Once you’ve done that, a lot of the things you need to check fall under proper site maintenance and making sure that Google can see everything you want them to see. Honestly, I could only come up with a broad price range: from about $30,000 to about $150,000, and on average, larger companies pay larger salaries. On that note, please don’t ask me what I make a year, because I probably won’t tell you. It could just be that I don’t really know! when they cana€?t even get one for themselves. If a site offers you a top 10 position, check out their position by using their URL. If they were so good, wouldna€?t they be in the top 10 for their URL? I would have though so! But NO. The first check he can perform, of course, is to make sure that his site is set up in accordance with Google’s own guidelines. The search engine just recently updated these guidelines to be clearer and include more information. From bookings of flights to hotel reservations, it is estimated that 70% of all flights are booked online through websites. So, we can easily assume this big online competition. Keep in mind that the Google search results page often includes paid advertising and free organic search results. Take your time with these to make sure you fully understand the guidelines. So, do what you can to understand what Search Engine Optimization is. What it really is a€“ not what some would want you to believe what it is. It was inspired by a thread in our own SEO Chat forums. The original poster mentioned that he maintained a site that had less than half of its pages listed in the main index of Google. He made some major changes to its internal linking structure to fix some mistakes he’d made earlier; Google also isn’t listing his internal links correctly now. He’s looking for some kind of checklist so he doesn’t feel like he’s just stabbing in the dark. Do you know how to tell the difference? Most cana€?t, and so are led by what they read online. The problem is that since a€?most cana€?ta€?, most of what is written online is garbage. It is difficult to spot the truth from the opinion. It is truth that gets you a good Google or Yahoo listing, not opinion. The problem is that more people believe opinion than truth since they dona€?t know what truth is, and most of what they read is false opinion. Okay, I mentioned putting key words in an internal link that goes from the page you’re optimizing to another page on the site. Make sure you also have key words in an internal link that goes TO the page from another page on the site (preferably from the home page). Every SEO seems to confront this frustrating situation sooner or later. Fortunately, there are forums devoted to SEO. Many heads with lots of experience, often with very different kinds of sites, can come up with things to check that one person beating his or her head against a bunch of pixels might not have considered. Developers call the practice of trying to figure out why a particular program isn’t working the way it should “troubleshooting.” This article will cover some of the things you’ll want to consider when troubleshooting your web site’s SEO. 12.Basic SEO Troubleshooting There are a number of good SEO checklists you can use when you start to optimize your web site for the search engines. The best advice you can have is to check out the websites that have succeeded and copy what they do. However, that is not as easy as you think since the off-site linking strategy that you cannot see is as important as the on-site SEO that you can see. Starting a brand new web site can be a daunting challenge. But it isn’t hopeless. It takes a good bit of work and patience, but you can eventually build the traffic and sales figures of your dreams. 39.Does Your Search Engine Optimization Company Understand Your Marketing Strategy? However, any search engine optimization company worth its salt can achieve high rankings of some sort. The true question is whether those search engine rankings are for targeted phrases that are in line with your overall marketing strategy. In order for your search engine optimization campaign to be truly successful, a search engine optimization company must understand your business, products and services enough that it can accurately promote them on the Internet. Unique Differentiators And you don’t have to bookmark just your home page; as you build content that you think others might be interested in, you can bookmark those pages as well. Every company has them. Every search engine optimization company should be interested in knowing what they are. These vital components of your marketing strategy can be a huge determinant in the keyphrases that are targeted in your optimization campaign. Social bookmarking sites are another place for you to consider. Post a link to your site and tag it with relevant keywords. Google and other major search engines visit social bookmarking sites regularly, so this is another way to help your site get indexed. Don’t be rude about it though, or the community will brand you a spammer and act accordingly.Some who have been in the field for a long time see even bigger changes coming. EGOL, a veteran SEO and well-respected moderator on SEO Chat, notes that search volume is going down for a lot of the terms in his fields. For example, do you provide customized solutions in an otherwise highly-commoditized industry? Modifiers like "specialty" and "customized" added to your keyphrases will help you to obtain the types of visitors most likely to be looking for exactly what you offer. This is only one example - a typical marketing plan will detail several points that effectively differentiate the company from its competition, and a good search engine optimization firm will take the time to understand what these are. By knowing and understanding these points of differentiation, an optimization company will be able to get the most out of your campaign. Staying focused on the blogging theme, if you’re in a professional field you probably frequent web sites related to that field; they might even have their own blogs and/or forums. If not, there are plenty of blog search engines you can use. Michael D. Jensen of Solo SEO recommends finding five fairly popular blogs that are relevant to your site and have been updated within the last couple of days. Then you should read the post and make a comment that contributes to the discussion. Most of the time, comments to blogs offer a field for a URL; that’s where you put the URL for your web site. It will give you and the site some exposure in context, and if you’ve written something intelligent, blog readers will be predisposed to favor your web site (because you’ve just shown you know what you’re talking about). High-Profit Segments Most companies have certain products or services that are more profitable than others that they offer. Some companies may also have some new products or services that they are aggressively targeting. Without the knowledge of these facts, your search engine optimization company is likely to target all areas of your business equally. Money will definitely be spent in the areas of site redesign and probably in getting content (you may actually have to hire writers to get content) but then again, if you are a web designer who is building your own websites on a low (or nonexistent) budget, organic SEO is definitely the way to go. It may take some time, but you will actually grow in real time experience as you move towards your SEO goals. Before beginning your search for an SEO, it's a great idea to become an educated consumer and get familiar with how search engines work. They’ll help you make sure you don’t miss anything as you climb to the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs). But what do you do if you’ve done everything you can think of and your site doesn’t seem to be going anywhere? We recommend starting here: * Google Webmaster Guidelines * Google 101: How Google crawls, indexes and serves the web. If you're thinking about hiring an SEO, the earlier the better. A great time to hire is when you're considering a site redesign, or planning to launch a new site. That way, you and your SEO can ensure that your site is designed to be search engine-friendly from the bottom up. However, a good SEO can also help improve an existing site. With the industry reaching a tipping point of sorts, we at SEOmoz felt compelled to examine the numbers and produce what is almost certainly the most comprehensive public report on search marketing, particularly the organic SEO side, to date. That hypothetical plumber I mentioned earlier in a quote from Wall might not get any customers from talking about legendary plumbing disasters, but what if he did an article on five fast ways to keep your plumbing system running smoothly? Or maybe he could write one on the seven hidden signs that your system might be malfunctioning. (I just bet mold is one of them). I’m just pulling these numbers out of thin air, you understand, but I think you get my point. Defining Prospects Are your prospects already educated about your industry, or are they looking for solutions to a particular problem? Are they a mix of both? Your search engine optimization company should be asking you about the makeup of your client base. Targeting highly technical and specific keyphrases (such as "email deliverability testing platforms") could attract highly-educated prospects, while targeting solution-based keyphrases (such as "marketing through email") will target someone who is looking for a solution while not necessarily understanding exactly how it is provided. Change over Time Going for the Links You’ve properly set up your internal linking structure for your web site, but what about external links? Many new web sites find this challenging. Everyone knows that Google counts an outgoing link to a site as a “vote” saying that site is relevant. Votes help your site reach a higher position in the SERPs (along with tens of other factors in Google’s algorithm). But how do you get those votes? Unless you are in one of those rare industries that hasn't changed much for 50 years, your marketing strategy will likely shift to accommodate new challenges and new opportunities. As an extension of your marketing team, a good search engine optimization company will want to keep abreast of these changes and adjust your campaign according to what is current today. All too often, a company will change its products or services, adjust its Clearly, this would not serve your company well if your marketing strategy was calling for phase-outs of certain product or service lines, a focus on higher margin business, or aggressive promotion of new offerings. Go through the various steps listed here as necessary. It’s worth noting that this strategy might not be the optimal one for your site, but it should at least give you an outline for thinking about what your site needs and how to tackle its optimization.3. Use different Title Tags for all pages The most important sentence on any web page is the title tag. The title tag gives the search engine a good indication as to what your page is all about. Incorporate your main keywords or search phrases into your title tag, and keep them at the very front of the sentence. These keywords are more important than your company name. Another step you can take is to install Google Analytics in your web site. It’s free. You’ll have to verify your site with Google to get the data collection started. Google even has a special blog for the service, free product support, a help center and something called Conversion University with a good assortment of articles. Basically, Analytics tracks the traffic to your web site, showing you where your visitors come from and how they interact with your site. This kind of information will be invaluable over time as you grow your site and make various changes. These represent only a few examples of how a good search engine optimization firm will want to fully understand your marketing strategy throughout the lifetime of your search engine optimization campaign. While it is true that no single company ever understands your business as well as your company does, it's also true that a search engine optimization company with a stellar track record will understand search engine optimization better than your company will. The marriage of knowledge between the two entities can be the single largest determinant in the level of success (or failure) of your campaign. If you suspect that your search engine optimization company is taking a cookie-cutter approach to your campaign and is not taking the time to fully understand your marketing strategy, it may be advisable to look elsewhere. (C) Medium Blue 2007 About the Author I said earlier that blogging is inappropriate for some web sites. That’s true, but it’s also true that if you’re posting some kind of content regularly, you might find it advantageous to base your CMS around a blogging system that is friendly to search engines. I’ve seen WordPress recommended as a good system for this purpose. Best of all, it is open source, so if you need to modify it to make it work for you, you can. As Mark Jackson writing for Search Engine Watch noted, “I figure if it’s good enough for Matt Cutts’ blog, it’s good enough for us to modify into a CMS.” Scott Buresh is the CEO of Medium Blue, a search engine optimization company. Scott has contributed content to many publications including Building Your Business with Google For Dummies (Wiley, 2004), MarketingProfs, ZDNet, WebProNews, Lockergnome, DarwinMag, SiteProNews, and Search Engine Guide. Another thing that will help both Google and you is building and submitting a site map. I don’t mean the kind of navigational site map that a visitor can get to from a link on your web site, though that’s a good idea too. I mean an XML site map of the sort that can help the robots from the search engines know exactly where to go to index your site. There’s an official web site set up by all three major search engines that explains the sitemap standard and how to create one. There are also many tools available for automatically generating XML sitemaps; a Google search for “XML sitemap generator,” without quotes, yields 1,780,000 hits. Many of these tools are free. Still, if you’re at all technically inclined, I’d recommend reading through the information at Sitemaps.org, so you understand the structure. 40.Search Engine Optimization for Dynamic Websites One of the major issues which have always raised questions among the search engine optimization fraternity is" Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Dynamic Websites". In this whitepaper, we will show you how to optimize dynamic websites for top search engine rankings. But, first the basics.1. Use of softwares - Exception Digital Enterprise Solutions (http://www.xde.net ) offers a software which can change the dynamic URLs to static ones. Named XQASP, it will remove the "?" in the Query String and replace it with "/", thereby allowing the search engine spiders to index the dynamic content. Get Help from Google Google can help make your life easier – and vice versa. By all means, sign up for a Google Webmaster Central account. Google is more forthcoming these days, with services such as duplicate content reports. Paying attention to what Google can tell you may give you a competitive edge over your rivals. Of course, they may already be using it – in which case, you’d still be smart to sign up. What are "Dynamic Websites"? Dynamic websites are websites whose pages are generated on the fly. Unlike static pages (primarily .htm/.html pages), dynamic pages are generated when an user triggers an action through that particular page. Here isa sample dynamic URL- http://www.bbc.co.uk/cgi-bin/search/results.pl?q=%22dynamic+websites%22&tab=news &go=homepage As per the above example of www.bbc.co.uk, the dynamic part (i.e. the part) of the URL which changes as per surfer request is the part after the question mark (?) What are the problems that search engines face in indexing Dynamic URLs? 1. Search engines often consider a dynamic URL as an infinite set of links. How are you going to build up your content? One obvious example you’ll hear everywhere is through blogging. 2. Since dynamic URLs find maximum application in online shopping carts, there is a possibility of incorporating a session id to a particular page. As session ids of that particular page change, the search engine spider needs to index an infinite number of copies of the same page, which is a Herculean task for them. While you’re at it, make sure your internal linking structure is set up properly, with appropriate links that all work correctly. Site navigation can be confusing to new visitors and search engine spiders. Make it easy. Make sure that every page on your site links to another page on your site; you don’t want any orphans here. You should also consider setting up breadcrumbs, so that your visitors know at a glance where they are. 3. Proceeding with the same logic presented in point #2, indexing the same dynamic page might overload the servers of the search engines and therefore prevent the search engines to present with the most relevant information in the fastest possible time. Look at the URL structure for those pages, especially your home page. Keep it simple! Remember, for an online business it’s all about being found. Dev Basu writing for Search Engine People notes that “Using simple static url’s or permalinks that are descriptive of your web site will help you rank better.” Here is what Google says about indexing of dynamic websites- Reasons your site may not be included: Your pages are dynamically generated. We are able to index dynamically generated pages. However, because our web crawler can easily overwhelm and crash sites serving dynamic content, we limit the amount of dynamic pages we index. What are the options that you have in order to make a search engine spider index your Dynamic URLs?
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