Often I review many different sites a week. As part of that review I have some standard things I look at - Does it have meta tags? Are they unique on every page? Does the site use a sitemap? And so on. In this article I'm going to give you some of those things, and some ideas on how to improve your site overall.
When did hypertext links become the enemy? Google's PageRank began a burgeoning search engine optimization link building industry that now seems to be out of control. What's the deal with text link ads? Isn't a link just a link? Not really, at least according to recent blog and forum posts.
An increasingly common Search Engine Marketing problem faced by many large corporations is that of Sponsored/PPC keyword management.
While many large companies have a centralized marketing department that all their divisions market through, others have decentralized marketing. With decentralized marketing, different divisions of the same company (who each have their own website) can find themselves bidding against each other for the same keyword on the same Search Engine - a very costly practice for the corporation and one that drives up the cost of prime keywords.
When you consider that there are basically only three major Search Engines that account for over 96% of all searches done in North America - it is easy to see why the divisions find themselves bidding for the same phrases on the same pieces of Search Engine real estate.
Some webmasters have discovered a new trick to get inbound links from authority web sites. At the moment, it seems to be possible to improve your Google rankings with that trick.
According to the results of the iProspect Outsourced SEO Metrics & ROI Study (PDF link), 35% of the surveyed organizations that promote their web sites with natural search engine optimization (SEO) and pay per click advertising recognize a higher return from SEO.
This compares to just 11% of marketers who report that PPC ads produce higher ROI. That means that three times as many webmasters who can measure the ROI of each method recognize a higher ROI from natural SEO than from PPC advertising.
Top Google software engineer Matt Cutts recently wrote about paid links in his blog. Being one of the main software engineers on Google, Matt Cutts knows best about Google indexing and quality control issues. Matt Cutts suggested that it was better not to use paid links.
Last week, I had an excellent reminder of Search Engine Marketing basics.
I was writing about Yahoo! Search Marketing's problems and the reactions to their last upgrade. While trying to find the right words I used a variation on an old phrase 'venting spleen' - and ended up with:
During the last few weeks there has been a lot of spleen vented in the direction of Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture).
Much has been said about Google's way of determining the rankings of web pages. Incoming links and optimized web page content are the key to top 10 rankings on Google and other major search engines.
The most important thing you can do for your business and your website is develop relevant keywords that are not too competitive yet generate targeted traffic to your website.
It's called keyword optimization. Why is it important?
Because Keywords and keyword phrases do a couple of things for you:
With the right keywords, you will attract the viewers most interested in the items or services on your site.
You will rank higher in the search engines for your chosen keywords, saving you thousands of dollars in advertising.