My father always told me that I should jealously guard my reputation and die for my principals – all too poignant, maybe, but his views strike a significant cord today when working with companies to build, repair and control their online reputations.

Andrew McCance
Search Engine Marketing People

Online Reputation Management

If you type your company’s name or indeed your own name into any search engine, you will find lots of content shows up, some of this content might be your own or  just as likely it is information written, posted or blogged about you or your company by third parties. More worryingly, sometimes it’s written by those who seek to damage your online reputation. We have come accross people who do that for a living – like black-hat-optimisation, we avoid such unethical practices.

Take Control of your reputation today

Search Engine Marketing People will help you ethically ensure that search engine page results reflect the true nature of your business.

The Internet is a Fair & Foul Medium

The Web is all about content – we are hungry for knowledge. Unfortunately, negative content is written more often by consumers than endorsements – why? – it’s just human nature.  Let’s get back to my father again, ‘Andre’ ye remember that bad news travels faster than good news – do-you-ken-son?’

The internet is full of innocent factual errors to malicious attacks on companies and individuals — all negative content is a potential threat to your reputation and livelihood. Worse, there’s little recourse, since responding to attacks just attracts attention to them.

Google – Do Not Shoot the Messenger

Search engines like Google and Bing rank web pages using multiple criteria such as quality, credibility and popularity. Their mysterious algorithms weigh those three factors — along with many more — to decide which links and content appear at the top of the search engine results pages.  Search Engine Marketing People strive to ensure that your name and indeed your online reputation are ethically and positively represented at the top of the search engine results pages in a manner befitting your company or status.

Give the Messenger the Right Message

We’ll help you reorder your top search results — and over a period of time push negative links into obscurity — using our long-experience, search engine analysis technologies and search engine marketing strategies based on years of research and development.

Own Your First Page of Results

Don’t worry about negative content that can’t be deleted because 84% of web searchers never look past the first page search results — you need positive content that will rank higher than negative content in search engines.

Get Positive Content you Control

Our team of professional writers and editors use information supplied by you and your clients to create truthful biographical material and other custom designed content — that you control and approve.

Improve your Reputation Ethically

Replace negative content in your search results with new content posted and promoted using our proven publishing strategy. You’ll have direct access to a reputation advisor and receive periodic email updates and alerts for the duration of our tenure.

Gain Control of your Reputation

Once search engines log and rank your new content (which doesn’t happen overnight), your first page of search results will then reflect you or your business more accurately. Generate the right type of content and poor informational links will be invisible to most internet users.

Are you new to search engine optimization and marketing?

Give yourself an immediate head start by kick-starting your SEO and SEM strategies with the latest FREE SEO Downloads at Search Engine Marketing People.

That’s right!  ‘Test drive’ the two leading SEO software downloads free of charge for one month or buy now with a 30-day money back guarantee!!

No credit card, no commitment, just download and if and when satisfied you can achieve top ten Google Rankings buy with a 30-day money back guarantee!

Below we offer SEO newbies the chance to benefit from our professional research and get the best FREE  SEO software downloads available online for search engine optimization and Internet marketing absolutely free of charge!

Search Engine marketing People tried many SEO softwares available and sold on the Internet and offer our unbiased reviews for two of the best optimization softwares on the market!

The SEO downloads offer SEO instruction, monitoring, reporting, competitor comparisons and the best chance for new online marketeers to get a remarkable head-start over their online competition and the very best chance of SEO & SEM success.

Simply click on our FREE SEO DOWNLOAD icons below and get the latest SEO Reporting and Monitoring Software, and FREE Google SEO Tools absolutely free of charge – no catch, no credit card required, and definitely no purchase necessary!  WE PROMISE!

IBP 11 the latest SEO Software Download Free!

IBP 11 provides all the necessary tools for a complete search engine optimization overhaul of your website from searching for keywords to checking your search engine page results and rankings or even snooping on the competition.  This SEO software is used by thousands of industry professionals and is one of the most powerful suites of SEO tools found in the market – well worth you downloading this software and comparing it to our other recommendations.

• IBP 11 features 7 professional SEO tools in one software program
• Top 10 Ranking Optimizer tool
• The next generation search engine submission tool
• Submit to Internet directories semi-automatically
• Submit to special interest sites and improve your link popularity
• Track your search engine rankings over time
• Analyze the keyword density of your web pages
• Professional reports in PDF, HTML, text and MS Word format

Get your IBP 11 today completely FREE of charge for one month with a few features disabled to allow for an extensive testing of the product, or buy a “Standard” edition that provides full functionality for up to five projects, and a “Business” edition aimed at SEO professionals that allows an unlimited number of projects. You can upgrade from the Standard to the Business edition by paying the price difference at anytime. If you choose to purchase IBP 11 you are guaranteed a complete refund if you decide within 30 days it does not meet requirements.

WEB CEO the latest SEO Software Download Free!

WEB CEO is a trusted top all-in-one SEO software solution with some very powerful interfaces and features and you must definitely try the free download and compare the software to IBP.

Web CEO is a unified workspace for ten modular programs that help you promote your site on the search engines, intelligently analyze your visitors, and easily maintain your online presence.

• Research your keywords
• Optimize your site for high rankings in search engines
• Submit your URLs to search engines
• Check your rankings with search engines
• Know who links to your site and competition
• Pinpoint broken links and other errors on your site
• Edit your Web pages in the WYSIWYG mode
• Upload HTML and other files to your server
• Monitor your website to know if it is up or down
• Track and analyze your visitors, ad campaigns, transactions, revenues, etc.
• Enhanced off page analysis, including information on the Alexa and page ranking of the linking page.
• The backlinks theme analysis gives the information on keywords in the BODY, titles, descriptions of the linked pages, etc.
• An enhanced report feature allowing reports to be customized with the brand of the SEO company.
• A time tracking tool that monitors time you spend on various tasks, helping to automate the billing of time to clients.
• More flexible settings for optimization reports that allow configuration to include more details.
• Keyword and key phrase analysis are taken into account in on page text analysis – not only in English, but also Russian, Spanish and French language pages.

Get your WEB CEO today completely FREE of charge for a one month test drive with a few features disabled that still allows for an extensive testing or if you choose to purchase WEB CEO you are guaranteed a complete refund if you decide within 30 days it does not meet requirements.

You can Free SEO download, free SEO tools and free SEO software here:

Got any questions ask Search Engine Marketing People

Do you want to learn the basic principals of SEO and SEM or brush up your SEO strategy – check out the most talked about FREE SEO guide on the Internet and learn your craft in 7 easy SEO lessons!!

SEO STUDY GUIDE MADE EASY!

Refining Your Strategies

The final stage of your search engine optimization strategy is taking the time to reflect on you results and to formulate a new plan of action for the next phase of optimization.

For the most part we have some idea what creates good rankings, increased traffic and link building before we begin.  It is good to run campaigns on a 2 to 3 month cycle with 2 months being the preference for newer websites.  As the site matures you might find it prudent to either increase or decrease that time frame depending on circumstances.

This time for reflection is a simple four stage process that we will not briefly discuss.

Phase 1:  Assessing your Keyword Strategy

Unless you have created a pay-per-click campaign, you should wait a couple of months before assessing your keyword strategy.   Of course your primary goal is t increase traffic and after a couple of months you should observe a noticeable change in your traffic and rankings.  After a few more cycles certain patterns should begin to emerge.

For instance you might note that some search terms result in more sales and you will obviously want to put more of an effort behind developing those keywords and phrases on your website.

At the same time you will also note other terms will become less of a priority over the passage of time.

Your goal at this time is simply to determine what changes to make to your keyword strategy.  You will look to see if you are targeting the proper search terms and if site visitors are going to the pages you want prioritized.

Phase 2:  Refining your Site Content Strategy

At this stage you will want to use your analytics to identify areas where you might need to develop new content or to expand upon existing content.  You will determine which pages are not performing well in terms of visitor behavior and where you might need to use the new keyword strategies you discovered in phase 1 of this chapter.

Phase 3:  Refining Site Structure

If you have determined from phases 1 and 2 above that you need to rethink your keyword strategy and create more content for the sites, you may need to create some minor structural changes to accommodate those changes.

However, it is more likely that when considering refining site structure you will be looking more at methods of sending more PageRank to specific pages which will involve increasing the amount of anchor text we send to those pages in order to improve rankings on those pages for specific search terms.

Phase 4:  Refining Link Building and Promotion Strategy

If you need to boost a page’s ranking you really only have two choices:  refining the site structure and pumping more links to a page or getting more links from offsite.  This is where phase 4 comes in:  refining link building and promotion of the site.

If your internal linking and anchor text is not helping enough, you will need to bring in some help from outside the website.  Over time you will see that your link building efforts will also increase you ability to do things internally.

At the end of each planning cycle you will want to look at your link building strategies, take stock of your links and determine the effectiveness of your program.  Activities that have proven to be successful should be pursued or even expanded.  Those that are showing weakness will either need to be modified or dropped from your program.

In the long run you will want your link building campaign to pay for itself, but that does take time so you will need to be patient.  One thing you can do along the way is to try to create promotions that can be profitable while at the same time promoting the building of more links.  Also if you are paying for any advertising from vertical directories it is a good idea to look at those costs in relation to any leads and sales that are created through those links.

Again, being patient is the key to any successful link building and promotion strategy.

Measuring Your Results

Every successful website should have an effective way of measuring its performance.  Every SEO campaign should have some way of determining the success of its outcome.

Even though SEO, search engine optimization, can create free web traffic it is far from free.  Even if you do not spend any money (or especially if you do not) you are investing a lot of time, effort and energy in the process.

Since you are using these valuable resources, you want to be sure you are seeing a return on that investment.  This is why it is important to measure your results.  You want to see what efforts are effective and to continue them.  At the same time you want to identify what is not working and either modify it or do away with those efforts entirely.

This process begins with determining what to measure.

Phase 1:  Establish the Metrics

To begin, we need to determine what exactly we are going to measure.  With a good analytics solution you will be able to compile a lot of important data to study later.  So at this point we are interested in determining exactly how you want that data to be comprised.

Here are some categories you should look at:

• Costs:  As you are spending valuable time, effort, energy and sometimes money on optimizing your site you will likely want to look at what those costs are (primarily in the areas of time and money).  You can then relate those expenditures to specific results from your campaign.

• Leads and Sales:  For most businesses developing lead which later amount to sales and the sales themselves are the goal of the website and any associated marketing and optimizing campaign.  With proper analysis you can link those leads and sales to specific keywords, phrases and marketing campaigns.

• Site Rankings:  When evaluating your main search terms and your overall keyword strategy it is important to monitor changes in your rankings across the top 2 or 3 search engines.  At the same time you need to remind yourself that SEO is a long process.

• Referrals and Traffic:  In addition to looking at specific results for certain keywords and phrases, it is important to measure the overall performance of your SEO or SEM campaign by looking at the total volume of traffic generated from organic search results.

• Links:  If you are actively engaged in link building and promoting our site you will naturally want to look at the volume of inbound links to your site.  This is a great way to determine if your optimization efforts are paying off even if you cannot connect the links to a specific activity every time.

Phase 2:  Setting up Analytics

Here are some recommendations for tools that are good for analyzing and tracking your website:

Tracking Rankings

For a web-based solution look at Digital Point www.digitalpoint.com which offers a free keyword ranking tool that works on all of the top 3 major search engines.

A great offline tool is Advanced Web Ranking www.advancedwebranking.com .

Tracking Traffic and Referrals

Two great sites for tracking traffic and referrals are Google Analytics www.google.com/analytics and Clicktracks www.clicktracks.com .

Tracking Links

Yahoo Site Explorer is great www.siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com and Google Webmaster Tools works well if you do not mind registering and verifying your www.google.com/websmasters/sitemaps .

Phase 3:  Measuring Results

Once you establish your metrics and determine which sites or programs to use to gather all your data, you will want to set up a regular schedule of reporting and analyzing data so you can see reports at the same time each week or month to better gauge results.

Phase 4:  Tracking Resources

It is also important to track the resources spent on optimizing your site be they time and money or other less tangible assets.

Now its time to look at ways to create more links to your website.  This stage involves actively promoting your website.

In Phase 3, you will be seeking ways to entice or invite other sites to link to your site through creating provocative link targets on your site.  The basic idea is to create a reason or reasons for people to want to link to you.

Here are a few examples of things that might work for you:

Getting Noticed by Making the News

Never underestimate the Jerry Springer approach to driving traffic to you site through sensationalism.   Doing something noteworthy be it positive or negative can create interest in your site and can lead to new links, whether your actions were positive or negative.  Remember the adage “there is no such thing as bad publicity”?  Like it or not it works.

Lists

Doing simple and fun things like creating silly lists or even “Top Ten” lists is a great way to generate interest in your website.

Creating useful and informative links is another great way to generate link building as well as creating a loyal site visitor base.

Offering Something for Free

One of the easiest ways to create interest in linking to your site is giving stuff away for free.   Be it products or services everyone loves the chance to receive something for free.

Don’t Just Build it and Expect Them to Come

Don’t just build a great website.  Get out there and tell your family, friends and co-workers about it.  Tell them to mention it to their friends.  Add some “Digg This” and “Del.ic.i.o.us” buttons to the site, add a quote to “Twitter”.

Blogging

Blogs are good for a lot more than just sharing your life story or posting photos of your last vacation.

Creating and regularly posting interesting material on a blog is a great way to create a steady stream of traffic and links to your website.  Your blog goes out in RSS feeds which will be picked up from time to time by others.  Blogging about other bloggers can generate a tremendous amount of traffic and links through the “backtrack links” and back and forth dialog.

If you can effectively blog on your own site and can get indexed and attract links you can then use the blog (carefully) to point some anchor text links back to the rest of your site.

Phase 4:  Promoting your Site

Sometimes the best way around a challenge is found through taking an indirect path.   With this idea in mind, often times the best link building strategy involves something else:  marketing and promoting a site to increase profits and to generally assist in branding a company.  The best thing is these methods often more than pay for themselves.

A lot of these kinds of strategies also can assist in creating links because “presence creates presence”.

Promoting Content

One of the best ways to promote a website and to build links is by promoting the content of a site.  This is known as “article marketing” and involves creating and distributing content to other websites.

What you can do is write an article and submit it to an article directory such as ezinearticles.com.  You get a link to your website and possibly some others might pick up the article and use it.

You can also use these articles, if well written articles and not just content about purchasing your products or services, and go to content rich websites and present the material to them.  Now, the internet hates duplicate information so instead of offering them that particular article why not offer it as an example of your writing skill and then suggest that you can offer them original articles and content for their website.  In this way you can create more links to your website through requesting credit for the article back to your own website.

Social Media Sites

Not to be confused with social networking sites, content sharing sites like Hub Pages (www.hubpages.com) is a great way to promote your site.  Search engines seem to be quite interested in these kinds of sites as well.

Using PR Firms and Other Traditional Methods of Marketing and Advertising

Do not be afraid to use conventional methods of promoting your website.   There are great PR firms out there offering services promoting your products, services and website.   Traditional marketing strategies are also very effective at promoting link building.

Anything you do to advertise or to market your business has great potential to enhance any link building program.  And the greatest thing is that traditional marketing and advertising have the potential to create profit for your company on their own.  If you can make a little bit of cash while building some links then you are miles ahead of your competitor who only thinks in terms of promoting their website through the internet.

Outbound Links and Link Exchanges

Once considered a “must do” for search engine optimization (SEO) reciprocal linking or link exchanging is now a big “no-no” unless there is some other reason for having the link.  Search engines can see both sites, identify the reciprocal links and ignore them.

When considering outbound links you should consider whether you like a particular site or not because search engines do consider themselves the quality of the sites you link to when they evaluate the quality of your own website.

Reciprocal Links are not Always Bad

Although reciprocal links do get ignored by the search engines there are other reasons they might be useful.  For instance linking to an important website in your particular field of business or interest and requesting an exchange link might very well drive more traffic to your site.

Do Not Ever Stop Working on Links

In conclusion, do not ever stop working on building links to your website.

In the long run your goal should be to have as many high quality links from authoritative sites with great trust levels.  It is also important that these links be relevant to your site.

It is also important that you continue working to build more quality links to your site.  The simple truth of the matter is that websites come and go and there is no guarantee that next week, next month or next year all the sites linking to you will be there.  Also, there is no guarantee they may not rethink their own link building strategy and decide to start removing links, including yours.

The problem is that often times it takes a couple of months for dropped links to be discovered by the search engines, so by the  time you learn your rankings are dropping you could already be several weeks behind on rebuilding links.

Remember, there is no better day than today for creating an even better and more successful future.

Taking the time to submit your website to web directories is one of the easiest ways to boost your website with search engines.  Through making the simple effort to submit your site to a few general purpose directories, you will find the increased traffic to your site and search engine referrals is well worth the effort.

In the course of this phase, it is important to consider the different kinds of directories and vertical (or topical) directories.

Major Directories

Currently, there are only two major directories:  Yahoo.com and DMOZ.org.  While Yahoo charges for its services and DMOZ is in need of some new leadership, you will find using both services is worth the time and effort.

Currently, Yahoo charges $299 a year for a listing and the process is quite simple.   You surf the Yahoo directory at dir.yahoo.com and find the category your website best falls under.  You then click the “Suggest a Site” link at the top of the page.  Yahoo requires your site to undergo an editorial review, which they guarantee will be completed within 7 days.  If for some reason your site does not pass the review, you will be given one opportunity to correct the problem.  Remember that your Yahoo listing is not an ad, it’s a description of your site.

Once you complete the process with Yahoo and get yourself listed you can then go and follow essentially the same process with DMOZ.  The easiest thing to do with DMOZ is to slightly edit the same basic language Yahoo editors used to describe your site as DMOZ editors do not like to read an advertisement, rather they prefer a well written editorial description of your site.

It is important to list your site with these directories because the Yahoo directory is the directory behind the Yahoo portal and DMOZ is the directory that Google offers its visitors.  Both will generate more traffic to your website.

More important, a Yahoo listing lets the search engines know you are a serious, legitimate business and not some frivolous website since people who create spam site do not typically spend $299 to have an editor review their site.

Minor Directories

In addition to Yahoo and DMOZ, there are some other directories to consider listing your site on, some are paid and some are free, but this seems to change too frequently to list all the individual details here.

• The Best of the Web:  http://www.botw.org

• Gimpsy:  http://www.gimpsy.com

• GoGuides: http://www.goguides.org

• Jayde:  http://www.jayde.com

• Skaffe:  http://www.skaffe.com

• Starting Point:  http://www.stpt.com

Vertical Directories

In addition to the directories listed above, there are vertical or topical directories that deal with a variety of specific topics.  You can find listings of these sites on sites such as SearchEngineGuide.com and the Internet Search Engine Database (ISEDB.com).

You can also find vertical directories by performing a Google search for terms such as “apartment directories”.  You can also examine the inbound links of your competitors to see if they are listed in any vertical directories.

Another tool that you will find helpful is Hub Finder which you can use to find sites that link to multiple competitors.  If you find not all these sites are vertical directories you might discover that they are great leads for sites to host a link to your own.  You can find them at www.tools.seobook.com .

Blogs and Forums

Blogs and forums that are active in your market field or location can be invaluable sources for developing relationships, creating links and for getting more visitors to your site.

Both blogs and forums often offer lists of recommended resources, links to other sites of interest and are great for creating an online network of individuals, websites, and other blogs.

The rest of this chapter will focus on four stages of linking building and promotion:

Phase 1:  Inventorying Your Assets

Phase 2: Getting Listed in Directories and Verticals

Phase 3:  Developing Link Targets

Phase 4:  Promoting your Site

Phase 1:  Inventorying Your Assets

Assessing your current situation and that of your competitors is the first step in developing an effective link building program even if you have a new site.   Even if you do not yet have any links pointing to your site, there are some important steps you should take to identify your strengths and weaknesses before mapping out your initial link building strategy.

Determining Incoming Links

The first thing you will want to do is assess the incoming links to your site. There are several online tools to use to perform this task to include:

• Google Webmaster Tools:  You will need to sign up and verify your site before using Google’s Webmaster Tools, but once you do so you will get a very complete look at inbound links.  (www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps )

• Yahoo Site Explorer:  Yahoo’s Site Explorer allows you to analyze the links coming to a single page or your entire website.  By comparing the total number of links coming into your site, versus those going to your homepage, you can get an accurate picture of how many links your site has going to internal pages.  (www.siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com )

There are some other online tools you can use as well including Backlink Analyzer, Optilink, SEO Elite and Tattler.  Many are free while others are paid tools.

Aside from determining the inbound links to your site, this process allows you to know who links to you and in some instances you can offer them content to their site in exchange for other links, you can offer suggestions for possible anchor text.  You can also often find other sites from theirs that might be interested in linking to your own website.

Identifying Link Targets

Of course you want others to link to your website using relevant anchor text.  A part of creating this situation is having a reason for others to link to you.  When looking at pages that you determine “need a little love” from other websites in the form of links, you need to consider why someone would want to link to that page.

Does the page have rich content?  Resources that others might find useful?  If not then you might consider working on the page to make it more appealing to other websites.

For example what if you have a site offering vacation rentals in Buenos Aires such as www.bastay.com ?  What if instead of just listing apartments on the site you include valuable information like articles on the different neighborhoods of Buenos Aires?  What if you offered detailed studies on the history of Argentina?  What if you offered shopping guides?  Don’t you think this would have a positive impact on their link building strategy?  Go ahead.  Check out their website and ask them, because this is exactly what they have done.

Not only does this strategy create appeal for links coming from other sites, but it also helped them create a site with rich search terms as well as internal links.

If you can develop an effective way of creating web pages of interest for incoming links, you will also find that these kinds of pages encourage visitors to the website and give them a reason to stick around and explore the site a bit more.

Assessing Strengths and Weaknesses

Take a few moments to look at your website and consider its strengths and weaknesses.

Is your website unique?  Is it special?  Does it have something other sites do not have or is it just more of the “same old thing”?

Whatever you determine is unique and special about your website are your strengths.  Whatever areas are just a repeat of what has already been overdone on the internet are your weaknesses.  The more strengths you have the easier it will be to build links because you can leverage those unique and special qualities about your site.

If you have weaknesses consider ways you can improve the site to make it more interesting, special and unique.  It can be as simple as adding more original content to your site or adding some useful resources or information for others.

And the great thing is this process goes beyond link building, for it also assists you in creating a more interesting site that is rich with search terms.

Evaluate Resources

Take a few moments and determine whether you have more time or money, or both.  This can dramatically effect the way you choose to develop your link building strategy.

Evaluate the Competition

It is important to know what your competition is doing to determine what is working for them and what isn’t.  This gives you the ability to learn from their strengths while at the same time avoiding some of their apparent weaknesses.

You will want to run a detailed link analysis on your major competitors to see who is linking to them, why you think they are getting those links, and to help determine what their strengths and weaknesses might be.

In the long run, you will want to have as many of the sites linking to them to link to you.   Identifying competitors and the sites that link to them is a great place to begin looking for other websites to link to your own.

Link Building & Backlink Development

The Concept of Link Building

If you know anything about Search Engine Optimization, SEO, you have realized by now that building links is extremely important to the success of a website.  However, for the sake of avoiding confusion we refer to link building as search engine marketing or SEM.

As discussed in Chapter 4:  How Search Engines Work, all the search engines use link analysis to determine the rankings of pages.  The various search engines are concerned with fighting what they call “spam” and link analysis is part of the process.  As a result, it is important to understand their algorithm as best as we can and what they are looking for when developing your link building strategy.

With this in mind, there are a variety of ways to look at any given link you might find on the web.  As a person trying to optimize a website, there are a few important points to consider when deciding what links search engines value and how they value links:

• What page does a link point to?
• What is the anchor text?
• What is the value of the text in the link?
• How much value will you get from the link?
• Is there any risk of being penalized by using a particular link?

To effectively being this analysis, we must first look at links from the perspective of the search engines.

What a Search Engine Wants

Search engines use an algorithm to measure the type and quality of links before deciding on their importance.

Why does a link exist?

The primary question a search engine considers is why a link exists.  Internal links that are blue underlined links in the body of your webpage are considered as likely being there to assist the users to navigate your website or find information.

On the other hand, links that have no visible indication that they are a link are viewed as probably being there to influence your ranking.

Why was this link given to a website?

When looking at external links, the search engines break down the links into the following categories:

Stolen Links:  These links are created through web applications that allow users to add links to a webpage.  These kinds of applications can include blogs, directories and the like.

Manufactured Links:  These links exist because someone has gone out of their way to create websites and web pages for the sole purpose of creating links.  This is known as “link farming” and is often difficult for search engines to detect.

Bartered Links:  These links come about by people asking others to exchange a link to their site for a link to theirs or can be the result of including links in signatures of forums and links found on social networking sites.  When search engines determine that links are merely exchanged, the discount the value of that link.

Purchased Links:  These are considered by the search engines as falling into one of two categories:  Those which may be legitimate and profitable advertising for the purchaser and those which are there merely in an attempt to influence rankings.

Given Links:  These are links that are awarded freely because someone likes a website and wants to link to it.  These are the links the search engines like the most.

Authority and Trust

The value of a particular link depends on how much authority a website has (as measured by Google through its PageRank system) and the trust a site has.  An authoritative site might do well in the ranking while at the same time be an untrusted site because it sells link ads to other websites or SEO companies.

It is interesting to note that links from such sites might be regarded as useless in one search engine and invaluable in another.

While there are legitimate reasons to purchasing links such as attempting to drive traffic to a website, for optimization purposes it is better to create a link building strategy based on the concept of authority and trust.  The optimal situation is having a lot of links from authoritative sites with a high degree of trust, whether they are purchased, bartered or earned.

As the text of the webpage is important when it comes to making a site friendly for users, it is important to write using a natural and flowing style, making sure to include keywords and phrases (and their variations) in wherever and whenever it makes logical sense to a human visitor to the site.

Be sure your text is appealing and interesting and not just an exercise in trying to squeeze in as many keywords and phrases as possible.  However, do consider that you might get a boost in the rankings by including primary search terms in the first paragraph.

Also consider that use of the modifiers discovered in Chapter 5 can be more important than the exact placement of keywords.

Phase 4:  Content Creation

Many of you will discover when mapping out your keyword strategy is that there is not enough content on the site to support the use of all the keywords in your strategy.   This suggests the obvious:  more text is required for the site in order to effectively use your keyword strategy as developed in Chapter 5.  This should also suggest to you that there is not enough content on the site for your site visitors.

Remember that it is important not to merely duplicate information using the same text over and over again, merely changing a few keywords and phrases.  Whatever the search terms are you have decided to use on a particular page, write something original and not overly repetitive.

Level 1:  The Home Page

While it is possible to get good rankings from your homepage without developing any text, you will have to pour a lot of time, energy and resources into building links.  However, it is preferable to take the time to write some content for the home page.

Level 2:  Category Pages

Even if these pages include items such as photos, links and forms be sure to include some original content.  Otherwise you run the risk of the spiders looking at those pages as merely duplicate content and do not crawl them any further.

Level 3:  Content (Destination) Pages

As many of these pages include ordering forms, or forms for placing reservations, etc. many believe there is not reason to include original content on these pages.  However, this is  a golden opportunity bring you additional traffic from search engines if you would only take the time to include some content, being sure to use appropriate search terms and when possible links with keyword rich anchor text.

Website User Generated Content

Website user generated content can include forums, reviews, comments, etc. and are great at creating a lot of fresh content for your site.  This interactive element to the site is not only great for the interest level of site users, but can create a lot of keyword rich content.

Guidelines for Search Engine Friendly Design

Here are a few basic rules for creating web pages that are “search engine friendly”.

Frames

Search engine spiders do not like frames and you should avoid them.

Flash, QuickTime and other Plug-Ins

While search engines can now read and index websites using Flash, they cant really trust what they find in the sites since there is no way for them to determine what text exactly is visible to users of the site.  Therefore, creating an entire website using Flash is not a good idea.

It is okay to use some Flash, QuickTime or other Plug-Ins but only do so selectively on your HTML pages.

JavaScript

While there has been some experimentation by search engines with reading JavaScript, it is best to assume it is invisible to them and it should be avoided for the most part, except when used sparingly on HTML pages.

HTML Validation

In most instances warnings should be ignored and errors corrected when running your code through an HTML validator.

Image Maps

Image maps can be useful in designing a page, but search engines to not follow them, so do not waste any time on them expecting them to navigate those maps.  Also be aware that like with images, there is no way to include anchor text.

Take the headache out of content creation Search Engine Marketing People write web page content for English, Spanish and Portuguese language sites.

Want to see free of charge how a web page is ranking and competing with a key competitor ask us for a free SEO report.

Web Page Optimization

The process of optimizing web pages is actually quite simple, particularly if you have done a good job of organizing your website and developing your keyword strategy.  Remember to plan first, design later.  If those two things are in place, then webpage optimization should be quick and easy.

Web Page Optimization:  An Overview

When optimizing web pages, remember that if you need to bend or break a rule here and there to make sure your pages are easy to use and fun to read, do not concern yourself about it too much.  You can always make up for any deviations through the proper use of anchor text.

What we will do in this chapter is quickly take you through  a webpage from top to bottom and to indicate to you where your keyword and keyword phase placement will have the greatest impact.

Remember, that the algorithms used by search engine are designed to catch the theme and content to provide search engine users with meaningful search results, you are trying to ‘crack’ the formula and ensure you have the best chance of ranking higher in the search engine page results,

As was the case in earlier chapters, this is a four stage process involving:

• Phase 1: The Head Section
• Phase 2:  Headings & Links
• Phase 3: Body Text and Modifiers
• Phase 4: Content Creation

We will end this chapter with more information and Guidelines for Search Engine Friendly Webpage Design.

Phase 1:  The Head Section

The HEAD section of your website is not visible to human visitors of the website with the exception of the TITLE tag which appears in the title bar of your browser window.  However, there are many important elements to consider in the HEAD section.

Title Keywords and Description

Page Title: The page title should contain no more than 10 words and should contain somewhere between 2 to 3 primary keyword phrases as developed in Chapter 5 and nothing else.  It serves as a sort of “ad headline” for those who find you in the course of a search so it should be designed to encourage clicks from those who see you in the search results.  You might want to note that typically only the first 65 characters in the TITLE will show up on the search result page, so plan accordingly.

You should also be aware that the search engines will display the matching keywords in the search in bold.  The title in the listing is clickable to the website, so it is important to insure your primary search terms (keywords and phrases) are in the first 65 characters of the page title.  Having those terms in bold will increase the chance of a user clicking on your website.

Keywords META Tag:  Some people believe that the keywords META tag is unimportant but we recommend you use it to input some of your primary keywords here.  Even better, you might try putting in a few misspellings of keywords if you surmise that your keyword is spelt incorrectly many times.

Description META Tag:  Use the first 10 to 12 words to attract visitors to the site being sure to use keywords and phrases.  We highly recommend using a different description META Tag for each page of the website.  The first 155 characters of the description are included in the search results and influences the click-through rate for your site.

Robots META Tag:  The robots META tag can be important because you can use it to tell robots (spiders or crawlers) not to index a particular page or to follow any links from it.  The following example shows the structure for telling a robot not to index the page or to follow any links:

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, nofollow”>

You do not need to tell the robots or spiders index or follow because this is their function unless instructed not to do so.

Other META Tags: The only other META Tag that is particularly important or relevant for SEO purposes is the “verification” tag used by Google Webmaster tools and discussed in Chapter 11:  Misc. Information and Summary.

Phase 2:  Headings & Links

Whenever possible, you will want to use core terms, keywords, phrases and their variations in the headings and subheading of each webpage.   Along with headings you should be sure to use these search terms in the anchor text of links used throughout the page.

Want to know more about Search Engine Marketing People?

FREE SEO SOFTWARE TO TAKE THE GUESS WORK OUT OF SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION!