Pratice Your Best SEO

Best SEO Practices
By Shannan DuShane
October 29, 2012

     

Search engine optimization is a new venture for many business owners.  When we first meet and we get into discussion about it is definitely a lengthy discussion because it is new to them, they have only heard about it, but never went into much detail because they didn’t think it was a big deal.

What most people need to realize is that you can have a beautiful visually stunning site, but it will not work for you on the search engines for the reason that search engines are not human - they are text driven.  They can’t determine if you have a stunning website, beautiful graphics and a cool logo.  They can only read and interpret text. So if you aren’t up to date on the latest trends and methods with SEO then your website is not virtually doing anything for you.  They (the search engines) will need to crawl, index and process the text on your site in several different formats and locations before they can deliver search results - effectively what you see on page when you search for something. 

·         Below are just some of the best SEO practices that you can make sure you are implementing.  This is not a complete list but it will get you started….

·         A picture might be worth a thousand words, but search engines don't read pictures. Make sure your key search terms are written out in text

·         Develop your Meta Tags – Title, Keywords, Description, H1 tags around your products and services.  These should reflect what your customers are looking for as well as how you want to be found.

·         The Meta Title should be no more than 3-9 words or 60-80 characters maximum in length containing your primary keyword. Remember it will be displayed in search results so choose sensibly. This should be your primary location, service or product and company name. The title should also reflect your keywords on the page of the website.

·         Each page of your website should have a unique Meta Title to be indexed by the search engines.

·         The Meta Keywords -try to include your most important keyword phrases in heading tags on your page if you can but keep in mind it should not be exactly same as title of your page. You can use (H1 H2 H3) tag for specifying anything important. These keywords should be reflected on your pages in your website.

·         Meta Keywords in heading of document should be limited it to approximately 75 words.

·         The Meta Description needs to contain keywords and concentration with the verbiage in your webpage. These will appear on the results page of the search engines.

·       Use text for navigation menu instead of using images or Java scripts; if you use images, embed alt text in your code to ensure proper indexing

·        Write posts and articles on a blog or website related to your industry or company to warrant you having higher page ranking and leave your websites links for them to link back.

·         Use Google Webmasters Tools-You can make Google do a lot of work simply by adding your site to Google Webmasters Tools, that is linked to your Gmail/Google account. It shows you how Google crawls and indexes your site to help diagnose problems, and many other functions.

·         Create a sitemap.xml file for Google Then Submit It!

·         Make a site map-besides creating a sitemap.xml, you should also make a detailed html sitemap page that links to every page on your site. It helps your users and search engines find the content easily. The fewer clicks it takes to get to a page, the better.

·         Add a robots.txt file to your website directory-by default, search engines crawl and index everything in a website. You can block some files or folders that aren’t relevant or don’t want to get indexed by placing a robots.txt in your root folder.

·         Check for broken links and images -if your page has links pointing to content that doesn’t exist, it will probably never be found. It’s also a fact that search engines penalize sites with many broken links, so don’t forget to use the W3C link validator tool to find them.

·         Avoid duplicate content-duplicate content can be dangerous to your search engine rankings. But, what is duplicate content? You can solve these and others duplicate content problems by using noindex, follow in your robots meta tag, using a 301 redirect or with a robots.txt file.

·         Create an Informative Error Page - if a user mistakenly types a wrong or incorrect url, it will show a default server page with an internal error message. That message is not very helpful, so instead you should create a user-friendly 404 error page that links back to the homepage, shows alternatives for navigation or links to possibly related content.

·         Utilize search engine friendly url’s -Search engines cannot make sense of urls with dynamic and session id names, so instead of:

·         Design an Effective Footer - User your footer links to help search engines navigate through your site, replicating your main navigation and linking to the most important pages on your site.

Write Good Quality Heartfelt Content – don’t forget about keywords and all that, the best SEO advice you can receive is to just write valuable verbiage and content, interesting articles, connect with social media; that your clients will like and interact with and find useful.

The Google Blog Network Massacre - Blog Networks Deindexed

What is a blog network?

In case you aren't aware what a blog network is, allow me to quickly explain. Basically, blog networks allow you to publish blog posts (read "articles") on different websites that are linked into some form of automatic content distribution system. For example, if I wrote an article called "5 Killer Guitar Solo Secrets", I could then submit to a blog networks and in theory this article will then be published to sites in the network related to "guitars", "music", "hobbies", and things like that.

Blog networks come in many different flavors and varieties, with the only real underlying similarities being they are a system for generating backlinks by submitting content, and there is usually a price for membership (I'll come back to why this is important soon) "Public" blog networks consist of blog owners putting their sites in the network to receive free content. "Private" blog networks are slightly different, because the administrators of the network actually own the sites to which writers publish their content.

The biggest casualty so far of Google's push against blog networks is the Build My Rank service. This was a private blog network, and the sites which made up the network have all been deindexed by Google. Any links generated through Build My Rank are now worthless, and the service has been closed down to new members. You can read BMR's statement about the closure of their network here - kudos to them for coming clean straight away about what happened too.

Other notable networks that have been punished include SEO Link Monster, Authority Link Network, and Linkvana.

If you want more evidence of this latest algorithm update in action, just search "blog networks deindexed" and see how many discussion results there are. Some of them are truly frightening - SEO companies relying entirely on blog networks like BMR to build links for their clients' websites, entire websites disappearing from Google's index; it's like Nightmare on SEO Street.

Article by Sam Frost
http://www.affilorama.com/blog/the-google-blog-network-massacre-blog-networks-deindexed

Art of Marketing

Is Your Marketing Strategy Working? By Shannan K. DuShane 9/30/12

Almost some time or another all companies have gone through a struggle. Business struggle, marketing initiative struggle, or loss of business, either way, the economy is hard-hitting, global opposition is a fact, and technology tends to superseded products in months. Your marketing strategy is more important today than ever. Making it work and knowing when and how to initiate a new strategy is imperative. I’ve seen too many companies living on a false hope that tomorrow will bring a different light to their already failing plan or that they have some hope of bringing back a past edge that will they can bring back the history to this decade. “We need to see what happens next quarter,” yet another alternative of false hope rearing its ugly head, I’m not sure if to call it hope or stupidity.  Most of the time it is laziness to develop a strategy and plan; because it is a long process to execute it correctly and in order.   The lack of first realizing that you need to have a new plan and approach, then hiring a marketing strategist to analyze your company is the first intelligent objective anybody could do for their company.  Sometimes a third party is the best way to move because of the non-biased opinion and view that they don’t have about the organization.  So the question to be asked, “how do I know if my marketing objectives are working?” Measure – Analyze – Make Changes – Initiate – Measure and so on, unless you can read minds or foretell the future. Communication is crucial; if you are not communicating the strategy and objectives with your sales force, you are not going anywhere; the sales team is your face and name of your company.  They are the ones selling your product and service and if they aren’t familiar with your marketing plan and marketing plan, you basically wasted your time and money. Poor and low generation of leads is another factor; this also leads off from the lack of communication.  Marketing creates opportunity for your sales force.  Your sales force like I mentioned above is your strength; you should take full advantage of this and if you are not generating leads and opportunities then your marketing strategy isn’t working for you.  I’ve seen it where the sales teams are ignored by management when they should be embraced and more at the forefront of the strategy.  Find out why the leads are not creating sales opportunity and fix it. Time management is yet another failure of problems; if you have a plan, and only accomplish about the first 2 months of it, then it goes cold, and you don’t set aside that dedicated time to spend  on your plan; then shame on you; that is not something that you want to be responsible for.  You need to stay current and up to date on what is going on all around your business; your clients and your competition are you best avenues of gaging how you are doing. If you don’t plan on using it don’t complain when you don’t get results or your leads drop off. Customers and clients are too often confused, not about you or your services they know what you do, but maybe they don’t understand why your service or product is the latest and greatest.  Why should they choose you over your competitor? This is the biggest question to answer. A new marketing initiative could put this into better perspective for your clients to understand your offerings and more. Lastly, you need to be where your audience is; you can’t force your audience to be somewhere they are not, get in front of them and make them remember your company. Utilize all of your avenues, and if you don’t have the time or patience, hire someone to do it for you; this is not an option if you want to keep your head above the water. Use social media, use internet marketing and ppc marketing, utilize banner advertising and a new website with marketing materials or find another path to fulfill the tasks at hand; more visibility that converts to more sales!  Don't Work It....Network It