January 20th, 2010
SEO or search engine optimization, over the last couple of years has started to get a bad rap from fly-by-night companies and scam artists. For some reason, the majority of people that need SEO don’t actually realize the amount of work, effort, and time involved in doing SEO properly. They think you get a couple back links and tada, you will automatically be #1 for your keywords. Well folks, it doesn’t work that way. The reason there are so many crap SEO companies and scammers out there is 100% because of YOU! You are soooo cheap, you won’t even dig into your pockets to pay someone to do it right. You would rather pay some scammer from Russia, $50 to build you a couple links and call it quits. You can pay me $50 dollars and I will get you a couple links too, but that’s not what you need. What is that going to do for you? Nothing. Quit being so cheap and if you actually want to make money from your website, then pull out your wallet and make it happen. Any company that will charge you a couple hundred dollars a month for a good SEO campaign, isn’t worth the air or the skin they are wasting. These people that charge you $200 for a month of SEO, do the same thing for hundreds of people and make a ton of money off of people like you who are uninformed of proper SEO techniques. Also, a lot of the times they will just post your link on blogs or in forums and that is actually considered “black hat seo”. This can get your site banned from Google. Do you really want this? I suggest you do some research and ask for references. Also, if their references are like this: “We got this site to number #1. http://www.howtoloseweightquicklyandeasilybynoteating.com and the keyword is “how to lose weight quickly and easily by not eating”", do NOT hire them. Duh, of course they would be number one. No one is searching that term, there is NO competition and the domain name is the EXACT .com keyword domain. Use common sense and if nothing else, shoot us an email and we will give you advice, even if you don’t use our services. We hate to see people get ripped off, but now you’ve been warned.
Tags: black, black hat seo, google, hat, relevant keywords, scammers, seo, site google
Posted in SEO news | No Comments »
January 6th, 2010
Most people and designers that that just have a decent design is all you need. Wrong!!! What is the point of having a good looking website if no one can find you? You spend thousands on a GREAT design, only to have very little if any traffic. Do you use a lot of flash? Maybe a large flash header? Well don’t. The search engine’s bots can’t read flash or images. We’ve already discussed using alt tags for images but nothing about flash.
Flash is attractive and makes your site jump out at the user. Yes it’s pretty awesome to look at. However, it’s not search engine friendly at all. You don’t entirely have to stay away from flash, but you need to know how to set your site up properly in order for it to be seo friendly.
First, Google and other search engines read websites like you read a book. From top left to bottom left and from top right to bottom right. You need to keep your content, keywords, and anything else that you may be targeting, on the left side of the page so that it is crawled first. Keep your flash to the right side of your website.
Second, for some reason, people always put javascript at the top of the page. Don’t. It’s not necessary. You can put your javascript at the bottom of your page and it still does the same exact thing. Having it at the top, first of all, makes your page take longer to load, which is not good, and secondly, is one of the first things Google will try to crawl.
Third, name your pages with your keywords. For example: Let’s say you have a website that sells diet pills. You would name your pages like this; http://www.yoursitename.com/diet-pills.html or http://www.yoursitename.com/weight-loss-pills.html. On these pages you would also make sure your keywords matched the page name, as well as your title and meta tags. This will help that page with relevancy.
More to come later on. Subscribe to our RSS feed and get updated when new blogs are posted.
Tags: design, flash, google, seo, seo friendly design
Posted in SEO Tips | No Comments »
December 22nd, 2009
If you are an aspiring internet marketer or a seasoned professional, you should probably pay close attention to this blog post.
One of the questions we receive a lot is, “Should I write blogs or not? Will it help me with my seo campaign?”. The answer is “YES!”. However, it must be done right or it could damage your reputation with the search engines. Blogging is one of the best ways to build a lot of quality backlinks to your site. Google loves blogs because they have fresh and unique content and that is considered a valuable commodity to them. However, do NOT use automated blogging software. Automated blogging software basically steals content from other blogs and inserts it into your blog. This does 2 things. First, it opens you open to be legally liable for plagiarism and copyright infringement. Second, it’s duplicate content and Google does not like that. Always make sure your content is unique.
How to blog for SEO:
1. Choose a keyword that you are targeting.
2. Write at least 250 words about that keyword, mentioning several times.
3. Link that keyword with anchor text, to the website that you are doing the seo for.
4. Make use of valuable free tools or plugins that you can download. These will come in very handy when blogging.
5. If you are not using a plugin to link to other pages of your blog, then be sure to manually link to another relevant page within the same blog, or to another blog if you have one.
6. Submit each blog post, after you write it, to social bookmarking sites so that Google will crawl your blog post.
That’s about all there is to it. There are more in depth methods, but those will come at a later date. This should be enough to at least get you started on blogging for seo.
Tags: anchor text, blog, Blogging, copyright infringement, google, internet marketer, link, relevant, seo, site google
Posted in Blogging, SEO Tips | No Comments »
December 18th, 2009
Anyone who does SEO or knows even a little bit about SEO has probably heard the “all too famous”, Matt Cutts, Google’s whiz kid spokesperson for SEO, say that Google does NOT use keyword tags as a ranking factor or relevancy. Yeah right. Check out this affidavit (PDF) between Jenzabar & Robert Maginn, as the plaintiffs, vs. Long Bow Group, as the defendants.
It seems that the plaintiffs are suing the defendants for trademark infringement for using their trademark as a keyword in their keywords tag. Now I’ll say it again, we all know that Google doesn’t use keyword tags as a ranking factor or for determining page relevancy. Then how can Long Bow Group be held liable if this is not the case?
Now, a lawsuit being filed over trademark infringement, that’s nothing new. That happens on a daily basis. What is interesting is the fact that the defendant cited a post by Google that Google does not use meta keyword tags as any ranking factor at all.
The defendant, filed a motion (PDF) to strike the affidavit that Google does use meta keywords and therefore they can sue for trademark infringement.
So what’s the deal? Do they or don’t they? Well, as you’ve probably guessed, I am pretty skeptical of some of the things that Matt Cutts says and I truly believe that Google DOES use keyword tags for ranking.
Tags: long bow group, matt cutts, meta keyword tags, trademark infringement, whiz kid
Posted in Google News | 1 Comment »
December 18th, 2009
While Google has recently announced its support of the canonical tag across different domains, Bing says it’s still working on supporting the canonical tag on a single domain, and suggests webmasters should rely on other means to manage duplicate content.
The rel=”canonical” link element was introduced earlier this year as a way for webmasters to define the canonical version of a page within a single domain. A Bing spokesperson says their “plan is to have this supported in the next several months,” and that they also plan to support cross-domain canonical tags, too:
“Based on how we are seeing canonical tags being used cross domain, we will support the largest users of legitimate cross domain tagging in roughly four months. Canonical tags for these users will behave in the same way that an intradomain canonical tag works. Our first concern in these cases is dealing with those who will try to game the system, not those who will use it properly, hence the phased rollout.”
Despite its planned support of the canonical tag, Bing says webmasters should essentially use it as a last resort.
“Our first and foremost advice is the same as it always has been: 301 redirects and good site design should be the primary focus of webmasters, with canonical tags picking up the slack when technical limitations impede other solutions.
Bing’s spokesperson pointed to this Bing Webmaster Center blog post with its advice for webmasters on handling duplicate content. Bing also says it’s focusing on “more scalable” solutions to removing duplicate content in its index and search results.
Tags: canonical version, google, link element, scalable solutions, webmaster center
Posted in Bing News | 1 Comment »
December 18th, 2009
So, you want to do your own SEO? Ok, then listen up. Alway use alt tags to define your images. Don’t over do it though. If you are optimizing for Google, they will see this as spam and you could get penalized. Don’t know what an alt tag is? Here is an example: <img src=”images/keyword-image.png” alt=”Keyword”>
Where it says “Keyword”, that is where you would put your keyword that you are targeting. Now, I’m not kidding when I say don’t over do it. When Googlebot crawls your site, it will read your alt text and include that as a relevant keyword. Why do we do this you ask? Because Google cannot read images, just like it can’t read javascript or flash. Therefore, we have to give it something it CAN read, like text. So we ad the alt tag, insert the text, Google crawls, and abracadabra, there you have an image that it can read. Now, heed my warning. Do not, do not, don’t, give all of your images alt tags. W3c compliance may say to, but trust me, you don’t want to do that. If you feel it necessary to do so, then please name each image differently. If you give them all the same name, it could be considered keyword spamming and could get you penalized or banned from Google.
Tags: abracadabra, google, image png, img src, relevant keyword
Posted in SEO Tips | No Comments »
December 18th, 2009
The infamous Matt Cutts, Google’s SEO spokesperson, says “NO.” He claims that Google gives no credit to a keyword tag. Now, I personally have seen several websites that rank well without the keyword tag, but in all fairness, they were the dot com for their respective keyword. Every site we work on, always contains a keyword tag with the appropriate relevant keywords and all of them rank very well. I have yet to see a site that does NOT have the exact dot com domain name for the respective keyword, rank well for that keyword.
If your description tag is read by Googlebot, then why not your keyword tag? What about your author tag? Or how about your favicon? All of these help with your Google SEO, but NOT a keyword tag? Come on Matt! I honestly believe that he says that the keyword tag is not important or even necessary, in order to throw people off. Having been doing SEO for quite a few years, I would be scared to death to remove a keyword tag from a well ranked site, for fear of losing rankings. Why is it that 99% of the websites on the planet, contain keyword tags? Are they all wrong? Well my friends, you decide. Take what I have said and understand that I just might know what I’m talking about, OR, if you choose to listen to everything Matt Cutts says, leave out your keyword tag and see if you can rank well. Remove your keyword tag from your already well ranking site and see what happens.
Tags: fairness, favicon, google, googlebot, keyword tag, keyword tags, matt cutts, relevant keywords, seo, spokesperson
Posted in SEO Tips | No Comments »
December 18th, 2009
So I guess Google is buying Yelp for $500 million. Is it really worth it first of all? I mean, yeah, Yelp is a great site for reviewing all kinds of establishments, but $500 bucks? Well, Google does have the money for sure. I hope they don’t go in and change everything on the site because Yelp is great the way it is. I would put money on it that they do the same thing they did to YouTube. They’ll take it over and then load it to the max with crappy advertising and you won’t even be able to read a review of a restaurant without having some stupid sponsored ad popup or see google adsense everywhere.
Google is definately a powerhouse but I think that sometimes they go too far. Every piece of internet property they buy, they fill with ads and just ruin the integrity of the site. I used to love YouTube, but now, every time I watch a video, there is that stupid ad that pops up over a quarter of the video and you have to close it in order to see the video. When will it end. Does Google think they can buy the whole internet? To be honest, I wish Yahoo, Bing, or some other search engine would come up with a technology that is far superior to Google’s ranking algorithms, along with something that is more complex and inviting than Adw0rds.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate Google, I just think they want a Monopoly on “internet search” and “sponsored listings”. That, in my opinion is wrong. Any takers?
Tags: adsense, algorithms, establishments, google, internet property, internet search, monopoly, other search engine, powerhouse, yelp
Posted in Google News | No Comments »
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