Archive for the ‘ Search Engine Marketing ’ Category

5 Tips: SEO Friendly Titles

Wednesday, November 4th, 2009

How often do we come across websites that have the same title and descriptions on each and every page? The answer is….hardly. Although this mistake is seen all of the time by those of us who work on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for a living, those who are searching using search engines will unlikely find your site unless you are spending tons of money on your adword campaign. If you have 5 pages in your website, and each has the same title and description, you are loosing out in 80% of market visibility. Not only is variety important to attract as many potential customers as possible, adding variety to your web page is very easy and it can make your website rise in ranks. The following are 5 tips to help you add variety to your website through effective title and description implementation.

1. First things first, Google and other search engines hate repeat information. Repeat information tells search engines that your site may be a spam site since your descriptions may not coincide with the information provided in each page. You will effectively drop in ranks quickly if you do not solve this issue immediately. Remember that dropping in ranks is a lot easier than rising in them. This not only applies to your head tags such as your title and descriptions, but also affects your content as well. Look through your site and find which pages look like mirrors of each other, which pages can be deleted, and which can have more variety added to make them unique.

2. If you are working with a template, be effective in how you add your head tags. Be sure your title and descriptions are enclosed inside of an editable region, otherwise, your title and description will not only repeat throughout your site, but you will have a tough time editing them in the future without making a change in your template code, then still having to go back through each page and making the required changes.

3. Your choice of Titles and descriptions should be complimented with keyword research which you can easily do using Google’s free keyword tool. Make sure you incorporate your keywords inside of your title and description and yes….your content too. Be sure to practice good judgment when selecting keywords to make sure you don’t pick overly-competitive keywords. Although they may work well with your adword campaign, very competitive keywords should be avoided for organic results. Otherwise, ranking on the first few pages of a search engine result will be close to impossible.

4. Target a different search terms for each page. People don’t always land on your home page. This means you should consider each page in your website as a landing page and provide content accordingly. You want to give them a short overall idea of what your company is about, providing a link to your home page in case they want to read more about it, but focus the bulk of your content to the search at hand. You want to your visitor’s search relevant. If they are searching for “liposuction medical procedures,” they want to read about “liposuction medical procedures.” Adding content that they can find in other places of your site may confuse them and they may loose interest.

5. Don’t repeat your company name on your titles unless your company name utilizes searchable key terms. Your titles are amongst the most important tool used by search engines to find your site, so do not fill them with needless information. Rather choose brief statements that have your keywords incorporated, and that have an enticing marketing message that will make a reader want to click on your site. Unless you are a big, and highly recognized company, chances are that most searchers will not be searching for your company name.

We hope you find these 5 tips useful in your pursuit of an optimized website. Read through the rest of the blogs for more useful tips and remember to subscribe to our feed. If you found this useful and would like to see more useful tips and tricks, please leave us a comment or visit our San Diego SEO homepage.

Improving Your Website With a Blog

Friday, September 18th, 2009

Creating a blog can be one of the best ways to distribute information in today’s society. It is fast, easy, and can reach millions. The decision to begin blogging can be easily made, but a good plan must be implemented if you want your blog to benefit your website. A San Diego Search engine marketing professional can help you create a good plan.

A well written blog that captivates the audience is great but will not benefit you if it cannot be found. In order to resolve this issue, it is recommended that a business owner who owns or plans on owning a blog, make a serious effort to optimize their website to take advantage of the great opportunities a blog has to offer. In order to better understand how you can benefit from a good blog strategy, let us look at the benefits of having an optimized blog.

1. Constant Content building

Blogs will allow you to create a lot of great keyword rich content that will be read by search engines. Search engines love content and favor websites that stay fresh and up to date. Make sure your pay per click Adwords strategy stays up to date and current in order to gain maximum exposure.

2. Promotion

Blogs can be utilized as one of your top forms of marketing. A well targeted blog can reach your audience by providing useful information. It also provides flexibility in your marketing efforts, allowing you to target specific groups without having to make significant changes to your website and with little to no out of pocket cost.

3. Link Building

Search engines love links and place a great amount of emphasis on them in order to know what a website is all about. A blog, will allow you to target specific pages of your website by creating keyword rich links. By examining your website analytics, you can find out which pages of  your site may need a boost and you can begin targeting these pages for your blog linking effort.

4. Reputation Building

Lastly, a blog will allow you to gain the advantage over larger competitors who may have not yet caught on to the benefits of blogging. In this online world you can extend your company brand to reach new heights, by posting relevant and valuable information, you can begin to earn a following as a leader in the industry, innovator, critic, or promoter. Blogging alone can open up many opportunities and can make  a person’s career (i.e. B-list celebrity, Perez Hilton).

Although a great blog can benefit your website, it is best to consult a San Diego Social Media Marketing or San Diego Internet Marketing professional to make sure your marketing plan is sustainable and that you are getting the most out of your efforts with an optimized blog. A professional will advise you on specific factors that search engines favor. If you are thinking about the benefits a blog can have on your site, call Saba SEO today toll free at 1-866-937-1717 for your free website analysis.

Creating a Good Blog Post

Tuesday, August 4th, 2009

Although it is common to come across a blog posting that may resemble in the spirit of a good Term Paper, it is best to avoid lengthy blog posts that may not keep the reader’s attention. The following is a short blog with some common best practices for creating successful blog postings of your own, without giving the reader incentive to leave.

Leave the big words out. Unless your blog is directly focused towards service providers such as doctors and lawyers who have languages of their own, avoid long and difficult words. People who are online will have a short attention span and if your site is too difficult to read, your blog will never be read. If you are online, you must expect that anyone will be able to access your blog and a large portion of the time, it will by found by an average Joe. Search engines will also suggest using elementary level language to increase searchability as it will help you get a larger part of the online traffic.

Leave the lengthiness behind. A blog post, no matter how interesting or informative will cause the eyes to tire if the post is too long. Give your audience a break by tackling the subject early in the post and provide reinforcing details to finish it off. If your have a lot of information, try to give your reader’s eyes a break by providing relevant images in between paragraphs to allow the eye time to rest before proceeding.

give your visitors an eye break

give your visitors an eye break

Giving your visitors an occasional break will help your readers find the energy to finish lengthy blog posts. Making the images relative to the subject matter and adding alt tags to the image help keep your blog postings search engine friendly.

Consider typographical hierarchy. Just like reading in a magazine, our eyes are attracted to certain parts of the page in the designer’s predetermined order, all in an effort to make the page easy to read with a good flow. The designer controls this with fonts, size, weights, color, etc. the only difference is that blogs use a vertical reading order rather than a horizontal one. In a blog’s vertical scroll arrangement, our flow is already predetermined, we are only assigned the task of making the words easy to read. This includes the use of a serif font for lengthy posts as they help lead the eye from word to word. If you are using a san serif consider a font designed specifically for online view such as Verdana. Avoid using more than 3 different fonts per post to promote a unified style. Use bold words sparingly. This is often a challenge as <strong> tags help search engines find keywords. We suggest only bolding 3 keywords per post, or leaving the keywords for titles or paragraph headings that would be bolded anyways.

Don’t be afraid. Posting blogs may be intimidating. This is specially true for controversial subjects, but your reader’s reaction may surprise you. Negative reaction is not always a bad thing, and may bring more attention to your site than positive feedback. If you fail, just post another blog tomorrow, no harm done. Putting the fear aside will keep your blog posts personable and will appear more as dialog to your readers. The only rule to always consider is that you represent the company, so keep it professional.

Be Transparent. If you post with a hidden agenda, or if you wait until the very last paragraph of a lengthy post get to your point, the reader will catch on an have a mistrust about you and your company. Be clear about your goals, your success and failures; and be concise. If your company is facing an embarrassing moment and a potentially bad PR crisis, it is best for the company to begin the dialog about it first because chances are that someone else will begin talking about it if you don’t. Beat critics to the punch by acknowledging your mistakes and how you plan to grow from it.

Creating a good post should not be hard. If it is, it’s probably because you are trying too hard. When you finish you may have a very well written term paper, but a bad blog. Our best advice is to put the fear aside,  don’t think about it too much, and avoid sounding like a machine. If possible, talk from the heart. This will encourage comments and interaction from your readers.

If you have found this helpful, please leave a comment. If you need further assistance putting together an online marketing strategy, call Saba SEO, a San Diego SEO Company today toll free at 866-937-1717.

Do Shortened URLs Hurt SEO?

Monday, July 20th, 2009
 

In order to subscribe to a URL shortening service and find it successful for your online marketing campaign, you must understand the benefits and consequences of using such services in a case by case basis ( tweet by tweet basis for twitter fans ). In this blog we will be covering when to use the services, when to avoid them and when to compromise between the two. We will discuss this while keeping in mind the importance of search engine optimization and how you can improve your marketing efforts.

Any good SEO expert will tell you the same thing. Stick to the fundamentals and you will see results. One of the fundamental rules when creating links to your site is the use of user friendly keywords in your link text. This is easy when posting links in HTML because you can choose to link any text of your choice to any webpage you want. You can easily select a word and link it to a page. Unfortunately though we are often faced with posting direct links without the help of HTML. In this case we are faced with the decision of whether or not to use a URL shortening service.

The use of URL shortening services is on the rise and can be easily seen when visiting twitter.com. They are the links that usually look something like this: http://tinyurl.com/lyaz6y, http://budurl.com/7ma6, or http://bit.ly/nd8bk. The use of these services are a growing phenomenon with sites such as Tinyurl.com and budurl.com. Sites like these have helped and hindered companies who are working hard to promote their companies online. They allow one to post short links, avoiding the use of long dynamic URL names. The use of such shortened URL’s will thus help problems often associated with long dynamic URL’s such as the lack of readability, difficulty with page layout, and maximum keystrokes allowed ( such as with twitter’s 140 character limit ). In these cases the use of these services can help, but will come at a price to your seo efforts.

1. Before posting, ask yourself the question: Is this page I am linking to a dynamic URL or a static URL? If your answer is dynamic, you are probably out of luck because your URL will most likely not be keyword rich, and your URL is not helping your SEO efforts. On the bright side, you will likely be able to use the URL shortening service to concentrate on the extra space the service allows. You can now focus on your pitch to entice your readers to visit this link. Your pitch must in this case be targeted towards your specific keyword to make it relevant to the shortened URL you have posted. Because the link is not specific on what page they are about to see, you are going to have to be smarter in your choice of words and accept that some of your readers may be hesitant on clicking on your link.

2. If your link’s URL is static, ask yourself this question: Are my site’s filenames optimized? If they are your URL will probably look something like this.

http://www.sabaseo.com/seo-services.html.

This link is obviously targeted to the keyword seo services. By posting this link the way it is, you have just created a relevant link that will target your keyword, while avoiding having to re-direct your site through a 2nd party. This link will have a lot higher ranking and will be trusted by your readers. They will know what to expect when clicking to follow your link. In this case, they know that SABASEO is the company, and the information they will access will speak about seo services.

By targeting specific keywords and keeping your site structure simple without many subfolders, you will be able to have optimized URL addresses that will be short, simple, and will not need any type of URL shortening services. These links will be stronger and will rank higher because they will not have to be redirected.

Avoid dynamic URL structures whenever possible and use relevant keywords in your pitch. The best links or tweets will be the ones that are highly targeted and have both the pitch and URL optimized. To optimize your site structure and make sure that it will help you in your marketing efforts, contact us. We can help you put together a keyword strategy for your site, and can optimize every aspect of your site to ensure compatibility, SEO friendliness, and future online growth.

Search Engines and the Purchase Process

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

Did you know that all together 85% of buyers use the Internet in one way or another during the purchase process?

nielsen survey

Nielsen Survey

The Internet is quickly replacing print media, the Yellow Pages, and traditional advertising. The consumer is shying away from passive media ads in favor of targeted searches on search engines such as Google, Yahoo,  and Bing to find the products and services they need. Luckily, expert SEO consultants know how to make targeted searches work.

One of the reasons that buyers like the internet so much is because they feel they are in control. The average consumer appreciates being able to compare prices and customize their order without having to step out to many different stores in what would otherwise be a lengthy, time consuming process. These customers will likely search for a key phrase, look at the first few pages, then if they haven’t found what they look for, they will conduct a new search with related terms until they find what they are looking for. Sound familiar? It is the same trend throughout every search engine, and the companies that rank higher in each of these terms will be the benefactor. This is an obvious truth. What most don’t know is that there is a way to increase your ranking and have your company represented on these top pages without having to submit your site to directories or start an expensive pay per click Adwords campaign.  SEO It is an effective way to organically increase your ranking without having to do any external optimization. Most leads are made through organic optimization. Only after this has been applied and examined, can one take the next step of external optimization and pay per click campaigns. These also will need a targeted strategy to avoid a loss of time and money. Contact a qualified SEO consultant to help you get started.

 

 

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