SEO Or Traditional Advertising – You Do The Maths
The majority of business owners who have a website prefer to use a more traditional form of advertising. For those with a local brick and mortar presence, it will be the traditional media such as print or radio. For those with only an online presence, it will be advertising in the form of banners or pay-per-click such as Googe Adwords. However, there are many more businesses that fail to use any form of promotion including basic search engine optimization. The biggest barrier to employing an SEO expert is not cost. It is distrust. Cost then comes a close second. If you stop and think about it for a moment, how much money would you hand over for what is essentially a marketing campaign if your told CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Why Reporters Should Never Talk SEO?
There is an old saying, "the world may think you're a fool, it's not until you open your mouth that you prove it". Sometimes I think reporters should note that before they start espousing SEO concepts. Forbes recently published an article titled How To Build A Killer Small Business Web Site. Some of the concepts were fine; some were so terribly off the mark. Take the following quote for example: The key to SEO: selecting 50 to 100 key words most relevant to your products, services and target audience. The more those words appear on your Web pages (within reason), the higher up the stack your site will tend to appear "The more those words appear on your web pages". Hmm, by that logic, I should be CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Do Tag Pages Benefit Your SEO Strategies
Search Engine Roundtable posted an article related to Tag Cloud pages and the way Google treats them. This follows a Google Groups thread on the subject. The issues raises certain questions including that related to Googles dislike of indexing 'search result' pages. Is a tag cloud a 'search result' page is one of the first questions to be asked. It is probably a line ball call, however, Google does seem to be indexing and ranking these tag cloud pages so they are probably not considered 'search results' pages at present - the future, who knows. I don't know if these pages actually offer any benefit to a user. I would certainly prefer a user to land on a page that was more relevant to their needs CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Boost Your SEO With Product Reviews
As the web grows and develops, so to does the complexity of search, particularly Google. One aspect of search rankings that may take effect in the future is the social aspect of websites. User generated content has been term used in the past, its search engine optimization value into the future may be important. If you have an ecommerce site then you should be encouraging your customers to write mini product or service reviews, or at the very least, leave comments. If social and user generated content does get included in the search ranking algorithms, your site will have a head start. It can make good SEO sense to incorporate it now for other reasons. Your keyword lists should include your products. If they do, every comment CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Take The Time To Learn SEO Basics
Many brick and mortar businesses that develop an online presence find it more economical to outsource their SEO and website maintenance to professionals in the relevant industries. If you wish to prosper online and you have little knowledge then this makes sense. These same owners however, have never really stopped to learn about running that online presence. It is a rather strange approach. If they were to open another bricks and mortar branch, the first thing they would do is analyze the market, learn who the opposition is, and develop some form of business plan. The online world is no different with the exception that maintaining an online presence is not about trading hours. The reason you employ an SEO consultant is to gain search rankings that CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
SEO – Inhouse or Outsourced, Which Is Best?
For many businesses, the question is often raised about whether their SEO should be done 'in house' or 'outsourced'. There is no definitive answer to question such as this as there are good points to each. The bottom line is often $$$. How much can we afford? There are a few pointers that may help to make a decision, but ultimately, it comes down to whether or not you have enough work to employ an SEO professional full time and whether or not the costs associated can be justified. If you only have enough work to employ someone part time then the financial incentive may be to employ a consultant. If your funds do run to employing someone full time in SEO, the investment can well CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Google Throws A Dynamic URL Spanner In The SEO Works
The search giant known to us all as Google has once again confounded all SEO experts by changing their views on a particular subject. In the past, the recommendation from all SEO consultants was to ensure that URL's looked more like a static URL than a dynamic one. Now Google says they prefer the dynamic! So, after webmasters the world wide have spent hours carefully crafting titles and URL's for the benefit of the SEO, Google says it would prefer a yoursite.com/?232 instead of a plain English URL? To quote the official Google statement on the subject: Does that mean I should avoid rewriting dynamic URLs at all? That's our recommendation, unless your rewrites are limited to removing unnecessary parameters, or you are very diligent CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
I Don’t Want A Blog But I Want The SEO Benefits!
There are many website owners that simply don't have the time, resources or finances to run a blog for their business. It could be argued that from a search engine optimization and social perspective they cannot afford not to have a blog - but that is a different argument. Let's assume they cannot have a blog yet some of the benefits of a blog are appealing. Is there a solution? For every problem there is a solution if you look hard enough. In this situation, there are numerous solutions. The first and most obvious is to find a blog in your niche and form a partnership. The blog includes posts on your products or services with links to the relevant pages. In return you pay the CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Top 5 Age Factors Affecting SEO
No matter where you go in the world, age does matter. In the search engine optimization world, age also matters, however, it's not the age of the SEO consultant, and it is the age of the various components that go into ranking a page. There five areas where age may have a bearing on your overall search rankings. No one can say for sure what effect they have, however general consensus is that age can be important. These five areas are: Domain Age: The longer a domain has been registered and the length of time a domain has before renewing or expiry is taken into account. Search engines, particularly Google, are looking for some validation of the site. If the domain is six months old and only CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Duplicate Content And Its Effect On SEO
For the second or perhaps third time, Google have published a post on duplicate content and how it effect on SEO. Quite simply, Google does not penalize for duplicate content. In fact, reading the post, they are rather clever in their treatment of duplicate content. Google's post really does put the issue beyond doubt. Are there penalties? For sites that scrape content - yes. For sites that get scraped - no! Sites, particularly blogs that have duplicate content because of the structure; for example, categories, archives, and perhaps renamed URL's. Will it affect your SEO, yes, but not because of penalties. Let's look at how Google handles duplicate content on a site: When we detect duplicate content, such as through variations caused by URL parameters, we CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
SEO Cannot Happen In A Vacuum – You’re Not Alone
A previous post referring to the benefits of linking out created a number of comments. What is important in the modern internet world is to realize that we are not in a vacuum. SEO cannot be done entirely alone. By its very nature, link building, one of the essential components of SEO, requires the involvement of many other website owners. Every website has business or strategic partners. They may not be active partners; in fact they are often partners without even knowing it. If you run affiliate ads, you have formed a partnership. If you sell products, there will be other products that may complement yours. For example, if you sell cleaning detergents, there are other sites that sell cleaning hardware. While there is no formal CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Description Meta Tag – SEO or SEM?
I come across a lot of blogs offering SEO advice and probably the biggest area of confusion appears to surround the use of meta tags. You can think of your meta tags as being advice notes to the search engines and one of the most important tags is the description meta tag - not for SEO purposes however, it is for SEM or search engine marketing purposes. SEO is the work you put into getting your site ranked highly in the search results pages. Once your site is appearing on page one, what are the searchers going to see. This is where the description meta tag becomes important. A well written description meta tag can make all the difference to how much traffic you see coming CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
There Are Real SEO Benefits To Linking Out
SEO Book has published an interesting view on sites that don't link out too freely, calling it 'black hole SEO". It's a fairly apt phrase too. These are the sites that welcome, in fact seek, backlinks to their pages. The link juice flows in and disappears - no different to a black hole. There are many website owners that don't link out and they do so for a variety of reasons. One of those reasons does relate to SEO, they simply want to channel all their links into their own pages. There are many benefits to linking out, not all SEO related, but certainly related to trust and helping your visitors finding the right information. For those worried about losing their visitor, simply force the link to CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
SEO Creates A Backlink Conundrum
The backbone of all successful search engine optimization programs are the backlinks. The more backlinks, particularly quality backlinks, and the higher your page is likely to rank. Search engines such as Google demand 'natural' backlinks, that is, backlinks acquired due to the quality of the content, not those found by actively seeking them. This creates quite a conundrum. If I create a new site tomorrow, it will never acquire backlinks. If it does it will be by accident. To acquire backlinks naturally, people have to find your site. Unless you actively promote your site and encourage people to link, your site will never be seen. This is one of the basic principles behind search engine optimization. Have your site optimized for the search engines then get CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
SEO And Local Search – Look Before You Leap
Local search has been on a lot of people's agendas over the last 6-12 months. Search engines have been improving and promoting the features. Delivering an SEO program for local search is no big deal; however, I think it is wise to really think through your options before going down that track. If your website is essentially trying to promote a bricks and mortar business in a particular area or region then undertaking an SEO program that focuses on local search makes sense. Likewise, if your online business only services a particular area, you should optimize for that area. Where some businesses get into trouble is when their long term goals are different to their short term situation. You may have an online business that services a CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
SEO Journal is Written by
Brick Marketing Founder,
Nick Stamoulis:
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