Is your company operating a large number of remote stores, branches or franchises?
It doesn’t matter whether these sub units are steel service centers, insurance agencies
or any other type of sub-businesses; you can experience a large improvement in your
online  performance by generating more organic traffic via the search engines.

Hence, if you have several related websites, scalability of such sites with better search options will provide you
with increased success.

Search engine optimization techniques make it easy to generate natural traffic when one website is involved.
But what about doing so with over a dozen local websites at the same time?

Bear in mind that larger number of businesses in this situation put in place a kind of thin centralized marketing
department structure. While most have already taken these steps, others are not far behind in simplifying the
management of several domains from one centralized department or location.

This strategy incorporates brand establishment and content revisions.

It won’t be long before the dogged effort to achieve brand-protection activities takes you down a road that
involves the following:

• Single Content Management System (CMS)
• Structuring a single website design template, as well as navigational structure
• Saturating each remote website with just one set of fill-in-the-blank content.
  Typically, the blanks would feature local business name,
  including geographical modifiers relevant to areas which the remote location has served.
• Using a single account (put up for the purpose of enabling cross-domain tracking) to access the web analytic data.

It is good to know that substantial part of the online chaos is now structured into a set of brand supporting websites.
The brand supporting websites would ultimately deliver a specific corporate message. However, organic traffic
generation for the sites would be low – this is bad news.

When content and navigational structure is controlled tightly, SEO results are impacted negatively. We’ve seen
through  Google Panda Update that meagre and duplicate content will not meet the requirements. Again, it
would be almost  impossible to pass link power between and within the websites. So, your content must be
relevant to the audience in a  particular geography before Google and other search engines can deem the
content of your website relevant in that geographical location.

What initial SEO efforts are necessary?

Your focus at the beginning should be on the onsite factors such as choosing keywords, creating XML site
maps and robots. txt files, setting up viable webmaster tools, structuring and incorporating your SEO on-site
plans such as content  modifications, meta tags and internal link structure, and fixing issues related to
canonical codes.

The first strategy is to split your websites into groups that are manageable. A fewer number of sites should
make up the first  group, while the last group should contain most of the sites. The creation of the groups
should hinge on the following:  business rotation, available labour and the performance of the websites.

Subsequently, after a few months into the project, you can start testing the original notion regarding the
most traffic  generating keyword, which is also capable of converting at the highest rate. You can accomplish
this using an outcome  from the first SEO efforts especially from the first group.

There are other things involved as well, but the content here is a great way to kick off.

One might not achieve the desired higher ranking on Google search pages
without having planned and optimized the ‘content’ of their webpages very
meticulously. Basically, you need to work on the titles of your webpages,
the contents they carry, as well as the backlinks from other websites.

Often, webmasters tend to overlook the internal link structure
of a website; the internal link structure plays a vital role in any
website’s overall ranking.

Why You Should Pay Attention to Your Website’s Internal Link Structure
Links from external websites count more than the internal links. However, internal links are important aspects of generating signals in search engine algorithms. In the eyes of search engines, links are as good as votes. When you focus on optimizing your site’s link structure, you can create a clear path for the search engines to access the important pages of your site and also reveal the keywords you desire to rank high on.

What You Should Do

• Your optimization should start from the main navigation of your website
  The navigational links that are visible on every page of your website are the major navigations on your site. The most important aspect of your website navigation is the main navigation. 
  
  Typically, it includes a “Home” link – e.g. linked business logo image. It also includes links pointing to the major sections of your site.

  Don’t meddle with JavaScript and Flash Menus. A good number of search engines would often bypass such web pages in the course of indexing. A better way to design your website navigation is to use CSS as well as standard HTML.

  Don’t fail to incorporate your top prioritized keywords onto links in your main navigation.

• Ensure that the initial link on the page is the correct link
  It appears that the first link on a webpage is the only one that Google considers. Look at it this way; if Webpage A links to Webpage B with “more info” as the anchor text on top of the page, and uses another anchor text ‘buy golf items’ at the bottom of the page, Google is most likely to use only the first anchor text on top of the page. 

  Therefore, if you link to another page more than once, ensure that the first link on top of the page features your most important keyword – the one you desire to achieve a high rank on.

• Breadcrumb navigation may be excellent for sub-webpages
  Breadcrumb navigation can be highly beneficial to sub-pages. Usually, sub web pages are not often linked from the main navigation of the website. 

  Search engines find it easy to place your sub webpages into the appropriate context when you incorporate breadcrumb navigation links.

You can show visitors and search engines the exact location of a webpage by using breadcrumb navigation links.  Don’t forget to incorporate descriptive as well as keyword-rich phrases in your site’s breadcrumb navigation – for example: Golf bag > Golf shoes > Buy golf items.

Pay attention to the information I am providing here; this is based on my several years of experience in providing search engine ranking services. There are lots of disinformation out there regarding SEO.

I have offered SEO and ranking services and advice to both big and small businesses. During these years, I’ve come to discover something essential; the sites that rank high usually share some common traits.

The anchor texts of the inbound links to your site
Using the anchor text from sites that link to your site, Google as well as other search engines are able to ascertain the theme of your site and determine what is best for your website in terms of ranking. Therefore, check that other sites are linking to you with both the keywords in your anchor text and URL – email them to this effect and ask them to update your link. Place your high priority keywords in the link.

Keywords featured in your title and meta tags
Meta tags have not stopped being part of the influencing factors to your rankings. Although they are no longer very weighty, meta tags work very well when it comes to placing your page in the right category. Meta tags also help to identify what search engines are likely to look out for in the course of spidering the pages. Ensure that your keywords are featured on your tags, and that the tags are well constructed.

What about the diversity of domains linking to your site?
A lot of search engines are not just concerned about how many sites link to your site, but on their diversities as well. This is the way to judge how popular your site is; this technique is quite helpful when it comes to enhancing your ranking.

Link popularity
Link popularity can be likened to Page Rank; the topic had been a subject of discussion in search engine forums for a while. There are several factors at work to assess the quality of webpages from external sources. The more popular and recognized the pages are, the more value their links add to your website.

Also, the root domain is one of the ranking factors. No doubts, you can employ dedicated pages or sub-domain to generate keywords in your URL; however, the best bait is still to have them in your root domain.

Finally, you have to continually be on the lookout for better ways of carrying out SEO campaigns to get the best result.

The SEO tips and techniques featured in this article were culled from the live chat that Google’s Matt Cutts granted on YouTube.

Tip One: All hope for regaining ranking is not lost for penalized websites
A big company’s website was penalized due to excess paid links featured on their site. The company which is JC Penney did a lot of work to fix the issues and filed a formal request for another chance afterwards. Well, it may interest you that filing a formal reconsideration request was possible for the company in question because of its size. Well, a small company may go down the drain when such issue arises. Therefore, it is better to play safe by using only endorsed or safe link generation techniques.

Tip Two: Google’s Panda is being considered by Google for more language options
The target of Google’s Panda update is content farms (also known as article directories) as well as poor quality sites. Well, it is not as though these types of website are as common in multiple languages. However, Google is set to bring out the Panda update to multiple languages when the testing period is over.

Tip Three: A Ranking Signal to Look out for is Data from Blocked Sites
It is possible for people searching through Google to block sites in search result. When sufficient number of users block a particular website, this is a signal that the blocked site is of poor quality.

Tip Four: When pointing links to your own website, do not use the nofollow attribute
This rule which was rolled out by Google’s Matt Cutt also applies to links to privacy policy on your website. The nofollow attribute should be employed for external links that are not completely reliable. The reputation of a site could be dented by the site you link to.

Tip Five: Another ranking signal is going to be Google’s + 1
Presently, Google’s + 1 is the answer provided by Google to Facebook’s ‘Like’ button.  In no distant time, Google is likely to offer this feature to those who own websites. The feature would also become a ranking signal.

Tip Six: Your site’s IP address can be a determining factor for its ranking
If you desire to rank high on Google, your chances would be high if the site features a French IP address.

Tip Seven: Prevent duplicate content by employing the canonical tag and 301 redirects
These tools would help you keep off from duplicate content issues, especially when you have the same content in several URLs on your site.

Finally, you can use Top10 Optimizer to get direction on how to acquire SEO skills to optimize your webpages for Google ranking.

We are oblivious of the fact that Yahoo search marketing is fast following after Google’s AdWords. So, it is worth trying – the bid fees are lesser, competition is minimal and conversation rate is high. Gradually, marketers online and advertisers who want to experiment with new markets and make their products known are now migrating to Yahoo PPC which is cost-effective.

What to Gain From Your Previous CTR (Click Through Rate) Data:
Using your previous click through trends, the quality of your ad can be determined; there are other determining gauges of Yahoo that you can employ when monitoring your ad.

In essence, there are times that you need to exercise patience in the course of building your campaign, so that you can generate desirable return on investment with Yahoo! PPC. You can realize more results than what you’ve had in the past when using Yahoo PPC. Well, ensure that you put other factors involved into consideration and not just focusing on this alone.

When you’ve made up your mind to embark on a PPC campaign on Yahoo, having an upfront investment ready is very essential; this is the best way to attain success with your campaigns. Upon opening your account, it is very important that the initial deposit you made would not result in hardship; moreover, get ready to shoulder the responsibility of extra cost that may accompany your campaign. You are expected to deposit nothing less than $30. Be optimistic that your campaign would yield good returns; thus, it is important that you optimize the campaign and monitor CPC expenses.

Keep Track  of Ads
Bear in mind that the sole technique to generate favorable result with Yahoo! PPC campaigns is to ensure that you are keeping track of your entire statistics. Of course, there are certain tools provided by Yahoo to help you monitor results and generate reports, as well as track your statistics. The whole concept is that you intend getting rid of keywords that are not generating desirable result in relation to advanced matches and are not either bringing positive outcomes generally, which is only achievable when detailed information is available -  something that Yahoo! did not make available. In order to get rid of your advanced match keywords, it would be necessary to cull the keywords alongside list of terms that would be taken off, and you solely require comprehensive tracking for the compilation of this list.

If your intention is to target a flourishing Yahoo PPC campaign, focus on the seemingly insignificant areas that require improvement; also remember to upgrade the quality of your ads. Now, always remember that the essential output of PPC advertising is the outcome that follows. So, once you make it to a commendable ROI from extraordinary results, then you are ready to jolly and keep smiling.

Now owned by Yahoo, Overture created pay for performance (P4P) basically. They foresaw increase in online shopping, that online buying activities would skyrocket dramatically and that advertising had the potential of getting massive as a result.

Without visibility, web visitors may not get to your site to buy and may not also be part of your list. One of the great ways to increase sales as well as traffic is to place ads that are capable of directing people to your website. The service mentioned earlier, which is now in Yahoo’s ownership enables companies or sites’ ads to be visible based on the keywords that a visitor is using to search.

Your List Building Activities Get Better with More Visitors
A company that desires to generate more traffic to its site can take advantage of this service. More traffic promises more viewing of your site and increased possibility of actual purchase after the visitors must have benefited from the information featured on your site. It would eventually also result in more potential buyers joining your list. It is relatively quicker as well as easier to build your list when you have more traffic. There’s hope that a good number of those in your list may eventually become loyal customers as you follow them up tactfully.

Every business needs high volume traffic to survive, especially traffic that has high potential of translating to actual patronage of your business’s offerings. So, services such as Yahoo Overture – P4P (Pay for Performance) is a great way to make your site visible to targeted traffic.

How Does this Service Work?
If you are conversant with Google Adwords, you would easily understand how Yahoo Overture works. It is simply the use of search-based keywords to put up an ad on relevant websites. The choice of keywords by the surfer would determine the results that would be displayed. You will get to see ads on the result page’s right side when you carry out a search. The paid ads are featured at the top of the ads. The position is exactly what the company or site paid for the listing of their choice keyphrase or keyword.

For instance, if your business offers Dell Computers for sale and computer accessories, you would need to select relevant keywords that would cause your ad to come up when a web visitor searches with related keywords such as “Dell Computers” or “computer accessories.

When leveraging this service, you may not bother much about site content optimization for visibility on search engine results. However, don’t take chances, spread your traffic generation tentacles and do not solely depend on one technique. In essence, embark on other techniques that improve your ranking on search engine results.

Anyway, Yahoo Overture is capable of getting your site listed on search engine’s first result page, but it all depends on the competitive nature of the keywords you chose and the kind of budget you have for the service. Well, ensure that you are not generous with your budget using this service, until you see it working for you. Let me say that search engine optimization still remains the best way to get highly visible to web visitors.

]]> http://www.aceinternetmarketing.ie/search-engine-marketing/is-search-engine-advertising-a-lucrative-investment/feed/ 0 http://www.aceinternetmarketing.ie/search-engine-marketing/how-to-verify-quality-of-your-content-to-meet-the-new-quality-standards-set-by-google/ http://www.aceinternetmarketing.ie/search-engine-marketing/how-to-verify-quality-of-your-content-to-meet-the-new-quality-standards-set-by-google/#comments Mon, 04 Jul 2011 06:23:27 +0000 admin http://www.aceinternetmarketing.ie/?p=1979

Recently, Google set a new standard or requirements that contents must meet in order to qualify passing through their search engine to get to online searchers.

Google now has the latest updated search engine algorithm with code name Panda. This algorithm is the cause of drop in ranking for a good number of websites. Google intends to decrease the rankings of substandard contents in their search result page.

Google has been magnanimous enough to make things easier for webmasters by putting up certain questions that would assist webmasters in determining the quality of their site contents, and thus ascertain whether or not such site’s content is sufficiently good for Google’s new quality filters.

Here are the questions that would help you determine whether your website contents qualify for Google’s new quality filters.

1. How reliable is the content on your webpage?
   • Can you vouch that the info outlined in your content is correct?
   • Who is the author of the article – a pro who is well knowledgeable about the subject, or is the article written by someone who is just copying contents onto the web?
   • Can you comfortably give your credit card info to the website?
   • For articles related to health, can you rely on the info presented on the site?
   • Is the website well known and respected for the keyword or subject of discussion?
   • Can you comfortably bookmark such website, recommend or share it with someone?
   • Are users going to be happy when they come across any page from the site?
2. Do you carry out a check on the quality of your webpages?
   • Do you check errors such as factual, spelling, grammatical or stylistic errors?
   • Was sufficient editing done on the article or was it hastily written and no extra check was carried out on it?
   • What extent of quality control measure was administered regarding the article?
   • Is the article quite insightful and informative beyond criticism?
   • Is the article worth publishing in a book, encyclopedia or printed magazine?
   • What about the thoroughness aspect, was proper attention to details given to the article?
3. Are your WebPages created for your visitors or search engines?
   • Are the subjects intended to benefit the site visitors, or are they merely created with the hope that they may be the kind of topics that compete well in search engine ranking?

Other questions include:

• How sufficient are the real articles on your website, are they even real at all?
• Do you overpopulate the article with too many ads, to the extent that the ads intercept the actual content?
• What is the length of the article and how substantial is the content? Does the article contain valuable specifics?

If your answer to all the questions is substantially positive, you still need to verify if Google sees your web pages as being relevant to the applicable keywords. Finally, you need to optimize your website with the top 10 Optimizers so that your site would rank high on the Google search result page.

A recently conducted study reveals that it is very important to rank very high in Google’s search results. The average click-through rate of the top results is almost 40%. The cost per click as well as the amount of searches is also an influencing factor on the clicks. What is the implication of this to your efforts toward search engine optimization?

The Exact Numbers
Based on the study, the web pages that occupy the first position generates 36% CTR (Click Through Rate). Second position’s CTR is 13%, third position up to the 10th position gets 10%, 8%, 6%, 4%, 3.8%, 3% and 2% respectively. You can see that the CTR for first position is higher than CTR of position 2-5 put together.

It may surprise you to know that the 11th position generates slightly more clicks compared to the 10th position. Perhaps, the reason may be traceable to the fact that position 11 tops page two of Google results.

There is relationship between CPC (Cost per Click) for AdWords and CTR
Based on the information curled from the study, high CPC (Cost Per Click) on Google AdWords generates lower click-through rate for organic results.

For a keyword that has a high Click Per Cost, the first organic result generates not up to 20 percent of the clicks. On the other hand, for keywords that have low CPC, the first result gets over 30 percent of the entire clicks.

The click-through rate is also Influenced by the search volume
The study further reveals that keywords with high number of searches generate higher click-through rate for the first position – the rate is 32% for widely sought-after keywords, while long tail keywords get 25%.

The overall click-through rate for long tail keywords on page one of Google result is better – 9% vs. 5% for popular keywords.

What is the implication of this to your SEO efforts?

• More than they appear on the surface, popular keywords are quite competitive.

If your optimization efforts are geared towards highly competitive keywords, you are not likely to see much result until you make it to the first 5 results.

• Long tail keywords optimization is a sensible thing to do.

There are several benefits attributed to long tail keywords; compared to popular keywords, long tail keywords are more targeted and the conversion rate is much higher as well. You are likely to generate more visitors via your long tail keywords; the exception is if you are ranking in the top 5 results for a keyword that is popular. Another benefit is that ranking high for long tail keywords is much easier since the competition is less.

For a larger part of the businesses,  it is quite easier to rank in page one for several long tail keywords and this is more beneficial compared to generating high rankings for only a couple of keywords that are popular.

Indeed, high ranking is very important; it is still far more valuable to rank on page one for a relevant keyword to your offerings than elsewhere.

Often, clients consult me to find out how the SEO techniques of their websites can be taken to a greater level. No doubts, these sites are already optimized as far as the previous SEO expert was able to go. However, I usually find out common SEO mistakes that are surprisingly made by most SEO experts. I’m going to discuss the major ones here.

1. Excessively Stuffed Title Tags
   Definitely, you can attempt to incorporate multiple search phrase variations in the title of a webpage. You are probably doing this to be on a safer side in case the search engines may decide to associate your page with majority or the entire variations. This may be effective at times.
   However, I discovered that when you populate a webpage with such multiple search terms, you are likely to alter the main message of that page; thus weakening meaningful ranking value for that webpage’s major search terms.
2. Concentrating Much on Google
   It has become rampant to see that business owners’ websites may have several of their pages indexed at Google, while only few are indexed in other major search engines such as Bing. In same manner, such clients may also be ranking on Google’s first result page for multiple webpages, while getting stuck on third or even fourth page at Bing.
   The SEO world tends to concentrate massively on Google, with the misconception that Bing would automatically work out things on its own. But little do they know that they are possibly missing out multiple businesses by concentrating solely or much on Google. The truth is that other major search engines such as Bing would possibly find it difficult searching out content all by itself.
   If you simply use the Bing webmaster system to submit a sitemap.xml file, this can raise the total number of pages indexed on Bing dramatically. It may interest you to also know that for each additional page in the Bing index, you can achieve a raise across your whole website. Well, there’s more to do at Bing, but this technique requires little or no effort – besides it is fast.
3. Being Philanthropic with Your Unique Content
   One of the most common mistakes I discover in most business websites is this; there’s something wrong with the way they create data feed on their offering listings for the purpose of shopping comparison. They tend to be philanthropic with the few unique content featured on their product pages, giving them away to multiple comparison sites – this results in significant duplicate content issues.   The worst part is when those data feeds get scooped by scrapers, which would eventually result in duplication of those product details on multiple scraper websites.

There are more common SEO mistakes that I surprisingly see in websites; however, the ones outlined above are more critical and should be addressed urgently.

The quickest way to have your website listed on Google’s search result page is to ensure that your website features all that is required by Google. And what are those requirements?

1. Your server has to be Google-friendly, in such way that it becomes easier for Google to index your page.So, what should you do to make your server and webpages Google indexing friendly?
   • Get rid of the ‘disallow’ lines in your robots.txt file if necessary.
   • Do not feature ‘noindex’ tags on your webpages – check to ensure that such tags are not found in your webpages.
   • Also, your web server would not be Google indexing-friendly if it uses cloaking scripts or bot blocking software.
2. Google indexes webpages with quality backlinks faster.Google bots often visit websites that have more quality backlinks pointing to them. Thus Google would be fast to feature your webpage on its search result page if your site has good backlinks that point to it.

   Bear this in mind; you need to wait for a while before Google can display your site on its search result page – why? Here are the reasons below;

   • Technical reasons: it is the procedure with this search engine, for an optimized website to wait for a while before it is indexed. Even when the bot eventually visits your website, it may only crawl some pages and leave some, and not all the pages crawled by the bot would undergo indexing.For the indexed pages, they would be parsed – the parsing process assigns the indexed pages to search queries. Again, why you must wait for a while is that Google would need to assess the content featured on your site and compare it with other websites’ contents, and subsequently rate your site in terms of quality. The entire process drags on for a while. However, if you have more backlinks pointing to your site, the process will speed up.
   • Competitive keywords: getting listed on Google search result page takes longer time for competitive keywords. So, you may need to target less competitive keywords first, then after achieving chains of top 10 ranking for these keywords, your chances of ranking higher for the highly competitive keywords would increase greatly.
   • Also, Google would take time to evaluate the quality of a new website, so ranking on Google’s top 10 search result page takes time for a new website. But as the website gets older and generates multiple quality backlinks, the chances of getting to Google’s result page increases.
3. Make your website meaningful to Google
   Google is slow to index single-page site. Google is likely not to find substantial valuable content on such site, especially a completely Flash site.
   Do not focus on just few pages of your website when optimizing your site, work on all the pages and fill them with valuable contents worth presenting to visitors. Google is concerned with presenting the most excellent webpages to web visitors who pass through it to search for information.

Don’t be deceived, there’s no short-cut to climbing to Google’s top 10 search result page. High quality content and valuable backlinks are necessary.