Archive for Search Engine Optimization

SEO and Content for Website Visitors

February 18, 2010 / Search Engine Optimization The Woodlands / 7 comments

Thanks for being a loyal visitor. Check back often for information on SEO!

Have you ever been to a website where there are so many keywords for SEO purposes that you can’t read it? There is a thin line between having good on site search engine optimization and having a readable and interesting website.


Some websites clearly focus so much on the search engine optimization that their website starts to suffer on the user experience side of things. You have to keep in mind that the whole goal of your search engine optimization is to drive website visitors to your website These customers want information about what you do and they want a good user experience.   I think sometimes search marketers look at analytics information and SEO techniques so much that they forget that unique visitors are actually real  human beings. These visitors want to be able to read about your products or services so they can decide for themselves whether or not to buy the product or service.  All this happens very quickly so if your homepage is more worried about SEO than  your audience, visitors will not enjoy the experience or want to stay on your page.

There are many different opinions out there when it comes to search engine optimization and marketing so it is important to really navigate through them with caution. Not all recommendations are good recommendations. Some could hurt you just as quick as they help you. Stuffing your website with links and really cluttering up the pages could lead to a variety of problems. Not only could load time of your website be really impacted.   Search engines read all the links on your website so if you are spamming them with keywords,  you could be penalized for it down the road.

Always think about your visitors and what they would like to experience when it comes to reading your website content.  Make sure it’s an enjoyable experience!

Category: Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Optimization The Woodlands, Web Content /

Search Engine Optimization Tips

October 13, 2009 / Search Engine Optimization The Woodlands / 14 comments

This is a second part to the search engine optimization rules I wrote about yesterday.  I will cover the remaining 5 areas that relate to solid Search Engine Rankings for particular number of key phrases. Again, this will apply to any type of website, on any industry you are targeting.
Lets review the last 5 areas:

Provide a road map of your web site, and search engines will follow it.
Called the “sitemap”, this very simple page contains links to every page on a web site and serves one very important purpose. That is to get your sub pages crawled, and into a search engine’s index.

Search Engines look for the robots.txt file, so make sure you have it.
As its name implies, this is a text file that tells robots what to and what not to index. Its content consists of so-called records. Only mention files and directories that you don’t want to be indexed. All other files will be indexed normally if they are linked on your site. Having a proper robots.txt file gives your pages the rankings they deserve. If search engines know what to do with them, then they can give them good ranking.

Submit your site to related categories in niche directories.
Internet directories have become very important because they represent an easy path for inbound links creation. Now, when you submit your site to related categories in your industry you get that extra link factor, quality. Links from these categories can have a very positive effect on the search engine rankings of your web site.

Writing articles about your site, a great way to get new content.
This will help you get good positioning on search engines and quality incoming links as well. Always keep your articles as informative as possible. Other web sites will link back to your articles if you do. Write about the topics that your visitors are interested in, and don’t forget to send them to syndicate sites. They will in turn offer them to others. Just make sure that you always have a link back to your web site so that all sites who publish your article will automatically link to you.

Become an authority in your field. Visit relevant forums and blogs.
Join forums and blogs that are relevant to your industry. Use your expertise as a site owner in your industry to give information and advice. Of course, put your URL into the signature of your posts. Being the authority is simply knowing your industry, and giving people the information they need to trust you and your site.

Category: Search Engine Optimization /

Should you write web content for visitors or for SEO purposes!?

October 8, 2009 / Search Engine Optimization The Woodlands / 9 comments

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization , is something that many webmasters are now obsessing over. Many web site owners are spending countless hours tweaking and modifying their web sites, adding keyword rich content, and spending hours obtaining back links, so that their site will rank higher in search engines. It is true that over 90% of all web surfers use search engines to visit sites on a regular basis, but should web masters and those who perform web site design build and tweak sites for search engines, or for their visitors?

The answer to this question is that when building a website, you are not targeting web search engine crawlers, you are targeting people. Hence, you should build a web site for humans, not for Search Engine Optimization purposes only. The whole purpose of creating a web site is so that you can get traffic. Without traffic, a web site is worthless. No matter how many features and how functional your site is, without traffic, your design and functionality do not matter. Although search engines can help bring in traffic, web sites that are designed for search engines alone are often not designed for human visitors and all the traffic that your web site gets will be worthless. Visitors will visit and then soon leave your web site and not return again. Return visitors are critical for the success of any web site.

One good example of optimizing for search engines only is some webmasters tend to stuff tons of keywords into the Meta-Tags and site; this is a very bad practice and will get the site blacklisted. Moreover, this black hat technique does not benefit the users.

Hence, when building a web site, one should build it for human visitors. IfYou can SEO and make your site readable but it will take work. You want to be able to put in your keywords – just don’t stuff them in so much that the site is unreadable. You want good content and you want your visitors to know what you do. Doing both Search Engine Optimization and having good content for your readers is possible with a little thought. You don’t want your visitors to read and be disgusted by the keyword spam.The more people that visit and link to your web site, the more popular it well become and naturally, it will be ranked higher in search engines. Also, rather than spending hours building links for SEO purposes, that time could be better spent on adding features to your web site which would prompt more people to return to your site and stay at your web site for a longer period of time.

In conclusion, although spending lot of time on SEO and increasing your search engine rankings in the short run is great, the visitors you get from your Search Engine Optimization efforts will not be valuable as chances are they will not visit again. If you build your websites for people, your traffic will grow and search engine rankings will rise naturally. The best way to build a successful web site is to build for people, use keywords sparingly, and allow your web site to naturally move up search engine rankings.

Category: Search Engine Optimization / Tags: ,

Get Links & Traffic to your Website!

October 7, 2009 / Search Engine Optimization The Woodlands / 10 comments

Link-building is still the best way that search engines determine relevancy.  Link-building is the most important part of a search engine marketing or search engine optimization campaign.  Here are some great ways to build links back to your site and drive traffic to your website all at the same time.

YouTube:  Use this like a social media site. Build your profile with your website link in the description box, comment on videos either by writing or doing your own YouTube video.  Alternately, you can find a popular video, make a video with a similar title and description and it will come up on the right when others are looking at the popular video!

Articles:  Write articles with good content and spin them so you don’t have to write several articles.  When writing the articles, put links using keywords back to some of your inner pages.  Submit these articles to article.  You can write an article or press release and send it to your local online paper and print paper with links back to your site.

Contests:  If you hold a great contest, bloggers will blog about you and link to your site.

Lists:  Write a list, like “10 easy ways to get free traffic” or “Great ways to buy links” and post it on Twitter so others will see it.  If people like your post, they will write about it on their site and link back to you, or they will Tweet about it.

Widgets:  Build a widget, like a calculator, a Firefox extension, Google phone application and add a link back to your site.

Outbound Links:  Google sees relevant outbound links as being almost as important as back-links.  Link to relevant sites with high Page Rank.  Link to education sites and to government sites that are relevant to your website or blog.  Ask for a link when you make a sale to a customer and ask for links from your suppliers when you place an order.

Create a page:  In Wikipedia, create a page about something your business does or look for a wiki with a relevant topic.  You can add to a page that is already there that is relevant to your topic and then add yourself at the bottom as a reference.  This is tricky and you can’t spam Wikipedia, but they have great link juice if you can do it correctly.  Even though these are nofollow, it still helps!

Social Media Sites:  Set up a FaceBook Page.  Set up a Twitter account for your business and put your webpage link on your Twitter page.  Link your Twitter and FaceBook pages.  Have links on your website that link to each of your pages on Twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn, and MySpace.  Have areas to retweet your blog posts and links to place your information on Stumbleupon, Technorati, Delicious, Digg, etc.  Put a listing of your business into Dmoz.  Create a Squidoo page and give useful information about your business, or put a link to your widget or tool on the page.

Classified ads – don’t spam them – offer something free (a free .pdf about something that you have on your site, article, etc.):  With Craigslist, watch what you post – limit the number of words.  If you want to know more about posting on Craigslist, go to Easy Ad Forum.  A friend of mine has a computer repair business, puts ads selling computers in a classified ad, and gets tons of calls for his business from that one ad:  Ebay Classified Ads, Walmart Classified Ads, US Free Ads, Backpage Classifieds

Forums:  Post regularly on forums – give people help, tips, etc.  After a certain amount of posts, most forums will give you a signature with your url at the bottom.

Contributions:  Donate to a charity and ask for a link from their page to yours.  Make quality content contributions to forums and blogs, not spam, and link back to your site using your keywords.

Blogging:  blogging, either responding to others blogs or creating your own, is a great way to get links and traffic to your site.  It’s best if you can be the first person to comment on a popular blog because you get traffic from your comment!

Content:  Write useful content and write controversial content!  People like to talk about controversial topics and will blog about your content.  It’s also great to put a blog on your site because you are adding content regularly and Google loves that.  Email your friends and business acquaintances and have them read and Tweet your posts.

Three Way Linking:  For this to work you must have three domains, either all yours or in combination with other webmasters.  If you have Domain One, Two, & Three, link from Domain One to Domain Two, from Domain Two to Domain Three, and from Domain Three to Domain One.  This is not seen as reciprocal linking and looks more natural.  You can use more domains than just three.

These are just a few of the many ways to get links from others.  You don’t want to spam people and you don’t want hundreds of links in a day because it doesn’t look natural and the search engines won’t like it, so take it easy!  Make sure your web content is good quality content so people actually want to read what you have to say!

Category: Search Engine Optimization / Tags: , ,

Welcome to JaxWorks Search Engine Optimization Blog!

September 10, 2009 / Search Engine Optimization The Woodlands / 26 comments

This blog will give you more information about what search engine optimization, search engine marketing, PPC, and social marketing are and how they can help you in your business.  JaxWorks specializes in all of the above and we design and develop websites as well.  Search engine is a process of having the search engines know that your website is there and think it is relevant enough to put it on the first page.  What I mean by a process is that it takes a lot of time and effort to put you and keep you on the first page of the search engines, depending on which keywords you want to use.  You can’t just fire and forget with SEO (search engine optimization).

This blog will be an ongoing process of educating you about search marketing and how it can help you grow your business.  Come back and read often!

Category: Search Engine Optimization / Tags:
 
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