Keyword research is undoubtedly the most important part of SEO. If you try to implement a search engine optimization strategy without doing keyword research you might as well be shooting yourself in the foot. You need to research what it is that people might be searching for to find your business. For example, are they [...]
Landing pages are a very important puzzle piece with search engine optimization and are essential in funneling and engaging your customer. However, you can’t optimize landing pages for the search engines…you have to optimize them for your readers because the search engines aren’t going to be the ones to use your service or buy your product. [...]
Whether you are a website owner or a business it’s imperative that you are involved in both search engine optimization (SEO) and social media marketing (SMM), also known and social media optimization (SMO). SEO and SMO go hand in hand and you need to be sure that your strategies work together to accomplish the same [...]
Improving site quality from the user’s perspective is the best way for sites negatively impacted by Google Panda to recover. According to Google, “high quality content is content that you can send to your child to learn something.” By raising standards for producers and driving progress in terms of content quality, Google Panda will increase [...]
10 Answers You Need Before Establishing A Website We have put together an explanation of why your business needs a website and why you should consider having a professional web design company, such as Pulse Media Solutions LLC, create that for you. Everyone is trying to save money anywhere possible so most decide to take [...]
During the late 90s and early 2000s Google invented a link building algorithm that allowed search engines to attempt to identify the most important web pages for any given topic. I say attempted because, as we all know, the algorithm has been targeted by spammers and other companies/people trying to find the easiest way to [...]
Keyword research is undoubtedly the most important part of SEO. If you try to implement a search engine optimization strategy without doing keyword research you might as well be shooting yourself in the foot.
You need to research what it is that people might be searching for to find your business. For example, are they going to be searching for “buy apple pie”, “make apple pie”, “sell apple pie”, “eat apple pie” etc. They are all about apple pie, but if you don’t have recipes on how to make apple pie then there isn’t any point to rank on it. Same goes for selling apple buy…if people want to buy apple pie and they find your site but you tell them how to make it then it’s a waste of ranking. You have put focus on a rank that isn’t providing conversion, thus rendering no value.
Once you have determined what keywords people will be searching to find your website you need to determine your audience. Demographics, age groups, religions, societies, cultures etc all can play important roles in your SEO strategy. You need to know if your website is targeted towards middle class stay at home mothers or high school drop out gothic teenagers. These are two very different target audiences that will expect two totally different websites.
SEO companies need to first determine the keywords that are relevant to the website, then the target audience/visitors and then search for keywords that are relevant to that target audience.
Understand that keywords are dynamic and will be ever changing with trends and vocabulary. What sounds good today might not be appropriate 6 months down the road. This means that keyword research should be a continuous process to ensure you are ranking on the correct searched keywords.
Keyword relevancy in content is a must, however it must be done tactfully and where it makes sense. You can no longer “keyword stuff” and expect the best result. Search engines have evolved past that and now penalize those websites whose content has too many keywords and doesn’t read properly. On top of that, if a user find your content but can’t read it because every other word is a keyword then they just hit the back browser and move on…fail.
Keyword research isn’t simply looking at your competitors and trying to rank on their keywords. It requires a methodical approach and continuous evaluation in order to be effective. Keyword research is sometimes described as being the most difficult to be effective at because it can be the most time consuming. Good keyword research is another piece of the search engine optimization puzzle.
Landing pages are a very important puzzle piece with search engine optimization and are essential in funneling and engaging your customer. However, you can’t optimize landing pages for the search engines…you have to optimize them for your readers because the search engines aren’t going to be the ones to use your service or buy your product. While you do need to be found, once you’re found you have to be able to convert that into a revenue of some sort.
These are numerous guides and books available on the web about building landing pages. One of the more important common themes among all these available guides is that you need a “call to action” above the fold. Most SEO companies will say that they want text at the top of the page and all the other stuff can go below it because search engines like it that way. Once again, your customers and end users should be your target when building landing pages…not the search engines.
Before you create landing pages you need to have a purpose. Your website certainly has a reason whether it’s to sell a product, educate people, provide funding, deliver a service or whatever it is…it has a purpose. Now you have to determine with that purpose how do you want to attract people and convert them into customers.
Once you determine that you move on to grabbing the attention of the users and keep their attention while you push them towards your goal of converting them into a customer. You can do this with an attractive first paragraph with an almost immediate call to action. With this though keep in mind you need to attract not only the visual and mental users. Some users prefer images (visual users) and some prefer text (mental users).
So on your landing pages make sure you don’t mislead a user in any way. You need to provide them the information, product or service they are looking for and if you do that without making it difficult to find they will keep coming back to your website.
Whether you are a website owner or a business it’s imperative that you are involved in both search engine optimization (SEO) and social media marketing (SMM), also known and social media optimization (SMO). SEO and SMO go hand in hand and you need to be sure that your strategies work together to accomplish the same goal.
Search engines exist because they provide users the best possible search results based on a users input. They base results of matching hundreds of different evaluation points on any given website, then assign a rank to it and display those in a ranked order to the user.
Search engines don’t inherently trust website owners because not all website out there are legit or have a purpose. Some website are built solely to attack your computer so obviously search engines use extreme negative impacts on those sites to keep visitors away. One way to build trust within search engines is having your website linked to in a manner that makes sense. This doesn’t mean links farms or spamming links across the web. It means providing quality links from other websites so those surfing the other website can find your website and find it relevant.
Inbound linking has never been an exact science and unfortunately black hat SEO companies used spam tactics such as paid links, link farms and link exchanges to play the system. Search engines needed a better procedure for establishing which web pages were trusted by human visitors.
Social media was the answer that search engines were looking for. As popularity continues to grow and corporations started using it to share information and communicate with target audiences, the search engines took notice. Social media networks are an entire framework in which people share links to content they found useful. This data provides insight to the search engines as to which links are “valuable” based on “social signals”.
With this creating of “social signals” social media marketing and search engines optimization are now intermingled. This doesn’t mean that the same company has to do your social media marketing that does your SEO work, it simply means that the two need to communicate and be sure they are working towards the same goal. Social media content needs to be optimized and SEO content needs to be sharable so it will be shared across social media networks. Social media now has a major influence and its impact on search will allow for a more productive overall online marketing strategy.
Improving site quality from the user’s perspective is the best way for sites negatively impacted by Google Panda to recover. According to Google, “high quality content is content that you can send to your child to learn something.” By raising standards for producers and driving progress in terms of content quality, Google Panda will increase the quality expectations of users over time. In order to successfully acquire and convert traffic from organic search channels moving forward, marketers, webmasters and site owners will need to understand, employ and embrace best practices for developing quality content. With that in mind, a number of web professionals clearly still do not understand the meaning of “quality content.”
Below are some things that you can do to increase the quality of your content:
All of these things can help you with Google rankings after the release of the newest update from Google … the famous “Panda” release.
Google has the mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. During this expedition, they encounter non-HTML files such as PDFs, spreadsheets, and presentations. Algorithms don’t let different file types slow them down; they work hard to extract the relevant content and to index it appropriately for search results. But how do they actually index these file types, and—since they often differ so much from standard HTML—what guidelines apply to these files? What if a webmaster doesn’t want us to index them?
Google first started indexing PDF files in 2001 and currently has hundreds of millions of PDF files indexed. Google has collected the most often-asked questions about PDF indexing; here are the answers:
Q: Can Google index any type of PDF file?
A: Generally Google can index textual content (written in any language) from PDF files that use various kinds of character encodings, provided they’re not password protected or encrypted. If the text is embedded as images, we may process the images with OCR algorithms to extract the text. The general rule of the thumb is that if you can copy and paste the text from a PDF document into a standard text document, they should be able to index that text.
Q: How are links treated in PDF documents?
A: Generally links in PDF files are treated similarly to links in HTML: they can pass PageRank and other indexing signals, and may be followed after crawling the PDF file. It’s currently not possible to “nofollow” links within a PDF document.
Q: How can I prevent my PDF files from appearing in search results; or if they already do, how can I remove them?
A: The simplest way to prevent PDF documents from appearing in search results is to add an X-Robots-Tag: noindex in the HTTP header used to serve the file. If they’re already indexed, they’ll drop out over time if you use the X-Robot-Tag with the noindex directive. For faster removals, you can use the URL removal tool in Google Webmaster Tools.
Q: Is it considered duplicate content if I have a copy of my pages in both HTML and PDF?
A: Whenever possible, it’s recommend serving a single copy of your content. If this isn’t possible, make sure you indicate your preferred version by, for example, including the preferred URL in your Sitemap or by specifying the canonical version in the HTML or in the HTTP headers of the PDF resource.
Q: How can I influence the title shown in search results for my PDF document?
A: Google uses two main elements to determine the title shown: the title metadata within the file, and the anchor text of links pointing to the PDF file. To give algorithms a strong signal about the proper title to use, it’s recommended updating both.
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