SEO Blog | Internet Marketing
SEO Blog (28)
When designing a new website, designing a new logo for your company or writing content for your new website or blog, it is important to be ORIGINAL. You don’t want to end up with a website that looks exactly like that of your competitors (this can easily happen when purchasing templates off of existing sites) and you don’t want to get punished* for duplicating another website’s content.
Let’s focus more on being original when creating content for your website for SEO purposes. Search engine optimisation has changed over the years and search engines are growing much more concerned with original content. Although nobody knows the exact algorithm for the major search engines, it has become very clear that original content is rewarded by increased page rank, and duplicate content is punished* – sometimes quite severely. Duplicate content is content that is identical to material found on another website. *Punished – Yup, Google almighty and other major search engines will punish your website if you duplicate another website’s content thus lowering your search rank. Some websites that pull RSS feeds from other websites or news services might seem to hide away from the duplicate content issue, but there is always more to a site than just RSS feeds. The more original content on a page, the more highly it is regarded by search engines. If any portion of a website contains content that is seen elsewhere, the owner can expect the subsequent penalty.
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Saturday, 10 April 2010 08:37
Meta Descriptions, Keywords and Ranking Your WebsiteWritten by Thom Henderson We may never know if or when Meta descriptions are a part of Google’s ranking algorithm, the team at Google keeps us on our toes when it comes to the successful use of these tools. The positive side of the coin is that your Meta can affect the positions of your website in personalized search results which we discussed earlier. Lets revisit what the meta description actually is.Your meta tag looks like this. "We can help you get to the first page of google search results for your specific keywords." The content in your description is displayed under the header once your site has been found on a google search. The description here must be catchy and appealing for the user to go ahead and give you his click. If you have poor text here the user will just naturally go to the next website that has taken some care in its meta descriptions. Your Meta description is a determining factor for a decent CTR (click-through-rate) of your site in search results. And lets not forget that if they click on your site in this instance, there is a high likelihood that your website will appear again, and possibly at a higher position the next time they do a search for that query or a similar query. If we are considering that google has enabled the personalized search history, without being signed in, to bump up the rankings then this could bring your site from position 35 to the first page! Meta Description Optimization You could always take some advice from the masters of SEO to write attractive page titles and meta descriptions, I’ll leave that out here. Just keep in mind one thing, Google can get sneaky, or just by using its algorithm it will not always show the Meta description you have written. Occasionally it just will select some text that contains the keywords used in the search query. So you will do a little bit of your own research here by making a few of your own searches to see which query’s display your meta description and which do not.
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Friday, 26 February 2010 08:02
Choosing your Keywords: The Initial ResearchWritten by Dr Peter Fish Choosing your Keywords: The Initial Research
Keyword research is one of the most important starting points of any internet marketing strategy. This has been stressed over and over again, yet it is either ignored completely or carried out illogically resulting in misleading results! In most cases we make flying guesses as to what keywords are popular in various business niches, yet time and time again after carrying out a properly thought through bit of research you’ll find you where in fact horribly wrong – let your competitors fall in to this trap, but don’t be foolish enough to land there yourself. I’ve laid out a decent step-by-step approach to deciding what keywords to chase. This entry only entails the initial research; it does not go into estimating exact search densities as can be calculated via a carefully constructed AdWords campaign. Note: For every step don’t forget to think in the dimensions of time and place! Step 1: Prospective Keywords To kick this research off you need to assemble a decent list of prospective keywords, before you do this give some careful thought to the following:
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What is SEO?
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of optimizing a web site to improve traffic generated to the site through search engines via natural (un-paid) search results. This is done by making your web pages more relevant, more attractive and more easily readable for both humans and search engines. A web site normally receives more traffic from the search engine the higher it is ranked. Search engines use programs called crawlers, spiders or robots to view and index your site. They travel from page to page and store links and relevant text. The search engines constantly improve how indexing works to help provide users with relevant websites and filter out spam. Here are some of our best SEO practices...
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How to Optimise for the New Mobile Search Era
 Google highlighted their work into their continually upgrading mobile search platform in Dec 2009. The latest additions include three serious technology dependant modalities that are a pretty mind-blowing; you can now search by sight, location and voice! As the technology of mobile phones continues to improve and come down in cost the access the world wide web becomes more and more widespread every day. All these phones feature cameras, compasses and GPS systems. As the leading search engine worldwide, Google has jumped onto the bandwagon and run with it. All these searches are taken in context of your location if it’s available. Location Search Ever used Google Maps for Mobile? If not I suggest you click over to m.google.com/maps on your phone a download it ASAP! It’s utterly incredible. It utilises two methods of localising your position – either it integrates with your phone’s gps or it uses the cell system to triangulate your position which is surprisingly accurate. Once it’s installed you can use the search function to look for things that are nearby. For instance searching the word restaurant will bring up all the restaurants it has indexed near your current location. I honestly use this all the time. The mapping is superb as well. How easy is it to travel with this much info in your pocket?
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Many people when they hear the terms Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Online Marketing immediately think possible short term investment and a quick way to increase their online business sales or increase their website traffic. They think that rankings happen quick, that they only have to do it for a month or two and that using SEO software should do the trick. (This is a big no no!) You as an investor in your own business should know that only from hard work can you reap what you sow; there is no quick way to jump the ranking queue with SEO.
 Many people when having a website designed or developed don’t even know what SEO is for and what it does, but let us tell you if you’re planning to have an online business or need to use your website as an online advertising portal to attract potential customers, Internet Marketing and SEO are vitally important. We have had experience with clients saying that they don’t need SEO (for the obvious reasons of not understanding what SEO does) or that they have a “friend” that will handle the SEO for them…SEO is a full time job which requires constant monitoring and updating, most times this is more than friends are willing to do. If you stop doing SEO work a site, you will soon notice a decrease in traffic and online sales. There is so much to learn every day and the industry changes all the time, the complexity of search engines rules have changes drastically over the years.
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Tuesday, 16 March 2010 06:55
Enhance SEO and site loading time using Google’s Page SpeedWritten by Chris Jacoby
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Thursday, 04 February 2010 12:49
5 Things your SEO Company should be doing for youWritten by Alexi VontasAny company claiming to know anything about Search Engine Optimisation or SEO, should at very least be fulfilling certain functions for you on a monthly basis regarding the marketing of your website. If they are not doing ALL of the following, they are pulling the wool over your eyes, stealing your money, and giving good SEO companies bad names. To get the full impact of SEO, always ensure the following are being attended to:
On-site Optimisation  The pages on your website tell Google and other search engines what your website is about and what industry you are operating in. It is vital that your SEO company address the on-site elements and make ample use of your keywords in the appropriate places and even stipulate the area you serve to narrow down geographic location. This ensures any person searching for your product/service in your geographic area finds your site. Another SEO rule is that all links on your website should be follow-able by search engines (ie: text, not images). If your SEO guru overlooks this, alarms should start ringing. Search engine submissions No matter how well you website works or how amazing it looks to the viewer, the bottom line is that if your site is not submitted to the major search engines, it is highly unlikely that you will feature in searches for a long time. Google finds your site using links, and eventually when it follows a link to your site, it will index the pages. To save yourself time, submitting your sitemap to Google, Yahoo and others will speed up the rate at which your pages are added to its search results. Inbound linking Once your site is adequately SEO’ed, and search engines have decided where your site ranks when compared to other sites competing for the terms, the only way to climb constantly up the rankings in Google is to build high quality, one-way links to your website. This can be time consuming but really is the life-blood to reaching the first page for commonly search phrases. The more reputable the site you link from, the better.
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 So you have made some nifty, accurate and specific titles for all your pages. Well done sir. But that is just the foundation of a long and hard effort to keep your website crawling with factors that google will pick up. Titles are hugely important as this is the first thing that will appear in the google search result. The result is a bright Bolded page title to show the user that this is exactly what they have searched for, and they are likely to find what they are looking for on your website. Woohoo!You want to have the titles that will be searched by the estimated 55 million searches done on a daily basis. That is your market and when they make a search query the phrase searched should appear in bold, should you have that phrase as part of your title. This shows your success as google has crawled your site, found the content relevant to the query searched and pushed you up to the first page results. However it is likely this will help your site but it is not a permanent deal. You will have to make sure to keep your website full of new original content before someone else overtakes you and pushes you down the results page. It is known that not many users will still be looking at the search results past page two. But the first page is where the success comes in. Significant, specific and accurate titles are just the gateway to having a successfully searched/indexed website.
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 The millions of searches done everyday require fair marketing practices by google to give people and businesses the opportunity to make something from everyday searches. Also considering that something like 97% of Google revenue comes from advertising.These come in the form of sponsored links, or otherwise known as cost per click (CPC) advertising. This gives the user the ability to place an ad for his product or service and google will guarantee (should your bid be high enough) that the advert will show when the enduser makes a search using a keyword that the advertiser has chosen. This of course has plenty of options to chip and change when it comes to your budget, time of day, location etc. But google finds a way to make sure that the fairest possible opportunity is available to anyone wishing to advertise their product or service on the web. “fantastic” is what you are thinking. I’m going to make an advert right now to sell my products. Lets just stop and do some more research before you jump in head first and end up overspending your budget at the wrong time, and at the wrong customers.
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 The Google ranking algorithm is changing its tuning once again, evolving further and making life a tougher competition for us SEO soldiers. The word on the street and on the lips of Google Engineer Matt Cutts is that your page load speed is about to be incorporated into Page Rank. So if you have a monster website that knocks your competitors out of the park, but takes up to a minute to load. Then you are in serious SEO trouble my friends. The site may be filled with excellent content and optimised pages and still will start to fall down the search rankings because of it. Google wants the internet to be more instant than ever and this means keeping our goldfish attention spans to under 2 seconds per page.According to the google experts (read users) the page load times need to decrease because that is what is felt is necessary to retain interest and not hit that back button so quickly. Nearly half of searches done show that users hit the back button before a site loads. So we know this is the honest factual truth which we can't hide from Google's statistics. The analytics and statistical data has proven that a faster loading site will lead to a significant increase in user retention. Which in turn will tick over that zero point something percent of a user to generate a lead or a conversion or a sale. You can't fault google for continually learning to optimise speed.
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A search engine is a mechanism used to find information on the world wide web. These automated tools utilise very in-depth algorithms to decide what online content is applicable for a specific search query. The algorithms delve further in to “respectability” of the content via various channels to ascertain which of the applicable content is more important than the rest and thus how to rank the results.
The earliest search engines started showing their heads in the early 90’s, yet these where extremely simple when compared to our modern day examples. As the sheer volume of online content increase the search engines where faced with an ever increasing task of detecting, analysing and arranging masses of data and the modern search engine was born.
Now days, in the South African setting as well as across the majority of the globe, Google is the dominant search engine, with estimates of about 85% of the market share, the closest rival, Yahoo! coming in at 6%, followed by the Chinese search engine Baidu and Bing at 3%. In the context of American searches the values are slightly different with Google at 74%, Yahoo! at 17% and Bing at 9%. Of course there are a multitude of other options which are listed below.
Most modern search engines use the same mechanisms, a robot or spider that trawls the web following links and capturing data, an index where the found content is stored for later retrieval and the search algorithm that ranks the results.
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