WireWalkersVA

A website’s basic information or content is one of the most important ingredients in implementing a successful website SEO optimization.  People will usually judge your site within a few seconds of entering it, so make sure you make a good first impression.  If you are outsourcing SEO services even from a trusted SEO company, they can do all the optimizing they can but if your web structure is not properly created and the content is lacking, the results will not be that productive.

You will want to make sure that your website contains all the basic information that people expect to see.  Here are the basic ones:

• About Us page: This is meant to give people who come into your website a quick idea of what your company is about and what it offers.  This is also a great place to share your company vision and mission.
• Description of your products or services: Sell your products or services to prospective customers by explaining how they can directly benefit them in an easy to understand way.  Convince your audience that they need you.
• Contact information: Make sure that your contact information is clear and easy to find so that customers can make inquiries and contact your company easily.  It’s good to give people several means of contacting you like giving your telephone, mobile, email, and mailing addresses.  This helps give your company a more trustworthy image.  Of course, be sure to respond promptly and satisfactorily when people contact any of those contact numbers and addresses.
• FAQ’s page: You can translate inquiries that you frequently get in emails into frequently asked questions on your website.  This helps reduce the hordes of questions you may receive over mail all asking about the same thing and save you the time and effort of responding to all of them.  A FAQ page also increases user satisfaction which would very well increase rankings in search engines as well.
• Keyword optimized articles: Many SEO experts swear by optimized articles as the best way to increase rankings in search engines. Since users expect useful and quality content, search engines strive to find the most informative content that contain all the necessary keywords that were searched for. That’s basically why a SEO company would normally include article writing as one of their SEO services.
• Customer reviews: It’s been found that people are most likely to trust peers over advertisements, even if those peers aren’t actually people they know.  Customer reviews of products and services are the best way for prospective customers to get sold on your product.  It may be wise to ask satisfied customers to provide feedback on your company whenever possible.

So there you have it; the basic content you need to start website SEO optimization.  If you are to outsource SEO services to an SEO company, depending on the company itself (if they are a web development company as well), you can choose to delegate the web development task to them to make sure that all the basics are covered when it comes to your website needs.

When choosing your SEO outsourcing company, it is best if you understand beforehand what SEO services are available and which ones you may need.   In our previous blog, we talked about keyword analysis and strategy.  Today, we are going to take a look at how to effectuate a Google Adwords Campaign – an SEO Service many businesses find useful.

In the Google Adwords control panel you can easily access their Google Adwords Keywords Tool that assists in keyword analysis.   You can then set your own pay-per-click fee and Google will show your ads in search results depending on your bid for keywords.   Of course, if you don’t bid enough and the going rate is higher, it’s possible that none of your ads will be shown at all.

You can get started with a Google Adwords campaign by clicking the previous link.  Click on “Create your First Campaign” and you will be directed to this page:

You can name your campaign and then you will be given the choice of which countries you want to target.  The more countries you choose, the wider the reach.  However, increasing the countries that you target will also lower the quality of traffic.  So try to find a good balance between a wide reach and targeted traffic.  After this, it’s time to write an ad to promote your product.  Try to create an ad that is clear and will capture your target market’s interests.

Next, you will be given a text box where you can add all your chosen keywords.

Finally, set your budget and the cost-per-clicks.  Higher cost-per-clicks usually get you higher rankings in searches and lead to more clicks overall.  However, choose one that still fits into your budget.  $0.50 a click is decent, while a network bid of 10 cents will suffice as a starting point.  (Note: again, this depends on the competitiveness of your keywords and the resulting going rate.  You can’t just bid a rate that’s too far below the going rate if you want any ‘action’.)  If you are within an acceptable range however, you can pick the lowest part of the range to begin with and can increase the rate later if you see a need.

You can analyze your progress by integrating Adwords with Google Analytics.  Simply link your two accounts and then go to the “Tools and Analysis” page on Google Adwords and sign up for conversion tracking.  With this tool, you can find out what keywords referred traffic to your website, and you can sift the good keywords from the bad.

You can opt to launch more than 1 Google Adwords campaign because Google will help find out which ones are most effective.  This will allow you to play around with different words and different target markets to see which combination of factors is the most effective.

Creating a great Adwords campaign will help increase traffic, online sales and help get your brand more recognition so make sure you use it wisely. When you utilize a SEO outsourcing company, you won’t have to worry about this process at all as they will be the one to do it for you. You can certainly choose to have a Google Adwords campaign included in your SEO services package.

WireWalkersVA is pleased to share with you the importance of Search Engine Marketing or SEM – and how a SEO company can be of help with this process.

You may fall under the category of website owners that have great sites with excellent content and feel as though they don’t need to market themselves anymore.   Unfortunately, it becomes an absolute waste of great content when nobody is there to see it.  When you are invisible to search engines, you’re nearly invisible to the rest of the world as well.  This is where SEO services such as Search Engine Marketing comes in.  However, if you’re too busy with other business concerns, you can have a SEO company do the marketing for you.  But sometimes, you may have to learn how to become more visible to search engines yourself by understanding how they work and what they look for when they rank results to queries.

For example, there are certain limitations to search engines which make some useful content not readily available to them.  One major limitation is that search engines can only read content that is in HTML form.  This means that if you have useful content in video, image or audio form, search engines cannot interpret it as being relevant.

Another limitation is that sites that don’t have solid links to interconnect all pages make it difficult for web crawlers to spider and thus become poorly ranked.  Finally, how search engines pull out results is very specific to the queries of its users.  So if your web page has excellent content but the keywords are slightly different from what the average person may type in the search box, then you won’t rank as highly as web pages that do tailor their content specifically to what people actually search for.

Why do you need such SEO services? Why would you need to be highly ranked anyway, you may ask? As was previously mentioned, nearly half of all users click the highest ranked website after performing a search.  The 2^nd ranked and 3^rd ranked get a considerable amount of traffic also but all the ones below them only get less than 5% of clicks.  People simply can’t be bothered to look through several websites that offer them the same thing.  Aside from that, people also tend to view the top ranked sites as more trustworthy while the ones in the next pages more likely to be unreliable, poorly maintained, or spam.  If you have a good product that’s priced well, it still won’t get you the recognition you should be getting if your website is not optimized.  You miss out on the opportunity to get new clients from the hordes of people who search daily for products and services online.

Now you may also be a business that relies more on your store than on your online sales.  You may consider your website as merely a reference (or, ‘brochure’) in case customers need to get contact numbers or ask a question.  However, it has been found that an increasing number of people have been choosing to buy products online, so much that for every $16 spent in stores, $1 is spent online – and, the trend is unmistakably towards increasingly more online sales.

If you’re simply relying on in-store sales, then you’re missing out on potentially huge revenues by not pursuing internet sales as well.  Also, it has been found that people look for new products using the internet and read reviews on them before they make those purchase offline.  If you’re looking for a way to increase the overall purchases in your store, then you have to learn to increase their visibility online.  For your business website to be visible online, you will need different kinds of SEO services like search engine marketing, for example.

It is very understandable that sometimes, you will want to focus more on other aspects of your business. When this happens, and since online presence is really important, it is best that you consult with a SEO company to render SEO services to your business website.

A lot of our readers and site visitors get confused about SEO just because there’s so much unfamiliar jargon and terminology – so, we thought we’d put together a quick list.   Now, you’ll know what SEO optimization really means and what SEO outsourcing really entails.

Boring – yes!  Useful and IMPERATIVE to know – yes, you bet!

• Anchor Text:  This is the part of a back-link that people click on a website.  Sometimes the anchor text is simply a “Click here” (not a good idea) but search engines actually consider the anchor text as a keyword for your website’s content so it helps to have anchor texts that use keywords you’d like to increase your rankings for.

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

• Back-links:  This is a hyperlink on another website that directs people who click it to your own website.  These are important for SEO because, generally, the more back-links to your website, the higher its search ranking.

• Canonicalization:  In the SEO world, this refers to the standardization of multiple links or URLs in your website.  It is rather important in website optimization as this process eliminates the visible duplications of pages from your site.

• Cloaking:  This is the practice of making the same website page appear differently to search engines and users.  It’s intended to get a page highly ranked for its keywords and then  promoting unrelated products to all the people who go to that page.  (Needless to say, this is a serious offence in the search engine world.)

• Keyword Density:  This is determined from the number of keywords divided by the number of words in a specific page.  While this used to be an important factor in search rankings, it was heavily abused by sites and is no longer given much emphasis.

• Keyword Stuffing:  This is the practice of increasing the keyword density to irrational proportions in order to raise a site’s ranking.  This was quickly discovered by search engines and now you can get penalized for it.

• Link Farm:  This is a group of websites that all link to one another.  These are created to increase the PageRank of all of the websites in the Link Farm.  While this was useful in increasing your rankings in the past, they are now seen by search engines as spam and actions are being taken to penalize these transgressors.

• Meta Tags:  These are HTML codes that are usually found in the header of a web page, just after the title tag.  These are not seen by users but are used to give search engine spiders data on various types of information as well as how they should treat certain pages.

• Meta Descriptions:  These are descriptions of the page that show up in searches under the title tag.  Only snippets are shown so meta descriptions should be kept under 160 characters.

• NoFollow:  This is used in links by website owners to show search engines that they don’t support the site they are linking to.  When search engines see this, they don’t count the link in PageRank.

• PageRank:  This is an algorithm that search engines use to determine the importance of pages in relation to other pages.  It was founded initially on the assumption that – among many other criterion – the higher the number of websites that link to your website, the more likely that your website contains important information.

• Robots.txt:  This is a file that is placed in a website’s root directory and serves as a guide that enables or prevents bots from crawling over certain areas of a site you don’t want them to crawl.

• RSS feeds:  RSS stands for Rich Site Summary but is also often dubbed as Really Simple Syndication.  It is a format for delivering updates of regularly changing content, most often automatically.

• Sandbox:  Google has a separate index where they keep all new websites.  While websites are placed in the Sandbox, they don’t appear in normal searches.  However, once Google has verified a website, they move it out of the Sandbox and the website can appear in normal searches.

• SEO Company:  SEO Companies are businesses that help websites to produce and, ideally, uphold high web page rankings with different search engines.   They will be the one responsible for optimizing your website, and doing SEO services such as keyword analysis, link building and much more.

• SEO Optimization:  SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the method used to improve a website’s visibility and ranking in various search engines.

• SEO Outsourcing (aka outsourced SEO):  This is the process of delegating your company’s SEO work to an SEO Company or firm, or to an outside company (may be offshore or onshore).  As a business owner, especially for start-ups, it is advisable, more often that not, to outsource SEO work so you can concentrate on other aspects of your business.

• SEO Services:  These are the services (usually comes in packages) given by SEO companies and firms.  SEO services can include off-site or on-site optimization.

• SEM (Search Engine Marketing):  This is the practice of marketing services and products using search engines.  It is divided into two parts, SEO (search engine optimization) which is the practice of optimizing websites to increase their ranking in search engines, and PPC (pay-per- click) which is the practice of buying clicks from search engines.

• Sitemaps:  This is a tool that allows you to give guidance to spiders on how they should crawl over your website.  Sitemaps come in 3 varieties:  XML, RSS, and TXT files.  They each have their pros and cons, but XML is the most widely used format.

• Title Tags:  These show up at the top of your browser page and in search results.  It’s also what shows up when you bookmark a page and add it to your “Favorites”.  They are meant to be accurate descriptions of a page’s content, but they should also contain keywords because they help with searches.

• Web Crawlers:  These are also known as spiders and or search bots.  They crawl though the web looking for new links and pages.

Thanks for reading!  If you have any other definitions or jargon that you think our readers should know, please include them in a comment to this blog.

Black hat SEO is easy, but is it ever worth the risk?

As you research the concept of SEO you may come across the term “black hat SEO”. In basic terms SEO practitioners can “wear two hats” – a white one or a black one. White hat SEO is the practice of all the things that search engines love – proper search engine friendly on site SEO, publishing great original content on your site and across the web, careful link building and nowadays your activity in the social media world can really beef up your SEO success as well.

What then is black hat SEO? Black hat SEO encompasses all the bad things some people do to try to fool the search engines and get their websites ranking well using techniques that the search engines frown upon. Some people get away with it for a while, but when they do get caught (and they do) the penalties can be extreme. Imagine, your site dropped out of the Google search algorithm altogether or at the very least seriously penalized in terms of rank. What impact would that have on your business?

Common black hat tricks that should be avoided at all costs include:

Keyword Stuffing – The careful use of the right, targeted keywords for your content is essential to your SEO success. But keyword stuffing is a huge no no. Not only does the use of excessive keywords upset the searchbots but it also drives away your human visitors as it creates content that is completely unreadable and useless.

Buying Links and Link Farms – Google and Bing are very interested in the links that are coming into your site. But they want to see links that have been created organically. They may not catch this technique very quickly but if they do – oh boy. Back in 2010 retailer giant JC Penney were caught by first the New York Times and then Google paying other sites to place their link. During the holiday season of 2010 JCP outranked everyone for terms like “dresses” and “Samsonite”. A winning situation for the company it seemed.

One week after the discovery was published in the NYT though the retail giant was not so happy. The average search term ranking for their selected keywords dropped from #1 to #52. Tiny boutiques from rural areas in places like North Dakota were outranking them. Ouch!

On Site Deceptions – Invisible text, doorway pages, hidden affiliate links, plagiarized content, deliberately misspelled content. some SEOs will try all of these tricks to get their clients the fast jump in ranking they promise them. The problem is that once your site has been penalized and is result number 15 on page 10 of a Google search for your keywords or keyphrases getting it back up again is very hard, and will take far longer than had white hat SEO techniques, that do take weeks and months to have an effect been employed.

Duplicate Content – Some people think that duplicate content is OK. The simple answer is it is not and the Google Panda update hit a great many sites very hard because of this issue. The only kind of content you should be publishing is that which is original, engaging and of value to humans.

Google’s company motto is “don’t be evil” and they expect anyone who wants to be included in their search results to follow that ideal too. Black hat SEO is never worth the risk, whatever anyone tells you.

Search Engine Optimization – SEO – can be the single most effective way to promote your business online, however small it may be. It is also one of the most cost effective. Pay per click advertising can get you a jump in the Google rankings quickly but once you stop paying your ads disappear, and if you have not made any efforts to create organic SEO you run the risk of becoming invisible to your target audience, the people who are searching Google and Bing right now for a business just like yours.

SEO, when done right, is hard work. After you have optimized your website the process isnt over. Off site SEO, which includes blogging, article creation, developing and maintaining a social media presence and deep link building are all important elements of any SEO campaign that need to be worked on constantly, which can be a difficult task for a small business owner to juggle, given everything else they have to do!

Outsourcing your SEO can solve that problem, but choose your SEO partner carefully. There are a lot of social media “gurus” out there who are really only after one thing – your money. You cannot rank on the first page of Google overnight, or in a week. And there is no magic formula for SEO that can be followed by every business. SEO best practices change all the time, because the way search engines operate changes all the time. Look for an SEO outsourcing partner who can demonstrate that they are up to date on current best practices and who wants to develop an SEO strategy with you, not for you.