19 Apr 2010 10:52 pm
Offering SEO as a service is extremely competitive and there is always a new Design agency or IT company coming out of the wood works suggesting that they can offer SEO.
The thing that all us SEO professionals know is that they are no where near as experienced as what other SEO companies are and have been doing for years but there are still a few pointers to go by to stay ahead of the game.
Be different
Offer a unique service and do well at it. Be on top of the game and up with new algorithm changes and what is happening in the industry.
Be competitive
Do a good job at the right price and deliver on time. You do not want to guarantee results at a time frame if you can not stick to it.
Be aggressive
Work hard on all your clients, if you are overloaded with work this does not mean you should spend less time on one client and more with another, spread out your efforts evenly even if it means you need to work harder or get a helping hand.
Be assertive
Always stay positive and on the ball, if your clients ask questions through email do not delay responses, keep them happy and trusting in you by answering all the questions they have asked you.
Ask questions
Get to know your clients marketing perspective, what they have done in the past both online and offline and what has or has not worked for them and use this information wisely. To be successful in any SEO or Marketing project you must ask questions before the project and during. If it’s a one way street it will not last.
Prove your experience
Show your clients examples of results you have achieved for keywords and sites you have got to 1st page of the search engines on and testimonials of clients that are genuinely happy with your work.
Reporting
Give your clients monthly reporting and if they require reporting when they ask you should also provide this. It will settle their nerves and give them the information they need to see that you are actually doing the work.
10 Mar 2010 05:37 am
When there's hope, there's always a chance that we can plant a healthy tree and it's on our attitude. The same thing with search engine optimization, when we do our SEO services, we must think that in order to grow our tree, high quality services must be observed. But first let's start from the bottom, shall we?
First we plant a seed that symbolizes a beginner or a newbie. In order to make the stem grow over and over again, we must learn from the basics to advanced. Don't jump till you don't know what you're doing, or else the stem will just stay as ease or will fall. We consider ourselves as the SEO tree.
As we grow our knowledge, it's just like the water flows like a rain to make the roots grow until leaves came out. We must try to see that when we are growing and growing, just keep pushing until you finish the course or the chapter of search engine optimization. The tree could take months until it bears fruit and to finish its exact form.
The same thing with us, if we're able to act as a SEO tree, we will always continue to grow and at the same time, our own tree could be more meaningful than ever. For all newbies and professionals, bearing our fruits to our branches will make us very successful, just like the successful websites of Facebook, Twitter, Digg, etc.
04 Feb 2010 06:06 am
One common error people make when designing a website is embedding text into images. This is done through any photo editing program. A lot of web designers focus too much on images, image links, and embedded text into images to spice up their website. This is the same concept as our other article “Focusing On Navigation Menu’s” .
Search engines cannot and I repeat CANNOT read text in images. If you are using an image with text in it to link to another page within your site, simply scratch that image and put a text link in there (anchor text link).
An anchor text link is just a basic URL/Href. Instead of putting a URL in it for the text, you put a keyword of whatever you may be linking to. Visit our other article on Anchor Text for more information on what they are and how to use them properly.
Search engines determine what your website is about by reading the text on every page. Using " tags really helps with optimization. These tags weigh more than regular text. Bolding and italicizing text also weighs out.
What weight means is, when a search engine crawls/reads your page, use of these tags makes these words stick out,
being the most. Use these for category names and article headings. When using any of the others, you don’t want to over due it for it will make the users experience miserable, for example bolding way too many words. Bold keywords that you want to rank for.
So the conclusion of this is, keep image use at a minimum when linking or using category names/keyword names. Using CSS can spice everything up AND use all of the text you need.
SEO
04 Feb 2010 06:04 am
A Navigation Menu in SEO can play a huge role in optimizing your website for search engines. The reason being is when a search engine crawls your website, it is going to read everything in the header and the first 100 or so keywords in your body which would usually be your article..
In this lesson we are going to discuss using targeted keywords, using text, why not to use image or flash, and why css is your best bet when it comes to header, footer and other navigation menu’s / bar’s.
Using targeted keywords in navigation menu’s
I am sure you have seen websites which use flash or image navigation menu’s in their headers. If you are trying to optimize your web site, this is a major SEO Mistake which has been added to the SEO Black book on here as reference.
The reason this is a no-no when it comes to SEO is because, search engine crawlers are not human, no matter how much you may want them to be. They cannot read images and flash. This is where using a CSS menu comes in handy. The reason this will come in handy is because you can spice up your navigation menu with awesome looking graphics and effects but at the same time you will use text to overlap every item on the menu. When designing a menu and adding categories and items, you want to use keywords that you are trying to rank for in search engines. We are going to discuss more of this below.
Using targeted keywords in your navigation menu’s
This will play a crucial role in your site ranking for keywords that you are targeting. In a normal menu you will see it categorized like this for example:
Home | News | Forum | Reviews | Tips | Tutorials
These are just general keywords. Now let’s say you have an SEO site like www.therantandrave.net and you are optimizing for SEO Keywords. When getting a site off of it’s feet, you want to use keywords in your menu until you start ranking for main keywords that you are aiming for. For example below.You would want your menu to resemble something like this:
Home | SEO Tips | SEO Tutorials | SEO Forum | SEO Tools
Now that you have a hint, these are keywords that I am trying to rank better for (SEO Tips, SEO Tutorials, SEO Forum, SEO Tools). As you can see in the top header navigation menu on our site therantandrave.net and on this site, our menu’s are in CSS. If you use wordpress, almost every wordpress theme comes with CSS menu’s which saves you a lot of work.
Notice that the keyword “seo” is used in each phrase. It is alright to use it in there like so when a site is getting off of it’s feet. Once you start ranking for the keyword “SEO” in this case, you then can change it up to just tutorials,forum,tools , for the search engine will start grabbing the information seo tutorials, seo tools in the future especially if you are building pages are given keywords.
Your best bet is using text/css navigation menu’s in your header, sidebar’s and footer using targeted keywords.
SEO Navigation Menu
04 Feb 2010 06:04 am
So you are here because your are wondering what SEO is? SEO is called Search Engine Optimization. The name pretty much gives you a hint itself but, let’s take a deeper look into better understanding what Search Engine Optimization is, how it works, and how it will benefit you and your website or blog.
If you own a website or a blog, you of course want to rank(be placed higher within search engines) and target as much traffic(website visits/hits) as you can. Nothing beats Organic Traffic. Organic Traffic is natural traffic that comes from people searching for keywords and terms that relate to your website within search engines and simply going to yours.
The more traffic that your website receives,the more money that you can make off of simply managing your website about something you may or may not love to write about. With this you don’t have to put in money to make it. If you are clueless to making money online with your website, shoot on over to our “Making Money Online” category.
Now that these basics are out of the way, let’s discuss SEO. As stated above, this is a practice of optimizing your website to rank well within search engines. I will discuss a couple of the main, basic ways of doing so.
- Building Back-links
- Using Anchor Text
- Using Keywords To Target Traffic
- Optimizing Your Meta Tags
- Unique Content
The best way to rank well within Google is by building back-links. A back-link is simply a one way link back to your site. Google counts this as a vote for your website. You want to build quality back-links with sites that are relevant to your niche(what your website is about) and with high PR websites. (PR is Page Rank 1-10, 10 being the highest). You can check website page rankings by simply using the Google Page Rank Checker tool.
Within back-links you want to use anchor text. Anchor text is the text within a link. Within this text you want to use keywords that you are trying to rank for within Google. So for let’s say this site, I would link with a few sites with my site link on theirs being “SEO Tips” then on a few others “SEO Tutorials” and on others “Search Engine Optimization” and so on so forth. You don’t want to over use just one keyword. Try to rank for a few different ones that are related to your website. It’s up to you how many you want to try and rank well for.
Using keywords which are related to your website to drive traffic is of course a must. As stated above, these are terms that you want people to search for within Google and stumble upon your site by searching them. Use keywords in meta tags, page titles, article titles, categories in your navigation bar, within your articles and etc. Do not overuse keywords in articles or on pages for this is called keyword stuffing and your site may get penalized or banned.
For every web page that you have, you want to have optimized meta-tags which are in the header of your page. Use keywords within your meta-title, description, and meta-keywords. Meta-keywords really aren’t too effective on ranking anymore because of the abuse of keyword stuffing in the past. It still doesn’t hurt to use it though. In your titles of pages, use some keywords you are trying to rank for. In the description, describe what the page is about while using a few keywords within the first 150 characters or so.
Unique Content is something I have to stress. Google doesn’t like duplicate pages and plagiarized work. Always update with fresh content that hasn’t been discussed before. Even if it has, write it better than all of those others out there. I do not recommend using article re-writers. If you can’t write a decent article about something you are interested in, you don’t need to be running a website.
Remember, you don’t have to pay out thousands of dollars to have your site ranked well within Google. You can do this yourself and we give you all of the tools, tutorials, and tips needed to achieve this. We use all of these methods on this site constantly and by each day that goes by, we rank higher and higher.
If you have any further questions simply leave a comment.
SEO Tips
04 Feb 2010 05:54 am
A lot of people out there are always asking and looking for article rewriting scripts and programs. I do not condone to this type of thing but, we do have an article rewriter on here for download.
Having unique content is something that search engines like. If you are just writing about something that a couple million other websites already covered, it is just old news. If you have something new and fresh, search engines and visitors alike will eat it up like a fat kid bum rushing the cake on his birthday. Hehe.
Also never, NEVER, plaigiarize content and steal from other people. You will get penalized or even banned from search engines for this. In some cases you could even have a lawsuit filed against you! Would it really be so hard to spend 10 minutes on an article? People come to your website for YOUR opinion and what YOU have to offer. So keep it real, don’t steal.
Sometimes, or in most cases, webmasters and authors are afraid to speak their mind and their opinions because of the bad feedback they think they might get. Even if you do get bad feedback, it is still good feedback. It is your website and you are speaking your opinion so let it be heard. There are always going to be critics whether you like it or not, learn to embrace it.
SEO
04 Feb 2010 05:52 am
Keywords are what make or break your website when ranking within search engines.
Here are the steps we are going to explain with using them:
- Meta Tags
- Navigation Menu’s
- Text Formatting
- Anchor Text / Back Links
Meta-Tags
Meta tags are the information in your header that tells the search engines what your website and certain pages are. In your tags you have the Title, Description, Keywords. The title is well, what it says. It is your page title. In your title you want to use keywords within your description. Please refrain from using your website name or your website address in the title unless your website name has the keywords in it that you are trying to rank for. In the title use a brief description of what your page is about while using a keyword or two within it.
Your meta-keywords are the keywords that your site is relevant to and what you are trying to rank for. Use no more than 30.
The meta description is what the description of your page is and this comes up in search engines under the page title/url/link to your site. Again use a brief description using no more than 140-160 characters in it with keywords that you are trying to rank for in it also.
Navigation Menu’s
For a more in depth explanation on how to optimize your navigation menu’s please visit our lesson for Focusing On Navigation Menu’s.
To give a brief explanation, you want to use keywords in place of your categories in your navigation menu’s. This helps you rank for the given keywords and it tells the search engines what each page/category is about and pretty much helps map your website out for the search engines.
Text Formatting
When writing your articles in the body of your page, you want to build it around keywords that you are ranking for. In the title of your article you want to use
, tags which are basic HTML header tags for a paragraph. These tags weigh a lot within search engines.
When using keywords within your articles you want to bold and italicize them which also makes them stick out within search engines and also makes them weigh a lot. Don’t over due it with the bolding and italicizing of keywords for your page will look spammy and non-user friendly. Try to use each keyword 5-7 times in an article and don’t use anymore than 2-3 keyword phrases in each article.
Anchor Text / Back Links
As explained in our previous lesson, anchor text is one of the main factors in your website ranking. The anchors help tell the search engines that this is a keyword phrase that your site is about hence when someone goes to search for example “SEO Tips” your site will come up. Whether it is first page or 20-30 pages back, it will come up. To help rank higher you want to use anchors in your back links. A back link is simply a link from another site to yours. As explained in the previous lesson, a back link is basically counted as a “Vote” for your website.
Always link with quality sites preferably with a high page rank. You can use the Google Page Rank Check Tool to determine what other websites rank. The ranking chart goes from 1-10, 10 being the highest.
For more information please visit our lesson on Anchor Text.
04 Feb 2010 05:51 am
What is Anchor Text?
Anchor text is your basic href link with text in it. for example:
Seo Tips And Tricks
Now your link text will come up as “Seo Tips And Tricks” .
Now when you link to a lot of pages, this will bring up your ranking but you must look into the quality of the pages you are linking to. So you want to have text links from your pages that go to pages already high in the Google ranking system. Stay away from link farms and spammy sites. Doing this will get you ranked higher.
Now this is a pretty long process, you should find some other ways to do this. You objective is to Build Page Rank higher. Here are some other ways to do so.
Blogging – If you are a blogger this is a good way. Link up with other Bloggers, do guest posts on other related blogs using Anchor Text and links in your articles.
Page content – So what is in your pages, how unique is your content? Do not use duplicate content for Google does not like this, do not steal other sites content either. Make your page interesting, to the mind and to the eye. If you site is unique other sites will come to you more often.
Social Networks – There has been a huge debate on this but Social Networking is great for a website. Build a page for your website, give information, add friends and reach out to people. Interact with others, don’t just spam or people will disown your site. Post links around in comments urging others to come to your site. Post when you have new content, try to get users active in discussion.
These are just a few ways that you can increase your ranking with. Focus on your content, make your content interesting that will keep readers around waiting for more. Get your readers into the discussion. Have a site that people want to link to, and you will achieve getting a higher ranking.
30 Jan 2010 11:09 pm
What are the pros and cons of buying sites verse buying links for SEO?
Well first of all most big websites out there these days have hundreds of mini sites or sites that they have established that are relevant and link to their main site. This is good if the sites that are linking in are from different ip addresses as it tells the search engines that they are not necessarily from the same owner.
Others say that buying links would save you the hassle of registering new sites and be just as effective. There are 2 sides to the coin. The 1st thing is when buying links it does not ensure you a permanent 1 way link. It might be good for some time, but at the end of the day you are not benefiting from it long term. Sure it can help getting a link from a site that has high page rank that you are looking for, but too much of link buying can also send off alarm bells to Google.
It is not against Googles terms to buy links but it is to sell links based on page rank, and it is against Googles terms to buy links specifically to gain page rank. So nevertheless, I encourage you to believe it is beneficial to do both. Although link buying can be time consuming and expensive to find the sites you want links on, so can building sites, but long term this is the key.
When you buy or develop a site to link to your main site, there are certainly other factors to consider such as the age of the domain you have bought or registered, the relevancy of the domain or site, is it being updated frequently, does the site have backlinks or page rank as well and does it have alot of cached and index pages.
Many site owners think they can just build 100 sites and link to their main site and think they can gain loads of traffic. Wrong, the problem is they don’t realise is it is those sites itself that need to also have alot of backlnks and page rank.
This tells Google that the sites that are linking into the main site have some authority.
So the big question is what works best for you, and do you consider buying sites or buying links to be more effective?
01 Jan 2010 11:12 pm
I would like to thank the year 2009 for being one of the most memorable years of my life. It helps me a lot on SEO and link building, which I learned over and over again to make this website successful as ever lived. Right now, it's time we move on to another new year, which is known as 2010.
For me, 2010 is a great chance for me to rebuild my strategy when it comes to SEO and business. I have been thinking of my New Year's resolution on how to be a successful entrepreneur and a webmaster than what I am in 2009. I have lots of goals in life which I want to achieve on my own and for my family.
In order to become a successful entrepreneur and a webmaster, I need to work hard and to study some of the professional eBooks that I have searched over the internet. I have been spending lots of time to study the market value of every niche that exists right now. It's time to being a "smart kid" when it comes to online marketing.
It's time to get serious guys, as if we would like to earn some hard cold cash this 2010, we should focus on what we're doing. Try to invest your money wislely and to think about the business which you have passion on your own. I hope for the best in 2010, as more SEO opportunities awaits us all over the world.
