Picture Perfect

Pictures and graphics are really cool, nice to look at, and entertaining. They can send an important message - especially in the world of highways and billboards. But when it comes to SEO and making the most of your website and valuable content, pictures don’t say much at all to the search engines. As a matter of fact, graphics and search engines don’t even speak to each other.

So, what does that mean to you?

It means that you should make sure you have plenty of text on the pages of your website and don’t fill them up with images and pictures that are overlooked and ignored by search engine spiders and bots. Search engines only focus on text to rank your pages. They want to find rich data and content that can be indexed and evaluated easily and quickly.

We’ve all seen beautiful web pages with a magnificent picture of a sunset promoting an exotic island vacation, or snow-laden mountains boasting a winter paradise. But when those pictures comprise the majority of the web page with very little description or content, the search engines won’t rank them very highly. They may not even be able to find them at all.

A judicious use of Flash and images is a good idea when it comes to SEO. Using too much will make your website difficult for search engines to find and it won’t rank well among your competitors. This not only applies to your homepage, or main page, but all pages throughout the site. Consistency is important and pages that are content-rich will make a significant difference in how well you are ranked. Use graphics to complement your content, but not over-power it.

An organized website that uses graphics, pictures, and other design elements carefully can be an attractor of search engines and visitors. Web pages that are logically organized will be more easily found. Make sure your sitemap is intuitive and easy to navigate. Following these simple guidelines can help with your SEO.

Target Your Audience

If you really want to attract traffic, be sure you know the type of traffic you want to attract. Just drawing the attention of hundreds of site visitors who have no interest in your website lowers conversion rates and is a waste of your marketing time.

The best way to increase SEO is to Read more

Optimize Landing Pages

The economic tide still hasn’t turned yet and people are tightening their belts even more when it comes to spending. Whether you’re managing an online or an offline business, you can attest to the fact that there has been a slow-down in sales of most products and services.

But don’t make the mistake of thinking that you can save money by dicontinuing your pay per click strategies for your online business. At least not until you’ve evaluated your success with PPC. If you stop and evaluate what PPC is doing for your business, you may find Read more

Simple Meta-Tag Generation

If you want people to find your site, then you need to make it as visible as possible. If they can’t see it, they can’t visit! One way to ensure your site is visible is to add meta-tags to your site that make it easier to find.

Rather than spending precious time on creation of meta-tags, let software do the trick for you. Advanced Meta-Tags Generator is a tool to help you add meta-tags to your site easily and quickly. 

There are some important elements to creating meta-tags Read more

Monetize and Measure Traffic

With the holidays rapidly approaching, it’s a good time to think about capitalizing on your PPC strategies and campaign. Including advertisements that draw visitors and send them to relevant websites for products and services can be a great way to monetize your site during a busy holiday season.

Unfortunately, economic conditions are still in a bit of a turmoil right now, but that also means that Read more

What’s Your Number?

Ouch! If you don’t know how your website ranks with the major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN, then how do you know what you need to do to improve your ranking? And how do you know that you even need to do anything if you don’t know your number!

Before you expend your time and effort on making changes, make sure you take advantage of the RankChecker.net tool. This is a prototype tool that helps you determine how to best optimize your website. It does it by helping you determine where you rank on the major search engines with your current design, layout, and content. Since it is a prototype, feedback is always appreciated on their website.

Most people search for a site by specific words, and hopefully those words are YOUR keywords! They probably don’t know your website URL or company name if they haven’t visited your site once, twice, or more in the past. That’s why RankChecker is helpful.

When you use RankChecker, you’ll Read more

PPC Incentive Offering

If you’re in the business of online marketing, you’re likely already using pay-per-click (PPC) as one of your promotional and monetizing strategies. In one of our previous posts on this site, we provided you with some of the top PPC search engines.

There are a few PPC search engines that are offering some great bargains or incentives for participation (as of this blog posting). If you’re not already participating with these, it might be a good time to get involved. Take a look at some of the incentives for participation in these reputable PPC resources:

1. Findology is offering a $50 bonus in free clicks when you sign up using this link: http://www.PayPerClickSearchEngines.com/findology-promo. Check it out and see it they have something to offer that will increase your monetization efforts.
2. Ask.com is also offering $50 in credit for registration to their site. Check them out at http://asl.ask.com/.
3. Search123 is making an offer to attract more PPC business. They will add $20 to your ad account when you sign up with a deposit of $50. Visit their site at http://www.search123.com/sc/advertiser_programs.shtml to access this offer.

Since these search engines change their incentives and offers frequently, be sure to check them out periodically. As of the writing on this blog, these offers were current and available so hopefully they will still be available when you visit their sites. Other PPC search engines such as 7Search.com, Adwords.google.com, ABCsearch.com, and Searchfeed.com may also offer incentives or bonuses at some time so keep an eye out. This is a great way to capitalize on PPC and optimize your marketing dollars. As the PPC competition becomes heavier, we may see even more opportunities to access incentives and bonuses.

Let us know if you find others who are offering incentives so we can share the information with our readers.

robots.txt to Exclude Content from Searches

Attracting spiders and bots to your website is one of your strategies to increase page rank and bring in more potential customers. But do you have pages of content you’d rather hide from those nosey search engines? Maybe you have multiple versions of a page on your site so you can split-test for effectiveness, or maybe you have different pages for viewing in the browser and one that is more printer-friendly. Rather than having them viewed as duplicate text, you can exclude one from being ‘crawled’.

Another aspect of many websites today is the value of privacy and sensitive information or data. It may be important to hide some of this information. You already know that search engines can only read text, so images and other types of graphics and javascript don’t really add any value to increasing your page rank. You may want to hide those from the creepy crawlers too. Read more

White Hat, Black Hat

For all of you online marketers who really want to succeed in this business, this post is definitely for you!

We’ve all heard about the White Hat and Black Hat SEO strategies, and there are even Gray Hat SEO strategies.

1. White Hat SEO is all about ethical, high integrity, and customer focused marketing strategies and promotional techniques. This is the most ethical way of ensuring SEO and it is highly valued by your customers because they are able to trust that they will find what they need on your site, as well as trust that you will provide what you say you will in terms of content and information.
2. Gray Hat SEO are those tactics that are not totally wrong but are still a little ’shady’ and sometimes a little misleading. For example, purchasing dozens of links through a link-farm rather than gaining links through the value of your website could be considered Gray Hat marketing.
3. Black Hat SEO references the bad guys. These are the online marketeres who operate with limited ethics and integrity and are only focused on gaining traffic - they are less interested in loyal customers, long-term relationships, and ethical marketing strategies. They are often “dishonest hackers”

Search engines become Read more

SERPS and Other Traffic Attractors

Moving to the top in search engine results pages (SERPS) is a way to attract more traffic and potential customers to your website. It all starts with the basic strategy of optimizing keywords and keyword phrases to attract the search engines.  But don’t mistake a high page rank according to SERPS as the best or only way to increase traffic.

SERPS are just one way to bring in traffic, but search engines themselves are more focused in evaluating your content to ensure relevancy, depth, and continual refreshment of content than just directing traffic to you. That’s what they are really starved for and websites that offer all of this will rise quicker in the SERPS. And that’s why you need to have a multi-faceted strategy to really succeed. Search engines will reward you for attracting traffic in a variety of ways.

Capitalizing on content is a great way to optimize your search results and gain those relevant clicks that are most likely to convert to paying customers. Read more

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