Google says that there are 151,000,000 searches a month for the word “car.” Question…Is it more important to therefore try to rank organically for the word “car,” to try and capture traffic from those hundreds of millions of searches and compete against every other website going after “car” searches? Or should you focus your efforts on other more specific keywords that are more relevant to your brand and you have greater potential to rank for?
Below are some thoughts and questions you should ask yourself about keywords when you are building a site, adding a page, or even naming a product:
Just because you call your product something, doesn’t mean that a consumer is searching for your product that way
A car can be searched for many different ways: sedan, coupe, Ferrari, sports car, two door sedan, red car, best sports car, which car is better, Ferrari that was in Ferris Bueller’s Day off
When trying to find keywords for your site, make sure that the keywords make sense for your brand and what the product actually is; this will help them rank better in the long run.
Make sure to check out how competitive the search landscape is
If you are a smaller website, it might be better to focus less on the broad, very high traffic keyword “cars” and put more effort into the “red four-door sedan” keyword which doesn’t have big companies competing for that space.
Just because consumers conduct 1,000,000 searches a month for a specific keyword, doesn’t mean you will get any traffic from it, if you are not ranking on the first page or second page of the results. So do your competitive landscape analysis and find the right keyword.
Map Your Keywords across your site
Why cannibalize your own keywords? Find unique keywords per page that you can optimize and have the possibility of ranking for all of them
Make sure to focus each page to two or three specific keywords and use each keyword two to three times in the content.
How are you choosing your domain name? Is it part of your marketing strategy? A short, memorable domain name will let people remember your product or service, but a short dictionary word domain name will also help your SEO positions.
Although many good names may have already been registered, you can still find good names available on secondary market websites such as Sedo and SnapNames.
The Value of Short Domain Names
It isn’t hard to understand why short domain names are valuable. A generic dictionary word domain name may cost thousands of dollars—or even millions. According to DN Journal, Social.com was sold for $2.6 million in the past July. However, don’t be discouraged! A recent study by SnapNames says that a vast majority of the domain names are bought and sold between the $500 to $5,000 range.
What’s a fair price for a domain name?
Generally, the more words in the domain name, the less it is worth. But a common two-word name is worth more than a rarely used single word name. A domain name without dashes or numbers is often worth more because typical users do not use dashes when they search. (Google, too, ignores dashes when you search.) Names ending in “.com” are also more popular than “.net” names because most people equate “.com” to the Internet.
Buy your Ideal Domain
Even when a domain name is listed for $10,000, you may still be able to buy it for significantly less. Like everything else, domain name prices can be negotiated. You can find out the domain owner’s information by looking up its registration records from DomainTools. One word of advice: don’t assume the domain owner is “squatting” on a domain name. Many domain name owners are very organized and have a large portfolio. A few of them are even public traded domain investment companies. read the full story...
When looking at most business infrastructures there is usually one thing that is most important amongst all of them—the consumer. Your revenue is driven by consumer purchases, and if said consumer is happy with the services your company provides, they will more than likely return for repeat business.
A strong online presence can be everything for your business, so make sure you follow these 4 simple tips when constructing/revamping your website to create the best online user experience for your customers.
1. Have a Mobile Version of Your Website
As we stated earlier, 2011 is the year for mobile marketing and optimization, and rightfully so. With the use of mobile phones for web browsing reaching all time high numbers and constantly climbing, it is important that you have a mobile version of your site so your consumers can access your site, on the go, from their phone.
If your budget doesn’t allow you to build a complete separate mobile version of your website, be sure that you web developers are building your site to be mobile friendly.
2. Constantly Provide Additional Information (Add a Blog or News Section)
Adding new supplemental information to your website can be extremely valuable for multiple different reasons.
Benefits on a Consumer level
The main reason consumers will be going to your website is to find out more information about your product or service, so having supplemental information that’s relevant to your business will strongly benefit them. It can also help push them over the edge to make a purchase.
Not only that, if you are constantly providing new fresh information about the particular space your business is in, your site can become a resource for information which in turn can drive lots of traffic to your site. And believe me there is no such thing as bad traffic to a website. read the full story...
Making sure that your website has links from other websites is a very important aspect of SEO. Although link building can sometimes be a very slow and very gradual process, the increase in traffic and visibility that results from meaningful links is a great reward.
As an intern looking to learn the ins and outs of SEO, I sought to find out more about some of the different link building practices and strategies out there. When it comes to SEO, things are constantly changing, so it’s important to continuously keep up to date with the latest news about which link building practices work and which don’t. Here are some great link building tips and strategies that stood out to me:
Create “Link-Bait”: It’s all about good content! Create articles, blog posts, videos, infographics, etc. that are well-researched and provide extremely interesting, educational or entertaining content. If you can establish your site to be one of the best resources in a given market space, people will surely link to it.
Guest Post On Other Sites: Find other bloggers in your industry and ask them if you can write a guest post for their site. Blogs are always hungry for fresh content and there are many blogs out there that accept guest posts. This is a great way to get a link back to your own site, build personal brand visibility, and start becoming a part of the community within your market space.
Conduct Interviews: Interview someone in your industry. Some people love to talk about themselves. You’ll raise exposure for your site through the interview and hopefully generate some favorable links or mentions from the person that you interviewed.
What the H!@# is a Canonical Tag? First off, it is pronounced [kuh-non-i-kuhl] tag and it helps eliminate duplicate content on your site in the eyes of search engines. It is easy to implement, accepted by all the major search engines and can help your site in the rankings.
In its simplest form, a canonical tag tells the search engines which page to display in place of similar pages (like a 301 redirect), but without actually redirecting the user to the new page. When there are multiple versions of the same page/URL (example.com, www.example.com, www.example.com/) they are all considered the same in the eyes of the engines, which means the engines don’t know which URL to display in their indexes. This in turn can affect your pages’ search engine rankings and traffic to your site (something no one wants).
To prevent your site from potentially losing rankings and positions, simply add a canonical tag to the duplicate pages. Like other meta attributes, it is added in the <head> of your page’s code. You will want to add the canonical tag to all of the duplicate pages, but not the preferred page’s URL. Here is an example of code that will be added to the duplicate pages that you will not want indexed:
Add <link rel=”canonical” href=” www.example.com> inside the <head> section of the duplicate content URLs:
http://www.example.com/
example.com/
www.example.com/
http://www.example.com
And by adding that simple line of code into the header of the duplicate pages, the search engines will understand that the duplicate pages all should be pointed to the preferred canonical URL. You can check your site’s duplicate content by going into Webmaster Tools and adding in canonical tags where appropriate. With these simple instructions and examples, start adding your own canonical tag today! read the full story...
Being that I am the last person at envisionit media that would do a search for recipes, I still found this latest improvement Google has made to enrich the online search experience pretty significant. You know, for those that love to cook (not me), but more importantly for those that feature recipes on their website and want to increase their online exposure for them.
So what is Google Recipe Viewer? Well, in the past, you could do a search for “chicken recipes” in the search bar, and hope that recipes appear in the results. Now, you can filter your results on the left hand side of the results page to search by ingredients, cooking time, even calorie count!
If optimized properly, recipes can get search presence better than ever before. How do you tag recipes to appear better? Recipe View is based on data using rich snippets markup which can be added to the pages of your website that have recipes on them. Pretty simple right? With a little bit of HTML coding, you can be on your way to maximizing the value of your recipes posted on your website.
Don’t yet have recipes posted online? If it is relevant to your business, and can increase the user experience on your website, well by all means, contact us and we can help you out!! And for those of you that actually um like to cook enjoy!!
So things over at Google are getting a little scary, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Although it is still technically in testing phase, Google is allowing users to block domains/hosts from appearing in your personal Google search results. They are also allowing users to report bad links and content farm websites through a new Google Chrome extension. The idea behind the extension, called Personal Blocklist is that users can block websites they don’t want to see in their results and Google can then determine bad websites and content farms by looking at the patterns of websites people most often block.
This is the first time that Google has given a searcher the ability to have an impact on search results and the search engine as a whole. Because of this new extension, users can effectively have an impact on page rank since “the extension will also transmit to Google the URL of the web page on which the blocked or unblocked search results are displayed.”
There are currently 116,995 users worldwide and an average of 23,835 weekly downloads. The extension also has a perfect 5 star user rating. At this pace it’s not going to change the Internet, but it’s a very interesting direction and one to keep your eye on. It is also cool because if you use Google Chrome you can now easily block those websites you don’t want to show up in your results. As search gets more personal, this will certainly have an effect on SEO and finding creative ways to get in from of people who can actively manipulate search results.
In honor of end-of-year reflection and round-ups, I wanted to use my last blog post of 2010 to pay homage to the classic Top 10 List. From popular radio to Cosmopolitan to Letterman to your best friend’s blog, Top 10 Lists have always been able to captivate the curiosities of many an audience. They can be fun or insightful, they make us laugh, they make us think…and sometimes they might even rile us up. Put that sucker on your website and BAM: you’ve got a simple little viral SEO tool.
Surprise! Google recently rolled out another change in their results pages. This time it’s to the local search results. When you do a “local” search in Google—something like “pizza Chicago”—you used to see a contained space at the top with a map and 3-10 short one-line listings of local business, each pulled from their associated Google Places pages. Now you’ll see Google Places results incorporated right within the regular organic results.
Let’s look at an example. Say you’re looking for something unique to do this weekend and search for “dueling pianos Chicago.” You might get the following results.
The 1st listing (our client, Howl At The Moon) and the 5th are both supplemented with great information from their Places pages—imagery, address, reviews, etc. But the title and description being displayed are still from the main website. Organic results and Local results living in unison…it’s a beautiful thing.
Okay, so why should you care?
Well, the buzz in the SEO universe is that this new combo of information is giving sites a boost in Google when their Places page is well optimized. Plus, take a look back at that screenshot—the 1st and 5th listings are more robust than the rest and look a bit more appealing, right? They just might encourage some higher click through rates.
So what next? Well, we told you in April to claim your Google Places page, so if you haven’t yet done so, get on it! And given the new impact we’re seeing on organic results, here’s a few tips to keep in mind: read the full story...
Be sure to fill out your profile completely…it makes a difference
What keywords are most important to your business? Use those in your Places description and in your categories, if possible
The whole first page on Google game has gotten a bit harder recently. This is because Google has started showing up to four pages from the same domain on one page of the search results. The reason? Google wants to present the most relevant search results based on a searcher’s intent. If that searcher is interested in a particular domain or topic they might see up to four results for one domain based on relevance.
Google’s reasoning from their blog: “As before, we still provide links to results from a variety of domains to ensure people find a diverse set of sources relevant to their searches. However, when our algorithms predict pages from a particular site are likely to be most relevant, it makes sense to provide additional direct links in our search results.”
It’s important to note that when more than one page is shown from the same domain, the website descriptions for the additional pages change from two lines to one. This makes the first 10 words of a meta-description tag even more important.
Previously Google would only show up to two pages from the same domain on one page, but in the past two weeks there has been a dramatic change. Showing four results from one domain instead of one or two can create a substantial advantage in the search engine real estate game. Just like back in the day, the number of times your website is visible on a search page the more opportunities there are to click it. read the full story...
And for those of you that actually um like to cook 
enjoy!!
