Austin SEO - Search Engine Optimization

To Rank In The SERP's You Have To Have The Right Kind of Links

2011-05-22T19:50:30Z

If you are wanting to get high rankings in the search results you have to do more than create a website. There are literally millions of websites owners out there that have spent good money on having a state of the art website to find that they get absolutely no traffic. In order to get listed in the search results you have to have links from other websites that point you out to the search engines. The search engines are basically a vote counting machine. The more links (votes) you have pointing to your website, the more importance they put on your site. The value of these links vary, but to be sure, each and everyone of them count.

Here are the 12 kinds of sites you should be getting links from:

1. Internal Links: These are links from your site to other pages in your site. Linking to your own relevant content, or site-wide links like “Home.” In some blogs, like this one, you’ll see links below each post to related articles. These are all internal links.
2. Directories: Directories list websites, usually under different categories of interest. The classic is DMOZ, but there are a lot of others out there you should submit your URL to and get a link from. There is one hitch to this however. It seems that when directories find your site on their own by following links to your site, that your site will rise faster than if you actively submitted them to your search directories. See "Social Bookmarking" and "RSS" for a means of having search engines find and crawl your website in a matter of minutes.
3. Press Releases: Press release submission and distribution services, like PRWeb, allow you to submit a press release (gotta come up with something newsworthy to say and have an interesting way to say it). That press release will be distributed to syndication services and republished – with your link.
4. Article Directories: Getting a link from article directories is as simple as penning an article and submitting it. Usually your link will be in the “About the Author” bio box. There are hundreds, probably thousands, of article directories out there for you to submit to. There are also software program available to automate the process of submissions. (See SEO Resources page on this website.)
5. RSS/Blog Syndication: Submitting your blogs RSS feed to syndication services will usually not only give you a link, but each time you publish a new blog post that individual article will get a link. There are WordPress plugins that you can use to help automate this process.
6. Blog Comments: Easy enough – leave a comment on relevant blogs in your niche to get these kinds of links. Don’t be a jerk though, use your name and say something relevant and interesting.
7. Videos: Sites like YouTube, and the many others, often allow you to link to your site either in your video’s description or on your profile page. Some let you do both. You can use a service like TubeMogul or Traffic Geyser to automate this as well.
8. Forums: Forums usually center around a particular topic, so they’re great in providing very relevant links back to your website. You can link in your profile and/or signature line on most forums.
9. .edu Links: From educational sites – colleges, local school districts, etc.
10. .gov links: Like .edu links these links usually carry a lot of weight, but it can be tough to get the government to link to your site!
11. Social Bookmarking: Social bookmarking services allow people to collect their favorite links in one place. If you bookmark your own stuff (there are services that help you do this automatically also) you get a link from the service. Even better if you produce content your readers love and bookmark themselves to refer back to.
12. Social Media sites: Kind of a catch-all here, but this can refer to places like Twitter and Facebook, where people network with each other, to places like Squidoo and Hubpages, where you can place your content on a page on their site and link out to your site.

There’s are other places and ways to get links, like buying text links, trading links with another site owner or participating in a link exchange service. The list above will get you started.

Search Engine Optimization Needs A Sitemap

2011-05-11T02:29:32Z

Sitemaps Are Absolutely Necessary

In order to tell the search engines how to spider your site (if you care about your rankings) you need to have a sitemap on your website. If your site is a WordPress site, this is a very easy thing to take care of. Just add a plugin that takes care of it automatically. There are lots of good ones. Do the "Add New" plugin search and find any of the many that has the most stars and load it.

Below you will find a short "primer" on sitemaps. This is easy, so just do this for your website. You will like the added push it gives.

Sitemap Help

Sitemap is a file (or multiple files) that list URLs for a site.

It is important to submit your sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools
It is important to include a link to sitemap file in your robots.txt file
If you want to put sitemap on different domain you must put a link to it in your robots.txt file
All information about sitemaps — http://www.sitemaps.org/
You can also submit your sitemap to Bing Webmaster Tools
If you don't have a sitemap, try sitemap generators

Robots.txt

Robots.txt is a file on your site that tells web spiders (like Googlebot) how to behave on your site.

Robots.txt should contain a link to your sitemap (for example: Sitemap: http:///sitemap.xml)
All information about robots.txt — http://www.robotstxt.org/

Meta robots tag

Meta robots tag is a special HTML tag that tells robots how to behave on that page.

Use meta robots tag if you want to prevent search engines from indexing the page.
More information about meta robots tag — http://www.robotstxt.org/meta.html

Are You Listed On Bing Search? You Should Be!

2011-05-07T22:09:37Z

For a long time now search engine optimization has almost entirely been focused on Google. The reason is because Google commands the largest share of the search traffic market.

That's starting to change some, though. Bing is at the point now that it's worth focusing some of your SEO efforts toward it. Especially if your market is for searchers in the United States.

The Bing search engine responsible for 30% of all U.S. based searches. It's split about evenly between Yahoo (which, believe it or not, is now Bing-powered) and the Bing.com web site.

Prior to the Bing taking over Yahoo's search traffic, it really wasn't worth time or effort to rank in Yahoo and Bing. The SEO methods involved for ranking in them were different, and sometimes contradicted each other. So I always designed my SEO efforts to rank in Google and if that got me somewhere with Yahoo and Bing, all the better. But if Yahoo and Bing rankings didn't work out… no big deal.

But now it's 30% on the Bing engine! That's worth putting some time into. So it's time to start doing some extra work to get sites to rank in Bing now. Let's take a look at how to do that.

So how do you get your website ranked in Bing? The good news is that is a lot of overlap between what you need to do for Google rankings and what you need to do for Bing. So many of the things you do for Google will lift all boats so to speak.

A couple of things are different which you should take note of.

1. Bing prefers links in the body of webpages and blog post.

To get traction for Google the main thing you have to do is build links. The more the better. Links from high authority sites even count more, so page rank plays a factor in the value you get from the mass of links that you build. Google want to see links and lots of them.

Bing, on the other hand, does place some value on all types of links, but the links that Bing values the most are links that appears within a block of content. This means Bing places a higher value for links within the content-portion of web pages and the text of articles and blog posts. Think of like this. If your links are attached to things like articles and blog comments, that's one thing. But if your links are in the body (main content) or a webpage, that means that people are not just "referring" to your site, but they are talking (writting) about your site. Hey, that would carry more weight with me too!

So to rank in Bing you need to put more focus links coming from within blog post and articles. The good part of this is that even when you are concentrating on ranking in the Bing search engine, all of these additional links you will also help your rankings in Google. It's just that you have to concentrate on getting better links.

2. Keyworded, Exact-match domain names count more in Bing.

The value of exact-match domain names has never been a matter for debate, even for trying to rank in Google. They serve to give your site, even a brand new one, a head start. It will help your rankings out a tremendously to have the domain name "austincustomhomebuilder.com" or .org to get you ranking for that keyword phrase. Even if you have to use dashes and a prefix or suffix on it, it is better than having that keyword phrase in the title tag only. So if you're wanting to start a new site or add a mini-network to your existing site, it would be better to pickup a domain name matching the exact set of primary keywords you want to rank for.

3. Placing more content on each page you want to have rank.

It appears Bing wants to see more content than Google does. With Google, you can rank an almost empty page if you have enough links pointing to it. Bing, on the other hand, favors content-rich sites and you will be hard pressed to find good rankings for the average "squeeze page," even if they are linked out the wahzoo.

So one plan of action to rank well in Bing is to make your pages content rich and make sure that your site contains a lot of related content that you can link to intra-page. That's right, links from one page to another, even within your own website is still a link! So be sure to do that.

Getting "in content" links to your site is probably the best route to take for ranking higher in Bing. Ranking in the search engines is all about the links you have to any given page. The major difference between Google and Bing however is that with Bing you have to get certain kinds of links (which does NO HARM with Google as well! )

Backlink Data — How Do You Get It Now?

2011-04-04T05:23:02Z

So, you've been working on your search engine optimization for a while building links to your website all over creation and when you check your site's backlink count you find very few! What's up with that? Why is it so hard to get backlink data about my site?

It’s not a secret that the search engines really don’t want you to have a whole lot of information about your website or your competitor's sites, especially when it comes to backlinks.

The data from Google has been unreliable for a long time. There aren't many internet marketers who trust their tracking tools (Google Analytics). The option is using Yahoo’s Site Explorer. However, now that Yahoo has been purchased by Bing, it to is going the way of Google… unreliable data!

So what should you do if you are wanting good, reliable link stats?

Well, the best thing to do is to access a massive database compiled by MajesticSEO.com . It's a privately held company with no ax to grind in skewing results and they have been sending out their bots and gathering data to build a comprehensive database of website information. And the great thing about it is that the search engines don't have any say about how that information is given out!

The only caveat is that there may be a 2–6 week delay in stats refreshing, depending on your site and the sites linking to it.

You can access Majestic’s FREE tools at www.MajesticSEO.com .

Austin Search Engine Optimization Strategies for "WOW" Type Traffic

2011-03-21T20:55:31Z

Most people think of making a website and driving traffic to it and making a million bucks! Sounds like a good plan. Who wouldn't want to do that? The reality is that while possible it's not very probable in today's market UNLESS you start thinking like a search engine and a searcher!

One thing I always try to hammer into the heads of website owners is that the search engines don't rank websites. That may come as a complete surprise but it's true nonetheless. No, what they rank are web pages. That may sound like the same thing but think about it a minute and you might note the difference. Let's say you own an Austin moving company and you move commercial accounts from one office to another and you move homeowner's belongings and you move apartment tenants. If you attacked the search engines with one page that has all three areas of your business on the same page, you just watered down your pages relevance to any one of those three type customers that are looking for your service. The search engines are going to say, "Well this guy does that but this page is about other things too (not just "office movers") so we'll serve up pages that are more specific to the search term this searcher entered." There you have it! A page that had what the searcher was looking for but it didn't get served up!

Making pages on your website that are for each area of your business gives you the equivalent of having multiple websites that are optimized for keyword phrases that are different from the ones used on your main page, but still highly relevant to your business. For example, a home remodeler might optimize the main page for "home remodeler" and then have another page to attract people who are searching on related terms like "kitchen remodeling" or "sun room additions." You can use this strategy to expand your visibility beyond just a few keyword phrases. In fact, it's like having a whole network of search engine optimized sites working to capture relevant search traffic and it's all on your own website!

You can do the same thing by making mini sites using keyworded domain names as a little mini net for your business. To make it even easier, just make a subdomain on your website with the desired keyword as the name of the subdomain (subdirectory) on your website.

This isn't hard to do, you just have to burn into your brain that the search engines never rank "websites," they only rank web pages! So literally, every page of your website is important and should be thought out before it is made as to what key phrase you are targeting.

Here Are Some Very Easy Ways To Gain Backlinks

2011-03-09T07:22:18Z

If you are ever wonder about how get started on some good search engine optimization for your website, Get some high quality backlinks! Here's a short list of some the the better and easiest ones to get.

•    Article Sites — writing articles (or having them written for you) is a great way to get relevant content on the web with anchored links to your site. The key to this is to submit your articles to authoritative article directories like EzineArticles, GoArticles, iSnare, ArticleCity etc. You can and will start seeing good results from making just a few submissions provided that your keyword choices are good.
•    Video Sites — making short and content rich videos gets you ahead of the large majority of others who are trying to get their websites found and noticed and converting visitors to customers. You can use paid submission services like Traffic Geyser or go the free route with something like TubeMogul. I use Traffic Geyser and have seen my videos hit page one in as little as 2 hours. The search engines love video!
•    Communities — interact with your peers and customers on blogs and forums. You can find a forum or community by doing a simple search trick for your keyword. Just type into the search bar your keyword or key phrase "+ forum". Then make comments or response and be sure to put a link to your website in your signature. You will get search engine credit but a lot of "street traffic" for free as well.
•    Guest Posts — offering your expertise on a subject and being able to post it with anchored keyword linking is an excellent way to get links. Just make sure the links are necessary and make sense in your post. So if you are going to write articles that will be placed on someone else's blog, don't go overboard with your anchor text links. Add just a few (2 or 3) and everyone will be happy.
•    Posting on public sites like squid.com, about.com, etc. If you have a white paper or anything with a lot of value then you want it syndicated all over the internet… with your keywords linking back to your most relevant pages.

Austin Search Engine Optimization For Local Business – Citations

2011-03-01T05:10:12Z

Local Business SEO – Citations
If you are a local business owner, it is important to know that search engine optimization and link building are important ingredients to increase your ranking in the search engines. Here's why: Just like you, the search engines are in business too. They want to provide you, their customer, the searcher with the best and most accurate results as possible. As a local business owner, your goal should be to provide the search engines a reason to serve up your site when people are looking for what you have. One great way to do that is through local citations.
What is a Local Citation?

A local citation is basically a listing in an online directory that serves a local area! There is a list of some of the more popular or well known local directories at the bottom of this article. But the main thing to remember here is that getting a listing in as many as you can raises your local status in the "mind" of the search engines. Here are some guidelines that will help you make the best and most thorough listings as possible.

Have your keywords research done and the results at your ready before you start making your submissions. You want to make sure that you are specifically targeting those who are searching for your type of business. Use as many categories, or keywords, as these local directories will allow.
STAY CONSISTENT! While the search engines are a marketing machine themselves, they are just that, machines. The machines like when things match up, which means that they will then like you! That means use your telephone number in the same way each and every time you make a submission. For example, if your business phone number is 512–550-3334, then use only that number for every listing you make. Do not use (512) 550‑3334 some times and your other extenuation 612–550-3335 at other times. The same holds true for street addresses, names, etc. If you use St. in one place, use it in every place. Don’t use Street if you use St. Type your website URL the same every time too. With or without the www is fine (that doesn't make any difference anymore) just be consistent in which one you use.
Fill out every block of information that is applicable to your business. Add photos, logos, business location photos, videos if they allow it and anything else you can think of! More is always better when making your listings.
Keep a text file or template that you can use to copy and paste your information into the appropriate fields for each local directory. Keep a record of each citation as you do it along with the user name and password. That way you will have a good reference of what you have input and if you want to change it, it will be easy to track down.
With that said, you should now be ready to start making your submissions. Here is a list of some of the free places where you can create your citations. This is only a partial list. There are over 140 of these type sites available for your input.

Google Places
Yahoo Business
Bing Business
Superpages.com
Yellowpages.com
biz.Yelp.com
Infousa.com
CitySearch.com
InsiderPages.com
MerchantCircle.com

LocalSearch.com
Local.com
HotFrog.com
local.botw.org (Best of the Web)
Localeze.com/whitepages.com
Thumbtack.com
Fastpitch.com
DuctTape.com
Craigslist.org

Have at it and let me know if you have any questions! You can get a free website analysis of your business website by going to http://MakePageOne.com and filling out the form you find on the page. (Don't worry, there is no obligation for doing this for you.) You'll probably find out some very simple things that you can do on your own that will greatly increase the business you get coming from your website. If you go to MakePageOne.com and request a free website analysis, I'll share with you a place where you can get 140 local citations for less that $50.00!

Why Is Hardly Anyone Buying? … Because You're Boring Them To Tears!

2011-02-21T16:06:25Z

When you use the same approach everyone else does, your Austin marketing takes on a “me too” look and your prospects have no idea why they should bother doing business with you versus the competition or just not doing anything at all.

Want a better response from your marketing?

Want your prospects to actually contact you and buy from you?

Are you putting stuff on your webpages that look, sound, reads and "feels" pretty much exactly like your competition’s marketing messages? Doing that will effectively kill your prospects’ interest in your business. To be more accurate, they just won't pay any attention to you or your site.

Here is the thing that most small business owners do that turns out to be a business killer. They need an ad, a marketing message or a website so what they do is simply copy what their competitors are saying. And they will do this nearly word for word. Basically, the only thing that is different is the name of the company and the contact info. For all intents and purposes, everything else is virtually identical.

If you want to see this type of marketing in action, pickup your local yellow book and go to the “Dentist” section. Here you'll find some of the worst offenders of this type of marketing. What escapes them all is that they all are going about it the wrong way from the get-go! Most print brochures and phone book ads are answering the questions "Who am I?" and "Why am I here?" These are questions that EVERYONE in the world is asking. But the part that fails to register is that is what EVERYONE is asking about THEMSELVES! They don't care who you are and why you're here! "Who am I?" is probably the most universal question of the human race. But if you're answering THAT question in your ads, you're addressing the wrong audience!

Answering "Who Am I?" and "Why am I here?" in your advertising is not only a swing and a miss, it's a swing and a miss without a ball or a bat. You might as well not even be standing at the plate!

The answers you should be giving is to the questions EVERYONE is asking about YOU! Those questions are "Why should I care?" and "What's in it for me?" and "Why should I give any of my attention to YOU?" I promise you it's not because you have 13 years experience and are a member of the XYZ Professional Guild.

Okay great. So how do I make my marketing different and better? Here’s a pretty simple way to get yourself thinking in the right direction:

Make a list of what the main features of your service or products are and then tag on the end of each feature the words "which means…" For example: Our office has 5 dentist and 30 chairs which means… that when you call we can usually put you in our schedule within minutes to take care of your problem or work within your limited time frame.

Isn't that a whole lot better? Doesn't that put it in terms which would make someone want to file your phone # in an easy to find place, even if they don't need your services today?

Next, add proof via testimonials (video if you can) that proves how good you are for any one of the benefits that you are touting.

And most important of all, break with convention and give your marketing a fun personality. Show the side of you that your friends and family like about you. Be you for a change. It will make your webpage, advertisements and commercials stand out from your competitors ads. For some unknown reason people seem to think business sales messages have to be cold, stuffy and boring. They make that type of advertising sound like it's something good by labeling it "Professional." But it's just ordinary and boring. Guess what? People do business with people they like!

MakePageOne.com is an Austin Search Engine Optimization and Marketing firm that does two things.

Gets people to your website
Gets them to pay attention

Is that a good thing?

For a free website and marketing evaluation go to MakePageOne.com.

Why Google Page Rank is Now Irrelevant

2011-02-20T04:29:22Z

Google Page Rank is a ranking method employed by Google that, to this day, no one (except Google) knows how is derived. A number from 0 to 10 that Google assigns each page on the internet presumably based on how "powerful" that page is in terms of the number and quality of links coming into the page. CNN is a Page Rank 10, my most recent blog is a 1, this blog is a 0… you get the idea. Because Google reveals this number, many SEO tools started using page rank in measuring the "Google Juice" of a given website or web page. Now there are rumors that Google no longer uses Page Rank and has moved to Trust Rank instead. Trust Rank is not publicly available.

Today, I think Google Page Rank is completely irrelevant, and here are some very good reasons I feel that way.

Page Rank has little or nothing to do with your SEO rankings or results. Do a search for most any keyword and compare the page rank of the websites listed on page 2 with those on page one. In most cases you will find websites show up on page 1 that have a Page Rank of 0, and still, there they are ahead of much higher Page Rank sites that are either listed below them or even on page 2 of the results.

Page Rank is not relevant for real time search and social media results. Social media conversations, real time news and status updates and other "instant" content are ranking high in search results. Even though the Page Rank for a tweet, status update or blog post or comment is 0, they can still show up high in search engine results. Same thing for news releases and other content. Heck, you can even find Youtube videos on page one results. How "dope" is that?

Google says Page Rank is not important. Google has taken Page Rank from its webmaster tools. Why? Because it is not important. Google Employee (Webmaster Tools Analyst) Susan Moskwa says "We've been telling people for a long time that they shouldn't focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it's the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true. We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it." In Google's forum is another place that Google tells you to not worry about Page Rank.

So, what should you do? It's simple… Don't worry about Page Rank. You should worry more about creating great content, optimizing that content for search and promoting that content in social media. That is what will get you visitors to your website. Then work to convert those visitors into leads and then customers.

Many of my clients have websites that they may have had for years and have a Page Rank of 1 or 2 and sometimes even 3! They also had "0" traffic. The reason wasn't because of Page Rank, it's because they had "0" or next to no backlinks. If you want to concentrate on 1 thing that would do the most good for your website, concentrate on link building. However, (and this is just a word of warning to save you time) you have to be going after the keyword (key phrases) that will give you a fighting chance. You do this with keyword research.

For a free evaluation of your website and how you can start driving more trafffic to it, go to http://makepageone.com

Want Your Blog Indexed In Google Within 90 Minutes? It's Easy!

2011-02-07T15:18:51Z

Everybody wants their websites indexed by Google and you run into all sorts of companies out there that will charge you a stiff fee to do it! Would it be alright with you if I showed you a "Stupid Simple" way to do it that will take you all of about 2 minutes to do?

You can do this for any blog you have that is a Blogger blog or a WordPress blog. The reason is they both have RSS (Really Simple Syndication) built into them. There may be other blogging platforms that have them, and this will work just as well for them.

NOTE: WordPress is a far superior platform to use for 2 reasons.

YOU own it and are in control of all it's content since it is hosted on your own domain
Because you own it, you never have to worry about it one day being deleted by some "Editor" that you don't know.

Here's the process:

Your RSS feed is automatically your blog address and "/feed" attached to the end of the URL.
Go to http://feedage.com and set up a free account.
Submit your "feed" in feedage.com's submission form.
Your submission will look something like this: http://mydomain.com/feed

I don't really have to go into a step by step instruction on how to do that. If you can read it will be there on your screen.

That's it! It's that Stupid Simple! Was that easy or WHAT?