When working on SEO, you must consider both on page SEO and off page SEO. While on page SEO is definitely important, off page optimization contributes more heavily to search results than on page SEO. Making sure to get your title page and meta tags correct is important, but optimizing off page still weighs in at about 80% of importance compared to only 20% for on page SEO.
Google search results are by no means magical. Google’s servers use algorithms to analyze web pages and give us the results to our searches. The algorithms used by Google are based on how research reports work. In any industry, a report really begins to gain weight when it begins to be referenced by others. Some ways that a report may be referenced include:
When it comes to business publicity, many business owners make the mistake of focusing their time on how to deliver the product. Instead, the focus should be on two factors that play a vital role in publicity- traffic and conversion. Publicity brings attention to the brand or business, which causes the traffic to increase. As traffic increases, more people will want the brand or service resulting in conversions of sales.
There is a classic 80’s movie titled “Can’t Buy Me Love”. In the movie, a teenager named Ronald Miller wanted nothing more than get rid of his nerdy reputation. Ronald knew the only way for others to see him as “Cool” was to be associated with a popular kid from school. He comes up with the plan to bribe the most popular girl in school with $1,000 to be his girlfriend for a month. Since the kids in school believed that Cindy was the epitome of cool, whatever or whomever she associated with was automatically cool.
Similarly, a good publicity campaign helps attracts traffic but also produces sale conversions because it builds authority, credibility and a good reputation.
Autoresponders are invaluable to online marketers. When someone signs up for your newsletter or buys one of your products, you can have a “thank you” email sent to them immediately. Seven days later you can have another email sent that says, “Just wanted to check in and make sure you’re enjoying…” Then another two months down the road you can follow up with them again. Autoresponders are a great way to keep your list informed and create a valuable client relationship.
But what if there were a way that your prospects and customers could receive a personal thank you? Not from a personally-sent email, but through the postal service – and it came in your own handwriting?
One of the often-overlooked ways of getting ranked higher on Google involves getting a Google local listing in Google Places. Let’s say you do a search for “Melbourne Copiers”. At the time of this writing, the first half of the page is taken up by businesses that have a Google Places listing. So to keep your business at the top, here are some ‘rules’ to keep in mind.
First you have to either claim or create your listing. If you’re already listed there, that’s great – some of the work is already done for you. But if you’re not shown you can always add a new listing just for your business (http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl).
When it comes to marketing online there are plenty of different ways you can go about it. You can buy pay-per-click ads (also known as PPC), you can buy ads where you pay per impression; you can use banner ads; you can build blogs and webpages. But the one thing you want to avoid doing is quite possibly the one thing that all internet users can’t stand: spam.
Spam is unsolicited email, and if you’ve ever had an email account then you know exactly what I’m talking about. Spam has nothing to with the canned meat product that a certain Monty Python waitress likes to sing about (Spam, sausage, spam, spam, spam, bacon, spam tomato and spam…). I don’t know the actual conversion numbers, but I’m willing to bet a good amount of money on the fact that a very, very small percentage of people have ever bought a product or service from an email they just received out of the blue.
Have you ever wondered whether using automated SEO tools are blackhat or spammy? We’d probably both agree you should avoid blackhat techniques right? However, we also want to make things as easy as possible too.
Here’s how we look at it – we think a certain level of automation is ok – as long as there’s some human input into a semi automated tool. Let’s look at a couple of examples to explain.
Generating fully auto posting blogs, scraping content from other sites using SEO software, just to create a feeder site that you can use to funnel page rank back to your primary sites is probably a little on the blackhat or spammy side of things.
Have you ever wondered if great content must equal great rankings? Unfortunately, and unlike the movie Field of Dreams, “if you build it, they will come”, doesn’t apply in the online space.
Here’s a personal example… early on in my internet career we developed a product called Metastock Programming Study Guide. This was a fantastic product to teach people how to use a charting package and, although it did well in our immediate community, I quickly learned that being a good product isn’t enough. Unless people know about the product, it’s not worth the paper it’s written on.
So how did I get people’s attention? I turned to SEO.
Come on, I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine.
In order to get your website ranked, it may have crossed you mind that reciprocal linking is the way to go. If you haven’t heard of the term, put simply, reciprocal linking is the old you link to me and then I’ll link to you strategy.
Even though I do believe that the algorithm is picking up reciprocal links and discounting them, that’s not to say they’re bad. Some links are always better than none!
There are two types of reciprocal links. The first type of reciprocal link is those for directories. You might even have seen these before? Have you got an email saying, “We’ve listed you in our directory, here’s the link to your listing and in order to keep your listing active, please link back to us.”
Keyword with an 's' or without an 's'?... that is the question.
A question I’m often asked is whether to optimize for the singular or plural keyword phrase. Following on from that, should we create separate pages for the singular and plural versions of a keyword phrase, or should we create just the one page and target both terms?
For example let’s say you are going after the phrase “trading system”, what’s the best way to also achieve keyword ranking for “trading systems”? Read More>>
SEO doesn't have to be as hard as high school algebra
Who else would be interested to learn easy SEO steps you can use to implement SEO into your website?
Stage 1 is to start with appropriate keyword research, using Market Samurai and the Free Google Keyword tool. Using one of these tools, identify ten to twenty keywords and then do some on page optimization to your website.
Then build links to these pages. Here are a few ways we build links: Ezine articles, directory submissions, blog networks and blog commenting. We follow the method outlined in the SEO Method which you can find on www.theseomethod.com. The key is to have a method for continual link building.
It’s simple, just build links to the ten to twenty keywords you identified and optimized your site for. After a month or two go back and see how your rankings are going. What have you achieved good rankings for without too much work or without specific targeted link building?
