Getting Professional SEO help is an essential part of getting quality web traffic today. With billions of web pages out there, don’t expect you site to magically draw the traffic you want. Here is an SEO ad someone spammed me with a few days ago:

Rule #1 is simple. If this guy knew how to do SEO, he would not be using spamming email to get his visitor traffic. Spam is at the bottom of the list in terms of effective advertising, and he is simply telling me he can’t do SEO.

A second point here is that NO ONE can guarantee you a top spot, as this company is trying to do, in the search results. To quote Matt Cutts, the Google Hero

Some SEO firms say they can rank people in first place. Can they guarantee this?

Not on Google. No one can guarantee this, not even Google, since our ranking algorithms are often updated. I’ve seen scams where the “#1 placement” is really buying ads. I’ve seen scams where the “keywords” that they sell are really for people who have scumware hidden in their browser. I’ve seen stuff where the guaranteed keywords are 5-6 word phrases that only have nine results, and no one would ever really type that really long, specific phrase. I’ve seen situations where the guarantee is that they’ll try to get a #1 spot, and if they don’t, then they’ll try again. Cold calling and cold emailing is a bad sign in the first place, frankly. So I’d be skeptical of that in the extreme, and read the fine print carefully.

Also, remember that SEO today is vastly different that a few years ago. Reciprocal links (swapping links to boost your pagerank) is out. Doesn’t help. Also, buying links to your site in most directories is out. That doesn’t help, either. What does work? You’ll find a few clues in this blog. For one thing, blogs and social networking is VERY important. Why not let us help you with your SEO strategy?

A blog is online journal, published frequently (often daily). Each journal entry is called a “post”, and the posts are maintained in reverse chronological order; that is, the most recent is first. The word “blog” itself is a derivative of “web log”. The blog also supports comments and feedback from it readers, enabling it to potentially be a highly interactive form of communication with a global community.

Some of the reasons for blogging include:

• The blog allows you to respond dynamically to your vision. It’s easy to post and manage the contents of the blog with only a minimum of experience. No programming experience is needed. You are authoring and publishing at near-zero cost.
• The blog enables you to build trust and relationships with your clients (or readers).  It is a way of servant leadership. Business leaders today have learned how to use blogs to talk to their customers and to turn those conversations to serious business relationships. You can use your blog to serve your customers.
• The blog establishes your authority in the area of your expertise.
• Blogs, as a part of your social networking, provide a high level of search engine optimization when they are done right. There is a running joke among serious bloggers (Your competitors don’t want you to know this) that BLOG stands for Better Listings on Google. That is a true statement.

If you are trying to decide whether to blog or not, here are some issues you need to consider:

1. Do you have the time? Blogging and the related social networking are very time consuming. Bloggers often post one or more times daily in the one or more blogs they own and also post in Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, and other networks. Their posting content involves time-intensive research.
2. Do you have a passion for your vision?  If the passion is there, those that read your blog will know it – and the opposite is also true. Are you willing to make the commitment for the research, writing, support, and all the peripheral work involved to make the vision work? Do you really believe in your vision, service, or product?
3. Do you have the knowledge? One goal here is to establish yourself as an authority on your subject. If you find yourself weak here, it shouldn’t be too serious a concern as you start. If the passion is there, you should be able master a subject in a relatively short time – at least know considerably more than most of your clients.
4. Do you have the necessary awareness of the new marketing paradigm using the blogs? If you don’t have this awareness, you will turn your readers off very quickly. This isn’t like television or magazine advertising.

In the old days a typical marketing phrase for success was “location, location, location”. Today it is “blog, blog, blog”. And your audience is global. The blog has become so important that people often just set up a blog and skip installing a static web site. You really need both.

Here is the basic game for most serious people using blogs and web sites. First, make massive use of the social networks: Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, MySpace and more. Use at least some of these for quick, short, regular, and if possible daily postings. Use advertising sparingly, but tease their interests and draw them into your blog. Use quotes, inspiration, humor, and personal stories in the social networks with very short postings. In between, you are David with a slingshot aiming at their niche and need. Once in your blog, use your postings with content and stories – then call them to action. If that’s new for you, why not let Carl help you with your blog?

You’ve just created a new web site (or we created it for you) and you want it working NOW. You want those search engines showing your site at the top of the listings when somebody searches on Google for it. Amazingly, this can be done and we’ve done it. It’s all in knowing the rules of the game.

Let’s look at one of many of our stories that illustrate this. A group of local community activists wanted to stop the construction of a bridge over a local park. (OK, Carl was one of them.) Someone in the group had built a free web site with a blog and the group wanted me to get the site working quickly in the search engines.

The FIRST step for the web site, I told them, was to get as many links as we could into the web site that evening from other quality sites. I put a link into the site from a blog on one of my web sites. I also went into Twitter and put a posting in Twitter with a link into the web site. Others went in and did similar things.

The next morning, the top listing for a Google search on the subject was the blog posting I did in my site with the link to the new web site. The second listing in the search results was the actual web site. The third listing was to a newspaper article about the issue.

The next day the listing for the new web site was not there, but the top listing again was my blog post pointing to the web site. My posting in Twitter with its link to the web site began showing up soon. Eventually, after a few more days, the web site again was showing up in the listings.

What did this teach me?

• Links from blog postings in quality sites seem very important to the Google algorithm.
• Links from major social network sites are also important to Google’s algorithm.
• Although the listing in Twitter did not show up immediately, Twitter indexes any listing you put there immediately. As soon as you post in Twitter, Twitter indexes it internally immediately and searches within Twitter on the subject will find it.

This isn’t a unique story. In another case, we took a slow moving web site and added extensive social networking. In fourth months, visitor traffic had increased 400%.

Summary: Google loves social networking sites, including blogs.

Here is a comment on this from Google’s own Matt Cutts:

Social networking (including blogs) is becoming increasingly important in getting your message out. Making this strategy work, however, requires professional help. Contact us for more information.

Here are some links from Chris Brogan for good sites to help you with optmizing you site. We’ve already been using the first for some time:

Website Grader from Hubspot. This tool is a really great way of seeing how you stand with typical SEO and social engagement scoring. Start here. This is also a favorite with Carl.

Google Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide (pdf). You can use this to understand the basics behind the scenes on how search engines like Google see your website or blog.

Google’s SEO Report Card (pdf) – Useful for knowing what Google sees when they look at your site. A lot of what’s covered in here is measured by the Website Grader tool mentioned above.

WordPress SEO. If you’re using WordPress for your website or blog, this is a really useful resource. It’ll take a while to pore through, but you’ll find some value in it, for sure. My friend, Yoast, also has a WordPress SEO plugin that you might find useful.

Chris also use Scribe (affiliate link) to help him with his SEO on his site.
Carl also uses the Search Engine News and the analyzers provided with it.

We’ve had some real exciting results this year with our increase in visitor traffic (http://www.netadventures.biz/results.htm) with several of our sites drawing an amazing increase in traffic. In some cases, overnight. I like the recent story of a group here collecting signatures for a petition for a ballot measure to protect Tualatin parks. They had the web site using weebly.com, a free web support service. The site was up (http://www.protecttualatinparks.org), and they contacted me to help them get some starter links into the site. I dropped a link from my blog and also one from Twitter into the site about 11 p.m. By the next morning the web site popped up as number two in results on Google and my blog post with the link to the post was at the top spot on the result page. Let’s take a moment and look at how that worked.

The three things Google looks for, according to Matt Cutts (Matt works for the Search Quality group in Google, specializing in search engine optimization issues.) are:

1. Links coming into the site and the quality of the source pages containing those links to you.
2. The content on your site and how the content is organized.
3. The activity and interaction with users that your site is experiencing.

We need to define a few terms in this list as a starter. What, for example, is “activity”? And does Google really treat a source page linking into your site as Google-neutral; i.e., does Google really democratic in how it sees its pages, even if quality is considered?) In all probability the answer here is that Google will say they are neutral, as my social network pages (my blog and twitter post are dynamic and treated as more important (higher quality) than static web pages. Google will tell you a social network page is really of higher quality because of its more dynamic nature.

In the example I gave earlier, the petition website dropped off the Google results the next day as Google holds it until it has proven its value. That takes some time. My blog link to that web site was still there the next day at the top of the results list. My link from Twitter was indexed immediately (the evening I put it there) in Twitter. For Google, however, it took it a few days for Google to find the Twitter link even though Twitter had already seen at and would be found if you searched on Twitter.

Now look at each of the three points we mentioned:

Links – Google based its early result pages on this years ago using a patented mathematical formula that assigned the page a “Page Rank” or PR based on the number and PR of the links coming in (what is now called “Google juice” minus the juice of the links going out of the page). Today Google rates the quality of a web page today on a much more complicated formula, but those incoming links are still very, very important.

Activity – This, along with your content, affects the quality of your site. Google likes to see users staying for some time at your site, going deep in your site. Google wants to see visitors returning to your site often. Also important is how recently they visited your site. In addition, Google is probably looking at how often people comment on your posts, join your email list, and if they bookmark your pages. Watch leaders on web sites, blogs, Facebook, and to see how they encourage interaction: give away books, poll you on a movie or other issue, or ask your opinion. Having and RSS feed from your blog doesn’t help much on this. Google wants interaction.

I’m also a firm believer that social networking is very important. Your web site may do the work in terms of giving information, motivating them to take action, and then giving that all-important call to action. The social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, and your blog act as gates, leading the user to your site. Going back to that starter story – the social networks keep the web site going and helped Google to see it was important.

And don’t forget those keyword phrases. Those are always the front-end that draw the user into your social networks, blogs, and web sites. Your content should be built around them.

Need help getting your site drawing a lot of visitors? Why not contact us? http://www.netadventures.biz

What are some of your experiences in getting high visitor traffic for your web site?

Want to increase your visitor traffic to your web site? Take a look at the stats on this web site that had already been active for years and what we did in four months.

SEO Results

Want to see this for your web site? Contact us to see what we did.

1. Sell to the need of your customer. Actually, you sell to the “want” of the customer. What the customer wants and what he or she needs are two different things. Suppose you sell health products. For example, HGH is a hormone that enables the rebuilding of cells and restores youth. Normally you don’t take HGH, but rather a precursor that forces the body to release the HGH that the body has already made. If the product is XXX, you are not selling XXX. That may be what the customer needs, but the customer doesn’t know that. Also, you are not selling an HGH precursor. What you are selling is youth. Target that with your keywords and content.
2. Go for the niche market. Do your keyword analysis, use long keyword phrases, and target a niche in your market. Use multiple web sites and blogs if necessary to target multiple niches.
3. Drive from content. Lead from ideas and information. In the old paradigm, this would look like you are giving the store away. In the new paradigm you are establishing yourself as an authority and drawing people from your authority. To win, you have to lead from authority and encourage networking in terms of that.
4. Be interactive. Keep your blogs open for dialog. Interact on the social networks like Facebook and Linkedin. Join groups on the networks and contribute to them. Force interaction with controversy and novel ideas. Be creative. Comment on blogs that relate to your issues. Don’t interact to sell, interact to drive comment and synergy. Give people multiple ways to reach you. Be sure to follow up on contacts.
5. Use lots of links. Link from the social networks to your site and blogs.

For search engine optimization, having a large number of links into your site from qualified sites (sites Google trusts) is very important. Reciprocal links don’t work as well as those one-way links coming in from good sites. Here’s a good trick to find your incoming links. It doesn’t work too well in Google (the link command is broken there), but you can do it in http://www.yahoo.com. Probably the same links will be in Google.

In Yahoo, enter the following in the search box, replaceing yoururl with your domain name:

link:http://www.yoururl.xxx

This will return both the external and internal links for your site; i.e., it will also show pages linking into the home page.

To get ONLY the external links to the site, use:

link:http://www.yoururl.xxx -site:yoururl.xxx

To get the listing of links to any page of your site:
linkdomain:www.yoururl.xxx
(no http:// this time!)
and only the external links to any page of your site:
linkdomain:www.yoururl.xxx -site:yoururl.xxx

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

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