SEO Tips by Steve

Optimizing the meta tags of the pages on your website has been common practice since the dawn of SEO. However, there is much debate over the importance of such tags and some question their existence altogether. So, do meta tags work? The answer is sometimes. Search engines learned very quickly that people abused and manipulated the meta tags on their web pages to influence rankings in their favor, or sometimes to try to rank highly for totally irrelevant terms. We're talking about meta description and meta keyword tags. So now if you don't have perfect meta tags in the pages on your website than you're better off removing them altogether... and here is why:

• Search engines know people manipulate meta tags so they look for clues to your intentions. If they think you repeat keywords too many times (keyword density too high), or there are terms in your meta keywords tag that do not appear on the page than they will penalize that page and drop its rankings.

To avoid being penalized by the search engines try following the guidelines below when creating the meta tags for all of your web pages:

• meta description tag should be approximately 20 words long (this is roughly how many words appear in the descriptions on search results) - make sure your 20 word description makes sense if someone is reading it.
• repeat the primary keyword for a specific page two times in the meta description tag.
• the meta keywords tag should only include words and phrases that are visible on the page. when in doubt leave a keyword out. nothing bad will happen if you forget to include a relevant word, but if you add any that are questionable chances are your page will be penalized.

The above guidelines are for those who value meta tags and treat them as a necessity to any SEO campaign. I however believe that you no longer need meta tags on your web pages, and that you can actually achieve higher rankings by leaving them out.

I've tested this theory with multiple websites and have seen the same results from all of them. All that happens when you leave out meta tags is the search engines look at the on-page content and pull excerpts of text pertaining to the search phrase. And by leaving out the tags the search engines know that you are not trying to manipulate your page in any way.

Final verdict: leave out the meta tags on your next project and instead spend extra time on the copy... making sure to include variations of keyword phrases in the visible text on every page. Chances are you'll achieve higher rankings using this method of optimization.

Submitting your website to web directories is the most important aspect of search engine optimization. Link popularity is the term used to reflect how many incoming links you have to your website. Reciprocal links were a popular method of building back links for a long time, but there has been studies recently that have shown that search engines are not weighing reciprocal links as much as they used to. One-way links have become the new standard for calculating link popularity. Or in other words, getting other websites to willingly link to yours and not linking back to them from your site. This can happen naturally by people reading your content and posting their ideas or reviews of it on their website, but this alone would take a long time. One of the ways you can take initiative to build back links to your website is to submit your site to web directories. Examples of web directories would be www.dmoz.org, directory.yahoo.com, www.joeant.com, www.bestoftheweb.com, etc. Most directories will physically review your site before adding it to their list of accepted websites. Some directories are free, some will accept a reciprocal link as payment, and some require you to pay a fee to be considered for inclusion. Only think about submitting your website to directories if your site is functional, well-designed, and not spammy or misleading in any way.

DMOZ.org and the Yahoo! Directory are the most heavily weighed directories in the eyes of the spiders. The DMOZ directory (or Google Directory) is free but it takes forever to get your site reviewed. It is still smart to submit your site anway, just be extra sure your site is at its best. The Yahoo! Directory is $299, which guarantees that your site will be reviewed within 7 days. This does not mean that your site will definitely be accepted, but as long as nothing is seriously wrong with your website you should get in. This $299 fee is recurring every year that you wish to be listed. Ok so honestly, you probably won’t receive a ton of traffic from being listed in these directories. The major benefit of being listed in human edited web directories is the inbound link juice. Spiders love directories because it tells them that an actual human reviewed each of the sites to check for quality and relevancy. Search engines don’t like to leave it up to the webmaster to tell them what a website is about because there is too much room for corruption. Too many people have used spammy or unethical techniques when building websites to try to manipulate search results. So basically, you want your site in as many directories as possible, and you should be willing to pay for the good ones. If the $299 vig for the Yahoo directory is too steep for you right now you should start your link building campaign by submitting your website to the Best of the Web directory. This is the internet’s oldest directory; around since 1994. Being listed in this directory can significantly boost your site’s link popularity, and in turn improve your rankings. Botw.org now charges $99.95 per year to be listed. Submitting your site to web directories is highly recommended as a first-step for website owners, or as a fantastic addition to an already existing link building campaign by experienced marketers.

Submitting your website to web directories yourself is a tedious and time consuming task. Services like Directory Maximizer are a perfect solution. Fill in some quick information about your site, craft a few optimized titles and descriptions, and pay a small fee to have Directory Maximizer manually submit your website to a choice of ~1200 web directories. It is advised to submit to about 100 directories at a time at the rate of 100 submissions every two weeks. Gaining hundreds of links in a short period of time will raise a red flag with the search engines and they will penalize your site for it. The current rate is $0.14 cents per submission, or $14 for 100. When submitting to a 100 directories it is normal to be accepted by 10% to 50% of them. Don’t be alarmed, it is still worth the money. It is important to take advantage of the fact that you can customize your anchor text for these directory links. All of these links will point to your homepage so be sure to enter titles that contain keywords you wish to target.

There are many ways to go about contacting potential SEO clients. Internet marketing services are in great demand, but the business has a bad rap from all of the people who promise high rankings and don't deliver. This causes website owners to be very skeptical when choosing a firm to manage their internet marketing and search engine optimization campaigns. When contacting sites to ask if they would be interested in your services you must be prepared to ask the proper questions and you must have reasonable answers to the prospects questions. There are a few general guidelines for gathering useful information from potential SEO clients. Some questions need to be answered before an analysis of their website can be completed so you know what your getting yourself into. If you can find a client who already has metrics tracking code installed (Google Analytics, Omniture, etc.) you are way ahead of the game. Being able to view and analyze a potential clients current rankings, number of visits, pageviews and other data will give you great insight when preparing a proposal. Some questions to ask:

• Introductions
• Is this your business?
• Can you explain exactly how your business works?
• Have you ever worked with a marketing or SEO company before? What was your experience?
  • We work on approval systems – you approve everything before it ever goes live
• Do you have a webmaster? Someone to take care of the HTML?
• Do you have someone managing pay per click? Negative keywords? Exact matches? Geo-targeting, etc..? Do they understand quality score?
• Landing pages – do they have any? Do they understand why they need them? For PPC
• What are 3 things someone would type in to find their business on the search engines?
• Name 3 competitors
• Explain the way spiders work, from coming to your site, how often, seeing the url, title and meta data, then h1’s, content, navigation etc… looking for a common theme
• Are you tracking visits? What are you using to track visits?
• Explain the way our system works
  • We will provide you with a project plan and proposal all in one shot…
    

Make sure to plug in custom questions about their site, CMS, programming, purpose of site, goals of site, etc.... into this template.

Opening an eBay store is the easiest way to get started. You pay a monthly subscription fee of $15.95 for a basic store front and a $0.05 to $0.10 insertion fee per product you wish to list. The “Insertion Fee” is for a listing duration of 30 days. Once an item sells you pay a “Final Value Fee” based on the selling price of the item. An eBay store is the lowest maintenance method of selling on eBay but should be used in conjunction with Auction Style or Fixed Priced listing methods for maximum product exposure. EBay store listings will also be displayed on eBay Express once a feedback score of 100 has been achieved. Owners of a store also have access to Omniture traffic reporting which is an extremely useful tool to analyze your listings.

eBay Auction Style or Fixed Priced Listings

Listing products in this format maximizes store exposure on the eBay marketplace. You have the option of allowing visitors to bid on your items or setting a “Buy It Now” price to allow immediate purchasing. Listings of this type can be posted for durations of 3, 5, 7 or 10 days. Once an item is purchased or the listing duration has passed the item must be re-listed on eBay. This method of selling requires a bit more maintenance to run efficiently but ensures maximum traffic to your listings. Fixed Price listings also show up on eBay Express once a feedback score of 100 has been achieved.

FEEDBACK

eBay allows buyers and sellers to leave feedback on each other that can be viewed by any eBay user. In a basic transaction the seller would leave a feedback for the buyer about how quickly they paid or how hassle-free the purchase was, and the buyer would leave feedback for the seller about communication, how quickly they shipped the item, quality of the product, description/image accuracy, etc. In addition to a one-line comment there are three feedback ratings eBay users can give to each other, Positive, Neutral, and Negative. EBay keeps track of feedback and gives each user a score based on how many positive and negative comments they have received. They also display the percentage of positive feedback comments a user has received. Practicing good business ethics and taking care of all customers promptly will raise your positive feedback rating and ultimately raise orders and revenue as more and more visitors feel comfortable buying from you.

PAYPAL

PayPal is thoroughly integrated into eBay and is the fastest, easiest, most secure way to accept payments online. Customers can pay you from an available balance in their PayPal account or from any major credit card or checking account. Funds deposited into your account can then be withdrawn to your own bank account. PayPal also provides a debit MasterCard that can be used anywhere and subtracts the funds from your account balance.

Optimizing your website for Google is a frustrating task that will make you pull your hair out. However, topping Google search results is very rewarding. If you’ve ever had a site that appeared on the first page of Google results for high search volume keywords you know the amount of traffic, and potential business, you could experience. Yahoo would give you decent traffic also but now with their Paid Inclusion it’s all about how much you’re willing to spend. MSN is just plain weird. I’ve managed sites that rank #45 on Google for a particular term and rank #2 on MSN for the same keyword, although it’s rarely the other way around.

I’m an account manager at an internet marketing company / search optimization firm. I’m not gonna lie it’s a decent job and it teaches you every aspect of promoting your website online. I’ve analyzed a wide variety of e-commerce and lead gen sites but I’m not going to tell you that I’m an expert and that you should listen to everything I have to say, I’m just offering information that I think could be useful to others. With that said, I think flat out that Wordpress is the best content management system (CMS) currently available to fast-track your website into search results, but I’ll talk more about this in later posts.

Google currently weighs heavily the amount of inbound links to your site and the text used in the link, or the “anchor text” of the link pointing to your website. I’m saying like they overly rely on this to determine the ranking of each site for a particular keyword phrase. Your site could be full-out optimized to the max for a keyword, but if there is another site that has more links pointing to it with that keyword in the anchor text the other site will rank higher. A perfect example of this (although extreme) is with Adobe Acrobat Reader. If you search Google for “click here” the first page that appears is that of Adobe. But that page doesn’t even have the words ‘click here’ anywhere on the page? That’s because thousands and thousands of websites do this: “Click here to download Adobe Acrobat Reader and view this PDF” - Google sees this as all of these sites ‘voting’ for the adobe page, and telling the web surfer that the page they’re going to will be about ‘click here’. Google pretty much does this so that it’s harder for people to manipulate search results by keyword stuffing their page. They look to see how many other sites voted for your site, and what they say your site is about when deciding on where you will rank in the search results. It’s a weird concept but it makes sense the more you get into it.

So how do you get more links? And how do you control the anchor text of these links? See my post specifically about link building.

I’ve also found that Google loves it when you submit an XML sitemap in Google Webmaster Tools. They like to see that you keep it updated as well (updated lastmod dates). There is a help system in webmaster tools that answers common questions about how to create and submit an XML sitemap. Wordpress has a simple plugin that automatically updates your sitemap as you add new content and Google seems to eat it up.

I also believe that Google slightly favors websites that have installed Google Analytics, but this is just my opinion. I do recommend that you install google analytics on your site, the information it tracks provides very useful insight into where to focus optimization energy. We use Omniture at work and it has tons of extra features but to my knowledge is extremely pricey and it’s really only meant for use by large organizations.

Ok so hopefully you have a general idea of the direction I’m heading in with how to optimize your website for Google. This is a general outline and I will focus on specific areas of search engine optimization in upcoming posts.