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

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.

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.

Create A Squidoo Lens- With Squidoo you are creating an outside site that is sending your site an incoming link. Therefore the more time you take to create a lens that has quality and good volume content the more power your Squidoo lens will carry, meaning the more power your incoming link will have. Now you can take 15 mins and whip up a lens with a few paragraphs containing a link or two to your site. However that incoming link won’t carry as much power as if you created a lens that actually gets traffic. Don’t go overboard and spend more than an hour, but take the extra time to create a quality, topically relevant lens which in turn creates you a quality link.

Submit to the D-List- The D-List is a list of blogs that have Do-Follow link value in their comments, meaning when you comment your name can become a link to your site. Courtney Tuttle offers a list of do-follow blogs, there is a list of links to these blogs there so it is easy to click down the list and make comments. This is a valuable resource but must be used with caution, don’t spam through comments. Go in, genuinely read their posts. Then use the keyword you are trying to rank for as your name and put your sites URL in the website box. Make a comment that adds to the post. This will not only ensure that your link is left in their comment section (instead of removed as spam) but it will also build a positive reputation around your keyword link.

Write an Article- With an article, you are writing the content that will go on another site, meaning it will be relevant content that will point back to your site. Write an article on one of the keywords you are trying to rank for. Make it completely relevant and interesting and then link one or two of those keywords to pages on your site. Then submit the article to a variety of article directories.

Submit to Unspun- Unspun is a site where users can create their own ‘Top 10’ lists and then vote on which item in the list is #1. The lists vary from topics like the” Best Skin Care Products” to “Hardest Disability to Overcome” so you are more than likely to find a list that fits your topic. The 2 coolest parts about unSpun are one; if you don’t find a list that fits your topic then you can create one. And two, you can add your link under the item on the list that fits your topic. On the actual list page the link is no follow but if you click on the item in the list it will take you to a page where your link has followed value. It can take some time for this page to be seen by Google but every link counts so it is worth the 5-10 mins it takes to add your URL.

Link building isn’t impossible, it can just be difficult to know where to start or where to try next. These 4 ideas are just starting blocks but they can help get your site ranked, indexed and become more appealing for future link trades.

1. Decide upon the main phrase of a web page or blog post
2. Type it into a keyword tool like the Google Adwords Keyword Tool
   
3. Choose a handful of the most relevant phrases to be in the cluster

For a more in depth explanation on how to clusterize, read this post: Clusterize Your Phrases Once you decide which cluster is assigned to the URL you are optimizing, then you are ready to create an effective title tag. Title Tag Best Practices At this point, I want to explain some “best practices” for title tag creation.

1. Prominence – Place your most important phrase closest to the beginning as possible.
2. Density and Long tail – Use long tail phrases and/or a combination of phrases within the cluster to help increase density of main phrase as well as help the page rank for long tail phrases
3. Use plurals and singulars where applicable
4. Realize that the longer the title tag, the more diluted the strength of each word becomes

Let me give you an example that keeps all four points from above in mind. Lets look at a blog post that talks about a forex trading course. At the time of this writing, the title tag is “Forex Course – Forex Trading Courses – Easiest Forex Course Videos”. Here is the cluster of phrases that I chose to rank this page for:

1. Forex course
2. Forex courses
3. Forex trading course
4. Forex trading courses
5. Forex course videos
6. Easiest forex course
7. Easiest forex course videos

As you can see, I put the main phrase of the cluster first to give it the most prominence.

I used two of the sub phrases from the cluster which, in one way or another, includes all of the words from each of the seven phrases in the cluster. Doing that increases my keyword density for the main phrase “forex course” and helps me rank for the sub phrases at the same time.

I used both singular and plural for the word “course”. Wordtracker showed me that “course” was searched for more than “courses” and so that is why I placed the singular version first—to give the higher search volume phrase the most prominence.

I limited this title tag to just 3 phrases so as not to dilute the density of every phrase included. I typically don’t do more than 3 phrases in a title tag.

Take Aways Keep all these factors in mind when you are creating your title tags for every single page. And yes, every page should have its own unique title tag.

Also, realize that these are just guidelines. Every phrase has different amounts of competition and there is no set way that works the best in all situations. Sometimes I find that one or two phrases works best and other times I use four or five. The only way to know is to test. Analyze your competition to get ideas? Yes…and then test.

Let me say it again in bold, you should always test different title tags to help rankings improve. If you tweak a title tag and your ranking drops, you can always change it back to the original title tag and get your rankings back as soon as the Search Engines re-index the page.

One last thing. After all this talk about testing different title tags, don’t get too obsessed. You ABSOLUTELY need to focus on BUILDING LINKS TO THIS PAGE. No amount of title tag tweaks will get you to the #1 spot without link building.

1. What type of techniques do you use to achieve rankings?
2. What type of risk is involved with this method?
3. What will happen if our relationship is dissolved?
4. Can you show me examples of past work?
5. What was the client’s ROI?
6. What type of volume increase in traffic is reasonable to expect?
7. How long until I start to see results?
8. What would you expect from our end to aid your work?
9. What were some of your top search ranking achievements?
10. Do you offer any other internet marketing services to supplement your SEO offerings?

Asking each of these questions should give you enough knowledge about the company and their services to make an educated decision. Remember, you are only investing in SEO to gain a competitive advantage in your industry; you need the greatest return that you can possibly get.

Search engine optimization is a very relevant aspect of creating value in an online marketing mix. We all know that phone books are out and websites are in, but what is the secret to transforming a great idea into a world-wide must-have product? How can the little guy win the online battle against the Goliaths of big business?

The trick is to play smarter, not harder. These are four great ways to gain value from SEO:

1. If you can’t beat ‘em, join em. Every business wants to be the first hit on a Google search, but you can’t do it alone. Linking your site to other sites is one of the most important elements to search engine optimization. Google and other search engines weigh the relevance of the link and then send traffic, through higher search rankings, to the sites that best fit the query. Being a respected authority within your industry is an important part of online business. Linking is going to help you make connections with people that sell or deal with similar products. This connection can help you spread the word about your company and synergize with other websites, but most importantly, it’s a necessity for moving your business from page 50 in the search engines to a page someone might actually see.

2. It’s not what you know, but who you know. This rule of thumb from the business world is just as applicable online as Facebook, MySpace, blogs, and a variety of other social networks continue to attract record numbers of visitors. And the popularity of social marketing is not expected to slow down anytime soon. Peter Daboll, President and CEO of Comscore.com said back in 2006, “This is a phenomenon we’re seeing not only in the U.S., but also around the world. Social networks have proven to be a new, innovative way to spread the word about your company. Individuals both young and old are using these sites as a place to gain meaningful information.

3. A picture is worth a thousand words. How does a three-year old know to throw a fit near the Lucky Charms in the grocery store isle? How does your teen decide that she’ll die without a Hannah Montana t-shirt? The answer, of course, is brand impression, and it is the make-it-or-break-it difference that sells “yummy” to tots, “cool” to teens, and “reliable to grandma. SEO can help your market get a good impression of what your company represents. The benefits of brand impression come from exposure and a more meaningful experience on the net. With so much information on the internet, it is easy to have your brand mixed up with another company’s brand. Increased traffic and exposure will help clarify who your company is and why consumers should chose your product. The goal of brand impression is to be the first company the consumer thinks of when looking for a specific product. Having a strong company brand will raise sales and increase the overall value of the company.

4. Every little bit counts. You may think that if you can’t devote your life to search engine optimization, then it’s not worth spending time trying. Rome wasn’t built in a day, Michael Jordan didn’t become famous from shooting one basket, and Mozart’s first work wasn’t his greatest symphony. Thomas Edison is credited with saying that genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. In the field of internet marketing, any advances you can make in driving traffic and customers to your site will put you one step closer to fulfilling your goals.

Search engine optimization is truly a new, innovative tool that will add value to any company. ioVentures has seen the value of SEO in a variety of companies. If your company is not taking advantage of these benefits, you may want to look into making an SEO investment in the near future. ioVentures would be more than happy to help you assess your SEO needs. This article from Google is also a great place to start your journey:

What’s an SEO? Does Google recommend working with companies that offer to make my site Google-friendly?

1. Setting up a WordPress Blog
   1. Hosting (BlueHost: Fantastico, Simple Scripts)
   2. WordPress Installation & Setup
      1. Installation
      2. Settings
         1. www
         2. permalink structure /%postname%.html
      3. Plugin Essentials
         1. What are plugins & how can they help me?
            1. Explanation
         2. Uploading your first plugin
            1. Plugin Central – List of Plugins to paste
         3. Setting a Stable base
            1. Publishing
               1. Google Sitemap Plugin
               2. Twitter Tools
            2. SEO Your Site
               1. All-in-One SEO Pack
               2. SEO Friendly Images
               3. SEO Smart Links
               4. Simple Tags
            3. Networking
               1. Social Links
               2. Tell-A-Friend
            4. Usability Features
               1. Featurific
               2. Awesom Dropdown
               3. Favorite Posts
            5. Creating Stick
               1. What Would Seth Godin Do?
               2. Comment Relish – emails a thank you to first time
               3. Subscribe to Comments
               4. Comment Thank You Page
         4. Others
            1. Askimet
               1. Registering for WordPress.com & API
            2. Ohz Dropdown Menu
            3. One Click Plugin
         5. Find more plugins
            1. WordPress.org Plugin Directory
            2. Google Search
      4. Installing Your Template FREE ONES
         1. Finding a Template
            1. WordPress.org Themes
            2. Google Search
         2. Installing & Activating
2. Building Community
   1. Read
      1. Search for your topic of interest
      2. Skim or read 5 a day
      3. Setup Google Reader or iGoogle
   2. Bookmark
      1. Onlywire
      2. Shareaholic Firefox Add-on
      3. AddThis
         1. Digg
         2. StumbleUpon
         3. Twitter
         4. Facebook
   3. Commenton on Blog Posts (links)
   4. Tweet
      1. 3 times a day is solid
         1. 1 blog post (Twitter Post)
         2. 2 links to good resources (in your reading)
         3. 3 Thoughtful replies (TweetDeck – Twitter Search)
   5. (Make New Friends & Connect)
      1. Twitter Search – Tweet Deck
      2. Facebook Groups
      3. Youtube Channels
3. Content, Content, Content
   1. Principles
      1. QUALITY 1.
      2. Engage Your Reader
         1. Ask questions
         2. Respond to User Comments Quickly
      3. Think SEO, at least partially
         1. Categories/Tags
         2. SEO
   2. Push Content
      1. Facebook Notes/Page
      2. Twitter – Twitter Tools
      3. LinkedIn