Website Analysis: SEO Starts with a Thorough Analysis

SEO starts with a thorough analysis of the website to conclude which aspects of your site need optimization. Why let coding errors or poor site architecture impact rankings for the worse? With search engine algorithms changing daily, there are no guarantees that the immunity you have today (from a favorable pat on the back) will pass value tomorrow.

A typical website analysis SEO sweep would look for things like:

Link Optimization - Links leaving each page (even if pointed at other pages in the site) should all have something link worthy to communicate. A link that says “click here” is a candidate for a makeover to something more consistent with the topical theme of the site, such as click here for more information about “main keyword and qualifier” as the link instead. 50% of your link profile is up the the webmaster, make good use of internal links.

Site Architecture - does your site employ a flat or robust site architecture? If you have everything in one folder (the root folder) and are just using random or diffused titles on each page, then you could optimize your information architecture to be more conducive to a search engine friendly website. Without making the topic complex, I often use Wikipedia as an example of solid website architecture.

The use wikipedia.org/wiki/main-keyword as the optimized naming convention then, the title is the main keyword and on that page are inbound links pertaining to all manor of semantic variations of the keyword, singular, plural, analogous keywords and more importantly multiple paragraphs about the keyword.

Combine this with a few million other pages and a few million other links and now you know why Wikipedia ranks so well in search engines. The take away is clear, create consistent titles and content and link to yourself (meaning the target page) with other related pages using the main keywords on the target page.

Aside from constant refinement, the need to create performance benchmarks, asset the competition and their methods as well as prune words, links and make adjustments to code (unless your rankings are stable or improving) is just another day at the office for an SEO.

Content development – Content development is crucial (fresh relevant content is king), but you have to make sure you are not diffusing your main keyword with lots of filler as well. By publishing content frequently you are flagging the attention of search engine spiders who will visit more frequently to index your new pages.

Depending on those pages, you will either add weight to your theme and build a more robust presence or potentially sap the existing link weight and authority in your site as the real page rank becomes buoyant and moves around to find the most likely page for relevance. Eventually it will mature and transcend the new page and flow back to the rest of the site, but in the beginning, there is a gestation period where the new page is like dead weight. During this initial phase, the best thing to do is build links to the page, so it becomes an asset sooner than later (as the internal and external links normalize) and the real page rank is assigned.

Finding the right balance of links in to links out is what gives a page expression in the (SERPs) search engine result pages. Typically the ratio is 35% of the links to the homepage and 65% of the links to pages other than the home page, this is known as deep linking.

Deep links – Using deep links combined with solid site architecture, focus titles and topical content are the foundation for an authority site. This is more intermediate SEO, but a step you cannot neglect or the competition will own the SERPs, theory is nice but the distinction between word and deed and theory and action must be bridged in order to test, retest and overcome real time obstacles as they arise. SEO is truly a trial by fire, so you must constantly be ready to look for a better way to find solutions when others can only see problems.

Developing Authority – I am an advocate of building authority sites, essentially, this shifts the focus and dependency from relying on other sites to support your pages or content. An authority site can create or attract it’s own links and anchor itself as a pivotal contribution to the industry. However, it is a massive undertaking that requires a tremendous amount of nurturing to get off the ground.

But sometimes, there is just nothing really worth salvaging aside from the concept alone, in which case the evaluation may call for a transplant of a CMS (content management system) or website redesign to add some advanced functionality which prior to the solution was the source of the site being on the outs with search engines.

Salvaging what can be saved and changing what cannot – It is a difficult call, but 7 out of 10 times, a site owner may be better off scrapping an old site (deleting it) and erecting an optimized blog in its wake to organize and administer content.

Without a search engine optimization analysis, their may be phantoms lurking in your code, internal links worth saving, site architecture that with a few tweaks can purr like a finely tuned engine and an addition of 20-30 pages or topical content that can turn your site around, but without taking that first step and getting a Free SEO Website Analysis, you could be clueless about which action to take or which strategy would have the most dramatic impact on your online marketing campaign

Optimizing the Right Content for the Right Audience

Most SEO efforts are directed towards lead generation and sales, but prospects and customers are not the only audiences for web content.

Fundamentally, SEO is about making the search engines’ job of crawling, indexing and ranking content easier, more useful to searchers. Companies publish many types of content to many different audiences. Most SEO efforts are oblivious to anything but leads and sales because marketing is the cost center paying for the SEO consulting.

Recently I’ve been educating public relations and corporate communications professionals at conferences like PRSA Digital Impact and Media Relations Summit on how SEO can be used specifically for news content. The intended audience are journalists and bloggers not consumers looking to buy products.

For example, here is a typical process involving SEO for lead generation where the intention of the searcher is to find products or services and they are presented with features, benefits and a call to action. The desired outcome of that interaction is a sale or a conversion and the searcher becoming a customer or a lead:

With news content, the target audience isn’t really people looking to buy products, although few companies would turn that traffic away from their press releases, media coverage, etc. Rather, the desired audience would be industry analysts, journalists and bloggers who are looking for sources, subject matter experts for stories they’re researching/writing. The desired outcome is not a sale, but to be selected as a topic, contributor or interviewee for an article/story published in the media.

The additional outcomes (potentially) include a relationship with the journalist for future story considerations and the journalist/analyst/blogger now having a new, trusted resource.

It’s an important distinction to make, optimizing the right content for the right audience but many companies and their SEO consultants tend to focus on content that can convert directly into revenue. This is a reasonable expectation but there are other types of content, communications and audiences that affect the bottom line like increasing the likelihood of getting media coverage. Valuations on each piece of media coverage can vary from $2,000 to $20,000 depending on the publication.

Other right content/right audience opportunities for corporate web sites include: careers and jobs content, customer service content (as mentioned in my previous post), investor relations and even corporate charitable programs. Optimizing those kinds of content not just for the sales generation opportunity, but also for the specific audience will enable the company to gain far more value out of their SEO investment.

I’ll be talking about this kind of focused content optimization specifically for news content at the upcoming Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose. “News Search SEO” which will be moderated by Dana Todd of Newsforce and includes co-panelists Greg Jarboe of SEO-PR and Lisa Buyer of The Buyer Group. Be sure to attend this session because it’s all new information from all 3 panelists you won’t want to miss.

Link Building Strategies

Improving One Way Links

One of the best ways of improving the popularity of your website is by having more and more websites linking to your website. However the important thing lies in improving the one way links that link to your website. This means that the links that lead to your website should all come from good websites.

Linking to link farms and nonsense websites may not at all help you in improving your one way links. The websites where you place your links should have a good generation of traffic, as it is this traffic that will link to your website. If the website you link to has no traffic at all, then there is no point in trying to improve one way links with that site.

All of the one way links that you select to link to your site should be from reputable websites that generate a sizeable amount of traffic. This is especially true for links that you may purchase from one way link packages. It is good practice to try to get a guarantee that the links you secure are reputable, and that they work at improving your site popularity. All of the one way links that you choose should be beneficial at improving your website popularity.

Using a good one way link provider website should be easy. Generally, you should just have to login to a good one way link site, and choose the right link package that will help at improving one way links to your site. You should be the one who chooses the links that you want. You should not need to use the links that link providers suggest to you. With a superior one way link provider website, if you find that the links that you had chosen do not prove to be effective at improving the link popularity of your site, then you should be able to change links and exchange links from over 1000 links that are offered by the one way link provider.

By verifying the links that they have on their site, you work at improving one way links to your site. This verification can be done with the help of search engines. Remember that the top three search engines recognize links on the site with varying speeds and numbers. This is why some search engines may take about 20 days to recognize your links while others may take 2-3 months to recognize your links.

There are different one way link packages with different numbers of links provided to you at different rates. Don’t just get an unlimited number of links for improving website popularity, as this only burdens your website with too many one way links. Instead, choose a few creditable one way links from a collection of links to aim for improving one way links.

Buying One Way Links

One way links prove to be important in improving your page ranking in search engines. This does not mean that you link to any link that you find on the internet. It is important that you choose links that prove to be quality links that help you to improve your search engine ranking. And the best way to do this is to consider buying one way links.

Once you join our packages, there is no need for you to worry about buying one way links. This is because just by signing up once on our site, you will have all of your worries about buying one way links taken care of. We offer several packages to choose from, depending on the number of links you desire to link up to. You may choose a fixed number of links depending on which package you choose, and you are at the liberty of changing your package when you want to.

In addition, if you find that the one way links you receive through buying a package from us are not effective in increasing the popularity of your website, you may always add and remove links as you require for your website. All you have to do is to log in to your account, and consider which links are worth buying and which have to be omitted. We have a range of over 1,000 links for you to choose from.

As we believe that the quality of the links you choose has a great influence on your page ranking, we ensure that all of the one way links you consider buying are from different domains, and have unique C Class IPs. And if you sign up with us now for buying one way links, we offer you a special 25% discount on the package that you choose.

When buying one way links for your site, it is not necessary that you choose only sites with high page ranking. This is because even if you choose links with lower page ranking, the page rank updates that take place recognize the links that you get, and over time the page rank of the link increases. So if you are considering buying one way links, buying them from us proves to be much more effective, beneficial and economical for you.

The owner of a website should always look at means to get one way links instantly. It is possible to get one way links instantly by including search related content to your websites, linking to article directories, and by linking to other websites that have similarities with your website and business.

Once you learn the tricks to get one way links instantly, you will find an increase in the page ranking of your website, an increase in traffic to your website, and also an increased page ranking in search engines. In other words, for a successful online presence, all webmasters should work at means to get one way links instantly.

We offer several packages for you to choose from to get one way links instantly. We have a large archive of over 1,000 links that you can choose from for linking to your site so that you get one way links instantly.

All you have to do is to register on our website and
choose the best package for yourself. There are different packages we offer depending on the number of links that you wish to access from our site.

We don’t believe in providing you with an unlimited supply of links to get one way links instantly, as there is little point in weighing down your site with hundreds of links. We know that in a bid to get one way links instantly, many people tend to add numerous links, sometimes unrelated links to the website. This does not serve much function as it mainly hampers the opening of the web page, and drives unrelated traffic to the site.

Once you join our package, you are at the liberty of choosing the links that you want to get instantly to your website. You can also change the links found on your site as and when you require to get one way links instantly to your site. If you find that some links are not working in generating traffic to your site, you just have to delete these links from your website by logging into your account on our website.

Similarly if you find some new links that prove to be better to get one way links instantly to your website, you can add them to your website as long as they comply to the package that you have with us.

Using Keywords In Your Link Building Campaigns

Many webmasters forget the basics when it comes to link building. An incoming link that does not contain keywords or phrases in its anchor text is nothing more than a poorly designed link, and can hinder the over all potential of your placement on the SERPs. The bottom line in your SEO efforts is achieving high ranking for your site and its pages. You wouldn’t omit relevant keywords in your sites Meta content, so why limit your site efficiency with poorly designed anchor text in your inbound links?

It is common practice to develop ‘copy text’ for your sites banner ads, sales letters and related items, so it makes perfect marketing sense to create keyword rich anchor text for the use in your one way links. Many incoming links are the result of a Webmaster or SEO admin who finds value in the content on your site. In most cases, they add a link on their site pointing to yours with a simple link of text that in most case is your site’s name or URL. This method has the visual appearance of being a valid link, but what is missing is the real power of your site’s keywords or phrases.

If your site deals with selling Florida vacation packages, you would want keywords and as many possibilities used in your sites backlinks. If you are buying links for your site, then it is only a matter of contacting the site and changing your linking preferences. If on the other had you discover a new inbound link to your site that has weak anchor text, you should send a friendly email to the Webmaster thanking him for his link to your site, and then ask him to edit the anchor text using your keyword rich copy. Keep in mind that having variation in anchor text is as important as they are in your keyword use in your Meta content.

There are also quite a few linking scripts available that will display an easy to use copy & paste line of code that can be added to almost anywhere on your site. If you are on a budget, then creating a simple image or text link that asks for visitors to link to your site is another option.

Controlling how your incoming links are seen on the SERPs is paramount to achieving prominent placement, and the key is using keyword rich anchor text at all times.

The Difference Between Text Links And Image Links

One of the most important aspects in web development is visual appeal. Your site’s visual appeal is the first impression that a visitor makes about your site, but visual appeal alone will not keep your visitors in your site. The key to success is useful relevant content. With the building of appeal, many Webmasters are convinced that the use of image links outweigh the use of text links, but sadly enough they are mostly dead wrong.

Google places a great emphases in textual content, hence the importance of keyword relevant content on your sites pages. When your site has an incoming link to it via an image, the only text seen by the search engine robots is the ‘alt’ tag. This ‘alt’ tag can contain relevant keywords, but the weight that it receives from Google is far less than the weight that a textual link would receive. Here is why.

An inbound text link using the ‘title’ tag ties relevancy with the textual phrase in the anchor text, and because the anchor text is associated with the relevant keywords that would be used to find it at the search engine query level, Google’s algorithm gives more weight to these textual links.

The strategy in any aggressive SEO campaign is building site visibility on the SERPs, and to date the most effective way to increase both the placement of your site in the SERPs, and your site’s PR, is thru the use of relevant one way link building.

Google’s algorithm was developed to actually examine all of your site’s textual content and code and award it a value based on the relevancy of its content. Additionally, Google PR is given by the rank and value of your incoming text links. This means that as the number of relevant incoming links to your site increases, so does your site’s PR.

Another point to make clear is that although having a large number of relevant inbound links is good, having a smaller number of incoming links from sites with high PR is better! Again, by looking at the way that Google awards PR, we see that in essence when your site receives an incoming link, that the site is casting a vote for your site’s relevance. Google weighs the PR of the site voting for you and uses that to determine your site’s value. Not all links are considered important. This is why relevancy is a key factor in link building campaigns.

Text Links Help Build Site Relevance

On the road to achieving prominent search engine placement, many webmasters are stuck in that SEO fork in road when it comes to building relevant site content. The chief concern is whether to focus on building page content or incoming links. There are many arguments for both sides when discussing building content versus link building campaigns, but from a practical stand point, shouldn’t the primary concern be aimed towards gaining prominent placement on the search engines using any legitimate means available?

Relevancy is the number 1 aspect of your website when viewed through the eyes of the search engine. The amount of relevant incoming links to your site is how Google determines and awards PageRank. In addition to having relevant organic content on your pages, incorporating link building into your SEO strategy is not only valuable, but prudent as well.

The argument regarding link building is which method works better and will deliver the highest PR value. For those who are new to the use of site linking there are 2 methods of link building: one way links, and reciprocal links.

One way linking building is exactly what its name says: Links point to your site from another domain or site on the Internet. Google and other search engines consider one way or incoming links as an indication of the value or importance of your site’s content. Incoming links can target your site’s home page, specific pages, or both. A perfect example of the use of an incoming link is a trackback or comment about your site, or a page on your site that is the result from a discussion or comment on an Internet forum or blog site.

Reciprocal links or link exchanges are created when 2 sites link to one another. There are no requirements for this link building relationship other than both sites continue linking to each other in order to maintain the reciprocal relationship. The downside to using reciprocal links is that relevancy is not required in order to create the linking relationship. Google and other search engines favor links that are rich in relevancy over generic reciprocal links. It is possible however to build relevant reciprocal links.

The next concern webmasters face is where they can obtain relevant links for their website. There are quite many options available online, some in the form of paid software and others offer linking services. The method in which you choose should be investigated thoroughly before including it into your site, and above all, remember that your link building campaign should be based on relevancy.

Protecting Your Link Buying Efforts

More and more as search engines catch on to creative link buying techniques, it becomes harder to protect your site from being detected. After some lengthy research it is found that there are more than 6,000 articles on how to protect your linking buying efforts.

The main focus described quite a few practices that you should not use, but adding them all here would create some pretty boring reading. So therefore let us focus on the more obvious practices.

Your links shouldn’t all come from the same place, nor should they all point to the same page or to your home page. You should avoid buying links from the same places your competitors do. Never buy links from places where you do not have control over how your anchor text is written. Avoid using the same keywords and descriptions in your anchor text. Stay away from link farms or sites that only have links pages, except for legitimate social networking sites and blogs. Never buy links from irrelevant sites, and never buy links in footers.

Creativity is the key to being successful in buying links for your site, and your efforts should be focused in making your links pass a human review should your site even encounter suspicion. Some of the best types of links you can buy are those that come from sites that have a long history of being online or substantial trust and authority.

Another good source of links can come from sites that already rank. The higher they rank the more they will help your incoming link efforts. Links that are in middle page content are a big plus. And above all, once you buy a link and keep it on your page, the longer you keep them the more they help your site.

It cannot be stressed enough about the constant necessity of being both creative and patient in your linking campaign. It takes time to build high ranking and PR. Work slowly and consistently and your site will reap the powerful benefits of link building. It is also as good idea to mix up your incoming links with a few legitimate links to help your site maintain the appearance of only having natural organic backlinks. There are many blog sites where you can post comments about information or events that are similar to your site, and include links to your site’s content that relate. Another creative idea is gathering free E-books about useful subjects and then posting articles on blogs sites and forums offering to give them away.

Giving Your Site Authority With Back Links And Creative Marketing

Many people want as much exposure as they can get for their site, but few are willing to really dig in and do the footwork required in gaining that attention. Even though your site may be ranking well with the use of inbound links, in order to keep to your sites backlinks looking human and natural there are a few things you should do to reinforce your site’s linking efforts.

One of the easiest tricks is to set up a free blog on one of the popular blog providers and post regular articles. It is a good idea to create the site with relevance to your real site. You don’t have to spend a lot time coming up with original content, it’s quite easy to use free available on the web content mixed in with some original articles. After the site has been up for a while then create a link to your site. Keep in mind that you need to make this blog site appear completely unique and that is has no direct connection to you or your real website. Another powerful trick used is to look for a popular topic that relates to your real site and post adversarial articles to lure and entice readers to link to your blog and post comments. This is a subtle trick that adds legitimacy to your blog site and aids in making it an authority.

Another good idea is to get your family and friends involved in the blog site by letting them post their own articles. This networking approach has a spill over effect that will help bring in others to the blog site, but please remember that the focus of this site is build trust and authority to be used in the promotion and protection of your real site and its incoming paid links.

If you live in a small city or town, you may ask the local chamber of commerce to link to your site, or maybe a local non-profit organization. These types of sites have valuable site trust and authority and will help strengthen your sites position on the SERPs.

Another solid source of authority can be found at your local city college. Find out who runs the college website and blogs and build a relationship with them through either a mutual interest, or simply inquire if you can purchase a link ad from their site to yours.

There are many more possibilities to building your site’s authority on the SERPs, be flexible and spend time looking at what other sites are doing, and try to think outside the normal SEO channels and always be creative!

Achieving fast SEO results for your blog or website can be time consuming and sometimes even confusing. Most webmasters are simply content building their site with lots of relevant content, and then they submit them to the major search engines, and sit back and wait. This can be both time consuming and actually limit a websites overall potential in building links to their site. The use of inbound text links is proven to help a website achieve higher ranking and PR (PageRank).

There are a few ways to begin implementing inbound links to your site; build relevant and useful content and wait for sites to link to you, or search for a reputable site that offers inbound link services. Choosing an inbound linking service can provide your site with quality incoming links in a matter of days. The cost of such a service is relative to the PR of the sites that you want links from. In general, inbound links from sites with high PageRank will increase the overall value of your site’s PR, and even though Google’s algorithm is the source of your site’s PR, other search engines base site rankings from the amount of backlinks your site receives as well.

Using caution is recommended on choosing the right service to buy links from. A simple rule is to look for a service that has been around for a while, and research them on the Internet. There are many sites that make fabulous claims, or offer super low prices as means of luring an unsuspecting victim to buy their services. Another important point is to remember that high PR is based on the quality and relevance of the backlinks to your site, and you would be wasting both time and money to simply buy backlinks that had no relevant value to your site. The key to increasing your sites visibility on the SERPs with the use of one way text links is quality and relevance.

Another way of getting incoming links to your site is by searching the Internet for sites that are using similar keywords or provide similar services, and then sending an email to the Webmaster asking for a link to your site. There is a big downside to this method in that most webmasters may consider your email as unsolicited or spam!

Many webmasters simply do not have the time or resources to research websites that would be a quality match for linking to their site and the actual amount time required for such a task couldn’t be considered fast results any way. The best course of action in achieving fast results from using inbound text links would be to buy 1 or 2 quality backlinks and then gauge their results.

What Are Text Links?

In today’s highly competitive race to achieve top placement on the major search engines, one of the most commonly misunderstood technique is creating one way text links, or backlinks. What are these links, what do they mean to my SEO campaign, and is link building really worth it?

A text link is a hyper link, also referred to as Anchor Text, that is coded around a word or phrase on a website that links to another website.

Your website’s popularity and over all value is measured not only by the amount of relevant content it has, but also by the amount of relevant websites that link to your pages or content. Building inbound links to your website should be as high a priority as researching the right keywords is. Google has created what is known as PageRank or PR. PageRank is achieved by the number of inbound links that are pointing to your website. Google assigns a numeric value (0-10) to all websites that are included in their search index. This linking value is based not only on the number of incoming links your website has, but also the quality or PR of the website(s) that are linked to you. There is quite a bit more to the PR algorithm, but in SEO terms inbound links are a combination of quality and quantity. In simple terms; any website that links to your website which has a higher PR (PageRank) will raise the value of your websites PR.

Sounds pretty simple huh? So now the question is where do I find websites that will link back to my website. Your first step should be to research websites that offer similar services or products, and then begin a linking campaign. In most cases you do not want to build links with sites that are in direct competition, but rather sites that offer products or services that would benefit or enhance your product or services. If your website sells auto insurance, then having inbound links from auto sales, auto repair, and auto parts websites would be perfect examples of the kinds of sites that would help raise your sites PR. Another good example would be backlinks from top-level auto insurance websites or insurance advocacy sites. The focus of all search engines is to provide valuable and useful results to the visitors who use their search engine to find products, services, and information.

Is inbound link building really worth it? Yes, Yes, and Yes! Having relevant one way text links to your site should be an integral part of your websites SEO campaign.

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