Posted by BlueSEO on January 29th, 2010

When you look at increasing your page rank on Google through natural search engine optimization there are a few methods you can use. First, you need to understand how search engines rank pages. Every search engine has their own top secret algorithm that tries to rank pages effectively to help people find what they are looking for. Nobody knows exactly what these sites look for but we know what works.

First of all, page title and web address are looked at. One of the easiest methods of achieving search engine optimization is to have your web address be one of your keywords. For example, if you are a painting company in Florida having your web address as “Florida Paints” will get you more hits than “Smith Paint Company” which would probably only be typed into a search engine by someone who already knows you.

The next method of achieving search engine optimization is by using keywords in your page content. You should use the words that people will use to find your page through the content, but not too much. Some search engines will actually decrease your rank of they think you are just putting in keywords to increase rank. A good idea is that something that sounds good to the human ear will also sound good to the search engines.

Finally, links are a very important method to achieve search engine optimization. You need sites to link to your page, but not just any site. Sites that are relevant to your content. Again, this is to overcome the habit of some unethical seo practices that created giant link exchanges with no real connection. Find sites that share something to do with your page and exchange links with them. This will increase both sites page ranks.

Natural seo is all about creating a site that people will find informative and helpful. The goal of a search engine is to connect people with what they are looking for, and by making your site a place with good information the page rank will naturally increase. The important thing is to always ask yourself, “How would my potential customers look for me” and find a way to connect with them.

Posted by BlueSEO on January 29th, 2010

I was talking to a friend of mine out of Los Angeles recently when the topic of web marketing expenses came up. He told me that he was paying two separate companies, one for his web design and another for his search engine optimization. He isn’t alone plenty of people think that web design and seo are two different animals, but really they are like a team of sled dogs – they work better together.

Why? To begin with there are ways to use web design to increase seo. Pages that use a clear hierarchy are much friendlier to search engines. Also, using meta tags and alt image text can also increase page rank. Information that is shown in flash or video formats can’t be scanned by search engines, and so page rank may fall.

The friend I was talking about in Los Angeles had this problem. His page included a really great video that showed the history of his company. Great! Except none of the information in the video was able to be read and counted for page rank. By simply including a transcript of the video he suddenly was able to have that information used for seo. It also made the page more accessible to people who may be viewing it at work where they don’t have speakers.

If he had used a web design company that also did seo then he wouldn’t have had this problem. The site would have been designed in a way so that everything worked together for the good of seo. This isn’t to say that if you already have a page that has been created you shouldn’t hire someone for seo. But for those people just beginning to get a web presence you should consider using them together.

Posted by BlueSEO on January 29th, 2010

Page ranking needs to be a concern of every person who uses their webpage for sales or marketing. The fact is that most people use internet search engines as one of the first ways to learn about a company, and without web sire search engine optimization you will lose out to your competitors. The real question is if you are going to do your own SEO or if you should hire search engine optimization specialists to handle the job.

First, let’s look at the benefits of doing your own SEO. Of course, you can save money. Also, nobody knows your business better than you do, so you may be able to bring a special level of personalization to your website.

On the other hand there are some good reasons to bring in search engine optimization specialists. First of all, these professionals already know many of the tricks of the seo trade. While you will need to take time to research and experiment with building your page rank, these people already know what does and doesn’t work. So, it can be more efficient to hire them than to do it yourself.

Also, having an outsider working on your site can help you get perspective on your message. The owner of a SEO web design company in Los Angeles told him about a client that had been doing their own SEO with poor results. One look at the website explained why. They used industry jargon and terms that would never be used by a potential customer. His site might rank highly with his keywords, but those keywords were unlikely to ever be typed into a search engine. Letting a team of search engine optimization specialists allows you to get real feedback about your site with a critical eye. Something you probably can’t give yourself.

Finally, hiring an outside team to work on the search engine optimization of your website will allow you to focus on growing your business. You have more important things to do with your time than checking page rank and Google statistics. Not to mention that you may not be able to properly interpret the findings unless you have some experience with them.

It comes down to a choice between saving money and getting the most effective search engine optimization. Only you can decide.

Posted by BlueSEO on January 29th, 2010

Making your website friendlier to search engines via effective search engine optimization (or SEO) is a great way to improve the number of potential customers who will discover your business through the internet. However, before you make the first change on your webpage you need to have a clear marketing plan.

Search engine optimization and web marketing share a lot of the same traits as traditional marketing. If you don’t have a written marketing plan this is the time to make one. Start off by identifying your target market. No matter how great your product is it doesn’t appeal to everyone. You need to focus on the market that is the best fit for you. A company making toys for babies will target their parents, since the children are too young to speak. However, toys for older children will market the produce at the kids themselves, knowing they will then drive Mom and Dad crazy until they get it.

What is your target market? Does it appeal to people based on age? Gender? Race? Region? Maybe your market is businesspeople as opposed to consumers or at small business owners instead of people who work in a large company.

Always focusing on your target market is the most important search engine optimization web marketing tip. This is the foundation that your SEO work will be building on. Choose keywords based on your target market. Young people may use slang terms more than older people. Business users will use different words than teenagers. A clothing company trying to aim at a target market of hipster teens might use the keywords “cool retro t-shirts” while a site looking at budget minded adults might use “affordable clothing”.

Appealing to your target market continues in the way you right your website. A product aimed at consumers will be written in a friendly and conversational way, as opposed to a more formal business tone that you’d use if you were selling the product to executives. The tone of the writing on your site is as important as the actual words you use. Even if you have a high ranking page, if it doesn’t capture the attention of those reading it then it doesn’t matter.

Finally, try and merge your internet marketing with your other marketing. Using similar key phrases, logos, and slogans help you build a unique brand. Look at the big companies like Apple, Coke, and Disney. The second you see one of their product you immediately know it belongs to them, even before you see the name. With the right mix of tradition, search engine optimization and web marketing you can make your company just as identifiable.

Posted by BlueSEO on January 29th, 2010

When people first start trying to find ways of effective search engine optimization they often are looking at getting the job done without worrying about the ethics. This is a huge and possibly costly error. Good SEO will also be ethical SEO, which means creating real content instead of just playing with words to trick the search engine bots.

Here are some basic tips on ethical search engine optimization.

1) Create your own content. Sure, it’s easier to simply cut and paste random articles from other web sites instead of creating your own content; it is also a copyright violation and can cause your site to be removed for terms of service violations. More importantly, it may end up backfiring in the end. Many search engines base page rank on the originality of the content. If your content is in dozens of other places on the net your rank will suffer. Not to mention the bad karma you’re getting from stealing someone else’s work.

2) Content needs to be helpful. In the early days of SEO people would just stuff meta tags or place keywords over and over again on a page to increase rank. Keyword stuffing is like reading the cliff notes version of a book. You might be able to bluff your way through a dinner party, but you won’t pass the real test. Most search engine algorithms now deduct page rank if they suspect you of keyword stuffing. And as the algorithms become more advance they will be able to detect more examples of this. It’s better to create real keyword rich content now than simply keyword stuff and get knocked down later on.

3) SEO needs to be natural. Some companies still are using tricks like link swapping to try and inflate a page rank by tricking the bots into thinking it is more popular than it really is. The biggest problem with these attempts to game the system is that the system is in constant flux. When a search engine changes their technique the natural SEO pages will increase in rank while these other pages will fall.

In the end these tips on ethical search engine optimization are really tips for effective search engine optimization. Really good SEO will work no matter how the search engine switches their ranking system.

Posted by BlueSEO on January 29th, 2010

There are a lot of people trying to give advice on effective search engine optimization, and it can get overwhelming when you are just starting out. Here are five basic tips to increase your web page rank without having to learn a new language.

1) Make sure your site is searchable. It is amazing how many web pages simply aren’t able to be read by web bots. Your site needs to be designed in a way where information is east to find in text form, and where links are arranged in an understandable hierarchy. Try to avoid too many fancy flash or java applications, because these are not able to be easily scanned. Using alt image texts are also an effective way to increase your search engine optimization.

2) Know your tools. There is a lot of great data available through Google’s web master tools. By adding a small piece of data to your sites html you are able to see what keywords people are using to access your site as well as the number of visitors you have and what sites link to you. Not using this information means just taking a shot in the dark and hoping you hit the target.

3) Choose your keywords carefully. Too many people will start building their site around keywords that won’t actually be used in the real world. Say you work for Allied Widgets in Los Angeles, California. You only sell widgets to people in LA. In that case, make sure that you have the location in one of your keywords. What good is it to be the number one page for “quality widgets” if people looking for “Los Angeles Widgets” can’t find you! It is a good idea to ask your customers what search terms they would use if they were trying to find you through a search engine.

4) Hit the Links. The numbers of similar pages that link back to your page have a big impact on your page ranking. The key is that these sites be similar to yours. Because of problems with people using link spamming to increase page rank, most search engines look at the content of the pages that link to you. Instead, contact web pages that offer complementary services and ask if they would like to link to you in exchange for a link back. However, the best way to get people to link to your page is to produce helpful content that people want to read.

5) Don’t let SEO rule your life. Yes, you want your page to reach that number one rank on Google, but just because you’re at the top it doesn’t mean anything if you aren’t increasing your sales. Some people get so caught up in the SEO game that they forget to make their site customer friendly. Effective search engine optimization isn’t just about increasing page rank, but turning those extra eyeballs into customers.

Posted by BlueSEO on January 29th, 2010

If you are starting a new website or are looking into methods of advertising an existing site, you should definitely consider hiring search engine optimization specialists. In the last few years this industry has really taken off and become the standard for advertising and increasing the traffic to your website. The reason that this method has become so popular is most likely due to the fact that it is by far the most cost effective way of marketing your website. In the past a lot of people have mainly stuck to more traditional forms of marketing their website. However, the industry started to notice that the methods that search engines use to rank websites is really the number one thing that dictates the amount of traffic that your site gets. So in theory, in order to get the content, service, or product that your site offers found by the people that are looking for it; you have to get the content on your website to be ranked well by the methods that search engines use to rank sites.

The fact of the matter is most people these days defer to popular search engines in order to find things that they are looking for. This is mainly just due to the fact that it is often easier to search a search engine rather than several different sites. When people are looking for services or products and they don’t know where to find them, they defer to search engines. This is why it is crucial to get your website to rank well and this is exactly what search engine optimization specialists will do for you.

There are many different methods that these search engine optimization specialists utilize. Perhaps the most important of all of these methods is content writing. In order to get the content on your website recognized by the major search engines and ranked well for certain keywords, there are many things that you must do. An SEO specialist will optimize the content for your website in ways that these search engines will recognize. This will result in your website being ranked very well among the major search engines thus increasing your traffic by driving people that search keywords that relate to the content on your site there are many different ways that search engine optimizations specialists do this. One way is method known as keyword density. This is method of placing particular keywords throughout content. A lot of people think that they do not need to hire a professional for their SEO content. However, the fact of the matter is that it is just important for a SEO writer to be a great content writer as it is for them to be able to optimize your content. If you have poorly written content, a search engine optimization specialist can only do so much. This is why it is important to hire search engine optimization specialists that quality writers as well as being skilled as an SEO content writer.

Posted by BlueSEO on January 29th, 2010

Yahoo Site Explorer APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) provide access to information about user websites from the Yahoo Site Explorer service. The following APIs help users understand their traffic and site usage better by querying for the pages in the Yahoo index.

Site Explorer APIs include:

Inlink Data service – tracks inbound links – allows users to retrieve information about the sites linking to a particular page or pages within a domain.
PageData service – finds subpages – allows users to retrieve information about the subpages, in a domain or beneath a path, that exist within the Yahoo index.

Other Yahoo Search APIs include:

BOSS (Build your Own Search Service)

* Audio Search
* Content Analysis
* Image Search
* Local Search
* MyWeb
* News Search
* Video Search
* Web Search

Posted by BlueSEO on January 29th, 2010

Yahoo Site Explorer allows users to explore all the web pages indexed by Yahoo Search. Users submit their site URL to get particular information related to the structure of that URL in the Yahoo Search database.

Site Explorer can be used to:

* Find which sites and subpages are indexed by Yahoo Search.
* View the most popular pages from any site.
* Find pages that link to that site or any of its pages.
* Submit and track feeds for sites.

By authenticating a website through Yahoo Site Explorer, users get more detailed information and greater ability to manage a site and its URLs. Users can:

* Find out which subdomains of the site are known to Yahoo.
* View other information Yahoo detects about the site, such as language.
* Delete URLs that they don’t want indexed by Yahoo.

Yahoo Site Explorer APIs help users to better understand traffic origins and the way visitors are interacting with their sites.

Posted by BlueSEO on January 29th, 2010

In November of 2007, Microsoft released a new service for webmasters who want to know more about how their websites are doing in the software giant’s search engine Live.com. The new service is called Live Search Webmaster Tools, and is used to troubleshoot the crawling and indexing of websites, submit sitemaps and view statistics about site performance. Both Google and Yahoo have similar tools for webmasters and now Microsoft has followed suit. Just like its competitors, Microsoft’s webmaster tools are specific to the corporation’s own search engine.

Using Live Search Webmaster Tools, webmasters can:

* View the top 5 pages on their website according to Live Search
* Access the top 10 incoming links that are performing the best in Live Search
* Access the top 10 outgoing links that are performing the best in Live Search
* See if any site pages are blocked in the index
* Validate a robots.txt file
* See if any of their site pages are listed under a specified keyword in Live.Com, and when those pages were last crawled by the MSN bot.
* Either notify the Live Search crawler if they change an existing sitemap or add a new one.

MSN has promised webmasters “tons more features” that will allow them to measure their site performance.