SEO Tips City » Search engines

SEO For Your Small Business

Seo Men — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 08:31:28 +0000

In today’s world, just about everything in business can be connected to the Internet. This applies to all types of business, from multimillion dollar companies to the smaller mom and pop stores. Small business can be losing out on a large customer base is they do not understand the power of the Internet and how maintaining a well optimized website has many benefits. When people seek information on services or products, most likely the Internet is the place where they will begin their search. Let’s take a look at SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and what this means for your small business.

SEO means search engine optimization. The acronym “SEO” can also refer to “search engine optimizers” professionals who can take your website, optimize it correctly and in the end, bring you a lot of traffic and potential customers.

SEO For Small Business

Let’s take a look at why this is so important and how this applies to a small business. Just about everyone has a website in today’s world, from international companies to personal sites. Phone books are rarely used anymore. When someone wants to find out about services or products, they turn to their computer.

Having a well planned out website is very important for a small business. You want any person to easily see who you are, what you offer and by which methods they may obtain your services or products. However, even if you have a wonderful website, this does not help you if no one can find you.

One business person created a well thought out, easy to read website and was very excited that when entering the search term for their business they came up first in the search results. However, it will do your small business no good if you can only be found by the particular name of your business.

You want to be found when people enter in certain keywords. What are keywords, you may ask. Keywords are words that the average person enters into a search bar to find out information. For example, if you sell hammers and nails you would want your small company’s website to come up high in the search results for “hammers and nails”.

The goal of most business websites is to appear on the first page of results. Very rarely does the average person look passed the first page. If they do, it is even more rare if they look passed the third page. You can always pay to appear first, this would be a sponsored listing. However, if you website text is optimized correctly, you can appear highly ranked for the key words of your choice.

The object of optimizing a site is to edit the content and HTML coding to both increase its significance to particular keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.

The majority of people search via Google, although other search engines are used as well. In most cases, a website should be created to please Google and other search engines will follow along. Do SEO for your small business and you will be been by more people than you thought possible. If you are not optimized correctly, you could land so far back in the search results that no one will ever find you. Never underestimate the need for proper SEO for your small business.

Top SEO Mistakes

Seo Men — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 13:21:25 +0000

Avoidance of the top SEO mistakes calls for familiarity with the most modern types of product marketing. Today, experts at branding sometimes struggle to avoid those mistakes. A branding expert might, for example, want to use a brand name as a keyword. Yet a brand name is not apt to be entered in the box of a search engine. The modern day marketing expert has learned how to downplay use of a brand name within website content. Instead, that marketing expert peppers the content with well chosen keywords, words that a potential customer might be expected to type into a search engine.

SEO Mistakes

The owner of a website wants that website to appear near the top of the search engine rankings. In order to achieve that goal, a website owner should direct his or her efforts at search engine optimization (SEO). In order to avoid the top SEO mistakes, a website owner needs to learn what he or she can and can not control.

While SEO includes the selection of keywords, those skilled at SEO work know that selection of the perfect keywords does not insure a high search engine ranking. The primary keyword should be included in the title tag for the website. Poor positioning of the primary keyword is one of the top SEO mistakes.

Whenever a website contains lots of good information, it becomes impossible to put all of that information on a single web page. For that reason, a website owner should plan to have an announcement or a description tag for each posted article on his or her website. The absence of an announcement or a description tag is another of the top SEO mistakes.

The typical Internet viewer does not want to spend time searching web content for a valuable piece of information. The first paragraph of any content article should summarize the focus of that article. That first paragraph should also contain the primary keyword. Failure to offer a suitable opening paragraph in each content article constitutes commission of yet another of the top SEO mistakes.

Search engine rankings depend on more than the presence of keywords; they also relate to the frequency and distribution of those keywords. Content that contains a flood of keywords will not appear near the top of a search engine ranking. Judicious use and distribution of keywords insures good positioning within a search engine ranking. Disregard for good keyword density belongs on the list of top SEO mistakes.

The “spider” that helps to determine the search engine rankings pays close attention to the number of outbound links and back links on each website. Good content will help a website to gain a satisfactory number of back links. The website owner should look for websites with similar content, sites that seem to be a fitting endpoint for an outbound link. Failure to include both types of links allows the site owner to become trapped in yet another of the SEO mistakes.

A fresh loaf of bread can get stale over time. Fresh content on a website does not stay fresh forever. The wise website owner makes certain to include information on company news or product changes in frequently updated content. The absence of fresh content can knock a website from the prime position in the search engine rankings. It is another of the SEO mistakes.

New Msn/Live Search Engine How Good Is It

Seo Men — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 15:23:07 +0000

If you have an online business or you just use Internet as one of your marketing tools, you know that how important are the search engines in your quest to get more targeted visitors to your website. The changes in search engine field can have unexpected outcome for your online endeavors. That’s why it is important to be well-informed on impending progress in this sphere.

Microsoft has recently come out with the latest beta version of its much touted search engine. Supported by 5 billion indexed pages, it is poised to become one of the most powerful search engines in the market. Right now MSN is using Yahoo provided search results for queries done through its search page, which it’s planning to change somewhere in early next year with its own.

MSN / Live Search

Google’s immense success and profitable business model enticed Microsoft and others to look into lucrative search engine market seriously. Amazon, for example, has recently launched its web search site A9.com. Today, Google carries out almost 50 percent of all searches on the Internet. Yahoo with 24 percent of the market share is trailing in a distant second place. MSN with 14 percent lags far behind from the competitors – a situation, which won’t be very easy to change.

However, Microsoft has a long history of copying booming products; make their replicas some times, arguably, better then the originals, and clinch larger portion of the market shares. Microsoft has successfully done this to Borland’s dominance of programming languages in the early days. The list of victims continued with once utterly popular word processor – WordPerfect, market dominant spreadsheet – Lotus 1-2-3, Novell’s Netware and finally Netscape. Since 90 percents of all personal computers run on Windows, Microsoft gets an extra edge against its competitors, which it’s capable of exploiting very effectively.

What is new in MSN search?

This version of MSN search incorporated several interesting features, which other search engines are lacking at this moment.

Unlike Google or Yahoo, Askjeeves has better ability to find answers to direct plain language searches. MSN search has taken this one step further by adding Microsoft’s Encarta reference tools to its features. Ask, what is the capital of Russia? You will get the right answer at the beginning of the result page. Questions like “What is the size of a Blue whale?” also brings in exact answer. No doubt, students will love this feature as it makes a lot easier for them to get specific answers to the questions related to facts and figures.

Near me

Microsoft’s new search engine includes a ”near me” button that helps users find websites for a given location. In this release, this works only in United States. Once you press this button MSN search figures out where are you located using your computer’s IP address. However, this can be easily superseded by changing setting preferences. This is important if you are located in New York and looking for something near Boston.

Search Builder

In other search engines, if you would like to customize your search you have to use advance search options from a separate page. MSN search has made it a lot easier for average users by adding the ability of customization right on the search box. Once you click on the Search Builder from the link right underneath of the search box a drop down menu will open. Initially, the menu might look a little confusing; with little patience you will be able to use available great features easily.

The tool “search terms” allows you to add Boolean search options. Site/ Domain tool is used for limiting a search to specific site or domain, or excluding them from your query. “Links to” tool helps you make your query within the sites linked to a specific site. Country/ region and language options are required to make geography or language specific searches.

The best option from this group of features is the “Result Ranking”. This option allows you to refine searches and give you a better control over the search result by using a set of three bars. By sliding the bars up and down you choose whether you want to see more of exact match or approximate match, more popular or less popular, static or dynamic pages as search results. You can generate an impressive range of results for a single query thanks to this option. This could be very useful for some types of searches. For example: if you are looking for news based pages, you might prefer to choose more dynamic pages rather than static ones.

Preference setting

Most notable options on the setting page are “Safe Search” – ability to filter out sexually explicit images and texts, and ability to fix the number of results displayed from one particular site.

Relevancy

Many reviewers claim that if you compare the search results with Google, MSN search engine “falls short” in relevancy. However, my results showed otherwise.

Conclusion

If you consider all the new features of MSN that Google does not have yet, its ability to cover natural language queries, quality level and relevance of results, ability to refine searches, there is no doubt that MSN search engine is as good as Google.

Search engines offer SMEs an international audience

Seo Men — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 09:11:21 +0000

Global internet information provider comScore has just released research which shows that Google became Canada’s most-visited website for the first time in January, overthrowing the Microsoft destinations which had previously been the most popular.

This is not a terribly surprising development as the search giant has long been one of the most popular websites globally and is the most visited in the UK. In Japan, it is beaten by Yahoo! and closely followed by various Microsoft sites.

Recently, Dan Cobley, Google’s director of marketing for UK, Ireland and Benelux, told IT Wales that the internet allows businesses access to customers they could never previously have engaged.

He highlighted:

“Even the smallest company operating out of a garage and with a marketing budget of a few pounds a week, can tap into these new opportunities.”

As the importance of search engines grows across the worldwide markets, there are more opportunities for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to market themselves within an international arena, all they need is visibility.

MSN warns on Google, so why should online publishers like aggregators?

Seo Men — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 06:04:56 +0000

Search engines, RSS readers and a range of new social media developments are playing an increasingly vital role in filtering out the “noise” of the web.But many online gatekeepers are viewed with suspicion by many media organisations, who believe they are cashing in by freely taking content which is often originated by other companies at great expense.

The news aggregators had a platform at the Association of Online Publishers conference in London yesterday. They say they drive readers to existing media websites, those readers often being an audience that would never have considered clicking through to a new source. But there was still a warning about Google News’s move into publishing its own news content from MSN’s executive producer Peter Bale.

He said:

“While the agencies will consider it welcome news, publishers should be very aware of what that really means to them. Publishers such as the Times, the Guardian, the Sun, will see a bump down in traffic towards them from Google.”

He said MSN took a different approach to its competitor, though, with its outlook not just about bringing content together, but placing tools around it. And one of the keys to that was encouraging publishers to choose to make their content “discoverable”, through networking and publishing tools such as meta data, tagging tools and existing applications.

He said:

“Journalism is not free. We have to work out how to pay for it.”

He told the conference that MSN’s news was organised by 30 journalists and so its news story listings were based on real human-based search assessments rather than computer algorithms.

“We really value the work our partners such as ITN, Reuters and PA, We pay for their content and we respect it,”

he said.

“What we are trying to do on the MSN home page is to consolidate our place on Internet explorer browsers – we want to make it the destination, not the default.”

Despite Google’s move to publish news agency content, Josh Cohen, its business product manager said: “We don’t own content but help people find it instead.

“Google focuses on news enthusiasts – we show them other perspectives on a story and so generate fresh traffic and new readers. Hosting stories from Associated Press is a big shift, and there’s a clear line between being a distributor and being a destination.”

And Angus Bankes, the founder of Moreover Technologies, took a similar line when he said:

“We don’t take content, we pass content on – we’re driving big amounts of traffic through our relationships.”

His company was also supplying and developing further products for publishers, with more “widgets” planned and more “pinging” of servers to let aggregators know when blogs are updated – with a move towards pinging for news sites not far away.

Meanwhile, Duncan Dunlop, general manager at Oodle UK expects a shift to performance-based advertising, with a merging of yellow pages, classified and the other mainstream advertising channels. His company’s technology enhances content and opens up the local advertising market.

How to rank on Yahoo!

Seo Men — Fri, 14 Jul 2006 14:07:03 +0000

Recently I have been concentrating on Yahoo and the elements on a page that they look at when ranking, I looked close at their own guidelines and noticed a few very important key points. Think of this document as a break down of their guide lines. As the following text points out, Yahoo are focusing heavily on page criteria.

Quoted from Yahoo: Users are more likely to click a link if the title matches their search. Choose terms for the title that match the concept of your document.

Sound advice to make the title tag descriptive of the pages contents as this is what people will see in the search results and click on.

Quoted from Yahoo: Use a “description” meta-tag and write your description accurately and carefully. After the title, the description is the most important draw for users. Make sure the document title and description attract the interest of the user but also fit the content on your site.

This is the clearest indication that Yahoo read and give weight to the meta description tag, make sure that the tag is a desriptive sentence with all of the pages keywords present. I would aim at no more than 3 lines.

Quoted from Yahoo: Use a “keyword” meta-tag to list key words for the document. Use a distinct list of keywords that relate to the specific page on your site instead of using one broad set of keywords for every page.

Clearly Yahoo hold weight to the Meta keyword tag, what once was deemed to be a spammy aspect of ranking tactics is now an ok method of getting your sites message across – by no means stuff it full of keywords and repeat them to the extreme, just make sure that the pages keywords are mentioned twice or so in the tag.

Quoted from Yahoo: Keep relevant text and links in HTML. Placing them in graphics or image maps means search engines can’t always search for the text, and the crawler can’t follow links to your site’s other pages. An HTML site map, with a link from your welcome page, can help make sure all your pages are crawled.

Basic sound seo advice, keep links and text plain HTML that way the spiders can read and follow the links.

Quoted from Yahoo: Use ALT text for graphics. It’s good page design to accommodate text browsers or visually impaired visitors, and it helps improve the text content of your page for search purposes.

From this it is clear that Yahoo, read and asign weight to the alt text. Make sure that the text describes the image, but be sure to include a keyword to increase your keyword density.

Quoted from Yahoo: Correspond with webmasters and other content providers and build rich linkages between related pages. Note: “Link farms” create links between unrelated pages for no reason except to increase page link counts. Using link farms violates Yahoo!’s Site Guidelines and will not improve your page ranking.