Google’s advice for your website: Content
Whatever the technical mechanism, Google is doing a pretty good job of identifying websites with good content and rewarding them with high rankings.
I looked at Google’s top five pages for the five most searched-on keywords, as identified by WordTracker on 27 June 2005. Typically, the top five pages receive an overwhelming majority of the traffic delivered by Google.
The web pages that contained written content (a small but significant portion were image galleries) all shared the following features:
- Updating: Frequent updating of content, at least once every few weeks, and more often, once a week or more.
- Spelling and grammar: Few or no errors. No page had more than three misspelled words or four grammatical errors. Note: spelling and grammar errors were identified by using Microsoft Word’s check feature, and then ruling out words marked as mis-spellings that are either proper names or new words that are simply not in the dictionary. Does Google use SpellCheck? Keep in mind that no one really does know what the 100 factors in Google’s algorithm are. But whether the mechanism is SpellCheck or a better shot at link popularity thanks to great credibility, or something else entirely, the results remain the same.
- Paragraphs: Primarily brief (1-4 sentences). Few or no long blocks of text.
- Lists: Both bulleted and numbered form a large part of the text.
- Sentence length: Mostly brief (10 words or fewer). Medium-length and long sentences are sprinkled throughout the text rather than clumped together.
- Contextual relevance: Text contains numerous terms related to the keyword, as well as stem variations of the keyword.
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Another under-the-radar-of-the-real-world blog firestorm erupted yesterday over high profile page rank drops. Google dropped visible PR of many blogs and mainstream news sites presumably as a penalty for selling links.
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| Google Slams Paid Links? Good or Bad? |
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No one except Google really knows for sure why PR dropped for these sites but it certainly looks like an extension of September’s paid directory massacre. This time Google targeted some well-known sites in the search marketing world and mainstream news too.
(Read more…)
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Simply add h1, h2, h3, h4, h5 with your important keywords as bellow:
Web Design, Web Development, Web Design Company, Web Design Ireland, Website design, Website Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation
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I was looking for a really good company for accessibility and usability and LOL I just found some Irish based company that will get your money for a badge …some content from their website:
Global Website Certification - The EIQA Certified Website Process - http://www .eiqa. com
Methodology
The EIQA website is conducted using a combination of over 200 automatic and manual checks on an organisations site. Automated tools are run to generate reports of standard errors like HTML and CSS validation errors, deprecated HTML and possible accessibility errors.
Structural elements such as HTML and CSS will be validated against the standard W3C and WCAG standards for compliant code. Good structural code should be in place and will be checked to ensure content is separated from presentation style. This is all done with an automated tool and manual process to ensure consistency and a detailed report is sent per page and per line.
—- they have some statement about accessibility/…etc
So like everybody I was checking they website ….and I was surprised, never seen this yet: 
I press the search button, the layout messed up, and I tried ti validate it … over 2000 ERRORS
I would recommend you do some checks, on the websites if they seems to be ok then you can go ahead…. do not throw your money on nothing.
The only Irish company I found that really does the job, I’ve checked like 10 clients from their portfolio is http://www.enhance.ie/
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A study of email campaigns presented at the Shop.org Summit contended that marketers aren’t doing enough to maximize the return on their efforts.
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| Your Email Campaign Needs Work |
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The ‘2007 Retail Email Marketing Study’ by Silverpop noted how email customers spend more online than their non-email counterparts. Those same email customers spend more on impulse, and are more likely to pass along the email promotions they receive.
“Clearly there’s value in fine-tuning email marketing programs to generate higher response rates and greater financial returns,” said Silverpop managing director Mike Weston.
One of the easiest things an online entrepreneur can do is capture the email address, and just that, for starters. List growth concerns everyone, but burying an opt-in box within a site, or asking for loads of personal details up front, don’t help improve that growth.
Make it easy for people to get onto an email list. “A robust email program can gather additional data from subscribers after marketers convince them of the value they receive from the relationship,” said Weston.
Retailers should make it just as easy to opt out of a list. This can be done effectively with modern marketing solutions, but the crafty marketer will send people to a ‘change subscriptions’ preference page, giving the person choices for alternative emails along with the choice to unsubscribe.
The persistent threat of malicious or intrusive code via images cause people to block them from displaying automatically in email clients. Web-based email systems like Google’s Gmail and Yahoo Mail do this by default, unless the person changes a preference for a particular sender.
That blocking has caused the “postcard-style” layout to fall out of favor in email marketing. Newsletter formats with a mixture of text and art can communicate the marketer’s message whether or not images have been blocked.
Email marketing may seem so quaint compared with newer formats that some may underestimate it.
Although figures from eMarketer based on Interactive Advertising Bureau data indicate email marketing spending will grow to $616 million by 2011, a lot more could be spent on the channel.
“One key factor is how e-mail is typically perceived and implemented,” David Hallerman, eMarketer senior analyst, said in a statement. “Most companies typically see e-mail marketing as a low-cost medium.”
That could mean businesses feel they won’t get the big returns a flashier campaign could draw. Email has the ability to help develop long-term, returning customers. Everyone likes to pull in new customers, but the real profitability comes from loyal returnees who keep coming back to spend.
Source: webpronews.com
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Your first reaction to the news that a college offers a class in YouTube might be to dredge up old “underwater basket-weaving” jokes; learning the school is in California, might be less surprising – after all, Stanford offers a course in Facebook apps.
But the guys that made Google came from there so we cut them some slack.
Pitzer, though, which sounds nearly vulgar (we’ll assume it’s named after someone and try not to be impolite by pointing and giggling), doesn’t have quite the recognition as Stanford, but was named one of the best 50 colleges by US News & World Report, so they must be doing something right over there.
The Yale Daily News Staff named Pitzer one of the “most artsy schools,” too. We’ll also assume that to mean a certain, well, unorthodox approach to learning, and that they might not be able to throw a football.
But it’s all good…this isn’t the Eighties and Alpha Beta’s not running things anymore.
“That’s the beauty of college these days,” says Droz.* “You can major in Game Boy if you know how to bullshit.”
Well, I think we’re just talking one class here, and not a major…yet. I did take a weight-lifting class in college, and karate, and acting, and one called International Approach to Dress (they called me crazy until they found out it was 49 girls and me in there) – you know, classes to help round out my education.
“Classes: nothing before eleven,” says Droz. “Beer: it’s your best friend, you drink a lot of it.”
What do you do in YouTube class? Well, you study what goes on on YouTube. The students have their own area on the site where they post videos and comment, and use YouTube as a tool to study American culture and Internet culture, and of course, American Internet culture. I’m back to counting words in my essays.
What exactly the class is seeking to learn about YouTube wasn’t clear in USA Today, but that initial WTF twinge you had wasn’t helped any by wondering how posting a video of yourself juggling is a form of study.
But Alexandra Juhasz, a Pitzer of a media studies professor there (couldn’t resist), brings up a more compelling reason to study YouTube later in the article: raising issues about “corporate-sponsored democratic media expression.”
And that is a big issue. We’ve got a raging conversation going in the comments section of our article on CBS and bloggers about that very thing, and I’ve raised it previously when YouTube struggled with international censorship concerns.
A commentator at TechCrunch by the handle “Wakarimasen,” (Japanese for “don’t understand,” but without a pronoun antecedent it’s hard to know if he or she means himself/herself or Arrington), says:
it’s absurd to think that academic study should not examine a prominent contemporary phenomenon like youtube. this class may need some fine-tuning, but is sorely needed in our increasingly technological world.
I think Wakarimasen gets it, and most likely Pitzer gets it too. This citizen media thing is important and revolutionary and should be studied, even if users admit, from one of the latest student videos posted, they “look at dumb things” on YouTube.
*Yes, I’m quoting fictional characters. You got a problem with it? Talk to Ogre from Revenge of the Nerds. “CRITICS!” says Ogre. Get’em Ogre.
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The final stage is so important – and unexpected – that I’m going to quote Maximum Tadpole again: “You won’t believe me, but don’t do anything but look at traffic for a month. Check rankings every day and most importantly, the keywords that people are finding your site with. Use those to decide if you should create entirely new pages to target JUST those words or to write content targeting those keywords. As you move into top positions for the easier words, go after the hard ones.”
That may perhaps sound strange; wouldn’t it make more sense to change the existing content by using the terms for which more people are searching rather than adding more pages? Not necessarily; it depends on what they’re searching for, and why they’re searching for it. As an example, Maximum Tadpole noticed 300 searches over one week on his site for a piece of equipment used in eye surgery. He’d mentioned it once in an article that actually had little to do with the equipment. A little more investigating revealed that people were searching Google for the equipment, finding his site, then searching his site for it.
Obviously, this was an unfulfilled need just begging for help. So he dedicated an entire page of his site to that piece of equipment. It is now one of the best pages on his site.
So, after you have gone through all of these steps, now what do you do? You take the information you got from Google Analytics about your traffic, analyze it and assess what you need to do. Go through the various steps listed here as necessary. It’s worth noting that this strategy might not be the optimal one for your site, but it should at least give you an outline for thinking about what your site needs and how to tackle its optimization.
Does it work? Well, Maximum Tadpole used this strategy for his client, and Google search referrals went from an average of three per day to 164 per day in one month. That’s a nice increase. Your results may vary, of course, but it’s good to have a plan.
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Once you’ve completed the on page optimization, it’s time to start the off-page optimization of your web site. That means building links. You don’t want to go the route of doing reciprocal link trades or link farms. What you really want to do is think back to the very first steps you took to optimize the site. What value does the site offer? Who would find it most valuable? Where do these people “hang out” online, and how can you get them to come to you?
Most web sites want to offer their visitors something of value. If you can show a site owner how a link to your site would help its users, you stand a good chance of getting a link from that site. You shouldn’t actually request a link so much as focus on the value your site offers so the site owner will think of linking to you himself. Maximum Tadpole said he has seen a favorable response rate of five to ten percent with a simple email that reads like so: “I have created a web site for nursing students called mysite.com, which could be very valuable to your graduating nurses. It is a free site with job opportunity listings and career advice for nurses. If you find time, please visit our site, and consider linking to it from your site, as it would certainly be a resource for your students. Any feedback would be much appreciated! Thanks for your time and have a nice day!”
How strong of a campaign should you conduct? Maximum Tadpole said that he personally requested 100 links per day for five days. Remember, this is just the beginning as far as SEO for your site goes; you’ll do more link requests later, after you’ve completed this first phase.
If you have a site that lends itself well to using social networks to help promote, by all means do so. Here on SEO Chat, you’ll find a number of articles that explain how to use this web 2.0 method of building interest in your site.
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At this point, you need to start thinking like the people you’re targeting. When they search for the valuable products and/or information you’re offering, what kinds of keywords are they likely to use? Temper this by also considering which keywords the site even has a chance of competing for, at least at first. You can go for the more competitive ones later.
To use the example of the free web site on which Maximum Tadpole was working, he explained that “I decided ‘Nurse Careers’ and ‘Nursing Job Advice’ were better choices than ‘Nurse Jobs’ and ‘Nursing Careers’ for the home page.” The secret behind this is that, by “first optimizing for less competitive keywords” you’re actually in a “better position to go after the more competitive ones in the future.” Don’t limit yourself to the home page, of course; you want to write down the best key words for each page of the site.
At this point you’re ready to do your on page optimization. Using your key words, place unique targeted title tags on each page. This is the title element. If you’re having a hard time coming up with a title for the page, Maximum Tadpole suggests a way to think about it: “If each page of your site is a book, what would you title it? Make sure your title matches the content of the page.” He also suggests trying to keep your title tag under five words. It’s very important to make sure that your title matches the content of your pages; if it doesn’t, change either the title or the content until they match.
As for other tags, you’ll want to use Meta and key word tags for your home page, but the jury’s out as to whether those are valuable for any other pages on your site. But there are other details you’ll want to tend to – doing a 301 redirect to send non-www pages to the www versions. You should also optimize every internal link on your site with relevant text, including alt tags for images. Maximum Tadpole gives an example of having a site focused on soccer with a soccer ball logo in the upper left hand corner that takes visitors to the home page when they click on it. Rather than “home” as your alt text, you might consider making it “soccer.” You can probably come up with something even better, perhaps “soccer home.”
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If you have been doing SEO for a long time, you may have an almost intuitive sense of what you need to do to optimize a web site. You may work on several things at once rather than following a step-by-step process. But when you’re learning SEO or trying to understand what your SEO is doing to your site, it can seem a little overwhelming, especially when it’s your first campaign.This article will hopefully help beginning SEOs to think more clearly about the SEO process, and veteran SEOs to communicate more clearly with their clients. I owe most of the information you’ll read here to SEO Chat forum member Maximum Tadpole. He noticed that many of his clients wanted a step-by-step guide to the SEO process. To help answer that need, he recorded what he did for one recent site that he took on as an SEO client.
The very first step he took for the site was opening a Google Analytics account. This free service from Google is designed to help you discover where your visitors come from and how they interact with your site. This important information can help you make changes to your site to increase your traffic and make your site friendlier to visitors.
Once you have that account, the next few steps involve some serious site contemplation. What value does the site have to offer? Is it selling products or offering content? What kind of content – articles, classified ads, what? To use SEO Chat as an example, our site offers articles, SEO tools, and a set of forums with plenty of networking opportunities.
Now that you know what value the site has to offer, you need to figure out who would benefit from that value. Maximum Tadpole was working on a free web site with job opportunity listings and career advice for nurses. Clearly, this information would be of most benefit to nurses, especially nurses who were just graduating from nursing school. Keep this audience clearly in mind, because much of the rest of your strategy is going to depend on them.
Indeed, the next steps in this phase of your campaign involve figuring out how to get in touch with those people – and figuring out how to get them to come to you. After you’ve thought about all these points for the site as a whole, you want to think about them again (though not in quite as much depth) for the parts of the site to which you will want to build links aggressively, such as category pages.
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