SiteProNews |
- 3 SEO Tidbits Every Ecommerce Site Should Know – A SPN Exclusive Article
- Article Marketing: Content is King and Syndication is his Mistress – A SPN Exclusive Article
- The Key Benefits Of WordPress for SEO: Your WordPress for Newbies Article
- Creative Brilliance and Logo Design – A SPN Exclusive Article
- Google’s Panda Update: Haters, Cheaters and Consequences
| 3 SEO Tidbits Every Ecommerce Site Should Know – A SPN Exclusive Article Posted: 20 Jul 2011 08:22 AM PDT 
Pay It Forward A common situation in ecommerce is that a site owner learns that their site is in violation of some SEO logic and wants to solve the problem immediately. A few examples would be poorly written or generated title tags, long URLs and messy site structure. Most ecommerce owners will likely have run into at least one of these issues and figuring out how to proceed from that point on is critical. If your URLs are too long you cannot simply shorten them, 301 redirect the old pages and hope for the best. That might result in a significant loss in link juice that outweighs the benefit you receive from shorter URLs. It is important to realize that you cannot transform your site overnight so create a plan of attack with an understanding that you do not want to undercut your current traffic. The best plan in this example would be to have shorter URLs on newly created pages and test out redirecting a small sample of pages to see if there is a potential benefit. It is critical to remember that your competitors are in the same boat as they do not have perfectly optimized sites either. Think about how to use your discovery to create an advantage in the future. If you are already ranking and getting organic traffic this means you are in contention so executing a forward moving plan can result in sizable advantages. Get It Indexed It might seem obvious that indexing your content is important, but for large ecommerce sites this should be one of your primary concerns. Ecommerce sites often struggle to get links pointing at their product pages, so ranking these pages for less competitive longtail keywords is an essential source of highly targeted traffic. Take a look at your Google Webmaster Tools account under the sitemaps section (assuming you have submitted sitemaps!), and see the ratio of URLs you have submitted to the URLs showing up in Google’s web index. I highly recommend having separate sitemaps for different sections of your site as this will reveal more information than a single sitemap if one section is underperforming. In doing so you will have a basis to compare against which will aid in identifying the causes of the indexation problems. Another critical aspect of getting pages indexed is to understand that not every page on your website is created equal. Google typically will index by crawling the pages with the most link juice and navigate outwards via links from that page. In most cases this is going to be the homepage so the pages you choose to link from there should be your most important. A common mistake for a large ecommerce site is to link to just the main categories or to be linking to too many pages. You want to use your homepage’s link juice to highlight the best pages on your site and this often may not be your main categories. Furthermore, the closer a page is to a well linked page on your site the better the chance it gets indexed and ranks well. This means you will want to be linking those pages from your homepage and be cognizant of how your site structure prioritizes your pages in Google’s eyes. Site Wide Improvements As mentioned earlier the difficulty in managing SEO for an ecommerce site is often caused by the breadth of the categories and products already on the site. However, this can actually be a strength when you are able to make a small improvement that will have a site wide effect. Increasing your site’s overall rankings by 5% could increase your traffic exponentially higher than 5% because of the mechanics of how people click on search engine results pages (higher results get the majority of clicks). Things like improving your site’s loading time or getting some extra backlinks are massive opportunities for ecommerce sites to receive an across the board boost to their rankings. As Google moves towards supporting strong brands, the benefits of this kind of improvement cannot be understated. A trusted site will often rank competitive words simply on the strength of their domain and these branding benefits will likely be even greater in the future. While ecommerce sites do present uncommon challenges when embarking on an SEO campaign, understanding the nuances is an area where large opportunities still exist. Because SEO for ecommerce has an added degree of complexity, it is a great barrier to help you differentiate from your competition making it all the more worthwhile. Chris Warren is a web content specialist for www.batteriesinaflash.com an ecommerce store for batteries, chargers, solar panels and accessories. Follow him on twitter @BIAFgreen. Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources |
| Article Marketing: Content is King and Syndication is his Mistress – A SPN Exclusive Article Posted: 20 Jul 2011 08:06 AM PDT 
Some people do AM for traffic and some do it for backlinks. Likewise, some people try to advertise with their articles, and some simply provide content. Well, there isn’t really a wrong way to do article marketing, but there is definitely a right way. Let’s clear the air and break down article marketing into its two core components and what they mean for your site’s traffic and rankings. Distribution and Syndication Distribution is where you submit your articles, and syndication is where they are published after they are found in the places you distributed to. For example, you submit (distribute) an article to EzineArticles. A week later, a webmaster finds your article and publishes (syndicates) it on his/her site. These syndication backlinks are usually much more powerful than any link you will get from a directory. Also, these links can and will send targeted traffic to your site. So to review, your article is distributed to directories where you will get some traffic and weak links, and then it is syndicated on other sites that give you a lot more traffic and better links than the directories. That means these links give you more traffic NOW and more traffic LATER because they help your rankings more. Our conclusion is that you want to create content that is made specifically to be syndicated – content for webmasters. Here’s how you do it: First, you want to consider the length of your article. If you were a webmaster looking for content to publish on your site, how long do you think you’d want it to be? The answer is basically as long as you can find! Longer content means readers stick around and read for longer and sites with more robust content often rank better. Rather than writing two 500 word articles that get little syndication, you should write one 1,000 word article because its chances for successful, widespread syndication are much better. And to reiterate, this means there’s a better chance of getting a whole lot more traffic and much stronger links. Next, you want to look at the way the content itself is written. Article marketing works best with content that is very informational and even instructional in nature. Do NOT write advertisements. They will not get syndicated, and they possibly won’t even be accepted on any directories in the first place. It can be tempting to write an advertisement – don’t do it. Simply write an article that you think readers would find helpful, and also, if you can manage it, entertaining as well. People go online for information and entertainment. If you can provide one, you’re good. If you can provide both, you’re golden. If you’ve got a 1,000 word, informative and entertaining article on your hands, then you’re holding a powerful piece of promotional content. It is well worth your time to write like this because the benefits can be fantastic. One aspect that cannot be stressed enough is the priority of quality content over well-optimized content. Concern yourself with writing a great article first, then worry about optimizing it for your keyword. Believe it or not, this will actually help your SEO in the long run. Everyone always talks about getting quality links. Well, duh. Who ever said that low quality links would be better? The problem is sorting them out and Great sites only publish great content, and great sites give great backlinks. Your answer to these high quality backlinks everyone’s been talking about is through quality content. The content itself is the most important factor for SEO, followed by anchor text in your links, followed by your keyword in the title tag and keyword density. You can’t always have it all and the choice is usually between having a slightly optimized article on a great site or a well-optimized article on a lousy site. I’ll take the former any day. Besides the quality of the content itself, widespread syndication for your article requires one other thing, proper distribution. You want to place your article where webmasters will find it. This basically means putting it on all the top directories, such as EzineArticles. This is all you have to do. However, there are a lot of services and products such as Article Marketing Robot for mass distribution. You do not have to use any of these for successful article marketing, but they do help. To restate, the links you get in directories are weak, however, in bulk they can still garner SEO benefits and slightly better chances of syndication. Overall, a combination of targeted and mass submission is best for a complete article marketing strategy. Article Marketing can be a complex beast to master. It is a muddled area simply because so many people use it for so many different reasons. The strategy outlined above will, in my opinion, give you the biggest gains in traffic and the greatest boost in rankings you can achieve per article. The most important part is the content creation itself, but for article submission, you can do it yourself or you can use an article submission service to automate your submissions for you. Check out our SEO course for more free information on SEO and related topics. Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources |
| The Key Benefits Of WordPress for SEO: Your WordPress for Newbies Article Posted: 20 Jul 2011 07:52 AM PDT 
1. Search Engine Optimization Friendly Permalinks: Permalinks are in essence links or URLs to your article. When you generate a post or article in WordPress, a URL is immediately created. WordPress lets you make URLs or permalinks that are made up of key words which search engines are attracted to. This allows for search engine crawlers to rank your site for the word of your choice. 2. SEO Compatible Article Titles: WordPress can be set up to automatically make the article titles a permalink. A keyword rich title utilized as a permalink to your internet site will make it simpler for you to achieve greater rankings in Google along with other search engines when people are searching for data or products that you are offering. 3. Allows You to Create Tags: Tags are similar to labels. Tags are found at the end of a article on any WordPress blog site and enable you to use keyword phrases to describe your post. At the end of this article you will likely see several words or tags at the bottom of the post such as “Word Press”, “WordPress for beginners”, or “WordPress for SEO”. These tags or key words will let the search engines web spiders better index your blog post which actually will assist surfers who are searching for information like “WordPress” or “WordPress for SEO” to find your website. 4. Lets You Cross Link Content: WordPress allows you to easily link associated content which helps with search engine optimization. Cross linking is where you create a link from one of your articles or blog posts to another relevant article on your website. Using this article as an illustration, I could create a link within this article that when clicked would bring you to a different WordPress 5. You Can Ping New Articles or Posts: Each time you post or edit either a posting or a blog page your WordPress web site can alert a range of different web sites that you have updated your web site. This is known as pinging and it is another very valuable aid that you can use to help your web site with getting ranked in the search engines. 6. Effortless Install of Google Sitemaps: Google Sitemaps has two important advantages for site owners. Not only can it help site visitors see a outline of exactly what they can find on your web site, but it helps Google to further index and rank your website by letting Google know exactly which blog pages are the most important. 7. Ability to Create Categories: Categories enable you to automatically arrange your content on your website. Think of categories like folders or maybe, a directory. A visitor to your internet site can find any article that you have ever published on your website, or any product that you want to sell easily because Wordpress lets you assign a category. If you have visited websites where you can easily choose a list of subjects or products based on type, that website has set up categories. As you’ve probably suspected, search engines like it when website information is well organized and this will also help with the indexing of your internet site on Google, or any of the search engines. Quick tip: Use keywords that your audience is searching for as categories to make it simpler for people to discover you. Building a website that is SEO friendly is a snap because of the tools built in to WordPress. If you want to make it easier to be discovered for the net, WordPress is definitely a powerful search engine optimization tool that you can absolutely not do without. Taylor Jordan writes for Tools For Social Media, http://www.ToolsForSocialMedia.com and Social Media For Business: http://socialmediaforbusiness.tumblr.com/ Check out more search engine marketing tips. Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources |
| Creative Brilliance and Logo Design – A SPN Exclusive Article Posted: 20 Jul 2011 07:31 AM PDT 
Thankfully, his emphasis on the BIG IDEA doesn’t need to translate into complexity. Simplicity, especially in the area of logo design is something we can still adhere to while following Mr. Ogilvy’s advice. So, with that in mind, I’d like to offer a few thoughts for those of you who are just starting the process of thinking through a logo design for your new company. There are many logos that can be highlighted as examples of accomplishing the BIG IDEA while remaining simple at the same time. There are many global companies who adhere successfully to this: - 3M All of these companies have simple, yet incredibly effective logos that identify their companies. These companies are industry leaders and well known around the world simply through their logos. Several of these companies have created incredible revenue streams just through the marketing of their logos. Many of these companies sell apparel and other merchandise that displays their logos, which in turn generates millions of dollars in additional revenue for their companies. They are simple, yet extraordinarily successful logos. Logo designs for some recent corporations would easily fall under the same, simplistic design parameter. Some examples would include such company logos as: - Aflac Several of these companies are focused solely on the Internet. Google, Yahoo!, GoDaddy, and Monster Worldwide are primarily web based companies. However, their branding and logos are universally recognized symbols for them. Yum! Brands is an internationally recognized company. Not only is their logo simple and easily recognizable, but so are the restaurants it owns: Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Long John Silver’s. Aflac’s logo is simply a combination of their name and the primary character of every advertisement…the duck. However, every time someone sees it, they immediately recall the last advertisement they saw. They say “Aflac” in their best duck voice, and they recall the type of insurance services they provide. Their logo is simple, yet exceptionally valuable to their mission as a company. Their logo is the pinnacle of creative brilliance and sums up the BIG IDEA for Aflac. In fact, every one of these logos functions the same way for each of these companies. Their logo completely fulfills the mission of their BIG IDEA. As we mentioned earlier, most of these companies generate millions of dollars in additional revenue for their companies by simply selling items that display their logos. Think about NASCAR, the NFL, and the myriad of other places where advertising reigns supreme. These companies are all present there. They have created an additional product by simply creating a recognizable symbol for their company that people want to purchase. The consumer is interested in attaching themselves to a company and identifying with them through the usage of their logo on apparel, stickers, and additional products. The power of exercising creative brilliance and generating the BIG IDEA for your company logo is so amazingly important. This is the reason that virtually everyone recommends seeking professional help in designing a great logo for your company or new product. There are two very poignant quotes from David Ogilvy that sum up the importance of designing your logo correctly. Ogilvy said, “It takes a BIG IDEA to attract the attention of consumers and get them to buy your product,” and “Unless your advertising contains a BIG IDEA, it will pass like a ship in the night.” So, what’s your BIG IDEA and how are you implementing it into your logo design? Color Card Administrator is the parent company of PrintBusinessCards.com and several other innovative Real Estate Business Cards website, we’re eager to share with you what it is we do. Give us a call today at 858-522-9335 or email at Author@CardAdmin.com for Online Business Cards. We look forward to discussing your comments, suggestions, or hearing any ideas for future article topics you may be interested in regarding business cards design or business card management. Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources |
| Google’s Panda Update: Haters, Cheaters and Consequences Posted: 19 Jul 2011 10:00 PM PDT 
Or, as they say in the hood, “Don’t hate the player, hate the game!” Just to be clear, I’m not talking about those individuals whose website took a hit, who are just venting – blowing off a little steam. I can appreciate and understand their frustration. No, I’m talking about all those Google haters out there (you know who you are) – malcontents who gripe and complain about anything and everything Google does – for no other reason than the fact they hate Google for its sheer and utter dominance. I’m particularly amused by those individuals who threaten they are going to get revenge and teach Google a lesson. They say they’re going to boycott Google and start optimizing their sites for Yahoo and Bing. Yep, that’ll show Google who’s boss alright. The fact of the matter is, they should have been optimizing for Yahoo and Bing all along. You should NEVER put all your eggs in one basket – even if that basket happens to be the most powerful search engine on the planet. Diversification wins the day – always has. Be smart, and try to get as much traffic as you possibly can from all three major search engines. You can start by registering your site with all three search engines. To register your site with Google: Google Webmaster Tools. The process is similar with Yahoo: Yahoo Site Explorer, and Bing: Bing Webmaster Tools. What are the benefits of registering your site with the search engines? There are many including: o Keyword relevancy percentage grading o Access to top search queries on the respective search engines o Access to crawl errors, search engine feedback on sitemaps and robots.txt o Latest data regarding incoming links and internal links o Helpful and constructive suggestions for HTML optimization o Valuable insight into crawling and indexing activity on your site …Just to name a few. And just like during the heyday of the Big 3 automakers, GM, Ford and Chrysler, when GM was unquestionably the most powerful automobile company on the planet, on the Internet, the Big 3 are Google, Yahoo and Bing. And Google is unquestionably the most dominant search engine on the planet. But despite Google’s dominance, it’s still important to optimize your site for all three major search engines. Because in addition to the aforementioned benefits, Google is losing market share (albeit slightly), while new-kid-on-the-block Bing is rapidly gaining market share. “Google lost 16 percent of its market share. It dropped from 73.9 percent last year to just shy of 64 percent. Bing on the other hand grew handsomely. In fact, Bing grew its market share a whopping 75% to 17 percent of the search engine market from 9.7 percent last May 2010.(Source: CompetePulse) This fact is bolstered even further when I analyze my own stats. Even though the vast majority of my search engine traffic still comes from Google, I’m starting to see more and more traffic coming from both Yahoo and Bing consistently, instead of sporadically like before. Speaking of Bing, Roger Janik, President and Founder of ServerSideDesign.com, has written an excellent article about Bing’s recent surge, as well as Google’s recent loss in market share titled, Google Losing Market Share in Search Engine Wars. But getting back to Google’s algorithm changes, the following are a timeline of Google’s major updates: o 2003-05-01 “Fritz” update We all know Google implements these earth-shattering and game-changing updates from time to time. But instead of griping about it, have you ever stopped to consider why Google has these updates? I have, and whether you agree with its methods or not, Google has always maintained its mission is to deliver “the most relevant and useful search results possible.” Unlike a lot of cynics out there, I believe that’s exactly what Google is trying to do – deliver the most relevant and useful search results possible. But that’s not the only reason for Google’s perpetual algorithm changes. Google is also concerned about maintaining the integrity of its search results, while trying to stay one step ahead of cheaters who relentlessly attempt to manipulate Google’s SERP’s (Search Engine Results Pages). And it’s not always the usual suspects either. “Google built its business on the strength of algorithms that yield speedy results. The company constantly refines those formulas, and sometimes takes manual action to penalize companies that it believes use tricks to artificially rise in search rankings. Recently, it has cracked down on retailers J.C. Penney Co. and Overstock.com Inc. Google acknowledged it “can and should do better” to beat back sites that “copy content from other websites” or provide information that is “just not very useful” but are ranked highly anyway.” (Source: Wall Street Journal) Overstock.com was penalized for utilizing link exchanges that violated Google’s WebMaster Guidelines in an effort to effectively gain an unfair advantage in Google’s SERPs. Overstock allegedly offered 10% discounts to teachers and students in exchange for links on coveted .edu websites. Exchanging links for a discount is a clear and flagrant violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. As a consequence of being spanked by Google, Overstock’s sales dipped 5 percent. In addition, Overstock suffered a whopping 32 percent loss in organic traffic. And while a 5 percent dip in sales might not sound all that significant for a Fortune 100 company like Overstock which had revenues of $1.1 billion in 2010, it can potentially amount to tens of millions of dollars in lost revenue. Like I said earlier, just like elections have consequences, so too does cheating! David Jackson is a marketing consultant and the owner of Free-Marketing-Tips-Blog.com – Powerful, free marketing tips to help grow your business! http://free-marketing-tips-blog.com Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources |
Ecommerce webmasters face unique problems when trying to optimize their sites for SEO. The standard logic behind listing products on the web is often in conflict with current SEO best practices. To make it even worse, it is generally much harder to change the structure of a site that has hundreds or thousands of categories and product pages even when it is clear a change could provide a great benefit. Due to this unique nature, ecommerce sites have different priorities as compared to other SEO campaigns.
Article Marketing is not only a misunderstood means of promotion, it is also probably the most misunderstood means of backlinking. It seems that everyone does article marketing, but we all have a different understanding of how it works and how to approach it.
WordPress is one of the most robust and extremely versatile content management systems available. It might be used to make a basic blog site, or it can be used as the robust support driving your ecommerce business. What is really special about WordPress is that you are able to effortlessly design both kinds of websites without any help; even if you do not know anything on the subject of creating a web site or Html code. Still the greatest thing about WordPress is that it is amazingly Search engine optimization friendly. Here are some reasons why WordPress is one of the best content management systems for SEO?
David Ogilvy, who’s widely considered the father of modern advertising, focused heavily on creative brilliance – the BIG IDEA (which he always wrote in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS) was of extreme importance to him. In his opinion creativity and originality were useless unless they brought results for clients with whom he did business. When presenting something in an ad, it had to be functional and relevant. “Unless your advertising is based on a BIG IDEA, it will pass like a ship in the night”, he preached over and over again.
Whenever Google has a major algorithm change or update, like clockwork, you can count on a huge army of “haters” to come pouring out of the woodwork complaining about the injustice of it all. Google’s last major update, “Panda” was no exception. The criticizing and complaining came fast and furious and non-stop. And even though the update occurred months ago, people are still posting diatribes about it on websites across the Internet. Sheesh…get over it, already!| You are subscribed to email updates from SiteProNews Recent Articles To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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