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Are You Listed in Local Search?

3 Mar

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SEO Reporting & Tracking

5 Nov

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Meta Tags

27 Sep

META tags, the hidden bit of code working behind the scenes of every HTML page.

There is a bit of confusion still lurking on the web whether META tags are usefull in SEO and are they required to rank well in the search engines. Well they are not mandatory but they are still used by some search engines so you shouldn’t exclude them altogether.

The basic info used in META tags are title, description and keywords. There are a lot of others but those first 3 are the most important. You should only use relevant information in your meta info. Don’t fill it up with every possible keyword otherwise known as keyword spamming, or stuffing. Keep your tags precise and this will increase your keyword density. As you notice the example below is focused on exactly what this page is about. Some search engines use the meta description as the text description used in their serps (search engine result pages) so it’s good to write a good description for each page.

Example META tags:

<HEAD>

<TITLE>nuvru – Meta Tags </TITLE>

<meta name=”description” content=”META Tag usage: are they still important?”>

<meta name=”keywords” content=”meta tags, meta tag, meta tag example, should I use meta tags”>

</HEAD>

META Tag Resources

Link Popularity

24 Sep

Link popularity is how popular your site is in terms of how many sites link back to yours.

Links to your site are important because they cast a vote that search engines tally to determine how important your site is. Links to your site are called many different things such as inbound links, incoming links, backlinks etc. They all mean the same thing and the more you have the better. Well that isn’t entirely true. The more quality links your site has the better. Quality links are ones that are relevant, oneway and from quality sites.

What determines a quality link?

Well I’m glad you asked. There are many factors that determine the quality of a link. These are

  • Link relevancy – is the site related to yours
  • Link density – is your link on a page with few links
  • Link title – does the anchor text of the link describe your site
  • One way – is the link reciprocated or not
  • Age of linking site – older sites are sometimes seen as authorities
  • IP or GEO location – links from sites that are on different IP’s or in different locations

How do you get quality links?

Getting quality sites to link to yours takes work. If you build a website that people find usefull it will be more likely linked to from webmasters running related sites. This means building up great content. If people enjoy your site they will link to it.

If you have a site that is new and doesn’t really have unique or special content then it is much harder to get people to link back, unless they are in the same boat. This is where exchanging links comes in. Two webmasters agree to link to each other in hopes of increasing their link popularity. Link exchanges are widely popular but search engines are catching on and penalizing webmasters that have intensive link exchange campaigns.

If you run a website for any considerable amount of time then you will most likely receive link exchange requests from other webmasters. You don’t have to accept any link exchange request that comes along. In the email there might be a link to the specified page your link will be on. Check the page out. Does it have tons of other unrelated links on it? Does the page have zero or low Pagerank? Stay away from exchanging links with webmasters who are blindly exchanging links with anyone. You might not be penalized by exchanging links with them but doing so will most likely not benefit your site at all. For quality control purposes do the link requesting yourself.

Give Away Content

One great way to get one way incoming links is to give away free content, scripts or templates. This is also a good way to establish yourself as an authority on your subject. Distributing free content does a few things. First it gets your name and url out there. If the quality of the content is good then other webmasters will be more inclined to use it. If you write articles, write scripts or build templates to give away make sure you include terms of usage. Make sure users have to keep your link in place so that you get a link back. It’s a fair request and webmasters are more then happy to link back especially if your site provides quality content and looks nice.

Text Link Advertising

Advertising on sites via text links is a popular way to get high quality one way links to your site. A few years ago you could buy up thousands of links very cheap and boost your site to the top of the search engines. Search engine have gotten smarter though with the popularity of this method. Now I would say buying a few links is acceptable but only if you buy only 1 link from a site at a time. It’s a great way for new sites to boost Pagerank and get indexed faster. Text links can be expensive and the price depends on a few factors such as Pagerank of the site, how much traffic the site gets and where the link is placed. Right now the going price for a link on a Pagerank 5 site is about $50 per month. Keep in mind that if you are looking to boost your sites Pagerank it might take up to 3+ months to see an increase. This is because Google only updates it’s info every few months and because there is no set schedule it is hard to determine how long your link needs to be up.

How to find your link popularity

There are a few ways to check how popular your site is in regards to backlinks, or the number of people linking to you.  Of course you can use the Google toolbar to simply see # of backlinks… but they will only show you a few of the possible backlinks you have.  I suggest using Yahoo to check your backlinks.  Simply go to Yahoo.com and type in:

link:http://yourwebsiteurl.com

You can also use Google’s webmaster tools to find how many links your site has, as well as see what subpages of your site have links pointing to them.  You might be surprised at what you find.

Keyword Density

23 Sep

Keyword Density is the amount of a keyword appears throughout a single web page.

When creating content for search engine optimization it is good to keep keyword density in mind. Each page of your site should be focused on one subject which naturally your main keyword should be sprinkled throughout.

Don’t go overboard though and place repeating keywords in places they shouldn’t be. If you are creating usable content then you want your copy to be readable and enjoyable. If you stuff your pages with repetitive keywords you are bound to set off alarm bells with the search engines and annoy your visitors so stay away from this method.

So how do you know when your pages are dense enough? Well there isn’t any golden rule here. The best thing to do is stick to one topic per page and use the keyword more or less depending on the amount of words there are on the page. If you have a 500 word article on keyword density then you should use the that keyword in the title and heading of your page as well as 5 times through out the article. But again, if you are sacrificing readability for search engine optimization then don’t bother. Even if you do get traffic people won’t stick around long.

Here’s a free keyword density checker you can use.

Proper Use of HTML Tags

23 Sep

HTML tags are many so we will cover the ones used for the purposes of SEO.

Formatting an HTML page for SEO is really pretty simple. The basic HTML tags to use are the h1, h2, h3, alt and strong tags. The h1, h2 and h3 tags are heading tags used for the heading of your page. See the big heading that says HTML Tags at the top of this page? That is the h1 tag in use and it is used for the main heading text of the page. It looks like this <h1>HTML Tags</h1>. It tells the search engines and users exactly the main topic of the page. The h2 and h3 tags can be used for sub headings which would follow lower in the page as seen below.

Proper use of h2 tags

So we started the page with a main heading using the h1 tag followed by a paragraph and then have a sub heading using the h2 tag. H2 tags appear a bit smaller then the h1 tag and so on. H tags go all the way up to h6 but I have never personally used anything beyond h3 and don’t know of anyone else using anything beyond that either. It’s good to keep your pages focused around one main topic and then breaking down the info into sub sections. And this is where you would use the h tags to properly define the hierarchy of sections.

Proper use of h3 tags

Using the h3 tag is not necessary but is used above as an example to show size decrease. Unless you have a lot of information on the page that is broken up into more then 2 sections you can get away with using just the h1 and h2 tags.

Using ALT tags

ALT tags describe images to search engines as well as people with disabilities that use screen readers to describe objects in a browser. If ALT tags are used on images users will know what they are about if they don’t load properly.

the alt tag describes what image is supposed to be here

When images don’t load properly or are seen by search engines and use proper ALT tags this is what they see.

nuvru logo - the alt tag describes what image is supposed to be here

Describing images properly helps users and search engines get a better idea of what your page is about.

It is important to use ALT tags for your navigation graphics. If you use graphics as your main navigation then it is extremely important that you use ALT tags to describe the graphical link. This tells search engines where the link is pointed in turn describing the destination page.

Using the Strong tag

The bold tag used to be <br> but now it is <strong>. Bolding text gives readers a visual cue or visual emphasis when scanning text. It’s plays a role in readability of a web page and should be used diligently. Also, some search engines pay attention to this tag letting them know what words should stand out.

HTML Tag Resources

Getting Started: Gain Traffic, Build Pagerank and Increase Revenue

23 Sep

Gaining Traffic

Traffic is the most important thing for any website. It’s your visitors that generate revenue by clicking on your adsense ads, by following your affiliate links to make a purchase or purchasing products from your website. It is very important to build up traffic to your site if you want it to generate any amount of money.

There are a lot of services around that web that guarantee increased traffic. I however steer clear of any paid services that claim to generate traffic because with a little work you can generate unlimited amounts of traffic yourself for free. I’m talking about what is known as SEO (search engine optimization) or what I like to call website publicity. Generating free organic traffic to your site doesn’t cost money, it just takes time and effort.

I’m not going to go into lengthy details on SEO. I’m just going to give you quick tips on what you can do to start generating traffic to your site in your spare time. Of course the more effort you put into it the more traffic you can generate. Just remember more traffic equals more revenue. (more…)

Anchor Text of Links is Important

23 Sep

The anchor text used in links back to your site is important. Anchor text is the actual keywords used in your link. So if you run a directory site you want to use text that is descriptive of your site but that also matches your main keywords used for your site. If you have a web hosting directory you might want to use anchor text such as:

The anchor text you use depends on what keywords you are optimizing your site for. Be sure to use the keywords in your anchor text and make sure those links point to the relevant pages on your site.

When building up your link popularity either by exchanging links, buying links or giving away free content make sure you use different anchor text every once in awhile. Having hundreds of backlinks all with the same anchor text is a tip to search engines that this was persuaded by a site owner and not an organic growth of backlinks, because not every webmaster will use the same anchor text or link to the same page.

Also, all your links don’t have to point to your home page. It’s better to switch it up a bit and actually have webmasters link to an important sub section of your site. If you have good site structure the Pagerank passed along to that page will spread to your other pages just as it does when you have links pointing to your home page.

The anchor text that you use within your own website is also crucial to search engine optimization.  Be sure you are linking to your subpages with the best and most appropriate keywords.  Instead of linking to say your homepage with the link text “home” try using your main keyword instead.

Real Estate SEO

11 Jul

When designing the website for Yucaipa Valley Real Estate we implemented on-page Search engine optimization as well as off-page search engine optimization techniques to get them where they currently rank. Their are currently ranked in the top ten for the main keyword. The website is completely css/xhtml so it loads fast and is very search engine friendly.

Real Estate search engine optimization is very important if you really want to obtain targeted real estate leads from any search engine.

If you’d like to learn more about Real Estate SEO and what it can do for your business please contact us.

Site Structure

10 Jul

The structure of your site aids in user navigation as well as helping search engines find and index your pages.

Website structure consists of how you link your web pages together. Everything starts from your home page. Your home page should include visible text links to subcategories of your site. As you can see the top navigation of this page consists of a row of text links. When you follow these links they go to subpages that then link to other subpages related to each category. So under marketing you have several pages such as this one that are linked to.

When a search engine spider visits our homepage it can easily follow the links and in turn find every subpage. But let’s say someone links directly to this page from their site. The search engine spiders following that link will still be able to find every other page of this site because we have a main hierarchical linking structure which flows downward creating a pyramid. The search engines and visitors can easily find their way around using this method.

Why information structure is important

Information needs to be structured or else it impossible to deal with. Breaking down information into manageable categories is important for proper information flow. Visitors don’t want to guess where information is located, they want it easily accessible. Site visitors are more likely to stick around if they can find the info they need quickly. And ofcourse it is crucial to search engine optimization.

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