pages on your site through following links. If there are no links on a 404 page, it will not know where to go.

Five must haves for a 404 redirect page include:

An apology for the error (even if the visitor is at-fault)

A search box that’s prominently displayed

A link to your site map

A link to your home page

Links to other main areas on your site

The above example could include a picture of a carpenter who’s frustrated that he can’t find a tool he needs on a job, adding some humor and empathy to the customer’s predicament.

If you’re 404 redirect pages are static, spruce them up by including a template of your site along with some of the elements mentioned above.

The point is – do not have static 404 redirect pages. They could cost you dearly both in terms of search engine rankings and conversions.

6 Not So Obvious Types of Duplicate Content

admin — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 19:10:01 +0000

When thinking about duplicate content, we generally only consider written content. Is what you are posting on your website original? Simply copying and pasting something from somewhere else is a big mistake- that much is obvious.

But something you may not consider to be duplicate content may be considered such by search engines like Google, Yahoo! and Bing. You see, they’re trying to return diverse content to their users …they have a vested interest in ensuring what they display on page 1 is helpful and diverse for their users.

That is what you have to consider – what do search engines consider duplicate? Not doing so could spell disaster for your site’s rankings. Site penalties can occur if a site is simply structured the same way for instance.

Continue reading for 6 not so obvious types of duplicate content to ensure you are not penalized for such an infraction.

1. Two websites share the same structure and content

Two websites having the same structure (i.e. same three column template) and the same content on a single page or site wide with the same linking scheme is prone to trouble. This is by far the most extreme example of duplicate content but the easiest to identify.

2. Identical structure with paraphrased content

Another scenario where two sites have an identical structure but the content is not 100% identical. Copywriters and content developers may see this as a grey area. But Google has a zero tolerance policy on this issue…content from one site simply cannot be a rehashed version of the same thing from another site.

3. Identical structure with similar content

In structural terms, it’s pretty clear two sites are identical. In this situation, the content on each site still has too close a resemblance. If it appears the content is managed in a similar fashion and presented in the same scope, the site(s) may be penalized.

4. Partially identical structure with similar content

While it may seem like splitting hairs, Google is very meticulous. Site A and Site B may only have a few pages that are identical but if the content between the two sites is sufficiently similar, they may take action and not index one of the sites.

5. Identical structure with reminiscent content

In this scenario, both sites have a similar structure and linking scheme while the content is relatively similar. Some content developers may think simply using a Thesaurus to change a few words may avoid detection but the search engines can spot this kind of move.

6. Unique structure with pieced together content

Two sites may have their own unique site structure and linking scheme but their content is simply scraped together from different sources the writer found. Search engines will flag this as duplicate content and act accordingly.

Image, videos and other document formats are sometimes ignored by the search engines since most don’t have the capability to spot duplicate forms of these types of content. They sometimes attempt to remove duplications based on file size, image size and file name however. Therefore in the future, it will be important you think about this as technology continues to evolve.

It should be obvious that simply copying and pasting content to your site is not only dishonest, it is robbing the original creator of that piece without due credit and compensation. But these other scenarios where search engines may flag your site are just as important. While you may not think your site is a duplication of another, what the search engines see is really what matters.