Archive for the 'SEO Tutorials' Category

Do’s And Don’ts Of Back Links – Improving SEO

Thursday, December 20th, 2012

A recent hot topic of discussion involves ‘back links’ and how they might affect your website’s rankings. Most of you who are familiar with search engine optimization (SEO) know that back links are an important part of your SEO efforts. Search engines, especially Google, use back links to influence how sites get ranked in their results.

A recent popular video of ours talks about a Google change that may penalize a website for having low quality back links. That video teaches users how to check the links pointing to their site by using SEIntelligence’s back link checker.

This Google change can be somewhat confusing for some users. Determining what constitutes a low quality back link is up for interpretation. Should users stop trying to get back links, or should users do things differently when trying to get back links? These types of questions and more will be addressed in this Do’s and Don’ts of back links.

Don’t

  1. Don’t use software, or pay someone else to use software to automatically get your site a large amount of back links. These methods are unethical techniques and can result in your site being subjected to Google’s new update, which could lead to a decrease in rankings.
  2. Don’t focus on one key term for every anchor text used. Anchor text is the text in the clickable link that users can click on to be taken to the linked page. A variety of anchor text is a more natural way for a site to obtain links.
  3. Don’t focus on the quantity of links. High quality links can go much further than obtaining many links from low quality sources. It can also look a bit suspicious if one day you have 25 back links and the next day you have 25,000. Google has ways of recognizing these things. These methods can result in a site’s rankings to drop.

Do

  1. Do continue contributing on forums and other social networking sites (including Facebook, Twitter, blog comments etc.). If you have something valuable to add to any conversation, including a link to your site, continue participating and placing your link. While some forums may be considered low quality by some search engine’s standards, it is still a good idea to communicate with your community and drive traffic to your site. Your rankings will not be harmed by this.
  2. Continue communicating with other web masters who might benefit from a link swap with you. If both of your sites have something good to offer, then it is always a good idea to continue exchanging links. Just be careful not to exchange links with sites that might not be helpful for you. Do research on a site before agreeing to link to it.
  3. Try to spread your links across several domains. In other words, don’t just keep getting links from the same website.
  4. Continue writing high quality articles with keywords linking back to your site. Just make sure that the site(s) you are posting the articles to are high quality sites. The same rule applies for press releases.

To summarize, the important thing to keep in mind is to always use common sense when determining if a linking technique might harm your site. If it sounds too good to be true, it most likely is. Focus on making your website have great content and the links will naturally roll in.

 

How To Pin An Image In Pinterest

Monday, November 5th, 2012

Pinterest is a site that showcases popular images posted by users. Images are linked back to the original site that they were posted from. This can be utilized as a marketing tool if you have nice images displaying your products that you have for sale on your site. This short video will show you how to ‘pin’ your images so that other Pinterest users can see them.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Pinterest is another great way to promote your businesses products, and hopefully catch the attention of users browsing the site. Think of Pinterest as a bulletin board where users pin images to. Users can then click on the image and be taken to the website where the image was pinned from.

Images with many repins will be the ones you see on the main bulletin board at pinterest.com

So how can you pin some images from your website? First, click on the Join Pinterest button. You can sign up with your Facebook account, twitter account, or using your email address. Any of the three options will do. I’m going to fast forward through the sign up process as that is pretty basic, and just skip ahead to the part about pinning.

So once you have signed up and are logged in, go to pinterest.com/about/goodies

You should land on a page that looks similar to this. Locate the Pin It button, and drag and drop this button onto your bookmarks bar. So if you are using Safari, the process should look just like this.

Now, head over to your website and locate an image that you want to pin. Once you are on the page with that image, click on the Pin It button. You will then be shown all of the images on the page. Click on the image that you want to pin. A popup window should appear. If this is your first time pinning an image, you will need to create a board for it. The board is basically creating a new bulletin board for this image to be pinned on, since it cannot automatically be pinned on the main board at pinterest.com. For my example, my business is called Jeremy’s Golf Shop, so that is what I will name this board. Then, all you need to do is click Pin It, and you’re done.

You can now pin more images if you want. You can add them to the same board that you just created, or create a new one if you want. You are not limited to pinning images just from your site. You can pin images from any website.

This can be a good marketing tool for users who sell items such as clothing or jewellery, or almost any product that would catch the eye of someone browsing through Pinterest.

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SEO Frequently Asked Question – Title tag and Description Updating In Google

Thursday, October 4th, 2012

We get a lot of questions from our customs at RAGE, many of which are quite similar. The video below identifies one of those questions and provides a clear answer. If you have any questions you think others may want to know the answer to, feel free to leave them in the comments section below. Also, be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel so you don’t miss out on any of our great helpful tips and tricks videos.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

This question comes from Shannon in Florida.

I recently learned that the title tag is what shows up as a site’s title in Google, as well as the meta description is what sometimes shows up right beneath the site title. Since I was not happy with what my results looked like in Google, I decided to change both the title tag and the meta description using SEIntelligence, but when I search for my site in Google, the old title and old description still appear. Why is this happening?

This is a very common question that we get from many users. The most important thing to keep in mind is that while your website changes appear as soon as you publish them, Google’s search results do not operate in real time. What this means essentially is that you just need to wait a bit so that Google can update their search results. How long does this update take? In some cases, it can be as quick as just a few days, but in most cases, allow for at least 3 weeks before seeing the changes appear in Google.

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How to remove your web.me.com (MobileMe) address from Google

Saturday, March 17th, 2012

After switching from MobileMe to a real web hosting service many users are finding that their web.me.com website is still appearing in Google, and often higher than their new website.

This happens because your web.me.com website has been around longer and your new website has the exact same content. Google is not likely to show two websites with the exact same content so you need to make sure you do this as quickly as possible once you move to a real web hosting service.

1) The first thing you are going to want to do is create an XML Sitemap for your new website. You can do this very easily with Sitemap Automator. Follow the instructions for publishing and verifying your website with Google Webmaster Tools (Hint: We have video tutorials on the above page that explains how to do this step by step.)

2) Delete the content from your web.me.com website. You can do this by mounting your iDisk in the Finder (or longing in to your iDisk at http://www.me.com) and going to the Web/Sites/ directory. Delete the contents in this directory.

2a) Advanced: Instead of deleting your content in step 2, you can also use a meta refresh with a refresh rate of 0 to redirect traffic from your web.me.com website to your new website. If you have set up your new website with our Web Hosting services we can help you with this. Otherwise you will need to contact your web hosting company.

3) The changes will not be reflected immediately. If you did step 2 above and you do a search for your website the web.me.com address will still appear in search results for about a week but will go to a non-existing page. If you did step 2a above your web.me.com page will still appear in search engines but will redirect to your new website. Eventually your new site will start to rank higher than your web.me.com page and your web.me.com page will be removed from Google’s search results.

4) Bonus: If you want to completely remove your web.me.com website from Google and other search engines as quickly as possible you need to create a robots.txt files that disallows search engines from indexing your website. To do this create a plain text file called robots.txt and enter the following code exactly as shown below in it;


User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Then put this robots.txt file on your iDisk in the Web/Sites/ directory. Again, if you are using our web hosting services we can do this for you. Otherwise you will need to contact your current web hosting provider.

That’s it for moving your iWeb website from MobileMe to a real web hosting service. Don’t worry, even though Apple has discontinued MobileMe, iWeb will continue to work for a long time as long as you have it installed on your computer. If you are looking to optimize your iWeb site for Google and other search engines, take a look at our iWeb search engine optimization training courses.

SEIntelligence : Website Content

Wednesday, November 16th, 2011

Your website content is so important for making a well rounded search engine optimized website. Watch the tutorial below to learn how to use the ‘Content’ tab on SEIntellgience.

Video Transcript:

Website content is an extremely important aspect for making a well rounded search engine friendly website. Without content, a website stands little chance of ranking high in search results.

On the content tab, you’ll be able to see the code for your page. If you don’t like looking at code or don’t know how to read it, then don’t worry about it. Just look at the suggestions below.

Read the recommendations and make the applicable changes to your site. Please note that these changes are not made here in SEIntelligence, but rather in your website builder or HTML editor.

Just a quick note for users who are using drag and drop editors such as iWeb, or web based builders such as WordPress. Some of the recommendations you will not be doing. For example. this recommendation states to add an address tag to each page. You would not do this recommendation as your website builder does not allow for it.

SEIntelligence : Alt Text

Tuesday, November 15th, 2011

SEIntelligence also makes it incredibly easy to add alternative text, or alt text, to your website images. Watch the following video to learn more about alt text, and how you can easily implement it on your website through SEIntelligence.

Video Transcript:

A picture may say a thousand words, but to search engines it doesn’t say much. Because of this, and a few other reasons, the alt attribute exists. On the Images tab, you will see the Alt Text and Image columns. Under the image column, you will see the file name of your images. If you click on each of them, you should be able to see previews for your images.

So why do we create alt text. As stated earlier, search engines are not really able to see an image the same way a human is able to. For search engines, the alt text can be a helpful way to understand what an image is. The alt text is also helpful when an image does not show up in a browser. This might happen when the image doesn’t load properly, or the user is using a non-visual web browser. In it’s place, the alt text will typically appear.

To add, or change your alt text, click in the alt text area and type your alt text. Your alt text is almost like a brief sentence, or a few words describing your image. Avoid using one word descriptions, but also avoid writing excessively long sentences.

Be brief, and to the point, while trying to include high quality key-terms that users would actually search.

For example, this image shows a set of men’s left handed golf clubs. This is exactly what I will type in. It contains good keywords, and describes the image perfectly. It wouldn’t be enough if I typed in golf clubs as that doesn’t really describe the photo well. It would be too much if I typed in left handed golf clubs that are nice and shiny and super expensive to buy.

When you type your alt text, it can be exactly like you see here. Almost like you are writing a sentence. No hyphens or commas are needed to separate the words.

SEO For iWeb : Header Tags

Thursday, November 10th, 2011

Adding header tags to an iWeb site has never been easier. Follow the instructions carefully in this video tutorial to learn how you can properly add header tags to your iWeb website.

Video Transcript:

Being introduced for the first time ever, iWeb users will now be able to add header tags to their websites, without having to hand code it in the HTML. Header tags are another way for you to demonstrate to search engines which keywords are important on your page.

So what is a header tag, and how do we make one?

Basically, a header tag is a block of text that can be compared to a title, or a headline for a larger body of text. Think of a newspaper article. There is a headline which indicates what the entire article is about. Then there is a subheading which gives a bit more insight into the article.

Our websites are similar to the structure of a newspaper article. A headline can contain our primary key term for each page, and an optional subheading can contain our secondary key term for each page.

In HTML, there are six headers that you can use. Those headers are h1 through h6. I am only going to demonstrate adding an h1 header since that is what most of you will be doing. If you want to add an h2 as well, then feel free to do so. h1 and h2 are the most popular headers, so use those if you have room on your site. Trying to add all headers to your site is not generally a good idea, unless your site is structured in a way that makes sense to do so. Also, the rule of thumb is to only have one h1 per page.

So to do this in iWeb, simply click on the Text Box button, and type in this code you see here.

The area where I wrote ‘This is my header tag’ is where you should type in your header tag. The HTML here should look identical to mine. But the text part should contain your header tag which could be anything you want it to be. I recommend putting the main key-term you are targeting for this specific page.

Before we move on to the next step, I want to point out that you can also change the font of this text like you normally would with any text, by highlighting the text and clicking on the Fonts button.

Now when you publish your site to a local folder, and load the site in iWeb SEO Tool, you must check the box to Convert header tags in text boxes to HTML code, and then press the Apply To Entire Site button. What this will do is strip the HTML code from the site, so that only the actual text is being shown. Remember, your header tag should be visible on your site. If you can’t see it, or if you still see the HTML code, it means you did not do this process correctly, and you will need to try again.

Some of you can expect to run into some issues when adding header tags. For example, you will notice that the header tag does not always end up in the same place online as it did in iWeb. This is normal. You may need to play around with it a bit until you find the right spot. To make things easier on yourself, try not to place the header too close other items on your page. This will leave you with a bit of a buffer for when the header ends up in a slightly different location.

Also, if your site has a black background, you most likely won’t be able to see your header. If that is the case, just send us an e-mail read this knowledgebase article on how to alter the font color.

SEIntelligence : Internal Links (Anchor Text)

Tuesday, October 25th, 2011

The way you link internally on your site can be a very important way for you to tell search engines about the content on each of your pages. To learn more about internal links, watch the video below.

Video Transcript:

The links tab will show you how your linking structure is set up on your site. You will be able to see the outgoing and incoming links for each page on your site. Just so there is no confusion, the incoming links in this section of SEIntelligence are for internal incoming links.

In each links section, you will see three headings; Anchor Text, URL, and Title.

The one heading I want to focus on is Anchor Text. What is anchor text? Anchor text is the text used to link to a certain page. Typically, it is the text you see that is blue and underlined.

So why do we care about anchor text? To help me explain, let’s take a look at an example. If I perform a Google search for the term ‘click here’, you will notice that the first result is for Adobe Reader. Why would Adobe Reader appear number one for the search term ‘click here.’ It has nothing to do with that term. The reason for this is because so many sites on the web link to this exact URL, and the anchor text they use is ‘click here.’

Because all of these sites are linking to the Adobe Reader page using ‘click here’, search engine algorithms now classify that page with that key-term.

So what does this information mean to you? Well, take a look at the anchor text you use to link to other pages on your site. Read the recommendations in SEIntelligence and see what you can do to improve your anchor text. If page A on your site is targeting West Palm each real estate, then make sure that whenever you link to page A, you use West Palm Beach real estate as the anchor text.

You can change your anchor text right here in SEIntelligence. So as an example, this page that I’m on right now is targeting these two phrases. If I look in the incoming links section, I will see all of the pages that are linking to this page. If I click on each of these arrows, it will bring me to each of those pages. I will then find the link in the Outgoing links section, and change the anchor text. So I will change this anchor from Listings to West Palm Beach Real Estate, or West Palm Beach Real Estate Agent.

I’m also going to change the Title for this link. The title attribute is usually used to give a bit of extra information about an element. The title attribute is not really a place to repeat your anchor text. You’ll notice that when you hover your mouse over a link that has been given a title attribute, the text will appear.

So in this case, instead of writing west palm beach real estate, which is what I have as the anchor text, I might type something different, but along the same lines. As an example, I will write John Smith’s real estate listings in West Palm Beach, Florida. If you can’t really provide any more information beyond your anchor text, don’t worry about putting anything in the title attribute. Theres is still some debate about whether the title attribute has significant value in terms of SEO, so I encourage everyone to do further research on this topic.

iWeb SEO Tool Instructions

Thursday, September 15th, 2011

READ THIS FIRST

The videos listed below give you detailed instructions on how to use iWeb SEO Tool the proper way. It is very important to follow these instructions in order to limit errors. The videos are in order and should be watched that way.

While these videos are very helpful in teaching you the proper ways of using iWeb SEO Tool, they cannot substitute the content that is in the SEO For iWeb Walkthrough Video Tutorial. That walkthrough video tutorial goes beyond the basics of using iWeb SEO Tool and can help you dramatically improve your website’s rankings in all major search engines. Your business is definitely worth it, so we highly recommend checking out that walkthrough video tutorial. It will also save you a lot of time and heartache in the future.

1. How to open your site in iWeb SEO Tool

2. How to optimize your site in iWeb SEO Tool

3. How to publish your site to FTP in iWeb SEO Tool

4. Updating your iWeb website and using iWeb SEO Tool

5. How to make sure you published your site correctly from iWeb SEO Tool

6. How to back up your data stored in iWeb SEO Tool

7a. How to have a shortened iWeb URL by using iWeb SEO Tool

7b. How to get rid of the site redirect AND shorten the iWeb URL

8. How to use the Favicon feature in iWeb SEO Tool

9. How to publish only changes with iWeb SEO Tool

10. Setting up a Mobile friendly iWeb site

SEO For Sandvox: Meta Description

Sunday, August 28th, 2011

To see the SEO For Sandvox Video Course in its entirety, visit the SEO For Sandvox Video Course page.

The meta description tag is a place where you can give a quick description of what is on your webpage. This isn’t a place to just pack in some keywords, but it is a great spot for you to write one or two sentences that really describe your page. It can also be thought of as a way of selling users on coming to your site. The reason for this is that sometimes, your description will show up in search engine results, right below the title tag here. So as you can see, this little blurb here reads “At Lefties Only, left handed golf clubs are our speciality.” If I were to click to go to this site, and then view the source code, we can see that that blurb actually came straight from the meta description. This isn’t always the case, but you have seen first hand how important it is to have a great description.

Again, it’s very easy to include your meta description in Sandvox. The box right below where we typed in our title tag is where we will type in our Meta description. You’ll want to try and limit the description to about 150 characters.

Google has gone on record to state that the accuracy of your meta description will not affect your rankings. The main purpose of the meta description is to try and improve click-through rates. Google also highly recommends that you avoid using identical, or very similar descriptions on every page of your site.