What website owner wouldn’t want this? I’ve been working with small and medium-sized businesses to increase internet profits for the last eight years, and the basic theory behind a successful website hasn’t really changed in all that time. Sure, the search engines change their algorithms, but if you follow some easy guidelines, your site will always be ahead of the curve.
This process of increasing natural web site rankings is called search engine optimization (SEO) and it is a multi-step continual process. It’s not cheating; it’s helping search engines do their job more efficiently, and like anything worthwhile, it takes a lot of time and patience. People often get discouraged in the process. Don’t worry! Search engine optimization pays for itself in increased revenue. It is worth the time and trouble. Here are some tips to get you started:

1. Your Domain Name: Are All the Good Ones Already Taken?

If you are just starting out, choose a domain name (URL) for your site which incorporates some of the words you think people will use to search for you. There are still lots of profitable domains available, and with some creative forethought I know you can come up with a great domain. There are many tools to research domain names, including http://www.checkdomain.com/. As soon as you get your domain, concentrate on building and putting up the home page right away. Submit the home page to Google and the Open Directory (that’s DMOZ.ORG). Directory listings are difficult to change, so it’s important to get your site listed in the right spot. Read the information on how to suggest a site or add a site before you submit. The sooner your domain is submitted to Google the shorter the time your site will be in the Google “sandbox”. Google places new domains into a sandbox until other sites begin to link to the domain (referring it) and legitimizing the business.

2. Get Some Referrals From Other Websites!

Search engines are basically programs, and they index your site without human assistance. So after Google reads through your site, it also checks to see if other websites have referred or recommended it by linking to it. It reads the link text and uses that to determine how to index your site. Try to get as many web sites to link to your web site as you can. Think of links from other sites as referrals. You wouldn’t want a referral from a “shady business”, and you don’t want a link from a “shady” website. Build up your internet network in the same way you network your business.

3. How are People Really Searching?

You know your business, but do you really know how other people refer to your services or products? You can see what people are actually searching for, (and this will help you to find the optimal search words for your site,) by using tools like Google’s Adwords Keyword Suggestions (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal?defaultView=2 ), Keyword Discovery Keyword Research Tool (http://www.keyworddiscovery.com ), and Word Tracker (www.wordtracker.com ). Choose two or three specialized phrases for each page of your site of three to four words. Sometimes “spying on your competitors” is an easy way to pick up good keyword phrase ideas. Here are two really great sites for “spying on your competitors”: www.seodigger.com which shows the search words the site ranks on Google for, and www.golexa.com which gives you a nice report on the SEO work they have done to their site.

4. Make it Text!

Search engines read text…not pictures. Write at least 250 words of visible text copy (not buttons, pictures or graphics) based on your chosen phrases at or near the top of each page. Use each search word phrase numerous times (between 3 and 7) within your copy for best results.

5. Titles and Tags (Not Just for Auto Sites!) Use Your Keywords

Make sure every page of your site has a search word-rich Title tag of about 60 characters. HTML title tags are critical because they’re given a lot of weight with all of the search engines. Put your search words into this tag, and if possible, also put the search words into the actual file name of that HTML page. Add your company name to the end of this tag, if you need to use it. Create a Meta Description tag that uses your search words and also describes your site. The information in this tag often appears under your Title in the search engine results pages, and should be about 150 characters. The Meta Keyword tag is not important to Google, but it doesn’t hurt to have it, and it should not exceed 1000 characters. Use your search words all over your pages. Things like headlines, image alt tags, header tags <H1><H2>, etc.), links from other pages, keywords in file names, and keywords in hyperlinks can cumulatively boost search engine rankings. Use any or all of these where they make sense for your site.

6. Double Check!

Your site is like a salesman. You need to give it all the tools and testing to make a great impression. Make sure your site is error-free and compatible with all browsers. Check your site here: http://www.anybrowser.com/siteviewer.html Stay away from graphics that take a long time to load and excessive flash animation. http://www.netmechanic.com/products/HTML_Toolbox_FreeSample.shtml is a good free tool to check the pages of your site.

Have patience. Improving your rankings take time. Once your site is added to a search engine or directory, its ranking may start out low and then slowly work its way up the ladder.

Susan McCrossin is a principle with www.painternetmarketing.com She would be happy to talk with you about your internet marketing questions and needs.

Much like any HTML document, there are certain areas on non-HTML documents that help search engines decide what search phrases the document should rank for.

If no title and meta description is specified, search engines will use the following areas to determine the document’s key phrases:

• The document title – usually stored in the file properties
• The first 60 characters of the document’s text
• The file name of the document
• Text in the document that was formatted in a larger font

Thankfully, search engines usually look for metadata like title, author and keywords first, so if you can add your search phrases and compelling titles and descriptions in these areas, it will greatly help in SEO.

In Microsoft Office applications and Adobe Acrobat, metadata such as Title, Author, and Keywords can be defined. Under File > Properties or File > Document Properties you will be able to specify these fields.

Search engines also look at the actual content in the document for additions to their indexes. Therefore it is important to follow normal HTML SEO guidelines for writing the content in these documents. You should also add normal internal linking with these documents too. For instance, link to other pages on the site from these documents, and link to these documents from other pages on the site, using the search phrases you want to rank for in the links.

Google actually helps you to see how these documents will be indexed by providing the “View as HTML” link. You can see how Google reads and indexes these documents and get a good idea of the things you need to add to your documents as well.

Since most of these non-HTML files are PDF documents, let’s take a closer look at the options offered by Adobe Acrobat for SEO.

In the File menu, select Properties. Look for the description tab and notice that you have the option of filling out the following fields: File, Title, Author, Subject, and Keywords. Use these areas to describe your document’s contents using your search phrases.

You can also use the “Additional Metadata” link to fill out a few more fields that may be useful in SEO, including Author title, Description Writer, Copyright Status, Copyright Notice, and Reference to your Copyright Info URL.

Some other tips for optimizing non-HTML documents include:

• Breaking the document into smaller pieces so that they can be optimized for individual search phrases.
• Adding a summary or abstract page to the document so that the first thing Google sees is not a large table of contents.

By following these guidelines you can make the most of non-HTML pages on your website, and optimize them for SEO.

Local Listings

Perhaps the most important trend for 2011 SEO in PA is a continuing focus by the major search engines on Local Search. In late October Google made a change to its search results.  Now whenever a search term is typed that can be construed as a local term, a map listing with seven to ten entries appears.  For instance a search for any local service business such as a restaurant or lawyer returns map results above natural search results.  Google has a large share of the search market, so website owners should pay attention to their Google places listings. Aside from the potential increase in ad revenue from Google places, another reason for the push on local search optimization is the continuing increase in mobile search demands. People are using their phones to access the internet more and more.  Because of this, businesses should claim and verify their local listings, make sure to appear in all the local directories, and encourage their customers to use local rating sites.

Social Media Optimization

For the last few years, social media has been growing at incredible rates, and this trend is expected to continue in 2011.  The good news is that Social Media Optimization (SMO) activities help SEO in PA efforts., since SMO includes getting links back to the website from inpidual social media sites. Businesses in Pennsylvania should be blogging, twittering, and interacting on other social networking sites as part of their SEO in PA efforts.

On-Page SEO Activities

Just as was the case in 2010, on-page optimization will help SEO in PA again.   One change is that Google is trying to increase not only the relevance, but also the speed of search results, so a properly coded website with a speedy load time can boost search rankings. Google is also cracking down on meta tag spam, so abusing meta tags or simply ignoring them will have a negative effect on search rankings.

The Yahoo and Bing merger is predicted to capture around 30 percent of the search market, and although this has yet to happen, optimizing for Bing should be a priority for SEO in PA.  If the site is an ecommerce site, it is very important to set up an automated feed into both Google and Bing shopping.

Personalized Search

One of the changes that both Google and Bing have made is in personalizing search results.  In this way, each person’s search results are based on their web searching history.  Sites they have visited before will appear over and over again in their search results.  As a result, less popular websites showing up in search results will be less likely.  Sites that are already popular will have better search rankings, and less popular sites will need to rely on social network recommendations in order to appear in search results.

Online Videos

YouTube has now offered text captions on videos, making them much more searchable, and it has also become the second largest search engine.  One of the reasons for this is that videos quickly and easily tell a story, teach, entertain, or demonstrate.  It is easy to share the link to a video, and videos can also be optimized for SEO in PA.  To take advantage of this trend, companies focused on SEO in PA need to set up their YouTube channels, upload videos and begin using this growing tool to market.

SEO for Pennsylvania Businesses: Onevery powerful and underutilized tool of a blog (or even a website) isthe ability to tag post and pages with SEO-friendly tags. Firstly,it’s important to note that you can arrange your blog inseveral different ways—the first is by subject (alsoreferred to as “category” by many if not mostblogs and CMS platforms), and the second is by date, which occurswhen your CMS or blog system organizes posts by year, month, anddate. The third way of organizing blog posts is by tagging, whichyou can do manually to “note” or“describe” the content of posts and pages.

The many methods of organizing yourblog (or website), when not done carefully can sometimes result induplicate content—a blogger’s #1 problem. WhenGoogle or other search engines recognize duplicate content, you willbe penalized. If you’ve published one page, Google mayperceive that page as existing as a page, but also a category archivepage, possibly a year archive page, and an archive for any tagyou’ve included or attached to that page or post. Thesearch engine will then have trouble figuring out which page toarchive and which results to display in the SERP’s.

Tip #1: To prevent confusion,you’ll want to block all date archives from beingindexed—this can be done by a simple “noindex”direct. Google supports robots.txt directs. Also consider“noindex” or “no follow”robot tags for every date archive page. This direction says toGoogle, “Don’t display these pages in theSERP’s, but display the pages themselves”.

Tip #2: You’ll alsowant to do the same for tag pages. We highly recommend usingWordPress as a blogging platform—they offer a WordPress SEOPlugin. This plugin does a bit of everything for you, includinghelping optimize your posts and avoid duplicate content. It’llauto-generate descriptions for every post (though we recommendwriting them manually) and “noindex” for archive,category, and tag pages.

Why use blog tags in the firstplace when you can categorize your posts? Back in the day, WordPressused to only offer a category option, meaning users were allowed togroup their posts into broad topics. If you wanted to“define” your post more specifically, you’dneed more categories to do so. This resulted in very long lists ofcategories… then came tags to the rescue. Tags are used todescribe blog posts in more detail. They mean easy navigation forboth readers, and expose your content to search engine spiders.

If you’re writing a blog postabout baking (say a brownie recipe), you’ll want to usecategories such as “dessert” and“baking”, but tags such as“chocolate”, “walnuts”,“brownies”, etc. Tags are optional, but areworth using. Categories (one must be selected per post) are notoptional. There is no limit to the amount of tags you can use, butwe suggest focusing on a few relevant ones. Avoid similar tags, suchas “brownie recipe”, “brownierecipes”, “brownies recipe”, etc…

SEO PA advice for online bloggers: usetags to break down the content on your website and make it easier forvisitors to navigate. This break down can provide easier navigationfor both blog visitors and search engines. Minimize duplicatecontent and duplicate tags whenever you can.

If you have further questions, contacta SEO Pennsylvania company for blogging advice.

When performing a content audit, Pennsylvania SEO companies consider the following key points. Naturally, you’ll need to do the same.

• The overall focus is to improve your rankings. You’ll be able to do so via link equity and ensuring all internal anchor text and meta tags are in place and accurate.
• Review the interlinking of content.
• Look over your website for pages or sections that need updating or improvement.
• You’ll need to remove pages of low quality or those lacking importance.

A good way to start your content audit is to export a spreadsheet of all website pages, including the number of inbound links to each page and the amount of traffic received. This is one way to assess where your website content currently stands. You can do so by visiting Webmaster central and exporting this data in a spreadsheet. It’s a good idea to include another column of page view data, preferably a years worth. Depending on the size of your website, it may be a good idea to outsource this task—contact a Pennsylvania SEO company for guidance.

Once you’ve got the data, review your pages and identify those which are underperforming. These are pages having fewer links, less generated traffic, and fewer pageviews. You’ll need to think about deleting these pages or making the necessary changes to their content.

To delete or to rewrite? After you’ve identified pages that aren’t driving traffic or generating links, you’ll have to make some decisions. Pages may be outdated, no longer relevant, or simply in need of new keywords, better keyword density, or more content (it’s a SEO best practice for web pages to be between 300 – 500 words in length). For keyword selection or revision, it’s best to contact a Pennsylvania SEO company—they have the ability to optimize content faster, choose relevant and competitive keywords, preserve reader engagement, and develop a quality linking strategy.

SEO PA: A Pennsylvania SEO Expert Can Assist You With the Following

• Analyze current keyword performance, reveal new profitable keywords
• Analyze your current or natural “reader-focused” content, and then develop a strategy to tweak this for search engines, based upon SEO best practices
• Assess how many links pages receive and then create new quality back links for you, and internal crosslinking as well to take advantage of your own web content.

A good idea is to always keep backups of your posts/pages—you may wish to bring them back at any point in time. WordPress is excellent because it allows you to remove pages from the public view, but it remains for 30 days and is easy to retrieve if necessary. Finally, be on the lookout for 404 errors and take care of any redirects. To learn more about how to successfully audit your website for SEO purposes, contact a qualified Pennsylvania SEO company.

PA Internet Marketing is a SEO PA company—visit us on the web to learn more about our services.

AdWords Ad Sitelinks: Increasing Choice & Relevancy in Search Ads

Adwords Ad Sitelinks is a brand new feature of AdWords, allowing online businesses and websites to attract more visitors and effectively direct them further down the purchase funnel-directing them deeper within websites to products and services more relevant to their search query. This is done by providing additional (specific) links to improve user experience.

For instance, if a user is searching for an all-inclusive vacation, a typical ad would read “All-Inclusive Vacations, discount rates w/travel price guarantee, reserve today”. Below that original text, searchers will now see “last minute deals”, “special travel offers”, “cruises”, and other specific links meant to better match their search query and specific vacation needs. Your ads will suddenly become more relevant to a wider range of users, as well as direct consumers to high value offers and promotions. Why are ad site links worth using? They’ll improve click through rates by allowing searchers to view promotions and seasonal offers, and they’ll increase conversion rates by leading consumers on a shorter path to purchase. Companies have an opportunity to better highlight their brand sentiments and narratives as well.

A Philadelphia SEO company specializing in Paid Search can help you utilize these features, working with your Google Merchant Center product feeds to enrich your already existing search ads. There’s no need to manage two separate product listings, or add any new feeds-and Adwords product extensions won’t conflict with free leads you get from Google Product Search.

Philadelphia SEO firms know that the goal of Ad Sitelinks is to provide users with more targeted choices-with four new destination URLs users are less likely to get lost on your site and more likely to find pages related to their interests, increasing the likelihood of a sale. Segment users and direct them to the most relevant part of your website.

Not only do Philadelphia SEO firms help companies appear at the top of search engine result pages for relevant keywords, they are incremental for paid search. Google Adwords features make it easier to effectively drive quality traffic to your products, services, and web pages. Learn more about how Philadelphia SEO firms manage paid search services to ensure every dollar spent on SEM (search engine marketing) brings your website and business the most qualified prospects. Find out which Google Adwords features would best benefit your company.

Why take the time to do SEO for Facebook?  U.S. search engine rankings published in June of 2010 (a report by comScore), indicate that Facebook search is becoming a popular search tool, significantly increasing in search volume between the months of January 2010 (receiving almost 400 million searches), and June 2010, where approximately 600 million were reported.  600 million Facebook search queries amount to nearly half of the nearly 1.7 billion queries Bing receives, although both are nowhere near the volume seen by Google.

Pennsylvania businesses, it’s worth reaching out to the approximately 500 million Facebook users worldwide by means of SEO.  Facebook presents itself as an opportunity for businesses to connect searchers with their content via optimization.

But why does Facebook mean greater search visibility?

Facebook displays results when viewers search its own internal search engine, and these web results are served up by Bing, Facebook’s partner.  Both web pages, questions, and Facebook results are shown, essentially a mixed bag of results such as Facebook apps, groups, and web pages unrelated to Facebook.  Also, pages hosted by Facebook tend to rank well when searched for and then displayed in other search engines, including Yahoo and Google.  You’ll see this when you search individuals or businesses by name.

How To Optimize Your Company’s Facebook Page:  SEO for Facebook

Choose the “vanity” URL of your page wisely, and use keywords there if possible, and in the “About” box as well, when writing the page description, and all info tabs available.  It’s also a good idea to learn basic Facebook Markup Language to add custom text, links, and images that can all include your businesses relevant keywords.  FBML combined with other keyword usage are well-received by search engines and as always, are a good internet marketing practice.

No doubt you’ll also be updating your Company page’s Facebook status, adding photos, and engaging in discussions—don’t miss those opportunities to use SEO keywords when appropriate.  Creating a Fan Page presents the same SEO opportunity as a content web page.  New opportunities for SEO on Facebook are always presenting themselves.  Recently, Facebook has given visitors the opportunity to create “Questions” content, and displays those results prominently in the Facebook results.  Carefully title your Facebook Question and add interactive media (perhaps a poll), and be descriptive and interesting.

Internet Marketing and Facebook:  Facebook SEO Considerations

Consider adding the “Facebook Open Graph Protocol” to your site.  This allows you to “Like” different web pages, and can be popular if your content includes, sports teams, restaurants, movies, etc…  This is a set of meta tags you add to the source code of your website, and can influence Facebook rankings, along with the likes and dislikes your pages receive.

Consider linking your fan page from other public pages—pages from external and relevant websites.  It’s a good idea to do this in article author bios, social profiles, and other appropriate places that make sense.

If your company is on Facebook, why not take the time to reap the benefits of Facebook search?  If not, take the time to sign up, it’s easy and as Facebook promises, free.  Learn more about SEO PA and Internet Marketing for Facebook and you’ll appreciate new opportunities.

You can view a presentation from Yahoo! on the Yahoo!/Bingsearch alliance here.

In addition to this change, the Bing search bot will alsochange on October 1, 2010.  Right nowBing works with MSNbot 2.0, and “Bingbot”, a brand new engine currently in teststatus, will replace this.

What will this mean for search engine optimization inPennsylvania (PA)?  You may need to checkyour robots.txt file to make sure the bot exclusions are set correctly afterthe rollout in October, but Bing has stated that if there is no directive forBingbot, then it will continue to follow the directive set for MSNbot, so youdon’t have change anything.  If you have directivesin your robots.txt file for both bots, make sure they are the same because inthat case Bingbot will ignore directives for MSNbot.

Both Google and Bing search engines value quality links andoriginal, keyword-rich content from cleanly coded sites. There are somedifferences in the Google and Bing user interfaces but the following guidelinesfor good search engine optimization in Pennsylvania (PA) should still apply:

• Make sure any old pages redirect permanently to current pages
• Validate HTML and remove any broken links
• Check to make sure your content is unique, and continually update your website content
• Make sure all your text (keywords) is visible
• Create smaller pages which link together and focus on only one topic
• Use text navigation (with keywords in text links) – not images
• Add both an XML and HTML sitemap
• Make sure your website is set up on Bing Webmaster Tools and there are no errors
• Take a look at the “Bing Cashback” comparison shopping engine if you have an ecommerce site.

In addition make sure that links to your site are not paidor from link farms.

Bio: Sue McCrossin owns and operates www.painternetmarketing.comand hopes to educate her clients on the upcoming Yahoo! and Bing merger tomitigate the impact for searchengine optimization in Pennsylvania (PA).

One major social site that has really been adding users in the last few months is Twitter. According to Twitter’s COO, the site now receives190 million visitors per month, and 65 million Tweets each day.

On June 17, Twitter started posting “promoted tweets” at the bottom of their Trending Topics, the spot where the most popular topics are displayed. These promoted tweets represent the first part of Twitter’s new plan to make money, and they are labeled “promotional” so that they do not interfere with user’s experiences on the site. Twitter has opposed putting ads into the tweet stream, and when a user clicks on these ads in the trends section, they are sent to a normal trending topic search result page that has the promoted tweets at the top of the page.

Should a company trying to do SEO in PA sign up for these promoted tweets? Perhaps not yet. Promoted tweets are priced currently on a cost-per-impression pricing model and open only to a few select large vendors such as Best Buy, Red Bull, Sony Pictures, and Starbucks. Twitter has said that this is just the first step in their advertising plan, and they will measure the success of Promoted Tweets before making changes. Promoted tweets will appear whenever the topic is relevant, and at the top of the tweet result page. The question remains about whether people will click on them, and further, whether they add to the bottom line for the company.

What else is new at Twitter for SEO in PA? Twitter now has a location sharing, featuring that shows a city or general area or venue that users can tag tweets with. If you click on the location name, this shows recent tweets from the same location. “Tweet With Location” is off by default, and you have to opt-in to the service. Then you can turn “Tweet With Location” on or off at any time, as well as clear your location before you Tweet. You may want to just show a general location rather than your exact home address too. The feature works by showing the latitude and longitude of your browser, and you can decide what type of location information you want to share.

Another relatively new Twitter feature that impacts SEO in PA is twitterlocal.com and local trending on Twitter. These new services allow users to see trends within their chosen countries or cities. In this way, Twitter can show newsworthy local topics. This service should allow local business to compete better when they use Twitter for marketing because they will be able to see what is locally newsworthy, and keep an eye on how their local competitors are using Twitter for marketing.

The impact of Twitter on SEO in PA has become measurable. Small PA businesses can now use Twitter to narrow their marketing focus and use local trending to identify potential customers.

BIO: Sue McCrossin owns Boomtown Internet Group, and is always interested in sharing ideas on SEO in PA with others.

You can purchase a .tel domain now from name.com for $8.99 a year. http://www.name.com/domain-extensions/tel or from lcn.com for $20 per year. You can also get it from MySpace http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=52084432.

Here is a great example which will demonstrate how your company can use a .TEL as a contact directory for easy access on mobile phones. http://celebrity.tel/ See how you can just click to dial the phone number?

I think this is going to be enormously popular. It has been highly anticipated, and on the first day it was available to the general public this week, about 250,000 applications were filed for 70,000 unique domain names, said Justin Hayward, the communications director at Telnic, the operator of the .tel registry.

One of the cool things about .tel domains is that, unlike a traditional domain, it stores personal and corporate information as well as index-able keywords. This information is stored directly into the DNS where it can then be universally accessed. The DNS for other domain extensions typically only provides a mapping between domain names and IP addresses.

If cell phone carriers adopt the new technology quickly, mobile search and local search will not be the same. The keywords in the domain extension mean that your contact information is easily searchable, and as more companies adopt it, your clients will automatically use your domain with the .tel extension to find your contact information easily. What this means to local Search Optimization practices is yet to be seen.

The plan to make existing phone numbers into Internet addresses was rejected by the telcom industry, but this .tel domain is designed specifically for use as a mobile website domain, accessible on devices such as the Apple iPhone and the Blackberry. Finding contact information and directions is often difficult on a mobile phone, and this provides easy links to make calls, open e-mails and find maps quickly.