Carl’s SEO & Web Design Blog

Picking the right keyword phrases, it is said, is the Holy Grail of the success of your website. It is your keyword phrases that drive your search engine positioning for the people who search for and answers to their needs. Your keyword phrases also drive your content and links, as well as your viral marketing. If those keyword phrases are the Holy Grail, then content and links are the king and queen. Even with viral marketing, your aim is to drive people to your web site with those phrases. Once they get to your web site, it is within the web site that you use your content to take your customer from those keyword phrases all the way to the action step.

Here are some basic steps for making that content work:

1. As a general rule, in site design, your keyword phrases should be problem to solution. People search on the problem, not the solution. Spin your content from these keyword phrases.
2. Structure your web site so that your web site is in categories and even subcategories, and then use the proper keyword phrases for the entrance page of each category and subcategory. For example, if the web site is for a pet store, your primary categories might be dogs, cats, fish, birds, and so on. And then, for each category you support, have subcategories. Under each subcategories use separate pages with keyword phrases based problem to solution: choosing the right food, choosing the right toy, should I declaw my cat, and more.
3. You should have about 400-500 or more of words of text content on a page.
4. Images, video, Flash, and JavaScript do not drive the search engines. Use these to draw the user, but remember to keep plenty of text on the page. Use ALT tags and CSS wherever possible to drive search engines.
5. Know your audience. What is their social-economic profile? Use the vocabulary of the people you are trying to reach, target your message to the audience and their needs. Target for your audience, not the search engines.
6. Write to draw an emotional response from your audience.
7. Optimize each page for the search engines but keep your user as the primary target.
8. Use a variety of content to enhance the user experience: FAQs, tutorials, video, pointers to offline resources. Try to engage the user in an interactive process: polls, games, blog comments, and more.
9. Use stories, stories, stories. If you are selling widgets, have people give their testimonies (stories) on how the widget solved their problem.
10. Subdivide your page with headings and use related keyword phrases in the headings.
11. Remember to give that call to action. Often I see great content on a web site only to find they never ask me to do anything.

Often the best way to develop your content is to outsource it. Why not contact us – http://www.netadventures.biz/content.htm ?
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All rights reserved

Administrator content content, SEO

1. Not seeing the search from the user’s perspective.
2. Not planning an objective SEO strategy.
3. Not using the right keywords.
4. Not using link text correctly.
5. Ignoring accessibility issues for physically challenged.
6. Designing for a high number of links to the site instead of looking for link-in quality.
7. Building menu structures with JavaScript or Flash and not providing an alternative.
8. Not creating a site map.
9. Not creating strong content.
10. Not tracking site statistics.

Want more? See http://netadventures.biz/seomistakes.htm

Administrator Search engine optimization Search engine optimization

1. Identify the key words the user might use to search for you on the
   search engines. Build the page from these. What is the problem
   that the user has? How will he or she search to resolve
   that problem?
   
2. Choose a title for each of your pages that includes 1-2 of the primary
   keywords you are using.
   
3. Do not duplicate titles between pages.
   
4. Use Heading tags (H1, H2, H3) to define subtitles and use keywords in
   them.
   
5. Build links into your site from other high-quality sites.
   
6. Drive people to your site from your content. Google loves content-rich sites. Establish yourself as an authority.
   
7. Google really doesn’t like JavaScript menus or Flash for menus and doesn’t see those links. Use CSS or direct links instead.
   
8. Use lots and lots of social networking to sell your site. The pages of social networks are very dynamic, and Google loves indexing
   dynamic pages.
   
9. Keep your site clean of errors.
   
10. Make sure you have an ALT tag that uses keywords of the destination page for every image you are using.
    

Want more? See
http://www.netadventures.biz/tentips.htm

Administrator Search engine optimization, Web Design Search engine optimization

We’ve been VERY busy with web site work recently and haven’t had time to to the major redesign on this site that is needed. We also need to update the SEO book we have been selling. Our priority is our client sites. Our primary market is search engine optimization and content development. We also continue to develop small web sites that, with the optimization, give customers a lot of bang for a minimum of investement.

Recently we updated the blog software - going from WordPress version 1.5 or so to 2.7, then changed the template so it works harder. We’ve also started adding tags now.

We will be updating this blog much more frequently now, so we suggest you subscribe by RSS or bookmark the blog. We write for 3 blogs, so that keeps us busy as well. Some of the better stuff we will blog here and then pop a longer version to library on our netadventures.biz site. Comments are open here - register and talk to us.

We are also on both Linkedin and Facebook.

Administrator Web, Web Design, Webmaster Web site, Webmaster

Warning:
We encourage everyone to read this about a new security threat from CNN, of all places:
http://weblog.infoworld.com/gripeline/archives/2009/01/is_it_safe_to_w.html?source=NLC-GRIPE&cgd=2009-01-27

This refers to a plugin they offer, Octoshape Grid Adobe Flash Plug-in, which is more than a Flash Plug-in. I turns you computer into a part of a peer-to-peer network. Read the license agreement carefully. Not cool.

Administrator Google, Security, Technical Writing, Web Design

Vonage still has problems, we just no longer track them. The Vonage stock value has plummeted to somewhere south of $1 most of the time, which means we predict they will drop off the NYSE pretty soon. Then they become pretty much road kill. Here’s another interesting insight on the company. Some years ago it took them 3 months (see below) to move my existing number from Qwest to Vonage. During that time the phone number was dead - it went nowhere. That was a business line - you don’t to that to a business line, ever. I billed them for the lost business. About $20,000. They never paid me.

Now I want to move my number from Vonage to Verizon FIOS. Guess what? Vonage won’t let you do that. To move my phone to Verizon FIOS, Vonage blocks my number and won’t let me transfer it. If you want to leave Verizon FIOS, that’s not a problem. they will let me move my number out. Since Vonage won’t, that means my business will need a new phone number. It also means I will need to hold onto that Vonage line for a few months until all customers and friends are moved to the new number. I have to edit the phone number on hundreds of my web pages. I have to reprint business cards for three businesses. The transfer cost for this will be about $1000 probably. but it should be done because I think Vonage will disappear soon. Incidentally, Bush and Company (SEC and FTC) have done nothing to stop their practices.

If you are currently using Vonage and wish to change, I would suggest you put your Vonage account on a separate credit card. This is what I have done. Then when you turn Vonage off you also turn the credit card off. Some people have told me that Vonage keeps billing them after they turn Vonage off. Don’t expect to get that money back.

Now that I’m switching everything to Verizon FIOS, I have to change my phone number on my business cards and several hundred web pages. I doubt if Vonage will pay for that. The SEC under Bush should have fined them and stopped their practices. But then, the failed Administration did nothing. Neither did the Administrative’s SEC do anything with Madoff. I’m glad God will judge the Administrative leaders. Congress certainly didn’t.

Administrator Vonage, Web Design

It use to be that Google did a “Google Dance” once a month indexing everything and if you were lucky you held on to your position or climbed up some. The less fortunates saw their site head for the back forty or disappear entirely. One of the famous ones was the Florida Dance that happened before a recent Christmas, dropping a lot of commercial sites the never-never land and getting these online businesses upset going into the Christmas shopping season.

The Dances are gone now. Google uses a different strategy. There are billions of pages, and the indexing challenge for returning the good sites to a searcher was too big for “the old way”.

Google now tries to return only pages with good ranking that are relevant to the search. These are indexed every month or less - some indexed every day. The main page of this site was indexed less than a week ago. The more important your page, the more often Google will index it. Sites considered less relevant are banished to the supplemental index. These are only returned to the searcher if Google can’t find much matching the site. These pages are indexed much, much less frequently if at all. If one of these pages is returned in a search, it is marked supplemental. Here is an example from our business site:

Comments on: Not getting a good Google position?
http://www.netadventures.biz/wordpress/2005/07/19/not-getting-a-good-google-position/ Building Web Sites that work.. Tue, 30 Jan 2007 16:32:58 +0000 …
www.netadventures.biz/wordpress/2005/07/19/not-getting-a-good-google-position/feed/ - 1k - Supplemental Result - Cached - Similar pages
Don’t worry if some of your pages get into the supplemental index. We have thousands of pages in our site and a good number in the supplemental index. We just make sure the important pages aren’t there. Our book shows you how to get your pages out of the supplemental index.

To see if you have pages there, search your site on:

site:www.netadventures.biz *** -yuiopjkl

where the domain specified is your own. Use the three asterisks and any nonsense string with a minus sign in front of it. Avoid any special characters in the string. This is an undocumented feature, so don’t trust it too much.

PS - yes, we know there are some bad links in this site. We are working on that.

Administrator Google, Internet Marketing and Promotion, Search engine optimization

Last month was busy here working with 4 clients. There is a bad link problem on this site with many links to our SEO book site going to to an old domain name. We are fixing these with time, but the correct link to our seo book is http://www.the-seobook.com.

We had a massive spam load toward the end of February as some black botnet launched an attack on us. We’ve collected all the hosts involved and posted them at:
http://www.creatingnewworlds.org/badhosts.htm.

Please help us kill all of these hosts. Each one is doing illegal activity. Moreover, we’ve also posted this on digg.com at:
http://www.digg.com/search/page3?s=spam&area=all&type=both&search-buried=0&age=7&sort=new&section=news

Please “digg” this article to help move it to the first page.

Our goal is to move links to the badhosts listing and the larger list to over a 100 blogs to really kill the hosts involved, but this takes time and financial resources.

Magazines and the rest of the media is not doing much on this. Probably afraid of being sued by the hosts. The government has failed us in this - which means the Republicans are dead in the next election. It’s up to the millions of users to stop this. Take the hosts down.

Administrator General, Spam, Web Design

A few months ago if you searched Google on “miserable failure”, you’d find the bio of George W. Bush at the top of the list that was returned. Google tried to communicate that this wasn’t a political statment on their part, it was simply the result of their ranking algorithms putting it topside.

This ranking was the result of what is popularly known as a Google Bomb. People set their websites with a link to the bio page with the phrase “miserable failure” in the visible part of the link. They get their friends to do the same thing, and their friends to…you get the idea. Soon you have thousands of links to the Bush bio site, all with the same visible link or variation of it. The practice is called Google bombing. It was used to push many sites to the top of the ranks.

No more. Google has changed their ranking algorithm to detect such Google bombs and direct you to sites that discuss the practice instead. Yahoo, MSN, and other search engines l will still give you that bio site at the top of the list. Has Google gone Republican?

Administrator Google, Search engine optimization, Yahoo

One very important blog - if you haven’t found it - is Matt Cutt’s blog. Matt works at Google and has become the primary interface between Google and the SEO community. This is as close as you are going to get to the inside scoop on how Google works. You can find his blog at:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/.

Check it out - search by topic or scan the archives.

A good recent posting is available at:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/infrastructure-status-january-2007/

This describes some of where Google is going in 2007. It’s a little big of technical stuff here, but those supplemental results he mentions are the listings Googe returns when it can’t find enough information on a search in its main database. These are labeled as such in the return from a search. Obviously, that isn’t a good place for your site to be listed. If you are there, it generally means you have a weak image to the search engine (too few links to your site?) or you are doing borderline spamming of the search engines. Matt says it basically means you have low PageRank.

Administrator Adwords - Google, Blogging, Google, Google Mapping, Internet Marketing and Promotion, Search engine optimization