In terms of SEO, what’s the best strategy to use when ranking for a name with 2 different spellings?
I’ve created an interactive resume/electronic portfolio of myself online – but all of my site’s content uses my full name MICHAEL. What if people search for MIKE? My site comes up as the 4th listing for MICHAEL (LAST NAME) but not on the first page for MIKE (LAST NAME). Does anyone know what I can do so I can rank for both MICHAEL and MIKE?
Hi Mpax,
You can try to help the search engines position you for both terms:
Ex: Title Tag:
<title>John Michaels – John Mike – Resume – Atlanta Georgia Software Engineer </title>
what this does is use both of the names in the tag in a prominent position, and also detail other relevant info.
Ex Description: <meta name="description" content="John Michaels interactive resume and electronic portfolio. Learn more about this talented Atlanta, Georgia software engineer.">
Ex Keywords: <meta name="keywords" content="John Michaels, John Mike, Atlanta Georgia resume, Atlanta Software Engineer, knowledge">
You can also build external links from high page rank blog sites to the site with both spellings of your name. If you optimize the page for your primary name, and include a little bit of text to address the shortened last name, the links you build to this page will have more value.
I’d be happy to help you – drop me a line via email with your site.
Brian
Originally posted 2010-07-23 18:46:18.
8 Linking Strategies That Work
When it comes to linking strategies for your website you need to concentrate on one word. Backlinks! A backlink is defined as having your website address on another website. This creates a link pointing your visitor or a search engine back to your website. If you were in a game and were keeping score every backlink gives you a +1. An outoging link is the link of another website on yours pointing back to theirs. You would score this a -1.
If you were playing a game to win you would want the most pluses you could get. So it is with linking strategies. Here are some basic ways to get backlinks to your website.
1. You can buy a text link. Websites that get high amounts of traffic and are ranked high with the top search engines will let you pay them to put your website link on their site.
2. Forum marketing is a way to get a backlink. If the forum let’s you create a signature file you can hyperlink you website to a keyword phrase pointing back to your website. You can also list your website in your online profile and get a backlink that way,
3. Writing and submitting articles is a quick way to get alot of backlinks. Create a bio box at the end of each article with a link for your website. Then submit your article to as many directories as possible. Or even better yet use a software of article marketer to submit your articles for you.
These articles can be picked up by other directories, webmasters, or online newsletters and spread all over the internet giving your website a viral marketing benefit.
4. Place classified ads with popular directories like USFreeAds or AdlandPro. Upgrade to paid member and you can place unlimited ads with links pointing back to your website.
5. Blog and ping. In each blog post include a sort resource box with your website address. If you archive you posts this gives you backlinks for years to come.
6. Trade links with quality websites. We are not talking about reciprocal linking to directories with thousands of worthless links. A better strategy is to trade a link with a website that closely mirrors your site without being in direct competition to it. Also look to place their link on one of your pages that has the same page rank as the link they are giving you.
7. Post comments on other peoples blogs. Take the time to read the post before you make a comment. Don’t write something worthless like ” I like your blog.” Make your comments informative and relate to the blog post you just read. Then include your website address along with your name.
8. Internal linking can bring valuable backlinks to your home page. This would be when you put your website address in a hyperlinked keyword phrase and point it back to your home page. This is a great way to build keyword relavancy along with building up your backlinks.
These are a few linking strategies that work. There are many others. Just keep it simple and remember this simple formula.
Jeff Casmer
http://www.articlesbase.com/link-popularity-articles/8-linking-strategies-that-work-102059.html
Originally posted 2009-02-26 13:54:59.
What About Keywords?
In an internet world such as ours, keywords are an integral part of any orange county seo campaign. It is a known fact that internet users use different keywords to search for the sites that they need and it is the task of a professional seo company to determine what these are. Keyword research is a vital component of an orange county seo campaign and should not be over looked. Before you start any seo campaign, you need to invest time and effort in searching for keywords to focus on.
A high page rank in the search engine results page is important since many internet users utilize only the first two pages of the SERPs in order to find sites that have the information that they need. For this, you will need to keep in mind two things – keyword density and keyword placing.
Keyword density refers to the number of times that a keyword appears in orange county seo content. According to some professional seo company, keywords should have a minimum density of 1% in order for the content to rank high in the SERPs. With appropriate density, Google can tag your site as “valuable” and will appear in a higher position during searches. When this happens, you can expect to receive more free traffic from the search engine.
In the past, websites stuffed keywords on their content in the hopes of getting a higher position in the SERPs. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work anymore. With real internet users who read content, it is important that you provide valuable information to them in order to get a loyal stream of visitors. Aside from this, there are several search engines which actually penalize a site when it has too many keywords stuffed on the page. On the average, professional seo company suggests a maximum of 4% keyword density to be on the safe side.
Keywords placement involves placing keywords in the right areas for better readability. When keywords are used naturally in an orange county seo content, search engines will rank it of high quality, and has a higher chance of appearing at a higher position in the SERPs. Typically, keywords should appear once in the first and last sentences so the content, and every 100 to 150 words in the body.
Louie Ang
http://www.articlesbase.com/web-design-articles/what-about-keywords-741696.html
Originally posted 2010-03-02 15:44:24.
The Ten Important Steps for Optimizing your Website for Search Engines
“The Ten important Steps for optimizing your website for search engines:
In these ten steps we will know ten basics and important steps to optimizing a website to perform better on major search engines. If you will follow these steps correctly your website search engine position website will be surly improve depending on you industry competition.
Step 1 – Keyword Selection
Step 2 – Creating optimized Content
Step 3 – Site Structure
Step 4 – Internal Linking
Step 5 Submissions
Step 6 Link Popularity Building
Step 7 – Title and Meta tags
Step 8 Monitoring
Step 9 social bookmarking
Step 10 Testing
Step 1 – Keyword Selection
Selecting Keyword is the single most important factor in the entire search engine optimization (optimisation) process. Choosing the right and relevant keywords will not only help you in getting good search engine position and targeted traffic but it will also increase you return on investment (ROI).
Example: If you are a company based in UK providing search engine optimization (optimisation) (SEO) services. The first keyword in your mind would be definitely
Keyword Competition
SEO : 73,000,000
Search engine optimization : 63,600,000
Seo Company : 26,800,000
It is possible to get good ranking on these keywords but it will take lot of time and money instead you can target “”Seo Company Uk” and “Search engine optimization company Uk’ this way you are targeting two keyword at a time with less competition that means more chance of targeted traffic and good Search engine positions.
Keyword selection and research tools
The Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool
Site: http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
Word Tracker
Site: http://www.wordtracker.com/
Step 2 – Creating optimized Content
There has been lot of changes in the search engine algorithms but there is no change in the importance given to quality content. In this step we will focus on how to create optimized and unique content for high search engine positioning using the keywords we have selected in the first step.
Unique and well written content will both grab your visitor’s attention and at the same time, make them want what you have to offer. So write in keeping mind what your audience are looking for and targeted keywords.
First ask yourself some questions:
What services you offer
Do you provide the services your visitors are looking for
Do some research
Provide as much as possible information on the subject. Provide useful and unique information about your industry / subject area it can entice your visitors to visit your website in future. It has found that most of the online visitors search for information about their interests.
Content Optimization
Four important factors for optimizing content
1. Heading Tags – (H1 to H6)
2. Special Text – (bold etc.)
3. Inline Text Links – (Anchor text and alt tags for images )
4. Keyword Density – (number of occurrences of your targeted keywords in a page)
Heading Tags
By default text in these tags appear too large than standard text in a browser. We can customize it by using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).
Tip: Do not use the same tag more then once on a page.
Special Text
It can be used in bold, colored, “”In quotes”" or (in brackets). Using special text will help draw the attention to important information and also add weight to your keywords.
Inline Text Links
Example: We provide seo services and web hosting.
You add a link to related page on your site to these bold words. it gives the reader a way to find the information you are referring to.
Keyword Density
Keyword density is the no. of occurrences of targeted keyword in the content of the page. You should not spam the targeted keyword in your content; recommended keyword density is between 4% to 10%.
Step 3 – Site Structure
You must structure your website to attract the visitor as well as the search engine spiders. The site structure will help spiders read your site. Keep the code as clean as possible so search engine spider can get to your content, where you want them to be.
Use CSS to cut down code extra code like for font style, tables, images etc…
Things to remember while planning site structure
Keep URL Short and close to Root of the site
While creating folder and files use keyword
Eg: for a page in web hosting packs www.domainname.com/web-hosting/website-hosting.html
Use Hyphens (-) while splitting name in to 2 instead of underscore (_) as shown in above example.
Step 4 – Internal Linking
Internal linking means linking to your pages within the website by way of sitemap, navigation bar, footer, header etc. The sitemap should be linked on all pages of your website to get spidered by search engines from anywhere. You should also include Google sitemap on your site to get indexed easily by Google. It adds relevancy to the linked page which directly helps in getting high rank for the linked page
Using text based links with anchor text, footer navigation and use inline text link will improve Your Internal Linking Structure. So spider can crawl it easily add relevancy to the linked page. The closer a page is in clicks from your homepage. The higher the value the page rank is assigned.
Step 5 Submissions
Where to submit:
o Search engines
o Web directories
Major search engines to submit
Google.com | yahoo.com | Msn.com
Major web directories to submit
1. Yahoo (paid)
2. Dmoz.org (most important)
http://www.about.com/
http://www.incrawler.com/
http://www.jayde.com/
3. http://www.wowdirectory.com/
Step 6 Link Popularity Building
There are 2 ways of building Link popularity
o Reciprocal link building (2 way link building)
o Non-reciprocal link building (1 way link building)
Reciprocal link building
There are some basic rules to follow when exchanging links:
Relevancy is more important
Check and make sure the reciprocal link aren’t being blocked and pages are indexed
Link pages with more than 50 links aren’t worth exchanging with
Non-reciprocal link building
It can be in form of paid link, directory listings, social bookmarking, article publishing ,blogs and press releases
Step 7 – Title and Meta tags
Once you have planned and completed the site structure and content integration. Its turn for Title Meta and Description. Unique and optimized title and Meta tags are really helpful in achieving higher search engine positions
Title:
this tag represents information of page this can be in browsers header bar
Meta keywords:
This include the targeted keywords for that particular page
Meta description:
The Meta description shows on the SERPS (search engine results page). It is used in describing the products / services you offer to your customers, you can describe specific pages within your website that shows in the search results page.
You can describe your pages the way you want them to be seen by your visitors in the SERPS (search engine results pages)
Next is alt tags, Alt tags is a white hat SEO practice used very commonly by search engine optimizers
Step 8 Monitoring
There are three basic things in the monitoring process. They are:
Monitoring your search engine positions:
You can go through the searches manually, you can use software like IBP to check your rankings or you can use online. There can find many related Seo tools listed here http://www.seocompany.ca/tool/seo-tools.html
Monitoring Back Links
Schedule weekly checks of how many backlinks you have and are your link partners still linking to you
Monitoring Changes in the Search Environment
The last thing you will have to monitor is for changes with the search engines themselves.
Visiting forums and subscribing to newsletters to keep yourself updated about search engines algorithm changes
Step 9 social bookmarking
The social bookmarking is used by many people to bookmark their pages and websites. Using the social bookmarking visitors can bookmark the sites listed in the social networking websites. The popularity of the websites in the social bookmarking world gauged by most favorites websites among the visitors. The most bookmarked website obviously will get more traffic than others and it can also help improving your search engine ranking in major search engines.
How does it work?
In a social bookmarking system, users store lists of Webpage Urls, which they find useful. Often, these lists are publicly accessible, and other people with similar interests can view the links by category, tags, or even randomly. Some social bookmarking systems allow for privacy on a per-bookmark basis.
Most bookmarking websites allows to enter multiple tags for your web pages in order to be searched by the visitors that helps social bookmarking visitors to get relevant and accurate search results for their keywords.
Advantages
1. Social bookmarking helps in promoting your website users market your site.
2. It indirectly helps by building a brand.
3. Generates targeted traffic.
Some important social bookmarking sites
Dig.com | Blink |Del.icio.us |Digg |Furl |Google |Simpy |Spurl |Y! MyWeb
Step 10 – Testing
You have created a great design and added SEO elements to your site. Now its time to see if all that hard work done has achieved the main goal of reaching the visitor and to convert them to a customer.
o Check for broken links :
o Other script errors
o Ease in navigating site
o visual appeal of the site
o placement of content
o are you able to find what u are looking for
You have created a great design and added SEO elements to your site. Now you should test your website for errors (i.e. 404 not found error, script errors etc.).
Check for broken links :
Other script errors
Ease in navigating site
Visual appeal of the site
Placement of content
Are your visitors able to find what they are looking for?
“
Sandeep Tyagi
http://www.articlesbase.com/seo-articles/the-ten-important-steps-for-optimizing-your-website-for-search-engines-67620.html
Originally posted 2010-08-01 08:35:58.
The Hats of the SEO World: What Hat Does Your Web Promotion Company Wear?
Determining which hat a web promotion company wears is a paramount concern for most web developers who wish to have their sites optimized. This decision is of great concern because the reputation of a website is contingent upon the kind of SEO work it receives.
In the search engine optimization world, there are three groups that fight for dominance: the black hats, white hats, and the grey hats. These three camps are all after the same thing—topping the search engine rankings for their target sites. What sets them apart would be the means they are willing to go in order to achieve their end.
Black Hat
As the term implies, black hat SEO’s will go the distance to make the page rank and engage in aggressive campaigns even at the expense of violating search engine rules and regulations and misleading spiders into crawling the link they are promoting. In so doing, the client’s site is endangered of suffering the eternal verdict of being banned from search engines. It can then be concluded that this type of SEO work is unquestionably threading along the lines of being unethical.
White Hat
They are dubbed as the good guys of the SEO world. Unlike black hats that would run the extra mile to spamdexing, this type of SEO would not dare violate search engine regulations. Instead of spamming like crazy, these white hats would orchestrate a well-planned and strategic manipulation of search engine results. This can be done through content and article submission, blog farming and, and forum posting. Smart web promotion companies opt to wear this hat.
Gray Hats
If black hats are the evil ones, and white hats are the good ones, gray hats would be in the middle of the spectrum. Gray Hat SEO pendulum swings both ways. Unlike white hats that employ planning and smartly execute optimization campaigns, gray hats tend to go the crooked path of duplicating content and artificial linking schemes. Moreover, they don’t go as sneaky as the black hats are. The target link would only be devalued and not banned when gray hat techniques are employed.
A web promotion company’s decision on what SEO hat to wear is extremely important. This is most especially important for web developers to know since it is their sites that would be affected by such decision. It is advisable to know the optimization strategies that would yield great results and make the site fly in the search engine results list without jeopardizing its reputation.
Jennifer Franco
http://www.articlesbase.com/seo-articles/the-hats-of-the-seo-world-what-hat-does-your-web-promotion-company-wear-716372.html
Originally posted 2009-12-15 00:44:42.
Live From Madison Square Garden, SEO Vs Sem!
A great evening in Manhattan, a fantastic atmosphere in Madison Square Garden. Web business people is waiting this match for a long time. One side there is Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing on the other, both seems fit and there is desire to win on face. Last years both sides challenged to other but they never came to face to face. Before the match starts, lets take a short look to their career, strength and weaknesses.
Called SEO is short term of Search Engine Optimization. A milestone in web business since the search engines are the main source for web users before they buy services or products online. Finest and most trustable data source with their high indexing capacity and different logical algos working on the back round may depend on your rankings while results are listed. As most web users do not look much after the 3rd pages of results, web business owners are directly influenced. A web surfer can be your client if your web site is ranked at the top of search results but how you get listed at the top of a major engine? Even there are different algos powering the search engines the main theory is mostly same, simple algo stands on location and frequency. A crawl base search engines use spiders a web site and classifies with different principles to define the ranking. A fact about algo can be changed or improved for search quality. I’am sure all professionals will remember Florida Update on Google. Indeed it was an earchquake more than an update, many results were changed or disappeared on Google, some high rankings even lost from the index. Actually general Google algo is formulated as Relevance Score , PageRank , Local Score with other tweaking , tuning or filtering aspects. Main development point of a search algo is how much off page factors are important and their degrees take part in your algo. The theory on here is not giving much control to webmasters with on page factors .Other search engines do not use Page Rank since Page Rank is a trademark which belongs to Google. Avoiding any spamming , manipulation trials, over optimization or even cloaked content, engines are modifying or changing the degrees ,adding new variables on their algo time to time but all work done is to provide higher search relevancy and quality for users. (Relevance score is SEO efforts, Page Rank is Link building efforts for Google and Local Score is links from expert documents) As seen from the formula, SEO efforts only work on relevance score and vary your ranking 10% if you hired a SEO professional but this can increase 18% if your SEO is master level. I would like to talk about Yahoo and Live search engines’ secrets either but as mentioned they are my professional secrets for now, if you don’t know these, its impossible to get top results on Yahoo or Live.
Search Engine Marketing (Pay Per Click) is paid inclusions as seen Sponsored Results on engines based on pay per click. This marketing tool has been increased enormously in these years, even with expensive per click rates. In some keywords or phrases a click may cost 10€ ( online dating industry) whether visit converts to a lead or not. Ads buyers are ready to pay these high per click bills because SEM efforts bring more revenue than they spent. How this technology works while displaying the ads? Lets say few words about Google Adwords. Google has 2 different networks such as search network and content network. Search network means Google powered search results that you may see on any website with a search bar using Google’s search technology. Content network is different spidering technology and matching the search query and web site content. If you have a web site with high quality and useful content, you may apply and get involved Google’s Adsense network to make money. Google will classify your content and display related ads when a search query is matched as you have probably seen Ads by Google on web.
If SEO and SEM are powerful marketing tools which is the best and effective on sales conversion rates? This is the fatal question, both have advantages changing to the case, then lets compare:
A)In SEM, your web site does not need a change in most cases. If you want high conversion rates, a SEM professional should prepare high quality landing page is necessary only, not your entire design. On the other hand SEO may require some major design changes to get good spidering by engines.
B)PPC Ads charged when clicked only, displaying your ads will not cost you anything but poor Click Through Rates will increase your minimum per click costs. SEO visits are free of charge as visitors comes by clicking the natural search results from a search engine. Most visitors likely to trust a site they find on a search engine, they feel like natural results have been approved by the search engine.
C) SEM brings very quick results to analyze your campaign while SEO effects can take long time on ranking. On Adwords, just 15 minutes is enough to display your campaign on screen but SEO results may take up to 3 months on engine’s ranking.
D) ROI and Conversion rates are higher in SEM because you may design different landing pages according to your major products or services with price charts, feature comparison tables .However in SEO, you can not make these much because your most powerful PR page is your homepage so your sub pages which includes your product specification will not get listed higher than your main page.
E) Targeting is easy in SEM with campaign settings option. You may target national ,regional or international geographical areas depending on your shipping options. Google has features to promote your local business with accessing your business address or just selecting distribution area on Google Map. Another useful tool is matching options are enables you to select broad ,phrase,exacxt or negative matches while displaying your ads.When you prefer SEO, you can not prepare different target pages as they will be sub pages and will not get listed higher than your main page as above.
F) SEM limits you with your budget because your ads campaign will stop displaying when your daily, keywords or monthly budget is reached while SEO results longer even months after optimization work is done.
Finally who wins this match? Well, this depends on your expectation, budget and targets from your campaigns. As long years professional , I dont have a preference . Each business needs different campaigns, you may select to attract new clients in both tools while achieving your corporate targets.
Ladies and Gentlemen, unforgettable match is about to start in Madison Square Garden, please sit back and watch this.
Erkan Meydanlioglu,Mr
http://www.articlesbase.com/online-business-articles/live-from-madison-square-garden-seo-vs-sem-120682.html
Originally posted 2009-12-15 00:44:16.
