Search Engine Optimization Blog

Many LinkedIn users do not realize that their blogs can be syndicated to their LinkedIn profile. In order for this to work, your website’s blog has to be based on WordPress or your blog will need to be hosted at WordPress.com.

Simply log in to your LinkedIn profile and select the LinkedIn WordPress Application. Select “Add Application” then set your RSS feed URL. This is generally, yourwebsite.com/blog/feed/. If you are an existing Adviatech client, just send your login information to your account manager and they will set everything up for you as a courtesy.

Otherwise, learn more at:
http://www.linkedin.com/opensocialInstallation/preview?_ch_panel_id=1&_applicationId=2200

Remember, the most successful blogs are the ones that get read. Syndicate your blog wherever you can and honestly, what better location than LinkedIn?

To learn more about search engine optimization and search engine marketing, contact SEO company, Adviatech.com at 1.800.728.5306.

Here is a topic that we recently discovered was still a problem… we hoped that such a practice was in the mid-90’s internet graveyard but its still a problem. Blending keyphrases into your website that are invisible to your readers is a technique that makes the Google Bot’s face red and will almost guarantee a delisting. However, some webmasters are still using this as a “search engine optimization” technique.

Unlike some search engine optimization techniques, this one is not up for interpretation. Some businesses, acting under the advice of misinformed “SEO Specialists,” have long lists of keywords in their website’s footer that are in the same font color as their background, thus making it invisible.

The problem is so irritating to Google that they not only mention it but built a whole section on hidden links and hidden text in their webmaster guidelines center.

Google is pretty direct in the language they use to explain the consequence of hiding keyphrases:

“If your site is perceived to contain hidden text and links that are deceptive in intent, your site may be removed from the Google index, and will not appear in search results pages.”

To check your website for hidden text, go to your web browsers top menu and click on “Edit” then “Select All.” This will highlight your entire web page and display any hidden text that your webmaster or “SEO Specialist” may have inserted.

If you find invisible words on the page, you should first demand that your webmaster remove them immediately. A termination of your agreement with them should probably come shortly thereafter as this negligible action will hinder your ability to be ranked highly in Google, and possibly hinder your ability to be ranked at all.

We recently reviewed a website for a company that had over 100 hidden words in the footer. The business owner informed us that he had paid someone to develop the website in February of this year; thus, acting as a reminder that unethical search engine optimization practices are still lurking.

To learn more about search engine optimization and search engine marketing, contact SEO company, Adviatech.com at 1.800.728.5306.

We review of a lot of websites each week and it’s always surprising when we see URLs (website addresses) that are not SEO friendly. In 2008, Google released an official guide to search engine optimization covering the basics of what they want to see in a website. Pages 6 – 9 talk about URL structures, but many web developers are still not paying attention.

Just last week, we reviewed a website for a law firm and this particular page on the website was related to bankruptcy law.

The client’s URL was: websiteurl.com/lawyer-attorney-1267187.html.

What Google outlined in their search engine optimization guide 2 years ago, was that they want to see relevant keyphrases in the URL. So if this was our client, this page would look like the following:

Websiteurl.com/practice-areas/bankruptcy-lawyer/

This tells Google that this subpage of the site is related to one of the keyphrases we are optimizing for “bankruptcy lawyer.” The other URL mentions “lawyer” and “attorney” but does nothing to describe which of approximately 50 practice areas this particular page is discussing.

Utilizing clean descriptive URLs is something that helps your search engine ranking as well as your click conversions from search result pages.

To learn more about search engine optimization and search engine marketing, contact SEO company, Adviatech.com at 1.800.728.5306.

Google puts a strong emphasis on website quality – quality content, quality navigation, quality inbound links, quality outbound links, quality, quality, quality.

Therefore, it should come as no surprise that your website being up and without returning “not found” errors is an important aspect of getting and achieving a high ranking.

As Google visits your website to index your new content, they look for “not found” errors caused by dead links. If your website’s server is timing out, this can cause an error and make an existing page seem non-existent. If Google gets a lot of these errors, their bot may in fact lose patience with your site which will affect your ranking.

Check on your website periodically, and make sure your hosting company is working with a reliable data center that has 24/7 performance monitoring. Some downtime will always occur with hosting for server reboots, upgrade installs, etc., but frequent downtime can only be explained by poor server management.

To learn more about search engine optimization and search engine marketing, contact SEO company, Adviatech.com at 1.800.728.5306.

The object of search engine optimization for most businesses is to reach local clientele who are in need of their product or services. It’s a pretty simple concept but getting ranked on the first page in many metro areas requires a lot of work. Google basically is looking for a short list of items.

1) Quality website – A websitethat is easy to navigate by both human users and the Googlebot.

2) Quality content – A useful website contributes something to the world in the form of valuable content. The more useful the content, the higher quantity of content, the more favor you will be granted with your ranking.

3) Inbound links – The Google democracy states that the more websites which link to a website, the higher quality the content must be. This should be achieved with content, social networks, directories and news releases.

To learn more about search engine optimization and search engine marketing, contact SEO company, Adviatech.com at 1.800.728.5306.

When we started this company over five years ago, content management systems were a thorn with which every search engine optimization specialist was constantly coming in contact. Their clunky feature lists and inability to customize individual titles made them a nightmare to deal with and generally resulted in futile optimization efforts.

How the times have changed. As content management systems like Wordpress and Drupal evolved, the open source programming community took over and now content management systems are actually more SEO friendly than static HTML. I’m sure many in the SEO community are still shaking their heads, so next week we will cover how not using a content management system may hinder your attorney search engine optimization.

If you tuck away the contact form, you are requiring the visitor to make an extra step to contact your company. The average visitor to a website will visit 2.3 pages on your site. This number can be increased if you keep a blog actively updated. However, if the homepage is the first page, the second page needs to be your contact form or else it becomes less likely that the visitor will convert to a contact.

The way to improve this is to put a short contact form on every page. Regardless of the page the visitor lands on first on your site, they have immediate access to an easy way to contact you via a short contact form. Otherwise, they may just pass your “contact us” button, read some information then leave without contacting your company.

Adding a short contact form to every page of your website is probably one of the easiest ways to improve conversion.

A lot of shuffling is taking place in the Google algorithm right now. Last year, their modified algorithm named “Google Caffeine” was released for public testing. In the summer, we reviewed it and realized that they were changing for the better. In November, they announced that they would begin upgrading their data centers.

In the last couple of months, we have seen a lot of fluctuation in rankings which is a pretty good sign that the upgrade is well underway. But one of things we are also seeing is that Google is looking for a new third element, social networks.

It appears that the world’s largest search engine is paying attention to how often a website is linking with popular social networks as a way to gage popularity. Some experts even speculate that they monitor Tweets and Re-Tweets.

The clear message to take from this is that you need a social networking strategy to compete online. It’s that simple. If you are currently working with a marketing company that is not implementing a social network strategy then it’s time to change quickly to catch up with the new Google search.

To learn more about search engine optimization and search engine marketing, contact SEO company, Adviatech.com at 1.800.728.5306.

We will admit, Twitter can be a little silly. The constant updating of barmy commentary can be a little maddening, and it’s not exactly the place you would think to plug in your business.

However, Twitter is also filled with real legitimate people. Where there are people, there is an audience and where there is an audience, you stand to get web traffic.

A couple plugins are available for your website or blog (depending on your platform), and the concept is simple. When you blog, you post a Tweet which then links back to your website. When you Tweet, you can post a blog on your website. It’s a neat package.

Contact your SEOLawFirm.com representative about including this feature in your existing website.

We previously talked about aged domain names having a benefit to your search engine optimization. If a domain name has been around a while, search engines tend to believe it has stood the test of time and must have something good to offer the web-surfing community.

What many people do not know is registering a domain for a few extra years may also help with your search engine ranking.

Registering a domain name for 2 years at a time rather than 1 shows more of a long-term commitment to your website’s domain, and some search engine optimization specialists theorize that this helps your quality score with Google and other search engines.

At an average of $10-$20 a year for domain name registrations, adding an extra year to your domain is a small investment that may yield a strong return with your search engine optimization efforts.

To learn more about search engine optimization and search engine marketing, contact SEO company, Adviatech.com at 1.800.728.5306.