What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization is part of a wider strategy to draw traffic from search engines called Search Engine Marketing (SEM). Pay-Per-Click (PPC), commonly referred to as paid search advertising is generally the other piece of the SEM pie. But that’s a topic for another day.

SEO consists of four main parts:

1. Researching phrases that your potential clients are using to search for businesses like yours
2. Optimizing your web content to include those keyword phrases
3. Getting keyword-rich links to your site with those phrases
4. Tracking your results

SEO often requires an upfront investment of time and money before solid results appear, but this ongoing process can bring you highly targeted traffic over time. (For a more detailed overview of the SEO process see Search Engine Optimization Training)

How can SEO increase the Value my Press Releases?

When considering the SEO benefits your Press Release can have, there are two areas you must consider: The ranking potential of your website AND the ranking potential of press release itself.

A well structured press release can rank well in the news search engines, stays visible longer to those searching news engines and if it’s not time sensitive you can even rank in the normal search engine results with a little link building effort. But, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. To optimize a press release here are some guidelines:

• Include keyword phrases in the title of the release. On many sites the press releases end up on, the title of the release becomes the title tag of the page, this is one of the most important factors in helping a page rank well.
• Include the keyword throughout the release, but especially in the first paragraph.
• If you include headings, naturally try include keywords there.

Helping a Press Release to reach a wider audience via SEO optimization is smart. However, with a little coordination with your search engine marketing company or team, every press release is also a chance to help your website rank better. Know the following items:

• Target keywords & keyword clusters
• Target pages (urls) on site
• Current search rankings for those keywords

Each release should include two to three keyword-rich links to different pages on your site. Each page on your site should be optimized to rank well for a handful of specific, related keyword phrases, a cluster. The keyword phrases you use to link to those pages should be the same keywords for which they are optimized. This combination of onsite optimization for specific phrases and related offsite links pointing to that page help it rank well for those phrases.

With these pieces of data in hand, you are armed with the information necessary to help your press release bring in traffic AND to contribute to your site’s overall search engine rankings.

What Online PR Tools Are Best?

Recently TopSEOs.com listed the top ten PR sites (Thanks @NewspaperGrl). A the top of their list was PRWeb.com, a site designed to help you specifically optimize your PR for SEO to get the largest reach possible. PRWeb & others have tools to help you know how many people saw your press release. In addition to this you should also be monitoring your own site’s stats to see how people are arriving on your site. You can tell this through your site’s referral statistics.

How Do I Assess the Effectiveness of My PR?

Every Press Release should have a call to action in it, an offer or a special discount. This doesn’t have to be the main focus of the release, but make sure to give the viewer something to act on. If this is in place, it’s one of the most important measures of effectiveness that you can monitor.

Other measures include views of the release, successful interviews from local or national news outlets as well as website traffic.

The Wrap-up: A Case for SEO in PR

As was stated at the outset of this article, a large majority of Press Releases go out every day and are NOT optimized for visibility on the web, let alone to help a company’s search engine rankings. With a little effort, you can drive targeted traffic to your website with the help of online Press Releases.

I hope these thoughts were helpful. If you have any questions, I’d love to write more on this topic, just leave a comment or shoot me an email and I’ll get back with you with an answer. Call me too if you’d like us to come present to your company and share with you how we could help you increase traffic & sales. Follow me on Twitter @ioVspaceMonkee or get our latest blog posts and free workshop announcements @ioVentures

Now that you know this, it is time to really dig in and understand blog commenting and how to use it effectively.  If you follow these steps that are layed out for you, you will start to see traffic and a boost in your organic search rankings.

1. Finding Related Blogs

This is important and not important at the same time.  There is a phrase in the SEO world that says, "a link is a link".  However, if you are commenting on blogs that are related to your niche or industry, you are much more likely to receive qualified buyers coming to your website to buy your products or services.  You can also comment on just about any blog and receive traffic, but they are not pre-qualified buyers.  Having a nice mix of both related and non-related blogs to comment on is a good idea.  You can find industry related blogs by doing a search on Technorati.

2. Using The Proper "Name" When Filling Out The Name Field

This will make or break your blog commenting efforts.  Using the proper name will not only help you with SEO link value, but it will help readers of that particular blog know what your website is about.  You will want to use your keywords that you are trying to rank for when selecting your name.  In addition to that, you will want to select the appropriate page of your website that is related to your keyword to use as your URL>  For example, if my website was about Blackberry Cell Phones, I would do the following…

• Name: Blackberry Cell Phones / URL: www.blackberry.com
• Name: Blackberry Bold / URL: http://www.blackberry.com/blackberrybold
• Name: Blackberry Storm / URL: http://www.blackberry.com/blackberrystorm

3. Don’t Spam Comment

This should be common sense, but for most people it is not.  They just want to rip out blog comments like nobodies business.  This is not how to blog comment!  You need to take time to read the post that you are going to comment on and then in the most professional manner, make an educated comment that adds value to the post and adds value to any readers to read your comment.  If you get lazy, even once, your comment could be marked as spam, reported to Askimet, and your comments will never see the light of day on any blog currently using the Askimet plugin.

Remember, you are a guest on other people’s blogs.  Don’t do anything that would make them mad or that would make them not like you.  You want to become friends with them, add value to their blog, and respectifully take their faithful readers and turn them into your customers.

Most directories on the internet are non paid and are free to use by anyone who has a website they want to list.  There are however, some paid directories that have a great impact on your SEO efforts and you will even get some traffic from them.  The first of these is the Yahoo Directory.

The Yahoo Directory is a paid directory hosted and maintained by Yahoo.  It costs $299/year to list your website.  Backlinks coming from the Yahoo Directory are high quality links because of the amount of page rank that this particular directory has.  You just need to decide whether or not you can afford $299 a year.  (In the beginning if the marketing budget is tight, I would spend that money elsewhere, but eventually it is worth paying for).

Another great paid directory is the Best of the Web Directory.  The links coming from this directory are not as powerful as the Yahoo Directory, but they are still high quality backlinks.  This site has two pricing options, first, you can pay one lump sum up front for $249.95, or second, you can pay annually for $99.95.  If you can muster up the $250, I would suggest that option.

Now, as I said a few paragraphs up, most of the directories on the internet are non paid.  All you have to do is go to the site and submit all the information they ask for.  Your site will then be reviewed and either accepted or rejected into their directory.  You will be notified by email when this happens.  I will go into detail on how to submit to these directories and get the most SEO value that you can.

How To Submit

1. You need to locate as many of these directories as you can and start submitting to each of them.  You can find a good list of the top 100 directory submission sites on the internet by clicking here.
2. Go to each site and start submitting.  You will want to look for a link that says "Add Link", "Add Site", "Submit Site", Suggest URL", etc.  Click there and you are on your way.
3. This is the most important thing to remember, or all of your effort and time will be wasted.  When it asks for the "Title of the Site" or "Link Name" or "Link Title" (I think you get the picture), you need to use your keywords, since they become the anchor text of the link pointing to your website.  You will also want to make sure that you have a nice variation of anchor text when submitting to directories.

Before I finish up, I should also talk about one other directory that is nigh impossible to get into, but if you do, it is one of the best links you can get in terms of SEO.  It is called DMOZ.org.  You need to know that you should only submit to DMOZ once.  If you keep submitting, your links will definitely be rejected.  If you do get rejected, you can submit again, but I would strongly suggest that you wait at least one year before re-submitting.  When submitting, you need to ignore my guidelines above.  Instead of adding your keywords as your site title, you need to use the name of your site.  If you use keywords, your site will be rejected. (DMOZ is the only exception to guideline #3 above!)

I hope this has been helpful, if I were in your postion, I would start by submitting to DMOZ and then move on to the others.  To see instructions on how to submit to DMOZ, click here.

Anchor Text

Anchor text is one of the biggest factors that influence what keywords you are raking for in the search engines.  Anchor text is the text that is found in the actual link pointing to your website.  At ioVentures we are trying to rank for many different keywords such as search engine optimization company.  Search engine optimization company is our anchor text that links to our landing page that talks about search engine optimization. You see, the search engines use links pointing to your website to help determine what your website is about and what your site should be ranking for.  Imagine if your site was about making brownies and you had a hundred links pointing to your site that say "click here" or "making chocolate chip cookies".  First of all, your site probably wouldn’t rank very well since the anchor text doesn’t have anything to do with your site.  Second, if you managed to get ranked for a keyword that isn’t related to your site, your conversion would be horrible.

One other thing that I should probably mention about anchor text, you need to vary the keywords you use when you get links.  Unfortunately, I learned this one the hard way.  When I first started out doing SEO, I used the exact same anchor text in each of my links.  I couldn’t climb the rankings for even the easy keywords.  Come to find out, the search engines analyze the number of links, your anchor text, and dozens of  other factors to determine if your linking patterns look natural.  If you were a search engine looking at all of my links that say the exact same thing, would that look natural to you?  Of course not!  This is referred to as Google Bombing.

So, what you need to do instead is come up with some variations of your keyword (at least 5) and use them as your anchor text.  (Read our post about grouping your keyword phrases into clusters).  For a website about making brownies you might want to use the following variations, making brownies, making gourmet brownies, instructions on making brownies… well, you get the picture.  This will make your linking profile look as natural as possible.  You might also want to throw some "click here" or "visit our website" in the mix as well.  Anything you can do to make your links look natural will boost your rankings greatly.

Related Content

Another huge factor that determines how good of a link you have pointing back at your website is the type of content on the page that links to your site.  If at all possible, you want to find links that are coming from pages that are very similar to yours.  You can tell if a page has related content by looking at the keywords in the title tag, header tags, and body of the text on that page. 

Basically if the site has something to do with your site, those links are the best to be on the hunt for.  The reason for this is because the search engines will not only see your anchor text that is specific to your website, but they will also see that another site in your industry is saying that your site is recommended by them.  These types of links with the proper anchor text are powerful links.

So remember, the more relevant the better.

Page Rank

Although not as important, page rank helps you rank higher in the search engines.  If you are a beginner, you are probably asking, what is page rank?  Page rank is a ranking that Google allocates to every web page on the internet.

Every link pointing to a web page passes along some page rank points.  The more links a web page acquires, the greater its page rank will be over time.  Generally speaking, the higher the page rank of a page, the higher the authority of that page meaning any links acquired from that page to yours is of higher value.

So, you will want to find links from sites that have high page rank.  Page rank goes from 0-10 with ten obviously being the highest.  The higher the page rank, the more that will be passed to your site.

Number of Links Going To Other Websites On The Page

The number of links on a webpage is a factor of quality.  The more links on one web page, the more diluted the power of each link becomes.  Less page rank is passed on through each outgoing link because it is distributed between more links. 

Link Positioning

To tell you the truth, sometimes you really can’t control this factor.  It has been proven that links within the content of a web page or blog post hold more value than those in a footer or nav bar.  These types of links also hold more power the closer they are to the top of the content or in other words, toward the beginning of the content.  The first link that the search engines see on a web page, the more authority they give that link.

I hope that this will help you in your link building efforts.  If done properly, your link building will really influence your website rankings.  Remember that you can’t control all of these factors in every situation but do the best that you can. 

The key to a successful link building campaign is to ALWAYS BE GETTING LINKS!  Be consistent and persistent your link building efforts and it will pay of with top rankings eventually. 

If you have any questions or comments about this topic, please feel free to make a comment below.

The purpose of an article is to spread general information about an industry or a concept. It can give an overview of the situation of the industry at present, or it can be an analysis of certain parts of that industry. It might be a relevant story about some happening within that sphere of business. Whatever the topic may be, these articles are extended to the readers for the purpose of keeping them informed on what is happening in the industry.

Why then does an article help your website to become the authority for your industry? Whenever you write an article online, you have a chance to make a name for yourself as an author. You will be able to write an author’s biography and describe what you do. In this biography you have the chance to reference your website and place links to landing pages on your site. When you make these links, be sure to use your keywords from your selected clusters as the anchor text. If you don’t, you aren’t building effective links.

These links help your site to rank in the search engines for your keyword phrases therefore establishing you as an authority in your industry because you will be on the top the the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

General Article Marketing Steps:

1. Write article
2. Write author bio
3. Submit article to each of the following directories

• EzineArticles
• Article Dashboard
• GoArticles
• Article City
• Buzzle
• SearchWarp
• ArticlesBase
• IdeaMarketers
• ArticleAlley
• Amazines

The Nitty-Gritty Details:

Writing Your Article

• Your article needs to be at least 400 words long.  Once you reach 400 words, finish the article as soon as possible.  You don’t necessarily get more benefit from your links if the article is longer so my opinion is not to waste your time going much past 400 words.
• Create a catchy title but be sure to include one or two keyword phrases that you will be using as links in the author bio.

Writing Your Author Bio

•  2-3 sentences that include 3 links with each link pointing to a different landing page on your site
• Use HTML coding to create these links.  An example of an author bio the way it needs to look when pasting it into the author bio form submission field is as follows:
• John Smith wants to help people learn about the different types of <a href="http://www.fezzari.com/categories/view/Road_Bikes">road bikes</a> and <a href="http://www.fezzari.com/categories/view/Mountain_Bikes">mountain bikes</a>.  Visit Fezzari today to learn more about or to purchase one of their <a href="http://www.fezzari.com">mountain bikes</a>.

Submitting to Article Directories

• Each article directory asks you to create an author account.  It is free to do so.
• Create a new email address that you will use just for these article accounts so as to avoid filling up your other emails with a lot of junk mail.
• Try to use the same username and password for all article directories so you don’t have to memorize more than one.
• Submit on a regular basis.  I recommend one article a week.  At the very least, one article a month.
• After you have some article links under your belt, start using an automated submission service.  The best one in the market by far is Unique Article Wizard.It costs $67 a month but it is worth it.

If you can take the time to continuously release articles on the web, you will soon find that you are building a strong ranking in the search engines and your traffic will increase. This tool is one of your keys to SEO success.

How can you get your story out there? The best way for you to do this is going to be a Press Release. A press release is a viable option where you will write a story on what is occurring in your company, or you can write a promotion for a new product you are distributing. Whatever your big news, you have the option of getting into the hands of the media so that they can grab it if they so choose.

Usually, you should not stress if your phone does not ring. There is link building power in the release itself.  Any media pick-up that might happen would be an added bonus. What then can you do to make your press release a strong link source for your site?   

You should choose a release package that fits your needs and budget. There are free press release sites, yet you should know that you get what you pay for. It will be worth your while to budget and get a quality press release done. Find the site that you wish to use. Two suggestions would be prweb.com and prleap.com.

Some of the things you will want to do as you write your press release would be the following:

1. Make sure to place links in the content of your press release. These links are the key purpose behind your release and they should not be excluded.
2. Be sure to use your keyword clusters as the anchor text for those links.
3. Be careful to only link once to each URL that you place in the press release.
4. Don’t use text with all caps.
5. Use a quote and some analytical information. This still ought to have meat to it so you can have the possibility of more media exposure.

If done correctly, a press release will be a great link building tool, and an opportunity for possible extra exposure. Be sure to track the effects of your press release and see the results of it. Watch your web traffic, analyze your amount of subscribers and return visitors to your site. All of these can be influenced by press releases. Do a good follow-up and analysis for yourself to see where you can change the way you use this tool.

In short, using press releases at times when you see fit will be a great way to build up your site, increase your traffic, and increase your site’s exposure.

Imagine a newspaper. When you are reading the newspaper, what do you do? You browse headlines to find the articles that interest you.  Once you find an article of interest, you might scan the article first looking at subheadlines to guide you.  We can all agree that the words in headlines and subheadlines are more important than the main body of the article.

In similar fashion, search engine bots read over the content of your web pages.  The bots tend to give more importance to phrases in headlines and subheadlines.  But what is considered a headline/subheadline to the search engine bots?  The answer is simple: Header Tags.  

Even though your page title might be big and bold and look like a headline to a human being, it is not seen as a headline to Google or other search engines unless it is turned into a header tag.  Those header tags are labeled in the code of your website, and the search engines look for those tags. Like the eyes that are looking for a relevant story, the search engines will place priority on H1 tags that cater to the desired search. 

You can make any text a header tag by simply adding a small snippet of html code around the text within the code of the website page.  Header tags range from h1 to h6 and the code looks like this:

<h1>Page Title Goes Here</h1> or

<h2>Subheadings Go Here</h2>

That’s it.  It’s not much code but adding them will help with your onsite optimization efforts.

How to put header tags into practice:

Put the main keyword phrase from that page’s cluster in the h1 tag for sure.  If you have any subheadings that are there for the user and they contain keyword phrases from that page’s cluster, then turn those into h2 tags.

Feel free to ask questions below. 

In my opinion, blogs serve three purposes.

1- To voice your opinions and ideas about the current industry that you are blogging about. In our case it is about SEO and internet marketing principles and strategies that we have developed, tested, and proven to work.

2- To increase the amount of traffic coming to your website. You see, the search engines love blogs! I would say probably even more so than normal HTML websites. Blogs, whether they are run by Word Press, Blogger, or any other blogging software make it easy for people like you and me to add new and fresh content to our sites without having to hard code anything. I’ll tell you what, Google loves websites or blogs that have new content and they come back to your site frequently to see what’s new. Because blogs are so easy to post to, you can save time and add new content all of the time.

As the search engines see new content and new internal links they will begin to rank your posts in their results. Blogs can generally get ranked pretty high with relatively little work in niche markets and with long tail keywords that you might not be focused on targeting at the moment. If you are using Word Press as your blogging software, you can use plug-ins like the Related Posts plug-in to supercharge your internal linking structure and get ranked even faster and get even more traffic.

3- For SEO value. It is no secret to anyone marketing on the internet that incoming links fuel search engine optimization and make or break your organic search rankings. It is vital that when adding new content, like blog posts, to link to other blog posts within your blog or related pages on your website. Yeah, it’s great to have a sweet internal linking structure down in your footer or side bar, but it has been proven that links within the body of your text have more value than those in other areas of your website.

Links are not the only reason why blogging helps your SEO efforts. It has also been proven that sites with over 100 pages do better in the search engines. It all goes back to the idea that you need to add new content to your website or blog regularly. The experts in the SEO industry suggest that you are adding content to your website every single day. This is why blogging is so great for your SEO efforts.

If you don’t have a company or site blog, you need to get one. Word Press blogging software is free and relatively easy to set up on your domain. If you don’t have the ability to set up a blog attached to your website, get a free blogger account. Anything is better than nothing! Take action today and work hard to add content every day! It will pay off.

It’s so funny to me how often SEO and Design are performed in vacuums, separate from one another.  A while back ioVentures adopted many of the principles that Coutney Tuttle talks about in his article that details 6 SEO Problems Common In WordPress Themes. I had become comfortable and forgot that this knowledge is not so common place, especially not among WordPress Theme creators, among website designers.

While getting top rankings is not completely the responsibility of he who makes the website (as link development is a critically important factor in ranking), he IS responsible for creating a strong foundation for those who will later do search engine marketing to build from.

Truly valuable is the designer that knows how to create an SEO friendly website.

CMOE is currently having a blog contest.  During this contest they are giving away some Amazon gift cards and some really good books that can help any organization or individual excel in the work place.  You can read about their contest here.

Here is one of their great videos about Strategic Thinking.

Strategic thinking is a skill that anyone can use in any role or position within a company. Applied Strategic Thinking is practical, ongoing, and informal. Strategic thinking is helpful when it is linked and aligned with grand corporate strategy.