Archive for April, 2010 « Small Business Internet Marketing | Small Business SEO

Archive for April, 2010

12 Best Practices for SEO Friendly Web Design

April 25th, 2010

It seems there’s ongoing confusion about the “do’s and don’ts” of website design when it comes to SEO. The goal here is not to belabor the complex details of web design but to highlight some crucial tips for making your site search engine and market friendly. Here are ten best practices for a friendly web design.

With regards to your design and how you include keywords within your content and page elements it’s important to maintain congruency or consistency to your theme. In other words, various tags and elements should include keywords that are also included within the content of your page. Otherwise your efforts become less effective and can even confuse the search engines as to what the theme and focal points of your various web pages are.

Title Tags: Your Title tags must contain keywords and try limiting them to no more than 65-70 characters long, including spaces – I realize this can be challenging but do your best. Two ways to economize characters are to use ‘&’ for ‘and’ and incorporate spacers. Also be as specific as you can in terms of describing your products or services within the 65 characters. Titles are the right place to use primary keywords as discussed in the keywords post.

ex/ “Healthy Diet & Weightloss | Adkins Diet”

ex/ “Dana’s Diet Solutions Nashville TN | Adkins Diet” — Always include your local business name and city/state if you own a local or regional business.

Note: Businesses competing only locally and regionally should definitely include their address and phone number in the website header or somewhere in the body or footer of the page. This should be typed in as part of the content and not in the form of an image. In fact I would probably put it in the header and the footer.

You must use header tags for section headings instead of merely bolding or using larger text. The h1-h6 header tags are all well-recognized by the search engines. Again, primary keywords are great choices here but not entirely necessary.

ex/ <h1>Weightloss Secrets By Adkins Himself</h1>

It’s helpful to mix in bold, underline, or italics tags (<b>, <u>, <i>) to add some power to your SEO when combined with keywords. I use them to highlight keyword-rich anchor text for links on occasion or to simply emphasize a point in mid-paragraph.

Meta tags, descriptions and keywords are considered helpful but limit your list of Meta keywords to just 10 and make sure your description includes keywords but is also appealing to a human reader. Keep the Meta description section a maxium of 150 characters long; this includes spaces. Primary keywords are a must.

Use image names and alt attributes (alt tags) that are realistic and consistent with the site’s theme and also based on keywords. Primary keywords and/or secondary keywords based on the page content itself are fine.

ex/ For a website about the UNC Tarheels, having an image named “UNC Tarheels.jpg” with ‘alt = “UNC Tarheels” ‘

Avoid the use of frames, inline styling, and outdated HTML code. Use CSS for all your styling and develop page content with current XHTML. Following these rules will lower the page download time and make it much easier for the web crawlers to scan your site.

Avoid Flash “splash pages” or excessive Flash usage. There are ways to tweak the newest version of Flash to help with SEO, but Flash is not worth all the hubbub in my humble opinion. Stationary Flash elements, such as headers, are better than Flash movies. Use Flash sparingly within your site.To learn more, go here.

When possible, eliminate confusing Dynamic URL’s created by Content Management System (WordPress, Joomla, Etc.). A great example an unfriendly dynamic URL is….

http://www.alabasterbox.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=5&Itemid=6I

I much prefer WordPress (discussed in a later post) and consider it the best as a CMS (content management system) for a number of reasons. But there appear to be ways within Joomla to rectify this problem. Before choosing a CMS make sure you can create search engine friendly URL’s within your site and whenever linking internally to or to external pages, use a keyword as the anchor text instead of the generic “click here.”

Example of an SEO-friendly link created in a WordPress blog

http://www.dietandfitnessdiaries.com/2009/10/reflections-on-diet-and-nutrition/

Example of Keyword-Rich Anchor Text

Train your dog instead of Click here for dog training tips

Logical Flow is Key! What I mean is, there should be a direct relationship among your keyword rich Title Tags, Meta Tags, Header Tags, and page content.
ex/

Page Title: "Chocolate Bon Bons by George | Nashville, TN"

Description Meta Tag: "George specializes in tasty chocolate
bon bons, plus other dark chocolate treats. We're located in
downtown Nashville, TN."

Keyword Meta Tag: "chocolate bon bon, chocolate treats, dark
chocolate, nashville, tn"

Header Tags: Tasty Chocolate Bon Bons, Nashville's Finest,
Dark Chocolate, Downtown Nashville

Use the right design style for your type business. A physician’s office would do themselves no good by having bright obnoxious graphics resembling “Mardi Gras” on their site. Cater to your target audience with the look and feel of your site.

Do use images but also leave white space and organize your site making it easy to read and pleasing to the eye. Look how much information the Yahoo home page contains yet it’s not overwhelming or too cluttered.

My last word of wisdom on this topic often goes overlooked and that is the fact that there’s more value to your site beyond the “home page.” If you think about it, each page within your site tends to have a different point of emphasis which means each page can be optimized individually. My recommendation is to optimize each page for different keywords within your quality keyword list. Sure there will inherently be overlap but if you take a look at your home page and, say, your products or services page, it’s evident that each will have different points of emphasis. The optimization activities described above can and should be applied to each page, not just the home page.

For more advice on keywords, the driving force behind the layout and substance of your website content, please read our keyword post if you’ve not done so already. Otherwise please move onto to read about the the ever important topic of Google Maps Optimization. This is one of the most effective things you can do to promote your business online!

Tags: SEO, SEO Friendly Web Design, Web Design Tips
Posted in SEO Friendly Web Design | 14 Comments

Ethical Internet Marketing vs. “Blackhat” Marketing

April 22nd, 2010

It goes without saying that an hour’s work earns an hour’s pay and that the job should be done right the first time . Any ethical and reasonable person would agree. But it’s another thing altogether to promise the world yet deliver misleading counterfeit results in what seems to be the blink of an eye. Unfortunately there’s still too much “fool’s gold” being handed out in this industry by shady SEO specialists simply looking to make a quick buck.

Don’t be fooled by the “quick and dirty” services that promise you big-time results within a day or two. Doing things right means focusing on your specific market space and geographic area (when appropriate) for the purposes of driving targeted traffic…not random traffic…but targeted traffic to your website.

I too am quite aware of underhanded ways to quickly drive hoards of random untargeted traffic and backlinks to any website very quickly for the purposes of artificiallyinflating page ranking and search engine presence. But is that really the point? Is that truly helping your business in the long run?

Let me give you a real-life example of what I’m talking about. Several months ago, a local chiropractor client of mine responded to a message left by a slick salesmen from an underhanded company and employed its services. Sure enough, this company delivered exactly what they promised…..more appearances at the top of the Google search page and many more visitors. The only problem is, their marketing tactics caused his local chiropractor site to show up in searches all over the country which did him no good whatsoever in terms of bringing in local customers. Plus it created quite a nuisance for honest local chiropractors in many other cities. One chiropractor in San Jose, CA actually called my client from across the country to complain about this, questioning his ethics and intent in the process. Needless to say my client cut ties with this underhanded SEO company to the tune of several hundred wasted dollars.

Employing ethical internet marketing practices, also known as “whitehat marketing” is the only way to ensure longevity and true success in the online world. Furthermore, it’s simply the right thing to do.

Compare internet marketing to say raising livestock or even being a great pro baseball player.

whitehat marketing = raising healthy, organic livestock in the wild.
blackhat marketing = feeding steriods and corn to churn out livestock
in just a few weeks.

whitehat marketing = Derek Jeter
blackhat marketing = Barry Bonds

Get it? Bottom line: Blackhat marketing is cheating!

Google defines blackhat marketing as “Trying to deceive our web crawler by means of hidden text, deceptive cloaking, or doorway pages compromises the quality of our results and degrades the search experience for everyone.”

Search engines have become highly tuned to fishing out blackhat marketing tactics and will not only penanize a site in search results, some sites are actually banned from appearing at all.

SEO Design Dynamics has a zero tolerance policy for blackhat SEO. You will never ever ever be able to associate any of the terms below with our practices:

Purposefully Driving Unrelated/Untargeted Traffic
Spam
Adult Content
Illegal Content
Excessive Keyword Repetition
Excessively “alt” tag Repetition
Excessive Popup Windows
Meta Spam
Cloaking
Gateway or doorway pages
Scraper sites
Link spam
Link farms
Hidden links or Text
Sybil attack
Spam in blogs
Page hijacking
Refferer log spamming
Buying expired domains
Mirror websites
URL redirections
Doorway page
302 Jacking
Spam in blogs

All these terms are associated with automated, quick-fix methods aimed at providing mass amounts of traffic and backlinks to your website quickly. No consideration is given to the relevancy of subject matter.

For example, I once made the mistake of using automated article submission and backlinking software programs aimed at producing mass volumes of backlinks to my site. Viola!! Hundreds of backlinks to my fitness site suddenly appeared over the next week. The only problem was, they were from porn sites, foriegn trade sites, art blogs, political blogs…anything but fitness related sites which was the theme of the site I was promoting. Needless to say, this was sniffed out by Google within a few weeks, and my blog site fell off the search listings for quite some time.

I watched a reputable healthcare company try this very same tactic. They had held the number one spot for the most common searches in their industry…then decided to get greedy. A new product came out creating some intense competition across many vendors. This particular company decided to try blackhat tactics to gain an edge. Not to my surprise, they disappeared completely from Google’s list for that particular search term for at least a week (I stopped checking after that).

How many times have you clicked on a link expecting one thing only to be redirected to another site OR have pop ups appear on your screen which were totally unrelated to your search. Irritating huh? Well the search engines agree and they have become intelligent enough to sniff this type behavior out.

There are ethical ways to develop a solid strategy the right way…the Derek Jeter way. It may take a little more time, but, just like Derek, you’ll have a long tenure at the top and will have quite a few long term fans.

As a general rule, sites touting quick results and large quantities of anything (article submissions, search engine submissions, backlinks, etc.) in an automated or “auto-pilot” fashion, should be considered suspect. There are only two automated services I would ever consider using which I discuss in my backlinks and article marketing post.

If you’ve not done so already I encourage you to check out my introduction to internet marketing for small businesses post especially if you’re somewhat of a newbie or looking for a structured way to manage your SEO and marketing.

Tags: black hat marketing, blackhat marketing, ethical internet marketing, ethical SEO, white hat marketing, whitehat marketing
Posted in Ethical Internet Marketing | 3 Comments

Easy SEO with Business Listings & Google Map Optimization

April 20th, 2010

If you’re business competes at a local or regional level, failing to manage your Google Places listing is equivalent to throwing money in the trashcan. Getting listed on Google Maps is not only extremely effective, it’s free and easy! But for this to be at all worthwhile, you should have a very good handle on keywords. I highly encourage you to read our post on keywords if you have not already done so.

Optimizing your Google Maps listing has become one of the most most critical elements to any local SEO strategy. Why?

For starters, organic links (map listings & natural search results) are considered the most trusted, receiving 65-70% of all clicks versus the paid listings which show up to the side or colorfully highlighted at the very top of the search page. This makes your appearance in the Google Maps listing of the utmost importance and here’s why.

The Google Map listing physically covers up to and eye-catching 30% of the first page of search engine results for many keyword search terms, making it most likely for potential clients to use the map listings to connect with local businesses. Don’t believe me? Go to Google dot com and type in “Dentists Nashville TN” and see what happens. You want your business to show up high in those map listings!

The fact is 66% of Americans choose the Internet as their main source for local businesses information and up to 80% make it a point to choose businesses close to home. So, the odds of pulling in local customers are stacked immensely in your favor simply by showing up high on Google Maps listing.

Before we go any further, I want to share a priceless resource with you about how to get your Google Places listing to the top of Google Maps. I’ve met and studied under this genius internet marketing guru and have nothing but positive things to say about his products.

What is Google Maps Optimization?

When buyers look for services like yours on Google, the three to seven most relevant local businesses are displayed on a the map listings at the top of the Google search window for relevant keyword searches.

You want your business high on this list anytime someone searches for key terms that describe your type of business and that bring up a Google maps listing.

Before creating a Google Business Listing, pull out your list of keywords you’ve developed using the keyword tactics I presented earlier. Otherwise go back and review that section or at least brainstorm and jot down a list of potential keywords that come to mind. Then use Google Adwords tool for additional ideas and fine tuning. As discussed in my keywords post you want to focus on terms that have high search volumes but also low-medium competition.

Ten strong keywords are sufficient for your Google Business listing ad. Expecting to get listed in the Google Maps for more than that would be unreasonable. By using the Google keyword tool you can discover alternative keywords and check search volumes for each.

Within a Google search window, I like to check each keyword option out by doing a search with and without local modifiers (ie/ “Dentist” vs. “Dentist Nashville TN” or “Nashville Dentist”) to thoroughly evaluate whether or not a Google map will pop up or not. The ones that do should then be considered primary for the purposes of creating your Google maps listing.

“Chiropractor Nashville TN” has a high search volume and brings up a Google Maps listing.

“Sciatica Nashville TN” has a high search volume but does not bring up a Google Maps listing. Despite its high search volume, I would not count on the term “Sciatica” to help because it does not bring up a Google maps listing. It’s okay to include such terms in your description for viewers to read once they arrive at your listing but not with the expectation that a Google Maps listing will suddenly appear for that particular term.

Furthermore “Sciatica” without the local modifier brings up random sites irrelevant to local competition whereas “chiropractor” without the modifier does show some local sites in my area. To take away the guesswork, always always always test your search term with the local modifier in a Google search.

Once your list is in place, it’s time to create a business listing with Google also known as “claiming your listing.” Having a Google account or Gmail account is required to do this…setting up a new account is easy enough to do if necessary.

Note that there are very rare cases in which a competitor or or someone with devious intent may have already “claimed your address” which means you won’t be able to register your business with Google using that address unless you “reclaim” it. One way to check is to go to Google Maps, type in the name of your business and city (“Wal-Mart Nolensville TN), look for your listing on the side bar, and hit the “more info.” You can then click the edit link which will bring you to a new page. There is a “claim” link in the upper right corner where you can claim this as yours. Google will want to verify the change via telephone so be prepared to answer your phone when they call.

We can assist you with this process in addition to fine tuning your listing according to keywords (market trends) in your line of business. Including a group of quality keywords in your description is critical but you want to write your description in natural readable format. Here’s an example of a description that’s worked for one of my clients.

“Affordable pizza delivery in Nashville, TN. We offer gourmet pizza, gluten free pizza, and pizza catering to all local areas.”

Any time you complete any directory listing like this it’s important to complete the hours of operation, payment methods accepted, description of services you offer, categories, etc. The 5 categories you enter are also important.

Much like other aspects of SEO, Business Listing and Map Optimization takes 2-3 months and to take affect and requires patience. I’ve seen instant success with some businesses whereas other SEO efforts have taken several months. Stay true to the methodology and the results will come in due time.

To get a head start, we will highly recommend a cost-effective business directory discussed in more detail on our next post so you should definitely read on.

We also have a few other tricks up our sleeve so get in touch if you’d like us to optimize your map listing for you.

Never ever ever consider overstuffing your listings with keywords or trying to add multiple listings to cover two cities. Simply write the listing for a human reader and potential customer. Also do not change your business name or edit your listing to add seasonal or temporary keywords, multiple phone numbers, etc. Just leave it alone as is. Google considers these sorts of activities spammy behavior.

Always be sure to use your doing business as (DBA) name and be consistent across Google, Bing, and Yahoo, as well as any other directory resources you subscribe to online such as Manta, InfoUSA, Yelp, Merchant Circle, etc. If your business is located in a small town next to a big town where you prefer to be listed, then get a business PO Box in that town and use that address for every directory listing you post online. Otherwise count on the fact that searchers will ultimately search various areas for what they want. If your business has multiple locations, I suggest creating a Google account and business listing for each so as not to water down your listing. Google generally frowns upon creating multiple listings from the same account.

Always upload as many pictures and videos as you can in these listings. Using a keyword-rich naming convention (such as “ABC chiropractor nashville tn.jpg”) is important for pics and videos.

Yahoo and Bing offer similar business listing solutions which you should definitely check out. Come right back to this page when you’re finished because we have more to cover .

Next you’ll learn about one of the best kept secrets for improving SEO and gaining quality traffic. Let’s move on to the topic of sitemaps and indexing. This is one of the easiest steps to boost your positioning that many overlook.

Tags: Claim your business on Google, Google Business Listing, Google Maps, Maps Optimization
Posted in Google Map Optimization | 12 Comments

Internet Marketing & SEO Basics

April 19th, 2010

Improving the ranking of your website in search engines is difficult yet a necessary challenge for any business to take on. After all, an attractive website without targeted traffic and site visitors is of little or no use to growing your business. We engage in a full discussion of all aspects of SEO and Internet Marketing for small businesses in a full blog series which I recommend you check out.

Creating a purposeful search engine optimization (SEO) strategy should be the primary aim of all companies striving to increase Internet visibility. The main motive behind traditional SEO has been to simply generate more web traffic, a properly designed SEO plan (sometimes referred to as a “search engine marketing campaign”) will lead to higher quality traffic that spends more time on your site and converts into sales.

Here is a list of 8 basic search engine marketing tips we recommend for increasing organic search rankings.

Make it easy for search engines to discover and understand your site by making proper use of keyword-rich title tags, meta tags, site content, search engine friendly URLs. Including strong keywords in the first paragraph of each page and writing page content based on keywords that line up appropriately with the nature of your business is what we recommend.ex/ Brand Name specific phrase “Toro mowers in Nolensville, TN.”
Category specific phrase “New York style pizza in Nashville, TN.”While these long tail keywords may not be necessary in the meta section itself, be sure to include similar style phrasing in the beginning two paragraphs on each page. You want the beginning of each page to be the most keyword rich.

Work on researching the most appropriated keywords to target through your search engine optimization strategy. There are many tools available online to search for the best performing keywords. Once you choose the keywords to target, make sure they are also present in the content of your site. Good keyword rich content is always respected and rewarded by the search engines.

The number and quality of hyperlinks play a part in achieving great SEO result. Hyperlinks are clickable links on a website which lead to additional information, either internally or externally through other websites. External web links (links from another site to your site) push search engine ranking up the most, while internal links pointing to various pages within your site do this to a lesser degree.

Optimize the images on your website by using keyword rich “alt” tags and image names. Optimized images have a great potential to increase your rankings in search engines. Google Image search sends a good number of visitors to web pages that contain well-optimized images.

Create your presence on social networks like Facebook and Twitter and start engaging your target audience. Don’t limit your marketing efforts to Facebook and Twitter though. Participate actively on other social sites (Yelp, Flickr, City Search, other industry specific sites, etc.) to help drive active targeted traffic. Social Media Marketing packs a powerful one-two punch by driving more visitors to your site which means more potential customers plus increased SEO by through the increase in website traffic.

Work on your link building: use social networking, discussion boards, forums, directories, article submissions for creating beneficial backlinks. Going for “dofollow” links is your best option but creating nofollow links on industry specific sites (blogs, forums, etc.) related to your business can bring quality visitors to your site. Pay attention to the quality of the backlinks you create. For example, if you’re in the fertilizer business there’s little or no value to placing a comment on a “dofollow” blog related to college basketball. This same logic holds true for forums and content specific article directories. Over time, and increasing number of unrelated backlinks can actually hurt instead of help your search ranking as the search engines become confused about the theme or subject matter of your site.

Create & Optimize your Google Map Listing. This is likely the easiest and most powerful technique any small business can apply to improve its SEO. Read our Maps Optimization post or contact us today to see how we can help optimize your optimization .

Speaking of maps, you should always include your full business address, including zip code on each page of your site. I recommend the the page footer. Tons of web searchers used cities, major streets, and zip codes as search modifiers when seeking out local businesses.

Please check out our other posts for important details on various tactics. I would start by taking a closer look at your page design and also our post on keywords, the foundation of optimizing your SEO and internet marketability.

Tags: internet marketing basics
Posted in Internet Marketing 101 | 10 Comments