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/