Linked Up Design

Far the last few years I have been dabbling in this subject of SEO/SEM. Some of my sites have been successful and others have been not so successful. The fact of the matter is that I have one client that has  a simple landing page which has his phone number, email and a contact form on it and he is getting several 1000 hits a week yet I have another site that I build this very elaborate meta system using PHP, made the name products of what the page is selling in to the URL, key words, <H> tags all over the place, alt and title in all of the pictures etc and they are getting maybe, maybe 10 hits a week.

Now here is the funny comparison, the first website I mentioned is in a huge and very competitive keyword category on the internet and the other one is in a very lite category so you would think that the latter of the two would be doing better…right? It just brings me back to the first lesson about SEO/SEM, “There are no guarantees!”.

To my point, I had a conference call this week with an SEO & Marketing specialist who was going over a few of our pages and in this 45 minute conversation, the one thing that he said to that really made any sense to me was this, “Keep It Simple”, meaning that we were putting in way too much effort in to our Titles, Descriptions and Keywords. He pointed out that we were setting up the metas according to our key words on the pages and <h> tags but we were over doing it, we were putting in too much information.

Example of this: We are selling Widgets and our company is XYZ Company Inc. You would have seen in the title Widget 123 – XYZ Company Inc, meta description would have had a long write up about the product and company while the key words would have been broken down with all versions of the product name and company name.

Now keeping in mind of “Keep it simple” you would see a title like: “Widget 123 Black Size 2″, the description would “Widget 123 Black size 2 as well as various other sizes and colors, 10 guarantee “.

The point I realized mainly with the SEO of this site is that we are not selling the company, we are not drawing people through Google searches to our site because of our name, we need to set up the metas to match the keywords so it is really our products that draw people to the site through their search.

Do your keyword research and Keep It Simple!!

In earlier articles I pointed out that one of the most important points of SEO is time! SEO work is something that takes time to get results. Far too many times I received calls from people that are looking to get their rankings up to #1 in Google and they want it right now. So I explain that it takes time to build up a site to a point where it can do so and they either hang up or don’t return my email or they become a client.

I have found some recent articles that you could say support my opening statement and here they are:

http://www.ijpweb.com/100-ways-help-build-traffic/

http://www.wilsonweb.com/articles/checklist.htm

http://netvestor.blogspot.com/2007/12/top-underestimated-methods-of-quality.html

http://www.prlog.org/

The last one is more a gift to you. This is a site that is an account for press releases as well as a good backlink to your site.

Just remember that anyone that guarantees that you will be #1 on any of the search engines out there is really a fool. A good SEO will go over how things work with doing SEO work on your site, how they will submit your site to the strongest search engines, set you up with local directories as well as directories with in your business arena, create site maps both for your site and ones that Google, Yahoo and Bing can read as well as setting up your business in the Social Media Marketing tools that will work for you.

I read a great article this morning about Google Caffeine. When I first saw this I thought that Starbucks and Google got together and made up a new drink for us web designers that would make it so we did not need to sleep any more so we can spend more of our time designing and less time sleeping! Well I was wrong about that.

Google Caffeine is a new search engine network that Google is going to be launching after the first of the year. I would suggest that you read the article yourself for more information about what Google is doing.

A few key points that I saw in this article that is very important for all of us. First was the point about when Google got started in 1998. One of their key ideas was to make it easier for small and medium sized companies to be able to be found in the search engines. At that point, the bigger companies with what seems like a bottomless pit of money for advertising were basically able to buy their way to the top which is still the same today but Google set up their search engine to rank sites based on their keywords, description, title, content, hits, etc, etc! One thing that Google did that made it easier for the big business to be able to jack up their page ranking was with back links. The more back links, the higher the ranking of a site. So of course companies popped up that made programs to build up back links and so the big companies were able to take over the rankings again.

Well Google Caffeine is going to try and change this by going back to the basics and start to rank sites based on the basics as well as how easily sites load to the browsers and now the amount of social bookmarks a site has. Well what is a social bookmark, this is your links to social media sites like, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Digg, etc. Basically Google has seen the light with regards to the latest web trend, our social media market which really has taken off over the last few years. Hell, you are reading this blog, aren’t you and I have a crap load of links to my and my clients sites so the proof is in the pudding here.

Unfortunately this concept of Google will be short lived. Social Media Marketing is a hot trend and if you take a good look at the multinational companies, you will see more and more on their sites, print and TV advertising “Follow us on:“.  These companies will start to co-op the social media market which will then give them the edge in the market again within a year or so. You will also see that the social media big boys will really be able to capitalize on this trend which means bigger buck in their pockets and less for the little guys out there. At least for now, all is good and those who are catching up to this social media marketing gravy train will be able to make a few bucks!!

Over the past few months I have spoken to a few clients with regards to taking care of their site once I have building it for them especially those that I did SEO work for. A few did not understand why it was that you need to keep updating your site in order to keep it up in the rankings.

The reason a site constantly needs attention is because the web spiders of the site basically pass over your site once they have detected it so there is no reason for them to crawl through your code any more. Spiders spend there time looking for new things to update their servers with so if your site has been up for a few months you are basically going to be ignored and newer sites or updated sites will start to move up in the rankings.

Think of it like a car dealer. You drive by it and see shinny new cars in the front lot, some catch your eye and some don’t, but you still notice the cars. Say 4 months later, after you have driven by the lot a few times and there is nothing new about the lot and the cars are getting dirtier and dirtier because no one is taking care of them. Then a new car lot opens right next to them and their cars are all shinny and new looking, this gets your attention and you start to pay attention to this new lot. Your site is no different and if you do not take of the site, it will start to drop in ranking.

Now I am not suggesting that you need to redesign your site every few month. What I am suggesting is that you change something. Update a few pictures, if you have a new hire you can add them to the about us or you have some major news about the company, you can add a link, do something to keep the spiders interested in your site.

Well it has been a few weeks now since I finished my site and I am starting to see some results with regards to the SEO work that I did on it. One of the main things that I have been working on is pushing up the sites ranking in my local area. This is being done more as an experiment to see if the higher SEO score is really paying off with regards to search engine rankings.

Well here are the results:

Google:

• First Page when you keyword search SEO Rockaway NJ
• First Page when you keyword search Search Engine Optimization Rockaway NJ
• First Page when you keyword search Website Design Rockaway NJ but this one is different and will explain later

Yahoo:

• First Page when you keyword search SEO Rockaway NJ
• First Page when you keyword search Search Engine Optimization Rockaway NJ
• First Page when you keyword search Web Design Rockaway NJ

Bing:

• First Page when you keyword search SEO Rockaway NJ
• First Page when you keyword search Search Engine Optimization Rockaway NJ
• First Page when you keyword search Web Design Rockaway NJ

I first want to stress that I really don’t see a whole lot of website design companies in this area so this is not like competing in Manhattan but I would still say that these are good results considering that it has only been a few weeks. What are the likeliness that someone is going to type these keywords, I really don’t know considering the size of this area but when I start to see some real results I will let you know.

Second thing here is the use of directories and their effectiveness with SEO. In the section on Google above, I mentioned that I would explain this and here are the results. There was a page one ranking but this ranking was part of the directory for the area through Google. What was done was I went to Google and did a search for local directories which lead to Google’s Local Business Center. Using my Google account I was able to set up my business in a local directory hence giving it the ranking mentioned about. Why do this? Other then the obvious reason that it put me on the first page, first line so to speak, it is also creating back links for the site. This is something that I am going to spend some time working with in the future and will be writing about it more later. From there I have found several other directories that are free out there on the internet that I have signed up for and place my site on to as well as my clients.

Again, this is a work in progress. SEO work takes months to bit because of the sheer size of the internet and the real results will be how many clients I get from my site. I also do not want to limit myself to the town I live in so future work will be done on directories for the County and the State.