Want to Improve Page Rank? Try Ritual Sacrifice

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Seven Steps to Get Your Website Caffeinated

Preparing for Google Caffeine

In 2010, Google’s search results are becoming more focused on results that are fast, fresh and visual.   Now is your chance to get your website ready to make sure you are part of Google’s first page crowd in 2010.

1) Are You Fast?

Google is going to judge you based on how fast your web pages load.  You should aim to have your page load in 3 seconds or less.

If you are clocking in at over 3 seconds you might try some of the following techniques (which your web master or website designer can help you with):  use CSS; limit the amount of Flash on the site; use image heights and widths; check for broken links; compress your JavaScript and CSS; cut back on cookies; review server or hosting provider performance; and remove…

Synonyms, Search and SEO

Or the “Picture” vs. “Photo” Duel

In the Official Google Blog today, Steve Baker gives some (frankly unusual) insight into how it is Google’s algorithms deal with semantics, specifically synonyms.  As he points out in his post, it’s kind of funny and amazing what computers are good at, and what they’re not:

An irony of computer science is that tasks humans struggle with can be performed easily by computer programs, but tasks humans can perform effortlessly remain difficult for computers. We can write a computer program to beat the very best human chess players, but we can’t write a program to identify objects in a photo or understand a sentence with anywhere near the precision of even a child.

But because Google’s primary directive is to produce search results most relevant to the query you typed into the search box,…

SEO Strategy: Link Building Tips, Part II

Sure-fire Ways to Bring Links in for a Landing

In Part One of this post, I gave you five tips for building inbound links to your site. In this post, you’ll find four more proven ways to develop high-quality links that can improve page rank in natural search results for your site.

Tip # 5: Get quoted – Seeing your company name (and a link back to your site) in a publication such as The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal is fabulous, of course – as is the resulting link juice from such authoritative sites.

Getting quoted in these publications is not so easy. (One thing you can do to help the media contact you is to ensure your press room is up-to-date and that it includes a contact name and number for journalists who are on a deadline.…

SEO Strategy: Tips for Link Building

Part One: Do the Basic Stuff First

Debra Mastaler, author of the Link Spiel blog, recently wrote that after she gives presentations about link building, someone inevitably approaches her to say something along the lines of: “Come on, what are the ‘insider secrets’ to building links? Everyone already knows those you talked about.”

Never mind the fact that, as she says, she just spent 45 minutes “sharing how [her team] use the media, customer surveys, website elements, RSS, directories, content development and offline sources to build quality links.”

I had the opportunity to attend Debra’s link-building presentation at Search Engine Strategies–San Jose a couple of weeks ago, and she’s right: she gives you the basic methods for building links – as well as some really creative methods even I hadn’t considered.

As Debra states, “The easy part of link…

Understanding the Link Economy

…and Why it Matters to You

It can be tough to be a small business these days. Once upon a time, one need only find a tidy shop on a busy street, hang out a shingle, and set about serving the people in your neighborhood.

Then came the internet. And Google. And terms like search engine marketing, search engine optimization, and pay-per-click advertising.  And that shingle? Forget simply hanging the little guy over your door: you now have to do things like “link out”; attract “inbound links”– especially the really juicy kind; and get crawled by search engines. (All of which sounds like a plot to a really odd horror movie.)

In other words, businesses today must be online and are governed, in part, by the concept known as the Link Economy – a term popularized by Jeff Jarvis,…

SEO Strategies Series: Creating Keyword-Rich Content

Three Powerful Ways to Help Your Site Work Harder

To round off our SEO Strategies Series on choosing the right keywords for your website and landing pages, I’ve listed the frequently asked questions (FAQs) we regularly receive about how to incorporate keywords within your website pages – as well as the answers.

How many times should I use my keywords in the page copy?

Rather than focus on how many times you should use each keyword per page, focus instead on incorporating the keyword where it makes sense to do so. For example, if you sell vacation packages, and you’re optimizing a page for “Cabo San Lucas vacation packages,” instead of writing, “We specialize in resort vacation packages,” use this keyword-rich phrase: “We specialize in Cabo San Lucas resort vacation packages.”

It’s also a good practice to include your main…

SEO Strategies Series: Developing Powerful Title Tags that Convert

Eight Dos and Don’ts for Driving Clicks and Traffic

In my last blog post, I discussed how to develop the right list of keywords – that is, keywords that people are actually using in their searches. Once you have your keywords in hand, you’re ready to incorporate them into your Title and meta tags. A significant part of your website is each page’s HTML source code, which includes these tags and which give the search engines information about your site.

From a search engine optimization (SEO) perspective, the Title tag is most critical because it’s where you add your important keywords that describe what your Web page is about. (Some people call this tag the Page Title Tag for this reason.)

You see a Web page’s Title tag every time you open your browser as the Title tag is…

SEO Strategies Series: Powering Up Your Keywords

Three Tips to Get at Your Site’s Best SEO Keywords

The foundation for effective search engine optimization (SEO) is choosing the right keywords.  Optimize your Website and landing pages with the wrong keywords and you’ll see little, if any, traffic to your site.

Choose the right keywords, however, and traffic will soar.

The problem many companies make when optimizing a Website is choosing keywords they think their customers are using – versus the keywords people are actually using in their searches.

In other words, marketers and business owners make keyword decisions based on hunches, not data.

Fortunately, this is a very easy fix. To determine the best keywords, all you need is a keyword search tool, such as Google’s free Keyword Search Tool, as well as tools like our own SEO Module in the Yield Web Marketing Suite.

Tools like Google’s…

Small Business Marketing Series: Effective, Effortless Websites

Improve Your Page Rank on Search Engines

Maintaining and updating a small business website can often become a huge headache for business owners. Many small business owners start by outsourcing the creation of a website, which is then hosted on a service that may or may not be the host for the e-commerce site.

After the site is live and inevitable changes are required, making those changes typically involves re-engaging the contractor to do the updates. Because small business owners often defer updates to their sites in order to bundle as many changes as possible into a single work order, websites can quickly get out of date and begin to fall down in the rankings of natural (or organic) search engine results.  And keeping your website as high as possible in natural search results — called search…