nuvru » Search Engine Optimization

Are You Listed in Local Search?

admin — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 16:13:01 +0000

Is your business listed on Google Local? What about when people search for you on Yahoo or Bing? Get your business listed for FREE by visiting getlisted.org.. it’s easy and free.

SEO Reporting & Tracking

admin — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 04:57:45 +0000

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Meta Tags

admin — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 13:27:11 +0000

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:

<span lang="en-us" xml:lang="en-us">nuvru – Meta Tags </span>

META Tag Resources

How to use META tags – Some info on how to use META tags.
Free META tag generation tool – Auto generate META tags by filling in your info.
META Data Profiles – META Data profiles from w3.org
SEO Friendly Web Content – Article by Yahoo on SEO friendly content with a blurb about META tags.

Link Popularity

admin — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 13:13:48 +0000

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

admin — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 13:13:47 +0000

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

admin — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 13:05:46 +0000

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

HTML Tags

. 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.

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

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
but now it is . 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

HTML tag reference – w3.org’s HTML reference page.

HTML tag examples – Examples of HTML code and tag usage

Barebones Guide to HTML – Barebones guide to HTML

Getting Started: Gain Traffic, Build Pagerank and Increase Revenue

admin — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 12:58:13 +0000

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.

So what is SEO? SEO is simply optimizing your website in a way that moves it towards the top of the search results when people search any major search engine. If your site is in the top 10 listings say on Google then you will be guaranteed traffic, depending of course on how many people are searching for your given keyword per month.

Your websites theme will dictate the keywords your site will be found under. If your site is about web hosting then that would be your main keyword. Other keywords related to web hosting would then follow and there are literally hundreds of keywords for any given topic. Keywords are just that. The Key Words that people will find your site under.

If they search Google or Yahoo then your site should show up for those keywords. Getting your site to show up for those keywords is key in gaining traffic from the search engines. Once you get to the top spots all the traffic is free, highly targetted and is thee very best traffic any site could get.

When I’m optimizing my website for the search engines this is what I do.

First I do a little research. I try and find out keywords to use and figure out how many people are searching for them each month. With that information I do quick searches on Google to find out how much competition there is also known as keyword analysis. If a keyword only gets 100 searches a month but there are 100 million websites competing for that keyword then it’s not really going to pay off if your in the #1 spot on Google. So you have to figure out what you can achieve and where to spend your time. Longer keywords or what are known as “long tail keyphrases” are easier to optimize for and are just as lucrative because people searching for very specific things are usually in the mood to buy or take action if they find exactly what they are looking for. A long tail keyphrase is something like “cheap webhosting with cpanel control panel” or “affordable hotel rooms in las vegas”. The longer the keyword the less competition there usually is and the easier it is to get to the top spots on Google, Yahoo or MSN.

Here are some tools I use to do keyword research.

Overture’s Keyword Suggestion Tool – Search for any keyword and it will give you a number of searches performed in a previous month. Perfect for seeing what the most popular keywords are and also shows what the less popular keywords are.

Wordtracker – Wordtracker is a paid subscription keyword service that allows you to do much more extensive keyword research.

Keyword Discovery – another great keyword research service that offers a great set of keyword tools.

Overture’s free keyword tool is perfect if you are just getting started and want to get keyword ideas. Plus it’s free. I wouldn’t recommend paying for a keyword service unless you’re really serious about using keywords to generate niche traffic. Again it’s just about how much time, money and effort you want to invest. Try the Overture tool first and then move onto paid keyword research tools as you grow.

Since you purchased a website from me you are off to a great start as every site I build is already search engine friendly and most likely already has Pagerank and receives traffic. Now you just have to continue to build it up to get the most out of it.

How to use the keywords you’ve found for your website.

Once you have a good list of keywords to use in your website you have to figure out where and how you will use them in your content to drive traffic to those pages. If you have a blog you can easily create posts using those keywords in the title and body of your post. You should follow keyword density guidelines to some degree to make sure your keyword is spread throughout your content. You don’t always have to use the keywords you’ve found during research. Simply staying focused on the main topic of your website is sometimes enough. Write or have content written that relates to your main topic. The more content you have the better.

Gaining Inbound Links

Links to your website are crucial to where your site shows up on the search engines. The more high quality links you have the higher your site will be when people search for keywords you’ve used in your site. The search engines view links as votes. You might have heard of the term “link popularity”. This basically translates to: the more links you have the more popular your site is. Without links your site is dead. So you have to increase the amount of links pointing to your site to increase your traffic. There are several ways to do this.

You can either exchange links with other webmasters or you can get one-way links through various methods. One way links are by far superior to trading links because you are not bleeding Pagerank off your website onto someone else’s. One-way links to your site tell the search engines that another webmaster thought your site was so good that they linked to you by their own will. You didn’t have to coax them into linking to you by giving them a link back. You won’t always be able to get people to freely link to you so sometimes exchanging links is the only method. Feel free to do this but maintain a sense of precaution as exchanging too many links can get your website penalilzed.

Ok, so what can you do to gain one-way inbound links?

Gaining high quality one-way links isn’t as hard as some people might have you think. With a little research and work you can gain a lot of great one-way links to your site helping you gain more traffic, build up your Pagerank and essentially generate more revenue. Here’s where to start:

Online Forums: Do some research on any online forums that are related to your websites topic. Join those forums and simply place links to your site in your signature. Most forums today offer the ability to put links in your signature and you can freely advertise your site like this as well as get one-way links to your site. The more you post obviously the more times your links will show up but make sure you use diligence when posting on other people’s forums. You actually want to become a friendly and respected member of the community so don’t go posting useless info just to get your links up. You don’t want to get banned alltogether.

Blogs: Do some more research on any of the major search engines for blogs related to your website. You will most likely find many people with blogs related to yours. Read through the posts and comment on anything that you find interesting. Again use diligence and only leave relevant comments. During commenting you can leave your websites URL. Again the more you do this the more links you can gain back to your site.

Article Directories: You can submit articles to article directories for other webmasters to use on their websites. To use your articles they have to keep your author bio intact at the bottom of every article. You simply place a few of your website links in your bio section and when other webmasters publish them they will be linking directly back to your site. Don’t worry if you don’t know how or what to write. Simply post a job on any freelance website such as elance.com, guru.com, scriptlance.com etc with a job for a few articles. Give the freelancer your topic to write on and you can usually get nice 500+ word articles for pretty cheap. They are definetely worth the money as your article will most likely be published by multiple site owners sometimes hundreds. You can find people to write articles for as little as $5 a piece. Once you have your articles submit them to the article directories. Here is just a few:

http://www.articlecity.com

http://www.articlecentral.com

http://www.authorconnection.com

http://www.goarticles.com

http://www.marketing-seek.com

http://www.netterweb.com/articles/articlesubmit.htm

http://www.boconline.com/sub-art.htm

http://www.dime-co.com/articlesub.html

http://www.freesticky.com/stickyweb/submit.asp

http://www.web-source.net/article_submissions.htm

http://ezinearticles.com/add_url.html

http://www.howtoadvice.com/Submit

http://www.ezinearticles.com

Social Bookmarking Sites: You can bookmark your own websites on every major social bookmarking site there is. You have to create a free account first then simply start bookmarking. You can bookmark several pages of your website if you want but again use diligence as you don’t want to be accused of link spamming. Here is a small list of social bookmarking sites you can use:

Furl - Del.ic.ous – Smarking – Simpy – Jots – BlogMarks – Scuttle – Blinklist – -Blogmemes – Bloglines – SocialBookmarking – Searchles – Reddit – Shadows – Co.mments

Testimonials: If you have ever used a product or service online that you love why not send a testimonial to the webmaster saying how much you loved their product. To make the testimonial look credible webmasters will usually include a link back to your site. This is yet another easy way to get more one-way links.

The Importance of Link Text

To make the most of these free methods of gaining one-way links you must use keywords in your link text. The text used in links tells the search engines what your site is about so use keywords that are related to your site. Also, don’t always link just to your homepage. Link deep into your site. Webmasters often link to subpages or subdomains of websites not just to the homepage. The more specific a link is often the better. If your site is about weddings and you have a page on your site named “unique wedding favors” get links to that page with that link text. The keyword “unique wedding favors” is a pretty popular keyword and to rank high on say Google for that keyword you need a lot of one-way links pointing to your site with that exact link text.

Building Pagerank

Once you work on gaining links to your site your Pagerank will naturally grow. The higher your Pagerank the higher Google will place your site amongst it’s results. Pagerank is achieved solely by links pointed to your site. The more links you have the higher your Pagerank will be. Pagerank is basically like electricity. It flows in the same fashion. Pagerank is passed from one site to another in varying amounts. The higher the Pagerank a website has the more juice or electricity it has to pass onto you. This is why webmasters are always looking for links from sites with a lot of pagerank. You can and will pass on Pagerank to other websites when you link out to people. The more you link out the more Pagerank you will pass and the less you will have. If you want to keep your PR high then link out less and gain more one-way links. Your websites structure is also important for passing PR through your website.

Increasing Revenue

Once your traffic continues to build you want to monetize it as much as possible. You can do this through displaying ads in a way that they get the highest visibility. Placing ads such as adsense above the sites fold is important for increasing your CTR (click through ratio). If you are relying on adsense for revenue then you want to display the maximum amount of ads as possible (currently 3 text ad blocks per page along with 1 link ad unit). You will also want to place the ads throughout your content so as to make it blend in. The less they look like ads the better. If you have a blog then you will want to place ads in every single post that is not displayed on the homepage. Remember not to go over the ad display limit. You will also want to make sure the links in adsense or even your affiliate ads are blue. Blue underlined links are the most recognized standard for links.

Using pictures next to adsense or affiliate links draws attention to them and increases click throughs. There is such a thing as banner blindness so using the standard 468×60 banner ads is not recommended. People have been so bombarded with this type of advert that they simply look past any ads in that size. Use text links whenever possible only displaying photos if they are relevant to your site and draw specific attention to an accompanying text link.

Only display relevant ads. Don’t try and push products that are not related to your websites main topic. You will have the most luck advertising products that are related to your sites content.

With the information above you should be able to generate more revenue from your website and I wish you the best of luck. There is a lot more information throughout this website that I encourage you to read. If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to ask.

Other Related Topics

Search Engine Optimization – More info on SEO.

Online Marketing – Overview of online marketing.

Anchor Text of Links is Important

admin — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 12:24:23 +0000

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:

Web Hosting Directory

Hosting Directory

Hosting Companies

Find Web Hosting

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

admin — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 02:44:15 +0000

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

admin — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 22:34:55 +0000

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.