Posts tagged Search Engine Optimization
More SEO tips
Mar 30th
As I’ve written before, on page SEO-actually a series of small changes, which make a big difference in how you rank in search engines.
On page, means the work you do on the web page or blog. Off page SEO is what you do outside of the website / blog, for example, create incoming links etc.
I have already published a whole bunch of articles about SEO but today I wanna talk about a few other small things you can do on page, that are important to how high you end up in the SERP: anchor text and images.
Anchor Text
When you link to another page on your blog/site (internal linking), you wanna use anchor text that describes what the page is about. The anchor text presents a higher relevance in search engines.
For example: If I have a fashion / beauty blog and has a page of my makeup tips I want people to find my make up page when entering the word ”makeup” in Google, Yahoo, Bing an so on. I use the phrase “makeup tips” for my link. Logically the phrase “makeup” is the anchor text.
The code would look something like this:
I’ve uploaded my latest <a href=http://myblog.com/makeup> makeup tips </ a> and pictures so you can easily ….
This means that the text and the link on the blog will look like this, to the visitor:
I’ve uploaded my latest makeup tips and pictures so you can easily….
It’s much better to do this than to put a link on a completely irrelevant word such as:
To get to my make-up tips click here
The word “here” is irrelevant and a waste of a good opportunity to get some SEO done. In other words, add your internal links to the target page’s keyword / key phrase.
A blog is normally not just optimized for one keyword. A fashion blog can also be about clothes, shoes, accessories, jewelry, hair etc. Each of these topics is a keyword and each post to your blog is a separate page.
Pictures
With pictures you are able to sneak in important text in the code that makes your site more relevant to certain keywords / phrases. The text is not necessarily visible to the visitor, but search engines see the text and bring it into consideration when your site/blog is ranked. Sometimes these texts are visible to the visitor and that depends on what browser they use.
For this purpose we use a so-called alt tag to add text in the image code. The alt tag may contain words or phrases and be a short or longer text. I recommend something in between (given that the text may appear in some browsers).
Let’s say I want to do SEO for the phrase “Make money on the Internet” and to use an image in my post. I do not want to spam the post with this phrase but I still want the page to be ranked highly by search engines. I publish my picture:
In WordPress, I can change the Title field (in the admin panel) and put my keyword or phrase in the box. In some browsers the text will then appear when the visitor point their mouse over the image. Like this:
If you do not have Wordpress, but a traditional website, you can change the HTML code and add the alt tag to you picture’s code. The code should look like this:
<img src=”http://uronliebiz.com/mypic.jpg” alt=”Make Money On the Internet” />
Replace the URL with the link to you image and “Make money on the internet” to your keyword or key phrase. Note that quotation marks should not be erased. In this case, I chose XHTML and thus ending the code with a /. If you write pure HTML you should remove / and add </ img> at the end instead. Like this:
<img src=”http://bloggliv.net/minbild.jpg” alt=”Make Money on the Internet”></img>
You can see at the top of your blog page if you should be using HTML or XHTML (when in HTML mode). If the page is coded with XHTML, it usually look like this:
DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “- / / W3C / / DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional / / EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”><html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml”>
If it does not look like this then you probably are using basic HTML.
Good luck with your pictures and anchor texts. Feel free to participate in the dicusssions by posting a comment and don’t hesitate to ask if you have any questions.
SEO scammers
Mar 9th
Google Maps is a free service that gives your site great web presence
Buying services from an SEO consultant is quite expensive and they can never guarantee the desired result. Since we have been working with search engine optimization for a few years new, it is only natural that we stay updated with what’s going on in the industry.
Just recently we found that 4 of the largest SEO consultants out there charge for “expertise” that really is a pile of BS. The reason I am saying this is because all they did for their clients was to list the site URL in a bunch of low quality link portals (around 400 of them to be more precise) and they listed the client’s site on Google Maps.
Sure Google Maps is a great way to get web presence very fast but it is a FREE service, not something a client should have to pay $15,000 for. In fact it takes about 3 minutes to get listed with Google Maps and there is just no excuse for charging the client that amount. Specially since these consultants did no on-page SEO-work whatsoever.
If you are considering buying services from a SEO consultant, make sure you are getting quality expertise and not just link spamming.
List you site on Google Maps to gain quality score.
Update: UrOnlineBiz does not provide SEO services, we just work with SEO on our own websites.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results as opposed to search engine marketing (SEM) which deals with paid inclusion. Typically, the earlier (or higher) a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search and industry-specific vertical search engines. This gives a web site web presence.
Source: Wikipedia
SEO: The 30+ penalty
Feb 17th
Background (facts):
A few years ago Google came up with “penalty 30 +”. The penalty is as such that a domain is degraded in the hit list and end up on position 30+ (there may be exceptions ), sometimes as far as 1000 +.
Pages that are heavily aderttising Adsense are common victims and also pages with little information. Link Directories tend to do less well, while forums do better. Lack of information is not a general problem, very frugal and hard-optimized content pages can still survive the filter.
The filter is very precise, seemingly bad pages go and good ones get to stay. Here it doesn seem to matter how hard the page is optimized with Iincoming links / onpage, a good page survives in the long run. In other words it is the content itself that control. I dare also state that the punishment is more related to keywords with traffic.
Theories
I have since the summer 2007 studying the filter and had some domains in the filter. Some have been filtered away, others not. Here are some theories about what you can do to get out of the filter, and also what I think will not affect the filter:
Incoming links?
At first glance, you can believe that the links are the problem. It is primarily for three reasons that I think this is wrong:
1. The externally, competitors could in a simple way crush the competition. Such an algorithm would be crazy to implement.
2. I have tried to link to an enormous amount of good sites, with the same anchor text, the effect has only been positive.
3. Cleaning out all links from a penalized site does not help!
First and foremost, I am sure there are various reasons for this punishment. Everything from keyword spamming to duplicate content may cause penalty but if we concentrate on normal sites, my main theory regards the bounce rate and time on the site. Google can measure this by registering clicks in the search results. If a click on your link is registered in the search result and later on a visitor click a link for another site (same keywords) then you get a “rejection” becuase the visitor chose the other site before yours. In combination there also seems to be a matter of how long a visitor stay on your site. This can differ greatly between different keywords, ranging from 30% to over 50% of rejection and times between 1-4 minutes. Becuase of the complexity of the algoritm I can not compare the different keywords. However,I would say all above 50% is bad.
I have noticed that if I keep track of the numbers and build a good site, I am safe. So, when working onpage create a good page with content that visitors want, that is my best advice!
