November 29th, 2006 admin
Most people involved in the marketing of the website want to start by having visibility of their site in the major search engines. Questions like: “Do I need to summit every page to Google?†or “How long do I need to wait?†are very normal and that is why we have created this 10 easy tips that you can implement to be listed in no time.
- Check the linking structure of your site. Make sure that all links point correctly to unique content pages and that your site has no-broken links. Check also that all the links to a page are referenced in the same way (i.e. the home page always is linked to with the href tag: http://www.merkados.us/ and not sometimes without the www, or without the “/†at the end of the URLl).
- Make every page available through a text link. The best way to accomplish this is to create a sitemap. The sitemap would be an html file that contains links to all sections of your site. NOTE: if you happen to have more than 30 links in the same page, then create several sitemaps and link to them from a common sitemap file.
- Create unique tags for every page. Use unique titles and tags for every page in your site. Usually since your developer or designer used a template to construct your site, the tendency is to find repetitive tags across the site. Before you even upload your site, create unique tags for each of your pages by doing a keyword research and finding what keywords your users are more likely to use to find your content.
- Create a sitemap.xml file with all your URLs. When you do, make sure that the URLS have the appropriate names. Remove any duplication that an automated tool could have created like: “www.merkados.us†and “www…/index.php†shouldn’t be both in the sitemap.xml file. Finally verify the ownership of your site with Google™ and Yahoo! and submit the sitemap.xml file for their crawling. Check out Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo Site Explorer services for more information.
- Join open forums or blogs that allow you to include links and include a link to your site in your profile. The main idea behind this is to create links in pages that are already being crawled by the engines so that they refer the spiders to your site.
- Make sure that your site has unique and relevant content. Many websites decide to go to wikipedia.org and “borrow†some content to place in their sites, this obviously decreases the chances that if your site is found by the SE they would want to rank it. So sit down for 30 minutes and write your own content and remember to use promotional language to convince your audience of why you are different and better.
- Don’t implement any techniques that are intended to manipulate in any way your search engine listing. Avoid any kind of hidden text, cloaking, repetitive text and keywords, spamming of the title and Meta tags, and any other technique that any human user would not find useful. You want to use the richest language possible in your copy. Try synonyms for your important keywords (don’t forget to include your actual keywords in your content).
- Make your content readable. Make sure that you are able to read through your content and that it makes sense. Also try to use H1 tags for your title and H2 for your subtitle. Use bold type carefully. Make an effort to look at your pages without using Cascading Style Sheets; they should be reasonably organized and usable.
- Provide quality links from your site. Be careful of your links. Include links that are relevant to your audience and that would improve their experience. Linking is good! If done properly linking is a very positive thing.
- Don’t change your tags every two days. The results of your SEO efforts might easily take from 10 to 30 to 60 days to really show in the search engines (sometimes even longer). Be patient.
I have no doubts that if you follow this 10 easy steps you will be up and running in the search engines in no time. If you have no time or desire to do this, then contact a professional internet marketing agency to do it for you.
Alex A. Centeno MBA.
Internet Marketing Specialist
www.merkados.us
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off
November 28th, 2006 admin
To find Michael’s article please look into: http://www.wolf-howl.com/seo/user-data-and-organic-rankings/
What is my opinion? I think that Google is not an amateur in terms of providing useful results but user intent is hard to predict. Can you use a combination of on-site (the publisher) and off-site (the public, competitors and affiliates) to determine the most accurate result for a search? I think so. In search engines the quality measure is to return exactly what the user is looking for, ranked from most to least relevant and considering the unpredictability of language that this person will have.
The only real way to define relevant is to add user-data to the equation. It totally makes sense in terms of diminishing the power of spam.
The one thing that I would hope is for Google to use not only stickiness, but also user experience itself. Not only time in site, but conversion information. If stickiness was the case then by creating longer landing pages people would invest an extra second in finding if the result was relevant or not.
Finally a trend that I believe to be true is that users are getting better at using search engines. At the beginning the language used to search was different than the one used this days (take a look at the concept of long-tails). This change in behavior should help engines in returning better results as the web grows.
I think that’s why Google should support SEO. Because the optimization of sites will ultimately share the good practices of the web and increase the users awareness of the SE capabilities.
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off
November 22nd, 2006 admin
Four Huge Web Design Errors That Are Costing You Business Online is an article that I ran across this morning. And I believe it to be excellent in determining 4 of the most common errors that web designers make in designing. Now, I wanted to extend the list to 8 common error mistakes: So the first 4 covered by the article are:
1. Your website must focus on capturing email addresses
2. Stuffing your home page with way too much information
3. Loading the site with slow-loading graphics (more about this can be read at Mr. Nielsen’s usability website)
4. No attempt to discern what the prospect wants
And the next common web design mistakes related to online business are:
5. No invitation to converting. Many websites have everything in place, good design, good colors, amazing corporate image and great content. But when it comes to inviting their visitors to perform an action they fail miserably. Often I see multitudes of designs out there without contact information in every page and sometimes after reading all the content you believe that you were being informed of their products and services and not being invited to purchase from them.
6. Follow trends because they are trends and not because they are useful. With Web 2.0 we are starting to see how many websites have a clean look, better navigation and better inter-browser support. Sometimes though, website owners include elements just because they are being used in their competitors website or because they thought they were cool. Examples of this awful practice is the use of blinking text to attract attention, or the use of sound and music in Flash without the possibility of stopping it! Be careful to include only elements of design that would improve your audience experience.
7. “Let’s make some space”. The mistake of pushing the limits of the home page because we have new products and we have new banners and we have new… STOP! Instead of including new elements in your home page remove something in order to add something and always plan ahead your space. Many websites out there decide that they want to include advertising banners, flash images, extra links, new headings and many other things that don’t fit into their initial conception. The recommendation is that if you find that you need new elements then redesign your site. If redesigning sounds unnecessary then those elements are not crucial.
8. The “I don’t like it mistake”. This mistake is the biggest and most often mistake in my opinion. If you don’t like your design that doesn’t necessarily mean that your web site will not appeal to your audience. When you are tempted to say to your web designer: “I don’t like it”, think for a second who is going to buy from this website? and think if they would like it. This is specially important for “generation X business owners”. Generation X kids like video games, skateboarding, X Games, surfing and what not, but the owners of the business that sell products for this audience have difficulty to separate their own preferences with their audience preferences. The best way to avoid this mistake is to proof read your design with members of your intended audience.
For more information about web design and internet marketing make sure to visit: www.merkados.us or www.merkados.com
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off
November 20th, 2006 admin
In my opinion search engines as they are today they have a very inappropriate model. People on the web indeed use the search engines since there is no better way to find the content they are looking for, but the fact that they are presented with a long list (sometimes millions of web pages) of results makes it ineffective. Based on my experience as a consultant I can see that people typically search many times for things, when in reality they should need to search only once.
I believe that the future of search engines should be related to hiper-links. For example if I am using a search engine like Google(tm) to find the “cheapest HP laptop with WIFI” then I shouldn’t have to repeat my search several times and find a good combination of words to finally get to what I was looking for. The alternative approach should be categories of links. If I type: laptops” then I should be prompted with options: 1. information 2. interaction 3. transaction. Let’s say I want to buy a laptop, so I choose 3. transaction. Then 1. Manufacturers, 2. Prices, 3. Options (and so forth). By the time that I have drilled down to what I wanted I have saved time and effort.
The second most important recommendation that I have for search engines in the future is “Don’t use clicking” With the use of AJAX and the advances in CSS I think that the web in the future should be browsed by “onMouseOver” events. Clicking takes time. Some people out there would say that the event onMouseOver makes navigation very difficult since sometimes you move the mouse without wanting to visit something. We learned before to use the mouse to click in objects, the next generations should learn not to move the mouse unless you want to move somewhere else.
The future is very difficult to predict in any industry, in the internet industry the far future is 1 year from today. The only thing that is predictable is that it needs to get faster. Faster browsing, faster server responses, faster downloading and faster communications.
Alex A. Centeno . Internet marketing consultant.
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off