Free SEO services on the internet by Ecklund Marketing Group

Free SEO services on the internet by Ecklund Marketing Group

For those site owners who are willing to take charge of their own online promotion, there is a plethora of free services offered by Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Google, for example, has a 'Webmaster Central' that allows you to submit sitemaps directly to the search engine, check to see if the robots have encountered dead links, and even report spam in the Google index! Yahoo has a similar feature in the form of a 'Submit Your Site' section where webmasters can submit sitemaps directly. It's a handy tool, although it lacks the detailed diagnostic features that Google provides.

If you don't have a sitemap, there are dependable online services such as FreeSiteMapGenerator.com. Google's Webmaster Guidelines page offers links to approved sitemap generators, many of which are free.

Adding your business to Google Local Search is also an effective and cost-free way to put your company at the top of the search results, where local information appears. Wordtracker.com is another application worth checking out- it analyzes your keywords and those of your competitors, and offers a detailed comparison report. Google Web Master Tools and Yahoo! Site Explorer are excellent tools for tracking your inbound links, checking the integrity of your interior linking structure, and seeing how thoroughly your site has been indexed.

There are several free products available, each giving your business a better chance at being found on the world wide web. It can be frustrating and overwhelming at times and certainly time-consuming.
See what we can do for you at Ecklund Marketing Group to maximize your time and market you on the internet.

Linking strategies by Ecklund Marketing Group

Linking strategies by Ecklund Marketing GroupA good internal linking structure is a must for any complex website. It's common these days to build sites that are several layers deep: in other words, individual pages within the site have their own mini-menus. For example, your menu bar may have a link to a page for widgets. On the widgets page are additional submenu items- purple widgets, green widgets, etc. Proper and clearly labeled links are crucial for both human site visitors and the search engine robots.

You'll also want have your site's link appear on other web pages that appeal to your target audience without being a direct competitor. There's a myth running rampant throughout the SEO community that buying links is a no-no. This is not exactly true. The fact that you paid for it does not matter so much as the quality of the link itself. If you are a litigation lawyer, there's nothing harmful about purchasing a link to your page from reputable legal directories such as FindLaw or LawyerLocate. But paying for inclusion in a link farm that sandwiches your link between a teenager's angsty blog and the Britney Spears official site is something you want to avoid.

When you do buy a quality link, make it clear to the directory's webmaster that you want a DIRECT link. Although this is rarely an issue with smaller sites and directories, larger ones funnel the link through third party tracking software, so that they can monitor how much traffic they drive to your site. Search engine robots can follow the link, but as one forum member on the Search Engine Watch board commented, "You won't get any Google love from it." The third party software deadens the SEO effectiveness of the link.
Proper external linking is a great way to be ranked by the search engines as a trusted source for whatever it is you're looking to sell.

At Ecklund Marketing Group we can help you realize your linking potential.

Over Stuffed Web Pages Hurt your Page Rank by Ecklund Marketing Group

Bloated web pages hurt your page rank.

The rule is that pages must load in five seconds or less. If you can’t manage that then you are losing customers and potential linkers. The trouble starts in your code. That’s why ‘style sheets’ and utilizing an HTML clean-up option on your program (Dreamweaver etc…) is a very good idea. The crowded code can leave the search engines at a loss, not reading anything of importance until line 500 or worse. It can make it very difficult for your site to show up for your descriptive keywords and descriptions.
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An entry from Eric Enge also explains what a webmaster can do in order to side step this fate.

A Crucial SEO Element: Web Site Credibility by Aaron Wall

It seems like credibility and trust issues are a serious concern in the SEO community. A recent post on the Search Engine Land blog reiterated the potential pitfalls when it comes to working with web-based companies. There's an old saying which goes, "If it looks like a duck, and sounds like a duck, it's probably a duck." In SEO land, it's probably a decoy, not a real duck! You get our meaning. It makes sense to educate yourself on a company that is web based. A one man operation can be just as impressive on the internet as a billion dollar company. SEO blogger Aaron Wall hit the nail on the head when he advised site visitors to look for certain features that confirm legitimacy: “Does a site have an 'about' section and list a physical address on it? How old is the company? Lacking these details makes an organization seem less like an organization and more like a person sitting in their underwear in a basement somewhere.”

Check out this link and read the rest of what Aaron Wall has to say on the subject: A Crucial SEO Element: Web Site Credibility

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All about the Blog, by Ecklund Marketing Group

All about the Blog, by Ecklund Marketing Group

A weblog (or 'blog' for short) is a great tool for any law firm or sole practitioner hoping to reach potential clients. From a 'techie' perspective, blogs are loved by the search engines because of their regularly updated content, so they're indexed at a rapid rate and can offer another opportunity to drive traffic to your website. By using proper anchor text in your blog, you can also get an added SEO boost: if you're doing a post about civil litigation, you can insert a link that says 'more information about civil litigation', and direct it toward the civil litigation section of your website.

Google, which recently took over Blogger.com, offers free blog space. Other blog hosting services are available, but some require server-side installation and tweaking, so choose one based on your personal degree of technical knowledge.

Think blogging is for teenagers? Think again. Major corporations like the New York Times blog regularly to satisfy their customers' need for news and information. And so this goes back to the very fundamentals of search engine strategy - write for your target audience and you’re writing for the search engines.

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Updating your website by Ecklund Marketing Group.

Updating your website by Ecklund Marketing Group.

An alarming number of websites lie stagnant for years. Their pictures and text remain the same, and some of them look like they haven't aged a bit: frames and the blink and marquee tags still haunt the Internet despite the fact that people and SE bots hate them in equal doses. What web surfers, both of the human and robot variety, do appreciate is regularly updated content.

Search engine algorithms take a site's popularity into account when calculating rankings, and a popular site is usually one whose fresh and useful content attracts repeat visitors. Popular sites are authority sites from the SE perspective, and when the emphasis these days is on returning the most relevant results for a searcher's query, authority is a huge deal. Visitor loyalty can be won by offering a site newsletter compiled by experts in whatever field you cover, or keeping a sharp eye out for news and innovations pertinent to your business, so that word gets around that your page is the one to see for the latest buzz. Blogs and forums where visitors can interact with you and each other are also great ideas. A flow of fresh content is also a great way to entice the search engine robots to keep coming back. Although crawl rate does not influence your ranking for a chosen keyword or search term, it does ensure that your new content is found and indexed more readily than it might have been.

Ecklund Marketing Group has the tools and the know how to take your business to new heights. Find out how.

Hide ‘n Seek with Descriptive Keywords by Ecklund Marketing Group

Hide ‘n Seek with Descriptive Keywords

Hiding descriptive words within the body of a web page, otherwise known as 'keyword stuffing', is an old trick that used to influence the site's ranking on the search engines. If a webmaster wanted to rank well for 'Britney Spears', all they would do is type her name over and over throughout the page, making sure that the text matched the color of the background i.e. blue text on a blue background. Site users wouldn't see it unless they viewed the source code, but the engines picked it up whenever the page was spidered, and the favorable indexing that usually followed made many a webmaster a reluctant black hat operator.

That was then. Nowadays, keyword stuffing not only makes you look like an amateur or a porn site operator- it can also get you banned by the search engines. Google, Yahoo, and MSN are on the lookout for such flagrant and unethical attempts to manipulate the search engine algorithms, and when abuses are detected, the penalties can range in severity from e-mailed warnings to total de-indexing from the search engine's databases.

Keyword stuffing still occurs, but usually in the form of poorly written page copy: ‘Hamilton Accident lawyers can help you because they are the accident Lawyers in Hamilton going to court for you if you have an accident in Hamilton.’ The engines may not penalize you for this, but potential clients definitely will.

Don't despair- you CAN still control how well the SEs receive your site. Make sure that your content is intelligently written, and emphasizes your preferred search terms without demolishing the page's readability. Seek link exchanges with REPUTABLE web directories and sites whose themes are in keeping with your site's purpose- since you're running a law office, you might pay LawyerLocate or LawInfo for a listing, or link to a court reporter's page in exchange for their linking to you.

Proper networking and relevant content are the keys to successful SEO these days. At Ecklund Marketing Group, we use our experience with copy editing and context-appropriate linking to make your site a hit with both your clients and the SE bots.

See what Ecklund Marketing Group can do for your website.

The importance of HTML Sitemaps by Ecklund Marketing Group

The importance of HTML Sitemaps

A sitemap is just that. It is a map or index of your site. It comes in two varieties: 1) XHTML files and raw URL lists (text files) that allow the search engine bots to crawl your links more fluidly, and 2) HTML pages that organize your site content for the benefit of your visitors. You've probably seen the latter when you browsed bigger web sites. Google recommends that If you have more than 100 links in total to include in your HTML sitemap, you divide the content over two or more sitemap pages.

Both versions should offer an easily navigated list of the site's pages and the html links to each page. Because human visitors go to web pages in search of information, not links, you should take extra steps to make your HTML sitemap organized and informative. You can group your links by subject and put a header over each group i.e. 'Provincial Rules of Civil Procedure' or 'Lawyer Profile Pages'. It is good etiquette to add in the vicinity of each link a small description of what that page might contain, so the user can decide at first glance whether it interests them. Search engine robots also take adjacent text into account when assessing links. For example: if you’re directing someone to a page that sells ‘green widgets’ you would use ‘Green Widgets’ as the link and offer a description such as ‘We sell green widgets in all sizes’.That tells both people AND bots that you sell green widgets in all sizes! A few extra words is all it takes to make your site more user-friendly AND get the bots indexing you favorably.

See what Ecklund Marketing Group can do for you. Visit us at: www.ecklundmarketinggroup.com

The trouble with graphics by Ecklund Marketing Group

The Trouble with Graphics

A big blunder that some webmasters make is to design sites that are nothing more than an assortment of graphics pieced carefully together like an online jigsaw puzzle. These sites can be visually very appealing because you can use fancy fonts that otherwise would not display properly and minimize the risk of the pages looking different from one browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, etc). But there's an enormous trade-off involved: search engines hate these sites because they're beautiful!

Search engine robots cannot read text that's incorporated into an image, so all of your content is rendered useless from an SEO perspective. It's important to keep your graphics and your text as two separate elements. When you do use images, make sure that you add ALT text to each one. Alt text is what you see in the little yellow box that pops up when you mouse over some images. It gives some information about the picture in question i.e. "A photo of our Family Law team'.

Graphics are frequently used as navigation links. There's nothing wrong with that, provided you include HTML links at the bottom of each page. The bots will be able to follow the image link without difficulty, but it can't read the embedded text, so you lose the anchor text advantage.

We don't recommend that your index page be one huge graphic. While using proper meta tags will ensure that Yahoo appreciates your site's content, Google ignores meta tags these days and dives directly into page text. If your index page, the gateway to your site, has no text to feed it, the Googlebot will go away unsatisfied. Graphic elements will always take a back seat to good copy.

See what we can do for your business at: www.ecklundmarketinggroup.com