SEO Blog Post "New Requirements for High Search Engine Rankings"

These New Requirements Are: 

Good Content- Post penguin update is good content. The penguin update fights SPAM constantly. The key to ranking high on a search engine is good content. The site also needs to show signs of growth.

Image source: Google images

Social Proof- An important role in rankings of a site. The content should be engaging and should be shared across all social media sites.

Author Rank- This carries heavy weight in ranking algorithms for a site. The author rank shows if a person is an authority on a certain subject. The sites where there is authority get ranked higher than sites with similar content that do not have authority.

Internal Links- Link Spam is not an effective way to boost rankings anymore. Over optimization of keywords and meta-descriptions aren't good for rankings either. Internal links need to point to other pages equally rich in content.

HTTPS As a New Ranking Factor- This is the newest ranking signal in Google's algorithm. There is an increased focus on security. This implemented secure searches.

SEO Blog Post "Google Panda"

Google Panda

Google Panda is a series of incremental changes to the algorithm used by Google to sort search result rankings.

It was first released in February 2011. An update was designed to give sites that were original and had high quality priority over sites that had low quality or duplicate content.

Increased rankings of sites that had dynamic and high quality content such as news sites and social media sites.

Thousands of sites were affected by this update.

What is Google Panda?

It's basically a design phase of the algorithm Google uses to rank sites. Google hired hundreds of humans to rate websites with specific markers in mind: the loading speed of the site, design and layout, and quality of the content.

These humans who tested the sites also had to say if they would visit the site again or not.

These human data results were then gathered and used to create the algorithm for Panda.

Image source: Google images

How does Google Panda Work? 

It uses an algorithm called PageRank which uses data from analyzing back links to rank sites. Pages can be penalized for having similar content. In order to get rid of similar content, you have to delete duplicate content or rewrite it.
Content is important. You have to make sure it's relevant and up to date.

SEO Blog Post "Social Media Optimization"

Social Media
Social Media is a huge part of online marketing. To optimize the Facebook news feed, you have to have a strong fan base. Networking is what helps social media sites grow. Creating a page with relevant content that engages users and gives them a place to make comments is important to the success of the page.

Reaching people with the content will help gain a following and more people will participate in the conversation threads. The default settings will have the top news feed over the most recent news feed.

Image source: Google images

Goal of Social Media 
The goal is to have your page in the top news feed for as long as you can. This will happen when users keep "liking" your page and making comments on it.

The content has to encourage the user to take action. This will help the page be ranked higher on the Facebook news feed.

Image source: Google images

Formula for Social Media
There is a formula to keep users engaged with their favorite pages on social media. This formula consists of the affinity score, the weight of the page, and the time decay.

Affinity Score- records how often the user comments, likes, or visits the page.

Weight- taking into consideratinn the number of actions taken on a particular post on social media.

Time Decay- how long a post has been on the Facebook page. Activity has to constantly be happening to make the most of the content.

SEO Blog Post "The Need for Site Links in Your Website"

Site Links

You can use site links to navigate a website easily. You can use single column or double column site links. Two column site links appear when a result is more authoritative and one column sitelinks appear when a result is more relevant for a certain search.

Image source: Google images

Things you can do to get better site links: 

1) Create a website that is easy to navigate.
2) Page titles should make sense for the content.
3) You should use relevant and interesting anchor text.
4) Don't repeat points.
5) Make use of headers.

Turning site links off

Google Webmaster tools can  block them for about 90 days. You won't have site links on your website if you only unblock three of them.

Bread crumbs

These are site hierarchies which can be used in place of URL's to show where in the site a particular result fits. There are many different levels of bread crumb hierarchy.

Ad Site Links 

These are normally used to get more visitors to your website. The ad site links help to navigate the site. Text in the site links should be brief and clear. These ad site links are normally managed at campaign level.

SEO Blog Post "How to Achieve High Rankings on Local Search Engines"

Globalization is important to businesses, but companies prefer to give business to local merchants. If a business doesn't obtain high rankings on local search engines, they might lose a business opportunity. Clients may not use the business if they can't find them on local search engines.

Image source: Google images

Ways to Achieve High Rankings on Local Search Engines: 

1) Include your client's websites to local search engines. 

• It's important that your site is included in relevant local search engines. 
• Some directories you should consider using to achieve a higher ranking: Google Local Business Center, Yahoo! Local Merchant, and Ask Business Search.

2) Submit your client's website listings to popular directories and internet Yellow Pages. 

• Some directories to consider: yelp.com, citysquares.com, mojopages.com, insiderpages.com 

3) Set your geographic location in Google's Webmaster Tools. 

• Build Google friendly sites. 
• Use Google's Webmaster Tools to see how clients are performing in their search results. 
• See how Google crawls and indexes your client's site. 

4) Add contact information to your site. 

• Add a physical address and phone number within an Address Tag on the homepage or some other contact page. 
• This will give increased credibility to your site. 
• Search engines will rank your site higher. 

SEO Post "Local Search Marketing and On Page Optimization Factors"

Local Search Marketing 
Local search marketing is obtaining local information from search engines. This type of marketing is marketing in a geographic area.

When using keywords, you need to keep in mind specific local keywords to help to get the search results you want. You can use zip codes, city names, county names, state names, and street names plus the keywords you are searching for. This will give you local search results.

Image source: Google images

On Page Optimization Factors
Include local phone numbers and physical address across all pages. Also, include a toll free number with the local number. This will help search engines identify the area of the business or company.
On the website, it is recommended to have location/directions page with a map from Yahoo or Google maps.

Image source: Google images

SEO "Blog Optimization"

Image source: Google images 

Blogs contain information about many different topics. They contain different posts that all connect in some way. Blogs can be a way of getting information in a different context. Blogs can be more formal or more like a journal entry. They can be interactive and full of content to draw the reader in. In order to gain more visitors to view your blog, blog optimization will help to rank the blog higher in search engine results. This is important if you want more blog views and more traffic to your website.

Blog Optimization Can Be Done in a Variety of Ways: 

• Simple Content- Keep the content simple and to the point. 
• Search Engine Submission- A blog's URL has to be submitted to search engines for indexing. 
• Keywords- Use specific keywords that relate to the blog and what people are looking for. 
• Optimize the Blog Template- Check that the post title appears in the title tag. 
• Regular Updates- Help to index the website

Image source: Google images

SEO Blog Post "SEO Monitoring and Visitor Traffic Analysis"

SEO Monitoring and Visitor Traffic Analysis
Search engine marketing has an advantage of promotion when it comes to return on investments. A website that is optimized well will deliver thousands of targeted visitors to your website every month.

Visitor Traffic Analysis
Ranking the website in the top ten results on major search engines is one goal. Another goal is to get qualified traffic to your site. Once you get that traffic you can covert them into leads and finally sales.

Traffic analysis is the evaluation of referrals from search engines based on conversion of traffic for keyword choices. The data is found in logs.

Image source: Google images

Visitor traffic analysis can be done on the following parameters:
1) Traffic on keywords- Selecting specific keywords that attract the most visitors is important.
2) Keywords and landing page- Use the keywords to get to landing pages with a lot of content.
3) Whether the call to action was followed for conversion- See if visitors are following calls to action or why they aren't.
4) Qualified traffic- Use more specific keywords to get the targeted traffic to your site.
5) Converted traffic- Convert traffic into sales.

SEO Post "Pay Per Click Campaigns"

Pay Per Click Campaigns 

Pay Per Click Campaigns are advertising campaigns that run on search engines results pages. It's a type of search engine advertising where payment is based on the number of times the ad is clicked on from the results list. You bid the amount of money that you are willing to pay for each click. The more money you are willing to pay, the higher the ad goes in the search results list. You can choose the keywords you want your ad to come up in the search results for. There are a lot of different search engines that run these pay per click campaigns, but the major search engines are: Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Google and Yahoo even have their own programs to create the ads.

Image source: Google images

Things You Have to Consider When Setting Up a Pay Per Click Campaign: 

1) Keyword Selection- You should
select persuasive and specific keywords that relate to your product or service and that help you stand out from the competition.

2) Bidding Strategies- The higher the bid, the higher the position the ad will be in the search results list. You should constantly monitor and test the campaign. Knowing your target market is also important, because you can use this in the strategy for the timing and the placement of your ad.

3) Advertising Text- You should have a couple different versions of your ad on different search engines to see which ad works best. There should be a title which is keyword rich and ad text which is informative.

4) Develop Proper Landing Pages- The Pay Per Click Campaign is linked with the website of a product or service that the campaign is advertising. When the targeted customers click on the ad, it will take them to the landing page and will ask them to take action and make a purchase.

5) Tracking- The success of the Pay Per Click Campaign depends on optimization. Google and Yahoo have free tracking tools that you can use.

SEO Blog Post "Dynamic Page Optimization"

Dynamic Page Optimization

Dynamic page optimization is a template that displays specific information in response to queries. the database is connected to the website and the response is generated through the connected database. Webmaster can easily update these websites, because they are connected to a database. There is a problem with dynamic sites though when content rich sites fail to rank higher in search engines.

Image source: Google images

Here are a few methods you can use to optimize dynamic pages: 

1) Use of software- various types of software are available that will get rid of the "?" in the query and replace it with a "/" which will help with indexing the dynamic content.

2) Use of CGI/Perl scripts- This is one of the easiest ways for a search engine to index dynamic pages.

3) Re-configuring your web servers- Apache server enables you to turn URLs containing query strings into URLs that search engines can index. ColdFusion- you need to reconfigure ColdFusion on your server so the "?" in a query string is replaced with a "/" and pass the value to the URL.

4) Creation of a Static Page linked to an array of dynamic pages- An effective approach to optimize the static page for search rankings.

Image source: Google images

SEO Blog Post "Keywords and Meta Descriptions are Important in Search Engine Optimization"

Keywords and Meta Descriptions Are Important In Search Engine Optimization 

Keywords are descriptive words that internet users can search for to get the content that they want. There are different tools you can use to generate new keywords such as Wordtracker, Yahoo, and Google suggest. These tools help choose relevant keywords that are similar to the ones you are searching for.

                                                  Image source: Google images
Meta descriptions are part of the HTML code that you can put a short search description using your keywords. It's a summary of what is on your website, so that searchers can decide if they want to click on your page. Meta descriptions can be found on the search results page underneath the Website title.

Both of these are important in search engine optimization.

  Image source: Google images

SEO Blog Post "Search Engines and Directories"

Search Engines 
I learned that search engines are programs where people can type keywords, and a list of documents will come back with that keyword in them. More than 80% of website visitors use search engines. Search engines give a list of the best content that is relevant to the keywords you are looking for. Search engines help rank pages in order of relevance.

The most popular search engines are: 

• Google
• Yahoo!
• Bing
• Ask
• AOL

Directories 
Directories are similar to search engines. They give you a list of results, but these results are organized by human editors. Directories come up with keywords by using the site name, domain, and a description of the site. They are usually groups of pages of related content.                    
                                                                                                                                                                             
Two ways that search engines rank pages: 
1) Crawler based search engines- scans and indexes pages
2) Human powered directories- manual listing done by humans