Archive for the ‘SEO’ Category

The Importance of Search Engine Ranking for Businesses

Monday, August 31, 2009 posted by Frank Stevens 11:46 AM

The Importance of Search Engine Ranking for Businesses

As a business owner, you most likely know by now the importance of having a website. A business website is more than just a new way to display your flyers or brochures. It can be a valuable resource for customers and potential customers. A business website is a non-confrontational way to get your message across and “sell” to those who are most likely interested in buying from you. If a customer has to call you up to find out more information about your products or services, they might be concerned that you will try the hard sell on them and that makes most people uncomfortable. Being able to peruse your website allows them to get the information they need and explore other products and services they may not have known about.

One of the most important considerations in developing and maintaining your business website is how to get people there in the first place. You can spend a fortune designing a pretty site and hiring writers to formulate the best copy but it all means nothing if you can’t get anyone to notice your website. For current customers, that can be as easy as putting your site address on your business cards or the bottom of your invoices, but, in order to grow your business, you need to attract new customers who need to be able to find you on the internet.

As new potential customers will not know your company name, they will most likely come across your company in a search engine search through Google or Yahoo! or another search engine. They may be searching on your product or service or they could be looking for solution to a problem. For example, they may type in “how do I clean my garbage disposal?” and, if you sell a disposal cleaner, your website may turn up in the search.

Search engines attempt to rank websites by an algorhythm that looks at what they think the site is about based on the words in the site. So, using the above example, if you have the keywords “garbage disposal” and “cleaning” throughout your site, the search engine will put your site up higher in the results for those words than other sites which do not make their purpose clear. Using the right keywords in your website text is critical to getting found in a search engine search.

Search engine rankings are based on other criteria as well. Search engines will try to estimate the importance of your site by how many others link to it, on the premise that if others think your site is important enough to link to, more people will too. Getting backlinks (as they’re called) to your website can be as having a few of your customers include the site link on their sites or Tweeting your website link on Twitter.

Ranking high in search engine results is critical to a growing business. Customers will not wade through pages of search results to get to you- they will look at the first page or two of results and find their answer there. If you can get your company ranked high in searches, it can mean a substantial difference in traffic to your website and, ultimately, business to your door.

The Illusion of Bad SEO Strategies

Saturday, August 29, 2009 posted by Frank Stevens 6:14 PM

While most SEO strategies tend to be rather simple in overall complexity and there are many tips available to promotion your website, the vast majority do little to actually improve your orderd rankings.

One of the biggest mistakes new SEO service providers and do-it-yourselfers make is expecting continuous improvement merely by doing more of the same.

The misconception of keyword density is one such mistake… adding a keyword to any element once seems to help improve ranks so adding it again must help more; and so increasing the density of the keyword phrase (within reason) must be better than reducing it.

The problem with that thinking is that, if you gain a quality score for adding a keyword to each individual element; whether that be a title keyword or body keyword or some other element – you’ve gained the score for that element – thinking that you can gain more of a score for the same things “collectively”… is wishful thinking.

Another misconception is that repeatedly using the same link anchors for external links to produce top ranks… isn’t entirely accurate. If your targeted term is “SEO” most people believe that more link anchors termed as SEO will produce the best results in the shortest period of time. The problem though is that search engines (especially Google) uses pattern recognition to determine what are manipulative developments… and one such manipulative pattern would be the development of a singular link anchor pointing to a domain.

Yet another misconception is the philosophy of article writing – write once and distribute to many; saves time and costs but depreciates the returning value any individual page can provide to your domain.

Lastly, many believe a volume of mini-sites or satellite sites aid the ranks of the primary domain being ranked.

All of these developments “sound good” in an academic discussion, but in practical application they, for the most part, simply wastes your time.

SEOAssur website currently provides advance knowledge and skills contribution in the following topical areas:

  • Robots.txt – Reduce bandwidth, spam, infringement & duplication, improve security & analytics by banning all with robots.txt.
  • Site Architecture – Avoid flat site designs (architecturally speaking). Optimal site’s architectural depth is 3 link generations.
  • Sitelinks – Create Google Sitelinks by using the same link anchors to multiple pages (using both internal & external links).
  • Strategies – Doing the exact same thing & expecting even better results is a sign of SEO incompetency.

In addition, SEO Assur provides independent referrals for operating search engine optimization firms and consultants within the United States arranged by state and city of origin.

SEOAssur
World Trade Center Delaware
702 N West St. Suite 101
Wilmington DE 19801
United States