Posts Tagged ‘website optimization’

How Many SEOs Do You Need?

Friday, September 30th, 2011

Here’s a joke for you: How many SEOs does it take to optimize a website?

Answer: Only 1.

So that’s not funny? I didn’t suspect it would be. It’s not really a joke.

The reason I bring it up is because some clients seem to believe that if they hire multiple SEOs to work on the same website, then they’ll get better search engine rankings. That’s not true. In fact, you could actually be hurting yourself.

Not all SEOs think alike. Some put more emphasis on link building while others emphasize on-site SEO factors. If you hire more than one SEO to work on the same website, then your optimizers could actually compete against each other and cancel each other out. What you really want them to do is work together and enhance each other’s efforts. But can you really expect them to do that?

You’ll save yourself a lot of headaches if you just use one SEO for each web property you own. If you own more than one website, you can have a different SEO working on each site. But don’t let two SEOs work on the same website. Ever.

The only time multiple SEOs working on the same website will work is if you have a division of duties system where there is one decision maker at the top who assigns responsibilities and tracks your total SEO efforts. It’s the only way to ensure the team remains a team.

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Posted in SEO for Small Business | 2 Comments »

Market Your Website Through An iFrame Gadget

Sunday, May 10th, 2009

There are several ways you can use gadgets and one of those is to create one that can be distributed to other webmasters. The benefits are multiple. First, if you brand your website with a back link then every time your gadget is used it will create a back link to your website. Those are great for SEO purposes. Secondly, since the initial information within the iframe exists on your website, you actually help the search engines find you better and crawl your website more.

An iframe is created from existing information. The information is your site. Even after the iframe is placed on another website that information still exists on your site. And the back links from the other sites to yours will get the search engines to your site to crawl that information more often. The combination of the often-crawled content and the back links to that content (with highly valuable anchor text) can help your search engine optimization efforts tremendously.

Another way iframes help you is through marketing. It gets your content in front of more eyeballs. Every time a website uses your gadget you are getting your content and website in front of more human eyes. And that’s good marketing!

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Posted in Small Business Internet Marketing | 4 Comments »

Optimizing Your Blog For Business

Wednesday, July 30th, 2008

Charles McKeever has a great post about the importance of optimizing your business blog. I fully agree with his two recommendations. He suggests the following two websites to help you better analyze your blog so that you can make the proper changes and more efficiently optimize your blog’s performance:

  • WebsiteOptimization.com
  • Google’s Website Optimizer

WebsiteOptimization.com is a great resource and all you have to do is type your blog’s URL into the box and the website will return an analysis of your elements. It looks at html, css, graphics, and both internal and external files to see where you can improve your blog’s load time and make it more crawlable. These are important issues. The slower your load time the less likely people will stick around to read and you also get dinged a little bit from the search engines and you’ll have a lower PageRank. So you want to increase your load time as much as possible. It’s a free tool and highly valuable.

Google’s Website Optimizer is probably the best tool on the planet. Through this tool you can test different versions of a web page before it goes live. It allows you to test two versions of the same web page to see which one will perform better for you and increases your ROI. But you can also perform multivariate testing, which allows you to test several elements side by side to see where on the page you’d like to place them. Highly beneficial.

If you are doing any kind of business online and you own a website, I highly recommend both of these tools. They will help you grow your business the smart way – by optimizing it for maximum performance.

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Posted in Blogging for Small Business, SEO for Small Business | No Comments »

Why Older Non-Optimized Sites Rank Better

Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008

Kalena Jordan of Ask Kalena was recently asked this question:

Why do older unoptimized sites sometimes rank better than younger optimized ones?

It’s a good question and I like the way she answered it. I’m going to give my own answer now even though she and I are in agreement.

The search engines have well over 100 criteria that they judge when deciding which sites rank for specific keyword phrases. The algorithms are such that no criteria is weighted so heavily that it dominates all other criteria. On-page optimization is just one ranking factor. Other ranking factors that influence where websites fall in the line up include:

  • Age of the domain
  • Relevance of inbound links to the domain
  • Quality of inbound links to the domain
  • Server neighborhood of the domain
  • Registration history and future of the domain
  • Web page load time
  • Code to text ratio
  • Link attributes and graphic alt tags
  • Many, many more

There is more to website optimization than merely choosing the right keywords and placing them a number of times within your content. Internal links are important, site navigation is important, and there are a ton of off site optimization techniques that are looked at. If an older non-optimized site in your niche is outranking you, it is likely because it is doing enough things right that the one ranking factor (on-page optimization) simply isn’t enough to push it down and push you up.

The good news: Over time, if you keep doing enough of the right things, you should be able to bridge the gap.

Find out the 3 essential elements to ranking a web site well in any search engine.

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Posted in SEO for Small Business | No Comments »