Search Engine Academy of South Carolina

Let’s say you have done your keyword research…you have written the content for your new page…you have even gone as far as making sure it is optimized and ready for the search engines to find and index your page and now you are just waiting for results. Let me share with you how you can take the game into your own hands and help it along a bit. 

After you have completed the few things we listed above here are your next steps for success with that new content. 

 1.      Link the new page on your site map.  Make the robots job easier and tell them exactly where they can find the new page.

2.      Link the new page from your home page within the actual text on your home page.  Most engines will crawl your home page first so make it easy to find.

3.      Introduce the new content in a snippet on your Blog or on another related topics page within your site.  Your blog would work best but if you still have not added a blog to your site another popular page that has similar content on it will work as well.  Point the keyword rich link text back to the new page on your site for the best results.

Try to keep this formula in mind every time you write new content for your site and soon the search engines will enjoy coming to your site. 

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I know I have been saying it over and over again and I am sure you are sick of hearing it but I have found a great easy way you can start dabbling in Social Media Marketing.

Each one of us has our own industry related topic that we know tons about.  For me of course it is search engine optimization and marketing for you it may be what every your passionate about or what your Web site is about. Whatever it is I am going to share with you a great way you can start getting your Web site in the midst of SSM.

The first thing is you need to sign up for a Yahoo! account so you can log into Yahoo! Answers. 

Start here: http://answers.yahoo.com/

Make sure you list your Web site in your profile so you can get some traffic from your answers. Once you have an account all signed up log into the area that your interest may be in.  Look on the left hand side of the screen to dig down into your topic as far as you can.

Next spend just a few minutes a day or a couple times a week and browse through the questions that have been asked.  Find questions that you may be able to direct someone for more information on your Web site and make sure you give them the link in your answer or questions that you have a real knowledge.

Answering questions in your special topic will give you the creditability of being an expert in your field.  Automatically you’re building trust in your product or service along with sending traffic to your Web sites. 

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If you utilize a copyright notice on your Web site don’t forget to update it this month.  The search engines like to see the current year on your notices so double check all your Web sites and make sure you have 2008 listed.

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Let’s do a quick review of a  robots.txt file. Basically it is a protocol for spiders to immediately find instructions on what they can and cannot have access to on your site. If you don’t want spiders indexing your images, just disallow them. If you’d prefer not to have certain areas of your site indexed and available for the searching public – go ahead and restrict access by using a robots.txt file.

There is nothing difficult about creating a basic robots.txt file. It can be created using notepad or whatever is your favorite text editor. Each entry has just two lines:

User-Agent: [Spider or Bot name]
Disallow: [Directory or File Name]

This line can be repeated for each directory or file you want to exclude, or for each spider or bot you want to exclude.

Googlebot, MSNbot and Slurp (Yahoo!) all look for the robots.txt file on your site so why not give them what they are looking for and index only those pages you want to share with the engines.

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Do you have PPC Ads that you are targeting for on-line sales?  If so did you know that the business days for holiday shopping are Monday’s and Tuesday’s between Noon and 4:00 PM. The peak on-line shopping day tends to be the second Monday before Christmas and this year that day falls on December 10th. Use your ad scheduling feature in Google Ad Words to automatically adjust your bids on those busiest days and times of the week.

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I came across a great guide today that I just had to share with you all.  Aaron & Giovanna Wall wrote “The Blogger’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization” and it is a great guide on how to optimize your Blog.

 Here is a inserp of the Guide but please take time to follow the link adn read the whole guide:

Why Blogs Are Different Than Static Websites

SEO for a blog is different than SEO for most other websites, largely because of the social elements baked into blogging technology. SEO for blogs is less about buying links or tricking inadequate search technology. SEO for blogs is more focused on giving people something to talk about and creating something worthy of attention.

The Social Nature of Blogs

1. RSS and feed readers make it easy for readers to subscribe to every post you write, and be notified the moment you publish it.
2. Many people who read blogs also write them, and many of them have hundreds or thousands of subscribers. If a few reputable bloggers syndicate your story it can have a cascading effect where many of their readers share your story.
3. Popular blogs that solicit reader feedback may have dozens or hundreds of comments on each post, adding unique content which the page can rank for.
4. Optimizing a blog is more about capturing attention and getting credit for spreading ideas than it is about optimizing page copy to match search relevancy algorithms.

Domain Name Registration & Blog Hosting

Services such as TypePad, Blogger, and Wordpress.com allow you to host your site as a subdomain off of their sites. Do NOT do that! Some of those services offer a limited set of features and/or prohibit placing ads on your site. It can take months or years to build an audience. Rather than eventually moving your site away from one of these services, you are better off starting with your own domain name and hosting it with a reliable web host.

You can register your own domain name for less than $10 at GoDaddy.com. Dreamhost is an affordable web host, and they offer one click install of the Wordpress blogging platform.

Read the complete “Blogger’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization”

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What are “backlinks”? Backlinks are links that are pointing towards your website. They are also knows as inbound links. The number of backlinks is a good judge of the popularity of a website. Backlinks are important for search engine optimization because some search engines, especially Google, will give more credit to websites that have a good number of quality backlinks, and consider those websites more relevant than others in their results pages for a search query.

When search engines calculate the relevance of a site to a keyword, they consider the number of quality inbound links to that site. So you should not be satisfied with merely getting inbound links, it is the quality of the inbound link that matters. A search engine considers the content of the sites to determine the quality of a link. When inbound links to your site come from other sites, and those sites have content related to your site, these inbound links are considered more relevant to your site. If inbound links are found on sites with unrelated content, they are considered less relevant. The higher the relevance of inbound links, the greater their quality.

Building quality backlinks is extremely important to Search Engine Optimization, and because of their importance, it should be very high on your priority list in your SEO efforts.

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 We can define SEO (Search Engine Optimization) as the art and science of achieving higher rankings in the organic search results.
 
 As an SEO you may have to spend a great deal of time explaining the differences between the two. Being able to properly define these two factors will distinguish you as the SEO that stands out in the crowd and becomes successful to the one that gets lost n the crowd.
 
 With the shift in the Internet world the “textbook style SEO” is not providing top rankings on it’s own as it once did in the past. We are now seeing a great shift in the results to sites that have a good balance between both the science and the art of SEO.

Read the complete article found on our Web site at:

http://www.searchengineacademysc.com/seo_marketing_articles/difference-art-science-seo.htm

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Often people are so concentrated on what is on their Web site they bypass the most important element of it, that being their title tag. 

Have you taken a good look at your title tags lately?

Have you done a search on your most popular keywords or phrases and seen how your sites title tag compares to your competitors?

Does your title tag compel someone to click on your site out of all the other choices on the page?

Have you included the three elements of a good title tag?
Keyword - Trigger - Benefit 

Let me show you some examples I found today on some compelling title tags against some not so exciting ones. 

My search for this example was coffeehouse:

Coffee House
Pretty common…does not give us any direction or makes me want to click on it.

Wayward Coffeehouse :: Late Night Organic Coffee in Greenwood …
Getting better I am interested in what Organic Coffee is and it is good to know at a glance that they are opened late at night.

Savor the Flavor Coffee House Lincoln Park | Ice Cream & Dessert …
Now this one is a great one it has combined the three elements.
Coffee House - Keyword
Savor - Trigger
Flavor - Benefit

My search for this example was chocolate:

Wilbur Chocolate
Pretty common… the chocolate company + chocolate, nothing out of the ordinary unless I was looking for that exact type or company.

CHOCOLATE SKATEBOARDS
Certainly peaked my interest to click on the site to see “Chocolate Skateboards.“

Anette’s Chocolates Napa Valley - ENJOY CHOCOLATE WINE SAUCES …
Now this one gave me a bit of everything.  It included the 3 factors of a good title tag plus it highlighted something that may very well be their niche in the market, “chocolate wine sauces,”  you don’t see that much!  I just had to click to see what it was all about.

So you see how something as simple as setting the correct title tag can make the difference between clicking to your site or by passing it and clicking onto your competitors. 

I encourage everyone to do a “Title Tag Audit” on your site today! 

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New page on your site? - Blog it! 

Do you have a Web page on your site you are trying to get indexed at Google? 

Do you have a Blog on your site?

If both of your answers are yes then you have the ideal situation for getting that new page indexed in Google much faster.

The steps are easy and quick and can bring you results fast.

Step #1 - Create your new page on your site

Step#2 - Optimize the page

Step#3 - Add the page to your site map

Step#4 - Write a short overview of the page on your blog

Step#5 - Optimize your blog post

Step#6 - This is the most imporatant step - link to your new page in your blog post.

Quick - Simple - Effective!

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