South Florida Web Marketing Blog

from SearchEngineWatch.com

If there is any one reality to SEO, it’s that there are winners and losers. There are certain qualities that are necessary for any winning SEO strategy that can be broken down into the 4 Ps of SEO: proactive, persistence, perseverance, and patience.

Proactive

Being proactive is fundamental to being a good SEO for a couple of key reasons:

Latency Effect Between Work and Results

Any SEO work done today likely won’t affect traffic or revenue today. When it comes to SEO there is a latency effect as new changes to your website or your off-site profile (backlinks, social activities, etc.) get indexed by the search engines and filter into the SERPs.

How long the latency period is depends on the situation. If you put up a new targeted page on your site that gets indexed quickly, you could indeed start to see some new traffic from new keywords within a day. If you’ve made a lot of sweeping on-site and off-site changes to your website, it might take a month to see the results you’re looking for.

The idea here is that it will almost always take longer than you would like to get the results you want from the activities you’re doing today, no matter how hard and smart you work. Think and plan ahead. Make sure you factor in the long-term into your day-to-day activities.

• Actionable tip: Use a calendar to plan all SEO activities ahead. Compare this on an ongoing basis against results tracking to make sure your plan is consistent with your SEO gains. This may also help you see whether you have space for innovation within your tactics.

Stay Ahead of the Curve

The other key point here is to be proactive as opposed to reactive – do your best to keep yourself ahead of the curve. Time and time again I see knee-jerk reactions to changes in the SERPs, and that is the worst thing you can do because new changes are made to the search algorithms all the time.

Firstly, you should have seen the changes coming and changed your strategy months ago. Secondly, if it’s already too late, you’re just going to need to accept reality and adjust your strategy accordingly.

You might be able to get back to where you were before, but it won’t happen overnight – sorry. Engaging in a huge flurry of SEO activity immediately following an algorithm update, for example, has a good chance of doing you more harm than good.

• Actionable tip: Meet with your team regularly to discuss the trends and whether your strategies require adjustment. Where do you see the industry in two years? Five years? Make sure your strategies are in line with long-term trends and are built to last. That way you’ll be more likely to ride out the future Panda-type algorithm updates with no trouble and stay ahead of the curve.

Persistence

SEO isn’t something you can spend a few weeks doing, and then sit back and watch the money roll in. In just about any given niche, several or even dozens of other individuals or groups are attempting to beat you.

In competitive niches, the competition is going to be doing something every single day to reach that goal. Unless you’re doing the same or better, you’ll simply fail.

You need to work every single day at something that contributes to your SEO success. That could be something as simple as publishing new content or developing your branding, but it should all be considered within the scope of your global SEO strategy.

• Actionable tip: Work harder than the others! The minute you stop working is the minute you stop winning, even if it takes a few months for it to become apparent.

Perseverance

No matter how strong your SEO strategy is, you don’t control the SERPs, the search engines do. What that means, fundamentally, is that you’re investing resources into something you have absolutely no control over. Yes, you can influence it (sometimes very heavily), but you can’t control it.

What that lack of control means is a high potential for volatility. Inevitably, you’re SEO campaign is going to have highs and lows. You might have huge successes, with money pouring into the coffers, followed by catastrophic losses that set you back months or even years (think of some of the Panda losers).

OK, those are extreme cases, but you need to be prepared to not always be winning, and to ride out the tough times. Those who persevere in SEO are those who eventually win.

• Actionable tip: Ensure that you are prepared for possible periods of no-growth or decline. Preparedness will help you understand the reasons behind the poor performance, which in turn will help you to respond faster and more effectively to get back on track.

Patience

This is maybe the toughest of all the Ps. No one is really patient, especially in business – everyone has bills to pay, executives to report to, investors to satisfy… considering that financial planning typically works on a quarterly basis, it can often be difficult to justify SEO spend in one quarter when results might happen the next quarter.

The fact about SEO is that results happen on their own timetable, and that’s just the way it is. Results sometimes come later than expected, particularly if you are taking a softer, lower-risk approach.

You really want results next month? Sure, go ahead and build 200 new backlinks this week with the exact same anchor text for the big-money keyword… and see what happens (hint: don’t do that).

Want to win in SEO? Create a solid foundation and gradually – patiently – build on it.

• Actionable tip: Take the evening off and smoke a cigar. You’ve got a lot of work to do tomorrow and if you’re smart about it, the eventual payoff might be big.

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From Eva-News

As soon as the question arises concerning research engine optimization then, automatically the concern to your optimizers comes into the picture. Nevertheless SEO deals with wide variety of activities that include keyword research, link building services along with on article and off post optimization services. Ranking with the websites depends over a search engine algorithm. But look for engine optimizers must continue following their ethical way to your optimization of the websites. Search engine optimization is absolutely a critical work on the other hand it has to become done to excel in the on the net business.

Role of Optimizers:

Briefly, the recognized reality is, so that you can get quality targeted traffic into your website, it is advisable to rank higher in the look for engine result page. No doubt you will discover other mediums through which site visitors come and visit your web site but search engine brings practically 60% from the visitors for the website. So, additional emphasis need to be towards the search engines. To be able to get the ranking in the look for engine, role of the look for engine optimizers comes into the picture.

There is a great deal of overhead even though dealing with search engine optimization. Targeting the keywords, in accordance with that ranking the websites, generating article marketing, SMOs etc. a lot many items needs to be done so that you can get the research engine ranking. It truly is accomplished through in-house SEOs or by outsourcing the SEO services to some other firm.

In-house SEO are the a single who are in your firms and optimizing your corporate sites to obtain strong business. Although when you outsource SEO-services to a SEO services provider firm that offers the optimization services is named outsourcing SEO-services. These outsource SEO services provider organization offers probably the most services in exchange of some flexible rates. Outsource SEO Services are Better!

It just isn’t always advisable to opt for the outsource SEO services provider business nevertheless it offers specific benefits which the in-house SEO can by no means offer. Some of the rewards are as follows:

* Resource Limitations:

With in-house SEOs, resource allocation would be limited as a result of the company’s limitations. Since, the company may possibly not be dedicated fully to the SEO consequently it could provide limited resources for the optimization that might degrade the high quality in the business. Whilst by outsourcing the SEO-services to other corporations which are dedicated to SEO-services, 1 can obtain the maximum offered resources for your optimization.

* Productive Time:

While you will rely on your in-house SEO, most of your productive time is going to be consumed to your optimization jobs and much less would be used for some other purpose. Thus, the overall career schedule would be hampered but in case you will outsource SEO-services then, maximum of your organization’s productive hours would be dedicated for top quality work.

* Better Optimization:

When you happen to be hiring some external source for optimizing the sites then, obviously your site will get better services as you happen to be hiring the professionals for producing the job. In contrast your in-house SEO will lack on some or the other thing to give their finest for ones optimization with the websites. So you’ll get very best services on time by outsourcing the websites for optimization rather than trusting your in-house SEO’s.

Three major rewards which you can grab although you hire a outsource SEO-services provider organization to your optimization of the corporate websites. It’s never late when you realize probably the most choice is nonetheless waiting. Is not it!

Why Outsourcing SEO Assistance is Far better Than In-House SEO Service? – Check Out seo service and seo tools

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From SearchEngineWatch.com

Web developers are great: without them, we wouldn’t have, well… the web! But unfortunately, a lot of developers can have a bit of a blind-spot when it comes to SEO. While some on-site SEO features almost always come as standard now (ability to edit meta tags, image alt properties, etc.), there are some important areas under the hood that often get missed. Let’s have a look…

Analytics (Google or Otherwise)

A decent analytics package is essential for any web marketing effort, both for measuring results and gaining insight into how your site is being found and used. Plus, as any marketeer knows, access to historical data from a site at the beginning of a campaign is almost priceless. And yet, it’s amazing how many sites, big and small, are launched without analytics. Get it on there from the get go and get it set up properly!

Semantic URLs

A semantic URL is essentially an address for a page that is human-readable and conveys useful information. An example for a page on “blue widgets” would be:

• www.example.com/blue-widgets/

However, all too often we see pages with addresses such as this:

• www.example.com/index.php?page_id=46

The reason we see this latter version so often is that it is much easier to implement. The trouble is that it’s a disaster for SEO! Although on-page factors are not that important compared to link building, by and large, having keywords in the URL is the single most important part of on-page optimization.

Make sure your developer implements semantic URLs on your site and gives you control over each page’s URL – no excuses! Although you don’t get penalized for using a non-semantic URL structure, you’re missing out on a big opportunity… and changing it after the site has gone live can be a big headache.

XML Sitemaps

Sitemaps don’t have a great impact unless your site is on the large side, but they’re easy to set up and cost nothing, so are always worth using. It’s not a problem to generate these manually (there are several free tools for doing this), but if your site is dynamic or updated often, this can become a real pain pretty quickly.

It’s much better for the site’s CMS to update the site map automatically whenever the site changes. A lot of packages will do this natively or with the aid of a plugin, but if you’re having a custom CMS written, make sure the developer includes this facility.

Controlling Indexation

If you have a large site, Google will almost never index your entire site: they have a percentage cap of the number of your pages that they will keep in the index. Now, discussing how much of the site they decide to index and upon which pages they bestow the honor of indexation is a post for another time, but suffice to say for now that although you definitely can’t tell Google which pages to index, you can tell them which pages you definitely don’t want indexed. You do this with this meta tag in the head of the page:

• [meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" /]

Again, if you’ve got a small or static site, this isn’t a problem to set up manually, but for larger sites you’ll need to be able to control this through the CMS. You may even want to develop a strategy for noindexing pages automatically – if they’re not getting search traffic anyway, for example. Ideally, yes, we’d like never to have to do this kind of thing, but if Google are only going to index a part of your site anyway, you’d better make sure it’s the part that counts.

301 Redirects

Honestly, could this be more important? Unfortunately, a lot of developers don’t think so.

If you’re migrating from an old site, making sure that pages from the old version are redirected to the new is vital (assuming that the page names or URL structure has changed), but it’s also important that your new CMS creates 301s automatically if you remove or change the URL of any page – something that you’ll inevitably end up doing if you work actively on your site.

Again, some CMSs do this natively or through plugins, but many don’t. If you’re having something custom written or your developer is using something off the shelf, make sure it handles 301s for changed pages properly.

Canonicalization

Sorting out canonicalization of URLs from the start is another must – you don’t want Google to see duplicate content on your site even for an instant, or it’ll be reminding you of it through Webmaster Tools for evermore.

The first step is www versus non-www canonicalization. From an SEO perspective, it doesn’t matter which you choose, but you have to choose one and stick to it. Implementing it involves just a simple 301 redirect rule and is easy for your developer to do.

The second step is making sure that your CMS, e-commerce package or other platform isn’t generating multiple URLs for each page, and isn’t adding a lot of extraneous data to URLs. This might sound like a no-brainer, but Magento, for example, makes each page available by three different URLs by default. Checking to see if you have this problem is relatively straightforward – use a tool such as Xenu’s Link Sleuth(yes, it’s a crazy site) to check the number of pages on your site. If it’s way higher than you were expecting, you’ve got a problem. If you’ve not fixed this problem before the site goes live, that means a lot of 301 redirects to set up as you rationalise the URL structure.

Lastly, implement the canonical tag itself. At it’s most basic level, this tag tells Google what the definitive URL of a page should be. If your CMS definitely isn’t generating multiple URLs per page, it is still worth implementing, as it will help prevent potential problems caused by incoming links with extra URL data in them (e.g., tracking tags from mailing list software, etc.). The canonical tag is dead easy to implement and should appear on every page. It looks like this:

• [link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/page.html" /]

Google is expanding the remit of this humble tag over time as well, so it’s worth keeping an eye on what you can and should be doing with it – it all helps with Google’s indexation of your site.

Site Speed

Hardcore coders are often obsessed with speed. This is a good thing, as site speed is now a part of Google’s ranking algorithm (although perhaps not a large part… yet). The problem is that the main issues to do with a site’s performance are not to do with the code itself (at least not for most smaller sites), but rather to do with things such as HTTP request optimization, combining and compressing external files, loading JavaScript asynchronously, using cookie-less domains, etc.

If all that sounds pretty technical… well, it is. Luckily, you don’t need to understand how to do it – you just need to ask your developer to look after it for you. If they’re not already on the ball with site speed, a number of free tools will audit a site’s performance and make recommendations for improvement, such as the Google’s Page Speed suite. You may also want to ask your developer about using a content delivery network such as CloudFlare. Going to town on your site’s speed really can make a surprisingly big difference!

Summing Up

Making sure that your developer gets these basics sorted right from the beginning will get your on-site SEO running like clockwork, leaving you free to concentrate on building links and great content. None of them are optional!

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By SEO Articles

Studies show that around 90% of the overall Internet traffic is generated through search engines, they (search engines) also handle more than half of all the E-commerce transactions. This reveals how important and pivotal the impact of search engines is, on your online business. At the same time, this also means that you can change the way your business performs on the web, or in other words worldwide (as your business is now visible to all who accesses the Internet).

Therefore, to place their businesses in the top most rank of search engines listings, online business owners adopt the practice of search engine optimization or hire professionals to do the same for them. Search engine optimization or also SEO (in short), can simply be explained as the practice of improving your business or site’s ranking on search engines by utilizing various tools and techniques. Getting your business listed on the top rank of search engines means your business will be the first recommended option for whoever runs a search, inquiring about a product or service related to the one your site provide.

However, not all types of tweaking and methods (that you perform on your site) are permitted by search engines like Google (which is also touted as the ‘Search Engine King’) who provides guidelines for site owners and webmasters. These guidelines, also known as the search engine guidelines, if implemented in to your website, assures what is called the natural ranking of your site on the search engines. This type of optimization with the application of ethical approaches is also known as white-hat techniques. Some few white-hat SEO techniques are:

• Quality content on your site.
• Structural or semantic mark up and separate content from presentation.
• Providing proper titles and meta data for your pages.
• Keyword research.
• Quality inbound links and so on.

To ensure that your website stays on the right side of the track and violates none of the search engine guidelines, you need a webmaster or a team of professional SEOs that has an extensive knowledge of all the guidelines and are able to follow them while optimizing your website. A poor or erratic search engine optimization of your website may result in the violation of the search engine guidelines and get your website a web spam label. Web spam or spamdexing or search spam or search engine spam, is the manipulation of the relevancy or prominence of resources indexed by a search engine. This practice is considered un-ethical and unfair, and is commonly known as the black-hat SEO technique.

Since black-hat SEO technique violates the guidelines for ethical techniques in getting natural ranking on search engines, your website could be penalized or even removed from the search listings of the search engines. This can be explained in a better way by citing an example. In a recent video posted by Matt Cutts, the head of the Web spam team at Google, he reveals two main types of ranking penalties a site can receive (from Google) and also how to deal with them. The two penalties are:

• Algorithmic Penalties – They include content spam, keyword stuffing, cloaking, sneaky Javascript redirects etc. If one of these or other related discoveries are made by Google on your website, your site will be penalized. To remove the penalty, you must fix the issues on your website, then Google will detect them and would return your website in its search results again.
• Manual Penalties – In case of a manual penalty, the length of the penalty depends on how severe the penalty is and how badly your site has violated Google’s webmaster guidelines.

Matt also added that in case your site is penalized (Manual penalty only) and you have, in response, made the required changes, it is helpful to request the reconsideration of your site. This action notifies Google that you have made the corrections on your site and that it now adheres to the guidelines. You can also do the same for a recently purchased domain (which you suspect may have violated Google’s guidelines before you bought it) or in case your site isn’t appearing in Google search results.

Hence, to avoid such penalties and complications that could harm your business, you need tweak and tune your site very carefully and skillfully or get the best SEO service provider who’ll handle it for you. This way, you can also focus on other core areas of your business. However, keep in mind that not just any SEO service provider will do. Only an expert SEO service provider will always stick to the search engine guidelines and never beat around the bush.

Comments

1. Good Readable Content.
   Check your web page content for spelling and grammar errors ( use at least 250-350 words per page )

   Solid readable content is by far one of the most important aspects of your web site. People like to read information that is easy to read and that makes sense. Give your visitors a reason to use your service or buy your product.

   Spelling is important to your visitors. Although I do not feel that the Search Engines are checking like they should be – I would avoid misspelled words that could effect your web page message and maybe your rankings for that keyword phrase.

2. Each web page must have a unique Title.
   Like for this web page: " Ten Key Techniques for Search Engine Optimization from Smitty's Holdings". Your title will show up in the search engines, so it's important to be brief but use your keyword phrase.
   
3. Put together a clear concise description in your description tag.
   The description tag is used to further explain what is found on the web page.

   This is used for this web page description:
   "Follow these top ten Search Engine Optimization Techniques that you can be use to help increase your web ranking from by Smitty's Holdings, Inc."

4. Even though it may not matter – Place your keywords in meta keywords tag.
   Many Search Engines gloss over this due to the abuse over the years by web marketing people, but I feel it should be used to stick with standard practice. Use no more than 10-20 keywords:
   "search engine marketing, search engine submission, search engine optimization, link research, web page listings, wed design, web site marketing services, keyword research, SEO, South Florida, Broward County, Davie, Fort Lauderdale, Florida"
5. Use your keyword in your heading tags.
   Just like I do above:
   <h1>Ten Key Techniques for Search Engines Optimization </h1>
6. Place your keywords in bold text or italics so they are emphasized.
   Ten Key Techniques for Search Engines Optimization
7. Use your keyword in text early and often.

   Use your keyword within reason – your audience has to read the web page as well

8. Use your keywords in alt tags with your images.
   Remember: Search Engines cannot read text embedded in graphics images. It may look great on the web site for you visitors but it will never help with rankings. That is why it is suggested to use ALT tags
   

   

9. Beware of Javascript menus

   There are many versions of menus out there that will stop a search engine spider in it's tracks – never letting your web site get indexed!  I use Text or CSS menu systems. Graphic links will work, but I always use a text menu in the footer with Graphic or javascript menu system

10. Interlink your web pages with your keywords hyper linked to other internal web pages.

    For example, if I mention to use Search Engine Submissions on a web page – I will hyperlink it to my web page for Search Engine Submissions.

    Good luck with your web site! – Smitty

11. Bonus – Update your content on at least a monthly basis. Adding fresh new content on a regular basis allows those search engine spiders to find new information. Based on the quality of that information, you can keep your site from being stagnant.

Although this is basic overview of some of the techniques used to optimize a web page, there are many more techniques to use. You may wish to contact us to find out more about how we can help you optimize your web site.