SEO Blog - Search Engine Optimization Blog
This blog is dedicated to the search engine optimization (SEO) field, and provides some basic knowledge on what can be done to improve rankings in the search engine marketing field. Good search engine optimization (SEO) takes knowledge, patience, and time. If you are seeking professional help in optimizing your web site feel free to contact our Los Angeles Web Design specialists with any of your SEO needs.
| Shoring Up Your AdWords Account for Better Results |
It's easy to have negative results using AdWords if you're not careful and don't have a solid understanding on how Google AdWords works. If you find that you're not getting the results you thought you would then it's time to check your landing pages and the keywords associated with those landing pages. Good keywords and landing pages will result in good conversions. So the phrases that you're targeting most importantly need to be where you take them with your landing pages. Once on your landing page you must present the user with a clear call-to-action. That call-to-action needs to be enticing and must make they want to continue. Since Google uses a Quality Score when deciding the frequency that an ad shows up and the position of the ad. It’s important that the keyphrases used in your ad are also targeted on your landing page. If that landing page also does well in the natural search engine results then it will also have a good Quality Score.
How to achieve a good Quality Score on Google's search network. The components of Quality Score vary depending on whether it's calculating minimum bid or ad position:
Quality Score for minimum bid is determined by a keyword's clickthrough rate (CTR) on Google, the relevance of the keyword to its ad group, your landing page quality, your account's historical performance, and other relevance factors.
Quality Score for ad position is determined by a keyword's clickthrough rate (CTR) on Google, the relevance of the keyword and ad to the search term, your account's historical performance, and other relevance factors. |
| Posted by Web Design and SEO on Wednesday, April 09, 2008 at 14:58
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| Google's Warning - Use Cloaking - we Will Find It! |
Cloaking is using a website optimization technique whereby a different web page is shown to the search engine than the actual web surfer. By knowing the search engine’s web bots different IP addresses one can serve up pages specifically for the search engines. Cloaking is a violation of the search engine guidelines. If and when you get caught your site will be removed from the search engines. Some companies that offer cloaking state that their service is undetectable; the search engines state that this is a false claim. If your website is of value to you then DON"T use unethical means to do well in the search engines. White Hat practices will prevail. |
| Posted by Web Design and SEO on Saturday, March 15, 2008 at 10:50
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| Website Link Structure |
The way you structure the links on your website can affect your Google rankings. As we had discussed previously consider a link to your site as a vote for your site. So, based on this if you have the most links coming into your homepage then that page has a higher vote count. The higher the vote count then the higher you will come up in the search engines for that phrase. Based on this the things that you can do to increase that vote count are as follows: Make links within your site absolute, not relative, so use the full url, use the key phrases in your links that point to relative information, use a nofollow tag for links that are not important, less links on a page give the links that you do have more power, reduce 404 not found errors on your website. |
| Posted by Web Design and SEO on Saturday, March 15, 2008 at 10:37
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| Google SiteLinks what are they? |
If you go to Google and so a search for AOL, you will see additional links below the main result under AOL that link to other internal AOL pages. These links are randomly chosen by Google's algorithm. Sitelinks appear for general terms and brand names. What determines which sitelinks Google uses is unknown? Ideally these links should have descriptive text links or a descriptive alt tag attribute. There isn't anything that one can do to have these sitelinks on Google; this is all done by Google's algorithm. There are known facts on what Google looks for in a sitelink, which are the following: You need to be number one for the searched phrase, how often you receive clicks for the phrase also matters, your website needs to have been around for a minimum of 2 years, and inbound links with the required anchor text help also. |
| Posted by Web Design and SEO on Saturday, March 15, 2008 at 10:22
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| How Important are High Search Engine Rankings? |
The higher up you appear, the better off you are. I would assume that I'm not telling you something that you don't already know, but here is the hard evidence. 62% of web searchers click on search engine results that appear on the 1st page, 28% of web searchers click on search engine results that appear on the 2nd and 3rd pages, and 10% of web searchers click on search engine results that appear on the 4th and 5th pages. That is why it is extremely important that you or your business appear on the 1st page of the SERPS! To get there for your demographic it is important that you select the right keyphrases that are pertinent to what you do, create rich content for all of the pages on your site, get inbound links to your site based on those pertinent keyphrases and make sure that they point to the correct pages within your site. So if you have a page about apples they inbound links to that page would have hyperlinked text talking and containing the word apple or apple types like Macintosh. Taking the time to optimize your site will not only increase your sales but your business credibility as well. |
| Posted by Web Design and SEO on Wednesday, August 15, 2007 at 18:36
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| SEO - Back to Basics |
A German Company Sistrix recently analyzed roughly 10,000 web sites to see if there were any common elements to reaching the top of the SERPS in Google. Here are some of the results that they found in their research:
They found keywords in bolded type, h2 to h6 tags (not so much in h1 tags), title tags along with these words in the body text were important. Image names and domain names with keywords helped also. Keywords in file paths or the parameters in a dynamic web site url didn't seem to have a positive effect. Having inbound links seemed to have on of the biggest impacts in Google's SERPS, for example a SERPS at number 11 in Google had about 4 times less the inbound links as did the number 1 spot. Once again it seems sticking to the basic rules of SEO over time will garnish favorable rewards! Happy SEO-ing! |
| Posted by Web Design and SEO on Friday, June 01, 2007 at 16:15
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| Google's Matt Cutts Video's |
Google's Matt Cutts has released a number of videos in which he talks about the way Google works.
Google's Matt Cutts has addresses previous and future updates of the Google index in these videos.
GOOGLE FACTS Google's index is updated every day as Google crawls the web. There pretty much is always an update going on.
Google has algorithms and data pushes that are going out on a less frequent basis. The latest were on 27 June, 28 July and 17 August.
Google's BigDaddy update was a software infrastructure upgrade that finished in February. The BigDaddy update introduced a new way how they crawl the web.
Matt Cutts mentions in the video that another software infrastructure update is on the way. The new update should increase the quality of the search results:
"If we find out that we can improve quality by changing our algorithms or data or infrastructure, or anything else, we’re going to make that change.
The best SEO's in my experience are the ones that can adapt, and that say 'OK, this is the way the algorithms look right now to me, if I want to make a good site that will do well in search engines, this is the direction I want to head in next.'" |
| Posted by Los Angeles Web Design on Tuesday, September 05, 2006 at 16:57
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| Inbound Links are VERY Important |
It's a well known fact that the on page contents of a web page are important to search engines. One thing that is most often over-looked however is building inbound link campaigns. According to Google, Yahoo and MSN inbound links are the single most important factor to a web sites success in ranking well and staying there.
When you optimize your web site pages you want to optimize them for keywords or keyphrases that are relevant to your industry. By doing this you are telling the search engines what keywords or keyphrases are relevant to your business.
If the keywords or keyphrases that you use are not that competitive odds are that you will get good rankings for these keywords or keyphrases. If your keywords or keyphrases are more sought after then in order to rank well you need to have inbound links coming into your web site from other web sites with those keywords or keyphrases.
The web site with the best inbound links will get the best rankings.
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| Posted by Los Angeles Web Design on Wednesday, August 02, 2006 at 19:01
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| Carefully Choose to Whom You Link To |
Websites that you link to create your neighborhood of websites if you will. If websites that you link to are known to be spammy websites by the search engines then the search engines may also think that your web site is spammy. Link farms would most likely be included as spammy websites.
What you want to do is link to websites that have good content and websites that are reputable. If you choose to link to high quality websites then web surfers will associate you as a high quality website also.
It's important to remember that sending people to other websites is not sending customers away from your site since they are going to leave at some point anyway. What is more important is creating a friendly neighborhood of useful information so you viewers will come back to you time and time again. |
| Posted by Los Angeles Web Design on Thursday, July 20, 2006 at 17:59
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| How Google Data Centers Work |
If you didn't already know Google has many data centers that run their index at any given time. They use different data centers to show different results. Some one on the East coast might see different results than someone on the West coast. Even using the next button on Google might take you to a different data center. Google decides what data center provides what result at any given time. If someone is aware of the different Google data centers IP address's then they can poll each data center separately.
With the upcoming Big Daddy update Google has said that they are targeting these types of algorithmic changes:
* Canonicalization - How the engine decides what url's reside in the engine.
* 302 redirects - Some developers have tried to spam the engines by serving keyword rich pages.
* Duplicate Content - Would be the same information at different locations.
These servers IP's have been revealed as Big Daddy index IP's: (66.249.93.104 and 64.233.179.104). |
| Posted by Los Angeles Web Design and SEO on Thursday, March 02, 2006 at 11:56
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