Vladimir Kuzin.com » Search Engine Optimization

Top 10 Questions about SEO

Vladimir — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 17:34:07 +0000

The following is a list of the top question we typically receive from our customers, potential customers and interested parties.
#1Q. How long will it take to get my site listed in Google’s natural or “Organic” listings?
A. This depends on many factors. Be aware that getting “listed” and getting good positioning in the search engine results pages (SERP) are two entirely different things. Getting listed is fairly easy but the most important issue is getting good organic positioning so we will discuss this here.
In short, it could take anywhere from one month to up to several years to achieve favorable positioning in Google.
Some determining factors on achieving good position are:

1. Web Site Optimization – Is you site optimized correctly for your relevant keyword phrases?
2. Inbound Links – Do you have many relevant, high PR (PageRank) links that point to your site? This is as important as the optimization itself!
3. Search Engine Friendly Site – Does your site have any barriers that would block search engine spiders?
4. How long has your site been online? The newer the site, the longer it will take to achieve good positioning due to all the factors listed here.
5. New sites generally have a zero or very low Page Rank. Established sites that rank at the top generally have a higher page rank. PageRank is gained by building inbound links from authoritative and credible sites.
Download the Google Toolbar to check your PR. http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769
6. How much competition do you have? New sites in highly competitive categories have an uphill battle. There are no quick solutions so settle in for the long haul. With perseverance, proper execution, and lots of hard work, good results can be achieved.
7. Use “White Hat” or Ethical SEO techniques.
8. Have you submitted press releases for Web/News syndication, submitted to social networking sites, submitted video? All of these are important aspects of modern SEO.
9. Are you keeping your content fresh by adding new content, articles, blogs on a regular basis? Search Engines love fresh, original content.
10. Have you built an XML Sitemap and submitted to Google correctly?

These are only some factors that will effect how fast your site will get good positioning in Google.
Beware: There are many unscrupulous SEO companies out there that will tell you they can get you front page positioning in two weeks. That should raise a big red flag with you. See our SEO FAQ for how to spot a phony SEO firm.
#2Q. Should I participate in the PPC (pay per click) or Sponsor links at Google, Yahoo and MSN or focus strictly on organic optimization?
A. Organic optimization alone is not a true “Marketing Plan”. A true online marketing plan includes sponsor link setup and management.
There may be a time when you can take your Sponsor links offline but if your positioning drops in the organic listings due to algorithmic changes, you still have a backup plan that can be quickly enabled to drive traffic to your site.
Many of our customers that have a #1 listing in Google still keep their sponsor links enabled.
#3Q. How much will it cost to participate in the Sponsor link programs (pay per click)?
A. Cost to participate in Sponsor link AKA Pay Per Click plans such as Yahoo Sponsor Search and Google Ad Words, which provide sponsor results in many search engines and directories, is based on several factors.
We must determine the number of phrases you wish to promote, the cost per click of the particular keywords you wish to promote, the position you wish to maintain, the competition for the phrase and the frequency of the clicks. Therefore, it’s virtually impossible to determine the exact budget amount you will need initially. However, we can we can work within just about any budget you set.
Note: AWSP does not charge any Agency Fees for managing your PPC/Sponsor link accounts! Many SEO agencies charge a 15-20% agency fee for all your PPC activity. If your budget is $10,000 a month, the SEO agency could charge you 2000.00 just in fees on top of the other marketing fees.
AWSP charges a flat monthly fee for managing your account.
#4Q. Google is the only search engine my customers use. Why should I submit to the other search engines?
A. While Google is currently the #1 search engine right now, you cannot discount the traffic you will receive from Yahoo, Bing and Ask. These are still very viable search engines that are used by millions of loyal followers. Current Stats break down something like this:
(Rough Estimates)
Google: 60%
Yahoo: 30%
Bing:       7%
Ask:        3%
Consider this, Yahoo is probably the Webs top portal and Bing is owned by the top OS software developer (Microsoft) and searching with IE using the Address bar defaults to the Bing engine.
Therefore, If you are not in these search engines you are losing market share.
We have always been surprised to see the traffic from Yahoo and Bing when running log file analysis on multiple sites. Another way to look at it is “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket”.
#5Q.   Do I really need to submit to all the directories you mention?
A.   Absolutely. Directory inclusion is just as important as the site optimization itself. Directory inclusion builds inbound links that increase your credibility with Google. Without this credibility or Page Rank your site will not have a chance to gain position in Google’s competitive environment.
Some of the directories we link to also include “Deep links” which link to your sites internal pages.
#6Q. Will you optimize our site without including us in the directories or doing any link building?
A. No. There would be no point. Link building is absolutely essential to optimization success.
#7Q. Why should I pay for an organic optimization plan once I gain good positioning?
A. Good organic placement is a moving target. It is not like a static “Yellow Page Ad” that never changes. Organic positioning is never guaranteed and always subject to change.
Once you stop worrying about your great organic placement, you competitor hasn’t and is still working to overtake you. We monitor organic placement of our customers and continually make recommendations that will help them maintain good organic positioning for their phrases. We also maintain the inbound links, making sure they are renewed and not dropped.   In addition we perform additional directory inclusion, link building, code tweaking, copy writing and ongoing consulting. Optimization is not a “submit and forget” proposition. It’s an ongoing process to stay on top.
#8Q. Can you optimize my page for my top 20 keywords?
A. No. A single page cannot be optimized correctly for that many keyword phrases. The general rule of thumb is one keyword phrase per page and the maximum of two. We generally optimize sub pages for your other relative keyword phrases. If a page does not exist that’s relevant to the phrase, we may create a new page specifically for those phrases.
#9Q. I know inbound links are important so I hired a linkage company to build additional links for my site. However, I have not noticed any results and my Page Rank has dropped. What Happened?

A. Be very careful when hiring linkage companies. Many will list your site in linkage schemes that will include “Bad Neighborhoods”, Link Farms or just pages that offer no real benefit. Make sure your know up front what where you will be listed. Also beware of low costs services. These are generally automated processes and will not produce any results and could have a negative impact on your sites placement in the search engines.
AWSP thoroughly investigates all the directories that we recommend and submit to. We are also constantly on the lookout for new directories and sites to submit your website to that will help with backlinks, relevancy and PageRank.
#10Q. I receive a lot of email requests for reciprocal linking. Should I participate it this?A. Generally speaking, no. 99% of all these requests are SPAM. Furthermore, the pages that will actually link to your site are typically buried deep within the linking site and offer no benefit to you.
Another tactic that link spammers use is to remove your link at some point in time leaving them with only inbound links which is the most favorable.
The exception to the rule is exchanging links with an industry relative site that is legitimate. Do they have a phone number? You may actually want to call them and discuss the exchange and negotiate for position.
Link exchanges should also be equal. If their link is one click off of the front page, yours should be too, not buried 5 pages deep in a site directory.

Integrating MS Word Content Correctly

Vladimir — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 16:42:23 +0000

Integrating content is a very simple thing to do with Sitebuilder. However, there are incorrect ways to do this that can cause problems. I will briefly cover this issue.

The most common problem is when customer’s copy and paste text/written copy from Microsoft Word into the sitebuilder WYSIWYG text field. While this seems innocuous, it actually can cause lots of issues.

Common issues:

Browser incompatibility
Different font sizes and spacing
Blown out table cells
Entire site spacing issues
Large WYSIWYG toolbar images
Incorrect HTML
Search engine unfriendly code
Heavy page to download. (Extra code increases file size and increases load times)

This occurs because when you copy from MS Word, you are not just copying the text on your document, you are also copying the “invisible” markup code that is behind the scene that controls the look and feel of the Word document. MS Word markup code is not compatible with HTML and a combination of the two will cause multiple site errors. Your browser cannot understand the Word markup.

Example:
Here is an example of some Word markup pasted into a sitebuilder site.

In Sitebuilder the text looks like this: Welcome to My Site

However, if you look at the source, it looks like this.

Word Markup:Normal0falsefalsefalseEN-USX-NONEX-NONEMicrosoftInternetExplorer4
welcome to my site

This may look familiar to anyone who worked with “Reveal” codes in the old Word Perfect program. Proper HTML would look like this:

Welcome to My Site

All formatting should be done using the Sitebuilder WYSIWYG tool. This will ensure proper HTML formatting.

Solving this problem is very easy. Just copy from MS Word and paste into Notepad or any text editor. This will strip away the Word markup and leave you with clean text! Next, copy from notepad and paste into Sitebuilder. Apply any formatting you need such as Bold, color, etc. and your done.

Another way to add clean text to your page is to type your copy directly into the text area in the Sitebuilder interface.

Creating SEO Friendly Text Links in your Content

Vladimir — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 15:33:44 +0000

By default, Sitebuilder creates JavaScript links when you hyperlink your Text from within the WYSIWYG editor. The reason for this is so you do not have to reformat your links when the site goes from trial to a live domain name mapping.

However, the JavaScript link is not the most search engine friendly linking method. I will outline ways to create search engine friendly text links in Sitebuilder.

If you are familiar with HTML, this will make the process easier.
One way to deal with this is to manually reformat the links to actual relative links. You can do this by editing the link in the WYSIWYG editor in Source view.

There are two ways to do this in the link text.
You will need to unlink the text first. (remove JavaScript link)
1) Edit source code and make links relative. if you were linking to the contact us page your code would look something like this example.
Please feel free to Contact us.
(I feel like this is the easiest way.)

2) Insert links in the WYSIWYG editor by using insert/edit link. Select link to “Website”. Paste in only the page name or path after your domain name forward slash “/”
Examples.
Correct: contact-us
Incorrect: www.yourdomain.com/contact-us
Next, look at the source and remove the http// and leave the code that would look like this.

Adding a Robots Text File

Vladimir — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 15:26:35 +0000

What is a Robots Text File?

A robots text file instructs the web bots/crawlers on exactly what to index and what not to index. For instance if you do not want certain content indexed, you can disallow access to the spiders. This will keep that content of the specified page/ directory out of the search engines results pages.
You should have the correctly formatted Robots Text file uploaded to your HTML directory.

Here is an example:

User-Agent: *
Sitemap: http://www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml
Disallow: /page-I-want-to-block.html
Disallow: /directory-I-want-to-block

This example can be saved to a text file using notepad and edited an necessary. It should be saved as robots.txt and uploaded to your HTML directory using file manager or FTP.
You can also use Google Webmaster Tools to generate and test your robots.txt file. Log on and go to Site Configuration, Crawler Access, Test or Generate.

Here’s what the commands mean.

User-Agent: is the bot/crawler. ( they all have names) i.e Googlebot, Yahoo is Slurp, Bing is MSNBot, * means all bots/crawlers are allowed.
Sitemap: Directs the bot to your XML sitemap
Disallow: Blocks bots from accessing pages and directories. You can also block particular bots that follow the correct protocol.

For more information on the Robots Text file please see http://www.robotstxt.org/

Is Your Site Search Engine Friendly?

Vladimir — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 15:05:47 +0000

The developers have worked very hard to make your Sitebuilder Web site search engine friendly, however, there are things that you can do to thwart all of those efforts.

These are the top ways to make your Site search engine Unfriendly.

One of the worst things you can do is setup an intro screen or a “splash” page before you get to your main content. Many times this is Flash that has no readable content for the search engines to pickup. Your home page is the most relevant page to the search engines, do not waste it on a splash page. If that’s not enough reason, consider this. People want their content fast. Believe me, no one want to sit through an intro page.
Using I-Frames. Do not place content in I-Frames. The search engines do not recognize this as on page content and will not index it.
Using images instead of written text on your pages. Search engines cannot index text that is in an image. Make sure you do not overuse images where you could use written text that the search engine can index.
Slow page load times. Google is starting to look at page load times. Heavy pages may be penalized. Therefore, you need to keep the page loading fast as possible. If you need to put images on the page make sure they are optimized locally (on your local machine before uploading).
A JPG should always be compressed. For instance, using Photoshop or Photoshop Elements a 1.3 meg photo can be compresses down to 60k without losing definition. The quality setting should be set at 60 when compressing JPG images. All good image editing software will have a similar feature. A good image editing program is a must!

How To Setup an XML Sitemap in Google

Vladimir — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 14:36:36 +0000

Setting up an XML sitemap is one of the first things you should do when starting your SEO effort. The purpose of the XML Sitemap is to keep the search engine up to date on all of your published pages by letting the spiders know they exist so they can capture that data and writing if back to their database.
The Sitebuilder automatically updates the XML sitemap each time a new page is created and added to the menu.
Note: Non-menu pages are not added.

Here’s the process. Working in multiple windows is the most efficient way to accomplish this.

Logon and go to Edit Site, Settings, Search Engines
Click the Generate Sitemap Icon and then Generate new Sitemap file.
Your new sitemap will be created.
Next, you need to setup accounts in the top search engines so you can authenticate and submit your Sitemap.

This process is specific to Google. See the other tutorials for Yahoo, Bing and Ask:

Create an account at Google if you don’t already have one.
Logon to Webmaster Tools at www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
Click the Add a Site Button and enter your URL, i.e www.yoursitename.com Click the Continue button.
Select the Meta Tag verification method. Copy the code in the dialog box and paste it in a text editor such a notepad or just keep it in the clipboard.
Go to Edit, Settings, Advanced HTML and paste the Google authentication code in the Advanced HTML setup field. This will place the code in the section of your site. Code will look something like this
Save your settings.
Go back to the Webmaster tools window and select “Verify”. If you did this correctly, you site should now be verified with Google.
Now that your site is verified, you need to add your XML Sitemap to your webmaster interface.
In the Webmaster Tools dashboard, go to Site Configuration, Sitemaps and select the Submit a Sitemap button. A text field will appear. This is where you need to enter your Sitemap location. You just need to enter the Sitemap extension. It should be “sitemap_index.xml” (without quotes). Click Submit.
Congratulations, you have completed the sitemap submission process with Google.