Posts Tagged ‘SEO’

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How to Evaluate Your Website with SEO Metrics

Thursday, August 12th, 2010

As the Internet has spurred an online revolution for consumer shopping, websites have become eminent for most businesses. So much so, that Search Engine Optimization has become a force of its own for businesses looking to gain more visibility on the World Wide Web. While small and large companies alike focus on metadata, link building, and keyword optimization, many are left to wonder just how much their efforts are paying off.

To help you assess whether your own website’s content is paying off or in need of improvement, here are several important website metric components, as outlined by the Colorado SEO Blog:

- Unique web pages indexed in Google Search Engine.
- Number of web pages viewed on your website daily.
- Keywords that delivered your search engine traffic.
- Referrers or sites that generated the inbound traffic.
- 404 errors for pages that can’t render in web browsers.
- Types of browsers people are using to find you such as Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer.
- Number of Incoming Links coming into your home page and internal web pages (They recommend the tool Majesticseo.com for Competitive Link Intelligence identification).
- In addition, pay attention to how many unique domains are linking to you from unique C-block servers.
-Word count or quantity of words per page, number of header tags, alt-tags, and images per web page.
- Text to Code Ratio.
- Most popular web page on your site with the most highly traveled site hits.
-  Countries that generate traffic to you. Obviously you want traffic where you conduct sales and business operations.
- How many times to website visitors return to your website, and exactly how long is the average visit or stay?
- What is the bounce rate where people come to your site and leave immediately?
- How frequently is your site spidered, crawled, or visited by search engine spiders such as Google or the Microsoft/Bing spider?
- What is your exact Alexa rank?
- How do you compare with other Colorado SEO sites that have actively engaged in hiring Expert SEO Advice?
- Does your business website have diversified bookmarks in sites such as Delicious.com?

What are some metrics that your company utilizes to measure SEO success?

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How to Select Keywords for Your Website

Thursday, June 17th, 2010

scrabble lettersThere are two ingredients to a successful website: a cleverly crafted website design and a strong SEO strategy. While an attractive and intuitive site will help to keep customers and prospects on your site, search engine optimization is the tool that will draw these consumers to your page.

Keywords are a critical component of SEO because they are the words that define you. In order to assure that your company is visible to prospects and customers, it’s important to utilize all of the possible words and phrases that consumers  might use for Google searches. Unsure of what keywords might work best for you? Here are a few tools to get you started:

  • Google Adwords Keyword Tool – Simply type in the subject you’re researching and Google’s keyword tool will suggest keywords and the monthly and annual search volumes for those terms. If you’re running a Pay Per Click campaign, this tool can also provide you with the cost per click.
  • Overture (Yahoo!) Keyword Tool – Yahoo’s keyword tool will also help you to predict the amount of traffic certain keywords will bring and lists monthly regional search volumes for the most popular search engines based on Overture search counts for different geographic markets. It also provides links to price estimate tools for Google Adwords.
  • Google Rankings Tool – If you’re curious about the strategy of your competitors, use the Google Rankings Tool to check how they rank with certain keywords. You can also use this tool to check your own SEO efforts.

One thing to keep in mind is that the Google algorithm is always changing. While metadata and pagerank might be important one day, both will be irrelevant the next. The one thing that Google will always value is helpful and well written content. Choose your keywords wisely, work on solid inbound and outbound links, and focus on quality content.

Any questions?

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3 SEO Boosters for Your Website

Wednesday, May 26th, 2010

Now that we’ve gone through a quick SEO 101 lesson, let’s get a little more detailed. While the foundation of SEO is built upon solid, well thought out content, there are a few SEO boosters that can continue to increase a website’s rankings. Without further ado, here are 3 SEO sprinkles to top off your strategy.

Social bookmarks: Every great piece of content that you write should be shared. Sites such as digg, delicious, stumbleupon and even Twitter can help your articles to receive a lot of attention and maybe even go viral. These bookmarks provide link juice, traffic to your site and major credit to search engine.

Links: Search engines view links as referrals. If someone’s linking to you, that means they value your site and find your content to be worthwhile. Therefore, the more people that recommend you, the more comfortable search engines feel recommending you also. On a similar note, by adding helpful links to your own content, you’re showing search engines that you care about providing useful information to your readers and that your site is worth visiting. And by linking to others, they might be flattered and feel inclined to link back to you, which is a huge SEO boost.

Tags and Categories: Behind every good piece of content is solid metadata and rich keywords. In addition to utilizing keywords in your anchor links, adding keywords as tags and categories will really punctuate the words you’ve selected to define you. To hone in on what keywords will benefit you the most, check out Google’s keyword tool.

Questions?

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5 simple SEO steps for Small Businesses

Friday, May 7th, 2010

As I’ve mentioned before, SEO is extremely important to small businesses because it levels the playing field with larger companies. If you’re a small organization looking to build a strong online presence, here are a few quick SEO tips according to the Midphase Blog.

  1. Google Local Business Listings – This is really where local businesses have a chance to shine. Since many large companies are able to invest in impressive SEO efforts, Google has provided the opportunity for local businesses to be seen first by creating free Google Local Business Listings. Many times when users conduct a search query, local business listings are displayed first. This also keeps the company’s information fresh and up-to-date so that if a person searches for a restaurant or store, for example, he or she will not only see the company on the results page, but receive the correct address and information as well.
  2. Blogging – Blogs are a powerful component of SEO. Whereas your website will mostly stay static, blogs will provide daily or weekly content, which will capture the attention of search engines. Engines value fresh and new content, so the more you can produce on your blog, the better. Additionally, blogs allow your customers the opportunity to connect with you and ask questions or provide feedback. This is your opportunity to show off the personality behind your business and build stronger customer relationships. Not to mention, blogs provide you the opportunity to show off your expertise and establish yourself as a thought leader. Blogs will be relevant to businesses for years to come.
  3. Social Bookmarking for Traffic – Whether you use Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Reddit or any of the numerous social sites out there, these tools will help drive traffic to your site and blog. Not only will each bookmark help search engines to quickly locate your website and index new information, it will increase the chances of your content going viral as well.
  4. Twitter – Twitter is a free tool that has many networking benefits. Not only can you communicate with customers, but prospects might find you when looking out for a specific item or keyword, and you can provide links to your site, thereby driving traffic to your pages.
  5. Get links through directories – Inbound links are vital to your SEO strategy. The more inbound links (links from other websites to your page) you have, the more important search engines will think you are. Research respected directories that are relevant to your business and be sure to add your blog or website to each reputable page. Not only will you have a new source for traffic, you will also have new inbound links as well. DMOZ is a famous and well-respected directory that every company should be listed on.

Any questions?

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