Archive for Phrases
Three Steps to Improved Search Engine Ranking
Posted by: | CommentsOne of today’s hottest marketing buzz phrases is “Search Engine Optimization”, or SEO. SEO is the process of configuring an organization’s Web site in such a way that when a person goes to Google (or other search engine) and searches for keywords related to the organization, the search engine lists the organization’s Web site within its search results in the highest possible position.
SEO can be a valuable promotional tactic within any Web site marketing strategy. However, SEO can also become time consuming because Google, Yahoo, and MSN (the big three) use sophisticated algorithms to index Web content. All three companies continually adjust their algorithms to provide users with the best search results. Therefore, you will need to continually test new techniques to achieve and maintain high rankings.
The AVS Group has researched and developed an SEO model that improves search engine rankings. This article highlights three tactics from our model you can use to improve your own rankings:
1. Select great keywords
2. Convert keywords into traffic
3. Link building
Tactic #1: Select Great Keywords
Your first priority should be to select great keywords that describe your organization and the content within your Web site. It might be tempting to save time by developing a list of keywords, some specific and others broad, and then applying all of them on every page throughout your Web site. However, you will achieve greater results by selecting 10 custom keywords or phrases for each page of content within your site. For example, select 10 keywords and use them exclusively on your home page, followed by 10 different keywords for each subsequent page of content.
When selecting keywords, avoid words that are broad or vague. Broad or vague keywords provide little benefit because likely too many other pages are currently indexed in the search engines using those keywords. To illustrate, let’s use AVSGroup.com as an example. Open a new browser window and go to Google. Search on the term “Web Site Design”. Look at the upper right corner where Google displays the number of pages currently indexed for the keywords. Google has already indexed about 22 million pages for “Web Site Design”.
Instead of competing against 22 million pages for “Web Site Design”, AVS chose to optimize a page of content for “Web Strategy Development”. This phrase precisely describes one of AVS’s Web services, and because fewer pages are indexed, there is a greater likelihood of achieving a high ranking. To illustrate, go back to Google. Search on “Web Strategy Development”. Google has indexed 623 pages and AVSGroup.com is the number one ranked site.
Tactic #2: Convert Keywords into Traffic
Once you have selected great keywords, the keywords must be incorporated into the right locations within your Web site to drive more traffic. Some of the best places are within your site’s page title, META description, and META keywords. Google, Yahoo, and MSN look for keywords in these locations to help properly index a site’s content.
If you are unfamiliar with how to view a page title, open a new browser window and go to AVSGroup.com. The page title is the white text that appears inside the bar at the top left of your browser window.
Next in importance is the META description and META keywords. Both are used to describe the content found on a particular page. To locate the METAs, open a new browser window and go back to AVSGroup.com. Click on the “View” drop down menu within your Internet Explorer window. You will see several options including “View Source”. Select “View Source”. This will display the HTML used to create the AVSGroup.com home page. At the top of the page, you will see the META description and META keywords.
You will achieve the greatest success if you develop custom page titles, META descriptions, and META keywords for each page within your Web site using the keywords that you selected earlier.
Tactic #3: Link Building
Link building is an SEO term that means requesting other Webmasters to add a link to your Web site within their Web site. This usually takes place in two ways. Webmasters will sometimes add your link within their own site’s content because your Web site could be a valuable resource to their site visitors. You can also encourage Webmasters to post your content onto their Web site provided they include a link to your Web site within the credits.
For the first example, open a new browser window and go to www.viroqua-wisconsin.com. Scroll to the bottom of the page and you will see a link that reads “Web site design and development by The AVS Group”. This link provides AVSGroup.com with additional traffic if someone were to click the link, but more importantly, the link helps increase our “Page Rank”. More on Page Rank later.
Next, open a new browser window and go back to Google. Search on the phrase “e-mail marketing tips”. You should see a link that reads “Learn Successful E-mail Marketing Tips” (it might even be the number two ranked site). Click on this link and you will find a Web site that is featuring one of The AVS Group’s Resources articles. This is an example of leveraging your Web site content by permitting other Webmasters to post it and provide a link back to your site. Scroll to the bottom of the article and you will see a link to AVSGroup.com.
Your link building activities increase what is known as, “Page Rank”. Page Rank is a measure that Google uses to evaluate the relevancy of a Web site’s content. If you have hundreds or even thousands of Web sites linking to your Web site using these two examples, Google will consider your Web site to be more relevant. You will earn a higher Page Rank score, resulting in improved search results for your Web site against sites that might even be optimized for the same keywords.
In closing, this article shared three key tactics within our SEO model that you can use to improve your search engine rankings. Because of the complexity of SEO, please let us know if you would like to learn more about our full SEO model. Our Web experts will demonstrate the various tactics within our model and discuss the results.
| About the Author: The AVS Group is a marketing, training, and communications company. AVS is in La Crosse, Wisconsin. AVS helps clients communicate and market effectively. AVS can be found online at http://www.avsgroup.com. |
Add Content To Increase Website Traffic
Posted by: | CommentsWhy lots of quality content is the key to lots of traffic.
Content – All webmasters want lots of it and need lots of it to get a lot of traffic to their websites. In order to boost traffic, many webmasters try work on their meta tags or even resort to tricks in an effort to get more visitors to their site.
But one of the simplest, most effective, and most dependable ways to increase the amount of traffic to your website is to offer more quality content. I’m sure you have heard it said that on the Internet, content is king. Well, it’s true!
For your website to be successful, you need to understand exactly how more content brings more visitors to your site as well as how to generate quality content that is related to your particular website theme.
Why do you need more content to bring in lots of traffic?
Many websites are really just company brochures that have been placed on the web. The site simply describes the company, with some contact information thrown in.
These types of websites usually have anywhere from five to ten separate html files. If these pages have a moderate amount of text on them, it’s possible to optimize them for a few keywords and a few web surfers may find the site via the search engines.
But if these sites are in fairly competitive fields, it may be very difficult to build enough traffic because the search engines try to rank the most important websites that match a search query. Search engine robots search for keywords or phrases in the pages’ text to try to determine what the site is all about.
But the search engines also consider the links on the web pages. For example, if your homepage is about bicycles and you have links to other pages on your site relating to the same theme, such as mountain bikes, racing bikes, etc, then the search engine will conclude that the site is about bicycles.
So if your site has a lot of pages about bicycles, your site will be better represented in the search engines for the search term bicycles than one that is simply a bicycle company brochure site with a handful of pages.
Also, each page stands alone as a “mini website” and may come up in searches, allowing people to enter your site through the “side” or “back doors” and not the homepage. The more pages your site has, the more chances it has of being found in searches, and the more you can optimize your site for different search terms.
In a nutshell, more pages mean more “roads” from the search engines to your sites. And traffic needs roads to travel on.
So then, by adding lots of quality content pages to your site, you boost the chances of one of your pages coming up in searches and you will increase your site’s overall traffic.
Another thing to consider: the more quality content your site has, the more respect it gets from human-edited directories such as the Open Directory Project as well as from other webmasters.
If you have lots of quality content, then you’ll get lots of link requests, requests for permission to publish your articles in newsletters, and more links to content pages on your website. All of these factors result in more website traffic for you.
How do you get lots of quality content for your site?
Depending on the type of products or services you offer, there are many ways to build quality content for your site. Here are a few examples:
1. Product Reviews – If you are selling other companys’ products as an affiliate, rather than just linking to the product, you can write a full-page review of it. Explain how the product has helped you and what its strengths are.
This type of content pre-sells the product, as well as providing interesting reading in itself. If you sell your own products, you can give background information on them or solicit satisfied customers or users to write reviews, or testimonials.
2. Background information – Every product exists in some context. For example, you may have a hotel in a particular city. Instead of only providing information about the hotel, you could offer some content pages about the history of the city where the hotel is located as well as any popular tourist attractions near there. The possibilities for adding this type of content are unlimited!
3. Questions and answers – Let your website’s visitors help you create content. Place a questions and answers feature on your website or in your newsletter. Not only will you get insight into what is on your visitor’s minds, but by answering these questions you can generate lots of useful content for your website and newsletters.
4. Forums – Your site’s visitors can also directly write the content on your site through a forum. Some forums are searchable by search engine robots, while others aren’t. If you have quality content on your forum, you can also cut-and-paste it onto the main pages of your website to ensure inclusion in the large search engines.
5. Guest articles by others – There’s no real need to spend a lot of time writing your own articles if that isn’t something that you enjoy doing (or of you aren’t very good at it). You can publish the articles that other people write!
There’s a lot of top-quality free content that is available on the internet. While you’re usually required to provide a link back to the author’s website (or give his/her email address), this is a small price to pay when you consider the fact that many of these well-written articles pull in tons of traffic.
Finally, if you’re wondering how best to arrange all of your site’s new content, you have two effective options. Some people may simply build a second content-rich website to draw lots of traffic and then direct the visitors to their main “sales site” via links.
My preferred method is to place an articles section on your existing site, or simply link your new content pages to the particular product and service pages that are most appropriate.
However you decide to present your content, you can expect to see a greatly increased traffic flow to your site as a direct result of the quality content that you have added.
Content Tips:
Do you want your own search engine? Do you want to get results for your meta search engine? With Entireweb’s XML feed you can easily include our free search results into your services.
Entireweb´s XML feed enables you to add great functionality to your site or application quickly. There are no licensing agreements or restrictions regarding number of queries.
We highly recommend you to take a closer look at this and we are sure that it will help you to add extra value and another great feature to your site.
Read more about Entireweb’s free XML feed at:
http://www.entireweb.com/webmasters/xml/
| About the Author: Donald Nelson is a web developer, editor, and social worker. Visit him at http://www.a1-optimization.com. |
