Keep It Fresh

According to Search Engine Watch's Mark Jackson, "Fresh content will help you achieve top rankings right away, and help your Web site become an "authority" site. Search engines love fresh content and deep Web sites."

That's the reality of SEO these days. While it's acknowledged that most websites will continue to have static pages (how many times can you modify the 'Contact Us' section??) site owners who strive to become an authority in their field will find that the increased traffic will translate into better rankings in the SERPS. Regularly updated content, a blog with interesting and informative posts, and your web link posted in vertical directories of appeal to your client base will all compensate you well for the time and effort invested.

Best SEO Tips by Matt Cutts

Google's Matt Cutts, in response to a request from USA Today, shared his Top Five Tips for Good SEO. They are as follows:

1. Spotlight your search term on the page. Once you have chosen a keyword (i.e. 'dog grooming'), ensure that you place that term in favorable spots throughout your site. This includes header tags, title tags, and in the copy itself.
2. Fill in your 'tags'. According to Cutts, the two most important meta tags are Title and Description, as their content is displayed in the search results and greatly influence a visitor's decision whether or not to click through to your site.
3. Get other sites to link back to you. Cutts confirms that this is one of the most important factors Google takes into account when ranking pages.
4. Create a blog and post often. Well, written, authoritative content will encourage repeat visits from bloggers and site owners who may decide to link to you.
5. Register for free tools. Cutts recommends that webmasters use the powerful tools available via Google's Webmaster Central, submit a text-based sitemap, and add their business information to Google's Local Business Center.

His final piece of advice was "less is more." No keyword stuffing, including your URL in link farms, or sharing links with sites whose content is not remotely comparable to yours. Such attempts to manipulate search results don't yield the top rankings that they used to. In SEO, impatience is now a liability.

-R. Keefe

Include a link back to your home page from PDF documents

If adding PDFs to your site, some good advice is to include a link back to your home page.

Search engines have become more sophisticated - the 'bots' are even crawling and reading your PDF files linked from your web site. If you use PDFs, make sure you have them open up in a separate window, that way the viewer can always close it and find themselves back on your site.

Also, add a link to your home page somewhere on each PDF; otherwise, site visitors that enter your site from a search engine via the PDF won't have navigation to take them to the rest of your site.

www.ecklundmarketinggroup.com

Identical content through varied URLs

When search engines crawl identical content through varied URLs, there can be many negative effects, such as:

Owning multiple URLs can dilute link popularity. For example, rather than 50 links to your intended display URL, the 50 links may be divided three ways among the three distinct URLs.

Link popularity is important to websites, because the more traffic you get for your search term, the more reputable your website becomes. So with three sites basically competing for the same terms, you are actually hurting your chances at gaining in Pagerank with any of them.

I know, you wanted more sites so that you'd have a better chance at getting more traffic. As long as you use different search terms and keywords for the same product or service you should safetly be able to have three or more sites (so long as they don't each have duplicate content).

The thing is, if all those search terms are on just one site, then you will pool all that traffic, thus gaining reputation with the search engines as the site to beat for all of your search terms.

Something to think about!

Exhibiting Search Engine Optimization at the Ontario Bar Association

The Ontario Bar Association was an exciting venue for our company to attend as an exhibitor, as we specialize in web marketing for lawyers and law firms.

This was our first time attending an expo like this and we were not disappointed. Several lawyers and paralegals approached us as well as some of the other exhibitors.

Our specialized marketing strategies for legal support companies such as Canadian Process Serving Inc., United States Process Serving Corp, Ontario Process Serving, and OLAP are but a few of the websites our company promotes successfully over the world wide web.

For more information on web promotion look us up!

Will the real sitemap please stand up?

Sitemaps. Every webmaster and probably every site owner has heard of them, but only a few A) know that there are in fact two different types of sitemaps and B) fully understand what they do and don't accomplish.

Let's examine the first point. According to Google Webmaster Blog, "There's a difference between a (usually HTML) site map built to help humans navigate around your site, and an XML Sitemap built for search engines." An HTML sitemap can be seen here. These are pages that organize your content so that visitors can find what they're looking for more quickly. The XML version is (usually) not publicly visible, as its purpose is to help search engine spiders, not people, explore the site's content. See an example of XML sitemap coding and protocol details here. Multi-page sites should implement both types to ensure convenience for all visitors, both human and robot.

Now for the second point. A common misconception is that the XML sitemaps ensure regular crawling, thorough indexing, and better rankings. At the Chicago conference that Rose and Mike attended last December, one site owner complained, "I've submitted a sitemap to the engines but I haven't been crawled or indexed yet! What gives??" Expectant faces were turned toward the experts panel, suggesting that his problem is not an uncommon one.

According to Google Webmaster Central, "Submitting a Sitemap helps you make sure Google knows about the URLs on your site. It can be especially helpful if your content is not easily discoverable by our crawler (such as pages accessible only through a form). It is not, however, a guarantee that those URLs will be crawled or indexed. We use information from Sitemaps to augment our usual crawl and discovery processes... A Sitemap does not affect the actual ranking of your pages. However, if it helps get more of your site crawled (by notifying us of URLs we didn't previously know about, and/or by helping us prioritize the URLs on your site), that can lead to increased presence and visibility of your site in our index."

The bottom line is that sitemap creation and maintenance is not a substitute for other good SEO practices, such as keyword rich content, carefully chosen meta data, and relevant links. They're an asset, but not the final word in SEM success.

-R. Keefe

The perils of wearing a Black Hat

On January 2, 2008 a story appeared on the Search Engine Watch Blog that rattled the SEO community and made website owners understandably nervous. Matt Marlon, CEO of Traffic Power, had been jailed for allegedly running a housing foreclosure scam. Using four different aliases and 45 corporations, he allegedly convinced homeowners that he could save them from foreclosure. Not only did Marlon not really buy their houses or pay off their mortgages, he also, according to the SEW blog, "would get the rightful owners out of the house under false pretenses and would... rent the houses to tenants."

Such tactics did not bode well for his SEO clients either: he was also accused of using black hat tricks to secure favorable rankings for Traffic Power's clients. Matt Cutts of Google confirmed that the company site, traffic-power.com, and the domains that the company promoted were removed from Google's index due to violations of Google's webmaster guidelines. The owners of the now-blacklisted sites are left with the task of taking the necessary steps to re-include their pages in Google.

It all amounts to the same thing: SEO is a breeding ground for scam artists. Don't let yourself be caught by one of them.

-R. Keefe

Header Tags and Optimization

The poor use of Header tags is a widespread issue across the web. Frequently, H1 and H2 tags aren't used and, if they are, it's often the same from page to page. To have the H1 tag the same on every page renders this extra SEO step meaningless for the most part.
Most SEO specialists know that Header Tags are a useful information source for both the human user and the search engine bots. Some will even place an H1 tag around their logo, a practice that is helpful (according to some) to the visually impaired by making the alt text more prominent in site readers as the page's main topic.
The fact is, is that Headers are important and to over look them is a mistake too many webmaster make in their day to day optimization efforts.


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