Jun 05

Search Engine Optimization for Business Owners – FAQ’s

Arizona, Phoenix, SEO, Scottsdale, Search Engine Optimization No Comments »

I am compiling a list of questions that I get from business owners on a regular basis when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO).  These are questions that I get most frequently when talking with my clients or prospective clients about SEO.

1.)  What is SEO, how does it work.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.  Search Engines use website crawlers to crawl all the website on the internet and index the text that is crawled from each site.  This text (including links, tags, etc…) get run through the search engines ranking algorithm and are assigned a rank based on this information.  The ranking algorithm is made up of several (hundreds) of factors that measure your site and assign a weight to each item.  The combination of doing all these things correctly will help you rank the best.  Some of the most known factors are:

-Title Tag

-Header Tag Usage

-In/Outbound links

-Keyword Density

-Domain Age

2.)  How do you know the algorithm?

Nobody has a guide or manual to any search engines algorithm accept for the team who developed/maintains it.  Search Engines such as Google & Yahoo don’t openly divulge the secrets that make up there algorithms.  Search engine algorithms change on such a frequent basis that it requires a lot of studying and staying up to date to keep up with these changes.  Anyone can learn the basic fundamentals of the algorithms by buying a book or searching the internet.  Experience is usually what separates to go optimizers from the bad.

3.)  Can I rank #1 on Google over night?

Promising #1 rankings is a dead giveaway that the person promising those rankings either doesn’t know what they are talking about or is just trying to get your money.  #1 rankings over night don’t exist using white hat (accepted SEO practices).  If you wanted to rank #1 for the phrase “custom made gold zippers in Phoenix, Arizona” then maby you could rank pretty high fairly quickly since it’s likely not a very competitive search phrase and no one else is optimizing for it.  Bottom line, ranking on the first page on Google really isnt possible using accepted SEO techniques overnight.

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May 02

SEO is like fine wine, it only gets better age!

SEO, Search Engine Optimization No Comments »

I wrote this sentence in my last blog post and thought I would expand on it a little bit.  This is often a term I used to put SEO in perspective for most new clients that I work with.  Some people have been misinformed or lied to when it comes to SEO.

4 Misonceptions about SEO:

-#1 organic or natural search engine rankings can’t be obtained over night.

-You can’t buy your way to the top of natural/ogranic search.  This is free reign and has been dominated by the SEO wizards for years.

-Immediate results.  You won’t see results generally for 2-6 months unless you are in an industry that is very niche and has little competition both on and off the search engines.

-The keywords meta tag isn’t really important, so if you are a business owner doing SEO yourself, don’t waste to much time on it.  Here is a link showing Matt Cutts, in charge web spam for Google saying that google doesn’t use the meta keywords tag at all for ranking purposes.

For a domain that is brand new, you shouldn’t expect any real significant results to determine ROI or other reports until 4-6 months.  Domains that are brand new often get put in a sandbox that google uses in order to put spammy site in their search engine.  After this waiting period, Google then gives them a shot.

For older domains, 1 year or older without a history of penalties or being blacklisted you should expect to see changes in your traffic within a few months.  Generally the older a website is, the more trust Google will have.

When setting up a budget for SEO, you and your company should think about your industry and how competitive it is.  In an industry such as mortgages or foreclosures, you will need to be very patient as there are a lot of websites vying for a piece of the search engines right now and you can expect to pay more due to the amount of work needed to be done by your SEO company in order to get you to the top.  If you are in the business selling a new product or service that doesnt exist than your search engine wait time will probably be much less and the amount of work your SEO company needs to do in order to get you there will also be less.

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Apr 28

SEO Tips for Business Owners

SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Web Design, Website Design, Website Development No Comments »

Are you a business owner that doesnt have a full time web or seo person?  Here are some tips that can help you improve your rankings that you can do on your own.

1.) Get your vendors or customers to put a link on their point to your website.

Getting 1 way in bound links for relevant websites is very important and can make a big difference.  Links should only be from relevant website and the link anchor text should closely match the keywords that you would like to rank well for.  For example, if I wanted a customer to post a link back to my website, it might say “Website Design & SEO” and if you click the link it opens my home (epicwebaz.com).

2.) Update your website on a regular basis with fresh compelling content

Google an all major search engines don’t like old stale websites.  Search engines love fresh content that isn’t found anywhere else on the internet.  Don’t ever duplicate anyones content and always make sure that you are writing your own content.  Copying content from other web pages is considered duplicate content and is an easy way to get penalized or even banned from the search engine.  One way of of adding fresh content is setting up a blog (wordpress, joomla, etc..).

3.)  Social media

Most all social media is free, so you should always take advantage of it.  Facebook, Twitter, Linked-in etc…  can be a valuable tool for most business’s i.  Following basic marketing practices with these is essential.

  • Only post business related information
  • Offer deals or discounts to try and guage ROI from these services
  • Use common sense when utilizing these tools, everyone can see what your posting so keep it clean.

Also, checkout HootSuite.com, this tool will help you manage all your social media and integrate it into one dashboard.

4.)  Use Google Analytics, it’s free and powerful

Google Analytics gives you valuable information about your website such as keyword traffic, referring websites, bounce rate, etc…  This tool is free and fairly easy to setup, contact your webmaster and have them install a small piece of tracking code on each page you want to track and just sit back and wait.  After a few days you can analyze your traffic and make changes to your content to target different visitors.

5.)  Don’t use a lot of flash

Flash looks great, and if used in moderation can make a website really pop but is also a double edged sword.  Search engines at this point in time can’t really index websites that are all flash because they contain no text.  The basis of search engine algorithms is that they crawl every website on the internet, index the text and rank you based on certain factors in relation to that text.  If there is no text to index, then you can’t rank for anything.  If you have a full flash website, just make sure you have an html version made and modify your robots.txt file to exclude the flash version from being crawled.  Having an HTML version is also handy for people with slower connections.

I will be adding more tips as I go, but here are a few free resources that can be used to help your website rank better.  These are intended for anyone with basic computer/internet knowledge.  If you would like a free SEO or website analysis please call me.

Thanks

Nick Julia

Office:  623-252-3584


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