Quick and Clean SEO - Part 2

In Part I of this article series, we discussed the SEO advantages of using keywords in your headlines. It’s one of the easiest and quickest methods to land a few extra points with the search engines. In Part II, we’ll reveal a couple more quick and easy methods of getting friendly with the search engines.

Bold or Italicize Keywords Throughout a Page

Bolding or italicizing keywords throughout a webpage will increase the relevance a search engine gives those specific keywords. The preferred method of bolding keywords is with STRONG tags, while italicizing should be done with EM (which is short for “emphasis”) tags:

Optimize for Less Popular Keywords and Phrases

Getting top ranking for the key phrase “hiking boots” can be tough because it’s a very popular term with a lot of competition. It can be done, but would require a lot of time and effort. And since this article is about speed and simplicity, we won’t discuss what would go into a campaign to get ranked for such a popular term.

For quicker and easier ranking, go after more specific, less competitive key phrases. For example, instead of “hiking boots” try combining the term with brand names, designs, material used, manufacturing process, and so forth:

You get the idea. While you won’t get as much traffic as a similar rank for a more popular phrase, you will get ranked much easier and faster. The traffic you get will also be more highly targeted and more likely to convert into a sale.

Keep the Code Clean

Search engines are interested in useful content on your webpages, not your sweet JavaScript or CSS skills. You can clean things up a bit by linking to script and CSS files from a separate location rather than including it in the same file as the rest of the webpage.

Clean code also makes it much easier for the search engines to scan your page and figure out what it’s all about.

The tactics that we’ve discussed in these articles can be very easily and quickly implemented into just about any website. Keep in mind, however, that you don’t want to get carried away by cramming a page full of keyword-stuffed headlines, bolding and italicizing half your page, or overusing a particular key phrase so much that nothing on your webpage makes sense.

Search engines are savvy enough to spot such meager attempts to get ranked, and most will penalize you for doing so. Also, don’t forget who you’re target market is… people. Stuffing a webpage full of keywords might help you get ranked higher (at least temporarily), but if a visitor can’t make sense of it, they’ll just leave your website anyway and your efforts will have been wasted.

So remember to keep it clean, keep it simple, and you’ll be happy with the results.

Quick and Clean SEO - Part 1

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a complex science, resulting in consultants that get away with charging thousands of dollars per month for just a few hours of consultation. The really good ones can charge tens of thousands per month and have no shortage of clients begging them for their help.

That some companies are willing to spend so much shows you just how important SEO is for an online business. A vital part of any internet marketer’s repertoire, properly managed SEO can get you listed at the top of every major search engine for the keywords of your choosing. For some keywords, being listed at the top can mean a difference of millions of dollars in revenue.

On the other hand, bad SEO can result in low rankings or even get you banned from the search engines. Getting blacklisted is enough to put some companies completely out of business.

Not everybody has the skills necessary to implement proper SEO. Good SEO means staying on top of things; getting to know industry insiders and constant vigilant testing of the search engines as you watch for changes in ranking algorithms.

Even for somebody that has the skills, running a business may take up all their time. So what is a busy business owner to do? The best solution is to hire somebody to do the work for you. While individual consultants charge a premium, you can often get similar results for a much lower cost from internet marketing firms such as OrangeSoda.

In the meantime, here are some quick, yet clean, SEO techniques that you can implement immediately to improve your search engine rankings.

Use Keywords in Headlines

Search engines figure that if something is in a headline, it must be important. Sub-headlines are also considered important, but to a lesser degree.

A headline is recognized as such with the following HTML headline tags:

Headline tags go all the way down to level six (H6) with H1 being the largest headline, and thus receiving the highest importance. If you want to optimize a page for the term “hiking boots”, then you should have that term between H1 tags.

If using a term in a sub-headline (H2, H3, and lower), then including those same keywords in a bulleted list immediately after will help give those keywords the same level of importance as keywords in a main (H1) headline.

In Part II of this article, we’ll discuss more easy SEO strategies.

Link Building, Link Exchanges, and Ad Buys – What’s the Difference?

Part I: Link Exchanges

The word is out: having inbound links to your site is good. But what types of links are the best, and what is the difference between an ad buy, link exchange, and one-way link building?

Each linking method has its purpose. Which one you want to focus on depends largely on your end goal. Are you looking to simply get a quick increase in traffic, increase brand visibility, or improve your search engine rankings?

Link Exchanges

A link exchange is the practice of linking to another website in exchange for a link on that site to yours. For a time, this was a good way to increase your search engine rankings because search engines considered the number of links to your site as an important indicator of your site’s overall importance.

Webmasters would often create a links page where they would place their link exchange links, resulting many times in individual webpages containing hundreds, even thousands of links. The web also saw a propagation of “link farms” where a group of webpages all link to the other webpages within the group.

Link farms today are considered by most search engines to be a form of spam against search engine indexes. Spamming a search engine index in this manner often results in a site being penalized, lowering its search engine ranking or even getting black listed.

Link exchanges still have their place however. Two websites with complimentary services may agree to a link exchange where each site drives traffic to the other. When doing a link exchange, you always want to be wary that the number of outgoing links on any particular page does not get too high; otherwise a search engine may mistake your page for a link farm.

Link exchanges generally do not improve search engine ranking because search engines don’t consider a two-way link to be a good indicator of a site’s importance.

Part II: Ad Buys and Link Building

Ad Buys

An ad buy involves purchasing a link on a specific page, in a specific location. The advantage of this is that you have control over where and how your link appears. Placing links to your site from a website that a search engine considers to be important can give your site a boost in its search engine rankings.

Furthermore, having a link on a high-traffic site will result in referral traffic from that site.

Link Building

Link building is the process of placing one-way links to your site from other sites. Since search engines give a lot of weight to one-way links, this is a very effective method of increasing search engine rankings.

An understanding of link analysis is an important part of effective link building. Link analysis is what search engines do to determine the importance of a particular site in a particular category based on the links that point to it. The text contained around a link, as well as the text that is included as part of a link, are analyzed to determine this.

For example, the following text with a link will increase the target site’s importance for the keyphrase “green dog hair” slightly:

However, much more weight is given to a link that includes the keyphrase within the linking text:

The main purpose of link building is to create many one-way links with a specific keyphrase in the link, thereby increasing the target site’s search engine ranking. The more one-way inbound links there are, the more important a search engine will consider your site to be in a particular subject. If you have enough links, then the search engine will assume that you are an authority on the subject and rank your site accordingly.

Another part of link analysis, though to a much smaller extent than the number of links, is analyzing where the link is coming from. If a site that is considered to be an authority links to your site, then it is assumed that you have some authority on the matter as well. However, since there are usually so few sites that are considered to be authoritative, having a large number of inbound links is still considered far more important that the referring site’s authority.

The purpose of link building, then, is not to increase referral traffic from related websites (though this will usually happen as a side effect), but to increase your search engine ranking by showing them that you are an authority on a particular subject.

Giving Your Site an SEO Boost

Search engine optimization (SEO) is nearly as much an art as it is a science. The complexities of SEO require the services of experts in order to keep up. However, there are several things that can be done to give your website a quick SEO boost, and potentially improve your search engine rankings.

Two things that can be done relatively easily and quickly are creating content and increasing your link popularity. Both of these items are vital and very important parts of SEO. Doing just these two things virtually guarantees a boost in search engine rankings.

Creating Content

This is mostly done by writing articles that focus on the key phrases you are trying to optimize for. Trying to improve your ranking for the key phrase “hiking boots”? Start writing articles about them.

If you’re a retail store that sells hiking boots, then articles that review different brands of hiking boots, explain what to look for in a good hiking boot, a boot fitting guide, and so forth are perfect opportunities to boost your site’s relevance in the eyes of the search engines.

Some additional SEO tactics you can implement as you write these articles is linking out to authoritative sites (sites with a high Google Page Rank), increasing usability by linking to other related pages on your site, and making sure all your code is W3C compliant and that there are no broken links.

Be sure to include your chosen keywords and phrases in the webpage title, headline, and throughout the document. Bolding your keywords helps as well.

Increasing Link Popularity

Link popularity is a score based on the number of inbound links to your site. Though all inbound links count toward your link popularity score, certain types of links carry more weight than others.

One-way links carry the most importance, while two-way (you link to me and I’ll link to you) links are given relatively low importance. Additionally, any incoming links from a page the search engines consider to be a “link farm” (a page with a very high number of outgoing links) doesn’t help your cause much, and in fact can hurt your ranking.

Additionally, a one way link from a site considered to be an “authority” on a particular subject is given a bit more weight than a link from a less authoritative site. However, quantity of links is still more important than who they come from.

So how do you get people to link to you? Well, the best way is still to have great content that is worth linking to. If you have good content, other sites will naturally want to link to you without you even asking.

However, since you’ve written all those great articles (from following the advice in the previous section) offering redistribution rights on those articles is a great way to increase inbound links. The key is to require that anybody who reprints your article include all links that you’ve inserted, and always be sure to include a link back to your website in the article’s signature.