JaxWorks Search Engine Optimization The Woodlands

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Whether it is the print, electronic or cyber media,  good copy can do wonders for a search engine marketing campaign. In this cyber age, the Internet is considered to be the greatest means of communication between people around the globe. It used to be that more people relied on outbound marketing techniques like direct mail, email span, and commercials.  However, that has changed because people have the means to block out these forms of advertising.  When people want products or services now, they look for them either through the web and search engines, or by asking people they know on social media sites.  Web businesses must realize that they need to leverage these forms of inbound marketing in order to compete in today’s business world.

In search engine optimization, good copywriting and web content is a must for online success. Effective content is the one that manages to grab attention, create interest, build desire, and then lead to action (from users). The use of powerful and persuasive words to drive target audiences and generate sales has become the norm with websites nowadays.

Online business owners specially hire content writers to revamp the text matter on their websites, and make it more appealing to Internet surfers. This form of writing is known as SEO copywriting. The main purpose behind this service is reaching out to a target audience,which is comprised of your potential buyers.

The best part about writing for the Web is that it has no time or space constraint. News websites do have the urge to meet deadlines, but in general, almost all websites can simply go on and on, creating additional pages at will. However, to achieve SEO success, they do need to adhere to search engine guidelines even when writing text for web pages.

Being a virtual medium, the ‘emotional connection’ between buyer and seller is at  minimum on the web. Therefore, it is necessary to establish that relationship with the help of the written word, keeping in mind the needs of the user as well as the dissimilarities between two different mindsets.

In simple terms, copywriting for Search Engine Optimization means re-writing the text on a website page in such a way that it appeals to a web surfer, along with being compatible to search engines. Working on this requires specialized skills,especially when it comes to judicious use of keywords. One should remember that  good web page content does not have to be flowery or laden with complex words. Instead, it has to be simple,easily comprehensible, and keyword rich.

Don’t be content if your website is amazingly designed and well-structured, adorned with proper links and easily navigable. All your efforts will go down the drain if your content is not appealing enough and doesn’t manage to hold the user’s attention. At the end of the day, the success of your search engine optimization campaign lies in bringing targeted traffic for the long term. Thus, put in extra efforts and money in building your site’s content and driving the correct targeted traffic to your site rather than the site design alone and see the difference it makes.

SEO is a continuing process and one that should not be ignored.  As you know, or will soon realize,  search engines are the main entry point at which your customers will find your website.  But there are other issues you must be aware of to get the targeted customers that you want.

You may have optimized your webpages and people are coming — but not many.  Why? One of the reasons could be the keywords you are choosing.  Choosing the right keywords take time and effort, and it is an important factor to consider. When choosing keywords you should ask yourself:

1.) What are the exact words people are using to find the product or service that I am offering.  For example: is it refurbished tools, cheap tools, free tools, red tools, ugly tools …?

2.) Are my keywords too general, or overused. If the keywords are too general, you may receive visitors that are not buyers, just browsers. If the keywords are overused, you may be so far down in the search engine rankings that your site will never be seen.

3.) Do I have my keywords or keyword phases in my Title Tag and other metadata, including keywords and description. Your keywords in the metadata  should be relevant to your web copy and should include the keywords you have chosen. If they don’t, you’ve just wasted an important  tool that the Search Engines utilize.  Some people use the meta keywords tag and others say that the search engines no longer use them.  And still others claim that it gives their competition an unfair advantage. I personally will continue to use them, because I don’t believe all the search engines ignore this tag.

Finding the correct keywords is no easy task.  Did you think of asking the people around you what keywords or phases they would use to get to one of your web pages?  You might be surprised — it may not have been a keyword or phase that you even considered.  Another good way to find the keywords you need is to use the Google search-based keywords tool or the SEO Book keyword tool.

Even though a keyword may be popular to the masses, you also must consider if it is targeting your specific market.  Why?  You may begin to get the traffic, but not the specific target market that will buy your products. And that is the bottom line, not so much the popularity of the word, as the quality of the traffic that the keyword brings.  If the keyword is popular, you may find your web page competing with established websites — which translates into poor positioning.  Thus, you could consider other smaller niche words, and still get the ranking you seek.

You will have to experiment with the keywords that you use on your webpage/website, to determine if the keywords you are using is giving you the sales you want.

I have found testing, evaluating, and re-evaluating is the name of the game of SEO. If you keep that in mind, you will begin to see the results you want.  However, once you are in the top ten of the search engine results, do not think your job is done. You must continue to monitor — because the Internet is not a static environment — and people can come online that can slide your web page or website down the line in the search engine rankings.

Please let me know if this helps you with choosing keywords for your webiste. Also, if you like this post, please see below and share this post on Twitter, Facebook, or other social media site!  Thanks.

When you first launch a website, you naturally want all the content crammed into it that you can lay hands on. But if it’s real traffic you’re looking for, consider taking a more patient approach.

Anyone involved in search engine optimization can tell you that organic growth of relevant content is the most successful long term strategy for search engine placement. When people read that, however, their brains toss the part they don’t understand or want to deal with: “organic.” What they see is “successful long term strategy” and “search engine placement.” And that’s where the trouble starts, because it’s the organic growth that does the work.

What do people mean when they talk about organic growth?

Organic growth means slow, steady, continual growth – the way plants and animals grow. When Google ranks your site they look for this pattern of growth to help determine whether your site is “for real.” Think of an informational site you visit a lot, a forum perhaps, or a site like Wikipedia. Those sites did not spring into being overnight, chock full of content and with a hundred links pointing to them. They started as miniatures of themselves, and as people posted messages and articles they got bigger and bigger.

How can this be harnessed to help promote a website?

Timing of updates can be more important than size of updates. A lot of webmasters have a hard time updating their site regularly. They have day jobs, families, and other websites to run. This can lead to a tendency to update sites in large infrequent chunks.

To get the maximum benefit from your updates, do this instead: When you get time to update your site, prepare and arrange your new content so that it can be uploaded in small pieces. Get everything ready to go so that the only task remaining is the actual publish. Then upload each small piece separately, allowing a day or two to pass between each upload.

By doing this your website ends up with the same content, but search engines monitoring how frequently you update will see a pattern of steady growth. You can still write or gather all your content in one fell swoop, just dole it out to your webserver slowly instead of as a single publish. You won’t see immediate results, but give this a month or two and search engines will take notice, to your benefit.

If you were writing a book on Search Engine Optimization linking circa 2001, you almost certainly would have included a chapter on web directories. They used to be the primary way of actively acquiring one-way inbound links, before content syndication, blogs, or the paid link market really took off.

Web Directories and SEO Links: What Went Wrong?

Fast forward a few years, and you’d have to rewrite the chapter on directories and web links. In fact, you would probably downgrade web directories from a chapter to a page or two. In the SEO world, nothing good ever lasts long, and so it is with web directories.

* Traffic. With Google more accurate than ever, there was no more reason to turn to a human-edited list of websites. A directory might get you one or two click-throughs a month–or none at all.

* Redirects. Once directory owners realized their link popularity was valuable, they started hording it. Overnight, many, if not most, directories switched their HTML links to search-engine-invisible redirects.

* Fees. Most directories started charging for inclusion, or at least, for inclusion with a link rather than a redirect. If the fees were reasonable, that would not be so bad. But why would you pay $35 for a link on a PR 3 page with dozens of other links and virtually no content, on a site with dwindling traffic?

* Corruption. In the search engine optimization world, low-hanging fruit quickly goes rotten. Any volunteer-edited commercial category in a link directory runs a very real risk of being taken over by a corrupt SEO.

* Dubious link popularity. Given the notoriety of many directories for selling or inappropriately bestowing links, it’s not hard to imagine a search engine quality control engineer turning the link popularity juice off from these sites.

* “Welcome to our list.” If a directory doesn’t charge a fee to enter, it may ask for payment in the form of an email address. You’d better use your special Hotmail account for that one.

* Anchor text. Many directories do not allow for anchor text to be specified, delighting in providing as little SEO value as possible for the effort involved in submitting to them.

* Time. When link directories really were vital efforts to categorize the web, getting a link in them was as simple as having a good website and letting them know about it. Now that they’ve turned into tightly rationed supplies of link popularity, that kind of responsiveness is out the window.

* Idiosyncratic applications without any promise of timely follow-up.

* Application forms that often empty straight into a black hole:
* No way of checking on the status of submissions.
* Threats of scuttling submissions that are re-submitted when there is no response.

Web Directory Linking Alternatives for the 21st Century

* Reciprocal linking with a twist. If you network with other site owners, you can triangulate link trades so that they are not direct. If you really like each other, you may just link to each others’ sites for the sake of it! It’s worked for me with some high-PR links.

* Blogging. Blog early, blog often, and someone is bound to link to you. It’s the nature of blogging. The fastest way to get inbound links from your blog? Write about other blogs. The more controversial, the better. Post this article on a webmaster blog, and in the same post, reference the blog of someone who thinks link directories are still a good idea! In the blogosphere, arguments mean lots of links.

* Article directories. These are the closest things to link directories, from an SEO standpoint, to emerge in the 21st century. You submit an article to one of these sites (of which there are over 200). In your article you include a link to your site. Article directories are everything link directories used to be: responsive, fair, fast, no-fee, relevant, and quality sources of not only links but information. OK, most of their pages are PR0 and the rest tend to be PR 1-2. But with most article directories, you can choose your exact anchor text for the link–often more valuable than PageRank for non-competitive search phrases. Besides, if most of your links are on PR 4+ pages, how natural will that look?

In short, even if a few web link directories do still have  SEO value, they should no longer be your first stop for one-way inbound links. There are much better, and much less aggravating, linking methods.

This is the second part to Search Engine Optimization Unmasked for CEOs.  Link-building is one of the most important tasks you will do or have done to your site for SEO.  Here is some information about building links for search engine optimization.

LINKS TO YOUR SITE

Now that you know how to tell the search engines what you do, let’s talk about how to convince them you’re important.

Links to your site (or “inbound links”) are the most important factor in ranking. The more links you have to your site from other sites, the better your ranking (related sites generate better rankings).

TIP: Think of the Internet as a big election. All the websites in the world are candidates, and all the links to those websites are votes. The more votes (links) a candidate (website) has, the more important it is, and the higher its ranking.

There are many possible ways to generate links. Some are dubious (like auto-generation software). Others are legitimate, but offer limited results (like asking customers and suppliers to list you on their sites, and adding your site to various business directories). You can experiment with these methods, but I’ve always found the best way to generate inbound links is to write helpful articles and let publishers of newsletters and e-zines use them for free – on the proviso that they link back to your site.

People who publish e-Zines and newsletters are always hungry for quality content. And there are websites out there dedicated to giving them just that. If you submit a well written, relevant, helpful article to one of those sites, you can have thousands of newsletter publishers ready to snap it up. Then you just sit back and watch the links multiply!

TIP: This method is beneficial in other ways too. Readers of your article will see that you know what you’re talking about, and because you’re published, they’ll see you as an authority.

It’s impossible to say how much time you’ll need to spend generating links. You just have to keep at it until you have achieved a high ranking. Even then, you’ll still need to dedicate some ongoing time to the task, otherwise your ranking will drop.

Summary

So to cut a long story short, it comes down to this. If you have a lot of the right keyword phrases, used in real sentences, distributed realistically throughout your site, and a lot of links from other relevant sites, you stand a good chance of being ranked highly.

That’s what you’re paying your providers for. And that’s what Search Engine Optimization is all about.

If you’re like most other CEOs, the term “search engine optimization” will mean very little. Either that or it means expense!  But it doesn’t have to be that way… If you feel like you’re standing in a dark room handing money to strangers to get you in the search engines, then this article is for you.

This is an article written by a business owner for other business owners and CEOs. It explains Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) in layperson’s terms. It won’t make you an expert, but it will give you some insight into what you’re spending your money on, what you should be spending your money on, and just as importantly, what you shouldn’t.

But before launching straight into an explanation of SEO, let’s talk a bit about search engines. Approximately 75%-80% of website traffic comes through search engines. What’s more, research shows that most people don’t look beyond the first 2 pages of search results. This means if your website doesn’t rank in the first 2 pages of the major search engines, it’s only receiving 20% of its rightful traffic… and revenue. (And remember, being ranked number 1 when you search for your company name or web address doesn’t count. You need to rank highly for the words your customers use at search engines.)

The biggest concern for search engine companies like Google, Yahoo, etc., is finding content that will bring them more traffic (and thus more advertising revenue). They do this by using complex algorithms to determine whether a site is useful and should be included in their search results.

This is where SEO comes in.  SEO is the art of ranking in the search engines. Nothing more, nothing less.  Search engine optimization means creating your site such that the search engines consider it useful. The two main weapons in your arsenal are:

•    Keywords
•    Links to your site

KEYWORDS

Figure out what words your customers are looking for on the search engines, and use those words on your site. By frequently using keywords that are important to your customers, you tell the search engines what you do. These keywords are used in your copy and in the code behind the page. Generally speaking, the more you use the keywords, the more relevant you are to searches in that field.

Keywords in Your Copy

The use of keywords in your copy is easy to understand. But it’s not easy to do. You can’t just pepper your site with a meaningless array of words. The trick is using the most important keywords several times without compromising the readability of your copy. It’s a balance between writing for the search engines and writing for your reader.

TIP: If you find this too time consuming, a website copywriter can take care of it for you. And if you know your keywords already, it should cost you no more than normal web copy.

Keywords in Your HTML Code

The use of keywords in your HTML code is harder to understand, but it’s easier to do. There are four main places these keywords are used:

•    Keywords
•    Description
•    Alt
•    Title

TIP: When you hear people talking about meta tags, this is what they’re talking about. To see how meta tags are used in practice, go to Google and pretend you’re a customer. Search for something your customers would search for. e.g. If you’re in car audio, search for “car audio”. Click on the first couple of results to bring up their website. Right-click on the home page, and select “View Source”. You’ll see a whole lot of code. You can ignore most of it. What you’re looking for are the following…

meta name=”KEYWORDS” CONTENT=”keyword 1,keyword 2,keyword 3″

meta name=”DESCRIPTION” CONTENT=”Meaningful description of page using the main keywords”

img src=”filename.gif” alt=”Meaningful description of picture using the main keywords”

<title>The title of the page using the main keywords</title>

Take a look at the way the creators of the site have used keywords in these areas, and follow their lead. You already know they’re ranked highly, so chances are they’ve done a good job.

Enough to think about for today.  Tomorrow we’ll go on to link-building!

It is indispensable to your service company to get the attention of major search engines as well such Google, Yahoo, Bing, and others. In order to get high rankings you should have well-optimized content. SEO copywriting is a special technique that allows search engines to get more high rankings for your web site. This method by which your web site is found by major search engines is one of the most effective search engine optimization technique as it is most frequently used by the visitors of your web site. Moreover, it is one of the most cost-effective methods. Online advertisement is expensive and most of the time your potential client may not even pay attention to it. You should bear in mind what type of business you provide as well as what type of clients you intend to target. That is why it is very important to develop effective marketing strategy with the your search engine optimization process. You or your SEO company should know the keywords by which your web site is found by your visitors. Needless to say,  the web site of a dentis is found by different keywords than the site of a law firm.

This SEO technique allows your site to be ranked higher and will increase free traffic on your web site. In writing SEO content copy, it is important to remember that one should not attempt to write a completely new web copy each time.  Rather,  one should concentrate on the revising and re-editing of content written by you or your Search Engine Optimization firm. Remember that final product should be “suitable for reading” both by search engines and people. The survival of many web sites depends on the traffic received by major search engines but you want your customers to be able to read and understand the web copy as wells. Once your text ha been written and  submitted, the search engines start looking for relevant words. The pages of your web site will be ranked higher if more relevant keywords appear in the content of your web site, as long as you don’t spam  your page with keywords! Finally, try either to read about this process or hire some professional who can handle this task for you. Remember that if the SEO process is performed incorrectly it might ruin rather than help your business.

You don’t have to be a SEO expert to make a fortune on the web. Search engine optimization is not complicated at all. It may be exhausting and annoying. You may get frustrated. But it is easy if you know the basic rules. Read the following SEO Dos and Don’ts and start making money.

SEO Dos :

1. Stay natural – Search engines like natural behavior. Remember this whenever you get a tempting proposal to pay for software that will boost your search engine optimization and get you to the top search engine ranks.

2. Links, Links, Links – The online world equivalent to: “Location, location, location” in real estate. Links are the foundation stones of your SEO strategy. The quantity and quality of the links pointing to your site are the main criteria that affect your search engine ranking. Never stop creating new links to your site using techniques like links exchanging, articles submitting, affiliate marketing, link buying etc.

3. Page and site optimization – Remember, Search Engines like what human like. Optimize your site according to valuable keywords you have researched.   Make the navigation on your site easy and clear.

4. Automate and delegate – Do not work on your own – use software to automate processes and outsource some of the search engine optimization to others.

SEO Don’ts:

1. Do not shoot and forget – Search engine optimization is an ongoing task. You will not see results in a day or in a month. Do not work on one site or do too much too fast. In other words, add links and pages to your site gradually.  Remember, you want this to look natural!

2. Do not optimize only for the best search engine – Google is not the only search engine and all search engine change their ranking algorithms every once in a while. Do your best to get your site in a high place in at least three of the best search engines.

Now that you have read the SEO Dos and Don’ts, all there is to do is work on your sites’ search engine optimization. It may take time but it sure worth it to drive customers to your site. Good luck.

Directories should play a major role in your search engine optimization efforts (well, at least the big and important ones) for the following reasons:

• Listings within major directories provide “context” to search engines. For example, if your web site is listed in the Open Directory Project under the category Pets -> Weird Pets -> Blue Cats, search engines will assume your web site has something to do with blue cats. Your web site and pages will be indexed faster and might have a better ranking in search results for specific terms (in this case, “blue cats”).
• Major directories (such as Yahoo! Directory, ODP, Jayde etc.) have high page ranks and as long as you obtain a non-reciprocal listing from them, paid or unpaid, your page rank will benefit greatly.
• Major directories are often replicated by other web sites (think of ODP, with hundreds of copies) which means that a listing somewhere in such a major directory will cause listings in all replica sites, contributing towards your link popularity efforts and boosting page ranks.
• The ODP (Open Directory Project) feeds results to Google, AOL, AltaVista, Lycos, Netscape – once again, a presence in ODP can get you quite far.

As with most good things in life, you need to make efforts to get into quality directories. Although detailed instructions on how to submit your web sites are always provided by the directories, there are certain aspects to consider before you start hunting for directories and submit your web sites:

• Start with Yahoo! Directory and the Open Directory Project: being listed in the two of them is worth more than being listed in all other directories together! You will find soon enough that, unfortunately, being listed in these two is the hardest thing to do: Yahoo requires a $299 annual fee for regular web sites (only non-commercial sites qualify for a free listing) and $600 for adult sites, while ODP is free but you need A LOT of luck to make your way into it. ODP is so large yet is strictly human edited, which means the waiting time for a listing can extend to even years! Make your search engine optimization duty to submit your web site, but don’t get your hopes too high.
• Religiously follow the submission guidelines provided by directories: read them as many times as you need to make sure you will not upset its editors by submitting your site the wrong way, with inaccuracies, the wrong description style, or to the wrong category.
• Try to find niche directories if your web site’s content is suitable for that. For example, if your web site covers Marketing topics, focus your efforts into finding a Marketing-only directory (such as MarketingWHO.com) and submit your site there: search engines love links from sites relevant to yours!

You will probably come across many directories with paid inclusions: use your common sense to appreciate if it’s worth it or not. A good criteria is to check their Google Page Rank: if it’s at least 3 levels higher than your site’s Page Rank, it’s probably worth spending the money for the inclusion fee. However, do look for directories with a flat, one-time fee rather than recurring monthly or annual fees: you’ll end up spending less money!

In the end, remember a simple rule: if it’s too easy to get into a directory, it’s probably not worth the effort to get into it!

This is a second part to the search engine optimization rules I wrote about yesterday.  I will cover the remaining 5 areas that relate to solid Search Engine Rankings for particular number of key phrases. Again, this will apply to any type of website, on any industry you are targeting.
Lets review the last 5 areas:

Provide a road map of your web site, and search engines will follow it.
Called the “sitemap”, this very simple page contains links to every page on a web site and serves one very important purpose. That is to get your sub pages crawled, and into a search engine’s index.

Search Engines look for the robots.txt file, so make sure you have it.
As its name implies, this is a text file that tells robots what to and what not to index. Its content consists of so-called records. Only mention files and directories that you don’t want to be indexed. All other files will be indexed normally if they are linked on your site. Having a proper robots.txt file gives your pages the rankings they deserve. If search engines know what to do with them, then they can give them good ranking.

Submit your site to related categories in niche directories.
Internet directories have become very important because they represent an easy path for inbound links creation. Now, when you submit your site to related categories in your industry you get that extra link factor, quality. Links from these categories can have a very positive effect on the search engine rankings of your web site.

Writing articles about your site, a great way to get new content.
This will help you get good positioning on search engines and quality incoming links as well. Always keep your articles as informative as possible. Other web sites will link back to your articles if you do. Write about the topics that your visitors are interested in, and don’t forget to send them to syndicate sites. They will in turn offer them to others. Just make sure that you always have a link back to your web site so that all sites who publish your article will automatically link to you.

Become an authority in your field. Visit relevant forums and blogs.
Join forums and blogs that are relevant to your industry. Use your expertise as a site owner in your industry to give information and advice. Of course, put your URL into the signature of your posts. Being the authority is simply knowing your industry, and giving people the information they need to trust you and your site.