Archive for September, 2008
Keywords effect your conversion rate
Keywords are important for two reasons.
Firstly by using the keywords which relate to your reader you get listed by search engines accordingly meaning that people can find you. Notice that I phrased the last sentence carefully. I said keywords which relate to your reader. It’s important to understand that what you consider key words might not be the keywords your visitors are using to reach you.
Secondly and from my point of view more importantly keywords help to qualify your audience after they have arrived at your web site. If you click through from a search engine to a web site and the headline or first paragraph don’t strike you as relevant to what you’re looking for you’re likely to bounce. The key words you use help to assure your visitor they are in the right place.
Good use of keywords embedded in your copy and content will firstly help you to attract the right kind of people and secondly help to effectively qualify them as being in the right place. If you manage to attract and qualify them, the reader is then more likely to click through to find out more about what your website is about. If they do that, there is a much higher chance that they will convert to your desired goal.
A good SEO or SEM company in my opinion is one that understands that its about answering the visitors needs, not simply packing the website with related key words and phrases.
Advantages of SEO outsourcing in India
Develop Criteria for your Content evaluation
Quality is the page written in plain language? Are there errors in spelling or grammar? Does the page duplicate information found elsewhere on your site, or another government website? Does the page follow your standard website template?
Review top task content more frequently than lower priority content. The content that is most important to your visitors, or that is likely to change often, should receive the most attention.
TIPS FOR EFFECTIVE LINK BUILDING
Some of the tips with which you can make a better use of this process are:
Links directory: A content rich site with a good relevancy can always act in your favor and developing a link directory can ensure the repeated visits of your prospects. You can choose to have reciprocal links with the sites that are linked to your sites. But make sure about the relevancy of the content. If you have the provision of submitting links to your site then ensure that you screen the links well and remove all the dead links.
Article submission: Fresh content is the requirement of the different websites and publishers. It will offer you added advantage if you offer reprint facility for your content or articles with the deal for a link back to your site. Submit your articles to the different article banks.
Frequent updation on your websites is very much required. This will definitely attract more prospects to your website.
If you have some valuable stuff on to your website then you will find many people just linking to your site. Make it a simple process for people to link with you, you can offer a link to us page that could enable all your graphics, images, text to link to them so that they can use it for their own site. It is good that you display the different terms and conditions for linking on your web page incase you have any.
.com Not Listed in Regional Yahoo? Dont Despair!
If you’re a non-American business with a .com web address, and your regional Yahoo ranking is important to you, then my story might interest you.
Recently my copywriting website dropped out of Yahoos Australian rankings. For quite a while, it had been at number 1 for my primary keywords advertising copywriter, copywriter, and website copywriter. But then it suddenly disappeared. I clicked through about 10 pages of results, and it was nowhere to be seen. I then searched for my domain, and Yahoo couldn’t find it.
Something smelt fishy.
I’d done nothing to my site to warrant a ban, and I still had heaps of links to my site (actually, I had more than ever before).
I’m an Australian advertising copywriter. I’m based just north of Sydney and I host my website with a major Australian host. But my web address is a .com, not a .au. I started thinking this might be the problem.
So I emailed Yahoo support, explaining the problem, and sharing my thoughts on the cause.
And all of a sudden, nothing happened.
So I waited. And I waited. And I waited. And finally, after about a couple of weeks, I received an email from a Yahoo support representative informing me incorrectly that my keyword wasn’t featured in my page title or description. I should remedy this shortcoming and re-submit my site to Yahoo.
Frustrated, I replied. I repeated the important facts from the first email just to ensure they listened. They hadn’t even searched for my domain to confirm that Yahoo no longer recognised it.
When they got back to me this time, they had started paying a bit more attention. The support rep confirmed my suspicion that Yahoo had excluded my site because of its .com URL. Her very helpful solution was that I should change my domain to .au! She included some ridiculously complex instructions for how to do so, and sent me on my merry way.
As you might expect, I wasn’t satisfied. Nor was I merry. I explained to her that this was not an acceptable solution because all the links to my site on the internet are pointing to the .com and my email address uses the .com.
She was unmoved. She asserted that this was the best and only way to solve the problem. It might help if I added my primary keyword to my title and description.
My laughter was not good humoured! I wrote back expressing my displeasure at this solution. I painstakingly explained how Yahoo had made a mistake, and that if Google was capable of recognising my Australian business despite its .com addresses, I would think it’s technically possible. I also cited several other .coms in the first couple of pages of Australian results.
No response.
The situation didn’t look promising
If this sounds like a familiar story to you, don’t despair. A week or two later, I searched Yahoo Australia for my primary keyword, and surprise, surprise. My site was ranked number 1 again!
The moral to the story? Don’t be intimidated by Yahoo. Trust your instincts and don’t give up. If you’re an Australian business with a .com, and you’re not listed in Australian searches, this might be why. In fact, I would think this story is relevant to all regional Yahoos. (Of course, before making any accusations, it’s a good idea to make sure your site is properly optimised and that you have plenty of inbound links.)
Anyway, thats my story. I hope it helps someone.
And they all lived happily ever after. So far at least
Significance of Metadata
Metadata is important for many reasons
- Provides a standardized system to classify and label web content.
- Supports website maintenance and administration.
- Improves search relevancy.
- Provides an audit trail (information about who created the information and when it was created).
- Helps identify redundant, duplicative, and possibly obsolete content.
- Identifies similar content so you can establish logical links and other relationships.
- Allows information to be tracked and assembled government-wide.
How Does Link Popularity Work?
Here’s an example of how I consider link popularity works:
Let’s say that Sally Pizza Palace Web site has a link to Michael Clothing store. This almost certainly won’t assist Michael link popularity for the keywords “men’s clothing.” However, if both Sally Pizza Palace and Michael Men’s Clothing Store are both situated in the city of Sydney, and people are penetrating for “men’s clothing in Sydney,” the excellence of that link, may have now gone up a small. There’s now a ordinary thread (Sydney) between the sites. It probably won’t help for those people simply probing for men’s clothing, but may help if they’re searching particularly for stores in the City of Sydney. A higher quality link for Michael, though, would be one from “Sam’s Clothing Store Directory,” which lists a whole group of clothing stores that can be found on the Internet. That is precisely the kind of link that the search engines would credit in the direction of link popularity. The key is in having that ordinary thread between the sites.
Link Building that make logic: Who to Link To
When you are engage in building links to enhance your link popularity, who to link to? The query of where to link to enhance ranking can be puzzling. Logical thoughts is needed to attain link popularity in a natural means.
Google Page Rank
First and Primary, Page Rank is part of the algorithm of Google’s positioning in the search engine results. New search engines utilize link popularity in their algorithm to assess your website as well. But Page Rank is only one of the 100 plus criterion Google uses to assess your web pages. Use the thought of Page Rank as a “tool” to assist make decisions, there is no need to exist and die by the results. Link popularity itself is simply one way to progress your ranking.
Should You Link To Them?
Think about it. You see an excellence website; you see high-quality content. The website is a “Mom and Pop” site with little ranking. Thus what if the Google Toolbar says Page Rank 2/10? That 2/10 might one day be 8/10. More prominently, you are linking to it since it is good to link to for your guests.
What is The Google Sandbox Effect?
However the website is not hindered as much as the links that are reciprocated from other users. Newer links that are created are put on a probationary status until again they pickup in rank from other matured sites or placed directly by an ad campaign. The idea behind the hindrance is to prevent a fast ranking to occur on a new website. The usual holding period seems to be between 90 and 120 days before a site would start obtaining rank from reciprocal or back linking.
Some advice has been given to have companies you are going to reciprocate back add your link first to the website. This may help grandfather your site in, thus reducing the waiting time associated with new websites. People have noticed a 0 page rank when first signing up and receiving a bolstering 7 page ranking after 4 months. Why the delay? The fact is, that if people realized how easy it would be to get a high ranking, would that take away the credibility of the engine. It depends on whom you ask, but it does seem to be happening frequently to newer subscribers. Do not discontinue back linking, your rank will eventually appear.
Importance of Homepage
The homepage is the main tool for sending your visitors in the right direction.
- Government websites need to focus on helping the public find the services and information they want and need most.
- Research shows that more than half of all web users evaluate websites based on homepages alone. If you have an ineffective homepage, many visitors will immediately be turned off and may never come back to your site.
- Web visitors want fast, efficient service. On homepages, they expect to find what they are looking for with little or no scrolling.
- Web users are impatient. They do not want to be distracted by text or graphics that don’t help them find what they want or that increase download time.
- Even if your website is targeted to specialized audiences, your homepage needs to communicate basic information to the general public. Citizens as a whole are an audience for federal public websites, funded by taxpayer dollars.