IdealMedia.co.za

Search Engine Optimization Tips: Getting Indexed

2009-05-16T11:23:27Z

The search engines use programs called “spiders” to discover new pages on the Internet. The spiders simply scan every page they know about, and find links to new pages. As they find them, new pages are added to the search engine’s database, or “index”.

It stands to reason, then, that in order to appear in the search engine results, your web pages must be in the index of each of the search engines.

How do you find out if your pages appear in the index? Just typing the URL of a page won’t necessarily tell you – you might just end up with a list of all your competitors sites. You need to use one of the search engine operators.

Here’a cheat sheet listing some of the operators you can use with Google: Google Cheatsheet.

The other search engines generally use similar operators.

The one we need to use to find out if a site is in Google’s index is “info:”. You would type info:yourwebsite.com to find out what Google knows about the site. (Make sure there’s no space between the colon and the first letter of the domain name.)

If Google tells you, “Sorry, no information is available for the URL yourwebsite.com”, it means that the site is not yet indexed.

It used to take a couple of months to get a site indexed. Fortunately, these days, it’s a lot quicker. It’s possible to get a new site indexed in a few hours, using the immense power of social media networks.

In fact, all you need to do is submit a single link to Digg.com and your site should be indexed within a few hours.

If you update your website regularly, as you should, you’ll find that the search engines come back and index your new pages within a few hours.

Post from: IdealMedia.co.za

Top Business Networking Groups

2009-05-16T11:22:50Z

Business networking groups and online forums can be an effective way to get your marketing message out to other small business owners. In South Africa, there are a number of groups which meet regularly.

All of the groups have some form of online presence. They generally require you to create a user profile so that you can post text and images to the site.

Here are the ones I have personal experience with:

Networking Groups
Inner Circle
Inner Circle meetings are held regularly in Johannesburg, Midrand and Pretoria. They focus on finding synergies between businesses, and help to set up strategic alliances or joint ventures between business owners. Meetings generally attract 20 to 30 people. There is a R100 charge per meeting. The online presence is a Ning social media site, with around 300 members. Highly recommended.

MyGenius
A national business owners membership site, which claims to have 13,000 members. Paid membership is R95 p.m. There is a free membership option. MyGenius members meet in small groups, usually 10 or fewer. There is no charge for meetings. The online system is a sort of social network, running with quirky home-grown software.

SA Business Hub/Majestic Coffee Groups
Majestic, in association with SA Business Hub, coordinates regular coffee group meetings throughout the country, where business owners meet to discuss their challenges and work together to become financially sustainable. Attendance is free. There are usually between 6 and 12 people at a meeting. There is a sort of online presence at MajesticInteractive, but all it lets you do is publish “informative and educational” articles, without links. Why bother?

Online Forums
TheForumSA
TheForum is a free forum for business owners. Fairly active, with 297 signed-up members. You need to be a member to post, but you can read most of the forums without signing up.

BusinessWarriors
Business Warriors is Peter Carruthers’ paid membership site. The forum is lively and interesting. The paid structure means that people are more willing to speak their minds.

Social Networking sites
ecademy
A high traffic international social network for small business owners. Plenty of South Africans here. There is a 3-tier membership structure – free, Power Networker and Blackstar.

Collabor-Eight
Another South African Ning-based social networking site. 143 members.

< a href=http://www.businessnetworkonline.co.za>Business Network Online
I’ve just joined this network. It’s a social networking site, with around 330 members.

Other resources:
Of course, the ‘traditional’ social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc let you contact people based on their location. A new entry is GatorPeeps, which is Afrigator’s ‘Twitter-like’ microblogging platform.

Another possibly useful resource is Meetups.com which lets you contact like-minded people by geographical area.

If you are in any kind of B2B enterprise, you should at the very least visit the websites I’ve listed above. The contacts you make can be invaluable.

Post from: IdealMedia.co.za

Search Engine Optimization Services

2009-05-03T09:49:41Z

How many SEO consultants does it take to change a light bulb?

Two. One to change the light bulb and another to explain that there are over 100 factors that go into determining the state of the light bulb and it could take 3 to 6 months to know for sure that the light bulb has indeed changed.

What exactly is search engine optimization? It’s simply the process of getting your website listed as high in the search engine results as possible.

The benefits of appearing high in the results pages are fairly obvious – more people will find your website, which increases the amount of traffic you get, which in turn should increase your sales.

The process is fairly simple, but because the search engines are reluctant to share the exact methods they use to rank web pages, no-one is really sure exactly what works and what doesn’t.

There are some ground rules which we can be fairly sure about.
Firstly, the search engines are looking for quality content which is relevant to the search term their user types in.

All the search engines use the text on a page to work out what that page is about. If you want your web page to appear for a certain search term, that search term (or ‘keyword phrase’) had better appear somewhere on the page. If the keyword phrase is really important, then it should appear in the page title and in the headline on the page.

At the same time, the search engines are clever enough to spot deliberate attempts to manipulate them. Repeating a keyword phrase too often can result in the page dropping in the rankings.

‘Latent Semantic Indexing’ is one of those catchy buzz-phrases beloved by the SEO crowd. It simply means that once the search engines know what the primary keywords are for a page, they look out for similar, related keywords one would expect to find on a page about that topic. For example, although this post is about ’search engine optimization’, I’m not repeating that phrase over and over – I’m using related terms like ’search engine’, ‘SEO’ and so on.

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How To Rank In Google

2009-04-30T06:15:43Z

Getting your website to rank in Google is not as difficult as you may have been told. There are thousands of articles about search engine optimization on the Internet, 99.9% of which are complete rubbish.

The first step in the process is ensuring that your site is indexed – that is, included in Google’s index of websites. If it’s not in the index, it won’t appear in the search engine results pages.

You can check if your site is included in the index by typing this expression into Google (or most of the other search engines):

site:yourdomain.com

If the search engine can’t find any results, your site is not in the index.

Getting your website indexed can be as simple as getting a backlink from a popular website, such as Digg.com.

There are two four factors used by the major search engines to decide on the ranking for a given web page:

On-page
The search engines analyze the text content on a web page to determine what the page is about. If your web page doesn’t include a keyword, it’s very unlikely that the page will rank for that keyword.

The most important place for your keyword (or keyword phrase) to appear is in the HTML ‘title’ tag. That’s the line of text that shows up at tthe very top of the browser window, usually in a blue bar. The search engines will usually show the title as the first, bold line of text in the search engine results.

If the title is too long, it will be truncated. 60 characters is safe.

The other important element is the ‘description’ tag. Most of the search engines display the description as the second and third lines of text on their results pages. If it doesn’t exist, they will usually use the first 20 or so words from the page. It’s important to remember that the description should be written in such a way that it encourages people to click through to the web site – in other words, it’s really ad copy.

As I mentioned, your keywords should appear in the page text. The best way to do this is to write about the topic naturally. ‘Keyword stuffing’, where you repeat your keywords in virtually every sentence, is not effective. It alienates human readers, and the search engines detect it and give the page a poor score.

Original content, written for human readers, is the best approach.

Off-page
Google pretty much revolutionized the search engine business when they introduced their algorithm which determined the authority of a web page by the number of incoming links to the page. Effectively every incoming link (or ‘backlink’) is a vote for the quality of the content on the page.

All the major search engines now use incoming links as a factor in their rankings.

There are hundreds of ways to get incoming links. A few years ago, ‘reciprocal linking’ was popular – ‘You link to my site, and I’ll link to yours’. The search engines quickly realized what was going on, and started discounting these links – in otherr words, giving them less value.

The key strategy these days is to get backlinks from sites which already have a large amount of traffic. Many of these sites depend on user-generated content, and a backlink to your website is your reward for providing your content for free.

These sites include article directories, like EzineArticles.com, social news sites like Digg.com and free webpage sites like Squidoo.com.

Unique, original content – especially controversial content, or ‘linkbait’, can result in thousands of people arriving at your website.

Domain Name and URL
The next factor which affects your search engine ranking is your domain name. The search engines look at the age of your domain, the theory being that if your domain has been around fro some time, it’s less likely to be a spam site. The length of time that your domain is registered for is also a factor.

Having your keywords in your domain name also plays a part in the ranking formula.

Carefully-chosen URLs for each page of your site also have an effect on ranking. If the URL contains a keyword phrase which matches the page title, it’s likely to rank well.

Human review
The major search engines employ people to monitor the quality of the websites in their indices. Nobody knows what effect human reviewers have on search engine rankings, but it can be assumed that they look out for spam sites and reduce their rank or remove them from the indices altogether.

If you want to find out more about how to rank in Google, you can read Google’s own excellent Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide.

Post from: IdealMedia.co.za

Using Google Maps for Your Business

2009-04-06T06:41:49Z

Google Maps has developed to the point where it could be quite useful for your business.

Here’s a map I put together as an example. This map shows the locations of most of the Outdoor Warehouse stores in Johannesburg:

View Larger Map

It took me about 10 minutes. Click on any of the markers and you’ll see a pop-up with more information. This could be the store address, phone number, web address or whatever.

You can also add a photograph or a video.

If you have a business with multiple outlets, you can see the value. But even if it’s just a map to your office, or to your favorite local meeting place, there’s tons of potential.

Why would you want to do this? Google has been integrating information from sources like YouTube and Google Maps into their search results for some time now.

Look at this page:

http://www.google.com/search?q=pizza+trenton+nj&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&client=firefox-a

It doesn’t quite happen like this in South Africa… yet. But I reckon that as more SA businesses start using Google Maps, you’ll start to see them appear more often in local searches.

Having a detailed entry for your business in Google Maps can only help your search engine ranking.

Post from: IdealMedia.co.za

Stop Wasting Time

2009-02-18T09:52:48Z

Anyone who’s read The 4-Hour Workweek
by Tim Ferriss will know that one of the keys to recovering some of your precious time is outsourcing. Tim gives examples of how he and other people have outsourced all kinds of tasks to Virtual Assistants in India or the Phillipines.

Getting visitors to your website is an area where outsourcing can work very well. Building a network of incoming links is a tedious, mundane task which you probably shouldn’t be wasting your time on. If you could get Billy down the road to spend an hour a day doing it for you, it would free up your time to do the other important things which need to be done.

It really comes down to working out what an hour of your time is worth. If someone else can do the mundane work at a fraction of the cost, why would you not get them to do it?

If you’d like to know more about outsourcing, help me out by filling in my quick survey at http://outsourcefreedom.com. I’ll be creating a report based on the answers I get, and you can get a free copy as soon as the reort is written.

Post from: IdealMedia.co.za

Follow-Up System Demo Site

2009-04-06T06:42:20Z

If you look at the menu bar at the top of the screen, you’ll see there’s a link to my demo site.

On the home page of the demo site, you can sign up for a short (3 messages) email series which shows you how an Automated Follow-up System works.

There’s a demo of a Lighbox pop-up as well.

The whole site is created with WordPress, and i’ve included a Theme Switcher so you can toggle through some of my favorite themes for business websites and blogs.

Go ahead – take a look! Demo Site

Post from: IdealMedia.co.za

My Apologies If I Ruined Your Day

2009-02-11T16:37:53Z

My apologies to everyone who received a bunch of blog notifications from me earlier today.

My blog notification service, which sends a short notification email every time a new blog post is made, is automated by means of AWeber’s Blog Broadcast feature. AWeber monitors the RSS feed from my blog, and whenever it detects a new post, it sends out a short message with a link to the new post.

The RSS feed from my blog is handled by FeedBurner, which offers some advantages over a ‘raw’ RSS feed.

Google acquired FeedBurner some time ago, and since the beginning of this year has been encouraging FeedBurner users to switch their account to a Google account – by the end of February.

I logged into my FeedBurner account today, and without thinking it through, clicked on the ‘Move My Account’ button.

Now…. AWeber do have a warning on their website,
“Be careful not to make any changes in FeedBurner that cause them to republish your feed, or to change the URLs for your posts, as this could cause Blog Broadcaster to think those posts are new, and need to be emailed!”

And what’s worse… I’ve made this kind of mistake before.

What I SHOULD have done is to log in to my AWeber account and disabled blog broadcasts BEFORE transferring my FeedBurner account.

So… what have we learned from this experience?

Technology is far from perfect, and human beings are even less so.

Automated systems like this work perfectly 99% of the time. It’s very easy to get complacent and assume that they’ll do the ‘right’ thing – but ultimately, they do what you tell them to do, and not always what you WANT them to do.

My apologies again if your inbox got flooded with notifications – I’ll try to make sure it doesn’t happen again!

Post from: IdealMedia.co.za

Johannesburg Hardware report back

2009-01-23T20:45:16Z

I had to go out for three hours, but in that time my previous post reached position 8 on the first page of Google. You’ll also see a link to the same post from Digg.com, listed at #2.

There’s no guarantee that the post will stay on the front page, but there’s also no reason why it shouldn’t.

And there’s no reason why that shouldn’t work in just about any market.

Post from: IdealMedia.co.za

Johannesburg Hardware

2009-01-20T13:26:13Z

If you’ve been wondering about the value of having a blog for your business, you should find this interesting.

There are 170 Google searches a month for the search term ‘johannesburg hardware’. In other words, around 6 people are typing the search phrase ‘johannesburg hardware’ into Google every day.

Not one hardware store’s website appears on the first page of Google’s results.

There are listings for a number of directories,forums and classified ad sites – gumtree.co.za, yellowpages.co.za – but not a single hardware store’s site has made it to the front page for that search term.

There are a couple of computer hardware sites, but that’s all.

If I were the owner of a hardware store in Johannesburg, I’d be all over this.

Other terms people might be searching for might include

hardware stores johannesburg 28
linden hardware 210
morningside hardware 91

Now…getting back to the value of having a blog. Google likes blogs. Once a blog is indexed, it is generally spidered by Google on a regular basis.

As a little experiment, I’m going to see how long it takes to get this blog post to the first page of the Google results for the term ‘johannesburg hardware’. There are 275,000 competing pages, which is not too scary – those pages all have the keywords ‘johannesburg’ and ‘hardware’ somewhere in the page.

I’ll report back on this later….

Post from: IdealMedia.co.za