SEN Linking Best Practices

In a previous blog, I mentioned the three types of linking: Reciprocal, one-way, and triangular. While knowing the different types is important, it is also essential to know practices that matter while link building.

• Keyword Anchor Tags

         The are numerous ways to write the anchor test, but there are some ways that are better than                others. If you want your anchor text to be the most powerful, follow this example:

      <ahref=“hXp://domain.com/page.html”>Keyword</a>

        If you are trying to go the safer route, use this example:

      <a href=“hXp://domain.com/pages.html”>www.domain.com/pages.html</a>

       Which ever way you choose, make sure not to overdo the keywords! Google's Penguin Update             targets sites that use too heavy keyword link profiles and they keep tightening the restrictions.

• Location  

          Just  having the link visible somewhere on the page isn't good enough. Links that are in the                 content and header areas are treated more important than other. Remember to make your links             relevant to your site. If they aren't, you will have a lower rank even if everything else is ideal.

• Code 

         The first link in the HTML Code is the one that matter the most. So, make sure it is exactly the            way that you want. Most of the time secondary links are ignored, unless a #hashtag is used. 

Other various factors include

• Font size/color
• Location
• Number of words in anchor text
• URL
• Number of links on the page
• Page authorship
• Click through rate
• Language
• User Behavior 

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SEO Loading Speed

We live in a world where everyone wants everything instantly. If a web page takes more than 20 seconds to load, we get annoyed and just try going to another page. Speed is an important factor when it comes to optimization. Not only do people hate slow web pages, but Google is adding speed as a new ranking factor into its algorithm.

This means that Google will be putting faster sites higher in the search results, so slower ones will be harder for people to find. Since speed is such an issue with everyone, Google is trying to take steps to avoid the slowness of certain websites. So, if you want your website to be fast and seen you need to crank up the speed.

The ranking of speed won't be set on a specific number, but it needs to be just as fast as the competition. A sites average load time is dependent on the niche. So, if you have tons of photos and videos, your website will take longer to load. To attempt to make your load speed faster, there are a few tools that you can use.

The firebug plug-in is one tool that allows you to check the speed of your website and make changes to it. It also helps if you install Google's Page Speed with this so that you can have two tools that evaluate the speed.

What to check for:

• Script Language 
Using Flash can be a concern. The visuals and graphics take time to load and run which can slow down the speed of the site.

• Hosting Server Speed
A good number of people find that their hosting server is what is slowing their website down. To fix this, revise your providers SLA to determine the bandwidth and speed allocation.

 • Coding Quality
Google has resources available that can take your Java script code and condense it to the minimum requirement. By doing this, you speed up the loading time and you can test out how fast your site is going.
 • Picture Resolution 
The higher resolution your images have, the longer it takes to download, which means a slower loading speed. So, cut down the resolution to the minimum amount.

• Bulky Applications 
Adobe applications have some of the slowest loading speeds, and this is a concern for people who practice SEO. Try minimizing the number of the bulky applications, but this problem is inevitable.

SEO 4 Pointers for a High Rank on Search Engines

Globalization causes people to want to reach every part of the world when advertising on the web. So, many forget to give enough attention to local business. If localized searches are ignored, a business can lose potential customers. There are 4 strategies that you should keep in mind when planning for SEO local.

1.Include your clients' website to local search engines:

Their site should be included in relevant search engines. While doing this, you should consider using directories. One directory that should be used is Google Business Center. Here , you can create a free listing with information such as hours of operation and address. Yahoo!Local Merchant and Ask Business Search are also sites that can be used. Local Merchant allows three types of listing: Basic, Advanced, and Featured. Ask Business Search is part of website.city.ask.com and it  allows the customer to see a map of the local area.


2. Submit Clients' Websites to Popular Directories and Internet Yellow Pages:
Commonly used directories: Yelp.com, mojopages.com, insiderpages.com, and citysqaures.com
Commonly used Yellow Pages: SuperPages.com, Switchboard.com, and yellowbook.com

You can also place the website on citysearch.com, which is a provider for local information sites such as MSN, Ask.com, Expedia.com, and Ticketmaster.com.


3. Set Geographic Location in Google's Webmaster Tool:
First, it is important to find detailed reports about the website's visibility so that. Then, you can submit it to Google and use the tools which can help identify problems and come up with strategies. After you submit it to Webmaster Tools, you will see the site the way Google sees it. So, you can get a clear picture of any problems and see what you need to drive more traffic to the site.

4. Add Contact Information:
You should add a physical address and phone number within an address tag on the homepage to increase your credibility.Increased credibility in the eyes of a search engine will lead to higher ranks. To achieve the best results, you can put the address on every page of the site. Using free press releases and Yahoo 360 social networks will also help to be noticed locally.

SEO Tips for Marketing Strategies

There are numerous marketing strategies that if applied correctly are beneficial for an organization. Local search marketing is one practice that has increases over the years. Webvisible and Nielson conducted a study in 2007, which showed that 74% of 2,000 adults in the U.S. used search engines as the primary source for getting local information. When someone refers to local search marketing, they are referring to a limited geographic area. Since the area is local, the keywords must also be local. In order to properly implement local search marketing, there are a few steps to follow.


To start off, you should have on page optimization. The local phone number and address should be seen across all pages and it is also helpful to have a page with directions. When optimizing, use geographical qualifiers in the title tag such as name of cities, counties, states, and streets.

The page should also have an off page optimization factor. For example, include the anchor text for incoming links so that you can hold local qualifiers. Once you complete on page and off page optimization, you can submit to major search engines. This can be done by going to a local business center. Here you enter your business information, details, location, and brief description. Then, your business listing will show up in the local section of the search engine. Other search engines such as yelp, local.com, and yellowpages.com can help drive traffic to your website.


Link baiting is another useful marketing strategy that involves using a bait or hook to attract back links. Below are some commonly used link baiting strategies.

Resource Hook: Resource hooks provide useful resources for the audience. One example is a stock exchange ticker.

News Hook: This provides the latest new first and works best over a period of time.

Contrary Hook:  This type of hook looks at contrary views and takes a contradictory view of what someone else has written. Example:5 reasons why SEO is not useful to marketers today.

Attack Hook: An attack hook is similar to the contrary hook, but more direct and provocative. Example: John Smith gets sued for blogging.

Humor Hook: A humor hook usually stands out from the others. So, it is able to gain more links.

Tip: Use Google webmaster tools. They allow you to view sites that you add and you can get an overview of index and crawling. There are different tabs such as: diagnostic tab, statistic tag, links tab, sitemaps tab, and tools section that are useful for analyzing purposes.

SEO Latest Concepts

The internet and technology are updated constantly, so trends in SEO also change. One trend that is emerging in SEO today is blogging. There are a number of ways that you can approach thhis trends, so below I will give you some basics to get started.

Almost everyone has seen of a blog, read a blog, or even written a blog, but for those of you who don't know what a blog is, it is a user-generated website with journal style entities that provides information about a particular subject. One the blog you will see text, pictures, links, and other related topics.

To optimize a blog there are a few steps that should be followed.

1)Keep the content simple, but make sure it is good quality and is interesting to the viewers.

2)When you submit it to a search engine, make sure to have as much content as possible because search engines prefer bigger sites than small ones. Just like a webpage, the URL for the blog must be submitted to the search engine for indexing.

3) Identitfy keywords and use them as offers to give you an edge over the competitors. If you need help with this process, you can check out Google AdWords or use Digital Point.

4) Optimize your blog template so that all of the post titles show up in the title tag. The actual title of your post should be used as a permalink.

5)Update the blog regularly with new and fresh information. Make sure to maintain the quality of the content and be creative.

Now that you have some basic information about blogging for SEO purposes, you might want to know why you should even bother taking these step. Well, the answer to that is simple. blog optimization helps increase ranking on search engines, which only helps the optimization process. Also, it helps to increase traffic from different sources that include social search such as Yahoo and Google.

SEO Monitoring Basics

Compared to traditional advertising methods, Search Engine marketing offers a unique advantage when it comes down to the overall return on investment. With SEO, you can achieve a better ROI and long term success because well optimized pages can be visited by thousands of targeted visitors a day.

The success of the SEO campaign needs to be measured on percentage of traffic from search engines, traffic from keywords, and rankings. It is important to remember that ranking is not the only way to measure success. A number of different elements need to be considered. Calculating the ROI can help better understand why the numbers are the way they are, and allow you to make changes and better your campaign. Once you calculate the ROI, you should analyze your visitor traffic, to do this there are a few steps to follow to get started on the right track.


Many have the mindset that having an SEO ranking in the top 10 is the most important objective of the entire SEO campaign. While having a ranking in the top 10 is ideal, the real objective of a SEO campaign is getting qualified traffic to your site. Once you have the qualified traffic, the traffic can be converted to leads or sales.  To analyze the visitor traffic, certain areas should be considered.

Traffic on Keywords: Your site will get targeted and un-targeted traffic. It is highly important to select the right keywords. Not only do you need the right keywords, but you should know the performance of each so that you can replace the ones that aren't working.

Keywords and Landing Pages: Different products should have different landing pages. This helps you to see what content and keywords are working the best. If the site is saturated, include more content to help convert viewers to leads.

Whether the CTA was followed for Conversion: If you find the Call to Action wasn't followed for conversion, find out the reasons why. You might have the wrong selection of keywords, or your content might need improvement. You can't fix something until you know what's wrong.

Qualified Traffic: In other words, qualified traffic is targeted traffic. Know the demographics behind the personas viewing your content and making purchases. Higher traffic rate will result in a higher conversion rate, which will help your campaign succeed.

Converted Traffic: Tracking converted traffic is also important. To do this, you can calculate the percent of traffic converting to actual sales made.


Tip: If you aren't comfortable doing SEO on your own, there are qualified individuals that you can hire. They can determine the success or failure of your company's online marketing activity, so make sure to do your research before hiring and chose an ethical SEO specialist.

SEO Pay Per Click Basics

Pay per click campaigns are  advertising campaigns that run on search engine result pages. You can use various programs, such as Google AdWords or Yahoo PPC Ads. It might seem a bit intimidating at first, but here are a few steps to get you started on your pay per click process.

Key Word Selection: Picking the right keywords is extremely important and is the first step in the PPC process. For this step, you can pick keywords that directly relate to your service or product. To help generate effective keywords you can use programs such as GOOGLE, Yahoo, or wordtracker. If the words you chose aren't specific enough, you can face a big loss. The goal is to generate useful and relevant traffic, so it is important to understand the product or service that is being offered.

Bidding Strategies: Where your ad gets placed depends on the amount you offer each search engine for that word. The higher the bid, the higher position you will have. There are a number of tools that can help monitor the numbers, and even adjust bids, which include: Atlas One Point, BidRank, and PPC PRO. It is highly important to constantly monitor campaigns and test how well your process is working. Ideally, a campaign should be monitored 4 times a day for at least 1 month.

Advertising Text: Having more than 1 advert is essential. You should make at least 3-4 adverts and use them at different times while observing their effectiveness. You want you ad to stand out from other competitors. People tend to mention discounts, offers, and special deals for the text, but you must have something informative in your text. After all, that is the reason they are searching the internet.

Develop Proper Landing Page: A landing page is ultimately more important than anything else.  If you are not sure what a landing page is, it is simply a web page designed for a keyword or related groups of keywords. They landing page and the advertising text needs to be relevant and consistent with the claim made.  This is where the visitor is asked to take an action. Relevance and consistency are important for your PPC campaign to be successful. People don't want to be taken to an irrelevant site or to a homepage directed towards a broad audience. If you give people what your ad promised, there is a higher chance of converting them to customers. To make your landing page the most successful it can be, you can try trail runs. For instance, have 3-4 different links with different landing pages, and see which one produces the best results.

Tracking: This is the last step, but not at all the least important. Optimization also plays a key determinant in the success of your PPC campaign. You need all of the data regarding your performance that you can get. Some tracking tools that can help you with this step include Webside Story's Hitbox Professional and Hitbox Enterprise.

Tip: Balance is important! All of the steps should be followed and go hand-in-hand if you want your PPC campaign to be successful.

SEO Site Readiness Using Links

Links can be useful to send more potential customers to your website, but you must use the right technique. There are three different types of linking that you can use to optimize your website. They include: one way linking, reciprocal linking, and triangular linking. Below you will find some basic information about each type.

One-Way Linking: If you are looking for the best way to improve your rankings in a search engine,
then this is the way to go. One way linking is done a lot like it sounds.You accomplish this by putting your link on one site without exchanging any other link. By having your link exclusively on one site, you are automatically protected from bad links that have no relevance to your site. There is also a long term benefit because one way links have more value and tend to stay on the site longer. Although one way linking is effective, it takes long term determination and planning to achieve link popularity.

Reciprocal Linking: Today, reciprocal linking is the most popular linking practice. Reciprocal linking means that two websites agree to link to each other. Many people know also know this as "link swaps". This type of linking helps to drive traffic to a website if the link is relevant to the site. From reciprocal linking, there is assurance because the other website was confident in your content and wanted to be linked. Trust is a major factor. Before you participate in reciprocal linking, it is important to do some research. Conduct a competitive analysis of the website you want to link to and you could even go as far as running a PR search to see where the website's ranking.  

Triangular Linking: This type of linking involves manipulation. When using triangular linking, you are manipulating reciprocal linking into looking like one-way linking. You use two websites to fool the search engines. There is a trade that occurs, but you make it look like you earned the link.
Search engines have found out about this technique and are currently working on an algorithm to work against this problem.

SEO Meta Tag basics

Meta tags can help people find your website based on the description that you provide. Although search engines do not give a lot of prominence to meta tags, they can help you rank higher on a search with certain words that are used for a targeted search. Below I have listed some do's and don'ts of meta tags that should help you to get started.

Meta description tags:
Do's
Pay attention to the sequence of your words
Make sure that your keywords are relevant to the page you are posting\
Use a description tag that is between 25-30 words
Place the most important phrases at the beginning

Don't
Use excessive repetition
Make a lengthy description tag
Have a tag that is irrelevant to your post

Meta Keyword Tags: These are considered to be less important than other Meta tags, but they do add some extra information that can be useful. Using the proper keyword tags can help your website be found and make the site more search engine friendly. You don't want to use words that are irrelevant. For instance, if your post is about cats you're not going to put the keyword "puppies" in the keyword tag.

SEO Basics

Almost all of us use search engines on a daily basis. When I need information Google is the first place that I go. Although many of us use search engines, we don’t know exactly what they are and how they work. So, a search engine is defined as a program that searches documents for specific keywords and returns a list of the documents where the keywords were found.  Some of the top search engines include Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Ask. Below I have provided some information about these particular search engines.

Google:  Personally, I prefer to use Google when I need information because I think that it provides the most accurate results of what I am searching for.  Google is by far the most popular search engine and there are over 250 million searches performed in just one day! It is a crawler base

d search engine which helps to provide relevant information.  Its size and scope it covers are the search engines greatest strengths.

Yahoo!: They are the second most popular search engine, owning 28% of the market share. Like Google, Yahoo! is a crawler based search engine. They were actually powered by Google until 2004, but now they use their own technology. There are around 167 million searches conducted per day using Yahoo!.

Bing Search: This search engine is powered by Microsoft and is the search engine for the MSN portal site. In 2005, it began using their own unique database that includes separate databases for images, news, and local databases. Although the search engine is large, it lacks advanced features, which puts it at a disadvantage.

Ask: This search engine has built its own unique data base.  Its original debut was in spring of 2001, but it re-launched in April of 2002. Like Bing Search, the search engine lacks more advanced features, but it expanded its capabilities by adding a more advanced search. Sometimes there are paid ad results and its weaknesses include a smaller database and no direct URL submissions. 

How to Optimize a Website

      The video that we watched in class today gave useful information on how to effective optimize a website. I learned about the steps involved, and what exactly helps to make a website more effective. The two topics greatly discussed in the video involved searchers and search engines. Understanding both of these terms and ideas are important in order to successfully optimize a website.

      The searcher typically has something in mind when they are searching for a website. They are looking for something to accomplish or do, hoping to learn something, or searching for somewhere to go or do something. It is important to keep this in mind because the searchers are the ones that are going to buy the product or service offered on the website. Search engines are what connect people to a website. When I think of a search engine I automatically think of Google. Search engines like Google have website finders that discover pages that are new or updated. The content of the pages are extremely important.

      From the video I learned that  design, content, and content formatting are extremely important in attracting people to your site and keeping their attention. Many people think that the content is the most important part of a webpage, but the way that content is formatted is also important. If someone visits a page that look crazy, and has everything all over the place and hard to find, they will most likely leave that page and go look at a different one. It is better to have a webpage simple and to the point than all over the place while filled with unnecessary content. It is important to remember that a webpage should change! They are not suppose to be static. With technology everything changes at a fast place including websites.



                                            Example of formatting content gone wrong 

Formatting content done well