Optimize Your Text for Search Engines!

"Notice that I also changed the sub-title of the book from “Fire Your Boss, Toss Your Alarm Clock, and Double Your Income With An Easy Transition Into Self-Employment” to “How To Work At Home With The Perfect Small Business Opportunity” for the Amazon copy."

Reading an excellent blog about how to start a business on the Internet, I came across this quote. I have often talked about how newspapers have had to change the way they write their headlines in order to accommodate search engines, and I thought this was a great illustration of the point I was trying to make.

Brian Armstrong, the author of this fine blog, goes on to say that "... very few people search for terms like “breaking free”, “fire your boss”, or “self-employment”... " so he rewrote his text to something that people would be searching for. In this article, and in several other of his posts, he talks about the importance of keyword research to determine what people are actually searching for. This is crucial to making your website deliver the kind of traffic you need to support your business.

I highly recommend this blog as a reference for great information about making money from the Internet. Brian's focus is more on how to make money from a blog than from moving product or services, but his writing style is easy to read and full of great information.

Matt Cutts Interviewed about Link Building, etc.

"We really think of these things as trying to provide as many opportunities as possible to sculpt where you want your PageRank to flow, or where you want Googlebot to spend more time and attention."

This is an extended interview with Matt Cutts where a number of interesting topics are covered, such as link building, PageRank management, hidden text on pages, adjustments made to the Google algorithm, and so on. I recommend reading the full interview, as I am only mentioning a small part of what was covered.

The discussion of link building was of particular interest to me and covered items like the NoIndex and NoFollow tags as well as a discussion of the Robots.txt file. In brief:

• NoIndex - can accumulate and pass on Page Rank, but will not show in Google index.
• NoFollow - stops the spider from following the link, so the target page will not be crawled and indexed (although it could still be based on a link from elsewhere!)
• Robots.txt - allows for management of the spider activity from a single location, but with some differences in application.

Note that the description of each of these features is limited to one point of view, and that it pertains only to how Google handles them. There is more to know about them, and other search engines may not treat them the same way!

Why I found this interesting is in reading about how these tools can be applied to redirect the pagerank within a site to emphasize the importance of the important pages and de-emphasize the importance of pages that are not relevant to search engine results. Specifically, when examining the link structure on a site, it is common to see many links point to such pages as "Contact Us" or "About Us". Neither of these pages will typically carry much information about the business focus of a site (sometimes you will see relevant material on the About us page, but that is an exception), so it is not important for these pages to rank in searches. These tools allow the site manager to take the pagerank value that is being sent to these pages and redirect it to pages that will do much more for the business if they can be made to rank well.

Attention to this kind of detail in creating your site is what will set you apart from your competition! Learn to use these techniques to your best benefit and apply them consistently as you create your site and you will be successful! Review our postings from past Internet Marketing Classes to find help on how to apply these principles to help yourbusiness.

Mastering Both Kinds Of Link Building - Authority & Reputation

"... presence builds presence - simply being present in more channels will lead to you getting more links, more authority, more PageRank."

Here is a nice article outlining several important points about successful link building approaches.

The author makes a distinction between pursuing links based on page rank versus links based on anchor text. I have never made that sort of distinction in my own campaigns, but it is an interesting perspective.

What I like about this article is that he talks about the importance of getting good anchor text on internal links (those on the same site) as well as on external links (those on other sites that point to yours.) He also emphasizes the benefits of LOTS of promotion, that is, getting your presence out on the web in as many ways as you possibly can (see the quote above)!

Many of our classes have addressed such tools as article sites, press release sites, and blogs. These are all valuable tools for increasing your visibility on the web, and part of their appeal is their residual power once you have gotten them out there! With this residual power, the placements are also accumulative, that is, they all add up to more and more power for your site.

For effective marketing, the lessons are still, "Content, content, content" and "persistence" in pursuing good techniques for your site.

Optimize Your PDF Files!

I should say at the outset that I am not a fan of having web site content in PDF files. Opening such a file always takes longer, and that is pretty much always bad for search performance. Having said that, "... many businesses have a lot of PDF assets. These may include sell sheets, brochures, white papers, technical briefs, etc. The purist simply says why not convert these to html? In the real world, not everyone has the time, budget, and expertise to do that."

I just came across this article that provides some real insight to making PDF files work better for your site. There are a number of good tips (11, to be precise!) included in this article, but there are three that stood out in my mind while reading through it:

1. PDF files have titles! These are set within the document properties, and are the most important improvement one can make to making these files perform.
2. Copy should be optimized just as any web page should be. In other words, pay attention to the keywords in the documents when you are drafting them. Many times, companies are simply posting documents written for other environments onto the web to make them available to their readers. If it is possible to modify these documents to incorporate keyword phrases, that can make a lot of difference. It may also be possible to write a short summary introduction to append to the pre-existing document. Think about your alternatives!
3. Build links into the PDF files wherever possible. These files may get forwarded to others out of the context of your web site, and these links can travel with the document!

If you have PDF files on your site, this article is well worth your time to read and understand. The more such files you are working with, the more important this article can be to you.

Notwithstanding all this good advice, I still recommend creating HTML pages to summarize the content of PDF files as the most effective technique for optimizing your content for search. This gives you faster load times, the ability to really focus your content on the phrases you want to emphasize, while still having the PDF available for your users to create documents that they can print and carry around for their convenience.

Meta Description Makeover

"The quality of your snippet — the short text preview we display for each web result — can have a direct impact on the chances of your site being clicked..."

This article from a member of the Google "snippets" team outlines the appropriate strategy for crafting meta Descriptions for your pages that will contribute to the quality of traffic you receive from ranking in the search results.

As a reminder, and as the author points out, descriptions do not contribute to the ranking of your pages. What they do is allow you, the writer, to communicate directly with the reader to tell them what you think they should know about the content on your page and, therefore, why they should visit this page rather than the others displayed in the search results.

What are the key points?

• Each page should have its own unique description.
• Targeted keywords should be included in the description.
• Descriptions should be brief, but comprehensive.

As we continue to stress in our weekly clinics, the desired end result of search engine optimization is to get the searcher to visit your site, but the desired end result of the effort overall is to get the searcher to communicate with you, either as a lead, or as a sale! Better descriptions can contribute to the quality of traffic that you get from the web, and to the conversions that you experience!