Author: Thomson Chemmanoor
SEO Coordinator

The goal of every SEO is to build a site that ranks well with search engines. But building a website that ranks well with Google and other search engines has a great deal to do with how search bots see your website. With any type of SEO marketing, there are several factors that can negatively impact your ranking.

These following components may negatively affect a spider’s ability to crawl a page or Google rankings:

1. Server is inaccessible for search engine bots.
2. Duplicate of existing content within the site.
3. Outgoing links to low quality/spammy sites.
4. Duplicate Title/Meta tags on all pages.
5. Overuse of Targeted Keywords (Stuffing/Spamming).
6. Broken or missing internal links
7. Wrong syntax in robots.txt file
8. Wrong 301 redirects
9. Characters in your web page URL
10. Sites entirely built in frames and Flash

These are only some of the major factors that impact search rankings negatively. As you can imagine, there’s a host of other issues, such as no-follow links, which also make websites less crawlable.

At this point you’re probably wondering “Well, what can I do to enhance my site’s crawlability?” For starters, you can manage your site in Google Webmaster Tools to identify some other crawling problems your website may have. Also, ensure that your content is readable. Avoid excessive use of Flash animations and javascript. Supplement visuals with sufficient textual content. If you decide to outsource your optimization needs, make sure you’re not dealing with a bad SEO company.

Finally, continue to immerse yourself in website content usability tips and other natural search engine optimization resources. The goal is to build a site that is easily accessible to users as well as search bots. And as the saying goes, build it and they will come.

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Author: April Hall

Internet Copywriter

What is the ultimate purpose of the internet? (Wow-I know that’s a loaded question that could take forever to answer!) For some, the internet is a source of information. For others, it’s a place to interact with friends, play games and enjoy the range of available entertainment. For many of us who work with SEO, however, we have one true purpose for ourselves and our clients: to make money. We want to sell as many of our products and services as we can, and this is done by attracting customers–not just visitors–to our sites.

But, how can we attract those ready-to-buy customers to our site, when there are so many other sites floating around out there? How can we make our businesses stand out and make it to the top of the search engine results page when there are such giants as About.com and Yahoo to content with? The answer is to make use of long tail keywords.

I first head the term “long tail keyword” a few months ago; and although I got the gist of what that term meant, I was still confused about exactly how to write content using them. Did it mean that I had to put the entire string of terms together, without any words in between? Did I have to use the long tail keyword in its entirety every time? Some quick conversations with SEO pros, along with some sample searches, led me to these conclusions:

• Long tail keywords are one of the most effective ways to draw unique visitors to your site
• You may break up these strings of words with minor prepositions without causing any major differences to your page’s searchability
• It is best to use long tail keywords in conjunction with shorter keywords on the same page
  

Long tail keywords are 3 to 4 word keyword phrases that are very specific to what you are selling. For example, rather than a t-shirt company writing content that targets “t-shirts”, they may choose to target the long tail keyword phrase “funny political t-shirts”. It seems like targeting such a specific keyword would reduce your number of site visitors and reduce your page views, doesn’t it? Well, this may be true, but there are three very good reasons to use long tail keywords anyway:

1. It makes writing SEO Content much easier. Any content writer is more easily able to write a page of content on “used hybrid cars gas mileage” than they are “used cars”. A more focused keyword content makes for sharper, more focused writing.
2. It makes it easier to target customers who are actually ready to buy. An internet searcher who is looking for “home security systems company houston” is much more likely to be to the point of actually buying a product than a searcher who simply types in “house alarms”. You may be reaching a smaller pool of searchers, but you are reaching those customers who are ready to close the sale.
3. It makes it more likely to reach the front page of search engine results. Using long tail keywords means that you will have fewer competitors trying to reach the front page of the search results, because fewer pages have targeted that string of keywords. Big-name sites usually dominate the search result pages of simple, broad searches; but smaller sites that have created properly targeted content stand a good chance of reaching their ideal customers.

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Author: Henry Adaso
Internet Copywriter

So now that you know why you should start building links today, are you ready for some tips? If you’re an expert in the field of search engine optimization, you may already know most of these. For the rest of us, here are 5 characteristics of a quality link.

Informative - No reader will fault you for linking off to an article or website that adds value to their experience. But linking to a sub-par site is an easy way to lose readership.

Credible - Quality inbound links come from credible sites. Elevate your own credibility by offering only fair, objective, and accurate information to readers. If you establish yourself as a trusted source, inbound links will be less difficult to obtain.

Descriptive - Explain what the link has to offer. Why should a reader click on the link? Don’t use phrases like “click here” when crosslinking. Use a creative signal phrase instead.

Brief and Useful - Writing links in blocks of sentences or paragraphs is bad SEO practice. Keep it brief and user-friendly or it will look like you forgot to close a tag.

Groundbreaking - Be the first to report a breaking news story in your niche and others will be happy to credit you for the gesture.

In summary, a quality link is brief, useful, descriptive, and enhances user experience. If you’re new to SEO, you may first want to get acquainted with linking, inbound & outbound links.

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Author: April Hall

Website Content Writer

Every small business is searching for ways to save money on their advertising and internet marketing campaigns, which is why the following discovery may seem very exciting. As I was perusing the internet blogs this morning, I came across what seemed to be talk of an unbeatable offer: website services and marketing for under $50 a month! Who was offering this amazing deal? I searched further…

It turns out the company offering this service wasn’t a website development company at all-it was a huge small business warehouse that charges a membership fee to join (need I mention the actual name? they currently work to monopolize virtually all aspects of running a business…). I was, of course, quite skeptical. What reputable web development company could offer high quality, dependable website services and pay per click marketing campaigns for such a nominal fee? It turns out my first instinct was right-there isn’t such a service (yet. I say yet because I know the unrivaled power of this company and have no doubt it will only take a period of time before execs figure out how to make this work too… Call me cynical).

I noticed the company’s own website first, as the aesthetics and marketing targets used on a company’s own site is a great indication of what they can do for their clients. As I am automatically trained to look for keywords, I noticed a blaring lack of such words on their site. Instead, it was filled with foggy language (see the previous post by Eric on “fog”) that lacked any understanding of how keywords are used. There was talk of “submitting your website’s url” to search engines, but no discussion of how to get your site ranked high on the search engine results page. In short, I sensed a very real lack of knowledge about the way internet searches work and how to make use of the major search engines (besides a basic understanding of how to use pay per click advertising, which is completely taught by the search engines themselves).

While I’m sure that this small business warehouse company will outsource their web development services out to another professional web service firm, I am not confident that either organization will be successful getting their client’s websites noticed. Perhaps I am wrong, but I stick to be belief that sometimes it is worth paying more for higher quality, particularly when it comes to the highly competitive field of internet marketing!

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