Casa De SEO | SEO Blog | SEM Services

Webpage Hits vs. Page Views - Explained

Casa De SEO - Matt — Wed, 07 May 2008 14:46:52 GMT

iWhat is the difference between page views and hits within my website analytics?

It has come to my attention that many people do not understand the difference between a website “HIT” vs. a website “Page View”. Everyday your website will receive both hits and page views. What do millions of hits per month versus thousands of page views mean when you look at your traffic logs? It's all about the graphics on a webpage vs the user viewering the page.

Here’s some information you should understand before we proceed:

1. 1 graphic/image equals 1 hit

2. 1 webpage equals 1 page view

3. A page view is sometimes referred to as a request. This is because you are requesting a page be loaded when you click on a website or any of the sub pages.

4. Loading means the webpage appears on your browser.

5. The terms visit or visitors have no precise meaning unless the site is tracking its users. The term page view is the basic agreed upon standard

Information about a website's traffic is kept in the log file, a kind of general record. For more direct identification of the user , many websites use cookies. Similar to knowing what apartment house someone lives in, but not the specific apartment.

The number of graphics displayed on the webpage equals the number of hits. The display of the webpage is a constant number. Number of hits equals number of graphics plus 1 hit for the page.

For example:

1 graphic + 1 webpage ( 1 hit + 1 page view ) = 2 hits
10 graphics + 1 webpage (10 hits + 1 page view) = 11 hits
100 graphics + 1 webpage ( 100 hits + 1 page view ) = 101 hits
1000 graphics + 1 webpage (1000 hits + 1 page view ) = 1001 hits
10,000 graphics + 1 webpage (10,000 hits + 1 page view) = 10,001 hits
100,000 graphics + 1 webpage (100,000 hits + 1 page view) = 100,001 hits

I hope this helps everyone understand why the hit count is so great vs. the page views.

Regards,

Matt your SEO Blogmaster

SEO Consultant for Rioforma.com

Alexa Rank Comparison Tool

Casa De SEO - Matt — Thu, 01 May 2008 09:19:19 GMT

The Alexa Traffic History Graph allows you to create a traffic history graph for any site. Alexa computes traffic rankings by analyzing the Web usage of millions of Alexa Toolbar users.

What is Traffic Rank?
The traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users. It is a combined measure of page views and users (reach). The three-month change is determined by comparing the site's current rank with its rank from three months ago.

What is Reach?
Reach measures the number of users. Reach is typically expressed as the percentage of all Internet users who visit a given site. Alexa expresses reach as the number of users per million. The three-month changes are determined by comparing a site's current reach with its values from three month ago.

Please use the FREE Alexa Rank Checker below to view your ranking changes.


	Alexa Rank Comparison Tool © SEO Chat™ Domains Enter a one or more domain names (domain.com or www.domain.com) up to 10 domains. Width Width of the chart Height Height of the chart Graph Type Select Alexa Graph Type Daily Reach Rank Time Span Select Time Span 3 Months 6 Months 1 Year 2 Year Enter Captcha To Continue To prevent spamming, please enter in the numbers and letters in the box below Report Problem with Tool.

Regards,

Matt the Blogmaster

FREE SEO Website Review

Link Building - How Too

Casa De SEO - Matt — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 10:04:56 GMT

There are many ways, some traditional and some quite innovative, to get other web sites to link to yours. That said,, it can be easier said than done. Google defines a link as it pertains to rankings and SEO as a "vote" from one site to another. The more quality votes your site receives, the greater chance you have of rankings well. If a well established site links to yours, that link carries more weight than one would from a less reputable page.

If your site has useful content and is doing something unique, you're already ahead of much of the competition. People need a reason to link to your site, as very few will do it out of the goodness of their heart. Trading links can work, but link exchange networks have decreased in value and won't be of much use in competitive fields. Buying Text Links, if you haven't heard, is a big Google no-no. While entire articles could be written on this topic, here are a few popular methods of acquiring incoming links:

1) Create and issuing press releases with a link back to your site

2) Submitting to reputable business directories such as DMOZ

3) Start participating on related blogs by commenting and exchanging ideas

4) Ask clients with web sites, if they would add your link to their "partners" section

5) Participate in relevant forums and discussion boards with a link in your signature

6) Get involved in social media and bookmarking websites

Regards,

SEO Blogmaster Matt

Local Search SEO Help

Casa De SEO - Matt — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 19:00:45 GMT

Hello all,

A friend of mine sent me this article and I thought it was perfect for the website!!!! Now on with the show.

Many brick and mortar companies that are catering to their local clientele find it hard to SEO for local markets despite targeting the best keywords. Quite naturally this is not a surprising matter as many of them, although efficient in running their off line businesses, typically stumble over two critical blocks.

Stumbling Blocks and SEO for Local Markets

When local businesses set to do SEO for local markets, many of them invariably ignore the need to think rationally because they are advised by SEO experts to target the big three search engine users and sometimes get confused and tackle this feat on a global level resulting in global traffic. The direct fall out of this step is exposing your business offers, products or services to the world at large only to dilute all other local online SEO efforts. If your product is not global you are in trouble.

So here is the stumbling block number one.

1. Not using localized target keywords, however good they are, will leave your new websites way down the SERP's locally. Actual localized keywords you should be targeting in which will bring you a steady stream of natural traffic.

The second block where you might probably stumble, especially if you are new to web and optimization is wrongfully assuming internet marketing techniques as something radically different and for removed from the earthly- worldly affairs that we all do by trial and errors over and again. The crux of the matter here is SEO for local markets is only a small part of larger marketing exercises, with certain twists, to get exposure with local locations.

Here is the second stumbling point in SEO for local markets.

2. SEO for local markets is not a marketing technique but a sophisticated local technique of optimizing websites on a local basis. Obviously, the one who knows the pulse of the market is not the SEO expert but can contribute his knowledge to SEO expert.

So, What Is Actually SEO For Local Markets?

Let me dash you through steps involved in SEO for local markets in short.

1. Localize your target keywords. This includes prefixing or suffixing local terms, names, and names of areas, cities or zip codes with target keywords. Example: "remodeling contractors Orange County", not "remodeling contractors".

2. Submit to local search engines (find one, if you don't know already), directories and web based yellow pages.

3. Display your mailing address with street address, zip code and complete. Once your site is indexed, these words gain prominence as a part of content.

4. Submit to local listing sections of Yahoo and DMOZ which is in addition to generalized listing.

5. Don't leave out general SEO techniques because you want to SEO for local markets which the power of link building which can be done globally as there might not be enough local sites to beat you competition.

6. Get on the local maps of Google, Yahoo, as this generally puts you on front of the local search engines.

7. Exchange links and banners with local businesses as the local traffic exchange will bring you new business. Avoid changing banners or links with competitors but exchange them with businesses that will complement you. Verify their traffic so it's an almost even exchange.

Dominating local SEO can be done fairly easily, you just have to either hire a professional with a proven track record or take time to learn local SEO. The main concern is to be patient as it takes at least 3 months to start seeing results.

Thanks Michael for the use of the article.

Regards,

Matt your SEO Blogmaster

About the Author: Michael S. Francis the author is a seasoned local SEO expert. Michael S. Francis is the owner of www.seovida.com

How to Build More Website Content

Casa De SEO - Matt — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 16:18:52 GMT

Ask your partners and wholesalers for content

If you have a product-based website, your suppliers can be a terrific source of content. For example, if you are a reseller of hand woven rugs, ask your manufacturer’s permission reprint promotional material that details the weaving and hooking the rugs. This content or copy is usually well written by a professional copywriter and has been loaded with pertinent keywords. Additionally, it is usually supplied in digital format so that adding to content to the website is so easy. Also add some product photos along-side the content to help keep the attention of the visitors. Before long, your website will begin to rank higher for handmade rugs, hand woven rugs braided rugs, rag rugs, and hooked rugs.

Just add more related words to your website

The reason this is a great "secret" is because everyone wins. This is my favorite method of doing adding content to a website. First you must understand that there are other authorities and experts in a given field or related industry who are often seeking collateral exposure, which you can provide them. Your job is find an article published online that contains content related to your industry and ask for permission to "reprint" it on your site. The trick is to identify “complimentary, not competing materials”.

For example, if you are a realtor. There are numerous associated trades that go hand in hand with selling homes (i.e. home appraisals, financing, title companies etc.). So search the web for a really good article that has something useful to say about the associated subject. If you are a regionally based business, it would be even better if you can find something from the site of another local business. When you find it, send a gracious email requesting permission to reprint their article on your site. Mention how helpful and informative their article is and how valuable it will be to your site's visitors. Naturally you will give appropriate credit to the author as well as a link back to their site. This provides them with additional credibility and exposure, as well as a nice reciprocal link. So… what if they ignore your request, or even say no? Just keep looking. The beauty of this process is that the information is readily available. Trust me, it won't take long before someone says yes. All you have to do is a little surfing and a little sweet-talking.

Creating or finding content for your site is not rocket science. Think about it. Every product or service solves a problem for the consumer. Identify that problem, and in theory, you're an expert on it. So, write about what you know, or find related content that someone else has already written. Just get those words on your site. By doing your homework, providing pertinent content, and supplying your customers with a wealth of resources, you are building not only business, but also relationships. And there's only one word for that -- success!

Regards,

SEO Blogmaster - Matt

How to Kill Your Page Rankings

Casa De SEO - Matt — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 15:12:13 GMT

Hello faithful patrons,

So sorry for the lack of posts lately, I've just been crushed with business. With that said, every week I get some prospect who tells me that they are going to use some fantastic technique to boost their websites rank or popularity within the search engines. The conversation always starts out something like this, quote "I only need you to help me market my website, my cousin showed me how to SEO my website using keywords and by building other websites to double my traffic."

What they are really saying is they have no clue what they are doing and just because the great "Google Gods" have indexed a page or two they are now SEO experts........ So to make sure you all end up to be real SEO experts please do not use any of the techniques listed below!

Keyword Stuffing:

One major "no-no" in meta-tags is stuffing as many keywords as possible into your meta tags and website with the sole intent of boosting your ranking in the search engines as opposed to creating quality content. Another common stuffing and "black-hat" technique entails creating keywords that match the background color of your web page, with the intent of hiding it from the human eye, but still allowing search engine robots to index them.

Although once popular, keyword spamming techniques can have a severe negative impact for your website. If the web indexing robots are able to detect keyword spamming, your site may be penalized with a lower ranking, or simply be removed from their index.

Doorway Pages:

Auto generated pages that are produced only for search engines to index and have no other value to the site. Doorway creation software can create hundreds of additional pages for your site in very little time, with the intent of having many pages for web robots to index. Auto created doorway pages are looked at as spam and if detected by the search engine spiders, your site will be penalized or be removed from their database.

In some instances a website such as full on flash website may not have any choice but to create a limited number anchor pages/ doorway pages since their entire site is in a format that can not be spidered. Care should be taken in how this is rolled out.

Baiting:

Also known as cloaking. Is the use of custom scripts that detect when a particular spider is crawling/visiting your website, and auto loads preset meta tags and or content built specifically for that spider and is different content then that which actual users will see. This technique is considered search engine spam and can have a severe negative impact for your website ranking.

Duplicating Web-Pages:

Another big "no-no" is creating multiple identical webpages or websites with identical content but different domain names. Essentially an advanced version of doorway pages. Often the websites are database driven and share the same database. Although once popular and still done by some , if web indexing robots detect duplicate sites, then both websites may be removed from their index.

Closing Thoughts:

If you find a new hot "magic" technique for getting that #1 ranking, chances are it is a form of spam. If you get caught spamming the search engines you will likely damage your ranking or be removed from their database! The top search engine companies have some of the best minds in the business who's full time job it is to continually make their search engine better. One of the ways this is done is by improving the relevancy and quality of the database by removing sites that spam their databases. Remember most search engines such as Google have a place where people can report sites they think are spamming the search engine. As rule of thumb, if you find a technique that attempts to artificially boost your ranking in the engines by circumventing or exploiting an algorithm that the search engines use, then it is SPAM.

What is the Code to Text Ratio of your Website?

Casa De SEO - Matt — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 08:33:36 GMT

Many search engines such as Google base their search results upon relevancy to the content provided. So basically if the page isn’t relevant, it won’t appear in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

If your web page contains too much HTML code, that could prevent a search engine spider from crawling the page in its entirety. Some search engine crawlers will check the amount of code there is on a page and compare it to the amount of text as part of its algorithm. If the page is too big, the spider may only be allowed to capture portions of the page, leaving out possible vital and relevant content.

Basically the more code you have on a page, the less search engine spiders will be able to pick up on the important language in your text for rankings purposes.

A good Rule of Thuml for Text to Code Ratios:

0-10 % - Consider adding more content or revamping your code.

11-24 % - Content is moderate, but always room to improve.

25+ % - Generally good, but don't over do it.

Things to do to increase your Text to Code Ratios:

Minimal Text on a Page
Placement of large amounts of Javascript on the page
Placement of CSS on the page
Table on Table development

Store Javascript in external file son your server and simply call for it in your code. There is not real need to place most Javascript directly on the page, save space and file it externally.
Create smooth tableless CSS pages. These are great pages from an optimization standpoint. First they create a better code to text ratio, and second they give the spiders a clear path through the entire page for indexing. Tables should only be used for tabular data.
Place all CSS in external CSS files. This makes is easier as you develop anyway, so you can simply call the entire CSS instead of rewriting it.

There are tools across the internet that can tell you what your code to text ratio is like the one below.


	Code to Text Ratio Tool © SEO Chat™ URL Valid URL to check Enter Captcha To Continue To prevent spamming, please enter in the numbers and letters in the box below Report Problem with Tool.

A rule of thumb should be - "the higher the ratio number, the better".

We thank Collins Internet for use of their article:
Portions of this article have come from "Collins Internet Website Solutions"

http://www.collinsinternet.com

Thanks again - your input is always welcome!

Regards,

Matt your SEO Blog Master!!!!

How to Check What Pages on Your Website Have Been indexed

Casa De SEO - Matt — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 21:00:24 GMT

Can the Search Engines Index the Pages and Content on Your Website?

Probably the biggest surprise to most people is that search engines are unable to either navigate or read most of the content on their website. If the search engine can't read your copy (text), then it's not surprising that you're not getting the rankings or traffic to your website that you aspire to.

The only thing a search engine can read is words. Sites that are dynamic, or created in other technology platforms such as Flash or Java, often cannot be read by the search engines. Even if they can read the content on your site, many times search engine cannot navigate your website properly because there are no specific links or sitemap to tell the proper sequence of pages or where to go next.

Want to see what Google is indexing on your website? Go to Google and type in: site:www.yourdomainname.com .

This will show you the title and description of the pages of your website that the search engines have indexed. If they are all the same or they don't have a title or description listed, chances are very good that your site is invisible to your target market. Make sure you have basic meta-tags and content of 100 to 500 words per-page preferably in straight HTML.....

Have a great day....

Matt your SEO expert and blogmaster.....

Search Engine Statistics for Dec. 2008

Casa De SEO - Matt — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 20:35:33 GMT

Below you will find some interesting statistics for Search Engine traffic and keywords searches for December, 2008.

Top Search Engine Traffic - Dec. 2008

Top Shopping & Classifieds Search Terms for Dec., 2008

Top Wedding related searches for Dec., 2008

Top Fashion related searches for Dec., 2008

For more information about search engine statistics go to hitwise.com

Regards,

Matt - Your SEO Blogmaster..........

What are Google Sitelinks?

Casa De SEO - Matt — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 11:32:36 GMT

Hello fellow Bloggers and Happy new year!

Sorry for the delay but I have about 5 SEO and SEM projects going right now. So it looks like 2008, is starting off as a great year for me. With that said, let's get on with a great question one of my clients asked me today.

The question was this:

When you do a search on Google, sometimes you see some of the search results with additions links to pages within that website.

What is this? Can you pay for this service? Or how do you optimize for it?

Here's my response and a little information as to what this is.

Sitelinks are extra links that appear below some search results in Google. They serve as shortcuts to help users quickly navigate to the important pages on your site.

Selecting pages to appear as sitelinks is a completely automated process. Our algorithms parse the structure and content of websites and identify pages that provide fast navigation and relevant information for the user's query. Since our algorithms consider several factors to generate sitelinks, not all websites have them.

Now, Google's Webmaster Tools let you view potential sitelinks for your site and block the ones you don't want to appear in Google search results. Because sitelinks are extremely useful in helping users navigate your site, we don't typically recommend blocking them. However, occasionally you might want to exclude a page from your sitelinks, for example: a page that has become outdated or unavailable, or a page that contains information you don't want emphasized to users. Once you block a page, it won't appear as a sitelink for 90 days unless you choose to unblock it sooner. It may take a week or so to remove a page from your sitelinks, but we are working on making this process faster.

To view and manage your sitelinks, go to the Webmaster Tools Dashboard and click the site you want. In the left menu click Links, then click Sitelinks.

To summerize,

The links shown below some sites in the Google search results, called sitelinks, are meant to help users navigate your site. Google's systems analyze the link structure of your site to find shortcuts that will save users time and allow them to quickly find the information they're looking for.
Google only shows sitelinks for results "when they" think they'll be useful to the user. If the structure of your site doesn't allow Google's algorithms to find good sitelinks, or Google doesn't think that the sitelinks for your site are relevant for the user's query, they won't show them.

At the moment, sitelinks are completely automated. We're always working to improve our sitelinks algorithms, but there can be no guarantee that your indexed page or pages will have these additional sitelinks. Also not that sitelinks are usually associated with heavier traffic-sites.

Have a great day!

Regards,

Matt your SEO blogmaster.............

What is Keyword Density

Casa De SEO - Matt — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 08:29:12 GMT

What is Keyword Density

What is keyword density? Well it’s the percentage of times a particular keyword or phrase shows up in relation to the overall amount of text on that page. Example: if your webpage about SEO has 100 words on it overall, and your top keyword that you wish to rank on is the keyword "SEO" and it appears 5 times on this page. Then the keyword density for SEO would be a 5% weighting on that page. It’s also important that your top keywords on your webpage are also included in your meta-tags. Care should be taken with keyword density as it can greatly effect your website ranking especially on high-competitive keywords and phrases. Keyword density relates directly to text on your webpage, because text is content and content is always king as far as search engines are concerned!

Why is Keyword Density important to search engines

Text is important because the robots (aka: spiders , web crawlers) the search engines send out to index your site are really only able to use text information from your site in their databases. The robots index your website looking for text, and once it finds it...by downloading your page and parsing out the html to retrieve useful text. It sends the information back to the search engine database where it is stored and made searchable. The text words that were found on your site are associated with your webpage url inside this database. (Parsing is sometimes done on the engine side in order to free up the spider for more spidering...it really depends on how the engineers developed their system, but you get the idea of how data is being handled)

Key words in the search engine database are broken out across a tree format as a form of storing them in the database and are assigned a pointer back to a stored URL, and the URL is assigned a weighting as to the number of times this word appeared on that particular page (along with many other factors that make-up the score of the algorithm).

When an incoming search is made, the engine walks its tree to find the appropriate word and the URL's that the keyword is pointing to (pointer as mentioned above). All URL's associated with this keyword are gathered together and sorted as to which order they will appear. Pages that the engine determine are more relevant receive a higher ranking. Often this result is cached for rapid look up the next time...particularity because the sorting of the data tends to be a tremendous over head for search engines. Now this may not be the exact way all the search engines handle their data, but it does show what can and does happen in the world of search engines. Each engine has its own twist on the variable, but they all have the same issues such as: getting data, storing data, making it searchable at high speed.

Beware text is not always text

We have seen many web designers create images with text placed above or below the image in the picture. Essentially this is creating a picture of a product that has a nice write-up about the product below it. (This is done many times because many shopping carts do not allow for different style fonts for titles and descriptions or have some funky template format that forces many web developers to attach/embed text in an image) The problem is the text is not actual text, but really just text embedded into the .jpg or .gif image. Now a websites visitor may have no problem at reading this information but a web crawling spider only recognizes the image file and has nothing to index, as it cannot pull the embedded text from the picture. There are some things you can do to help the spiders with the images such as including Alt-Tags but we will save that blog entry for another time.

Good luck working on your keyword density percentages!!!

Matt - your SEO blogmaster

Understanding Link Building

Casa De SEO - Matt — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 18:02:24 GMT

What is link popularity?

Well it is best explained like this, it’s the number of links pointing back to your site, with the idea that the greater number of links means the more popular your website is. Search engines are known to increase ranking based upon link popularity.

It should be said, that the major engines (Google especially) are no longer only looking for the sheer number of links pointing back to your website, but focus more on the quality (page rank) and relevancy (related subject matter) of those links pointing back to you.

Link exchange isn't just about generating better search engine ranking, it is about generating sales through cross marketing your website through others that are in your industry. If you just run amok and try to exchange links with everyone and anyone, you'll do nothing to but waste your time! The same thing goes If you submit your site to thousands of FFA sites (free for all link pages) then you are really wasting your time! (plus you can plan on a ton-of spam after you submit your website to them)

Focus on Cross-Segment Marketing:

So does this mean you need exchange links with a competitor? Not really, for example; you may sell “Home-Made Texas Style BBQ Sauce” on your website, and you know of another website that sells Barbecues. Well your both in the same industry but you don't compete head to head, but you do share a similar client base. In this case it’s a good fit for both websites to swap links. It should again be noted that this type of linking “will not lead to higher search engine ranking but it will help both website convert more lead and possible increase product sales. These reciprocal links do not boost your page rank because for every link you receive you are also linking out of your website. (this search engine algorithms was based upon the thinking that “if you have the content on your website” you would link internally and not externally)

Affiliate Marketing:

Affiliate marketing programs offer a sales commission for successful leads that are generated to or from your link partner. There sometimes nothing better than a financial benefit to encourage the link exchanging, But affiliate marketing is no guarantee to make easy money with your affiliate partner links. First you have to find the partners, second you have to have something they are willing to promote on their website and then you have the first part of the puzzle solved.

For the second part, you must make sure your link page is easy to navigate and well enough organized so that the link page you offer can be found by users to your site. Don’t forget, you want to make sure that the link page is indexable by the search engine spiders.

Closing Thoughts:

When asking other websites to become linking partners, think cross selling, remember your prospective link partner is interested in selling more, so explain to them the benefits they will receive by cross selling both of your products and services. Link exchange is in many ways about relationship building.

Regards,

Matt your local SEO blogmaster .....

11 Reasons That Drive Traffic Away From Your Website

Casa De SEO - Matt — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 18:40:45 GMT

How to Drive Traffic Away From Your Website

Let's take a look at some of the reasons why your website visitors may be leaving your website before they've had a chance to hear what you have to say; or to put it another way, if you want to drive traffic AWAY faster than you attract it, here are some of the things you should do.

1. Give Web-visitors Too Many Options and Choices

Social scientist and Swarthmore College professor, Barry Schwartz, has coined the phrase, "the paradox of choice." His studies have concluded the more choice you give people; the less likely they are to make a decision. Some choice is good, but too much choice creates confusion: it's a case of diminishing marginal utility. A well designed website explains, directs, guides, and focuses visitor attention on the things that are of real benefit to your visitors and to your company. Every business provides a variety of products, services, and information to their customers, but these things are not all of equal importance. Your website is a place to focus attention on your core marketing message, not a place to provide a shopping list of everything you are able to do and every product or service you may be able to offer.

2. Give Web Visitors Too Much Information to Process

Architect, author, and information designer, Richard Saul Wurman, in his book, 'Information Anxiety' talks about, "the ever-widening gap between what we understand and what we think we should understand." Good website design is about more than technology and aesthetics; it's about deciding what information needs to be presented and what information needs to be left out. If you are truly an expert in your field, you should know what information is important to your customers in order for them to make a decision. Too much information is like too much choice, it confuses rather than clarifies. Focus on delivering meaningful content or risk having your visitors hit the exit button.

3. Give Web Visitors Too Much Non-relevant Content

The only thing worse than overloading your website with more information than visitors can absorb is confusing them with useless and non-relevant content. Non-relevant content is content that doesn't advance your major purpose: to deliver your marketing message in an informative, engaging, entertaining, and memorable manner. If it isn't relevant, dump it.

4. Give Web Visitors Too Many Irritating Distractions

Websites should be designed to direct visitors to the information they want and that information should be the content you want to deliver. You cannot sell someone a product or service they do not want. A real prospect is one that needs the same information you want to provide; the art of sales is directing potential clients to relevant information, and presenting it in a way that visitors see your product or service as fulfilling their needs. On the surface, third-party advertisements and banners may
seem like a good way to make some extra cash from your traffic, but these ads become so distracting, visitors either get fed-up or click on one of the links that takes them away from your site. Whatever few bucks you earn from these ads, you are loosing by chasing real customers away; this of course assumes you are a real business with something legitimate to sell and not a website that's an excuse to deliver advertisements. Other nonsense like favorite links and silly fluff-content merely distracts visitors from investigating your site to find what they are looking for.

5. Give Web Visitors Too Many Red Flags

Website visitors are constantly looking for red flags that tell them that the site they are visiting should be skipped as soon as possible. If you want to make sure visitors won't deal with you make sure you don't provide any contact information: no contact
names, no telephone numbers, and no mailing address are a sure sign that you won't look after any problems that arise from a website transaction. Your website must be designed to build trust and foster a relationship, not scare people away.

6. Give Web Visitors Too Many Decisions to Make

How many decisions do you demand from your visitors in order for them to do business with you? Take for example the seemingly simple task of purchasing a new television. Do you purchase the inexpensive but old tube technology, the newer Plasma technology, or the LCD technology? How about all the various features to choose from like picture-in-picture, commercial skip-timers, and on and on? All you really want to do is relax with your spouse and enjoy a good movie - is that on a VSH, DVD, Blu-ray, or HD-DVD?

7. Give Web Visitors Too Many Stumbling Blocks

Do you make people go through the order processing system before they can find out how much something costs, or do you demand potential customers read a ridiculous amount of small print legalese that only a lawyer could understand? If you want to drive traffic away from your site make sure you build in as many stumbling blocks as possible.

8. Give Web Visitors Too Many Forms to Fill-in

Do you attract your visitors with special offers or free white papers and then demand that they fill-out complex forms, surveys, and questionnaires before you give them access to what they came for? If you do, you are probably losing a lot of people you attracted, and you are guaranteeing that your next email promotion will end up in the trash.

9. Give Web Visitors Incomprehensible Page Layouts

Good design, proper page layout, consistent navigation, and well organized information architecture that promotes serendipity, helps visitors find what they're looking for and provides a pleasant, efficient and rewarding experience for the website visitor. Website designs that rely on technology, databases, and search engine optimization rather than focused content, coherent organization, articulate presentation, and a memorable, rewarding experience are designs designed to chase traffic away.

10. Give Web Visitors Too Many Confusing Instructions

One of the most frustrating experiences website visitors encounter is confusing instructions and incoherent explanations of how your product or service works or how to order what you are selling.

11. Give Web Visitors Too Many Reason to Click-out

If you really are determined to fail, make sure you provide website visitors with as many reasons as possible to leave your site: irrelevant links to your favorite sites, links to your suppliers because you're too cheap to put their information on your own site, or any combination of the reasons mentioned above, all contribute to driving traffic away from your site.

This article was originally published on Rioforma.com on April 7th 2007 by Copy Contributor: Jerry Bader

One-Way Link Building For SEO

Casa De SEO - Matt — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 16:38:58 GMT

Link building is one of the effective ways to assure you achieve a higher page ranking for your website by search engines. One-Way-Links (links on other websites pointing to your website pages without a reciprocal link on your website) are considered as a positive "vote" towards the quality score of your website or blog. Each website acquires link popularity (page rank on Google) depending on the quality of the pages that link to it.

Google and other search engines consider the link popularity when they evaluate the web pages that they include in the search engine databases. Google offers a free download toolbar where you can see the "page rank" of websites you visit.

Why One-Way-Links are Important

A One-Way-Link is a link pointing to your website from someone else's website with no link-back in return. Sometimes the webmasters agree to exchange links between websites, those links are called reciprocal links and really have no great value to you in regards to search engine rankings. One-Way-Links are more valuable for the website link popularity as they link to your website, thus the search engines think that your information must be important since someone is linking to you.

The main advantage of One-Way-Links is that you don't have to worry about linking back to a "bad website". If you exchange links with the sites that serve as "link farms" or "free-for-all" websites, you may not gain any in rankings and more often you will lose page ranking because these are not quality links. These bad websites tend to have links to and from all different sorts of sites. Google, Yahoo and MSN will think that those sites serve the only one purpose: that is to artificially increase the number of links pointing to your website, so they give no value to these links.

Other advantages of One-Way-Links is that they will tend to stay listed longer because the website who places a link to your website on his or her page thinks that their visitors will benefit from the content of your website. So you will benefit from having longer-term links to your website. This is the case with links from websites covering the same or related topics as your website or blog.

10 Methods for Obtaining Quality One-Way-Links for your Website

The most important thing to keep in mind is that to get more links, you must offer something significant to link to. Think of what you can give that people or websites will want to link to. Here's a list of 10 different methods for identifying quality One-Way-Links :

Look for websites that maybe looking for links from related websites like your websites topics
Offer free articles, e-books, PDF's or other content on your website
Submit your URL to general directories, get listed under the category related to your topic
Submit your URL to business directories, get listed under the category related to your topic
Submitting your comments and website URL link to blogs with related subjects
Join business associations, like a Chamber of Commerce and ad your link their website
Newsletter text ads promoting your business, archived online on related websites
Submit articles on related topics to eZines that will be archived and available for others to use for their websites
Create a press releases and submit to an online Press Release website on related topics
Add your website to Local and Mapping sections of Google, ASK.com and Yahoo

Remember when you create your own content, always save your work in the archive on your website. This way you buildup your website content and increase your own popularity by growing the number of pages on your website.

Remember they main reason you do One-Way-Links, is to increase the ranking and popularity of your website. Once this is done, it generally leads to the articles, newsletters, directory and business association links bringing you more traffic from visitors who are interested in the subjects contained within your website.

How-To Optimize Your Title Tags

Casa De SEO - Matt — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 23:31:47 GMT

Here’s your step-by-step instructions for optimizing your webpage “Titles, META-Description and META-Keyword Tags. The instructions and examples below should be used as a starting point to begin any page for search engine optimization.

While some parts of this process are very important all by themselves and others are not as important anymore, “DO NOT MAKE THE MISTAKE” of not using and optimizing all these tags as a group. Because as a group and done correctly you are well on your way to successfully indexing your pages under the right keywords and phrases. Not mention you stand a much better chance of ranking higher in the organic listings than those who just focus on one or two of the META-Tags below.

Step 1: What is a Title Tag?

TITLE Tags

The TITLE TAG, (more properly called the TITLE Elements Tag), plays a key factor in today’s search engines algorithms. The Title tag is considered by many of the top SEO gurus, to be the most important factor to establishing the correct corresponding keyword indexation as it relates to your webpage. In their ranking algorithms, nearly all the major search engines attribute a high relevancy weighting to the content within the TITLE tag.

In the HTML code of a web site, TITLE tags look like this one (example of a fictional small business, a “Day Spa” Title Tag):

<TITLE>Day Spa – Relax in our Beautiful Mineral and Mud Baths in San Diego</TITLE>

You can view the HTML code of any site, simply by clicking anywhere within the text of the webpage and choosing "view source code" from the list within the box.

Step 2: Understand the Role of the Meta-Description Tag

META Description Tag

The META Description Tags are designed to describe the content of web pages. Search engine robots gather up this information when indexing web pages, then they often use the Meta-Description for the “description sentence” places under the organic listings with your page title within the search results.

While not all search engines continue to utilize the META-Description Tag, a majority of search engines rely on the content of this tag (along with your web page visible text) to provide information about a site that they match-up with the search queries. It’s therefore important for webmasters to include keywords and phrases in the META-Description that they would expect searchers to use to find their site content.

In the HTML code of a web site, META-Description Tag look like this one (example using the same small fictional business as above):

<META name="description" content="San Diego Day Spa offers relaxing spa treatments, mineral baths and mud treatments for housewives to the business professionals we have an affordable spa package waiting for you.">

You can view the META-Description Tag by once again click on the page to view the source code.

Step 3: Understand the Role of the Meta-Keyword Tag

META Keywords Tag

While only indexed by a small handful of search engines these days, the META Keywords Tag is still worth including within a site's HTML code, if only to provide those search engines with as much information as possible about site content.

In the HTML code of a web site, META Keywords Tags look like this:

<META name="keywords" content="day spa, spa, mineral bath, mud bath, spa treatments, massage therapy, herbal facials, seaweed wraps, pedicure, manicure, San Diego, California">

The current lack of support for the META Keywords Tag by so many search engines can be attributed to increasing spam abuse (known as “keyword stuffing”) by poorly trained webmasters and so called SEO specialists. These webmasters and SEO practitioners thought the keyword tag was a good place to stuff hundreds of keywords in the hopes of achieving higher search rankings. This ultimately results in the "spamming" of the search engines with useless, non-relevant data. This act of keyword stuffing has prompted many of the search engines to filter out the META Keywords Tag or lower its importance within the ranking algorithm.

But with that said, the search engines do use the keywords to help measure the balance of the keywords within the Meta Keyword Tags vs. the relationship to the page text content.

Here’s an example of what I mean, I run a script against all Meta Keyword-Tags on each page to measure the relevancy of the keywords to the page content:

Keywords:

Keywords meta tag contains no errors.
This tag contains 13 keywords and 134 characters.

Keyword relevancy to page content is excellent.
The keywords relevancy to page content is 100%.

(Note: one more hint, place the most relevant keywords first on the list and try and limit to less than 20 keywords per page)

Once again, you can view the META Keywords Tags of a web page by viewing the source code.

Step 4: Now it’s time to Optimized your Meta Tags

Now, it's time to create optimized TITLE and META Tags for your website. Let's start with the TITLE Tag for your Home Page.

Optimize Your TITLE Tag

Make a list of keywords and phrases that you want your website to be found for in search engines. You should have already allocated them to the appropriate pages of your site to be optimized. You can use a spreadsheet to keep track of what keywords are associated with what web pages.

Now, open a text file in Notepad or something similar. If you like, you can use an existing sample TITLE Tag as your template. Let's say our existing Title is:

<TITLE>Day Spa – Relax in our Beautiful Mineral and Mud Baths in San Diego</TITLE>

Now take your list of keywords for the home page and put them in order of importance, with the ones you want to rank highest first, second and so on:

San Diego Day Spa, Mineral Baths, spa treatments

Now you are simply going to combine these keywords into a sentence or short blurb so they make the best use of the keyword real estate available. Always try to use as few words as possible in your Title Tags, because each additional keyword dilutes the ranking relevancy of all the others.

In this case, I would initially combine the keywords as follows:

<TITLE>San Diego Day Spa Specializing in Mineral Bath Spa Treatments</TITLE>

Notice how I've got the keywords in the correct order for the search queries? I've tried to include the most important keywords towards the start of the tag. Most search engines will ignore "in" as a stop word, so it shouldn't matter that we've included it.

Although it's tempting to put a comma between Mineral Bath and Spa Treatments, some search engines treat commas as a keyword separator, so we don't want to use one here because we don't want really need "Mineral Bath' and "Spa Treatments" to be separated.

Now, there is just one problem with this draft Title. Our 3rd keyword phrase 'spa treatments" is right at the end of the sentence, meaning it may lose some relevancy weight (search engines consider keywords closer to the start of the tag as the most important). How do we fix this? Let's try this:

<TITLE>Day Spa in San Diego – Mineral Bath Spa Treatments Specialty</TITLE>

We don't want to use a period after "San Diego" for the same reason that we don't use a comma. But a hyphen should not make a difference to search engines yet still allow the sentence to read logically to a searcher. So now we have our three target keyword phrases covered in a very short space.

In fact, the above sentence now covers the following keyword combinations:

Day Spa San Diego, San Diego Day Spa, San Diego Spa, Mineral Baths Spa Treatments, Mineral Bath Spa Treatments, Spa Bat etc…. I think you get the picture….

When working with your keywords, remember that their order is very important. If you want your site to have the best possible chance of being found for the search query "Day Spa San Diego", you need to put the keywords in that exact order and not "San Diego Day Spa", because the spider searches the keywords in exact order. Unless there are stop words, also try to avoid using extra words between your keywords.

If you wanted to add your company name to the Title Tag, don't sacrifice a keyword to do so. Instead, try placing the company name at the end of the tag so you can be sure that all your important keywords will be indexed first as your company name usually is more unique and is a less competitive keyword.

I hope you found this entry helpful for the SEO of your website, as always I look forward to your comments.

Regards,

Matt

What is the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003?

Casa De SEO - Matt — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 19:09:44 GMT

What is the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003?

"The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act) establishes requirements for those who send commercial email, spells out penalties for spammers and companies whose products are advertised in spam if they violate the law, and gives consumers the right to ask emailers to stop spamming them."

Below I have taken the liberty to assemble some general information about the CAN-SPAM Act and what you need to know before you send your first Email marketing campaign out via your own Email or through a reputable system like ConstantContact.com or Vertical Response.com.

General CAN-SPAM rules:

Outlaws the use of false or misleading headers
Outlaws the use of deceptive subject lines
Requires a clear and conspicuous opt-out mechanism within every commercial email
Requires the inclusion of a valid physical postal address within every commercial email

Violators may be subject to “cease and desist” orders or penalties from the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) of up to $11,000 per violation. Criminal prosecution is also possible in the case of egregious offenders, which can result in penalties such as fines, forfeiture of proceeds and equipment. The worst offenders can also be subject to prison time.

What to do to comply with the law:

No False or misleading headers:
All manipulation of the email headers. This means that anyone reading a client email (recipient, ISP, etc) can clearly see who the email was sent from, i.e. “the email servers must be correctly identified and the correct IP address from the originating emailer”.
No Deceptive Subject Lines:
Any subject line attached to an outgoing campaign must clearly relate to the content of the email. Deceptive or misleading subject lines are prohibited by federal law.
Must have an Opt-out mechanism in every email:
Every email must include an unsubscribe link detail to the bottom of every email sent from your system to ensure that there is always a clear, easy to use, and fully functional unsubscribe method included with every email campaign.
Email must include a Valid Physical Postal Address
The CAN-SPAM law also requires that the “sender of the email”, (i.e. the person or company noted in the From Label), to display a physical postal address within the content of the message. The best place to post this postal address is in the footer of the email and it may change from campaign to campaign in the event that the “sender” changes.

That's the main laws as it pertains to the CAN-SPAN law. I will follow-up with more important facts about this law and others in future SEM blog entries.

Regards Matt

GoDaddy.com too offer Google Webmaster Tools

Casa De SEO - Matt — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 11:09:04 GMT

Internet domain name registration and hosting giant GoDaddy.com is teaming up with Google to help clients enrich their web hosting accounts (via Sitemap SEO Tool), according to a GoDaddy press release issued Tuesday.

Working as a pilot partner, GoDaddy has integrated Google Webmaster Tools into the hosting accounts of their customers.

This integration will make it easier for the average site owner to identify potential problems with their sites and to help improve their site's visibility.

"When Google approached us about incorporating their product into our hosting accounts, it was an easy decision," said GoDaddy.com CEO and Founder Bob Parsons. "Our customers are always looking for simple ways to make their sites easier to find and attract new visitors. Thanks to these easy-to-use tools, customers can quickly tap this valuable Webmaster resource without having to be technical wizards."

Google Webmaster Tools allows site owners to get current indexing, link, and other information on how Google is evaluating their site. While this free service is available to everyone with a simple Google account, the integration right into hosting interface will certainly make it easier for some to access this information.

Enabling Google Webmaster Tools from within GoDaddy

If you have an existing GoDaddy or CasaDeDomains account, log into your hosting control center. On the top bar you will see "Google Webmaster Tools", click here to continue and then click enable.

The domain will automatically be verified with Google and you will find a large blue button to launch Google Webmaster Tools. This will bring you to a screen where you must accept Google's terms of service to continue. Next you will find the standard Webmaster Tools Dashboard that we all know and love.

You can also use GoDaddy's built in XML sitemap tool to spider your site, create, and upload the XML sitemap to your server. Once created, launch Google Webmaster Tools to submit the XML sitemap directly to Google.

This is really cool stuff and I'm personally glad to see that the service I offer are getting easier and easier for the average person to use. It's not perfect and you still have to have a basic understanding of servers, domains and HTML but now the tools are in your hand via one user interface......

Applause to GoDaddy and Google