This post is intended as a walkthrough for the installation of the totally free visitors tracking software we recommend to all of our clients, Google Analytics. It is intended to help the average to low skill level webmaster install this tracking software that enable you to track conversions and goals for free.
My site is PHP will Google Analytics work for me?
Whether your site is in plain HTML or a Dynamically driven site like PHP or ASP you still should be able to use this guide. Before installing Google Analytics you will need to sign up for a free Google Analytics Account. If you you already have one then skip this step and log into your account.
Everyone is trying to save money in today’s economy - but sometimes when you think you are saving money you are actually losing so much more than you save.
If you are considering handling your SEO, that is only a good decision if;
a) you have the time to do the work and actually get it done and b) you can get the results you need so you actually improve your traffic from top rankings.
1. Can you work within simple HTML? At a bare minimum, you need to be able to add Meta tags to an HTML document. Ideally, you can also bold text, set up links, change formatting, rename images, move java script into a .js file etc.
2. Do you have enough time to make your site search engine friendly? Plan on a minimum of 3 hours for sites that are in great shape, and up to 25 hours (or more) for sites that may need a complete overhaul. In our experience, 3 - 6 hours seems to be the norm for time spent on updating SEO friendliness issues.
3. Will you have this time for SEO friendliness work within the next week? Typically, if people don’t take action in the immediate future (within the next 5 business days), the project ends up being delayed indefinitely. You need a clear scheduled start date for your SEO work - especially when the holidays are approaching! You need to get things going!
4. Can your business afford to “lend” this time to SEO without experiencing some other negative impact? If the time is not truly extra time you have, then you would be “borrowing” the time from another area of your business. Can you do that without harming another area of your business?
5. If your SEO project becomes bigger than you initially anticipated, will you have the time and attention to continue dedicating to it until completion?
6. Are you an experienced and competent copywriter? If you said no, do you feel you can quickly master writing compelling copy that is also keyword rich?
7. Is the content already on your site something you feel comfortable altering? Often people that have paid for high-end marketing copy on their websites do not want to make any SEO alterations themselves, for fear of altering the effectiveness of their current copy - and therefore affecting their conversion rates.
8. Do you have any prior SEO experience?
9. Do you have the tools or know where to purchase the tools that will help you in keyword selection, site analysis, reporting and current industry information?
10. Would you rather spend your time working ON your business (i.e., growing it) than IN your business (i.e., taking care of the nitty gritty details rather than the big picture)?
11. Do you have a plan in place to make sure you stay current on all SEO trends and changes so you can maintain your rankings on-going?
Now let’s take a look at your answers and what they mean:
1: Can you work within simple HTML?
On-page optimization requires that you work within the HTML on your website. If you are not able to work with an HTML document and feel confident that you will not cause any errors or malfunctions, then you simply can not handle your SEO at this time.
You would need to learn HTML before you could consider handling SEO. Please note, if your site is more complex than simple HTML, you would need to be comfortable working within the code used on your site.
2, 3 and 4: Do you have enough time to make your site search engine friendly? Can your business afford to “lend” this time to SEO, and therefore experience no significant negative impact? If the time is not truly extra time you have, then you would be “borrowing” the time from another area of your business.
You will also later need to write content, alter content and handle various optimization techniques, but to get started - before you can do anything else - you need to make the time to get the foundation ready for SEO. If you don’t have time to do this, your project simply won’t get off the ground.
Do you truly have the time, or are you just taking it from somewhere else. If you are taking it from somewhere else, that may be fine - you just need to be sure that you aren’t harming your business in other ways. Getting rankings, and ultimately traffic to your site will not benefit you if your business falls apart while you work on the optimization.
The remainder of the questions are details for you to consider. Basically, the more No’s there are, the more likely it is that you should NOT handle your SEO in-house.
If your results determined you can handle your SEO, here are the final details you need you consider:
1. What is your time worth per hour? Which option is more cost effective for you - hiring someone or spending your time?
2. Can you recognize when your choice is not working for you and are you willing to try the other option at that time?
3. You must commit to educating yourself and learning all that you need to know to truly run a successful SEO campaign. Inadvertently spamming, or using a questionable technique can result in a temporary loss of results or a permanent ban from the engines. Be 100% sure you aren’t endangering your business.
If your results determined you should outsource your SEO, here are the final details you should consider:
1. Make sure you know what questions to ask the SEO firm you hire.
2. Plan on spending anywhere from $300 - $1000.00 per month to run an aggressive SEO campaign.
No one but you can decide - we just wanted to arm you with some things to consider. It is all in the details, and you should consider them carefully before making a decision.
We posting this because of a recent issue we had with a company online that dominates Google’s natural listings for competitive search terms. The company in question is ProjectorLampCenter.com and they rank very well for terms like “projector lamps”, “projector bulbs”, etc.. They are a known scam site and you can read all about our report and others at RipOffReport.com.
The question in hand is that natural search results have been and should always be trusted results, due to the fact that you actually have to work and genuinely care about your site in order to rank. Any one can pay for rankings in PPC on Google or other search engines to rank well but we have sold our services on the basis of customers trusting natural listings over paid listings. Due to potential customers trusting natural listings over paid, there is a higher click ratio, thus more visitors.
Companies generally do not start off being great and then switch to a scam site, they usually have prior intentions. Maybe this is true maybe not. But when a company has been scamming people since 2006, why is Google still ranking this site well in it’s Search Engine Results Pages (SERP’s). If users can go to RipOffReport.com and find out if a company has a scamming report, why can’t googles bot do a quick check and see if they have a pre-determined amount of negative reports and decrease rankings accordingly. When a company resolves these issues Googles bot will recrawl and improve results.
I personally think this would be a great update into they’re algorithm and will reduce a lot of scam sites out there from continuing to make money. This could even be incorporated into the paid results, pretty sure they would never do that though.
We started this blog a few weeks ago in effort to help maintain and gain our web presence for our main website Astonish SEO.
We figured that we might as well throw some adsense ads on it to help maintain the blog. Now the site currently makes a steady $7 dollars a day. It may not seem like much, but it’s $210 a month for doing something that we were going to do any ways, for free.
Fresh content gets indexed quickly with Blogs!
All of the content on our blog is fresh and written solely by us. This allows us to have totally unique articles and posts that are usually indexed by Google within 3 hours. We currently run Wordpress with the All In One SEO Pack and Sitemaps plugins. We also have inputted a custom ping list. Wordpress gets priority indexing with Google, especially if you link your domain (and as many others you can) to your blog. If you can run it off of a /blog/ folder on your site, it is preferable.
There are many custom and free wordpress adsense templates out there. The majority of them are very intrusive with the ad placement they use. Be careful which on you choose, remember the less they feel they are on a site solely for adsense clicks, the better chance they will click.
There is so much talk about content being king, when there are many websites out there that have tons of unique content and rank very poorly. Why is this? Is there a new King out there thats more powerful than content. There always has been, In bound links.
In-Bound Links blow content away in the SERPs!
Having good quality in-bound links from separate IP addresses will out-weigh good quality content any day, when it comes to ranking well in the search engines. But why only have one of the two?
The Key to better search rankings
The key to obtaining top rankings is to serve up fresh useful content on your website, as well as obtaining good quality in-bound links.
How to use Image Alt Tags for Search Engine Optimization
If your unfamiliar with the term Image ALT Tag, its a piece of code that describes an image on a website. This description is embedded in the website’s coding Here is an example of html code, where it says “insert text here” is where you want to place descriptive text about the image or important keywords from your site.
<img src=”../../images/picture.gif” alt=”insert text here”>
If your site was about Search Engine Optimization, your image alt text would look like this
Many website’s abuse this alt tag, stuffing it with keywords over and over again. The way you want to gage your image alt attribute density (meaning how many times to use a keyword in it), is buy the overall density of the keyword on the page. So if your keyword is “SEO” and the page density is 4.0%, then try to have “SEO” present in about 4-8% of your image alt tags.
If your on the market for a new seo tool you have to check out SEO Elite. This is a fairly new search engine optimization tool, that also functions as an article submitter, backlink analyzer, ranking checker, link builder, etc…
SEO Elite’s Ranking Checker
The ranking checker on seo elite is scans google, yahoo and msn very quickly. It has a decent report creator that can export .csv files, as well as html pages.
Problems: Itsdifficult to have separate website ranking profiles, if its even possible. All the website rankings you check get jumbled all together. This makes it very difficult to run ranking reports for clients.
SEO Elite’s Backlink Analyzer
SEO Elite probably has one of the best backlink analyzers available today. It scans very quickly and is usually very accurate. It will tell you where the link comes from, what text they are linking with, page rank of site, age of domain, as well as many other functions. This tool alone makes seo elite worth it. Aaron Wall of SEO Book developed a similar tool simply called, Backlink Analyzer which is FREE and functions almost the same. You can use this tool very effectively to see how competitors rank well, and who links to them.
SEO Elite’s Article Submitter
SEO Elite has a built in article submitter that is very basic but effective. The selection of article sites to submit to is very basic, there’s maybe 30-40 article sites in the list. One benefit of it, is that it tells you which sites allow you to submit html code. This will allow you to add keyword rich links to your site in the article. Once search engines your links, you’ll have many links to your website, with a keyword as the anchor link text.
SEO Elite can check indexed pages in Google, Yahoo, and MSN!
This is a cool feature that a lot of seo software does not have. This tool will check Google, Yahoo and MSN to see what pages from your site are cached in there index. This is very useful to see if new pages you created have been crawled and indexed.
SEO Elite is definitely one of the top seo tools on the market today. It has a lot of useful functions and can serve as a stand alone seo tool that will generate very good rankings and alot of traffic for your site.
When you place a link on your website make sure to give it a title. Doing so gives search engine spiders one more spot to find your keywords. Make sure to describe whats on the other end of the link, using keywords from your site as the title text. Make sure you don’t overdue it (use keywords to many times), switch it up a bit. Many WYSIWYG editors allow you to add a title to a link easily, but if you you have to do it manually here is the code.
It would be in your best interest to run through your website and place title tags on all of your links. It just gives you one more advantage to use to your benefit, why not!
The way that page rank works, is it flows from page to page and site to site through outbound links (”rel=nofollow” tag can stop this). Outbound links are like the pipelines that page rank flows through. Think about websites being connected together through plumbing pipes and water flowing through them in Page Rank. Every time you link to another site your letting this water (page rank) flow out of your site. There are some sites that you may want to give page rank to. If your website is new you don’t want to give out to much of your page rank value.
So how do you solve this, use “rel=nofollow”?
You can easily block your page rank value from going to another website while still having a link to them. You do this by adding a rel=”nofollow” tag. This way you can still add links that will be useful to your visitors, while keeping all your page rank trapped in your site.
How to add the rel=”nofollow” tag
Here are two examples one link doesn’t have the rel=”nofollow” tag the other does. In the end you want you link to look like the 2nd one.
Example 1.)
Visit my <a href=”http://www.example.com/”>discount pharmaceuticals</a> site.
That link would be transformed to
Example 2.)
Visit my <a href=”http://www.example.com/” rel=”nofollow”>discount pharmaceuticals</a> site.
By utilizing this “rel=nofollow” tag you can maintain all your page rank, without giving any away.
Search Engine Optimization for a brand new domain, get rankings quickly!
Following this guide will help you start up and rank a fresh domain on Google, Yahoo and MSN. If you do everything we say in this guide, step by step you will rank in the top 10 for most of your keywords (med competition) within 3 months. Search Engine Optimization can be very tedious and time consuming, but if you follow these steps you can be off to a having a great web presence very quickly.
Eventually you will need all of these seo tools to continue, so its better off to get them all ready before hand to make it easy. Some of them are free, others you must pay for, most you can get a free trial and use it to its advantage(buy if you like).
SEO Tools Needed:
(we are not affiliated with any of these companies)
Do not register or submit yet, you must optimize your website first. We will visit this site later on.
If you can, buy SEO Elite (http://www.seoelite.com) if you are running low on cash download Aaron Wall’s Backlink Analyzer for free at http://tools.seobook.com/backlink-analyzer/. These tools will allow you to see what other sites have links pointing to yours. With SEO Elite there are many other useful seo tools and functions. You will also be able to see what text they are using in they’re out-bound links to you (this is very important, discussed later on).
Download a free version of the search engine rank checking software you choose. Some good ones are Web CEO (at http://www.webceo.com) and Internet Business Promoter (IBP) at (http://www.ibusinesspromoter.com/download/index.htm), these are used to see where your website ranks in Google, Yahoo and MSN (as well as others, but who cares about them).
You will also be submitting articles about your services or products (to build backlinks to your site) so you will need an automated Article Submitter (http://www.submitsuite.com/products/article-submitter.htm), this one submits to over 500 directories. So unless you want to do this by hand we suggest getting a copy. There are other article submitters out there, but this one is very easy to use. There is a new version of article submitter called Article Submitter Pro, but we find that this one works fine and is a lot easier to use.
Now that you have the tools you will need to optimize, lets begin with the on-page seo optimization process.
Step One: On-Page SEO
On-Page SEO Optimization
We will begin with your meta info. If you don’t know the meta info is contained in the <head> area of your page. This meta info tells the search engines what your site’s pages are all about. Having these tags properly configured will allow you to change the way your listing appears on Google, Yahoo and MSN.
Before setting up Meta Info choose your Keywords, Bruce Clay offers a great tool for finding out the number of searches performed each day for a certain keyword. The tool is located here:
Use this to choose good keywords that get a lot of traffic. Once you find some good ones move on to the next step.
TIP > Try to optimize for no more than 5 keywords on each page, optimizing for 1 or 2 is using the best tactic. This allows you to really focus on one topic.
How to edit Meta info
The easiest way to edit meta info in a standard HTML page is to open the page with notepad. Look at the top info you should see something like this, but with your info instead:
<html> <head>
<title>Affordable SEO Services | Astonish SEO</title>
<META NAME=“KEYWORDS” CONTENT=“SEO, Services, Affordable, Search Engine Optimization, Tools, Organic, Small Business, Ma”>
<META NAME=“DESCRIPTION” CONTENT=“Affordable SEO Services, Organic SEO, Free SEO Tools, Search Engine Optimization Information, Consulting, Training”>
</head>
The info between the red head tags is where the meat info is contained. Notice the title tag, the keywords tag and the description tag these are what your going to edit. If any of these tags are not present copy and paste them from here to your website in notepad. Enter a short, to the point title tag. Avoid using words like “and, a, of, or any 3 or less letter word. These are called stop words. Use your the pages main keywords here, most important starting first. Arrange your keywords in the same order, most important first and fade to the least important. Your description should be a sentence including the keywords from your title tag and keywords, try to make it one sentence only.
This is how your title tag is displayed in the search engines:
So you want to try to make this tag sound catchy. The better it sounds the more likely potential prospects will click on it.
Your description tag will usually appear here:
Sometimes when a search is done and your site contains more relevant content about the search term elsewhere, it will display that content and surrounding text where the description usually goes.
Once you have these tags set up for what ever keywords you are targeting you can save the document.
So you want to try to make this tag sound catchy. The better it sounds the more likely potential prospects will click on it.
Sometimes when a search is done and your site contains more relevant content about the search term elsewhere, it will display that content and surrounding text where the description usually goes.