SEO for webmasters’

This is a guest blog post submitted by, Nick LeRoy

Nick LeRoy is the Search Marketing Specialist over at Minneapolis MN Web Design

SEO checklist

Every SEO has had to deal with web developers that don’t know much about SEO.   Their job is to create a website and many times they don’t realize what they are doing (or not doing) is hurting your sites search presence.  Sometimes all it takes is some direction and reasoning to get them to change their ways.  Other webmasters may take SEO suggestions offensively and will make you jump hurtles in order to get them to make changes.  “Simple” changes by a webmaster can indeed make a world of difference when it comes to search engine optimization.  Below is a list that every website owner should be printing out and handing to their webmasters.

1. Create Unique Title Tags For Every Page

Placing the website name or company name on each page does not accurately describe what that individual page is about.  Every page should have a custom written title tag that describes exactly what a user can expect from that page.

SEO Importance: 10/10

SEO Tip: Include keywords within your title tags.  A big factor in ranking for a specific keyword is whether or not the keyword is located within the pages title tag.

1. Avoiding Duplicate Content Issues.

Duplicate content issues occur when the same (or nearly identical) content is found on two separate URL’s.  This issue is most commonly found on e-commerce websites but does exist on standard sites as well.  If avoiding duplicate content is not possible use a 301 redirect or a canonical tag. Canonical tag html code is the following. <link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.yourwebsiteurl.com/” />

SEO Importance: 10/10

SEO Tip: Avoid having the www and non-www versions of your website available.  Choose one and 301 redirect the other so your website doesn’t split its link juice between the two different URL’s.

1. Implement Internal Linking Throughout Entire Website.

Linking is essential to top rankings in the search engines.  Webmasters have full control over internal links so it doesn’t make sense to not take advantage of them.  Whenever you see a keyword or key phrase that a certain page within the site is dedicated to, make sure to link to that page.  If we have an e-commerce site and within the category page a specific product is mentioned, it’s a great idea to hyperlink the product name and point it to that specific product page.

SEO Importance: 9/10

SEO Tip: Try to link to each page using the same keyword phrase throughout entire website.  This will help convince the search engines that this page is about that keyword and help it rank better in the search engines.

1. Set Up SEO Friendly File Names (URL’s).

A static, keyword rich URL will give your page an extra SEO boost. Search engines have been known to give precedence to a website that has keyword matching URL’s in their search results.  Just like the title tag, you want this URL to be related to this specific page so make sure to keep it topically relevant.

SEO Importance: 8/10

SEO Tip: Use dashes to separate words within your URL’s. An example for a web page that sells red socks could use

(domain.com/boys-red-socks.html)

1. Create Search Engine Friendly Navigation Menus

Search engines at this time have not perfected the art of reading flash and JavaScript technologies.  If your menus are created in flash or JavaScript the search engines will not be able to see them and won’t be able to dig deeper into the website.  Alternatively, avoid image based menus; search engines can’t see images either.  If it’s absolutely necessary to have image based navigation, make sure you place image alt tags on each individual image within the navigation.

SEO Importance: 8/10

SEO Tip: If you cannot avoid Flash or JavaScript, place text links to each of the menu pages in the footer of the website so the search engines can find the deeper pages within your site.

SEO for Mom and Pop Stores

Mom and pop stores are still the cornerstone of many towns in the United States. When many of us think of our childhood we still remember that corner store that was a block away where we’d get milk, or that diner where we may have gone on our first date, or perhaps the flower shop or that boutique… most importantly we can remember that nice store keeper who we got to know through the years…

Much has changed for mom and pop shops recently, globalization and the “Wal-Martization” of the marketplace has made things very difficult… but through the internet many mom and pop shops are now able to reach a global audience, and the local boutique, that only recently catered to a few neighborhoods or a small town may now have the entire world as a potential customer!

When it comes to websites and SEO for mom and pop shops there are a few things that ought to be considered; such sites should be targeted to the local community, and off page SEO for these sites should be done primarily through Google local and other local search engines/classifieds. If your shop produces a unique product or service the site should include a page that describes this and the geographic region where this is available (if applicable). In the case of unique products/services it is also important to have proper title tags, b/c since these products are unique (not very competitive) it is likely that these pages will rank well in Google with little effort; additionally, you can target your link building efforts at the titles of your core products, so that your product pages will rank well.

When it comes to local SEO, it is extremely important to properly optimize your local SEO. This means that you set up proper local accounts on all of the top search engines (Google local, Yahoo local, Bing local) and that you provide these accounts with all of the proper information (Your company name, address, phone #, website…) As far as the optimization of the title for your Local listing, if your company name does not mention your product you should try to include it in the title, for example, “Bold Electric – Licensed electrician NJ”.

Marketing During a Recession

SEO and strategy

Marketing is an essential part of any business. Marketing is that part of your businesses that lets your customers, clients… know that you exist and that allows you to create relationships that will make your business successful. Marketing is especially important during the end of a recession b/c it is at this time that your customers are suffering the most and it is at this time that you can cement your relationship with them. Despite the doom and gloom, and despite the way that we feel during an economic downturn, every downturn will eventually come to an end, the “boom” days might not return, but the unemployment rate will eventually go down, the GDP will go up, and those customers who were suffering before will now once again be interested in spending, when this happens it is vital that these customers think of you.

Today one of the primary ways through which many companies market themselves is via the internet (websites, blogs, Facebook, Twitter etc…) Such platforms are not always designed to “sell” but are rather there to provide information to the customer, so that when they are ready to “buy” they will know where to turn. It is such relationships that can be priceless to businesses, and that businesses (small and large) should cultivate at every stage of the economic cycle. (create an informative blog that provides info on your service, if you are a doctor a “Health care information blog” where you discuss healthy living tips; if you are a contractor, you can create a “Home remodeling blog” in which you give people ideas on home remodeling, as well as DIY and other money saving tips…) Not only will the cultivation of such relationships help cement your business in a customers mind, but proper implementation of a well run off page search engine optimization campaign will also do wonders for the rankings of keywords that apply to your core website, and this will enable you to get better and higher quality traffic and to expand your client base further.

Easy Ways to do Local SEO

A guest post submitted by Eric Rea

Eric Rea is a college student who has a passion for Blogging and Sports. Check out his personal blog at www.ericrea.com

Local SEO is important

Local search engine optimization (SEO) is a powerful marketing initiative to make. It’s the perfect blend of driving more traffic to your online website as well as to your local retail location. Alerting potential customers who live in your retail location’s general area to the existence of your business is going to undoubtedly increase sales. After all, people tend to trust local businesses more than obscure, online outlets. The beauty of the matter is that there are some relatively easy ways to do local SEO for anyone who is so inclined.

My first suggestion to you for your local SEO efforts would be to pay close attention to the keywords you use in the anchor text. Google does. Anchor text is the text that’s used to embed the link you are using. So, if you’ve written an article to post online and you’re going to link back to your website, instead of saying, “click here” and embedding the link into the word, “here”, instead use the keywords you want to rank for along with the local area your business is in. For instance, if you wanted to rank for the term, “Dentists” and you were located in Chicago, you might want to embed the link into the phrase, “Dentists Chicago”. That helps the search engines to connect the dots and realize that your link is relevant to those keywords and that geographical area.

Another great way for you to get your business to pull up on local searches is to submit your information to Google Maps. Google Maps is a very useful and popular tool that millions of people use every day. It can be used to get directions for various local businesses by consumers. By submitting your company address and information to Google Maps, you’ve just made yourself available to those who are looking for directions to local businesses in your community. Oh, and did I mention it’s free to do this? Yeah, it’s free.

Lastly, you ought to participate in local blogs and forums. Any sort of website that is already established for your local community will also already have local customers visiting there on a regular basis. Get in on the conversations. Contribute useful and relevant information and opinions for the conversations at hand. Be sure to embed your company website in your signature. The more people who see you participating actively on these local blogs and forums, the more their interest will be peaked. People will inevitably click on your link in the signature and will therefore learn about your business that’s located right in their local community. Local SEO really can be an effective marketing strategy that’s easy to do.

The SEO big picture

One of my favorite lines from a book is the opening line from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”. I find this quote to have much wisdom for human nature, and I find that upon analysis it lends useful insight into the world of SEO, although (even though it might be sacrilege to rewrite a classic line of literature) it may need to be rewarded, “All successful SEO strategies are alike; all unsuccessful SEO strategies are unsuccessful in their own way”. What I am trying to say (however colorfully) is that there is no single recipe that will allow you to be successful in your SEO efforts, there are many different ways to have good SEO and there are many techniques that will allow you to rank well for your keywords and get quality, targeted traffic. Although there are a few best practices for on page SEO that it is recommended all webmasters follow, proper meta tags, well written H1 tags, alt tags for images… when it comes to off page optimization there are many ways you can achieve success, you can go the traditional link exchange route, posting thousands of links… or you can write articles, post blogs, write guest blogs, you can become active on the leading social networking and social bookmarking sites, or you can do web 2.0 optimization etc… We recommend that if you want to achieve SEO success you should probably follow a couple of these methods, and become proficient with them! The other thing that we recommend is that you stick to what you know best, your business, and hire a top SEO firm like NETLZ to do what we know best!”

How to write a blog comment

Writing blog comments is one of the leading methods through which you can generate backlinks (this is a statement that is disputable and is not one of the issues that will be discussed in this blog post. For the record, I hold a neutral position as to the link building and SEO benefit of blog comments, but I do believe that comments help drive traffic to blog posts and are interesting to read, and so I invite you to comment on any of my blog posts). The topic that will be discussed here is the writing of quality blog comments, or rather how to write a comment that will get approved.
Throughout my SEO work I manage many different blogs on many different topics, these blogs receive tons of comments and in any given month I approve hundreds of blog comments, and report thousands of others as spam, or delete them, given this I feel that I am qualified to discuss this topic. The first and most important thing in a blog comment is, you should always (always!) use your real name in the “name” section of the comment form; I realize that the name will become anchor text for your link, but if I see a comment with the name, “Laser Hair Removal NJ” or “Modern kitchen showroom in New York” I am far less likely to approve the comment than if the author had used their real name. Oh, and as far as any link benefit that you might potentially get from anchor text, a higher approval rate for comments is more beneficial.
The second thing that I would urge you to do is to please, please, please, do not copy/paste the same comment to a bunch of different blogs! I monitor comments on many blogs and I often see the exact same comment being posted on each blog, word for word. I realize that this is probably done by a spam bot, but I’ve known webmasters to do this, with the misguided belief that more comments will be approved… I implore you, I like to approve comments, and I want to approve more comments, so if you are going to take the time to post a comment, please take an extra 20 seconds to skim the blog post and to leave a comment that relates to the post.
The next tip that I can give you regarding blog comments is to not waste your time leaving comments like “Good job” or “great post” even if these comments are not flagged by the blogs’ spam filter many blog owners are unlikely to approve such comments, and I know that I often flag such comments as spam.
There are many other tips that relate to the posting of blog comments, be positive, stay on point, do not try to include 10 links in the comment etc… and many more tips, but here we are nearing commenting tips that are (or at least should be) common sense, and I will not devote time to such tips at this time.
Do you have any advice regarding how to write blog comments? Please leave your response as a comment. LOL

Promoting individual blog posts

In order to have a successful blog there are two things that you need, the first is quality blog posts, your goal is to have real people visiting your blog in order to get information, entertainment… Writing quality blog posts should take about 40% of the total time that you dedicate to your blog. The second thing that is required in order to have a quality blog is blog marketing; the marketing of your blog should consume the remaining 60% of the time that you allocate to your blog.
Blog marketing can be further broken down into two parts; the first of these is submitting your blog to active blog directories, and active participation in blogger communities such as Blog Catalog… Being active in these directories/communities will help improve the general visibility of your blog, and the benefit of these is that you only have to submit your blog to them once and after that each blog post you write will be indexed and posted. The second method by which to market your blogs requires more hands on attention and can be more time consuming than the first, though it is necessary, this method is marketing (promoting) of each individual blog post that you write. The marketing of individual blog posts can be done in a few ways, greater participation social networking, so that each blog post gets added to your Facebook wall, or gets tweeted… A second way that you can market individual blog posts is through social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Stumble Upon… but beware that you cannot be the only person leaving all of the bookmarks b/c this will cause your account to get flagged and all your bookmarks to be deleted. There is also a community that I like called Blog Engage, this is an invite only blogger community and combines some features of traditional social bookmarking sites with a few added benefits. (If you wish to be invited to join this community please let me know via comment and I’ll invite you).
In addition to these methods of marketing your blog and individual blog posts there are also methods such as using subscriptions to promote your blog, and using the RSS feed…
How do you promote your blog? What is your favorite blogging community? Please share with us by leaving a comment below.

Online videos and SEO

Online videos posted to sites such as You Tube have become a leading form of online content. Videos are fun to make and often interesting to watch, and every day thousands of hours of video are posted to sites such as You Tube, although the majority of these videos are doomed to obscurity, only being viewed a few times by close friends and family. Videos are also a great way to get your business to have some brand recognition and are typically given more weight by Google when indexing new pages and displaying search results.
When it comes to videos and SEO there are a few important things to remember (this is not a discussion of how to make a video or what should go in the video, but rather how to post your video so that you get the best results). The three most important things to remember are having a good title, a good description, and tags. Looking at the title of the video, you should think of a video title the same way as you think of a blog title (how to title a blog post), simply put, this title is an H1 tag, and is the phrase that someone might search for in Google, so make your titles direct, brief and to the point. When it comes to the description, it is important to be clear, concise and descriptive, make sure to explain what the video is about… and DO NOT STUFF KEYWORDS! The video description is also the place where you can insert a link to your website and you should try to do this. The last thing that we want to look at here are tags, tags are keywords that describe what your video is about; ideally the tags should relate to keywords that you are trying to target for your site. Please take a look at Tap Water video, and New Jersey summer camp video as a few examples of the right way to make/post videos on You Tube. Another important thing to note about online videos is that after you have made and posted the video, do not forget to promote the video, tweet about it, add it to your Facebook, and create a blog post about it…
How have you used You Tube? What other online video posting sites have you found useful? Please share your thoughts with us in the comments section below.

What is content?

“Content” seems to be the buzz word of the year, all I constantly hear is content this… and content that… but what I do not hear is, what exactly is content?
When dealing with online jargon, the word “content” refers to anything that you post online for others to see, so if you post a new Tweet, that is content, or if you write a blog, you have just created content, or if you post a video on You Tube of your friend falling off a chair… you get the idea right?
In recent years the amount of content on the web has exploded, and the importance of content rich sites has increased. Whereas it was once OK to create a webpage and rarely update it with new content, today it is recommended and expected that you update your site often. If you are in a competitive industry my advice to you would be to generate as much content as possible, write blogs, post articles, create videos…
What kind of experience have you had with content creation? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below.

How to fix a bad reputation

Your reputation is one of the most valuable things that you own, and just like it is difficult to get rid of that embarrassing childhood nickname that your older sibling, or classmates called you, it is difficult to fix a bad online reputation that you may have, although it is possible.
Today there are many companies popping up that promise to fix/manage your online reputation for a “Low, Low monthly rate!”, but as with everything else, I would urge you to take these ads with a grain of salt. Depending on what exactly is “wrong” with your online reputation, how well you want/need the reputation scrubbed and a few other factors will determine whether this is a job you can do yourself or if it is a job that requires professionals (NetLZ offers an online reputation fixing service).
The first thing to realize about your online reputation is that the “bad stuff” will never really go away, all you can do is make the things you want people to see about you to be more visible and the bad things will become less visible – just like that annoying childhood nickname might one day pry its head if you run into a classmate that you’ve not seen in years and who is unaware that your current acquaintances do not know that you were once, in a former life, called “stinky”, you might occasionally encounter a person who, in doing a more detailed search on your name will discover your past, but with time, and with the right effort, your past will remain in the past.
The first step to fixing your online reputation is to Google yourself and look through the first few pages of the results, if nothing comes up on the first two pages that you do not want seen you are pretty safe as far as an online reputation is concerned (people rarely browse past first 2 pages of results), if, on the other hand, the first, second, or third result is an article written about you that you do not want read, there is work to do… The first step is to join, and become active in a bunch of the top social networking sites, Facebook, Linked In, Twitter etc… (and make sure that ALL of the content that you post here is stuff that you want other people to see!!!) You should try to get as many friends as you can in these networks, start discussions, join groups, create groups, debate with your friends… (basically be an active member of each site). Doing this will help move that negative article about you a few slots down in Google results and will hopefully bump it off the first page of results, if not try step two, (below) and if that still doesn’t work I recommend you contact us and we will fix your reputation.
The second step in fixing your online reputation is to start a blog, blog often, and blog consistently. This step is more complicated b/c you need to make sure that your blog has proper SEO so that it will be well indexed… but even a blog with “bad SEO” will help you a little as far as managing your reputation.
Besides the above steps there are many other things that can be done to manage your reputation, perhaps I will discuss more such things in the future…
(If you know any other tricks that I have overlooked in this post please feel free to mention them in the comments section of this post)