How to Build Link Popularity
Very important to building your site’s natural search result status is link building. It is very important to have inbound links to your website from as many websites with a good reputation as possible. Basically, Google evaluates all websites and gives them a ranking for any given set of keywords. One of the primary criterion for rank is how many inbound links are going into your website, and which websites they are coming from.
Getting Links
There are many ways to go about getting links to your website.
One popular way is through seeking out vertical search engines and business directories. A vertical search engine is a website that lists companies in a certain niche or industry. It is important to find these for your own industry and get yourself listed. These are typically free and I strongly caution against paying for any type of listing.
Another method of building links to your website is through blogging. Bloggers are typically very conscious of other websites that are linking to their blog. Many times if you have relevant content on your website they will give you a return link to your own website. Also, commenting on other blogs is also an excellent strategy towards getting links to your site as most times you are able to leave a link to your website.
Building links in social media is ever growing in importance. Search engines are now giving heavier weight to social media websites which means links found there are now stronger. On top of that, high-quality social content will generate links to your own website from outside the social media world as well.
Not all links are Equal:
The greater the reputation or ranking for any website linking to you, the better the ranking for your own website. A link from Facebook, Yelp, a national media website, or a highly viewed blog such as Mashable is ranked very high by the search engines. On the contrary, a link from a local business directory with minimal pageviews is not ranked nearly as high. That means you want to strategically seek links from highly ranked websites in order to bolster your own ranking. Find rankings for any website in the world using Alexa. Obtaining links without investigating how highly ranked the linking website is, only wastes time and effort.
Track your links:
Keep a record of all the websites that link to you. At DK we maintain a spreadsheet with the listings, passwords, and other pertinent information to any website that links to our own site. There are also tools from all the major search engines that provide you with all the links they have found for your site, but they rarely will all agree about where your links come from on any given day. Yahoo Site Explorer is a good place to start researching your own links.
If you’re thirsting for more, find many more tactics on either of these 2 highly ranked locations:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/link-building-from-a-to-z
http://www.seobook.com/archives/001792.shtml
Choosing Keywords to Land Your Webpages on Google’s 1st Page
Picking the right keywords can take time and a large chalkboard
No-one knows the exact way that Google (or any other search engine) ranks websites. There are over 200 factors that are analyzed that determine how your website will rank for any given keyword set. It is known that content is king. If your website is easy to find, navigate, and gives a reason for users to return it will likely have a higher search result. This article is all about making your website easier to find. Read more specific detail in Step 7 Implementation for specifics on how to use the keywords you have chosen.
A small business client of ours asked us a question this week how we go about choosing keywords for our website to land on Google’s first page. Many small businesses with limited budgets need a process for choosing keywords themselves without paying for automated or professional keyword assistance. We remind our clients that picking accurate keywords and optimizing their web pages for them enables natural search traffic, which is the best (and cheapest) kind of traffic to have. Our own team has considered several different tactics for picking keywords over the years, but the one we have the most success with is detailed in the following 7 Step Process.
Step 1: Brainstorm
Of utmost importance is thinking of what products, services, news, promotions, etc. you offer that have a high probability of being interesting to the target market. Begin with that list and then come up with some basic keyword ideas that you believe people may search for that are interested in those topics. The picture at right gives an example of an online fitness training company brainstorming keywords it may like to optimize its site for. Choose your keyword sets and move on to step 2.
Step 2: Research additional Keywords based on Actual Search
Very important is to not just pick keywords that your team thinks may get searched a lot, but to use an analysis tool such as Google’s Keyword Tool to find words relevant to your products or services that your target market actually searches for. Imagine the example for the online fitness training company having selected the keyword set “online fitness coaching.” When putting the keyword set in the keyword tool they realize that no-one ever searches for that keyword set. However, the tool does suggest to them “online fitness trainers” and “online fitness training” which generate 590 and 3,600 local searches on a monthly basis respectively. Notice that just because one search generates 3,600 local searches per month does not necessarily mean it will be the best overall result until we finish the entire process. Also note that the Google Keyword Tool does provide Local Search data as well as Global Search Data. To avoid confusion ‘local’ here means in the country you are accessing the search from (USA in this case). Also, to be even more specific you can use the tool to only look for phrase or exact matches monthly searches to be even more accurate.
Step 3: Cross Reference Potential Keyword Sets against Google Search Results
It’s always good to know how much competition you may have. That is exactly what we do here as we take those keyword sets that have been selected and run a simple keyword phrase search in Google. To run this test, simply go to Google and enter in the keyword sets in parentheses (like this “online fitness trainers”) to obtain the search results figures Google presents. In this example Google presented 498,000 results for “online fitness trainers” and 30,000 results for “online fitness training’. These figures represent the total amount of web pages you will compete against when optimizing for each keyword set.
Step 4: Obtain the Keyword Score for each Keyword Set
Finally, you will divide the Search Results total by the Local Searches total to obtain each Keyword Score. The lower the Keyword Score, the better as it means there are more monthly searches and less competition for that keyword set. In this case you will find that “online fitness trainers” has a score of 844 while “online fitness training” has a score of 8. Then you will select the keyword set with the lowest score for your page.
Step 5: (Important but Optional) Head to Head Comparison with First Page Search Results
For even higher probability of choosing keywords that may gain you the respect of the search engines’ algorithms, you can take the process a step further. If you are evaluating many keywords with similar Keyword Scores, you can compare your site against the websites that come up on Google’s 1st page of search results for any keyword set. Using Alexa’s free toolbar ranking system, compare how your website ranks against the other 10 pages on Google’s first page of results. If you rank higher than a majority of them, then you have a much greater chance of replacing them on the first page of search results.
Step 6: Implementation
Now that you have found your keywords, how do you use them? Well, you don’t load them up in the keywords meta tag and expect good things to happen. Google has explicitly stated that they no longer use that factor in search rankings because of the amount of spamming found there. You do want to use your keywords in the Title, Description, link URL, and definitely in the overall content of the page. Those locations, especially the Title, help Google understand what your page is about and deem it as relevant to its users.
Step 7: Monitor Your Results
It is very important to monitor your results and constantly improve. You can download the RankChecker add-on for Mozilla to easily run your keywords and see how your optimization efforts are doing. If you find there are words that just aren’t working, then go through the process again and choose new keywords.
Finally, there is no guarantee for how to land your web-page on Google’s first page of results. If any company says they can guarantee that, your best option is to turn around and run as far as you can from that liar. For more information from Google about how they rank websites, see the Google Webmaster Blog.
How do you succeed at selling online: SEO E-commerce
The Internet has changed drastically over the past five years and so has the way we do business online. Many consumers are now purchasing large portions of their goods on the web through online retailers. Because of this, e-commerce website development has grown tremendously in order to meet the upward demand. There are many factors to take into consideration when starting a new project and most importantly would be your site’s capabilities to perform well in all major search engines. A very large factor in it’s performance is based on the site’s structure and how a search engine can navigate and index the site.
Understanding that the success of a website can largely depend on the ability for it to be found by keywords the target market may use to search, is the first step in creating a search engine friendly e-commerce website. By taking that into consideration through the development phase you will be cautious to avoid major pitfalls that can easily inhibit your sites search engine capabilities. There are many companies that can provide e-commerce website development that function well once a visitor has made there way onto the site but if these visitors don’t find your site when searching in Google, Bing, or Yahoo, you don’t have an opportunity to convert them into a paying customer.
DK specializes in producing search engine friendly e-commerce website development. Our developers are involved in the e-commerce development phase from the early stages of site structure development through individual page optimization using meta tags and keyword positioning.
Free SEO Report: 5 Free Tools to get you Started
Rapid growth in internet use over the past decade has created an interesting challenge for businesses everywhere including major brands and corporate giants; How to accurately measure what people are doing on the Internet, sort them into appropriate audiences, and engage with them? These tools will help you conquer these SEO challenges. Enjoy the free SEO report tools.
Alexa
Alexa is a useful resource for people to discover information about websites. You can use Alexa to discover how popular a site is, see visitor trend patterns over a rolling 6 months, find related sites, learn who owns a site and much more.
http://www.alexa.com/toolbar
Quantcast
Quantcast measures and organize the world’s audiences in real-time so businesses can buy, sell and connect with those that matter most. Quantcast engages all 220 million U.S. Internet users, providing detailed audience profiles for the advertising marketplace to learn more about what consumers are doing online.
http://www.quantcast.com/
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the enterprise-class web analytics solution that gives you rich insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness. Powerful, flexible and easy-to-use features now let you see and analyze your traffic data in an entirely new way. With Google Analytics, you’re more prepared to write better-targeted ads, strengthen your marketing initiatives and create higher converting websites.
http://www.google.com/analytics/
SEO Chat
SEO Chat aggregates a number of different SEO tools so that the everyday website owner can quickly find highly relevant data involving meta-tags, keyword optimization, site link analysis, and much more.
http://www.seochat.com/
Keyword Discovery
Keyword Discovery collects keyword data from many different search engines world-wide and compiles a range of search related statistics. The site provides you with exact search phrases customers use to find products or services and enables you to maximize the available search engine traffic.
*Note, there is a free and a paid version of this tool.
http://keyworddiscovery.com/
What is Your Websites Value?
The Dispatch.com iPhone Application, while ornate, may not drive much loyalty from its users
By TJ Warren
If two websites are identical in terms of their use of graphics and imagery as well as their use of modern web techniques does that mean they also will get the same amount of visitation from web users? And how does the quantity of visitation relate to a websites value? We set out to answer these questions by comparing two seemingly identical websites, those of local Ohio newspapers. At first glance, The Cleveland Plain Dealer’s online home (Cleveland.com) and The Columbus Dispatch (Dispatch.com) appear very similar. However, this appearance is only skin-deep. Here are some figures to consider:
Alexa page rank:
Cleveland.com- 3,878
Dispatch.com- 16,672
Daily page views:
Cleveland.com- 263,283
Dispatch.com- 47,907
Daily ads revenue (potential):
Cleveland.com- $792
Dispatch.com- $146
Estimated worth (websites value):
Cleveland.com- $578,379
Dispatch.com- $106,704
Cleveland.com is estimated to be worth $578,000 while Dispatch.com is estimated to be worth $107,000. These estimates were derived from daily page-views on each site as a function of how many dollars in advertising revenue each website could generate if that were there business model. The more page-views to each site, the more they may charge for ad space. There are many ways to value a website, and this is one of the more popular methods.
Cleveland.com offers a simpler layout and no iPhone app, but has 5 times the number of pageviews as Dispatch.com
Cleveland.com has around 263,000 page views a day while Dispatch.com has about 48,000 per day. While both sites are valuable assets, Cleveland.com somehow is able to drive up their daily page-views relative to Dispatch.com. There are several possible explanations for this comparison. First, the Plain Dealer has a circulation of 450,000 newspapers delivered daily compared to 350,000 by The Dispatch. Also, while Columbus is the most populous Ohio city, Cleveland has the larger metropolitan area, with 2.25 million people compared to 1.73 million in metropolitan Columbus. However these advantages do not clearly indicate why one newspaper would have over 5 times as many daily page-views as the other. It may very well be that Cleveland.com offers better content or does an excellent job of inspiring its readers to engage online.
Whatever the reason, the larger volume of visitors results in higher estimated ad revenue for Cleveland.com ($790/day as opposed to $145/day). This estimate means that Cleveland.com could use the extra revenue to further distance themselves from Dispatch.com in the future. The overall lesson is to look further than just the appearance of a website to determine how valuable it is. There are many things that go on behind the scenes which contributes to the relative success and visitation of a website.
Free tools worth checking out include:
http://alexa.com
http://websiteoutlook.com
References:
http://factfinder.census.gov
http://www.infoplease.com/