6 Steps to Launching a New Website

1 – Having a Reasonable Goal in Mind: Having a reasonable goal means understanding that depending on your strategy, resources and competency you will either have to spend lots of time fine-tuning your campaign, or pay someone else to.

Most competitive keywords take up to a year to secure with consistent optimization applied. Hence, managing expectations means understanding the competitive thresholds for your keywords and the degree of trust required for a website to “break loose” and start climbing over competitors.

With the competitive landscape becoming more challenging by the day, the range of competitors fighting for topical relevance and keyword positioning can overwhelm those who are easily discouraged and seeking short-term gratification.

There are only tens spots available for any given keyword; and depending on if those keywords are candidates for commerce determines how many companies, businesses or individuals will have them locked in their sights.

The idea is to target keywords within your reach initially, but build the more competitive keywords into the site architecture, link structure and off page SEO to brand each page with a purpose,  which leads to the next point.

2 – Create Pages for Specific Purposes – Just because visitors arrive does not ensure success. You need compelling content infused with overtones of intent. Instead of overwhelming visitors with a bland one-size-fits-all approach, try segmenting your traffic by offering one specific conversion objective per page; unify your message, images & call to action.

Search engines look at singular and plural keywords in a unique fashion. For example, just because you rank for one variation of a keyword does not ensure you will rank automatically for the stemmed or plural or synonymic variant.

Most people search in plural format by default “bank accounts vs. bank account” for competitive 2 word key phrases and tend to use modifiers and / or alternate keyword synonyms.

With this in mind, make sure you have a predefined destination page for each variation or create a page for multiple keywords by using the singular, plural and alternative keywords in the title or meta data. For example, a page about pricing could use keywords on the page about SEO rate, rates, fees, fee, costs, cost, SEO pricing, etc…

If that does not work, then try utilizing conversion paths vs. traditional landing pages by offering a selection of 2-3 choice/selections to clarify consumer intent.

Example: I am here for (a) SEO Services (b) SEO Consulting or (c) Free Themes and Downloads, then based on which option they click, tailor your message to get to the next layer of engagement.   By segmenting conversion paths instead of pages is an effective way to deliver a targeted message to the right visitors at the right time.

3 – Structure your website to facilitate rankings – Creating a tiered structure of relevance from the onset and matching your keywords to pages created specifically for those keywords is a must.

You can theme and silo (use a series of topical categories) for your website or use flat site architecture and keep all of the naming conventions relevant that incorporate exact match keywords. The idea is to use unified titles, url structure, h1 tags, meta data and internal and external links to define each page with SEO.

4 – Employ Staggered Link Diversity – Different links work better for different stages of your website’s development.  For example, to warm things up, Yahoo Directory, Business.com, Best of the Web and other trusted directories work wonders to escalate trust (here is a great list from SEOCompany.Ca).

After adding the base layer of links, invest time and energy looking for niche related links from notable aged sites in addition to fresh editorial links from news, press releases, blogs and social media to balance the mix.

It’s better to get deep links to specific pages with specific anchor text (5-15 links per page) rather than just acquiring random links to the homepage. No one said building links is easy, but it is a mandatory step to distinguish your pages in search engines (and increase your potential exposure for readers).

5- Add Fresh Content Regularly – Industries are competitive, which means you need to offer something worthwhile to search engine spiders and human visitors alike to encourage them to consider your website as an authority on a subject.

The ultimate objective of SEO is to develop authority; from there rankings are produced from the on page and off page synergy of trust, citation and the coherence and / or synergy of the collective content within your website.

6 – Pay Attention to the Long-Tail – Long tail keywords (keyword incorporating 3 or more words and or modifiers) are responsible for 80% of the traffic to most websites.

Rarely do websites start from zero then jump to the top for competitive keywords. First they show signs of traction with one or more keywords then that phenomenon continues to stem as additional keywords cross the tipping point and become buoyant.

The key is to use analytics, referral data to study where that traction occurs, then intersect the intent of those keywords with additional pages within your website that have a related theme.

If you pick up on a keyword “breaking lose” then feed it with additional editorial pages using similar titles and / or internal links to polish the ranking factor to create more traction through keyword stemming.

To summarize:

1) define your site in advance, top level keywords, categories, landing pages and on page copy for conversion, 2) add another layer with a blog or CMS (content management system) to add topical content to support your cause, 3) track your results with analytics to gauge the effectiveness of a campaign, 4) build a base level of aged links and then 5) use deep links via editorial linking from articles, blogs & social media while 6) targeting long-tail traffic until your site can devour more market share as a result of age, trust and authority.

SEO Tips to Find and Qualify Directories

Hence, authoritative links in to the quantity or percentage of links out a domain has, determines how much link flow a domain can produce in tandem with its contained volume of content.

Popular websites with user generated content are always ahead of the supply and demand curve, because they always have something new for search engine spiders to dig into, which keeps them coming back for more in addition that they also receive a healthy flux of inbound links.

Wikipedia is a prime example of a website with a 94% deep link percentage and all user generated content with millions of relevant themed pages and subjects.

Directories of that magnitude may not exist, but you can find smaller more potent themed directories to acquire links to your homepage or more importantly deep links to individual pages with keyword-rich anchor text that pass just as much value.

On the contrary, websites that constantly link out, offer bleak editorial value or are dripping with commerce laden jargon often do not make the grade when it comes to developing an authoritative domain.  When picking potential directories to submit your site, you should focus on quality and relevance rather than bulk submissions.

There are only a handful of directories that have kept a clean link profile as a result of a human review editorial process. In addition to the neighborhood of a website, you can also use off page citation as a measurement of if that directory is worthwhile for submission.

Search engines scan their index for duplicate, so vary your title and descriptions for more impact. Use other websites as a yardstick to assess how authoritative a domain might be.For example, using Alexa ranking as an indicator could signify what type of imprint that domain has. Another great website you can use as a yardstick is DMOZ.

If a site appears there, in most cases you know it has passed a stringent editorial review and has been around for some time. You can also visit DMOZ and just use their search box and type in keywords (topic) directories such as legal directories, shopping directories, etc. and find dozens or hundreds of hard to find pre-qualified directories for consideration.

Another method is to use the *wildcard technique in a Google search such as:

furniture * directories
legal * directories
blog * directories
rss * directories

Google will fill in the blanks based on authority and return a list of top domains that feature related searches based on the shingles (words) used in the query.

Or you can even search for

www directories or
www AND legal directories (just replace the word legal with your category).

If you just typed www into a Google search box, it would list the most powerful sites online in chronological order based on citation. By adding the word “directories” to it you are adding a modifier for the information retrieval parameter to lock on to and return relevant results.

Cut down scrolling time by using http://www.google.com/ie?&num=100 first to view 100 results at a time or just click your advanced options in Google and switch results to 100 (to view descriptions and meta snippets in addition to titles).

Then by context alone you can skim for relevant directories to add your website. Age, trust and authority are crucial elements here, not the submit your website to 1000 directories wild west approach.

Quality is the cornerstone of search engine result page longevity and combining this with deep links (links to specific pages) you can create buoyancy for pages nested deep under the surface in your website.

Another method is to add a modifier to the category such a:

legal directories AND deep links

*See example http://www.google.com/ie?q=legal+directories+AND+deep+links&hl=en&num=100&btnG=Search

Once again, replace your category in front of the word directories and see what the spiders have crawled and what is in the index as a potential link candidate.

Just replace the legal category with the one you are targeting to find the directories you are considering.

Next check to see if they are in Dmoz, Yahoo or Alexa and then check the PageRank of the homepage and sub category you are considering to determine crawl frequency and indexing.

If it hasn’t been crawled for a while, then it is more than likely penalized or the page suffers from link attrition and is not a good candidate for providing a link.

Also consider that the more links that are on the page, the smaller the percentage your site receives. Although you may not consider PageRank important, in this way, using it to assess crawl frequency and how much authority and citation a page has is not a bad idea.

Personally, I prefer using Majestic SEO to conduct a page level analysis of the AC rank (which is a much more straight forward metric), but to each their own.

Remember, as you develop your link profile, quality is better than quantity, so think before you link and remember, everything leaves a trail…

Happy directory hunting.

Finding the proper balance to streamline relevance and prevent theme diffusion using SEO means pruning, nurturing and tilling dated sub folders, managing cyclical content and finding enough link flow to feed each segment of the site via deep linking.

Content Creation and Link Structure

Relevance is subjective, what is relevant today may not have been relevant 2 years ago or vice versa; the tendency to hold on to dated content that (a) does not receive significant search volume or (b) no longer serves as a primary facet of the site should be assessed and evaluated for re-purposing via revision or / or 301 redirects.

The link graph both the internal links that cast the web within your website and the citation from other websites should both converge with a similar message (on a page by page basis). This means that internal links can be used to identify and strengthen which pages in a website gain traction for what keywords.

If I constantly link to page a with 3 specific keywords and external incoming links from other websites also do the same (in addition to 3 other related keywords) then the page can potentially rank for 9 or more variations (depending on the authority of the internal and / or external links).

Think of it as a cross between Wikipedia’s virtual theming as a result of consolidating relevant anchor text and keywords to specific pages all about that keyword and how Adobe ranks #1 for click here out of 1 billion competing pages from other sites linking to it with the anchor text “click here” to download Adobe Acrobat.

You want your pages to take on the aggregate sum of those internal and external links by mapping keywords to specific page, which then became buoyant and resonate that authority (making it difficult for competitors to rival your rankings using link building or just content alone).

Through theming the link structure, each page is branded with a semantic signature that earmarks where each page fits in the hierarchy of your content,  information and site architecture. The other advantage to this strategy is, over the course of time, different pages have acquired unique inbound links, if you redirect them, the new target page replaces that page in the SERPs.

Using 301 Redirects for Link Transference

When you consider that you can optimize a page, let is gestate and develop authority, then re-purpose is later (by staying within the context of the keywords it ranks for) and linking from it to new content or redirecting it to a new category / landing page. You can take a 2000 word page which ranks for 100 keywords then redirect it to (a) a new sleek landing page or path or (b) a category which consolidates the previous purpose of the page.

You really have to dig deep in a site and determine which pages you can “sacrifice” to lighten the load and reduce bloated content from irrelevant pages which are bulging at the coffers and keeping your site from reaching optimal buoyancy in search engines.

Creating lean, crisp new pages with exact match titles, relevant meta descriptions (which can contain synonyms or plural keyword variations) as well as a plethora of internal links from within the site and 5-10 deep links from other websites; your pages can cross the tipping point and break a ranking loose and shift from not in the top 1000 results to top 100.

After the top 100 results are breached for the main keywords the page is targeting, then you can go back and (1) add more topical content from subordinate pages and link to the preferred landing page (2) wait for all the on page and off page elements to synchronize and kick in (trust rank) or (3) build more links to overcome competitors.

Utility over History

As long as your present tense and short-term SEO goals can support your long-term objectives, then the threat of utility is a moot point (sort of like having a yellow pages book when you have search engines).

Sure, somewhere out there they may be a few people willing to type in some obscure long-tail phrase to evoke the “page from the pasts ghost” and interact with it on some level, but more often than not, pages are just anchors dragging a site off topic.

Just like spring cleaning, you have to assess which pages facilitate the big picture and which can be ball-rolled into a more relevant present-tense page to replace waning relevance from dated content.

Glitch? New Algorithm? Amnesia? Who Knows...

Let’s back up a bit, as someone who takes pride in producing top rankings for competitive keywords, the strangest thing occurred today; SERP data from the UK appeared in the US and usurped common positions held down by yours truly and others.

The typical search results for SEO typically comprised of a double listing of Wikipedia results at the helm (gone), the usual listing from seo.com (gone), and SEO superdude Aaron Wall from seobook.com (gone) and even our ranking in the #10 spot for www.seodesignsolutions.com/ (is nowhere in sight).

Although it could be a temporal flux of data centers or a bad case of amnesia, it is too soon to tell why one keyword has been displaced or misplaced from the otherwise common ground in the Google index.

Also, if you take the approach of looking at the entire array of sites typically indexed for the keyword the typical results are 903 competing websites holding down the primary index locations.

See for yourself by using http://www.google.com/ie?&num=100 as a search operator adding the word SEO and then going to the end of the line. The results stop at 376 vs. the 903 results from the previous day when you see the “omitted search results” which are typically a sign of duplicity and or the gateway to the dreaded black hole a.k.a supplemental index.

Although conspiracy theories could gain momentum how Google finally rid this keyword once and for all could arise,  it is more than likely a temporary circumstance caused by some type of beta test or blending of relevance thresholds.

Almost as if waiting for a screen to appear “technical difficulties” this broadcast will return momentarily, after refreshing the screen after numerous times, it appears that at least for now, there are an array of new sites “such as WordPress” and others enjoying the limelight for a highly trafficked keyword.

Stay tuned as the rollback occurs and things normalize again. Just in the last hour alone I now see seo.com and seobook.com toggling back in and out of the index and us at #14.

The last time this happened was during the Google.co.uk PageRank Update several months ago when we discussed it in a post called “Will the Real Google Search Results please stand up”, so, this is nothing out of the ordinary. But for those with livelihood attached falling from grace for a keyword with magnanimous search volume is not a laughing matter.

Hopefully for those all affected, by the time you read this, everything will have returned to normal. Otherwise, clean up on isle 5 is in order as the blending of results transpires. It is too early to tell, but in most cases, results like this normalize in a short period of time.

Is this the dawn of Google caffeine or just a glitch? and who knows how many other keywords in the index were also affected…

If you have anything to add to this from your own personal observation, feel free to share your thoughts.

Using SEO Ultimate for Competitive Research

Behind every great ranking there is a process, with the two types of results you can create (intentional and unintentional) the former is ideal, while the latter is always a plus. However, to target a keyword, you need competitive intelligence to perform S.W.O.T analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats).

Taking things back to SEO basics, using Google search operators provides you with the ability to “zero-in” on competitive metrics such as allintitle, allintext, allinanchor, linkdomain, linkfromdomain and more all on the fly from the dashboard.

For example, say I wanted to see how my website stacked up against the competition for all of our main keywords

First, I would then select the competition researcher module.

SEO Ultimate Module Manager

Next I would add all of my keywords.

Add Keywords and Select Show 100 Results and Google's Minimal Mode

Make sure to select the checkbox below that says “show 100 results per page” as well as “use Google’s minimal mode” for this exercise and then click the “submit button”. They are optional and will save you time scrolling, however it is your preference.

Afterwards, the tool will query Google and display the multiple keywords in their own respective window, where you can analyze the results.

*It’s always a good idea to click your homepage or the page you are investigating that corresponds to a keyword first (to eliminate having to look for it amongst the other results, however, if you are familiar with your titles or meta data, then disregard clicking them in advance).

Next, look for a new tab and the search results displayed in horizontal iframes that contain each search.  In this example, I want to see how many websites are actively competing for a given keyword to assess the competitive threshold of the keyword or key phrase.

To do this, I scroll to the bottom of the window of the keyword I am researching and then continue to click the next button until I see.

“in order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the (number) already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.”

End of competing sites for keyword SEO

This means that you have hit the depth of the well as far as relevance and Google has just informed you that there are only “X amount” of websites actually competing for that keyword.

So, instead of assuming that you are competing against millions of websites “which is what you might believe” using a broad match or normal search, this gives you the actual number of websites in between yours and the top ranking result.

Then, you could look at go back and look at:

1. Allintitle results (of all the websites in the index, who has the most title tag relevance).
2. Allintext results (of all the websites in the index, who has the most on page in text relevance).
3. Allinanchor results (of all the websites in the index, who has the most in anchor / link relevance).
4. And use a variation of the site: command to dig in to their competitive thresholds.

Usually, Google stops indexing results past 1000, so, you can gauge how competitive a keyword is, based on how close it is to that 1000 result cut-off point.

SEO in this instance stops at 903 results for “phrase match” or “in quotes” identifying that we are only competing with 903 websites vs. the 188 Million results you may think your competing with if observed in broad match.

Obviously, one word keywords are more competitive, so, better to check on two word or more queries using modifiers to investigate competitive thresholds.

Repeat that step for allintitle, allintext and allinanchor then you can simply go back to the dashboard and add the name of the website you wish to investigate before the keyword (no need to use http:// or http://www. – just the domain name is fine) then with the “show 100 results per page” active and toggle/unclick the “use Google’s minimal mode” if it was still selected, then click the “submit button”.

This is the equivalent of site:website.com keyword in Google (which allows you to determine on page keyword saturation and topical continuity). The more occurrences a competitor’s website has for a given keyword, the more SEO defense they have in the index to pad the results and stave off competitors such as yourself.

How Many Occurrences Do Competitors Have for Keywords?

So, this is a great tactic to see who the 800 lbs. Gorilla is as far as on page SEO.

*I used SEOChat.com in this example, but you can use any of your competitors to indentify how many pages they are dedicating to each respective keyword within their on page SEO.

Saturation Thresholds for Keywords

They have 28,300 instances of the keyword SEO, 1240 occurrences for seo services, 1690 for seo company, etc. I can then use the same approach on my own site to see how each metric measures up.

Observe the results next to determine which keyword you want to dig deeper into. You can also add domains by themselves for use in the query box to see how many links from the domain exist (to assess who they link to) as an indicator of hub strength or look at backlinks using the inbound links dashboard selection.

These are rather basic SEO commands used for competitive research, however, this gives you a way to access them conveniently from one consolidated control panel.

SEO Ultimate Version 1.2 Released with New Competitor Research Module

The Competition Researcher comes with a total of 9 tools to help you analyze the competitive landscape of relevant search engine result pages. These tools help you research either the general competition for given keywords, or the websites of specific competitors.

When you install or upgrade to the newly-released SEO Ultimate 1.2, your “SEO” menu will include a new “Comp. Researcher” menu item. Just click the item to open up the Competition Researcher interface. The options are delineated into 3 steps.

The first step is to choose which of the 9 research tools you’d like to use. Each one includes a small snippet explaining which information the tool will help you obtain. Next, based on the tool you chose, you either enter in the keywords you’d like to investigate, or the URLs of competitors’ websites.

The final step is to set additional options if desired to customize the quantity and/or compactness of the search results returned (feel free to experiment to find your preferred settings). Then just click the “Submit” button to open the parameter-modified search query results in a new window (i.e. no illicit scraping/crawling/automation is used). You can study these search results to glean information about the general competition for a keyword or about specific competitors’ websites.

Here are a few of the factors you can investigate with the Competition Researcher:

• How many webpages are competing for given keywords
• How many webpages your competitors have indexed
• What other sites your competitors link to
• How many incoming links your competitors have
• Which competing websites have the highest title-tag relevance for given keywords

…and much more.

The Competition Researcher provides an investigation-oriented application of powerful tools from Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Thanks to the direct integration of this functionality into the WordPress admin for easy access, the SEO Ultimate plugin has just acquired a new functionality facet that further entrenches its position as the ultimate search engine optimization solution for the WordPress blogging software.

If you haven’t already, be sure to download your free copy from the WordPress plugin directory today! Or visit our plugin information page to watch an informative video that gives you an overview of SEO Ultimate’s features.

How Does Your Website Measure Up?

In essence, Pagerank’s notable contribution to rankings has long since diminished; however what you can use it for is an indication of link health and connectivity to (a) your own website or (b) a measure of citation from other sites on the web. This type of algorithmic peer review can be easily channeled and consolidated to augment aggregate on page SEO ranking factors.

For example, if you know where page rank is pooling in a website, you can use those pages with a higher “rank” like air- traffic controllers to funnel search engine spiders a.k.a crawlers deeper into the site or use them for redirects to boost other internal pages or normalize link flow in areas suffering from link attrition.

It is important to understand that ranking factor comes from both aged and new pages but also the combination of trust and authority with the new fresh unique topically created content based on semantic clusters of relevance are what produce rankings.

Use PageRank to get link flow to the newer pages by funneling any link flow that may be “pent up” in the site deep in the site architecture by reviving older pages with fresh links to new content to maximize the synergy of trust and relevance.

Despite what the consensus is from other SEO’s, we acknowledge that PageRank is an arbitrary statistic that does not indicate the genuine rank of a pages strength in the index, but it is a precursor for other SEO metrics that hinge on the relevance of link flow and algorithmic calculations of relevance score.

How you use it is up to you, but at least you may be able to floss some bragging rights if your site / projects that you have been toiling away on for months, finally received an acknowledgment from Google as having a green badge or PR to validate your efforts.

Congratulations, you are now in the cue and can leverage the crawl rate to your on page advantage, or use 301 redirects to “pass it on” to pages more deserving of praise…

If Content is King, Relevance is Queen!

The average marketer will run a totalitarianism kingdom, in which all content focuses around a particular product or company. “Shamefully self promoting” is how my SEO co-workers refer to it and nobody appreciates it, or reads it for that matter, except the marketers themselves.

Repetitively posting your shameful promotion material every 15 minutes on Facebook and Twitter is officially deemed annoying and pointless. If anything, you’re repelling potential clientele.

What you, as ruler, want to do is run a socialist kingdom, where everyone (you and your reader) gets equal benefits from your writing. If you treat all of your subjects like royalty, they will become loyal subjects, follow your blog and, eventually, start looking at what you have to sell.

How is this done?

Luckily, with informational content, you don’t have to be the village’s best writer, although it’s always helpful. But you do need to know your industry inside and out. If you’re a good businessman, then you already have this down. If not, pick a different day job?

Let’s throw out some examples. If you are a mechanic, you sell the services that you offer. But nobody is going to read a blog that shouts out the hot deals at Bert’s Terrific Transmissions on I-94.

Instead, write about all that knowledge that is floating around in your brain. Believe it or not, it is worth a lot of money. But instead, you’re going to use that power for good and give it to your readers for free.

Blog about simple car maintenance that every car owner should know.

Blog about the three worse things you can do to your car.

Blog about your favorite transmission oil and why you prefer it to others, or what happens if you don’t change your oil frequently.

If you become an information outlet, instead of a promotion machine, then people will naturally gravitate to your blog for insightful information on their car troubles. Your goal is to become their go-to man for all their mechanical problems.

When you give people free, valuable stuff (i.e. information), consumers tend to trust you. Before you know it, they will trust you for all their car-related needs.

More examples?

“We are the best and smartest SEO provider in the world,” – shameful self promotion.

“4 Easy SEO Copywriting Tips for Smart Bloggers,” – useful industry information that entices readers (hopefully).

Bottom line is that everyone is an expert in their chosen area, so why not share all that juicy information with your readers, or should I say potential customers?

Jewelry designers can blog about how to spot flawed jewels. Real estate agents can blog about market trends. Restaurant owners should blog about in-season foods. And SEO providers should blog about how to rank on the first page of search results for your industry.

Hmmmm…….well, I digress.

So, the lesson to be learned is to be concerned about the well being of the people of your kingdom, instead of yourself. If you are a selfless ruler, you will soon learn that your subjects will come to respect, trust and confide in you.

In due time, they will offer up their shillings (or whatever currency you do business in) and then both you and your kingdom will live happily ever after.

The end.

4 Easy SEO Copywriting Tips

In fact, whenever possible, convince your techie counterparts to relay the information so that you can type it into pretty and, more importantly, understandable words for your readers.

Let’s face it, most of the techie SEO guys can talk circles around us with fancy techie lingo. But when it comes to putting it down on paper, they ain’t got nothing on us.

That being said, if you happen to be part of the rare breed of techi-journalist hybrid mix, then kudos to you because you are in high demand. Stop reading this blog and find a technical journal now.

For the rest of us who, perhaps, blog religiously about more everyday topics, such as the mystical art of underwater basket weaving, you might as well be optimizing your writing for the search engines so that basket weavers and SCUBA enthusiasts alike can find your insightful content (and possible product placement).

Here’s the basics:

• Don’t be self-centered enough to assume that your writing is the end-all-be-all of that subject. In other words, link keywords to other fantastic sites that feature more awesome content on your subject. Or maybe to the website for the National Association of Aqua Weavers.

Linking is a great way to shake hands with the ‘right people’ and gain authority for your site.

Hopefully, the more you reach out to other sites in your industry, the more they will reciprocate the act. As great as it is to link to other sites, it is even better if authoritative sites link to you. So make some waves and get noticed by your industry colleagues.

Linking to your homepage is also a great idea. You should always give your reader the means to get back to your home page quickly, if need be. No more than two links per article, otherwise you start to look spammy.

• Make your blog look pretty. For the men reading this blog, think metro sexual. Treat it like a magazine article, but online. This means you should play with your fonts and make them a good size so your readers don’t need to strain their eyes. You can even try color. Um, maybe a darker color. Use bullets or numbers.
  

Create an enticing headline, or title, that incorporates the main keyword or phrase you want to rank for (i.e. “The Fascinating Basics of Underwater Basket Weaving and More”).

• Don’t be afraid to stray away from the usual rules of print writing (my journalism professors will kill me, but we need to roll with the times). Reading on the Internet is a totally different experience for your readers, so you need to accommodate accordingly.

For example, have paragraphs.

Lots of paragraphs.

This is a no-no in the dead tree versions, where space is limited. But when space is unlimited, break it up 2-3 sentences per graph.

This is because people are lazy, as newspapers well know, and anything that looks like work won’t fly. But a 2-3 sentence graph looks a lot less daunting to your readers.

• Customize. A picture is always great for a personal touch and it will give your readers something to look at while they’re coming up for air and digesting your content.

I also recommend using the bold feature. When your reader first glances at your blog, the words may blur together and be intimidating. Put key sentences or phrases in bold, at least one a paragraph. This will break your blog up visually for your reader and make it easier to skim. The point would be for your reader to know what the article is about and your main points just by reading the bolded sentences.

Making your blog post look easy-to-read, pretty and enticing all relates back to the one main goal: getting your readers to actually read your blog. Once they are reading, focus on the second main goal: clicking on your links. Depending on your motivation, this may lead to your third main goal: getting people to buy.

But it all starts with good informational and enticing content. That is the way to your reader’s heart, and wallet. After all, the one person who is the expert in underwater basket weaving would be the same person who sells the water-proof weaving kit and decorative oxygen tanks.

For those who didn’t catch that awful analogy: if you’re selling something, you better be an expert on the product. If you’re an expert, you better be blogging about it. When you blog about it, you’re drawing people to your site.

Good luck and may the lyrical force be with you.

SEO Tips for Sitemaps

Managing crawl rates and ensuring your website has enough internal links or sitemaps to get search engine spiders deep into the sites architecture is a critical component of search engine optimization. In order for pages in your website to rank or in this case even matter to a search engine, it needs to be present in the cache as a result of being indexed.

Countless horror stories occur when pages fall out of the index. This can happen from (a) the wrong use of the .htaccess file which may have inadvertently blocked spiders from crawling the page (b) changes to navigation  or (c) changes to file name and / or naming conventions which result in broken links.

Although rankings typically resume when the broken links are fixed and re-crawled, or when the .htaccess file is restored, it can be a harrowing experience for any business.

There are certain protocols you should remember about sitemaps, if you do not have a cron (script) that monitors the addition or removal of new pages in your website and automatically updates the sitemap, then, when you make changes to a site, make sure to upload a fresh copy.

Google webmaster tools allows you to track how frequently your sitemaps are crawled, so this is your first line of defense to ensure that your pages get in and stay in the index.

Otherwise, one way to expedite crawl rates is to acquire links from sites with a higher crawl frequency. This means any website capable of having a do-follow link that spiders will traverse will be suitable in igniting a fresh crawl.

The larger the site the less frequent the crawl for pages further away from the root folder. Particularly in regard to sites with similar elements such as shopping carts or pages that do not have enough content to truly stand on their own as a genuinely unique contribution.

Using a tiered approach if you have hundreds of pages tucked away in subfolders works well. This means that you simply have a master sitemap that links to subordinate sitemaps. So, with a site with 10 sub folders, each folder should have its own sitemap; than all 10 should be linked from the main sitemap.

That way, when one is crawled, the others are included in that crawl and any changes you may have made to any of the pages all make their way into the search engine result pages.

If you find your website has become unruly and has too many sub folders, then flattening site architecture is another solution that can remedy deficiencies in link flow and revitalize languishing pages.

For example, if you have a dynamic site, you could simply copy the contents of a page and reposition it. If the page were domain.com/products/electronics/dvd-players/black-sony-model234.html you could create a static page close to the root and flatten the site / subfolders by consolidating the naming conventions found in the entire url string.

The revised page could be domain.com/electronic-products-black-sony-dvd-player-model1234.html which puts that page in the original root folder (which inherently has more link flow that other areas of the site).

As a result, that page could hold its own, enjoy a more frequent crawl rate (granted it is included in sitemaps, internal links or navigation) but the takeaway is, it is easier for user agents a.k.a search engine spiders that crawl the web to locate, update and index and changes to the file.

The last step would be to 301 redirect the old file location domain.com/electronic-products-black-sony-dvd-player-model1234.html to the new location domain.com/electronic-products-black-sony-dvd-player-model1234.html which can often be accomplished with a shopping cart setting.

After that, you still need to get spiders back to the page since files that far away have a longer crawl cycle, so by either building links to the old location or the new location, you will toggle the positive SEO effects of the pages recent transition.