Search Engine Optimization Blog

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.

One of our favorite features of a blog is its ability to be syndicated to multiple websites to drive links and traffic back to your site.

However, many bloggers are not aware that their blog’s RSS feed needs to get pinged in order to update the entries in Google Blog Search and other blog search engines.

Fortunately for our clients, this is done for them every month as part of their service plan, but how we do it is no secret. A simple-to-use free tool called Ping-o-Matic is the best 2 minutes each month you will spend.

To have your blog pinged simply go to http://pingomatic.com. Fill in the information about your blog and then check all relevant blog search engines to which you want to send your RSS feed. Click on “Send Pings” and wait for the status page.

Keeping the blog search engines up-to-date will help keep your information fresh and drive new traffic to your website based on the new content you post on your blog. The site is owned by the Wordpress Foundation and Wordpress users can integrate a plugin to automatically have their blog pinged every time a new entry is posted.

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

When looking at regional search engine optimization, it is important to identify your regional target. If you have a product or service that can be delivered nationwide, a general highly competitive keyphrase would be appropriate (for example, a windmill kit). However, if you are confined to a region, then you would want a keyphrase relevant to that region (for example, Cincinnati windmill installations or Cincinnati windmill setup).

This can be applied to all industries. With attorneys, sometimes firms will want to optimize too wide of an area. For example, a personal injury firm may want to optimize for California personal injury, but they only have offices in Sacramento. Certainly, they don’t want to filter out inquiries from Los Angeles 6 hours away, so it would be better to focus on Sacramento personal injury.

Other industries, like insurance, may be able to write policies statewide but prefer a more local feel for their agency. So in this case, the insurance agency would have to decide whether they want to fight for a statewide term or focus regionally within their closest major metro area.

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

Much of what the search engines judge you by is the information and keyphrases that appear at the top of the page. That is one thing that search engine bots and users have in common.

Therefore, it is important to establish what you do and where you are located at the top of the page starting with the first paragraph. If you are a dentist in Cleveland you would want your header to reflect that with “Cleveland Dentist Dr. Smith.” If you are a divorce lawyer in Boston, your header should reflect “Boston Divorce Lawyer” or “Boston Divorce Attorney.”

Following that, the paragraph should mention the keyphrase.

On the dentist site, that could look something like “Dr. Smith has been serving the area as a Cleveland Dentist for over a decade.”

For the attorney’s website, the first sentence should be something similar to “Selecting an experienced Boston divorce attorney for your case can make a positive difference in how your Massachusetts divorce is settled.”

By pushing your keyphrases to the top of the page, you can establish where you are and what you do so that the search engines can rank you accordingly.

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

Earlier in the summer, we did a podcast episode on Google Caffeine (http://www.adviatech.com/google-we-are-ready-for-some-caffeine/), the next generation of the Google core search engine. We were very excited and anxious for this technology to become the norm.

Just recently, Google announced that they would begin implementing the new technology in their datacenters. This is going to happen gradually over time so some users will continue to see the old Google and others (as our office has experienced) will see the new.

With this change, you can expect to see your rankings change. As we experienced when testing Google Caffeine, our clients ranked considerably better than in the current Google version so we are especially excited about Google Caffeine becoming the norm.

More emphasis is placed on quality links and quality content. It also filters out websites that make duplicate websites to help control certain keywords. Websites that are currently doing well based on “anything goes” linking will probably see a decline in their search engine rankings whereas other websites (like our clients) who have strong social network and blog based links and monthly updated content on their blogs will more than likely experience higher placement.

So if you see some new faces in the search results, don’t be alarmed; Google’s rankings are changing for the better.

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

For those of you who do not know what an H1, H2, or H3 tag is, basically it is the larger font toward the top of your website. It is important that this area of your site reflect your keyphrases and NOT your company name or a generic “Welcome to our website.”

To see an example, visit SEOLawfirm.com. The top H1 tag says, “Law firm marketing is evolving at SEOLawFirm.com.” In this case, were able to start with a keyphrase and end with our company name, thus doing two things at once. The result? SEOLawFirm.com ranks on the first page of Google for “law firm marketing.”

To see another example, visit ReadytoQuote.com. The top H1 tag says, “Insurance Marketing and Search Engine Optimization.” Notice we start with our primary keyphrase of “Insurance Marketing.” The result? ReadytoQuote.com ranks on the first page of Google for “Insurance Marketing.”

Making sure your keywords come first will greatly impact your search engine performance.

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

You should avoid “proprietary” content management systems. Content management systems are, in theory, easy-to-use, online website editors that allow website owners to easily make changes to their site by logging onto an online control panel.

Several marketing and web development companies have content management systems that are exclusive to their service. If things do not work out between your firm and the company, you have to start all over because they are not giving you their management system to take to a new web host.

Make sure your content management is like ours; compatible with most web hosting companies around the world. In fact, our system is compatible with any Linux based hosting that offers PHP and a mySQL database – that is 99% of them.

Usually, widely compatible software is easier to use than proprietary software. With its popularity comes user input. From that, programmers can make changes to make the user experience easier. A proprietary application can only grow when the owning company wants to pay for upgrades, which generally means new features are slow to arrive.

Ask your web service provider if your content management system is portable; meaning capable of being moved to a new host. Knowing this information will help you plan for your future website needs.

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

Everybody online knows about the Google search engine for web searches, but do you know they also offer additional search engines? Google News displays news from media sources from around the world. Google Image Search displays relevant pictures. Google Shopping compares prices on items. And Google Blog Search, well, searches for blogs.

If you have a blog on your website, you should submit it to Google Blog Search.

First, locate your feed URL. Generally, toward the bottom of the blog page you will see a link that says “syndicate” or an orange button that says RSS, ATOM, or XML. If you see any of those items, click on it.

Second, take your feed URL (generally yourwebsite.com/blog/feed) to http://blogsearch.google.com/ping. After a week, your blogs should appear in Google Blog Search. Most popular blogging platforms like WordPress, will offer you the option of automatically “pinging” Google Blog Search every time you update your blog. Doing this will automate the blog search submission and keep your Google Blog Search listings up-to-date.

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

A big mistake that many businesses make with their website content is wording it as if they were introducing themselves at a business meeting. The stale, “We specialize in widgets and whatnots,” just does not work when you are trying to convert your web traffic to new business.

Your website’s content is important for search engines and your visitors. Make it too keyphrase oriented and your visitors will get irritated by the redundancy. Also, if you don’t use inclusive language, your website is going to sound like a mundane commercial.

Here are a couple examples. We will assume that you are in the business of making blue widgets. Blue widgets solve everybody’s problems thus “blue widget” is your primary keyphrase. What better company to provide blue widgets than Widgitech?

Redundant Content – All of us at Widgitech believe that there is not a better blue widget solution then the Widgitech blue widget. These days, everybody needs a blue widget. Blue widgets make modern civilization possible. Nobody makes a better blue widget than the blue widget enthusiast at Widgitech… your blue widget specialist.

Notice that they go a little overboard with the talk of “blue widgets.”

SEO Visitor Friendly Content – Blue widgets are what make modern civilization possible. We understand that. For years, Widgitech has put quality and innovation at the core of our company to make sure that the Widgitech blue widget is the last blue widget you will every buy.

In both examples, we use the keyword a few times. However, the second statement puts the keyphrase in a less redundant manner. It is safe to say that the second version is both visitor friendly and SEO friendly, and would also look appropriate on a printed brochure. The first one would not.

Be descriptive with your content and do not be afraid to periodically use your keyphrases. However, keep your content interesting and maintain a balance. Doing so will impress your visitors as well as the search engines.

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

One of the oldest search engine optimization tools around is actually one of the few that is still effective. Sitemaps have been around as long as the Internet has been commercially available.

Basically, a standard sitemap is just a page that links to all of the pages on your website in a neatly categorized form. By having a sitemap, the search engines are able to immediately get a list of all the pages they need to index within your site.

By making this process easy on the search engines, you ensure getting your entire page properly indexed. Visit Adviatech’s sitemap page as an example at http://www.adviatech.com/sitemap/.

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