Tag Archives: search engine optimization

Link Exchange is Dead. Now What?

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Link exchange no longer validLet’s face it. Search engines are not interested in making easy. By definition, is a set of ways to manipulate search results, so why should the?

Google has always made it clear that the best way to promote a website is by focusing on human searchers, rather than on robots and crawlers. In several algorithm changes, it specifically targeted links that serve no purpose other than SEO and content that serves purpose other than SEO and advertising revenue.

So basically, traditional link exchange – you link to my site and I’ll link to yours – is dead. Gone. Buried. No more. You get it.

What now? How should an honest small business use the mighty Internet for some promotion, then? Without swapping links, what CAN we do?

The answer is … (drum roll) … fresh content.

Rather than having a static website, have a content management system (CMS). This is a piece of software that allows you to create and edit the content of your website through your web browser. There are many free ones out there, each with its own following, its own community and its own add-ons. Personally, I prefer WordPress.

Once you have a WordPress site, publishing new content is child play. You log in, click “Add New Post”, give it a title, type in some new and interesting information for your clients and prospects – special deals, industry changes, responses to news items and stories about happy clients – and hit “Publish”. When set up correctly, WordPress will do the rest for you: it will notify the search engines about the new post, update your company’s Facebook page, tweet to your followers and add to the authority and search ranking of your site.

Because Google didn’t just kill link exchange and reconsider page optimization, it also started to promote fresh content and view your entire site as one optimization unit. If you consistently post on a focused set of topics, your site WILL rise, maybe even to the top.

Another important factor is Google+. By many accounts, whatever is shared on Google+ and/or given a +1 is considered favorably by Google and gets a higher search ranking.

So now, SEO is as easy as 1-2-3:

  1. Post fresh, relevant and interesting content that people will read and share
  2. Engage your audience on Facebook (for consumers) or LinkedIn (for businesses) and share your content
  3. Build your network on Google+ and display the +1 button prominently on your site

Of course, you may not have time for all this, but that’s OK. With the help of SEO professionals, you can find the most cost-effective and time-effective strategies and methods for your business and generate high impact content the works for your business.

Have a great day,
Gal

My Site Has a PR5!

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C H E C K   T H I S   O U T !

I was showing someone this site as an example and quickly checked my Google PageRank (PR). It was 5!

In the past, whenever someone offered me services, the first thing I did was check the PR of their site, their keyword density and so on to get an impression of what they have been able to do for themselves. More often than not, the site looks good, but has a PR3 or lower. That, of course, made me wonder what potential clients might think of my own site, if they discovered its PR.

I worry no more, for my site is in with the best of them.

Life is good,
Gal

P.S. If you ever want a PR5 for your site…

Word Count for Firefox & Chrome

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This may not be strictly related to , but in the course of my work, I often have to count the number of words and characters in a given text (like page titles and descriptions). If you’ve ever used Microsoft Word, you know how that works.

Well, before Firefox 4.0, there was a nice add-on to do it, but it’s not compatible with the new version (how annoying). So I’ve had to resort to desperate measures.

Just kidding. Firefox allows the creation of JavaScript bookmarks, so you can put anything into them, really, and perform useful tasks like counting words and characters with a click of a button. In fact, Chrome provides the same mechanism, so this works on both browsers.

Thanks to as post by Joe Maller and another one by Media College, I had everything I needed. The code is this:

javascript:d=window.getSelection()+'';%20d=(d.length==0)?document.title:d;%20alert(d.split('%20').length+' words, '+d.length+' characters');

To install this “button”, drag the WordCount link to your Firefox or Chrome bookmarks area and you’re done. Just select some text, click the “button” (you can test now by clicking the link above) and a message will pop up with those numbers for you.

Note: when selecting text, make sure there are no trailing spaces or you will get an extra word and, of course, an extra character (this may happen when you double-click or triple-click).

Enjoy,
Gal

Edit (13/02/2010): To select text within iframes, try this code, posted by Thelizardreborn:

javascript:d=window.getSelection()+”;i=0;while(d==’null’||(d.length==0&&i<window.frames.length)){d=window.frames[i].getSelection()+”;i++;}d=(d.length==0)?document.title:d;alert(d.trim().split(‘%20′).length+’%20words,%20′+d.length+’%20characters’);

Or drag this WordCount link to your bookmark bar.

Google Search Results Have Changed (again)!

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So here I was, showing some small business owners how to get more business online in a webinar, and I suddenly noticed that the Google Search results page (or SERP for short) is behaving differently. Here is a quick summary of what’s new.

Google Places

New Google Search Results page

New Google Search Results page

Results from Google Places (formerly Google Maps or Google Local Business) now appear a lot like organic web results, with the following differences:

  1. A red map marker
  2. Contact information
  3. A link to the Google Places record with the number of reviews that place has received, if there are any
  4. A map, showing red markers for all the Google Places in the search results, which (OMG) slides down over the advertising sidebar when you scroll down!

Page Preview

New Google Search Results preview

New Google Search Results preview

Keeping up with the Joneses Bing, every result (except subscribed links) features a magnifying glass icon to the right of the title. When clicked, the pages goes into Preview Mode and starts showing scaled-down images of the listed pages when you hover your mouse over them.

In Preview Mode, all the magnifier icons turn a darker shade of blue.

When another magnifier icon is clicked, the icons return to the lighter, duller shade of blue and hovering over search results shows nothing.

What does this change mean?

To me, this change shows that Google is investing a lot of thought into making their search engine user-friendly and providing relevant, useful results as quickly as possible. Since Instant Search, results appear in a heartbeat, but now we can also scan then much faster and avoid wasting time visiting the wrong pages.

Moreover, local businesses have gained an enormous boost to their search presence by getting full exposure within the results, as opposed to the crammed listings they had before.

The only ones who may not like this recent change are Google advertisers who now see the sliding map object hiding their ads from view when the page is scrolled down, but this may not be so bad, because the map starts above the ads at first, so if the person searching chooses to scroll down, the top ads are probably not interesting to them anymore and might as well be hidden.

Oddly enough, I believe that pushing down the sidebar ads may actually increase clickthrough rates for the top positions in the sidebar.

Have an eventful day searching,
Gal

What’s SEO anyway?

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image New clients often start by asking me, “So, you do websites, right? Do you do ?”

“Sure”, I say, “Would you like fries with that?”

OK, not really. What I do say is, “What do you mean by ‘SEO’?”

The conversation then goes as many ways as there are clients.

Now, personally, I think that if you’re going to ask for professional help, it’s better if you stick to what you want to get for yourself and don’t try to use jargon, because that will get you both in trouble.  Leads? Great. Sales? Even better. Profits? Awesome. But SEO? Is that a business word?

But I shouldn’t argue with reality and the reality is that most people use jargon, so if you’re about to look for someone to “do SEO” for your website, at least you’ll know what to expect.

SEO stands for .  Oddly enough, it involves no changes to search engines at all.  Google, Microsoft and the other search providers can do that just fine without me and are continually improving their search engines.

The optimization actually aims to bring your website the biggest flood of visitors from the search engines.  A good optimization aims to bring your business the biggest flood of paying customers by making your site feature prominently in searches that are relevant for your business and starting to engage with them on the search results page.

Good SEO, like many other things, involves the 3 steps: keyword research, on-site optimization and off-site optimization.

Keyword Research

In short, this step is aimed at discovering the best online identity for your website.

In the same way you can’t see your own face without the help of a mirror, your Internet marketing consultant can show you hidden gems in your business by looking at things differently and by using specialized tools to discover good keywords.

Even in systems like Facebook, which seem unrelated to search, keywords reign supreme. Even when search results are not provided by Google or one of its large competitors, you’re sure to find a search function on nearly every site. Keywords are used to find and filter information online and so they are at the foundation of all Internet marketing work.

Once you know your keywords, you must put them in order of value for your business by asking “Which keyword represents the largest number of potential customers for my business?” or “Which is the keyword phrase my ideal customers are most likely to use when looking for my products and services?”

On-site SEO

In short, this step is aimed at making your website relevant for the best and most appropriate keywords out there.

Your topmost keyword phrase should be used as your domain name. It should be used as often as possible in your headings, page titles, descriptions and links. Your Internet marketer will make sure this keyword appears in all the right places.

But your secondary keyword phrases will tell you how to structure your site, each one of them becoming the topic of a page linked from your home page and linking back to it. Again, each page’s title, headings and various other elements must contain that page’s keyword phrase enough times for search engine crawlers to be convinced it is indeed the topic of that page.

Although this seems like straightforward work, it is complicated by the need to appeal to people and by the search engines’ increasing ability to detect unnatural content that is solely aimed at attracting . As a business website, what you are really after isn’t , it’s leads, sales and ultimately profit. If people find your site and read weird heaps of keywords, they won’t buy, so what’s the point in such ?

An experienced Internet marketer can weave keyword phrases into page content in just the right amount and make the text and images appealing to human beings who will take the desired action and make you, the site owner, successful and happy.

Off-site SEO

In short, this step is aimed at making your website even more relevant for your top keywords, but also popular.

Search engines keep track of references to your site from other places on the Internet – directories, articles, news feeds, social profiles and more. Those links imply that other people are telling people about your site because they have found it valuable and authoritative, so the more “inbound” links, the more valuable your site must be. This is how Google determines the famous Google Page Rank.

When searching for sites matching a keyword phrase, Google displays relevant sites in descending order of popularity, so the more links, the higher your site appears within search results. Get enough inbound links and you can be first!

Well, almost. See, links also have “link text”, which is very important in determining what your site is about. In fact, when you start building enough links to your site, that link text can become more important than your site’s contents. Here are two links:

  1. Click here
  2. Gal Baras – Internet marketing consultant

If you hover over link #1, your will see the words “What now?”. If you click it, you will be taken to Google’s home page. When a crawler finds this link, it will associate Google’s home page with the expressions “Click here” and “What now?”, neither of which are very useful for a search engine’s home page.

If you hover over link #2, however, you will see the words “Internet marketing consultant”. If you click it, you will be taken to my home page. Crawlers will then associate my website with two instances of “Internet marketing consultant” and with “Gal Baras”, both of which are very good for getting this site the kind of traffic I want.

Of course, it can be difficult to insert your ideal link text and link title into some paragraphs, but wording the text around the inbound link cleverly can yield a natural referral.

Did I hear anyone say, “No problem, I’ll just do some link exchanges”? Do you honestly believe Google hasn’t figured that out already? Getting a link is quite a bit easier than getting a valuable link, one that appears natural and can stand the tests of time and contact improvement of search engines.

Remember, search engines are doing their best to deliver the most similar results to what a human would, but of course, experienced Internet marketers already know this, which is why online competition is getting fiercer by the minute.

I hope this clarifies what SEO is. If you still have any questions about it, please post them below and I’ll be happy to answer them to the best of my ability (kindly refrain from self-promotion and stick to things other may want to know too).

Happy ,
Gal

Get Your Site Listed

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Google Search How long does it take to get your site listed?

One of my clients recently found out that, with my help, it can take as little as 6 hours!

I met this young man at a networking function and he told me his website had been launched 4 months before, yet there was no trace of it in Google Search results. In fact, if anyone typed the full site URL into the Google Search box, Google would tell them it didn’t know about the site.

When you try to offer your products or services to people and you tell them you have a website, one of the first things they do to check you out is search for your website. This man had given business cards, sent out emails and used various other ways to let people know about his site and he was embarrassed it was not indexed by Google.

“Leave it to me”, I said to him, “I’m going to do some thing real quick and your site should get picked up by the crawlers a lot faster than it would otherwise”.

I didn’t want to commit to a timeframe, because nobody controls ol’ Googlebot, but I had a good feeling about it.

So I went back home and spent about an hour creating some inbound links to my client’s website. No big deal, right? But by putting those links in places frequented by Googlebot, including sites, some magic soon took place.

After 24 hours, I searched for my client’s site and saw 6 results listed. “Not bad”, I thought, “Not bad at all”.

When I rang him to let him know, he said, “Are you kidding? I got up and checked first thing in the morning and already saw 3 results then. This is such a relief, man! Thanks”.

But actually, one of these search results had been labeled “18 hours ago”, which means it was picked up only about 6 hours after I did my work.

At the time of posting, there are 23 search results for my client’s site, including some PDFs.

Is you site not getting listed? Contact me

2 More Clients, Anyone?

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How would you like just 2 more client per month? How about just 2 more clients per week? Per day? Per hour? How would that affect your bottom line? Your life?

Too many business owners, when they consider taking their business online, can only think about costs and risks. They ask for detailed quotes and specific explanations of how each piece of work will be done.

What they normally fail to see are the benefits.

But realizing the benefits of an is really easy and, once you know what’s in it for you, it’s also easy to justify any cost that will leave you enough of a margin.

So how can you tell what good will come out of your new website or campaign or paid ads?

The first thing you need to work out is how much money you make from an average client. This may seem like a simple question, but for most of the business owners I meet, it’s really hard, especially when their business is new.

Online shoppingBasically, you need to take all your business profits and divide them by the number of clients who have generated that profit for you. If you have more than one line of business or group of products/services, you will probably separate them online, so work out each one of them separately. This will also help you decide what is most likely to be profitable online, so you’ll do that first.

If your business is fairly young, use conservative estimates based on what’s going during the past year of a few months, because that’s the closest you’ve got to the future.

It’s important to take into account any additional value brought to you by your clients, such as joint ventures, referrals, barters, etc, because those are worth money too, although they may be indirect. However, if you want to stay conservative, you can just count cash.

Now you know your client lifetime value.

With this figure, most businesses can quickly see that getting just 2 clients – not per hour, not per day, not per week and not per month, just 2 clients – pays for a lot of Internet marketing. The implication of this is huge:

By taking your business online and getting just a small number of new clients that would otherwise not find you, your Internet-based business pays for itself over and over again!

Of course, every business is different, which is why I encourage you to do the math for your own business and see for yourself, but even if it takes 5 clients to pay for your Internet marketing and even if it takes 2 months to get them, you are going to earn back all your investment in 2 months and then again and again and again every 2 months afterward.

What would this do to your life? Could you take some time off? Could you relax? Could you take the family out to a nice place? Could you fix the deck or upgrade your car?

Come on, what are you waiting for? Contact me

Site Speed

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As inventive as ever, Google is now launching a new version of its crawling and indexing engine. They’ve even given it a name: Google Caffeine.

To the person searching for something, Google Caffeine will seem like plain old Google – the search page looks the same, the results look the same – so what’s so different and why should anyone care?

Well, “under the hood”, Google has aimed primarily to improve two things: speed and accuracy. Let’s take a look at each of them.

Speed

Google has made site indexing a lot faster and improved the speed of listing search results in the new version. Faster indexing allows Google to keep up with the growth of the Internet, especially with social sites, like Twitter and Facebook.

Website owners are now expected to help Google index things faster by implementing some coding guidelines that will improve site performance. Faster sites will be deemed better and show up higher in search results. Google has even made special programs available for analyzing site performance and reducing the loading time of websites.

The downside is that non-technical folks who maintain their own sites are now at a great disadvantage compared to professional site builders who keep up with technology. This is yet another reason to let professionals build your website.

Accuracy

Google Caffeine seems to rely more heavily on keywords than the old version. This is not surprising, because it probably helps speed up pre-processing of crawled pages and reduces the size of the Google search index.

This means that do-it-yourself site builders will again fall behind Search Engine Optimization () professionals, who have the know-how to put keywords in all the right places.

Bottom line

Now, more than ever, a professional Internet marketing consultant can help clients rank well on Google Search and get business online. Small businesses that try to go solo and save will end up getting less and less, while those who focus on their own craft and outsource their Internet marketing will benefit.

Portfolio

Here are some sites I have created and/or promoted online, each with its own story. I built them with Internet marketing in mind. As you will see, the results are impressive and have made significant impact on the respective businesses.

Plastic2go – plastic pallets, crates and bulk containers

Plastic2go – plastic pallets, crates and bulk containers Within 6 months of launching this website, inquiries for plastic pallets, crates and bulk containers were strong and steady. While I initially used paid ads to attract targeted , I gradually cut back until I turned off the AdWords campaign completely. Plastic2go – plastic pallets, crates and bulk containers now receives only free search traffic and site referrals, being #1 or #2 in Google Search for every one of its keyword phrases. Even the images from Plastic2go feature highly on Google Image Search for the relevant searches, which means more free traffic.

Despite being a country-specific website, Plastic2go receives inquiries from outside Australia, simply due to its outstanding search performance.

Be Happy in LIFE – life coaching

Be Happy in LIFE - life coachingThis website has been redone 3 times based on its results and feedback from visitors who became clients. The Internet marketing includes a combination of paid ads, and blog referrals. As of the time of writing, it is one of the highest ranking websites for the very competitive phrases “life coach” and “life coaching” on Google Search against well-funded coaching schools.

Over the past 2 years, Be Happy in LIFE – life coaching has been pulling in a regular stream of life coaching, parenting classes, relationship coaching and kids assessment inquiries, building a list of prospects and sustaining this small coaching practice.

Family Matters – parenting blog

Family Matters – parenting blogThis website has received a steadily increasing flow of visitors who come to read the daily parenting posts, subscribe and participate in discussions. Based on WordPress, Family Matters makes posting content easy, allowing for more than one author to contribute and for many people to post comments every day.

This Internet marketing of this blog involves only my time and skill, yet gets thousands of visits per month, advertising requests and loads of syndication opportunities and drives traffic to other related websites. It receives its traffic from search engines, social networks and other websites and continues to do better all the time.

Family Matters – parenting blog appears on the first page of Google Search for the term “family matters” against the government and a movie and in the first position for searches like “positive thoughts for kids”, “positive thoughts for children” and “positive parenting quotes”.

As you can see, these sites are doing extremely well for their owners and operating on a very small budget. The ways in which I promote each website depends on the nature and target market of the site itself, but they are all very well optimized to be found easily, read and navigated easily and perform well for their business.

Would you like similar results for your own business?

handshake Get business online Today

What you don’t know, doesn’t hurt

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You may have heard this saying from people already

What you don’t know, doesn’t hurt you

Well, I’m here to tell you this saying is really wrong when it comes to getting business online.

You see, the Internet is a very BIG place and it keeps cHanGIng all the time, faster than anyone can keep up with, let alone anyone who happens to be busy making products, servicing clients or doing the accounting.

On the Internet, what you don’t know can hurt you. A lot!

For example, say you want to develop a website and all you know is Microsoft Word. You create a simple site that looks good to you and you publish it online. No niche research, no usability design, no speed optimization, no and no dynamic content. Just an online brochure, really. You think, “It cost me nothing and it looks nice. Now, all I have to do is wait”.

WRONG! Your website takes months to be picked up by search engines and sits at the bottom of page 523, never to be seen by anyone, let alone buyers.

What you need is someone who can help you put business sense into your website from Day 1.

But let’s say you got some help and your website looks professional and even includes a shopping cart for your products, but you have not done your Internet marketing research, so your keywords are off and your structure is sub-optimal. You cleverly figure out that AdWords can get you quickly and create a campaign.

BAD MOVE! Your ads will receive low quality scores by AdWords, which means they will appear lower than they should and you’ll be paying a lot more than you should. If that’s not enough, you’ll get the wrong type of visitors, the kind that doesn’t buy.

What you need is someone who can help you put business sense into your website from Day 1.

But let’s say you hire someone to put links all over the Internet back to your site. Surely, this will help bring you site up in searches and get you more business, no?

Nope. It will certainly improve your position, but working outside your site can only improve so much. Incorrect structure and content will still result in a low conversion rate and require a lot more links to make any noticeable difference to your business.

What you need is someone who can help you put business sense into your website from Day 1.

I could go on for a while, but the gist of it is

On the Internet, what you don’t know can hurt you. A lot!

If you don’t do this stuff (Internet marketing, that is) all the time and stay on top of things, you will pay more and get less than you should and make a lot less profit. Why waste time and money and why frustrate yourself? Find an Internet marketer you can trust (I know this great guy) and hire him to get you business quickly and easily from the ground up.

You new Internet business is not far away.

Talk to you soon,
Gal