Friday, May 30, 2014

SEO Statistics

SEO Statistics 



70-80% of users ignore the paid ads

75% never scroll past the 1st page of search results

Together search plus social media up 94% in CTR
Search Engine Facts
Search Engine Facts

Top 2 internet activities search and e-mail

Bloggers have 434% more indexed pages

Inbound leads cost 61% lower than outbound leads

81% consider their blogs to be important asset

SEO leads ... 14.6% close rate, outbound a 1.7% close rate

Google: 18% organic clicks go to #1 position, 10% to #2, 7% to #3

Bing: 9.7% organic clicks go to #1 position, 5.5% to #2, and 2.7% to #3

79% click on the natural search results. 80% rarely/never click on the sponsored search



Search Engine and SEO Facts
Search Engine and SEO Facts



Steve Steinberger
www.klicktwice.com
561-281-8330


Thursday, May 29, 2014

How search engines index content


How Search Engines Index


It's important to understand how search engines discover new content on the web, as well as how they interpret the locations of these pages. One way that search engines identify new content is by following links. Much like you and I will click through links to go from one page to the next, search engines do the exact same thing to find and index content, only they click on every link they can find. If you want to make sure that search engines pick up your new content, an easy thing you can do is just make sure you have links pointing to it. Another way for search engines to discover content is from an XML sitemap.


Sitemaps | Site Maps


How Search Engines Index Websites
How Search Engines Index Websites
An XML site map is really just a listing of your pages' content in a special format that search engines can easily read through. You or your webmaster can learn more about the specific syntax and how to create XML site maps by visiting sitemaps.org. Once you've generated your site maps, you can submit them directly to the search engines, and this gives you one more way to let them know when you add or change things on your site. Search engines will always try to crawl your links for as much additional content as they can.

And while this is generally a good thing, there are plenty of times that you might have pages up that you don't want search engines to find. Think of test pages, or members-only areas of your site that you don't want showing up on the search engine results pages. To control how search engines crawl through your website, you can set rules in what's called a robots.txt file. This is a file that you or your webmaster can create in the root folder of your site, and when search engines see it, they'll read it and follow the rules that you've set.

Robotstxt
You can set rules that are specific to different browsers and search engine crawlers, and you can specify which areas of your website they can, and can't see. This can get a bit technical, and you can learn more about creating robots.txt files rules by visiting robotstxt.org. Again, once search engines discover your content, they'll index it by URLs. URLs are basically the locations of web pages on the Internet. It's important that each page on your site has a single, unique URL, so that search engines can differentiate that page from all the others.

And the structure of this URL can also help them understand the structure of your entire website. There are a lots of ways that search engines can find your pages, and while you can't control how the crawlers actually do their job, by creating links and unique and structured URLs for them to follow, site maps for them to read, and robots.txt files to guide them, you'll be doing everything you can to get your pages in the index as fast as possible.

Steve Steinberger
561-281-8330
how search engines index




Wednesday, May 28, 2014

Website Hosting


Website Hosting Server-side Factors and SEO


While content and links can affect your website's search engine visibility, your web server can also play a role in how search engines view your website. The key here is to make sure that you're serving up pages fast and you are reserving them up reliably. A search engine is trying to give its users the best experience possible, and sending them to a page on a server that's down half the time, or that takes an eternity to load, is not going to be a quality experience. First and foremost, a web server is just a computer. and the performance of any computer relies in part on the hardware and the resources that it has available.

Website Hosting Server-side Factors and SEO


Things like the number and type of processors, the amount of memory, the quality of the network, and the connection to the Internet can all be important. You will want to talk to the people responsible for hosting and managing your web server to make sure the resources are appropriate to serve pages quickly and minimize any downtime. The physical location of your web server can also affect your search engine visibility. As visitors interact with your website, search engines will often collect data around how fast all the elements of your pages are loading for them. If a visitor is in one country and your web server is located on the other side of the world, the page may be loading very slowly, which is a concern for search engines.

This might seem crazy, but it actually happens quite often. Hosting your site halfway across the world might offer financial benefits, but it also might hurt your ability to quickly serve pages. Generally, you'll want to make sure that your web server is geographically located where most of your potential website visitors will come from. If you expect your visitors to be coming from all over the world, you may want to consider a web hosting solution that can help distribute requests for your pages across a global network of computers. And even if you're serving up pages locally, you may want to consider speeding things up by using content delivery networks, or CDNs, to help serve big files, like images and videos, from these servers located all over the world.

Another thing that will help your pages load quickly is caching. Your website may be configured to pull content and other information from a database on your web server every time a user requests one of your pages. One way to minimize the time-consuming database workload in these situations is to enable server-side caching.

This is where your web server interacts with your database only once in order to generate a given page. It saves a copy of that content on the server for a period of time. Once that copy has been made, each subsequent view of that page will load the content that's been saved on the server bypassing any redundant database work. Many content management and ecommerce systems have plug-ins or settings built in to help you accomplish this. Last, but not least, you'll want to make sure that your web server is consistently running and never experiencing any downtime.

If your web server is constantly down, search engines will consider your site unreliable, and they won't want to suggest it to their users. Remember, search engines are emulating people, and they're trying to reward what we like and penalize what we don't. One thing that people do NOT like is a slow loading page or a server down error message.

Steve Steinberger
www.klicktwice.com
www.ktthosting.com

561-281-8330
website hosting




Tuesday, May 27, 2014


Responsive Web Design

This is undoubtedly one of  the biggest web design buzz words of all time. And if you're not familiar with it, you're probably asking yourself, what does it all mean? 

Before there were iPhones or Android tablets, running around everywhere, websites used to come in two basic flavors. Desktop and mobile.

responsive web design
Responsive web design scales to the device 
On the rare occasion that someone did visit your site on their phone. Your site would recognize that and serve up sort of a barebones version of the site that looked a lot like a list of links. There weren't very may photos or videos to be seen because most phones couldn't handle that type of work load. Now-a-days however, Our content is being consumed on literally thousands of devices. All of which are capable of producing a rich web experience unlike anything we've ever seen. Because of this we must be able to deliver content in a better way and have our websites adapt and show content differently based on the type of device viewing that content at any given time.

Basically we need a website to respond to the device that's viewing it. And serve up the best possible experience for the end user.  Hence the name, responsive web design. Now, there are three basic ways to design a responsive website today. First is something called a fluid site, which means the entire site is based off of a percentage, and simply scales itself down as the window the browser decreases and scales back up as it increases.

Second, there's adaptive web design, which targets specific devices like iPhones, and Kindles by using something in CSS called a media query. This makes it easy to display your site in a uniquely tailored way to a variety of different devices. The problem is that not every device uses a standard iPhone or Kindle sized screen. And therefore you might not be able to adequately cover the full spectrum of devices that visit your site. Finally, we come to perhaps the best solution. True responsive web design. Responsive design is based on a fluid grid which can adapt itself based on the view port of the browser.
You have the ability to determine what are called break points meaning minimum widths and heights and tailor your content to fit everything in between. Keep all three of these in mind as you think about how your site will ultimately be built.

Work with your developer to deliver a functioning prototype of the site if you can. This gives you a more hands-on feel of how the site will perform at every stage. This is very important and a great little extra because it's really going to underscore the point of why you had to build it this way and, most likely, why it took a little longer than a traditional website. At the end of the day, this is all about user experience. Responsive design helps you create a better experience for your clients and their clients.
It's here and it doesn't look to be going away any time soon.

Steve Steinberger
561-281-8330

Friday, May 23, 2014

Responsive Web Design


Responsive Web Design



Responsive web design is a web design approach aimed at designing sites to provide an optimal browsing experience easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning and scrolling across a wide range of devices from desktop computer monitors to mobile phones. Responsive web design uses media queries to figure out the resolution of a device in question.
Considering these statistics:
  • There are 6.8 billion people in the world – 5.1 billion of them now own a cell phone.  (2013, Search Engine Watch)
  • 28% of Internet usage comes from a mobile phone – it is projected to take over desktop usage by 2014. (2012, Pew Research Center)
  • 50% of all local searches (e.g., Cedar Falls bank) are performed on mobile devices (2012, Google)
  • 62% of companies that designed a website specifically for mobile had increased sales. (2012, Econsultancy)
  • Thousands of screen sizes exist for mobile devices, and the number continues to grow.
Responsive Web Site Design
Responsive Web Design | Desktop View
Purchasing over the Internet use to be considered as very risky and there were few just a brave people who actually opted for online shopping over the Internet. Things have changed. Shoppers have no qualms about spending on the Internet from the safely of their very own desktop computer. With the introduction of smart phones and tablets it is now possible to access the Internet on the go where ever you travel.  In fact studies show that the people find it the mobile a better device to surf the Internet then the desktop computer. Besides which not everyone owns a computer compared to the fact that every third person posses a smart phone or a tablet computer.  
With such changing trends the web sites designed by a designer that used to be optimized for a desktop computer now need to be viewable on the hand held devices as well. A web site that worked splendidly on the desktop computer is no longer sufficient for the web site owners because they also required it to be viewable on their cell phone, mobile or a tablet device. Thus web designers shifted to responsive web design which is capable of providing all that and more.
Responsive Website Design
Responsive Tablet Design | Smart Device View

We recommend all of our clients consider responsive design for any new website we build. With responsive design, your site detects the type of device each site visitor is using. Flexible images and fluid grids then size correctly to fit the screen.

Steve Steinberger
www.klicktwice.com
561-281-8330

Thursday, May 22, 2014

Microformats... Wha


Leveraging Microformats

Search engines do a good job identifying what the overall content of a web page is about. But you may have parts of a web page that contain very specific types of content, like product reviews, an embedded video, or even a food recipe. Search engines can stand to benefit from a little help in understanding the semantic focus of these bits of content, and fortunately, we can give them some assistance. One universal code format that will help us do this is schema.org microformat.  Microformats give us a special syntax to use to help search engines identify very specific types of content on your pages.

This not only helps search engines identify these pieces of content, it also helps them identify very specific attributes of your content. For example some recipe text. We can look at this quickly, and identify it as a food recipe. But for a search engine, the short sentences and many line breaks are a bit awkward, and they can't possibly understand what each line really means. By augmenting the code behind this recipe text using the schema.org microformat for recipes, you have the opportunity to explicitly tell search engines exactly what this content is.

You can see that there are properties for ingredients, prep and cook times, and just about anything else that you could think of for a recipe. If you think about this from the search engine's perspective, knowing not just that this is definitely a food recipe, but also knowing all of this metadata around the recipe, will help it to return this content to users that are looking for it. If someone is searching for a particular chef's recipes, or has an abundance of apples, and needs something to do with them, the search engines will have a much deeper semantic understanding of what this content truly is, and they can return it in the search results for an array of relevant search queries.

Head over to schema.org and browse the various types of content that have supported microformats. Recipes are just one of many. You could use micro-formatting to describe a book, with things like title, author, publishing date, and number of pages, or you could use micro-formatting to identify an upcoming event by its name, location, dates, or even pricing. If you have a brick-and-mortar business, or you're doing ecommerce sales, make sure that you're using micro- formats for your local business content or your product content.

As a general rule, anytime you can specifically identify content for search engines, you probably should. Explore the different formats to see what may be relevant for the different types of content on your site, and get started sharing all that great information with the search engines and your visitors alike.

Steve Steinberger
561-281-8330

Wednesday, May 21, 2014

Keyword Research Plan , why do I need one?

Keyword Research

Plan 
, why do I need one?

Before you can optimize your website, you need to know what you're optimizing for. Finding the right keywords to focus your SEO efforts on can be challenging. Search engines like Google and Bing will go out and fetch the most relevant results for your search query based on everything they know about you and all the content on the entire Internet. The important thing  to remember  is search engines have a hard time understanding what a user is really after unless it's spelled out.

Keyword Research Plan
Keyword Research Plan | The Starting Point 
This is why you've probably followed up one search with another, maybe a more descriptive search. For example you tried to search for “Jeep” and followed up with “jeep Wrangler”  You try one keyword, but it doesn't give you just what you're looking for, so you get more specific. The bottom line is that people all over the world are typing in all kinds of keywords every second of every hour of every day, and it's important for us to understand what they type in so that we can optimize our pages to be in the search results for those terms.

Formal keyword research is the foundational piece in SEO that will help you understand what people are typing into search engines, how frequently they do it, how relevant those terms are to your business objectives, and how competitive those terms will be to try to rank for.

Let's take an example. Say you sell cars. You might think that the keyword 'car' is something that you want to rank for, but after you've done a little keyword research, you'll probably find that that won't make your list. Why? Well, even though that word gets typed into search engines with a very high frequency, think about its relevance. How many reasons could someone type the word car into a search engine? They might be looking for toy cars, or a place to repair cars, or rental cars, any one of hundreds of things that have nothing to do with actually buying a car.

A phrase like, "buy used 2009 jeep wrangler" might not get typed in as much, but it's extremely relevant and probably not that competitive. Keywords like this will very likely end up on your list of keywords to optimize for. 

Now that we understand a bit more about keywords and keyword research, it's time to talk about planning. An effective keyword research plan involves having a sound and structured approach that will lead to the discovery of keywords that you can use in the content of your website.


Ultimately, a keyword research plan will give you the data you need to make decisions about which keywords will give you the biggest bang for your buck and have the highest likelihood of being both relevant and profitable for your business. With billions of queries searched each month, it's important that we understand the goals of the keyword research process, what we're looking for, and how we collect and analyze that data to make decisions on our website.

Steve Steinberger
www.klicktwice.com
561-281-8330

Tuesday, May 20, 2014

SEO Expectations

SEO expectations

Search Engine Optimization is a process that requires a lot of work, a lot of time, and a lot of patience.  it's important to set some expectations. SEO is a bit different than most other marketing strategies, and understanding these differences will help us to stay on course for running and measuring a successful SEO campaign. Patience is a virtue and that couldn't be more true than with SEO. Approach this as a long-term process that builds long-term value.

seo expectations
SEO Expectations
There's a reason that all of those "ranked #1 in Google tomorrow" scams are called scams. It takes time to develop and execute on your strategy, to research your keywords, to create new unique content, to build more links and more authority, and to resolve any technical issues with your site. It's a never-ending process, there's always work to be done.  You also want to keep in mind that search engines don't necessarily interact with your website immediately; it takes them time to discover changes to your content, new links to your pages, and overall structure of your website.

It will take them more time to put all those factors in their algorithms to reassess your relevancy and authority before those changes are reflected in the search results. Being patient and true to your strategy will help you stay focused on the SEO process that you've laid out. Another thing to expect with SEO is change within the search engines, and it's important to realize and accept that we have no control over this. Search engines are always trying to improve their product to help deliver results that people want, and they're always trying new things.

Sometimes these changes are algorithmic, other changes are more about features or different ways of presenting different kinds of content to users. Search engines will keep making changes to enhance the experience for their users, so it's in our best interest to work with these changes as best we can. But one of the biggest expectations for a successful SEO campaign is to realize that you're really optimizing for two audiences, the search engine and real human beings. It's really easy to focus in on what we think the search engines will like about our site, but the real audience that generates business on your website is people.

While they may never find us if we don't show up on a search engine results page, it's people that drive the bottom line, and the fortunate thing is that the search engines know that. Search engines have the ultimate goal to generate search results that people find useful and helpful. If you build your authority and create content that's interesting to people, and if  you do it in a way that's friendly to the computerized audience as well, the long-term and consistent goal of the search engines is to reward that.

S teve Steinberger
www.klicktwice.com
561-281-8330



Monday, May 19, 2014

Search Engine Optimization (SEO), What is it?


Search Engine Optimization (SEO), What is it?

Plain and simple, SearchEngine Optimization is the process of making improvements on and off your website in order to gain more exposure in search engine results. And more exposure in search engine results will ultimately lead to more visitors finding you for the right reasons and going to your website. In order to understand what improvements will affect search engine results, let's take a step back and understand the goal of the search engines themselves. At the heart of it all, search engines are just trying to find and understand all the content out there on the Internet, and then quickly deliver relevant and authoritative results based on any phrase that a user might be searching for.

First, let's talk about relevance:
search engine optimization, what is it?
Search Engine Optimization

When a user searches for something like West Palm Beach Hotels, search engines want to show a list of results that are relevant to the topic of  West Palm Beach Hotels. Search engines will analyze all of the web pages that they've ever visited and pick out the pages that they believe are the most relevant to West Palm Beach Hotels. They determine this by evaluating lots of different factors, including how your content is written and implemented in code, as well as how other websites around the Internet are linking to you.

All of this stuffed into a very big, very complex, and very proprietary algorithm. At the end of the day, and in a fraction of a second, a search engine is then able to rank and display all of those web pages in order of relevance to that phrase that the user just typed in, West Palm Beach Hotels. This is very important to understand, because search engines make a very clear distinction between content that's about West Palm Beach Hotels versus content relevant for other phrases, like Florida resorts, or a phrase like “South Florida beach getaway”.

Search engines are able to understand quite a bit about semantic and thematic connections between words and concepts. Take another example: dog crates. A search engine knows that pages selling dog crates are extremely relevant to that search query, but it also knows that websites about pet carriers are also very relevant. It also knows that a website promoting things like pet food and dog toys might also be relevant to that search query, but perhaps less so. The other factor that influences search engine exposure is Authority.

In other words, out there on the largely lawless World Wide Web, where anyone can post anything, is your website a trusted place on the Internet that the search engines would want to show to their users? One very common way that search engines determine the authority of a web page or a domain is by evaluating what other websites think of you, and this can be measured through the links out there that are pointing to your website. You can think of a link as a vote on the Internet. A web page linking to your website is almost like saying, hey, I trust your content enough that I am wiling to reference your page and possibly even send traffic to your site.

It's a vote of trust, and the search engines pick up on this as they scour the web reading, evaluating, and storing all the data that they can find on all the pages of the Internet. But it's important to know right from the start that this not just a popularity contest where you try to accumulate the most votes on the Internet. Search engines have safeguards in place to prevent this kind of abuse, and instead place an emphasis on the quality of a link. For example, a search engine is more likely to trust a link if it comes from a well respected or industry-related site, like an industry leading blog or a nonprofit or government agency that's involved in your field of work.

A link coming from a one month-old site that has nothing to do with you or your industry, right above some text that says "I'll link to anything you want for five dollars" is not going to be valued nearly as much. From the search engines' perspective, some links are more effective than others in casting their vote to your website and determining your site's authority. So you might think of this whole system as a weighted democracy where some votes are worth more than others. Understanding how important both relevance and authority are to a search engine, will help us to both understand and improve these factors, and will ultimately lead to better search engine exposure and more visitors to the pages of our websites.

Steve Steinberger
SEO company




561-281-8330


Friday, May 16, 2014

SEO and Ecommerce

SEO and Ecommerce


Create an Interactive, Engaging, User-Friendly Website With Minimal Load Time
Before we talk about how to stay relevant in the search results, we should start by talking about how to make the most out of each visitor. That means boosting your conversion rate as much as possible with:

•Attractive site design
•Interactive elements that keep users from feeling passive
•Keep page load time low so that users don’t bounce off the site before it even loads
•Remove clutter from the site so that users aren’t distracted or overwhelmed with choices and minutia
•Remove as many steps as possible from processes like signing up or making a purchase


Panda is your friend

An eCommerce site is especially susceptible to updates like Panda because they are content-centric. In many ways, Panda treats the entire Web as though it consisted of blogs, videos, and content built to entertain and inform. Panda is designed to hit sites that don’t solve problems for users or focus too much on advertising.
Ecommerce sites can suffer due to their commercial nature. They can easily resemble thin affiliate sites and can lose search impressions as a result.

What can an eCommerce site do to prevent this:
•Don’t use template product descriptions, either provided by the manufacturer or developed in house.
•Each product should have its own unique content. This is where user generated content can be especially helpful.
•If creating unique content for every product isn’t possible, it’s a good idea to noindex your product pages and focus on creating unique and helpful content on your category pages instead.
•Consider starting a blog on your site. If the search results are moving in the direction of content, it might be better to go with the flow than to fight it. This can be a good way to attract links and build customer retention.

Keywords

If you want a page to rank for a particular keyword these days, all it really takes is making sure that the page is about the keyword, and the search engine has a decent amount of text to work with. If you stuff the keyword into your title, description, content, alt tag, and excessively interlink all of your pages, it becomes clear to Google that your site is built for search engines, not users.
It is still good practice to get your keyword, or something similar to it, in your title tag, but beyond that it’s generally good practice to forget about the whole thing. Squeezing keywords into subheadings doesn’t appear to have any positive affect anymore, and keyword density is a thing of the past.
As Google shifts away from links and keywords and towards statistical data and co-citation, site owners should focus on giving users as much helpful information as possible, rather than on using keywords. The search engines are increasingly good at sifting through this data to draw conclusions about the relevancy and legitimacy of pages on your site.

Go Mobile

According to Forbes, more than 20 percent of online shopping sessions are now happening on mobile devices. At the same time, the vast majority of online stores simply aren’t optimized for use on mobile devices. They are difficult to read, the buttons are too small, and users are frustrated.
Forbes estimates that within three years, half of all shopping sessions will be happening on mobile devices.

The eCommerce leaders over the past year have fallen into one of three categories:
1.Those that have found a way to make their websites deeply social in a way that makes users want to engage with the site and share from it.
2.“In transition” sites that do well on all social platforms and use a variety of strategies.
3.Companies that have a knack for going viral on social networks and drawing in referral traffic as a result.

Success with social media is about more than putting up a social signpost. Successful strategies encourage reviews, community, and photo sharing.

Social media is that it’s not really about using Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or Pinterest. Yes, you should get involved on these sites, but the key takeaway is that you need to interact with your audience. Also keep in mind that users are on social networks for entertainment and self-expression, not to find information or to buy something. They are most useful as tools for customer retention, reputation, and word of mouth, not immediate sales.

Penguin Friendly

•Focus on clicks instead of keywords when you obtain links
•Use a wide variety of different kinds of links
•Focus on links for sites that manually approve them
•Don’t get links from sites that exist to give links
•Win content marketing
•Use top-notch tools
•Monitor your link profile
•Don’t use any mass link building technique
•Use social media and build relationships that naturally result in links

Content Marketing

The search engines increasingly don’t want commercial results unless they own them. They want content.

Great content is not just Panda friendly. It’s also shareable, a good source of referral traffic, and there’s often much less competition to rank for content-centric terms than commercial-centric ones. Content is great for building reputation, long-term relationships with customers, and increasing exposure.Obviously, great content is also a good way to attract links, or to build links using guest posts and similar content marketing strategies.

While the search engines increasingly frown on commercial content  more consumers are diving headfirst into eCommerce than ever before. Businesses that become thought leaders with content, relationships, shareability, and knowledge of the future of SEO will crush the competition and see more revenue in the coming years than ever before.

Steve Steinberger
www.klicktwice.com
561-281-8330


Friday, May 9, 2014


Long tail keyword



Long tail keywords are the longer, more specific keywords that are less common, individually, but add up to account for the majority of search-driven traffic.

Long tail keywords are the opposite of "head" terms, which are more popular or more frequently searched on. For example, "fish tanks" is a head term, but "compare prices whisper aquarium filters" is a long-tail keyword.

Beginner search marketers often focus on head terms when optimizing their sites for organic search or creating pay-per-clickcampaigns. This is a mistake—long-tail keywords can offer incredible ROI because they're less competitive to rank for organically and less expensive to bid on for PPC. In addition, people using long-tail search queries are often highly qualified and more likely to convert.

The trick is to find a reliable, renewable source of longtail keywords that are relevant to your site and your business niche. Unfortunately, typical keyword suggestion tools don't deliver much in the way of long tail terms. They tend to return limited lists of very popular keywords, leaving you in the dark as to the long tail of search.

Steve Steinberger
561-281-8330

Thursday, May 8, 2014

SEO Checklist


Search Engine Optimization


The goal of search engineoptimization is to have the search engine spiders not only find your site and pages but also specifically rank the page relevance so that it appears at the top of the search engine results. The process of optimization is not a one-time process but requires maintenance, tuning, and continuous testing and monitoring.

Target Market Business Analysis
  • Website analysis. Analysis of meta sets/keywords, visible text and code to deter­mine how well you're positioned for search engines. For example, how much code do you have on a page compared to text?
     
  • Competitive analysis. Examination of content keywords and present engine rank­ings of competitive websites to determine an effective engine positioning strategy. Pick the top five results in the Google listing results to begin this process. Expand as necessary. Use tools such as Semrush.com and Keywordspy.com.
     
  • Initial keyword nomination. Development of a prioritized list of targeted search terms related to your customer base and market segment. Begin with this: What would you type into a search engine to find your business website or page? Then, ask your customers!

Keyword Research and Development
  • Keyword analysis. From nomination, further identify a targeted list of key­words and phrases. Review competitive lists and other pertinent industry sources. Use your preliminary list to determine an indicative number of recent search engine queries and how many websites are competing for each key­word. Prioritize keywords and phrases, plurals, singulars and misspellings. (If search users commonly misspell a keyword, you should identify and use it). Please note that Google will try to correct the term when searching, so use this with care.
     

  • Create page titles. Keyword-based titles help establish page theme and direction for your keywords.
     
  • Create meta tags. Meta description tags can influence click-throughs but aren't directly used for rankings. (Google doesn't use the keywords tag any­more.)
     
  • Place strategic search phrases on pages. Integrate selected keywords into your website source code and existing content on designated pages. Make sure to apply a sug­gested guideline of one to three keywords/phrases per content page and add more pages to complete the list. Ensure that related words are used as a natural inclu­sion of your keywords. It helps the search engines quickly determine what the page is about. A natural approach to this works best. In the past, 100 to 300 words on a page was recommended. Many tests show that pages with 800 to 2,000 words can outperform shorter ones. In the end, the users, the marketplace, content and links will determine the popularity and ranking numbers.
     
  • Develop new sitemaps for Google and Bing. Make it easier for search engines to index your website. Create both XML and HTML versions. An HTML version is the first step. XML sitemaps can easily be submitted via Google and Bing webmaster tools.
     
  • Submit website to directories (limited use). Professional search marketers don’t sub­mit the URL to the major search engines, but it’s possible to do so. A better and faster way is to get links back to your site naturally. Links get your site indexed by the search engines. However, you should submit your URL to directories such as Yahoo! (paid), Business.com (paid) and DMOZ (free). Some may choose to include AdSense (google.com/adsense) scripts on a new site to get their Google Media bot to visit. It will likely get your pages indexed quickly.

Continuous Testing and Measuring
Test and measure. Analyze search engine rankings and web traffic to determine the effectiveness of the programs you’ve implemented, including assessment of individual keyword performance. Test the results of changes, and keep changes tracked in an Excel spreadsheet, or whatever you're comfortable with.


Steve Steinberger
www.klicktwice.com
561-281-8330