Robert Snell » Internet Marketing

Page load times to impact search rankings

Robert Snell — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 21:53:01 +0000

Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s webspam team, suggested that page speed will soon become a ranking factor in Google search results. Speed has been a consistent factor for comapnies for quite some time now. It is quite evident that Google is giving considerable importance to page speed after all, to improve the user experience by delivering the best possible results. The quicker Google can crawl you, the quicker your results will appear.

Is using the speed factor a good idea?

Webmasters do welcome this idea of speed being used as a ranking feature in Google. But many feel that it might only benefit corporations and negatively impact the small people who might never end up reaching anywhere in the search engines. Moreover it can become a political issue as small nations whose internet infrastructure is poorer than technological developed nations. It also depends upon the affordability of the service and those who can afford a high quality bandwidth and dedicated servers stand more chance of a better page rank.

Many sites today have video blogs, rich content, and that definitely takes time to load. Once the search engines decide on the speed factor, these sites will be affected. All said and done this speed factor is sure to be a significant factor in the search results shortly and we can only follow the best tips offered by none other than Google itself for better site performance using its webmaster tools. This tool demonstrates a cumulative speed numbers, based on the frequently visited pages with the activated page rank feature. .

It’s highly recommended that you monitor the load times over a select period. If you see high load times then examine the factors that could be impacting your site. Poor design, too much rich content, bad website hosting provider? All issues that should be addressed.

One more page is included which is Page speed suggestions where Google lets you know the areas where your page has to be optimized for better speed performance. Google’s Page Speed Firefox/Firebug plug-in is used to find these suggestions.

Working with highly competitive keywords.

Robert Snell — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 17:45:02 +0000

Whenever you target certain keywords, putting in relevant data on your web pages with decent keyword density is the very first step. But, that’s far from the end of the story as you have a long way to go.

When you target keywords with low competition you may be able to make it to the top of Google search results pretty quickly. For instance, if you run an online cell phone store, getting high rankings for keyword phrases like “buy 32GB iPhone 3G in Chicago” may be considerably easier in comparison to keyword phrases like “buy 32GB iPhone 3G”.

But, that’s all fine – few more powerful in-bound links and lot of keyword rich data about the product should do the trick – what if you’ve got to compete for keywords like “buy iPhone 3G”.

Making it Happen

Do you think you’ll ever be able to make it to the top 5 results of Google even with 10,000 high quality in-bound links? Well, you know it for sure that the answer is a big NO!

So, how do you get higher search rankings for extremely popular keywords that have terrible competition?

Back to the Basics

Well, it all comes back to the basics. Why did you think you could make it to the top of Google when you had to compete for keyword phrase “buy 32GB iPhone 3G” instead of “buy 32GB iPhone 3G in Chicago”?

If your answer was the fact that there are 1,000 competitors for the second keyword phrase and 10,000 for the first but 10million competitors for “buy iPhone 3G” then you’re completely wrong on this one.

Make your way to the Top of Google progressively – Don’t try to Jump!

If you try to compete for the keyword “buy 32GB iPhone 3G” instead of “buy 32GB iPhone 3G in Chicago” right away, there’s very little chance that you’re going to taste any success.

Remember, before you can compete for keywords with higher competition it is essential that you compete for keywords with low competition and make it to the top of Google search results for several such keywords. This will essentially help the Google spiders and bots to identify that your site is closely related to iPhone and once that happens, it will be a lot easier for you to get higher search rankings for keyword phrases containing “iPhone”, “buy iPhone” or “buy 32GB iPhone”.

Now, it is time to again go back to the basics and try to make it to the top of Google search results for keywords like “buy iPhone 3G”, “buy 32GB iPhone 3G”, “buy 16GB iPhone 3G”, and all possible keyword phrases you may think of.

Having done that, you’re ready to enter into the bigger competition and target the extremely competitive keywords like “buy iPhone 3G”. But, this time around you can easily make it to the top 5 search results with the help of a good link-building campaign and publishing fresh content on your web pages, maintaining high keyword density.

So, it all about doing your basics right – don’t try to jump straight away. Everybody has progressed steadily and you’ll have to follow their footsteps because there are no short cuts that pay off!

Are You Making Full Use of SEO?

Robert Snell — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 13:37:17 +0000

If you start a new online business, be it an online store, an interactive website or just a simple personal blog, you’re never going to make it big in the world of internet without making use of some serious SEO.

So long as you keep trying things randomly, you’re not going to get any results for your hard work. However, with a proper strategy and decent investment on building, optimizing and marketing your online venture, you can expect very high returns. You can realize the true power of SEO only once you successfully market your website, optimize it in all the aspects and generate some stable income through it.

Remember, you need not sell anything to make good money through your website. By putting on informative original information on even your personal blog, you can drive a lot of traffic. Over time, you can start building in-bound links from various popular sites and do some link building to increase the popularity, search ranking and page rank of your website/blog.

Once your site becomes highly popular, you can generate even higher revenues by selling the precious one-way reciprocal links to your web pages with high page rank and traffic.

How to Get Started?

All this sounds simply fascinating, but you need to put in a whole lot of efforts before you reach that point wherein you can generate stable income with your website. To start off, you should try to optimize the on-page elements of your website, including the title, meta,

,

, alt, image title and most importantly the anchor tags and the body content.

By maintaining good keyword density in web page content and inter-linking your pages using anchor texts as the targeted keywords of your concern, you can significantly improve the search rankings of your website.

Link Building: Stay Away from Black-hat SEO tactics

Next, you should try to generate some high quality in-bound links and improving the page rank of your website.

Remember, you must never adopt blackhat SEO tactics, no matter how effective and tempting they may promise to be. Sure thing, you can even boost up the page rank of your site to 3 or 4 right away, but things aren’t going to be too pretty after a while.

Avoid building links from link-farms! It is fine if somebody links to your website from a link-farm but if you also link to a link-farm the search rankings of your website may be hampered to a good extent.

More so, if Google or any major search engine makes out that majority of your links are coming from link farms and irrelevant sites, and the content of your web pages isn’t worthy enough to drive enough traffic, they may even DROP OFF your site from their search results. That’s right, all your hard work may go in vain, with just a small mistake. This is precisely why most experts advise to stay away from Black-hat SEO tactics and stay clear of any kind of problems.

Importance of SEO Friendly Web Design

Robert Snell — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 20:43:28 +0000

Have you ever wondered what results in high conversions? Is it a successful marketing campaign, lot of search engine traffic, clicks on ads, or hundreds and thousands of back-links?

Well, in reality all the above-mentioned things can only drive a lot of traffic to your blog/websites, but it will never improve the conversion rate. The most important aspect behind higher conversions is an SEO-friendly web design. We’re not talking about the on-page SEO and working on Meta tags (you must have done it already, if you’re getting high traffic), but rather about the importance of using the right fonts, ad placement, and user-friendliness of the website.

Working with User Friendly Design

Imagine if your “register” option for the new users is located at bottom right corner of the page, who’d really bother to scroll down all the way and click on it? Likewise, if the visitors see only ads instead of the info they came searching for, they won’t bother scrolling down or browsing through your web pages.

Apart from good informative unique content, you need –

Appropriate graphics to go along with the text,
Nice SEO-friendly layout,
Thorough linking between pages,
Proper Website Structure
Media like photos and embedded videos to add attraction to the site

Optimizing Your Site Better

A well optimized SEO-friendly website design includes appropriate and attractive design elements, strategic linking, structure optimization, meta-tag optimization, specialized keyword choices, and most importantly alt tag optimization!

Remember, the alt tag shows up in the image results and this is where most of the people lose out on. Imagine if you run an auto blog and you’ve written the latest post on the 2010 BMW 520d, and someone searches for images of BMW 520d, your blog may not appear in the search results just because the alt tag was not optimized.

And, if something similar happens with 100s of other posts, just try to figure out how many visitors are you losing out on?

Optimizing for Common Typos

What’s more, it is also not a bad idea to optimize your site for some of the most common misspelled keywords, for instance, acomodate and acommodate along with the actual keyword accommodate. But, you must optimize your site carefully otherwise this may turn off the regular visitors (as they may feel that these are unintended typos from careless authors).

Homepage is not the Best Landing Page!

Lastly, you must ensure that you’ve a good landing page for your visitors. One of the biggest misconceptions is that homepage is the best landing page! This is 100% WRONG by all means! Remember, people click on your site/blog searching for something on Google and again asking them to search once again on your site to display the info of their interest doesn’t yield good results!

SEO Anxiety? Aren’t Results Instant?

Robert Snell — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 07:39:35 +0000

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a vital part of your Web marketing best practices. We’ve done enough audits for clients on SEO campaigns and their SEO strategies, and the companies that implement SEO projects to notice an interesting factor. We call this SEO Anxiety. It happens just about a day or two after an SEO campaign or project concludes and often several weeks later. SEO Anxiety is usually found at senior management levels by CFO’s, CEO’s and SVP’s who know an SEO project, perhaps very expensive, is underway. So what is SEO Anxiety?

Simply put, it’s the expectation of almost instantaneous results and massive domination of the top listings under a particular targeted keyword or search term. A good SEO campaign will deliver relatively quick results, but not instantly and sometimes not for a few weeks. With the speed of the Web and how fast information can fly across the Web, especially with a negative story, those who don’t live and breathe SEO have a perception of such programs showing immediate results and effect. When an organic and technical SEO program is combined with a Pay-Per-Click, and Social Media campaign, SEO results can occur much faster. If your SEO work is just organic and technical in nature, then results can take upwards of 2-3 weeks or longer.

Much also depends on the nature of your business. Sometimes, your efforts are better spent targeting your niche in social media areas such as blogs and forums, where they can be more effectively reached. Either way, top rankings may not occur for a few days, since it may take time to displace competitors and other sites who have been enjoying good placement. If your space is highly competitive, it is also likely your competitor is hard at work with their SEO efforts trying to knock you down. There are enough good SEO firms and practitioners that your competitors may also hire. Your competitor may also be outspending you on Pay-Per-Click campaigns (you can find this out in the keyword and term auctions.)

So your senior management may find you ranking high one week, yet falling the next. This is when SEO Anxiety kicks in and this often when we get a call to conduct an audit or evaluate a PPC project as an independent firm. Our initial strategy is to speak directly with the C-Level executive that is looking to retain us, and the manager responsible for the SEO project to determine when it was implemented. Sadly we more often than not talk ourselves out of a project. We recommend setting expectations clearly and in simple terms with senior managers on what the anticipated results are and project objectives and timelines for results.

This will enable smoother projects and mitigate the risk of SEO Anxiety and enable a closer working relationship between senior marketing, finance and operational executives.

As a final note, in any SEO project it is not a one off effort. Competitors, search engine changes, content etc … Can all affect the way you appear on a search engine. SEO is an ongoing process in most cases, especially if your operating in a competitive market.