April 19 Customer Website Tips galin
Article submissions are yet another way blogging can be useful for search engine optimization. An article submission is when you write an article on your blog and then submit a link to the post on an article directory site. Ezine Articles is an example of one. Here is how they are useful.
Article directory sites post articles from all over the web for people looking for articles on specific categories to link to on their blog. People looking for quality, enlightening content may look through one of these sites and decide to link to an article you submit. These are useful for SEO backlinks and for general promotion purposes of reaching audiences you would not of reached otherwise.
Webster Groves Article submissions are useful for generating new traffic, but does that mean you should just start submitting every article you write on your blog to these sites?
When trying to properly execute an article submission game plan, it is important to be careful when choosing which articles to submit. First, don’t just spam these sites with your articles. The good sites will notice, and the good users will notice when you are not posting quality content. Choose your blog posts that you feel are your most interesting, insightful, and unique. In addition to this, I do think one “spaming-like” tactic is smart. This tactic is to submit to all of the good article submission sites when you know which article you want to submit. There are tons of these article submission sites (some useful, some not).
We always offer to advise you on the article submission side of your SEO or to do the article submissions for you or your business. Contact us today to discuss a web SEO plan that suites you!
April 11 Customer Website Tips galin
When making a website, you should always keep in mind that you should put some way to have your users contact you from the site. One way to accomplish this is through just having a contact page with email addresses and phone numbers.
A contact page is nice but just putting email addresses up isn’t that practical for users. People use mail clients on web browsers like gmail, yahoo mail, etc. When you just put links up to email addresses and a user clicks it, the click opens the default mail program on your computers operating system. For a lot of people, they do not use these. These users would have to log into their email in their web browser, then copy and paste the email address to send it. Annoying and time consuming for the user, right?
Luckily there is a simple solution to make users not say expletives when using your website: Roermond Contact Forms. Contact Forms are ways for users to send emails to you directly from a website. An example of one is the one located at the bottom of every page on this site. These are easy to set up, and we always suggest them to customers. They are great for gathering information about your users and for making the experience better for your website users.
April 8 Customer Website Tips galin
The blogs we put together using WordPress have a pretty practical categorization structure. Using category options is very beneficial for your site. This is because for each category, your sitemap grows with the number of posts in that category (and you can keep it keyword specific). A larger sitemap is useful for search engines since you will have more pages out there as possibilities for being crawled (when a search engine visits a page and looks at all of the keywords on the page). The larger sitemap helps your SEO.
There are two types of categories to choose from, “Categories” and “Post Tags”. You should see both of these options when writing a new post. I view it this way. “Tags” are specific topic categories while “Categories” should be more general. For example, this post I am using the “Category” titled “Customer Website Tips”. The “Tags” I am using are “seo”, “WordPress”, “web advice”, “blogs”, and “Google”.
When running a blog, you should use this tag/category strategy. You should make sure to not have too many tags or categories and try to make the tags/categories grow in the number of posts that fit those categories. My blog currently has 5 categories and 55 tags. Tags can be more specific so your number of these should be greater than your categories. Not only is this useful for SEO since it grows your sitemap in a keyword friendly manner, it is also useful for your reader since they can easily view all of your sites posts for a specific category (i.e. here is where you could go to only look at SEO posts on my blog).
April 4 Customer Website Tips galin
We prefer setting up your site on Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a web traffic reporting tool developed by Google. It is loaded with features and has a very simple interface for analyzing your traffic.
Analyzing web traffic can be useful for more than the obvious monitoring your site purposes. One incredibly useful purpose is for SEO. With Google Analytics, you can easily see how much traffic you are generating from search engines. You do this from your main Analytics screen by navigation to “Traffic Sources>>Search Engines”. Once here you will see a break down of your hits from all of the search engines. Clicking on the search engine will then give you a list of all the search terms giving you these search results.
This is great for analyzing SEO. You can easily see which keywords are doing well. In addition, you can check to see if any keywords you wish to have be hits are on the list through a simple search.
Understanding your site in this manner is an important step in the constant research that is involved for proper search engine optimization.
April 1 Customer Website Tips galin
Customers may sometimes be contacted by other websites about putting a link to their site up in exchange for a link on their site. This is called a “link exchange”, and they are definetley useful for generating more traffic to your site.
Link exchanges are great because they generate additional traffic to your site in multiple ways. The obvious way is by people on the other site clicking on the link to go to your site. This direct effect is nice but not the main reason people are interested in link exchanges.
Link exchanges also help your search engine results. Google and other search engine “crawlers” see a link on a site and then follow it the link destination. By having links on other sites, it will increase the number of crawls you get to your site. There are some important factors to both be cautious of and to look for when deciding whether to link exchange with a site.
Important Factors for Link Exchanges
- Traffic of the Partnering Site – This can be researched through Alexa Ratings. Higher traffic sites will help you more.
- Relative Content of the Partnering Site – Do you have a law site and the partnering site is about basketball? That link wouldn’t be smart. Partner up with sites that have similar content but are not direct competitors.
- Dofollow Links – The link must be allowed to be followed by search engines. This means the link should not have the parameter “rel=’nofollow'” in it. Here is a blog post about html links that explains the ‘nofollow’ parameter.
- Link Text – If the partner is willing to put nice keywords in their link, then this should help SEO. That is, instead of “GPM Web Solutions” saying something more keyword rich like “Affordable Website Designs”. Search engines take note on the words in the link and what they should indicate for search results.
Always make sure to give careful thinking to who you decide to partner up with for link exchanges. They can be very useful, but one link can be more effective than 200 links. It is the quality of the link that matters.
