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  • SEO Factor Blog

    October 9, 2006 So you have an optimized site, have started and continue a good link building campaign, your site is on your business cards, and you tell all your friends about it, but for some reason, it just feels like your site needs a little…push. What ever will you do? One of the best next steps is a press release. Basically, an article will be written on your site/business/product or whatever, and distributed to many online press sources. This will provide your story to many eyes, which can lead to other article written by other syndications like newspapers, radio shows, and, the really big one, some sort of mention on television.

    There are many services out there that provide a written article, promote the article, or both. One that comes to mind the most is PRWeb. They allow you to write the article and do the promoting, or write and promote it for you.

    My next post will touch more on the specifics of writing and promoting an article, but for now just know that it is a really good way to promote your business.

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  • SEO Factor Blog

    October 9, 2006 The online community is a fast one. So marketing online requires that you make use of new and creative avenues on a very mobile basis. One of the coolest thing I like about blogs is that you open your information up to anyone and everyone, giving a good opportunity for visibility. Because of our access to so much information conveniently, we want everything we want and we want it now. And that’s not an unacceptable request. This being the way of the Internet, there are easily hundreds of blog, forums, and newsgroups on which one can post in order to be heard and answered.

    One of the coolest of these avenues is Digg.com. Here is a community that allows for a member to read submissions from other members, and decide on whether the submission is spread worthy. These submissions are not necessarily provided by the member, but said member is more or less referring to a story, post, or some form of information from somewhere else on the Internet. That was confusing. Let’s say it like this.

    I go to my favorite news site. I read a story that I really liked and felt that it should be shared by all. I go to Digg, (because I’m a member) and I write a blurb like: “This is a really cool post about some guy who won a million dollars and spent the entire earnings on hot-air balloons and slingshots.” I would then link to the original story, and publish it on the Digg site in an appropriate category. Being that the story in our example deals with hot air, it would obviously be in a politics category (lol…seriously though. It would). This will give other members of Digg to check out the story, and decide on whether or not others should read it. They can ignore it, letting the story slip further into the abyss of nothingness, or they can click on a link that says “Digg.” The more “Diggs” a story gets, the more visibility it will receive. Now, this is obviously a great way to get exposure online from a large amount of people from many different areas of interests. In essence, you could post something on your blog or site, and write a blurb yourself for Digg in an attempt to drive traffic. I don’t necessarily disagree with this method of marketing, in fact I sometimes make use of it, but I really don’t like shameless posts for the sole reason of traffic building. I firmly believe there is plenty of useless stuff on the Internet already, and we don’t need anymore. If you choose this method, please be mindful of your fellow surfers. Like your site, any posts you make on forums or whatever other method you use, should be done so in an attempt to educate or share. Putting a link to your site is fine, but please don’t just run around yelling “Click On ME!!!” So check out Digg. When I post something that I believe should really be shared by all, I will post it there. Suffice to say, that’s not too often as I like to be respectful.

    Ya know, I think I’m gonna post this one on Digg with a blurb saying that this is a good post on telling others why they shouldn’t shamelessly post on Digg for self gratification…lol. Yeah. I’m gonna do that.

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  • SEO Factor Blog

    October 9, 2006 A press release is an article written on or about your company, site, product, or whatever. In respect to marketing, this will accommodate the exposure of your writing when promoted to many avenues of online press release viewers and publications . This is a good thing that can lead to a better thing. If someone reads your press release, and then writes an article for a local paper or some other medium, you get that much more exposure. There are press release services ranging from writers to promoters, to both. And depending on the release and amount of work that goes into it, it can be one of the easiest and most inexpensive ways of marketing online. But a good press release is important. Obviously, a press release will bring reader attention to your site. But there are far more benefits to them as well. There are a large number of sites that allow you to search for a press release or related news. That being said, you will want to take the same on-page optimization considerations when compiling your press release. This means good use (not stuffing) of your desired search terms, “internal” linking to pages or services on your site, and a link to your homepage on the press release. The links are especially important because, once distributed, these can, and most often do, provide a one way link to your site. We all know how important that is. You will also want to make sure that the press release grabs the attention. Nobody wants to read boring stories or sales pitches about things they don’t want to hear about. Make it compelling enough to make people want to go to your site. One press release is not enough. It’s a good idea to release one every 30, 60, and 90 days, at a maximum of three or four in total. This will show follow ups on your product, etc. The idea is to make the first press release an introduction to your business and site. The second one should be some sort of show of success or exceptional service offered, perhaps with testimonials. The third should show how well the site is doing, and maybe promote a different service or product following a touch on the previous press release topics. This will show a continuity, and increase the likelihood that someone will not only read and go to your site, but spread the word a little bit more.

    In conclusion, a good press release is a very neglected, but extremely rewarding marketing plan that should get as much attention as the “optimization” of your site.

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  • SEO Factor Blog

    October 9, 2006 There seems to be a lot of talk on various blogs and forums (check SEO Book) that Yahoo! is giving more consideration to inbound links than before. This would be interesting, as that is also the thing that, in my opinion, is ruining the validity of a Google search. All to often the high ranked sites on Google are those that have more money and time to dedicate to getting links that show them in a better light than they are. Let’s explain a smidgen. Let’s say I’m a website that sells life insurance. Obviously, I want as many clicks to my site as possible from anyone looking for insurance or anything remotely related in hopes of making a sale. Now, let’s say I’m a college student. I have to come up with a great deal of insurance information on my thesis about “how-to’s of insurance.” (please excuse this example. It’s nothing personal, I’m just not very creative.) Now I type “insurance information” in a Google search. Well what pops up other than the insurance company before. I search and search the site and all to no avail as I can not find an ounce on insurance “information.” OK. So maybe I should have looked up something a little more specific. How about “life insurance how to.” CRAP! Same company pops up.

    You see, in reference to my post on Link Popularity, said insurance company could dedicate a great deal of time and money getting “relevant” links and seeing the anchor tag as a great deal of other topics. Even if it doesn’t really have any “information” but only sells insurance. And insurance is a very big industry. There are many other industries; website design. iPod, computers. SEO. All topics that have a great deal of competition and overly saturated environments filled with professionals, and professional con artist the like. The idea is to get as many links as one can. You may even get some that you and I would consider relevant. But then Google looks and says “hey, look at all those links. They must be something good.” And thus the ranking. And such is the reason we search on Google and get BLAH, when (and I never thought I would be advocating anything Microsoft) a search on MSN pulls a higher likelihood of what I want. In my opinion, Yahoo! was not far behind MSN when searching for something I want or need. And unlike most of the SEO community, I do believe that Google just got stuck, and will eventually clean up the algo that decides ranking, but with this recent development, there may be some problems.

    All to often, when ranking in Yahoo!, we concentrate on proper placement of keywords and the Title tag. If less is given to that, and more to link popularity, who is to say that they won’t become more like Google? There is talk that they are going to try to make the link criteria a little better, meaning that the link would indeed have to be relevant, but I don’t think the crawlers and algorithms are to the point that they will decide that an insurance company with 10,000 links from everywhere will not show when I do my search, when the former professor of a college has a site with exactly what I’m looking for, but no website friends. I want to say, I am not anti-Google. As a matter of fact, for the most of my adolescent and adult life I was anti-Microsoft. (Microsoft. You can’t call the largest software company in the world “micro.” And soft is not the sentiment shared when something is rammed into our computers and overall computing experience, regardless of what I want.) But you have to give credit where it is do, and constructively criticize when it is needed. MSN pulls way more relevant results for me as of late. And I believe it is because they put more weight on the content of a page and site overall.

    Google has done, and continues to do, some great things for the online community. Not too long ago, they bought a company that offered some CAD software. This company charged a nice fee for the software. Google bought them, worked with them, and made the software better, and free. We all know of Blogger, right? I hope so. Cus if not you may want to take a small look around this page. Before Google it was “Blogger? What the heck is a Blogger?” You can see the ever increasing number of new developments from Google at their Labs page. Most of this stuff is just really cool, and a good portion of it is something that we would use everyday. So, I love Google. And I likely always will. I just think they need to rethink ranking.

    OK. I’m done.

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  • SEO Factor Blog

    October 6, 2006 Well. I’m chillin’ out and wanting to make something useful. So, I will use this time to educate others on a piece of SEO. I think first we are going to talk about the Meta tags. No no, let’s start a little bit before that. How the search engines “work.” Nobody knows for sure. I would also like to point out the idea of SEO. Search Engine Optimization. There is a very fine line between legit and Too Legit to Quit. Crap….nevermind…that was the 90’s wasn’t it? There is a fine line between legit and shady SEO. The term itself is a little misleading. The search engines are trying ever so diligently to bring relevant results to their customers, and Google is very concerned about making the Internet “better” all around. One of the first things I tell a client is that you should make a concise and well thought out site for your customers, not the search engines. When you start to look like you are doing things solely for the benefit of the search engines, you don’t do as well and may loose a potential customer because your site looks like someone took a poo poo on the screen. So, make a site for your customers, not the search engines, and the search engines will love you for it. “Real SEO” is taking the site made for customers, and modifying it so that it is easier for the search engines to read, and proving it’s relevance and benefit to specific term(s). See the difference? Now let’s discuss Meta tags. (I really hate discussing these because most people leave the conversation at that and assume that there is nothing more. If SEO were a car, Meta tags wouldn’t even be your lighter. There is so much more to it, and many more things that should be a priority. But, we must get through this, so hold my hand, and let’s frolic together, shall we?) Keywords: They don’t matter. No no no…stop talking….they don’t matter. If you want to argue this then make a website, put it on the Internet, and I will make a website of the exact same subject minus keywords, and we will see who wins. I will. You know why? Cus’ keywords don’t matter. Description: This can matter. Some things have been changing lately with regard to description. Google is acting kinda funny so you may hear that they aren’t showing the correct description. Without going into too much detail, we will say that Google is sometimes using the description from DMOZ. If you’re not in DMOZ, they are likely using the text beginning your site. It is important to have some/all of your major search terms in your description. MSN still relies heavily on it and Yahoo! puts a little weight there. Title: Arguably the most important tag. Yahoo! puts the most weight on this tag and the other probably give it the most priority than the other tags. So it’s pretty important that you use you major search terms in your title tag. It’s also important to make sure the words in your title tag are used liberally throughout your text. Making use of bold and header tags is also a good idea for the words in your title. Also, it is commonly said around here that your title should be copied and pasted onto your homepage. This is not so. It is important to use these terms as close to the beginning of your text as possible, and again giving weight to them is a good idea, but some titles just can’t be copied exactly on your content. So, if keywords weren’t important, why would one even list them? I feel it’s a good idea to make a good keyword list and keep the tag just for my train of thought. Search engines still crawl all of your code, and the idea for content is to show a crawler how many times a term is used. For all that is SEO please do NOT repeat terms all over your keywords to try to “trick” the search engine into thinking you make use of a term a lot. They will see this and not like it at all. Again, just use it as your train of thought and keep track of what terms you are concentrating on.

    Ok, this does it for Meta tags. We will continue our SEO conversation more as time goes on. And by conversation, I mean I will talk and you will listen. Just kidding. SEO is information and information should be free. Some of you know who I am, and should feel more than comfortable to ask me anything. We all start somewhere, and I will be more than obliged to help in any way. If you don’t know me, please feel free to email me. I think my email is on here somewhere.

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  • SEO Factor Blog

    October 7, 2006 CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is a very great way to design and layout a site in terms of SEO. We have discussed how the crawlers will read through the HTML of your site and how this helps determine how you will be ranked. It’s best to make a website easy to read for these crawlers so as to provide the pertinent information to them promptly. Though the algorithm that determines your ranking is very complex, the crawler that crawls your site is somewhat simple. The search engine crawlers are much like Internet browsers with a few differences. First, the browser that is used to crawl is not updated on a basis comparable to personal browsers like IE or Firefox. To make an update to a search engine browser is such a tedious and daunting task, and the idea that so much responsibility relies on it, that they roll out these updates a little less frequently. Second, the search engine crawlers can only see text. They can not see images, so they rely heavily on the alt text on your images.

    That being said, you want to create an easily crawled environment with as little unneeded tags and code as possible. CSS can help you do this. You see, CSS helps define standards for many design and layout features that will be used on your site like font color, background color, placement of content blocks, etc. Obviously all of these things are defined during the actual implementation of such features in HTML. This can cause a great deal of extra code, especially on larger and more detailed pages. In CSS, they can all be defined one time, and used throughout the site by calling to the definitions. This, obviously, alleviates a great deal of code on the site allowing for faster loading time and ease of a crawler…umm….crawl. Check out the CSS tutorial here at Tizag.

    Now, CSS can be implemented in three ways. Internally there are 2 ways. You can make calls to a style while writing the code. This will happen throughout the coding process, and it will take the amount of code down a bit, but not as much as the other 2 ways. The second internal way is to make the definitions in the HEAD, and the rest of the site will call to this area. This will alleviate a great deal of code, but poses another issue. The crawlers read like you and I. Left to right, top to bottom. Putting a lot of information in the HEAD will make for that much more code the crawler has to get through. Again, this isn’t entirely bad, but can be taken just one step further. The third way, and in my opinion the best, is to implement the CSS in a separate file all together, and call to the file for the definition. This will relieve so much more code, and increase load time a great deal. Again, more can be read on this at Tizag.

    Now I want to touch on a subject that is not pressed enough. SEO procedures known as “black hat” are any methods used to trick or otherwise exploit a search engine to get better rankings and traffic. These methods rarely work and if it does not for long at all. Once one of these methods are caught by the search engines, you are left with very few options to get out of the grave you just dug. I think I will post on this next, but for now just be wary that this is a bad idea. That being said, using CSS you could theoretically place text on a site, and cover it completely so as to hide it from the viewer, yet showing to the search engines. It is widely believed that the search engines can not read CSS, but I don’t believe this to be entirely true. There is a little debate on this, and some good evidence on either side of the opinion, but if they can’t read it now, they will one day soon. And that will be a bad day for a website using this tactic.

    I hope this helps in understanding how CSS can help your SEO jobs. As always, if there are any questions at all, please feel free to find or e-mail me. I’m always in the mood to talk SEO.

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  • SEO Factor Blog

    October 9, 2006 I’m getting an increasingly large amount of questions about Google’s Adsense and whether or not they should be implemented on a site. First, let me talk about what Adsense is.

    We are all familiar on Google’s Adwords. If not, I will post something on this blog a little later, but to suffice, Adwords is Google’s Pay-Per-Click service. this allows you to place a bid on a word or term, and your site’s link will be placed on a sponsored listing section in Google. Every time someone clicks on your link, you are charged a fee.

    These sponsored listings can also appear on other websites that take part in Adsense. This allows for me as a webmaster, to place a piece of code on my site, that will show advertisements for other relevant businesses. When someone clicks on the advertisement from my site, I am given a small compensation. There are sites out there that don’t offer anything more than Adsense, and make a very good amount of money doing so. If you are getting 500,000 hits to your site a month, imagine how many people might click on the ad and in turn put money in your pocket. There is an unnamed site that ranks very very well in Google for various dating terms. They are nothing more than Adsense and links to other dating services and forums. I know personally that they make an average of $30,000 a month. Not bad. But… If I have to get to a site by going through another site, why am I at that site in the first place. Why would I want to waste precious clicking time, navigating more than one site to get to what I want or need? This is a sentiment shared by the majority of the online community, and search engines. I place Adsense on most of my sites, but only in the idea that these advertisements may indeed help my visitors. Of the cuff, I don’t offer an SEO service, but information. There are some good companies out there that do, and I don’t mind sending someone there. But there are a few things to consider when using Adsense. First, it should view well with your site. Try to match color schemes and layout so that it doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb. Also, Try not to place them all over the place or where there should be pertinent information. People are at YOUR site, not someone else’s. Treat visitors as such and the rewards will be better.

    Note: Sometimes you will see a banner at the top of my blog for SEO Book. I really like this guy so don’t click on the banner to get to him if interested. It charges him obviously. Click on the link on my sidebar. Goes to the same place.

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