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Monday, 3 August 2009

Informative Tables and Lists Make Great SEO Content Too!

By now most people in the SEO world are fully aware that great site content is a big part of the game. Content is king, or so we have heard many times. Developing creative, original, relevant and keyword-rich information for your website is a very user-friendly exercise and consequently will attract many visitors to your site.

Targeted content can create an even more positive impact by allowing you to access and reach out to your main market audience. User-friendly content is often spider-friendly, as well, since search engine spiders are naturally attracted to good writing, particularly if it is keyword-rich and original.

Great writing is not the only way to develop great site content, and should actually be just one of several different ways to do it. Creating relevant tables and lists for your site can also considered as great content, and will drive both users and spiders to it. This is particularly true if your tables and lists are keyword-rich, contain valuable information and are easy to digest or look at.

Information tables on your site which offer up details about ideas, products or services relevant to your company and/or industry are invariably good site content additions. Site viewers who find the information useful may refer others to your site on the basis of the tables themselves. Usually information tables contain important industry keywords, terms and/or phrases, so that makes them engine-friendly as well.

Information lists can also attract users and spiders, particularly if they are rich in keywords and industry terms or phrases. Lists containing the names, positions and companies of industry contacts, for example, can be very strong site content sources. Users searching for information on a particular person or business in your industry, for example, may stumble across your site if that person's name and/or the business in question are included on one of your information lists. Initially that particular user may not have been trying to access your site, but there is a strong possibility that, once there, your new visitor may stay awhile and look around. After all, he or she is likely from your industry community, and as such there is a good chance that your site will be of interest, at the very least. It is a safe bet to say that such a user should be viewed as highly qualified traffic.

The bottom line is this: keep on developing great writing content for you site, but do not ignore the idea of adding informative tables, lists and other such features to your site. Also, make sure that these tables and lists are revised and updated, and that other informative tables and lists are added on an ongoing basis. That way you be assured that new, original, and very keyword-rich content is being continually added in areas other than straight descriptive writing. And when you go to bed at night you will sleep tight, confident in the knowledge that both users and spiders are continuing to visit and crawl your site, because the information there is varied, useful and industry-specific.

Brad Lombardo received his B.Ed. from the University of Toronto and M.A. from McGill University. He has worked as a business manager, marketing consultant, account executive, admissions counselor, high school teacher and sportswriter. He has written a still to be published hockey book, and is currently penning a movie script based on his experiences as a Canadian teenager living in Spain.

Link Building For New Online Businesses

There are several methods to website link building, the best way to increase your search engine rankings. The sites you see ranked in the top Google results have several thousands of links all over the internet putting them in those top positions.

One way to effectively build your site links is through forum signatures. Join discussion forums where you are allowed to post your links in your digital signature so that every time you post in a thread, your link will appear. This is a popular, easy and completely free link building strategy.

Exchanging your links with those of other online entrepreneurs is another popular and effective link building method. You increase traffic to your website by having your links on someone else's page and vice versa and it can also be very beneficial in terms of search rankings to have lots of links to other sites on your page. It is recommended you use this strategy first due to how effective it really is for being a free resource.

On the other hand, those who want to invest in generating more traffic can best do so by purchasing links for their site. This can be expensive so it is a route taken usually by those looking to increase the revenue of an already busy site or, in general, site owners with larger advertising budgets. Buying links from bloggers with significant viewership is among the least costly option for buying links.

It is also advantageous to include your site on as many website directories as possible. These directories showcase key information on millions of sites that you write yourself and submit along with your website URL.

Your website and online business will never reach their maximum potential without a good selection of links. Using any or all of the above strategies will instantly increase your traffic, leads, and sales efforts to your full advantage.

A Guide to Google Analytics

At the end of each day, we wonder how many visitors approach our website & from where. Marketing tool always help us track visitors from all referrers. Everybody wants to get high ranking for their website on Google SERP's. A website appropriately marketed online will bring targeted visitors to your website.

Google Analytics is a useful tool which collects in-depth information of given website. These tool tracks fifty pages of each domain & extracts trove of information on each page. Signing up for Google analytics is free & is as simple as signing up Google account. By signing up, you will be accessible to all the free tools offered by Google to track website. Using this free tool, you will be able to see how many visitors entered you site & how they found your site.

Once logged into the Analytic account, Google will explain all-important features of each tool. The most important aspect of using Google Analytics is to add a tracking code on every page of your website. This code will provide indications of which pages are often visited & which are not. This information & statistics will help you improve those pages that attract minimum traffic.

Once this code is set on each page, Google will start recording all traffic tendencies such as total visitors to each page & time on each site. These analytical results can be used for search engine optimization efforts. You will be able to tweak & test each SEO methods to determine the right changes for each site. These exact changes will help bring more traffic to your website & ultimately get more customers in your business.

All these important tracking details will help you increase ranking on Google & limit your bounce rate. Google analytic system provides the accurate website reports which in turn will help you with every SEO techniques.

seo-10 Things to Expect from Your SEO Copywriter

From the perspective of a business owner, webmaster, or marketing manager, the change exhibited by the Internet is profoundly exciting, yet profoundly disturbing. The information (and misinformation and disinformation) it offers, the business benefits it promises, and the rules it is governed by change at such a rapid rate that it’s almost impossible to keep up.

These changes have led to a growing appreciation of the value of quality web copy. This appreciation has, in turn, led to an influx of opportunistic ‘copywriters’ promoting themselves as website copywriters or SEO copywriters. Don’t get me wrong, there are quite a few excellent SEO copywriters out there, and you should definitely shop around. The purpose of this article isn’t to scare you; it’s to help you find the SEO copywriter who’ll deliver honest service and excellent results.

So with that in mind, take a look at the following ten tips. These are the things you have a right to expect from anyone wearing a name badge that reads “website copywriter”, “SEO copywriter”, “internet copywriter”, or “web copywriter”… (See also www.divinewrite.com/websitecopywriter.htm and www.divinewrite.com/makethemost.htm.)

1) An understanding of SEO

Obviously, your SEO copywriter must have a solid understanding of the essentials of Search Engine Optimization. They must know that ranking is essentially the result of a website’s relevance (i.e. keywords) and importance (i.e. inbound links). There are a whole lot of other factors involved, but if your SEO copywriter doesn’t understand these two basics, you should look elsewhere. If you’d like to ensure your SEO copywriter knows a little more than just the basics, take a look at www.divinewrite.com/SEOCEO.htm, www.divinewrite.com/seocopy.htm, www.divinewrite.com/seotradesecrets.htm, www.divinewrite.com/webcopyenough.htm, and www.divinewrite.com/seoarticles.htm for some clues as to what you might like to ask in order to assess their knowledge.

2) Proven experience

The proof is, as they say, in the pudding. It’s not enough that your SEO copywriter can talk the talk; they must also be able to walk the walk. Ask to see some examples of websites for which they’ve obtained some good rankings. Note that it may be very difficult to find an SEO copywriter who has actually worked on both keywords and link generation (especially article PR), so if you find one who has, and they write well, snap ‘em up! They’ll have a very broad and useful working knowledge of search engines.

3) An understanding of how many keywords to use

You don’t want to fill every page up with every keyword you’re targeting. This simply dilutes your site’s relevance and reduces readability. Ask your SEO copywriter how many keywords they would recommend targeting on each page. Hopefully they’ll suggest no more than 3, preferably 2. By targeting 2 keyword phrases per page, you can use them a lot without impacting readability.

4) Clear agreement on who will provide keywords

Someone needs to perform a keyword analysis in order to figure out what words you should be trying to rank highly for. Your SEO copywriter should be able to do this for you, but it’s quite often more cost-effective if someone a little closer to the business does it. Either way, make sure your agreement with your SEO copywriter makes it very clear who is performing this task. Don’t assume the SEO copywriter is going to do it, because they may assume you’re going to do it, and then you’ll blow your budget.

5) Keywords or keyword phrases

Expect your SEO copywriter to offer some advice regarding how specific you should be with your keywords. In most industries, the competition for keywords is so fierce that you’ll be forced to target very specific keywords in order to rank – at least at the outset. For instance, if you’re in IT, you probably wouldn’t start out by targeting the keyword “IT”. The competition is immense (at the time of writing, there were approx 3,240,000,000 results for this search in Google.com) and the IT giants already dominate the search engines for this keyword. Instead, try using a more specific keyword phrase like “IT infrastructure consulting new york” (at the time of writing, there were only around 4,000,000 results for this search in Google.com). The other benefit to targeting more specific keyword phrases is that you’ll generate more relevant leads.

6) Agree on word count per page

Always make sure your SEO copywriter gives you an indication of the number of words they expect to write per web page. While it’s necessary to have a decent body of words on most of your web pages, you certainly shouldn’t have too many. What “too many” is all depends on your industry, the objective of the page, and the needs of your audience. It’s always a delicate balance, but it’s certainly possible to rank highly with only 100-200 words per page. So don’t be fooled into paying for copy you don’t need!

7) Density targets & measure

SEO of a web page is NOT guess-work. A good SEO copywriter will talk about density measures. This is a measure of the number of time the keyword phrase appears on the page. It’s expressed as a percentage of the total word count of the page. So if your page has 200 words, and your keyword phrase appears 10 times, its density is 5%. As a rule of thumb, your SEO copywriter should be aiming for a density of approximately 5% for your primary keyword phrase and 3-5% for your secondary keyword phrase. If your density measures are much higher than this, readability will be reduced, and you’ll risk being perceived as spam by the search engines. Make sure your SEO copywriter understands keyword density, is prepared to state the target density for each keyword phrase, and is also happy to be measured by that standard (should you decide to measure).

8) Where to place keywords

The question of keyword placement has been the subject of much debate amongst SEO copywriters. While it is still unclear how much impact placement has, there is a general consensus that it has SOME impact. Be sure that your copywriter is aware of this impact. Popular opinion has it that keywords are more effective if they appear in headings, bolded text, links, and generally toward the beginning of the page.

9) Some comment on structure & links

Websites are generally better indexed by search engines if their spiders can traverse the entire site using text links. This means your SEO copywriter should be linking each page to every other page using text links. If your site is complex, this may be impractical, so your SEO copywriter will need to create a hierarchical structure for your site. First, they should break your subject material down into categories. Then for each category, they should write a summary page. These summary pages should be accessible from higher level pages via text links. They should also be accessible from each other. Each summary page should link – using text links – to a number of pages discussing the finer details of the category. And each detail page in a particular category should link to every other detail page in that category (once again, using text links). This way the spiders are able to travel from the top of your hierarchy to the bottom, and from left to right across any level.

10) Don’t believe grand promises

SEO copywriters can play a significant role in increasing your search engine ranking. But they can’t do it overnight. By optimizing your site for your target keyword phrases, an SEO copywriter is simply declaring the relevance of your site. If you engage an SEO copywriter to write helpful articles containing a byline with a link back to your site, you can then submit these articles for publication on the Internet, and this will steadily increase your ranking. But if an SEO copywriter tells you they can dramatically increase your ranking in a matter of hours or days, be wary. NOTE: Your SEO copywriter should be able to submit your articles to various submit sites on the Internet. These sites are closely watched by hundreds of thousands of publishers of e-newsletters and article pages from all around the world. High quality articles are quickly snapped up and published prolifically. And each time your article is published, you’ve got another link back to your site, thus increasing the importance of your site (to the search engines).

Conclusion

An SEO copywriter is a valuable addition to your marketing function. But you need to make sure you choose wisely. When you know what questions to ask, the battle is half won.

Happy hunting!