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Tag: search engine optimization

  • SEO Services

    Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the act of making edits to your site to gain rankings and traffic. But there’s more to it than that.

    Before your site can even rank, you need to know what it is people are searching in order to find your products or services. We know they are going to Google, but what are they typing in?

    And once they type it in, are they finding your website? Well they should.

    Rank Higher in the Search Engines

    Our SEO Services will help you rank higher in the search engines, using only the most accepted methods as determined by the search engines themselves. By ranking higher, we can drive more traffic to your site and increase sales of your service or product.

    SEO Services You Need

    We don’t lump our SEO services into pages or try to fit every project into a pre-conceived plan. Every project gets a customized SEO solution based on the needs of your business, your budget and your goals.

    Google Places and Local SEO
    Local SEO involves focusing your efforts on ranking for terms that people in your area are using to find your products or services.

    Do It For Me SEO
    Our Do-It-For-Me SEO services will allow you to focus on other aspects of your business while we take care of your website. We take a direct approach to the optimization and promotion of your site so you don’t have to.

    SEO Consulting
    If you have the ability to edit your site yourself, or someone on staff, but still need an SEO direction, then our SEO consulting services are for you. We offer a range of consulting solutions ranging from on-site training, customized strategy plans and phone consulting. You can even keep us on retainer to answer questions as you continue to optimize and promote your website.

  • SEO Company in Jacksonville, Florida – SEO Factor

    You have a plan. You started a business. You even have a website. Now what?

    You need a way to show the search engines that you are exactly what people are looking for when they need your products or services.

    We show Google that your site is in fact what people are looking for. Our SEO solutions provide your site with higher rankings for search terms that matter, and our PPC management services get quality clicks to your site at the lowest cost possible.

    By charging SEO Factor with the task of promoting your site, you increase its potential for ranking and traffic, and thus the potential for increased income. Most small and medium-sized businesses already make use of a Pay-Per-Click option, but aren’t getting the returns they should be.

    From search engine optimization to PPC management, we create a custom strategy with your business’ needs and goal in mind. We don’t just drive traffic to your site, we drive converting traffic.

  • Website Design and Internet Marketing

    What can SEO Factor do for you? That’s not just one of those run-of-the-mill marketing questions, we really mean it. What can we do for you?

    From Website design to Search Engine Optimization, SEO Factor has a full breadth of services to help your business begin and enhance your online efforts.

    When it comes to promoting your business, one rule stands above the rest; be where you customers are. If they don’t know about you, they can’t buy from you. And today, your customers are online. If you don’t have a presence on the world’s largest medium, how can you expect to beat your competition? When you get down to it, you need 2 basic things.

    SEO Factor gives both of them to you, and they are catered to fit your needs. Furthermore, we provide a wide variety of other services to not only help you get online and gain traffic, but to help your business beat the competition who is already doing the same thing.

  • SEO Factor » Internet Marketing and SEO from the Mind of Josh Garner

    • Featured Article
    • About Josh Garner
      Todd Mintz Talks on Resumes and Job Searching

      Every once in a while, I get really lucky and connect with someone in the biz that I feel could help me grow. If you know me, you know I’m not one to idolize anyone, but I do believe that if you surround yourself with smart, successful people that you will start to gain some […]

      SEO Factor was a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Website Promotion blog I started while working with Website Pros. As their SEO, I was the point of contact for a great number of people, including those that were hearing about SEO for the first time. At first, I used the blog as a way of documenting a lot of beginner SEO information. As with all things, the SEO Factor site grew and changed, and is now the main point of promotion for my services as in independent SEO.

      Read More About Josh Garner

  • Bad Information From MSNBC Doesn’t Help Anyone – SEO Factor

    You are here: Home » The Client Side » Bad Information From MSNBC Doesn’t Help Anyone

    Today, I’m pretty upset. I read an article. I speak on an article on ‘Tech ‘Solutions’ Your Small Biz Can’t Use‘ over at msnbc.com (there’s a little businessweek.com logo there, so it may have come from them). So what is it that made me angry?

    Not knowing is not a problem. Lord knows there are plenty of things I don’t know. Unwillingness to learn? Well, that’s a personal decision. Bad-mouthing? Hey, if you’ve had a bad experience, let the world know, a better product may result? All these things balled into one? That’s just ridiculous. The article basically touches on 10 Tech Solutions that the writer, Gene Marks, feels should not be bothered with by a small business owner. Funny thing is, I consult to, and help small business owners a great deal on a freelance and corporate level, and make use of a good number of these items with a degree of success. If they weren’t successful, I wouldn’t be using them. It would be a waste of my time, the clients money, and in the end, result in fewer clients. And my son’s XBox 360 game collection will not have that.

    I want to go over these items, and touch on why Mr. Marks has a thing or 2 to learn about our world.

    1. RSS Feeds

    Bob, an electrical contractor, knows what RSS stands for, and I feel sorry for him. He had the misfortune of signing up for an RSS feed. This misnomer is designed to make us feel like we’re getting a “feed” of data just like all the really, really important media people do. When he first tried RSS, he thought, “Wow, I can get immediate updates on product and industry developments, important news from Yahoo! (YHOO), and even get a new joke from The Onion, all as soon as they’re published!” Instead, he was “fed” an endless stream of meaningless items displayed in an overly large browser window that winds up distracting more than informing. Like Bob, most of the business owners I know have abandoned RSS and gone back to controlling when they get their information. Still don’t know what RSS stands for? Trust me, it’s just not that important.

    Such is the world of RSS. If a blog or site doesn’t keep quality, fresh content coming, people take their feeds off, and replace them with better ones. It’s our circle of life. Instead of telling Bob that it would be better to not bother with it, educate him on the convenience it can provide, and the insight he can gather by subscribing to the right ones. Let him know of some tips on discerning decent blogs or news sites to enhance his knowledge of his own industry.

    2. Spam Filters

    I get this question at just about every presentation I give to business owners: “What spam filters do you recommend?” My answer: “None.” They all suck. Let’s face it: You’re not going to eliminate spam in your business. Instead you’re going to waste money on the latest filtering technology, which does nothing more than block that key e-mail you were awaiting from a prospective customer. Or you’ll require a sender to complete a Sudoku puzzle before “allowing” their e-mail to reach your in-box. In the end, it’s cheaper for your employees to just sort and delete spam as it comes in.

    You heard it. It’s cheaper to pay another person that could probably be better placed in another position, to sit all day and delete spam. Or, you could spend the 30 minutes it would take to get that nifty little JavaScript to hide your email address from scrapers. Then, take the other 30 minutes a week to tweak your filters properly. Yes, it will take time, and yes, it will be a lot cheaper and more productive than having a human dedicated to this. Just because you don’t understand something, Gene, doesn’t mean it’s a waste of time. It just means you have to try a little harder.

    3. Antivirus Software

    Betsy was looking for just the right technology to slow down her employees’ computers and significantly degrade the performance of her business applications. Well, she found it, and it’s called antivirus software. As an added bonus, this software prevents her from installing or upgrading applications without a team of NASA-trained IT consultants. Betsy’s spent more money with her IT firm trying to work around antivirus software than she probably would’ve spent if she received an actual virus. What should a business owner do to avoid viruses, worms, and other evil applications that can wreak havoc in our systems? Our tools are still too limited. Even telling your employees, for the 900th time, not to open up suspicious files doesn’t seem to work. I don’t have a very good answer for Betsy’s dilemma. But I do know the current group of antivirus software applications don’t do the job for small businesses.

    Same response as above, except this time, consider those credit card numbers you are keeping on your computers. Sigh…

    4. Blogs

    Jamie! You started a blog for your business? That’s dope! Now go out and get some accessories, like a pair of black-rimmed rectangular glasses and a Starbucks card. And oh, by the way, you’ll need to set aside about 17 hours each day to keep it fresh. Dude, it’ll be so viral. What’s that, Jamie? You’re not in the media business? You don’t work for a software company? You just own a hardware store? Dude, that’s a drag! If you don’t have something new to say each day, no one’s going to bother to stop by and check out your blog. It’ll be, like, so lame. And if you do have something to say, just be careful you don’t give away too much information. You didn’t consider all this? You don’t have the time? You’re not such a great writer? Word.

    Jamie. Hardware. Hmmm…

    Try this. Turn your simple hardware store into the authority on fix-it-yourself information for your customers. One post per week on a new subject: fixing a leaky pipe, building a deck (which could be a 5 – 10 part series, pulling visitors continually), fixing garbage disposals, humane pest traps, etc. There’s one a week forever. Also, Jaime, I know you get questions on an hourly basis. “How do I” is probably a phrase you hear more than anything else. Spend another post per week on answering the most common question of that week. There’s another set of posts for another infinite amount of time. Hey, Jaime, don’t forget to invite Bob to your RSS, he needs something good to read.

    5. Search Engine Optimization

    You mean for $5,000 I can get my company’s name on the very top of Google’s search results? Where do I sign? Many business owners have been fooled by the allure of search engine optimization [SEO] — and I’m one of them. I forked over a bunch of dough to a firm in California that promised to get my company’s name on “all the major search engines” when someone was looking for products that we sell. How did they plan to do this? I’m still not really sure, but it had something to do with spiders, black hats, and link farms. That should have been enough of a hint that witchcraft was involved. After a brief flirtation with page 47 ofMSN’s search results, I gave up. SEO probably does the job for companies with oodles of money, but not for the typical small business.

    I’m shaking my fist right now Gene. I’m very sorry you had problems with a past SEO. Unfortunately it’s a topic that plaques our industry. Instead of giving up on a service that could promote your business in an incredibly cost effective and successful manner, put some research time into it. Learn the basics of SEO. Learn what a legit SEO can do for you. Learn the right questions to ask. For the success of your business, learn to learn. I know I seem harsh on you Gene, and I probably shouldn’t mean to as it’s not your fault, but your a businessman. If you are going to be successful, you’re going to have to learn to do some research before pouring your money into anything.

    Seriously, Gene? Witchcraft?

    6. Mobile Applications

    Before you buy into any software vendor’s promise to “enable a mobile application” for employees to use on their cell phones, think really hard about the reality of that claim. Remember that time you used your phone to look up the weather in Chicago? Remember how the seasons actually changed while you were waiting for the forecast to load? Your customer may die of old age waiting for you to enter an order or look up an inventory item on a cell phone. Mobile applications will be a great thing someday. Just like hovercrafts, telepods, and renewable energy. But for a small business on a limited budget, it’s still science fiction.

    In this time of information handling, it would be very unwise for any business of any size to completely discount the need for mobile applications. I cherish my Treo, and more than appreciate those sites that make browsing with it achievable. Also, there’s this new phone/thing that came out recently. I think it’s called the iSomething. I can’t remember. But I know it was some sort of big seller. Apparently people are using it to browse the Intersomethingorother. Business decisions are made every minute, and the leaders know that it doesn’t stop. The leaders making the decisions are constantly on the move. Give them something that makes that move easier to cope with, and they will use it. Now, once they are using it, give them a proper means to use it to view your product/service/RSS feed.

    7. Customer Relationship Management Software

    Readers of my work may find this item a little surprising. I’ve always been a big proponent of customer relationship management [CRM] software. One big reason is that my company sells this stuff. And we have a lot of small business clients who have really used this technology well. Unfortunately, we have a lot of other customers who haven’t been as successful. Fred, a manufacturer of roofing materials, is one of them. Fred and I both learned that aCRM system doesn’t work for a small business without an internal “champion” who takes ownership of it. His $20,000 system just sat there. No one used it. At best, we hope it will become a glorified Rolodex one day. ACRM system can be a good thing, but it takes more than paying for the software and training. Without a substantial internal investment,CRM won’t work.

    This really boils down to the “research before you buy” thing again, but that’s been said. Instead, I say to Fred, roofing materials? I took a summer job as a framer, and I know the owner of the company (4 man group by the way) had to keep up with other companies, clients, clients’ clients, manufacturers, and a ton of other contacts. Some needed contact constantly, and notes were constantly needed. Maybe $20,000 was a bit much (I ended up using my then super Visual Basic skills to make one for them), but you have it now. Learn to use it, turn to the online community if you need help. It will save you time, money, and heartache in the future.

    Want to consider a real waste of money? Think about the lawyer fees you have to pay when you lein on a house, and can’t provide information when it’s needed. I can personally attest that $20,000 will be a dream.

    8. AdWords

    John’s a pretty smart guy. He runs a company that sells specialty pet foods. He manages his own investments. He keeps an eye on his taxes. But I’ve found a way to turn John into a blithering idiot. I’ve asked him to figure out how to use Google’s (GOOG) AdSense profitably. Are you interested in a mind-numbing exercise? Give AdSense a shot. Or Yahoo SM or MSN AdCenter. Don’t you know how much to budget for “clicks” on your ad? Are you just a little suspicious as to who exactly is counting these “clicks” that conveniently turn into revenue for these companies? Like John, you’ve just entered the alternate universe of Internet advertising! Here’s a word of wisdom: Leave the mass-market advertising to Coke (KO) and Pepsi (PEP). Small business owners should stick to less mystifying forms of promotion.

    I’m not even going to expand further on the fact that this is on MSNBC.com.

    John, you have 2 options here (well, three, but one is to keep listening to Gene, and I don’t really think he knows what he’s talking about): you can either take this task on yourself, or you can hire a legitimate SEM to help you out. IF you want to take it on yourself, Google offers a ton of tutorials, and eventually a certification. IF you want to hire someone, there are plenty of places to look. Just ask, and you will find. Do some searching though. Gene had some problems in the past, and I don’t want you to have the same kind.

    9. Online Video

    I totally agree with that guy I think who wants us to “leave Britney alone.” And yes, Barack Obama is pretty hot in his YouTube video. But none of this means online video is a workable medium for small business owners. Ron, a reseller of computer software, thought his business would be perfect for online video, what with the amount of Web-based training and support he provides. Ron figured he could post some videos on YouTube to help his clients. He soon learned that the cost and complexity was just too high. Quality videos require production companies. Otherwise you’ll have grainy, useless footage. And videos that run beyond a certain length aren’t even YouTube-able. They need to be housed with companies that sell storage space. Ron soon got sick of the process. Online videos are great — if you’ve got the budget of Time Warner (TWX) behind you.

    Cost? YouTube is free. So is Windows Movie Maker (It should be on your computer…right…….now). It’s not the best, but it works. Ron, your a computer guy, you shouldn’t have too many problems with the initial setup.

    Take it from an online marketing guy, if your videos are so long you can’t upload them, they are too long for your customers. Setup a YouTube channel, hand it out to your customers, break up the videos into series, set them up on RSS, get some AdWords for them, make sure they are mobile ready, contract an SEO or SEM to help you promote them, and setup your spam filter properly (do it right and you’ll grow more than you think). If it doesn’t take off after 30 minutes, give it time. Promote it effectively.

    Ron, I would have killed for video help when I was a budding computer teen, trying to learn my way through that stupid A+ certification (no YouTube back then). Or later when C++ turned from fun into I/O strings (easy my ass). Stick to it. Your customers will love you, and so will the new ones you gain. People, online more than ever, have a neat nack for picking out the ones that are legitimately out to help others. Success usually follows.

    10. Web 2.0

    Want to make a room of small business owners go completely silent? Ask them to define Web 2.0. The world is full of industries coming up with sexy terms to create buzz and mystique around their genius. Web 2.0 is no different. A Web guy will tell you, “It’s the next generation of Internet technology.” And how does this affect small business owners? I hear all these great predictions of earth-shaking developments to come. I hear words like “mashup” and “wiki,” and I’m still trying to figure out how these affect my business. All I really see are the same accounting, inventory, and order entry programs from the days of Reagan, albeit with new window dressing. I think we’re supposed to be using Web 2.0 technologies to do more work online. But unless you’re running an online business, these tools seem to have little relevance.

    Give me a second. I have a ton of smart little remarks for this one, I’m just trying to pick the right one.

    Wanna make a room full of parents go silent? Offer free Britney Spears babysitting classes. Wanna see me go silent, I’ll place the video on YouTube (it’ll only take me a second Gene) of my face as I watched my son open the drum set my parents bought for him for Christmas. My point? Given the right circumstance with the right question, you can create any desired outcome. Don’t use that as a logic.

    I don’t know what “web guy” would provide you with such a vague explanation as the one you provided, but I’m guessing it’s the same one that he was told by some other “web guy” that was more concerned with looking smart than helping the room full of budding “web guys” he was addressing. Wait a minute, I’m a web guy…

    Gene, Ron, Bob, Jaime. Let me tell you about Web 2.0. It’s not a fancy term we use to be smart. It’s an idea. It’s an idea to take an online presence to the next step by allowing the input and co-operation of the visitors to your website. By turning a one-sided conversation into a collection of the thoughts and ideas of your visitors, you open your site to a new level of growth. Let me give you an example (that’s what us web guys do when we try to help).

    Let’s say Ron takes his videos online. He could post them on a site for his customers to view at their pleasure, and leave it at that. That would be Web 1.0. Then, he could setup a voting system, allowing for his visitors to vote on the videos. That’s a little closer. For each video, Ron could setup a discussion forum, so that customers could ask questions online, and Ron, or any number of other visitors could easily answer them. Allowing for questions to be asked, and answered, a community to grow, and the warm feeling a potential customer gets knowing that others are taking part in the same thing.

    Let Me Wrap This Up
    It feels like I’m ranting, and I think it’s because I am. When I first looked at your article, Gene, I thought “well, this is my job. I should be nice and educate him.” But then I came to my senses and realised that you are in some sort of position to consult to these people. You also seem to be in a position to educate people through your articles on MSNBC. These people are looking to you, Gene (can I call you Gene?) for help and understanding in areas that you so obviously don’t have a grasp on. Instead of actually helping them by either researching the questions, or at the least sending them to someone that can (tell them about my RSS), you shuck it off, delaying or preventing all together a chance that they might have to take their business to the next level. This is extremely irresponsible, Gene, and your causing more problems than anything else.

  • About

    SEO Factor and Josh Garner
    SEO Factor was a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Website Promotion blog I started while working with Website Pros. As their SEO, I was the point of contact for a great number of people, including those that were hearing about SEO for the first time. At first, I used the blog as a way of documenting a lot of beginner SEO information. As with all things, the SEO Factor site grew and changed, and is now the main point of promotion for my services as in independent SEO.

    As an SEO, I have been providing SEO services to small and medium sized businesses for 4 years on both an in-house and independent basis. I have a strong background in local Internet marketing, having worked on major hospitality brands like Marriott, Hilton and Best Western. I have also had the pleasure of working with large, national websites offering both services and products.

    My Thoughts on Working
    Though I have nothing against the SEO firm model, I feel that I am able to offer a more attentive and economical service as an independent provider. Unfortunately, most firms have a double agenda. Sure, they may very well provide a decent service, but they also have to make a substantial profit. After years of working in-house or for an agency, I’ve found myself agreeing less with big company processes and policies, and wanting more out of the quality of my work and services.

    To give you an idea of my work philosophy, I can tell you that there are no clean firetrucks in my office, and I try not to become or work with clowns or superstitious pigeons. This indirectly stands to reason why I charge per project as opposed to hourly. I prefer to work in the mindset of providing success and return, as opposed to more hours. In the end, I work smarter, not harder.

    Please feel free to read more about my SEO services, the SEO Blog or contact me with any questions.

  • Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

    Posted by admin on Tue, 01/22/2008 – 01:12

    Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is defined by WikiPedia as the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results for targeted keywords. It sounds a little overwhelming when you first read that definition, so hopefully we can help you understand what SEO is, and how it can be used to help an online business.

    The SEO
    My name is Josh Garner, and I’m a freelance SEO (Search Engine Optimizer). “Hi Josh.” Hopefully I can explain a bit better than the definition above what SEO is, and is all about.

    As an SEO, my job is to “optimize” a website so as to attain higher rankings in the search engine, and provide my clients with a return on their investment; be it making a sale online, or getting a phone call, or a walk through the door, etc. By “optimize,” I mean that I will fine tune the site’s structure, content, meta information, and a large number of other factors (as much as I can find will appear on this blog) so the search engines will take a liking to it.

    The Search Engines
    If you haven’t already (and I’m pretty sure you have) go to Google.com. Type in a search. Anything at all. You see all that stuff? Well, that’s what happens when you search on Google. Google is a search engine, and its job is to process your search query, and return to you a list of websites it believes to be most relevant. In this respect, most of the major search engines (Google, Yahoo!, and MSN) act in much the same way. They take what you type in, and give you what they think you want. I say think because, like anything else man-made, it isn’t a perfect system. As such, this is really where SEO comes in.

    You see, the search engines have a vested interest to return results that you want. They make their money through advertising, so the more users they have, the more lucrative their ad spots will become. Likewise, if you were to use Google, and it consistently returned poor results, you would soon leave, and the ad spots would decrease in value; at the same time pushing the value of the search engine you decided to move to up just a little more. So, how do they determine what the right results are?

    Relevancy
    This term is used a lot in the SEO world. The idea for a search engine is to return relevant results, meaning results that would satisfy your search. Once a website is included in a search engines index (the database that holds a record of all sites that a search engine has crawled and listed) an algorithm makes a number of decision on it’s relevancy to terms depending on the site’s content. The more relevant a site is to a certain word or term, the higher its location in a search engine’s results page (SERP). Now, there are a lot of things that determine a website’s relevancy in a search engine’s eyes, and all the engines determine it in different ways.

    Overall, a site’s content, its markup (HTML, the way your site is built), and it’s popularity online make up a large portion of the relevance determination. Those, along with the selection of the words you want your site to target, the competition of those terms, where and how they are used on your page(s), what other websites link to yours, how many sites link to yours, how other sites link to yours, and a great giant number of other fine details help to push your relevancy score higher; and so your rankings will follow. Sound like a lot? It is. But it’s not as much as it sounds like it is right now. I’m sure there are a few questions about how SEO can help a business, or some more details on the ranking factors, but first may want to read ‘SEO Myths’ to see a little bit about what SEO is not.

  • The Designer’s Guide To SEO

    I received some feedback from a few designer-oriented folks over at the FreelanceSwitch forums, and would very much like to put something together that they can use. These guys and gals are designing sites all day for their clients, so they don’t have the time to do all the research and learning we do over in the SEO world.

    I put this together as a way for those outside of the SEO trenches to reference during their site design and creation. I hope it builds as I get more questions, into a standard designers can use to make sites ascrawlable and crawler friendly as possible.

    Please note, though, that the items involved will not necessarily gain fantastic rankings, as there is a reason it has taken me and my SEO brethren years to get this stuff to work. It gets a lot deeper and more involved to get sites to rank well, and drive quality traffic. Rather, this guide will help to prevent some pitfalls that designers may not even know they are employing.

    It should also be noted that most SEO questions are usually answered with “well that depends on…” As such, these are some basic ideas to be mindful of, and understand that each site carries its own challanges and required areas in regard to SEO. 

    If you have any questions about the information contained, please feel free to let me know, and I’ll do my best to answer them.

     
    Navigation

    • Make sure to opt for text link navigation as opposed to images.
    • If you have to use images, make proper use of the alt attribute.
    • In the alt attribute of navigation images, be clear and concise as opposed to stuffing it with keywords. If it’s the link to the used cars page, make the alt “used cars” as opposed to “used cars for sale in jacksonville florida cars for sale used.”

    Title Tag

    • Make sure the title tag for each page is unique and relevant to the page it is on.
    • Try not to exceed 70 characters in the title tag.
    • Don’t stuff the title with keywords in an attempt to rank. Instead, make it easy to read and relevant.
    • The title is seen in the search engines’ results pages, so it should make sense as well as make use of relevant terms.

    Good Title = “Freelance SEO services by Josh Garner”
    Bad Title = “Freelance SEO, SEO Services, Freelance SEO Services, Josh Garner”   Yuck!

    Description Tag

    • Make the Description unique and relevant for each page.
    • Try not to exceed 180 characters.
    • Don’t stuff the description with keywords in an attempt to rank. Instead, make it easy to read and relevant.
    • The Description is often used in the search engines’ results pages, so make it a good call to action with the necessary search terms as applicable.

    Good Description = “Josh Garner provides Freelance SEO services to small and medium sized businesses.”
    Bad Description = “Freelance SEO Services, SEO services, Freelance SEO by Josh Garner. Offering Search Engine Optimization and SEO services for freelance and such.”

    Keywords Meta Tag

    • Highly Debated.
    • Most say it doesn’t help, I’ve seen proof otherwise. However, it is extremely low on the list of things that matter the most.
    • Spend a few minutes here, nothing more.
    • Use it as a means to store the search terms you are targeting for the pages of your site.
    • Put 5 or 6 terms on each page.
    • Don’t stuff with keywords to get more coverage, this is exactly why it isn’t weighed upon by the search engines anymore.

    Good Keywords = “Freelance SEO Services, Search Engine Optimization Services, SEO Services, Small Business SEO”
    Bad Keywords = “SEO, search engine optimization, Search Engine Optimization, SEO Services, Services SEO, seo services, services seo, freelance SEO, freelance seo, Freelance SEO, Freelance seo”

    Content

    • Go for quality over quantity.
    • Use the search terms as necessary.
    • Don’t stuff search terms in the content in a fashion that would hamper the readability.
    • Use of header tags (h1, h2, etc.) should be used for intended readability and as a title for the page/paragraph accordingly.
    • Don’t stuff the header tags.
    • H1 and h2 tags should be used at the top of the page accordingly, and lower header tags to introduce paragraphs.

    Images

    • Use the alt attribute appropriately.
    • Don’t use the alt attribute as a means to stuff keywords.
    • Describe the image.
    • Image file names should also be descriptive.
    • More on the alt attribute.

  • Optimize For The Eyes, Nots The Bots

    I know the title sounds a little weird, but it rhymes, so it must be true.

    This was an article that I wrote for Andy Beal’s contest (PDF) a couple of years ago. Looking back, I would like to re-write it, as there are just a few points I would say differently now. I’m not too sure if I was trying to appeal to the audience, but some of the statements I made don’t really make sense.

    I was looking through some old posts to rehash and repost to appeal to the budding SEO or small business owner looking for information. This was an idea that I had, and still have, about the SEO process. Obviously, we are tasked to gain rankings, but there is a lot more to it; and getting too wrapped up in “rankings” can in fact end in us neglecting the bigger picture (which is creating and having better overall websites). So, I give you the updated version of an old article.

    What does ‘SEO’ mean? Search Engine Optimization, duh. No, no. What does it meeeaaan? It means ‘to optimize a site for search engines.’ Sigh. I guess that’s pretty close, but going with that thought alone can actually land you in a bit of trouble.

    We often talk on SEO and what the searchers are looking for, how they are acting, how to optimize a site, etc. But we often neglect a very important idea. Simply optimizing a site for the search engines isn’t really the best idea. If we do that and that alone, then we won’t likely find success in our business endeavor. We would then neglect our clients’ needs and/or any help that we might provide to the online community.

    Optimizing a site for the sole benefit of the search engines could result in spam or content that sounds too repetitive because we are trying to make sure our keywords are on the homepage a certain number of times to achieve ‘density.’ We may end up getting tons of links to and from areas that are less than acceptable because we keep thinking that ‘Link Popularity’ means ‘get as many as we can.’ We may end up in jail because every time we walk into Albertsons we keep hearing ‘It’s your store.’ So, what should we be doing?

    Yes, SEO means ‘to optimize a site for search engines,’ but we should be thinking of it as ‘optimizing a site, so as to show search engines what the site is about and how it can help the
    online community/consumer.’ If you have relevant copy on your site, you will likely be using your desired search terms sufficiently anyway. If you have relevant and helpful text on your site, you will get quality inbound links from other sites simply on merit. If you just remember that it’s just a jingle, your hands won’t become idle and attempt to steal your favorite candy bar.

    In closing, we shouldn’t be making and optimizing sites for the search engines alone. Consider the site and its visitors. Given proper content and quality, the optimization-for-ranking efforts will get the visitors. Yes, optimize the site for the crawlers. Make sure you aren’t doing anything too spammy. Correct errors. Clean up the code. Make proper use of header tags and meta tags. But do this for your visitors, not just the search engines. The search engines will love you for it.

    With this, and any other post, please read the disclaimer.

  • WordPress Optimization | WordPress SEO | Optimize Your WordPress Blog » SEO Factor

    « SEO Chicks – SEO Factor’s New Slogan » 10 June 2007

    Over the last few years blogging has taken leaps and bounds with not only it’s writer-ship, but it’s amazing uses to market a mother site, one’s views, or even producing an income all on it’s own. Because of it’s ease of use and publishing, anyone can (and almost everyone does) have a blog. They are incredibly easy to start (as of this writing I have personally created and marketed 6 blogs in the last 3 months. Not all mine I promise), incredibly easy to use, and ever increasingly easy to promote. With this article I want to go, step-by-step, through the process I have begun to fall into and show you how to optimize your WordPress blog for search engine rankings.

    A lot of this is SEO as normal, with optimization of the pages, titles, description, and content. But with WordPress optimization (and blogging in general) there are a few things to be aware of, a few things to make your efforts run a little smoother.

    The Blog
    The first thing we need to decide is whether or not you should be blogging in the first place. Blogging is open to anyone, but to be effective in the search engines and your soon-to-be readers, you should ask yourself a few questions:

    Are you blogging as a personal journal, to share your personal opinions, to promote your business? If the first answer is yes, you needn’t worry as much about the Search Engine Optimization and marketing that will be detailed here. However, if the latter is more your reasoning, you will want to take a lot of this to heart. That, and read the SEO Factor Blog (I will be shamelessly promoting myself throughout this article, get used to it).

    • What are you blogging about?

    Much like the last question, you need to decide what the general theme of your blog is going to be. Are you going to use it to promote news in your industry, news and new products for your company, free tips for your readers? These are all very valid reasons to blog, but success usually comes to a blog that has this question answered early on, so think it over.

    • Are you willing to write on a schedule?

    This is a pretty important one. A blog is only as active as it’s writer. It’s seems to be best if you can post at a minimum of 3 times a week. There are indeed bloggers that write only once or twice a week (and they are extremely successful), stating that they will only post when it is of the highest quality, but these bloggers are not the norm. And because we will be using RSS and other promotion techniques to ensure return visitors, you will want to provide something to your readers regularly, or they might leave.

    Once you have all those questions answered, you are ready. Well, let’s talk about some methods on that last answer. Again, I advocate no less than 3 posts a week. “Well, Josh,” I’m sure you are thinking, “we can’t all take time out of our days like you can just to write a little something.” And I say to you, Mr. or Mrs. WordPress Blog Optimization Article Reader, “you don’t have to stick to a ‘normal’ schedule.” Some bloggers write daily, as part of a routine they have mapped for themselves, some, again, prefer to only write when it is absolutely the best time (not my personal suggestion), and some write in bulk. “Write in bulk” you ask? My, you have a lot of questions, don’t you? Yup, write in bulk. Some of the most successful ProBloggers (that’s a hint: http://www.problogger.net/) prefer to take a chunk of their time out of their day, write 3 or 4 posts to be scheduled throughout the week, and supplement them with any news or ideas that come up during that week. This will allow you to make sure you get a few really good posts with content out of the way, and keep your busy week a little bit clearer for other obligations.

    So Let’s Talk The Blog

    WordPress – The SEO Friendly Blog
    I have personally used a number of other blogging services; Blogger, PHPBlog, and the 2 types of WordPress. With Blogger, you will find yourself restrained with a lot of customization. And though you can place it on your domain name, the easiest option is to have them host it, which is why the majority of Blogger bloggers have a subdomain name of .blogspot.com. With PHPBlog, you get the software and can place it on your hosting, and with a little elbow grease can work a lot of the customization into the code, but it’s a little cumbersome. Add the lack of support and pre-made functions and “widgets” available with WordPress to the un-ease of use, PHPBlog leaves a lot to be desired.

    With WordPress you have the option of having them host it (at wordpress.com), with the subdomain name of .wordpress.com. This will make for an amazing ease of use and customization. However, if you’re really serious about blogging, it will be best to have it as part of your domain name. You download the software and find information at http://www.wordpress.org. There is a large amount of support for the software, and the themes are always growing in number. These are the reasons that I have stopped at WordPress. I hear much about TypePad, but now I’m happy. “If it ain’t broke, don’t start over with a brand new blogging software” is what I say.

    Installation
    The installation of WordPress is ridiculously easy. Create a database, download it, upload it, and run the install function. That’s pretty much it. It will take you longer to wait for your hosting company to create the database than it will for you to initially install the WordPress software. You can get more details here.

    Pick your theme
    After you install the WordPress software, you will want to start looking for your theme of choice. You have some options here as well. You can select one of the literally hundreds of themes that have been created by others, or you can find a designer to build one for you; this will normally cost you about $500.

    If you decide to pick one of the themes created already, you can start your search at the following links:

    When selecting your theme, you will also want to remember the answers to those first questions I asked you. If you don’t want to make a lot of changes to the theme you pick, and you plan on using this to gain money with advertisements, then make sure there is ample room on the sidebars. This will allow for the navigation, blogroll, and any ads you want to run. Also, colors and functionality come into play. There are a few (really not many at all) that make use of iframes or frames. This would obviously cause a few problems with our optimization efforts later.

    Once selected, download your theme, unzip it, upload it to the ‘themes’ labeled folder in your ‘wp-content’ folder at your host, then go into the admin panel to select it.

    Setup Permalinks
    OK. So we have our WordPress blog and theme setup. Now we need to make the first, and one of the most important steps; setting up permalinks. Permalinks are search engine friendly URL’s. By default, WordPress will show the URL’s to any of the pages or posts you create with session id’s. This is not a good thing. Not only for the search engine crawlers, but for marketing efforts later. They will at first look like: www.myblog.com/blah?id=3, or something like that. Instead we will want the URL’s to be reflective of the associated page. Like: www.myblog.com/about-my-blog/. This will be easier for the search engines to crawl, the URL with keywords in it will help (though it’s not much, it’s something), and will be easier for our 2-legged counterparts to read.

    To set this up in WordPress, log into the admin panel and navigate to options -> permalinks. From there you can choose from a set of common setups, or customize the way the URL’s show. The rest is really up to you, but I like to have the smallest amount of variables possible.

    Duplicate Content Issues
    There is one more issue involved with the default setup of WordPress; Duplicate Content. This will create some problems with our rankings and indexing later on, by inducing keyword cannibalism, and will end up resulting in supplemental indexing. You see, if you post something, that post will likely be on a main page like the homepage, then have a page by itself, and will show yet again in the archives. If you have tagged the post for a certain category, it will appear there as well. Now, all these pages are fighting with each other for the rankings. As you post more, the landscape will change even further by pushing that post around, causing what is known as pagination, and then we are in big trouble.

    So, what do we do? First, panic! No, wait…don’t do that. First, become familiar with these issues by reading the posts mentioned in that last paragraph. Then, download this nice plugin that will allow us to automatically create a noindex tag for the parts of the blog that cause the problem; the archives and categories pages. That’s it. All done. Well, you will still have to be mindful of any duplicate title tags. Ooh…let’s move on to that.

    Title Tags
    As with any website, you want the title tags to your blog and posts to be conducive to Search Engine Optimization. If you aren’t to sure on this, first read these 2 posts on proper titles, and how to effectively title pages for structuring.

    • Title Tag Optimization
    • How To Title Your Pages

    The plugin in use can be found here. This will allow you to have titles for all your pages, posts, and even have the title automatically reflect the title of a post, which is something you will want to be mindful of while you write. The titles to your post act in 2 ways to promote your blog. First, you will want it to grab the attention of a potential reader. With RSS (we will talk about that in a sec), the title of your post is the first thing people will see. It has to be fantastical…or at least something that would get someone to read the rest of the post. Second, if you use the plugin I do, you will want to make sure that the titles of your post include some search terms. Blog posts have a funny way of grabbing links (if well written) and will show up in the search engines.

    Description Tags
     Yay for me! I get to direct you to another post on my blog about the description tag. And again, there is an easy way to set these up with a plugin, http://www.g-loaded.eu/2006/01/05/add-meta-tags-wordpress-plugin/ allowing for both specified and automatic descriptions as you see fit. Gosh, this WordPress optimization stuff is pretty easy.

    RSS
    Ahhh, the almighty RSS. Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is defined by the crappy, SEO hating Wikipedia as

    …a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines or podcasts. An RSS document, which is called a “feed,” “web feed,” or “channel,” contains either a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with their favorite web sites in an automated manner that’s easier than checking them manually.

    This means that your blog will have a feed that others can place into their reader, or aggregator, and keep up with your posts from one convenient location. They can then click on the stories they want to read more on. Again, think about those titles.

    As a supplement, I like to signup with FeedBurner. This will allow you to centralize your feed, making it a bit easier to promote and keep up with your stats. There are a ton of tools available through them as well, so be sure to check that out.

    Blog Promotion
    Again, like any other site, you will want to promote the blog using the same old methods, but are given the luxury of a few twists. There are a ton of directories for blogs and RSS feeds specifically. To save time, I’ll just link to a few posts from one of the more successful bloggers out there; Lee Odden. He has a few posts on blog and RSS directories

    After getting in all those, you will be well on your way to some PR (though that won’t help a lot) and some rankings (those help).

    Social Bookmarking
    Now, once you start posting, you’ll want to make it easy for your readers to spread your news. You can do this by displaying various little buttons on your blog and posts, making it easy for people to Digg your post, Technorati it, Furl it, Backflip it, Reddit…it, and a whole slew of other…its.’ Again, I guess I kinda have to send you to Mr. Odden. One of the guys at TopRankBlog (Thomas McMahon) has created a great tool to help you in that matter.

    Networking
    Also, you will want to network with other bloggers. You will be surprised how easy it is to get another blogger to guest-post on your blog. Obviously it will give them a link, thus promoting them just a little more. You can even offer other blogger to give write an article for their blog, thus giving you the mentioned benefits. You may even land yourself a link in their blogroll.

    Posting
    Now the meat. We have a WordPress Blog setup, optimized, and ready to go. Now what? Well…now you blog. When writing, try to stay consistent, and try to provide good, quality posts to your readers. You don’t just want traffic, you want return readers. Remember to keep those titles pretty. And most importantly, have fun. You are now a blogger, not some kind of machine. Your readers will want to read the thoughts and views of you. Try to be light and personable (unless there is a contradicting theme for your blog, in which case you should just remember to be consistent).

    Props
    As a blogger, remember to give link love to your sources. People put a lot of hard work in the things they do online, and if you are using a bit of what they offer, show your appreciation by letting your readers know. It’s just good etiquette. As such, here is a small list of other bloggers that have made my blogging life a little easier, and continue to help other bloggers. So, here they are:

    • TopRankBlog – Probably one of the most helpful blogs meant to provide information on promoting blogs.
    • ProBlogger – As the name implies, a professional blogger showing other bloggers how to blog for money
    • copyblogger – Great resource for the writing portion of your blogging efforts
    • Freelance Switch – This really goes for anyone making the leap to employer free…freedom.
    • Entrepreneur’s Journey – Another blog showing you how to monetize your blog.
    • Blogger Design – This will help you with the design and usability aspects of your blog.

    So, that’s pretty much it. For now. I’m sure this will be updated as I get questions and emails. As such, if you have any questions or see that I neglected to touch on something, let me know.

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