IdealMedia.co.za

Top Search Engine Optimization Tips

2010-05-21T06:40:02Z

Here are 4 of the top search engine optimization techniques used by SEO experts to get their clients’ websites onto the first pages of the search engine results. The tips I discuss in this post are on-page techniques – in other words, they are under your control.

If your keyword phrase doesn’t appear on a web page, it has a snowball’s chance of appearing in the search engine results for that phrase.

1. Write the title of each web page with the search engines in mind. The page title is the most important on-page SEO element. It tells the search engines what the page is about. The page title should contain the primary keyword or keyword phrase you want people to use to find the page.

The title is generally used by the search engines as the first line of the listing on the results page, so it plays an important part in telling human readers what the page is about as well.

In this example, you can see a search engine listing displaying the title of a blog post. I use a plugin to create the title automatically from the blog post heading.

The plugin (All-In-One SEO Pack) allows me to write a title which is different from the post heading, if necessary – for instance, if I used a very long heading, I could write a shorter version for the page title. This is important because the search engines only display the first 65-70 characters of the page title.

Type untitled page into Google and see how many websites are missing this opportunity.

I see way too many commercial websites where the title is exactly the same on every page – this is another missed opportunity. Every page you add to your website is a new way for visitors to find you, and should have a title which tells the search engines what it’s about.

2. Write a page description which tells searchers why they should click on your link. The page description is important – not quite as important for the search engines, but it’s usually used for the second and third line of the search engine listing. In the first example above, I’ve used a WordPress plugin to automatically use text from the first paragraph of the article as the description. Ideally, I should have written a short summary of the article.

If you pay no attention to the page description, the search engines will use the first text they find on the page – which might be the menu options or something equally useless.

Here are two examples from large corporate websites:

From a business perspective, the purpose of the description is to persuade searchers to click on your link rather than anyone else’s. You should be looking at it as a piece of ad copy, and write it with that in mind.

3. Descriptive headings also help the search engines. Headings and sub-heading for articles or blog posts also help the search engines work out what the page is about. These headings are wrapped in the HTML “<H1>” and “<H2>” tags. There should be one and only one H1 heading on each page; there can be as many subheadings as you like.

4. Make sure your keywords appear in the body of the text.
It used to be possible to improve your search engine rank by “keyword stuffing” – repeating the keyword phrases over and over again. Fortunately, the search engines have become more sophisticated over the years, and now they would ignore or penalize a site which tried this.

Of course, your keywords should appear in the text on the page so that the search engines can confirm that the title and heading match the actual topic of the page. It’s suggested that a ‘keyword density’ of around 3% is best. That means that your keyword (or keyword phrase) should appear 3 times in every 100 words.

It is also useful to highlight the keyword phrase once or twice, by using italics or bold text.

If you pay attention to these 4 tips, you’ll find that your web pages are much more likely to appear in the search engine results.

Top Search Engine Optimization Tips is a post from: IdealMedia.co.za

Free Website Consultation

2010-05-17T05:28:07Z

Are you making sales through your website?

Many business owners I’ve spoken to are disappointed by the performance of their company website. It may look terrific, but they don’t get as many visitors as they would like, or the visitors they get are not phoning or contacting them.

To help you understand why your website isn’t working, and what you can do about it, I’m offering a free 15-minute remote website consultation.

In an interactive online discussion, I’ll analyze a number of factors which affect the marketing effectiveness of your website. This includes the search engine friendliness of your website, the visual design, ease of use and how effective your web presence is.

We’ll examine the text on the your site and how the words you have used focus on your customers and their needs. We’ll show you where you can make quick and easy changes that will increase your sales.

We’ll also look ways to track your website’s performance, and ways to build a database of prospective customers.

You will need to have Skype installed on your computer, and a reasonably fast Internet connection. I use the desktop sharing feature of Skype so that you can see what’s happening on my computer screen.

The consultations are provided on a first-come, first-served basis. There is no obligation to buy anything.

Because of the time commitment required, consultations are scheduled in advance.

For more information, go to the IdealMedia Home Page

Free Website Consultation is a post from: IdealMedia.co.za

How To Block Facebook Applications

2010-05-04T14:22:35Z

Facebook Applications can be very useful. NetworkedBlogs, for example, automatically re-publishes my blog posts on my Facebook Wall. But there are dozens of applications which are.. shall we say… less useful.

If you’re using Facebook for business, you might feel that having your friends’ Farmville, Mafia Wars and Happy Pets plastered all over your News Feed and Wall doesn’t enhance your professional image.

Facebook doesn’t provide a button to eliminate all of these ‘fun’ Apps at once, but it’s quick and easy to make them disappear one by one.

At the bottom of the unwanted Application post, you’ll see the Application name. Click on it.

You’ll be taken to the Application Page:

Under the picture, you’ll see a “Block Application” menu item. Click it.

A dialog box pops up, asking if you want to block the application. Click the appropriate button.

There, wasn’t that satisfying?

Unblocking an Application

In the unlikely event that you want to unblock an application, you’ll need to click on the ‘Account’ menu option at the top right of the screen.

Select “Privacy Settings” from the drop-down menu.

Select “Applications and Websites”

Click on “Edit Blocked Applications”

Find the Application you want to unblock, and click “Remove.”

How To Block Facebook Applications is a post from: IdealMedia.co.za

Choosing The Right Category For Your Facebook Page

2010-03-04T22:22:39Z

When you create a Facebook Page, Facebook asks you to choose a category. The page category shows up in Facebook’s search results, so it’s important to get it right.

Many people have had a nasty surprise when they discover that Facebook doesn’t (currently) allow you to change the category once the page has been created. The only way to change categories is by deleting your Page and starting a new one – and if your Page already has fans, that could be a big problem.

It’s also very important to know that the fields on the Info sub-page are different for each category. The “Local” top-level category only offers a very limited set of fields, which may make it difficult to describe your business the way you want to.

You can send visitors who are not yet Fans to a sub-page of your choice, so the first thing they see could be a Note which describes your company, or a custom sub-page created with FBML, Facebook’s markup language. So all is not lost if you choose the wrong category. But careful selection of the category in the first place is a good idea.

There are three top-level categories:

Local

Brand, Product or Organization

Artist, Band or Public Figure

Within each main category are a number of sub-categories.

Local

Other Business

Automotive

Automotive Dealer/Vehicle Service

Banking and Financial Service

Bar

Cafe

Club

Convention Center and Sports Complex

Education

Event Planning Service

Grocery

Health and Beauty

Home Service

Hotel/Lodging

Library/Public Building

Medical Service

Museum/Attraction

Park

Pets

Professional Service

Real Estate

Religious Center

Restaurant

Store

Technology and Telecommunications Service

Travel Service

Info Fields

Basic Info:

Address

City/Town

Zip

Phone

Hours

Detailed Info:

Website

Parking

Public Transit

Brand, Product, or Organization

Products

Airline/Ship/Train Station

Communications

Consumer Product

Fashion

Film

Financial Service

Food and Beverage

Game

Government

Home Living

Hotel/Lodging

Non-Profit

Online Store

Pharmaceutical

Professional Service

Religious Organization

Rental Cars

Retail

Sports/Athletics

TV Show

Technology Product/Service

Travel

Website

Info Fields

Basic Info:

Founded

Detailed Info:

Website

Company Overview

Mission

Products

Artist, Band, or Public Figure

Other Public Figure

Actor

Athlete

Band

Comedian

Critic

Government Official

Model

Musician

Politician

Sports Team

Visual Artist

Writer

Info Fields

Basic Info:

Affiliation

Address

City/Town

Zip

Phone

Birthday

Detailed Info:

Website

Personal Information

Personal Interests

Contact Info:

Email

It’s obviously best if your business fits neatly into a sub-category. As I mentioned, the fields available in the “Local” top-level category are very limited, with no text field available to describe your business properly.

The Product category offers a useful “Company Overview” field as well as a “Mission Statement” field. Why Facebook thinks that local businesses don’t need fields like this is a mystery. Of course, things do change and I’m sure that at some time in the future it’ll be possible to change the category for your Page on a whim!

Choosing The Right Category For Your Facebook Page is a post from: 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.

Search Engine Optimization Tips: Getting Indexed is a 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.

Top Business Networking Groups is a 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.

Search Engine Optimization Services is a post from: IdealMedia.co.za

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.

How To Rank In Google is a 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.

Using Google Maps for Your Business is a 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.

Stop Wasting Time is a post from: IdealMedia.co.za