Category — search engine optimization

When you start a campaign for Google Adwords, you might want to consider excluding certain types of networks. For example, if you are selling an ecommerce product, you’ll want to exclude places where people don’t normally travel to purchase goods. For example sites about crime and war. We used to tell our clients to simply use Search only, but in some cases you’ll want to get on networks. Some of the sponsored links on buying sites can be very important for some products.

Therefore, you may want to exclude things like Parked domains, error pages, crime sites, death and tragedy etc. To do this you should click on “Exclusions” and use the list under Campaign Level to exclude those places. This will get you into content areas and yet get you out of money wasters that can reak havoc on your advertising budget.

Yesterday we had a client call us to complain that he does not rank under a particular keyword. We had done SEO on his site as a kind of afterthought. So we went over and took a look. Under the keyword there are some decent sized competitors and of course, no backlinks to his site for this keyword. The good news is that his site is already a somewhat decently ranked site under other terms, like for example “Diesel Tools”. So we decided to give SEO a little bump and embellish the page for him for his specified keyword.

Someone else mentioned that he needed backlinks and plenty of them. But we didn’t have time for that.

And who said SEO couldn’t be done in a day. Here we are today, and wallah! He is ranking number 4 already under the chosen keyword, up from #11. This was done with on page search optimization simply by

1. adding the keyword term full name as an h1 header tag

2. adding a back link to it from his home page

3. adding another link to it from the #11 page that ranked under the term.

Now his site, and specificially the #11 page moved up 7 spots overnight.

It can be done if you do a little focused work.

If you have a Zen Cart and have been agonizing about SEO options, take a look at Ultimate SEO. This one works well and despite seeing all the disclaimers, we did not find any issues with making our Zen install Search Engine Friendly and safe from wierdness.

Your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Zen Cart made easy.

According to Matt Cutts blog, Google has penalized sites that used the service traffic power to optimize and seo their sites:

I can confirm that Google has removed traffic-power.com and domains promoted by Traffic Power from our index because of search engine optimization techniques that violated our webmaster guidelines at http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html. If you are a client or former client of Traffic Power and your site is not in Google, please see my previous advice on requesting reinclusion into Google’s index to learn what steps to take if you would like to be reincluded in Google’s index. 

Ouch! That means that if you were an innocent site owner hiring and SEO and they used some trickery to get traffic to you, it’s your fault for being that stupid and not investigating their tactics. That makes sense. (no sarcasm here).

Meanwhile, we noticed some pagerank drops in sites and pages being pulled down in rank completely since last week – although still indexed, their ranking is gone. Why? The most obvious reason floating around is purchased text links, but in this case the only payment involved in the links on the pages I’ve noted are cj.com links, which relate directly to the site promoting a related product, and links to other related sites. This makes one huge reason to have a single website that handles EVERY aspect of your company as Google’s robot can not seem to differentiate between your other companies, your revenue production and pure spam out there. Linking between your various sites can give the impression of spamming text links to the index. The best recourse is therefore to only list those “resources” on a single page not related to any other content on your site, lest you find your entire site gets caught up in the mix.

Seems that many people have the impression that google shows backlinks of 4 PR sites only and not others, or in general those are the ones that count. Not so. We note that we have backlinks from sites that have PR3 and some other sites are not mentioned that are PR4 plus. It’s mish moshing when it comes to Google. While you can certainly open up a webmaster account on Google and look at what is really happening, it should be noted that what you see from the Google toolbar is not the end all of what you are getting.  Google is certainly counting links to your site, unless of course they are filtering out some, of course, and unless you work at Google it’s not likely that you’ll crack their algo. So keep on making links to relevant sites and don’t pay attention to those little rules that people are making up in SEO land.

Okay, so you need a sitemap, where to go to make this easier?

Try http://www.sitemapdoc.com/

The other day I was checking cache on a site and saw that the Google toolbar shows cache a couple of days behind. It delivers it into the Google Search a day or so later. Therefore, if your site is crawled on Monday it could take until Wednesday for the cached site to show up. So this leads one to immediately surmise that the cache is not really in the index, that this is not searchable until later. However, it should be noted that Google actually serves some content within a few minutes of it’s being put online, specifically blog content. We posted a news headline on one of our blogs and it was in Google immediately. Wow. We are talking within 5 minutes of the post.

If you visit that blog you’ll note that the cache for homepage is October 2, but the article that we posted October 5 is actually in the index. How does this happen?

Ping servers listed in your options usually notify Google to index the page. The minute you post a ping is sent out to those servers and they are pinging Google. Technorati is usually one of the first to deliver content from a ping, but Google actually picked it up on their own much faster.

If you are thinking of buying a used domain, or an expired domain name, you’ll want to check a few things first to make sure you are getting something good, unless of course you just like the name.

First off, try the backlink checker, which will tell you what PR value is assigned to any of the backlinks

Or how about an entire page of research on that domain.?? Try this tool

Well, if you read our Search Optimization article about our bulk domain site you’ll recall that at that time we went from a zero google keyword rank to a #17 page rank in less than two days! And that not all the good news about search ranking… Now it appears that we are at the number 7, up 10 spots since we last visited. In other words we are now on the first page of Google! Yippee. Now on some ranking sites that show google position we are at number 12, but either way we have successfully optimized the site to a much better extent than we had for 9 years.
How did we do it? Well first of all we optimized the page, we compared it against several other sites and figured out why other sites were ranking even though we have had that site for 9 years. We changed the keywords in the home page. We did some background code, mostly alt tags. This is simply the on page optimization we did. When we got to the #17 rank we did a bit more. We increased the number of terms in our title tag.

Finally, we started doing some directory listings, blog posting and forum posting. This is all manual work but it does pay off.

We have a single site that was new by the way and we linked it off of the domain site to get it indexed and interestingly that site has a #8 position in Google for it’s keyword, again within only a week of the link exchange.

For so many years people balked at the concept of making money with web sites. I recall as a young laddy, how I approached so many businesses to do web site design. No one beleived in the web. Ahhh, but that is old news.

The new news is that now we have the quest for making money on the web, even where no money exists. the old adage “build it and they will come” no longer applies with the myriad of thousands of websites going up each week… or are they. What we have now is a new breed of webbie, the domainers, who simply purchase domains for the sake of adwords revenue and put them online to compete with real mom and pops and mid sized buys trying to make a buck out here in the wild blue yonder. I’m not knocking the domainers who buy cheap bulk domain names to impart their wares upon the world, but moreover seller beware, the market has been skewed. As long as Google continues to reward the “fake” site with ad revenue, they will continue to exist and they will compete with you.

Now we get back to the original reason for this post. The glory of making money on the web is still alive but it takes oh so much more work these days. Once you get a domain, your next step is to design it, position it, link it and advertise it. Then and only then can you really make money. Each of these steps takes an additional step or two as you’ve probably discovered.

1. Design it: You must design it not only aestetically, but also in terms of consumer perception. Clarity of purpose, ease of use.
2. Position it: Your website standing out looking beautiful at a particular address is like a house in the burbs. If you don’t give your guests directions and there is no map out there with a way to find them, pretty much no one will be coming to dinner. You must position your site somewhere that will actually get noticed. You need an angle, and again clarity of purpose, a singular direction from which visitors may arrive knowing clearly where you are on the map.

3.Link it: the best way to get a position is to link your site from other sites. You can start with directories, free directories and cheap directories, but until your site is located somewhere on the web, it is landlocked within it’s own domain.

4. advertise it: Many small owners make the mistake of avoiding advertising, google adwords, and the like due to cost. But if you have a few dollars a week to make a buck, you can easily afford to advertise some niche keywords to get started.

Remember, you are starting a business, not just a landlocked web site in the suburbs with no hope of anyone finding out. Google and other search engines are mere robots, not here to punish you, or make it difficult, but certainly don’t realize your frustration. Take a step back, look at your dilema and make things happen that are logical from a robotic point of view. Spend a few hours a week on your website and in a few months you should be able to position yourself on a shoe string.

Good luck~!

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