The Vizion Search Engine Optimization Blog
- 2009Oct16Search Engine Optimization Tip 34: Find the Best Page for Your Keyword
This is Search Engine Optimization tip number 34 in our continuing series of Search Engine Optimization tips. All of these search engine optimization tips are meant to be specific in nature, they will not take that long to review, and are directly to the point. This search engine optimization tip has to do with finding the best page on your web site for your keyword or keyword phrase.
Once you have built links to your web site’s home page, it is important to start getting links to the other web pages on your web site. Since we traditionally focus on only one keyword or keyword phrase per web page, we need to get links to the internal or “deep” web pages on our web site. These links to our internal pages need to be from other web sites as well as from the home page. When you choose which pages you want to link to from your home page, those are going to be the pages that you have optimized for your main keywords.
But what if you have a very large web site (or even one that has more than 30 pages)? You know that there are certain [...]
- 2009Oct14How to View Your Web Page as Googlebot
Have you ever thought that it would be helpful and “really cool” to be able to transform yourself into a bot? Well, maybe not. But the next best thing for us webmasters and web site owners is to use a tool to see exactly how Google sees your web page. Why? There may be something on your web page(s) that you need to fix (or want to fix) on your site. Something that you didn’t realize that Google’s search engine spider, Googlebot, sees that you weren’t aware that they were seeing.
When it comes to search engine optimization, it’s important to note that there are both “on site” and “off site” factors that can influence your search engine rankings. Nowadays a lot of us are focused on building links, getting noticed on the social media web sites, and bringing in more traffic and sales: but we fail to take a deep hard look at what we have on our own web pages that might be causing a search engine to not “like” the page for some reason. And I’ve seen cases where it’s just one simple change on a web page (something that you may have never thought of) that makes [...]
- 2009Oct125 Great Places to Get Ideas for a Blog Post
As you may or may not know, I love to write, and I especially love to write meaningful, helpful, newsworthy, and controversial blog posts. While all of these types of blog posts will be something that your readers will most likely want to read and enjoy, there are times where we all suffer from “blogger brain freeze”, “writer’s block”, or whatever you want to call it. You know that you want to write a blog post, or you have been tasked by your boss to write a blog post: but you just don’t know where to start looking for ideas.In this example, I am going to look for ideas for a real estate blog post. Certainly, you could use any other phrase or industry phrase. Or, even your most popular keyword phrase or a keyword phrase that you want to “rank for” in the search engine results. Here are five places to look for blog post ideas.
1. Your Website Stats – Look at your website statistics from the last month. Look at the keyword phrases that people are using to find your web site. In this case, pay particular [...]
- 2009Oct9Search Engine Optimization Tip 33: Find Deep Links to a Web Site
This is SEO tip number 33 in our continuing series of Search Engine Optimization tips. All of these search engine optimization tips are meant to be specific in nature, they will not take that long to review, and are directly to the point. This search engine optimization tip has to do with finding deep links to a web site using Yahoo.
When searching for links to a web site, it is important to go to Yahoo! and search there. Google, on purpose, does not show you all the links that they know about to a web site. Bing.com also does not choose to show us links to web sites (although they used to). Yahoo! is currently the only search engine of the top 3 major search engines that is perfectly happy with showing us all of the links that they know about a web site.
The search operator you’ll want to use at Yahoo! (this only works at Yahoo!, by the way) is the linkdomain: search. So, when at Yahoo!, search for this:
linkdomain:vizioninteractive.com -site:vizioninteractive.com
Where ‘vizioninteractive.com’ is the domain name that you want to find the links for; we [...]
- 2009Oct8Search Engine Optimization Tip 32: Focus on Keywords that Convert
This is SEO tip number 32 in our continuing series of Search Engine Optimization tips. All of these search engine optimization tips are meant to be specific in nature, they will not take that long to review, and are directly to the point. This search engine optimization tip has to do with your what I would call your best keywords and focusing your SEO efforts on those keyword phrases.
How do you determine which keywords are you best keywords? Good question. I have often thought of that myself, and I did a little research to figure out exactly which keywords are the best keywords for a website owner to focus their efforts on promoting. To do that, I turned to Google Analytics and started looking at the keywords that are converting into sales (or inquiries) on the website.
Once you log into Google Analytics, make sure that you have Goals set up. To do that, look at this help topic about setting up goals. If you don’t think you can set up any goals for your web site, think again: you might want to set one up for your [...]
- 2009Oct7Search Engine Optimization Tip 31: Use SEO Friendly URLs
This is SEO tip number 31 in Vizion Interactive’s continuing series of Search Engine Optimization tips. All our search engine optimization tips are meant to be specific in nature, they will not take that long to review, and are directly to the point. This search engine optimization tip has to do with using URLs that I like to call “SEO Friendly”.
What is an “SEO Friendly” URL? A URL (which stands for Universal Resource Locator) is considered to be “search engine optimization friendly” when it does not extra ‘characters’ in it. Essentially, by looking at the URL, you can tell what might be located there: because the website owner uses keywords to describe what will be found on the page. Let’s look at an example of an un-friendly URL:
http://www.vizioninteractive.com/?p=310
In case above, if someone saw that URL in a search result they wouldn’t know what they’re going to get when they click on the link. The URL doesn’t tell you what you’re going to “see” or what’s on the page. Let’s take that same page on a website and turn it into a search engine friendly URL like this:
http://www.vizioninteractive.com/seo-tip-friendly-urls/
In the case above, by looking at the URL, you would [...]
- 2009Oct5Search Engine Optimization Tip 30: Promote Those Who Link To You
Search Engine Optimization can be confusing at times. Therefore, we recently started compiling a series of search engine optimization tips. This is tip number 30 in the series. Each search engine optimization tip is generally very specific, should not take a long time to fix or perform, and is rather “short and sweet” and directly to the point. For search engine optimization tip 30, let’s talk a little bit about promoting those who link to you.By now, you should have Google Alerts and Yahoo! Alerts set up for your company name, your URL, and keywords associated with your company, your brand, and your products. Setting up these types of alerts will keep you abreast of what’s going on online with your brand, your website, and your keywords (you’re emailed if something new comes up that matches your alert). If your web site is mentioned or you are notified by a Google Alert that you have a new link, then it’s important to take a look at it. And, if that link is a link from a blog, a news source, or another web site, then you [...]
- 2009Oct1Effective SEO! Great, You’re Halfway There!
Too often I hear people obsess with having top ten if not number one rankings for what they consider to be their top terms. The fact that makes me want to pull my hair out is that no matter where they rank they will never convert visitors if their site is not geared towards these terms. The following tips will hopefully show you how your site visitors digest your content and how you can make turn these visitors into customers
- 2009Sep25Universal Search and Local Search: Two Worlds Coming Together
Over the past two years we have steadily watched Google organic search results change. These changes provided local search results for Google Maps local listings but also for news, images, books, products and video, or what is known as blended or universal search.
- 2009Sep25How to Claim Your Website’s Google Sidewiki
As you may have heard, Google has recently introduced Google Sidewiki, as an add-on to the Google Toolbar. Google’s Sidewiki is an option that allows anyone to make comments on any website, and those comments can be seen by anyone who has the Google Toolbar with Sidewiki installed (and running) in their web browser. The Google Sidewiki is explained further here. It is important to know that as a website owner you can claim your Google Sidewiki space: and it will always appear on top of the comments. Here is how to claim your website’s Google Sidewiki.
Why Claim Your Google Sidewiki
I think it is very important to claim your website’s Google Sidewiki as the website owner because the comments you make are going to be displayed at the top of the list of comments. You can use this space to advertise your website, talk to your users, and generally tell them about what they will find on your website: and by doing this you can point out useful features or just give them a kind “hello” and a “thanks for visiting” type of comment. Certainly you can also use this as a way to point [...]
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