Archive for the ‘SEO’ Category

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The following series is pulled from a presentation I gave to a group of beauty bloggers hosted by L’Oreal in New York. Most of the presentation is geared toward how to make a blog more search engine and user-friendly, however I will expand many of the concepts here to include tips and strategies for sites selling products or services across all industries.

Core Term Qualifiers

Optimizing your website for core terms is only part of the optimization process. The vast majority of searches are performed using longer, more specific phrases. When it comes to keyword research, these phrases are really nothing more than your core terms with key qualifiers added to them.

Using your keyword research tools you can find dozens or even hundreds of qualifiers for just about every core term. Each of these new phrases must be carefully analyzed for appropriateness for your site, whether it targets what you offer and fits with the page’s content for which that core term has been applied. Those that don’t can either be discarded or set aside for optimization to other pages.

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The following series is pulled from a presentation I gave to a group of beauty bloggers hosted by L’Oreal in New York. Most of the presentation is geared toward how to make a blog more search engine and user-friendly, however I will expand many of the concepts here to include tips and strategies for sites selling products or services across all industries.

Research Takes Time

The process of researching your keywords isn’t something that should be rushed. Each phase of the research process needs to be performed deliberately, ensuring that you take the time to find all relevant terms and discard the irrelevant. Any attempts to rush through the keyword research process will likely lead you down the wrong paths at best and at worst cause you to have to rethink your entire keyword targeting strategy.

Unfortunately the research process isn’t always linear. You can often be working on several phases of the research process at a time depending on what your focus is on at a given moment. There is a lot of overlap and moving backward and forward through the processes but care needs to be taken that you don’t skip over or leave any of the phases out.

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The following series is pulled from a presentation I gave to a group of beauty bloggers hosted by L’Oreal in New York. Most of the presentation is geared toward how to make a blog more search engine and user-friendly, however I will expand many of the concepts here to include tips and strategies for sites selling products or services across all industries.

Keywords are the blue-prints from which all your marketing efforts are built upon. Keyword research tools provide valuable insight into what words people are searching on the major search engines. But research tools are just the first step in a thorough and well-planned keyword research process. Great tools like Keyword Discovery and Wordtracker or even Google’s tools don’t tell you the intent of each search, however that information can be deduced with a bit of analysis and keyword organization.

But before we get into that, let’s look at how people search so we can better understand how to segment and organize your keywords into an effective optimization campaign.

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The following series is pulled from a presentation I gave to a group of beauty bloggers hosted by L’Oreal in New York. Most of the presentation is geared toward how to make a blog more search engine and user-friendly, however I will expand many of the concepts here to include tips and strategies for sites selling products or services across all industries.

Common Architectural Problems

In order to move your site up in the search engine rankings you have to get your optimized content to the search engines in the most streamlined way possible. There are some common problems that often stand in the way of that. These problems may not keep the search engines from finding and indexing and even ranking your content, however they can greatly effect the performance of that content in terms of how well it ranks in the search results.

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The following series is pulled from a presentation I gave to a group of beauty bloggers hosted by L’Oreal in New York. Most of the presentation is geared toward how to make a blog more search engine and user-friendly, however I will expand many of the concepts here to include tips and strategies for sites selling products or services across all industries.

Search Engine Friendly URLs

When developing a website, you can save yourself a lot of problems down the road by planning ahead before moving full speed into the site development process. One of the first site architectural issues to consider is how your URLs will read. This is especially important for e-commerce websites that quite often have long complicated URLs. But having good URL structure is still no less important for static websites.

Here are a few things you can do to give yourself search engine friendly URLs:

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The following series is pulled from a presentation I gave to a group of beauty bloggers hosted by L’Oreal in New York. Most of the presentation is geared toward how to make a blog more search engine and user-friendly, however I will expand many of the concepts here to include tips and strategies for sites selling products or services across all industries.

Domain Names

Its easy to think that all the good domain names are taken. Sure, the easy and obvious ones have been snatched up years ago, but that doesn’t mean there still aren’t any good .com domain names left that are perfect for your business or blog.

The starting point, however, is to realize that you do need own your own domain name. Most businesses have figured this out already but a lot of bloggers haven’t. That’s because it takes a bit of work and some small fees. First you have to purchase the domain, then host it, pay the monthly hosting fees, install the blog, etc., etc. Not quite as easy as signing up for a blog service and pounding out your first blog post all in ten minutes.

If your blog is nothing more than a personal diary then the free blogging services may be all you need. But if you’re looking to build an audience, sell a few products, or make a name for yourself, getting your own domain name is the way to go.

Whether you’re a business, a blogger, or something in between, selecting your domain name can be a trying process. Those of you who have searched for the “perfect” domain name know what I mean. You go through dozens, if not hundreds of different options looking for just the right one. When looking for domain names for your business or blog, here are a few guidelines:

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Heading Tags

Heading tags are certainly no magic solution to building keyword relevance. They are merely one more baby step to creating a well-rounded optimization of a page. Adding heading tags using your keywords may or may not make a difference in your keyword rankings, but nonetheless, balanced against the rest of the page, using a heading tag properly, with keywords, is going to benefit your visitors, if not the search engines.

On the search engine front, at the very least, the Heading tags (H1, H2,… H6) can be used to tell the search engines the hierarchical structure of your page’s content.

When developing content, it’s pretty easy for visitors to see how the page breaks down, but search engines need a bit of help. The heading tags are that help.

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Meta Description Tag

One of the big misconceptions about SEO is that everything we do is designed to increase search engine rankings. This isn’t (or shouldn’t be) true, and there is no simpler example of that then the Meta Description tag. Even though this description tag doesn’t weigh all that heavily into the search engine ranking algorithms, it is still a very powerful part of an effective optimization campaign.

Like the Title Tag, the Meta Description tag will often show up in the search results. Generally what you see in the SERPs is the clickable title link and then the description tag or page snippet just below it. If the description is pulled in to the results, it becomes a very important part of helping entice visitors to click on the link into your site.

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The following series is pulled from a presentation I gave to a group of beauty bloggers hosted by L’Oreal in New York. Most of the presentation is geared toward how to make a blog more search engine and user-friendly, however I will expand many of the concepts here to include tips and strategies for sites selling products or services across all industries.

On-Page Optimization

A website can do just fine online without SEO. PPC, social media and other properly implemented off-line marketing efforts can really help a site succeed online with little or no SEO. But unless and until you begin to SEO your site it will always under perform, never quite reaching its fullest potential. Without SEO, you’ll always be missing out on a great deal of targeted traffic that the other avenues cannot make up for.

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I’m not trying to coin a new phrase here, just looking at SEO from a different perspective. See, I never really liked the term Search Engine Optimization. That seems like the job of the math geeks behind the search engine algorithms. Its their job to optimize the search engine, not mine.

To be more accurate, SEO should be called WO, or WSO: Website Optimization. That’s what I do, I optimize the website in order to help it gain more exposure, increase traffic and get more sales.

But what are we optimizing the website for?

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