May « 2009 « MKLINK Internet Marketing Tips

May 23, 2009

Starting Off With SEO

Filed under: SEO Search Engine Optimisation — admin @ 4:21 pm

SEO / SEO Techniques

Making sure your web pages appear as high as possible in the search
engine results listings, particularly Google’s natural listings is the goal
of what is generally called Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

The natural listings are the main results that appear on the left hand side
in response to a Google search engine query, and these listings don’t require
payment. Just because a web page cost a lot of money to produce, looks stylish
and professional, and contains what YOU think it should contain, this doesn’t
mean that Google will list the page highly for your important key phrase(s).

Similarly, just because a page looks basic in design, was inexpensive to
produce, and has no fancy graphics, this doesn’t mean that the page has
a less of a chance of receiving good rankings. The key point is that in
order to rank highly in for example Google, your pages will have to conform
to Google’s ideas on what makes a ‘good’ web page.

Web companies and SEO companies have no influence over Google’s listings
and rankings of web pages, but using among other things, experience over
time, and Google’s own published information and guidelines, it is clear
that some things should be given greater priority than others when producing
what you hope will be high ranking web pages. Each newsletter will focus
on one particular high priority element of your web pages. the intention
is that you will better understand where to focus efforts in order to make
a real and posistive difference in getting your web pages higher in the
Google natural listings.

Area of Interest: Improving the ‘relevance’ of a web page
to keywords and key phrases.

Focus: The Document Title / Page Title. As a basic point,
to increase the chances of having a web page found in Google for a certain
key phrase, it stands to reason that you should at least include the phrase
in that page. Google (and other search engines) rely on reading text to
make sense of, index, and categorise web pages, so it’s certainly worth
including your important key phrase in the body text.

However, the body text is not the first thing that search engines encounter
when visiting your web. If you were to look at the code that makes up your
page (e.g. go to ‘view’ and ’source’ on an IE browser), you will see at
the top of a web page there is a section called the ‘head’ of the page.
This area is contained between code ‘tags’ that look like this …. The
Document Title / Page Title is in this ‘head’ area of the page and is contained
within code tags that look like this Your Page Title.

These head elements are really for the benefit of the search engines rather
than human visitors and as such, are not visible when you look at the page
in a browser. The document title however can be seen when (in white writing)
when you look at the blue horizontal band at the very top of an IE browser.

This ‘title’ could be regarded as an essential element when trying to make
a page rank more highly in the search engines for your chosen key phrases.
By including this key phrases / these key phrases in the document title,
you are beginning to establish relevance to this phrase/ these phrases as
far as the search engines are concerned. It may also be a good idea to put
your chosen phrase(s) as near to the beginning of this document title as
possible.

Try to make sure that you include the key phrases that the page is mostly
about in this title, and the phrases that people are likely to/ are actually
putting into search engines to fined a product / service such as your. Avoid
including words in the document title that are not relevant to the page
text content e.g. avoid using ‘welcome to our website..’ or including the
company name (if it is not relevant to what people are searching for).

If you have a geographic focus to your business operations e.g. certain
counties or towns, you could include them in this document title as well
as in the body text of the page.

( Source: mkLINK ltd, Google Website.)

MKLINK Marketing Tips

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May 12, 2009

Getting Your Site Linked on DMOZ

Filed under: Internet Marketing Home — admin @ 8:28 am

Get listed in DMOZ

Checkout http://www.mklink.com/training/ for more internet marketing tips

What is it?

DMOZ has been around for years and anyone who knows about search engine optimisation will know all about it. It’s called the Open Directory Project. The URL is www.dmoz.org

The name originally came from directory.mozilla.org with Mozilla(Netscape) being the company that owned it.

Why Bother with it?

Because search engines love it. So get your website listed there!

Having a listing on DMOZ should help your rankings because the site is edited by humans. You can become an editor yourself if you want to.

It’s not as easy to become an editor of DMOZ as it is for say Wikipedia because you have to be “accepted” and can only edit a specific area that you are selected for.

The open directory is the largest human edited directory there is. It’s basically doing what Yahoo used to do a few years ago.

Because it is edited by humans, it is considered to have more clout than lots of others automated directories and this is why having a link there can help with your search engine optimisation.

Another reason is that because it’s free, the site in theory gets edited only by people who are interested in a particular category and therefore again the search engines value it more than sites that are automated.

However, I know from experience that getting your site listed can take ages because there is such a backlog of sites waited do be added. The queue is so long because of so many submissions from spammers and automated services which have made it awkward for bona fide businesses.

My advice is to ensure that you have at least tried to get your site listed under the correct category and don’t submit your site multiple times as you can get black listed.

If and when you are listed it’s a bonus. You could even use the Google alerts service that I mentioned last time when the category that you are under changes either with your listing or that of a competitor.

By no means should you limit yourself to this directory of course as there are loads of other free directories as well. It’s just that this is possibly the best known one. Craigslist is another…there’s plenty to do!

Need some help? Visit http://www.mklink.com/getstarted and try it today…

’till next time,

Mike Knight. MKLINK Internet Marketing Tips

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May 1, 2009

Google Alerts - A Useful Tool

Filed under: Internet Marketing Home — admin @ 2:11 pm

Google Alerts

Checkout http://www.mklink.com/training/ for more internet marketing tips

What is it?
This is a handy little service offered at no charge from Google that lets you know when certain web pages have changed.

Or blogs.
Or noticeboards.
Or forums.

It sends you an email so that you are automatically notified of any changes. You can then link this email to a text-message service if you want to receive an SMS about updates that are particularly important or urgent to you.

Why Have it Set-Up?
You’re probably already aware that you can request that Ebay sends you an alert via email every time an article appears for sale that fits the profile you’ve set-up.

It saves hours of searching and re-searching through Ebay to see if there any bargains of a particular type of product has appeared. You can even do clever things like filter the results so that only items within a certain radius of your house are emailed to you.

Similarly, Google alerts enable you to stay on top of things that are important to you.

It may be that you want to know if your competitor has updated their website (e.g. a price) or whether a blog or article has been updated for example.

Specifically, if you’re keen to stay on top of your search engine optimisation, having Google alerts set up will let you know about changes in your niche so that you can react and update your site content and so make sure you consistently out-rank other people

Use It to Track Your Reputation
I’ve written before about the importance of maintaining your online reputation.

With the recent advances in social networking online, keeping tabs on what people are saying about you can be time consuming.

Simply having your company name setup within Google alerts means you can be notified any time someone is saying anything about your company. So you can make sure your reputation is as it should be!

Obviously there are other applications as well and in fact of course you will have your own unique requirements to be alerted about.

From speaking to people, I get the impression that surprisingly not everyone is aware of this nifty little tool so I thought I’d share it with you in case it had slipped past your radar.

It’s available at http://www.google.com/alerts

Anyway - I’ll speak to you again soon with some more tips. Meantime, if you think you’d benefit from some straight advice, just go to http://www.mklink.com/getstarted

’till next time,

Mike Knight. MKLINK Internet Marketing Tips

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