Some webmasters get a great site, make sure it’s got the right structure for search engines and uses the appropriate elements, then they get stuck.

In order to really catch the attention of the search engine crawlers, you also need to provide relevant and authoritative content to show not just those search engines, but also the site visitors, that you have significant and relevant things to contribute about your niche.

Write content-driven articles with actual value for your readers. Make the articles relevant with information that will help your readers.

What kind of content could you provide? How about the most important industry trends, the hottest products, where is current research going, a list of the best resources in your niche, a top ten ideas list, a how-to guide related to your niche, or a planning guide.

Using the keyword research you did to create your site, decide on the most valuable keywords to use, and wisely sprinkle them throughout the copy. A good rule of thumb for the basic SEO writing is to use the keyword in the first sentence, then in the second paragraph. Skip the third paragraph, use it in the fourth and in the final paragraph. An average article on the web is between 300 and 500 words, and an optimized article will use the keyword approximately once for every 100 words.

Sometimes good writing is beyond the average webmaster. If this is true for you, hire out your writing to a good copywriter. Just make sure they understand optimization and do it right for you.

Another mistake rookies make is ignoring the tags: header tags, title tags, link anchor text, and meta descriptions. Make these tags keyword rich as well.

While you want your website to pop with catchy introductions and pithy prose that attracts the eye, when it comes to grabbing the interest of search engine spiders, a few small paragraphs of text on a graphics-rich page is not going to cut it.

Some webmasters get a great site, make sure it’s got the right structure for search engines and uses the appropriate elements, then they get stuck.

In order to really catch the attention of the search engine crawlers, you also need to provide relevant and authoritative content to show not just those search engines, but also the site visitors, that you have significant and relevant things to contribute about your niche.

Write content-driven articles with actual value for your readers. Make the articles relevant with information that will help your readers.

What kind of content could you provide? How about the most important industry trends, the hottest products, where is current research going, a list of the best resources in your niche, a top ten ideas list, a how-to guide related to your niche, or a planning guide.

Using the keyword research you did to create your site, decide on the most valuable keywords to use, and wisely sprinkle them throughout the copy. A good rule of thumb for the basic SEO writing is to use the keyword in the first sentence, then in the second paragraph. Skip the third paragraph, use it in the fourth and in the final paragraph. An average article on the web is between 300 and 500 words, and an optimized article will use the keyword approximately once for every 100 words.

Sometimes good writing is beyond the average webmaster. If this is true for you, hire out your writing to a good copywriter. Just make sure they understand optimization and do it right for you.

Another mistake rookies make is ignoring the tags: header tags, title tags, link anchor text, and meta descriptions. Make these tags keyword rich as well.

For businesses that consider their website and their customers who contact them online to be an integral part of their business, using a content management system is only logical. It will allow those businesses to provide a seamless, high quality online experience that open source or low-end solutions simply can’t provide.

For many of our customers, their website is a strategic part of their business. The added security and performance features of a CMS allow these businesses to focus the website and the usability features that make the customer experience truly superior.

By giving developers and content providers a simple to use and intuitive system, a CMS allows the marketing department or the sales department to create website content and design elements of the site. These professionals understand the customers and their needs better than developers or IT departments. With a CMS, the control goes to the people with the ideas, not only to the people with the programming expertise

The easy integration with business applications also provides a great opportunity for businesses to provide a better integration of Customer Relationship Management software and Enterprise Resource Planning software, as well as any analytics tools.

Because you, the company, are in control of the content and the programs and tools that you use on your site, you are able to better tailor your customers’ experience on your website, offer them seamless integration of eCommerce products and Web 2.0 feature, and fully optimize your site for search engines, so current and new customers can find you easily.

With so many advantages for developers and for the end customers, its easy to see why Content Management Systems are increasingly popular.

We think we offer you the best possible CMS with Sitecore. While there are still features they can improve, as we’ve mentioned here before, overall they provide a powerful program that is fully scalable so it can grow with your company. It’s also easy to use and forward thinking, constantly updating the product and forecasting the next trend, then responding to it.

Their “Gold” partner status with Microsoft ensures continuing support for all its best features.

If you haven’t utilized the power of a great CMS to provide your customer with the best possible experience online, I’d suggest giving it a try today.

There are a number of strategies through which one can optimize their own website. Of these, the one that is worth mentioning is the “Cloud”. Many of you might have this question in your mind as to, “what is a cloud?” and “what does a cloud has to do in SEO?” Well, let me throw some light on this. Clouds can be of many types, such as, profile clouds, link clouds, content clouds and so on. However, the most commonly, or rather the only form of cloud used or discussed in the SEO works is the tag cloud. When you are looking in some website page, you must have come across a section headed “Tags”. Under this head you will see a bunch of words, placed one after another, some appearing small in size, whereas, some big and bold. The difference in the size is dependent on the number of times each word or tag has been associated with an item. This whole section is called ‘word cloud’ or sometimes called ‘tag cloud’. In general, the tag cloud helps a visitor to have an idea about the well-liked tags that are present in that particular site. The individual word or tag is actually linked to a page where you will get contents related to the tag you clicked.

This has been a very useful tool for search engine optimization and is gaining widespread acceptance by websites who want to optimize their keywords for search engines. Actually, the whole idea behind a tag cloud is to help you “visualize” content that is most relevant to a websites based on certain keywords or the keywords you searched for.

However, I am sure, you might have come across a funny situation where you have seen a website having certain keywords in its tag cloud in the boldest forms and yet it does not contain any content related to that keyword! For those of you, who have not, watch out!

The most popular search engine spiders cannot read JavaScript or images, just as they read and process plain text. However since having a tag cloud requires some logistic optimizations on keyword history, such clouds are represented by either using JavaScript code or images. This accounts for a cloud that contains misleading tags. The answer to this problem is simple; pictures alone DO NOT best define your website. No, they are not at all friendly to search engines. They may be professional enough to attract the solitary attention of a friendly customer but they are like alien material for crawlers and spiders!

The best practice is to make good use of the “alt” and “title” tags for your images. This will allow the web spiders to crawl your web page in the most efficient manner and mine information from the content of your website. Identify your perception of the tag cloud; for example, which keywords should be bolder, and then compare it with the actual results. Modify or edit the “alt” or “title” tags accordingly.

If you spend some time on this, you will soon come up with satisfying results. Yes, “Tag” is the new SEO language that is creating waves, why shouldn’t you capitalize?

Have you recently noticed a wide shamble in the relevancy of your search results while you have been Googling around?

Thanks to the powerful Google LSI engine that does all that work for you. Many of you must have come across LSI and its associated mechanism but then for those of you who have not, let us take a look.

Simple indexing is a process where by a keyword is searched in an entire page and the results are presented. Frequency of occurrence of a particular keyword further streamlines the search results in the process. Thus, ensuring a proper syntax or a linear search policy is enough to produce the requested search results. However the question that arises naturally is, “How relevant are they for your search context?”

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) technology adds semantics to the existing search mechanism thereby improving the relevance of the search results. During the indexing process, the Google bot not only verifies keywords against the document being indexed, but also takes a holistic approach in determining which other documents can be linked with those keywords. Keywords may be semantically close or distant. The LSI utilizes a knowledge base of related keywords and some intelligent computing to semantically differentiate related words and accordingly improves on its indexing mechanisms. LSI thus allows a search engine to determine the overall information a page wants to project by looking for intelligent patterns in the content thus making the page more available against a particular keyword.

You will be able to leverage the enormous semantic power that LSI has to offer for the website of your organization. Improving the lexical arrangement of keywords and their related tags to an object on your page can now astonishingly reveal more improved page ranks. Not only this, the future looks good with a completely new Web 3.0 in the horizon and Google offering services that is ready to get you started right now.

Be Specific

A diffused title does not provide clarity for the reader or a search engine spider, so as far as first impressions are concerned, this is crucial to set the stage for short-term and long-term rankings.

The title should be short, informative. focused and concise. Each time you add another key phrase or keyword you can either diffuse or reinforce the title. However, if you add too many words, search engines will only get confused about the true topic of the page.

Creating Topical Relevance:

As far as pure ranking potential, a new post has more of an exact match connotations. Exact match in this connotation implies that if you type 2 to 3 words in the exact format they appear in the title, chances are you will find the page in a search engine (as the competition for that spelling, rhyme and meter of keywords combines is significantly less than just a keyword alone).

Eventually, each word in a title can act much like a net and get latched onto from search engines in broad match form when search engines troll the web using LSI (latent semantic indexing) looking for a suitable page to pull from the lottery of pages that have been earmarked as potential matches for that query.

Time and trust are the final ingredient if supported by the appropriate factors. Like a wave, a newly indexed page shoots out of the gate hot, hits a spike in the search engine result pages then after a week or so, starts to edge its way back to give way to new entrants who may or may not have more detailed information on the topic.

If your website has enough authority on the topic, the hang-time in search engines is longer. If your competition challenges you however, you must fortify your websites relationship to your coveted keyword with additional internal links, additional content, or allow the aging process to provide authority.

SEO Friendly Titles Must have Click-Appeal:

Writing a great title not only places your page higher up on the list, but it also serves to enhance click through traffic on the SERP (search engine result page) level from incorporating curb appeal as well as information.

Going back to a previous statement, in some instances a long title may be more suitable, depending on the competition for the keywords (we do not advocate stuffing titles with spam laden keywords). When a topic is very specific and you wanted to attract visitors from overlapping keywords, particularly if the keywords has low competition, then you could opt for a longer 7=12 word title.

Not that we are going backwards to simple algorithms such as keyword density (much like a bean counter approach to SEO). Not that keyword density has completely been expunged from the algorithm, it is safe to say it has been built on and improved (granted that on page and off page factors are supporting the reputation the page).

Though dated, keyword density was founded on a good premise, such as, if you replicate a word enough times, in key segments on the page, then you will rank for that term. Instead try creating multiple pages based around a theme (with SEO Friendly titles) and the overflow of continuity will leave an imprint in the index. More pages on a topic with the right metrics makes your website an authority on a topic.

SEO friendly titles should be 5-7 words, contain the keyword closer to the beginning that further away and have a benefit based action word incorporated.

The Relationship of Components:

SEO Friendly page incorporate the following elements.

• The keyword in the title
• The appearance of the keyword in the header tag (H1,H2,H3)
• The frequency and proximity of the keyword in each paragraph (how often used and how many times) leave an impression
• If the keywords are being used as anchor text (links) or how many inbound links the page is receiving (from within and outside of the site) sculpt each pages reputation

Search Engines Assess More than Titles to Discover Relevance:

Another metric at your fingertips is collective keyword focus. Just think of collective keyword focus like the equivalent of the refined version of a page that has sufficient internal linking, the right on page factors and enough support from other sites to say it is in fact what it is).

You create this by (a) writing about topics in detail (b) using keyword-rich anchor text to connect the pages and (c) using continuity between the titles. This premise of diversification, not relying excessively on any one page to produce relevance, allows you to refine or spread your spectrum of keywords attract more traffic from search engines.

For more information on this topic, here is another post about SEO friendly naming conventions that provides more specific detail on the subject.

Rather than looking for links obsessively, focus on capping the link flow and internal linking within your own site to seal up any hemorrhages your website may have. By doing this, your pages become less dependent on external links (granted they have authority).

Create Authority:

Naturally the next question is what is authority, to put it simply, an authority website has a great foundation of useful content. By the merit of the content it attracts a steady base of readers or new visitors.

Create Popularity:

Website popularity toggles authority and trust, so without igniting the proper metrics, you can have solid internal links and great content, but without traffic to endorse your site or a few backlinks from the right places, the time it take to gain authority and trust will take longer.

So, authority is great content, strong internal links augmented by popularity, time and trust. But, before you can develop trust, search engines and people have to know your content exists, which is why building links is important.

Link From Within:

Going back to basics the rule of thumb is build links from within to make inbound links more effective. So, here is one simple tactic we use to manage the way a website ranks.

1) Check you server logs for the keywords or the most searched queries your website received.

2) Identify the most appropriate pages to funnel those keywords. Most websites have one relevant page, if there are two or more then make sure the internal links from the 2nd, 3rd, 4th in line all point to the preferred landing page to funnel link weight.

3) Go back and edit older pages that have sprouted authority or page rank and can rank in the SERPs, one good way to find sleepers in your site is look for pages that are returned from your own site using a link:mydomain.com search command in Google or use our nifty little SEO Tool.

Use Internal Link Self -Referral:

Also, sub folders have a tendency to rank like external sites if you use absolute links in your own site http://websitename.com/page.html instead of /page.html

The point is, once you find those pages, edit the first link in the body copy to the root phrase of the anchor text for the most traffic phrases deciphered from your analytics. By doing this, you are invigorating keywords that have the metric of traffic and creating buoyancy within your own site through an internal linking self-referral mechanism.

This is a particularly great method to create surges of link weight into pages starving from link attrition. If pages do not have a sufficient influx of links, traffic (popularity) then the tendency is for them to wane in the search engine result pages as well.

Reflect to Move Forward:

Here are other posts that provide more in depth strategies about this topic:

• SEO Sleuthing – Tracking Your Progress
• A Great Post About Tilling Keywords from the Past
• How to Create Synergy with On Page / Off Page SEO

Hope you enjoy the optimization tips and thanks for visiting SEO Design Solutions.

The Symptoms: The search engines start by simply not listing your pages, but sometimes it gets more severe and whole subsections of your domain go unspidered or unindexed because the engines’ algos have determined that you’re a clearing house for material they’ve already seen and don’t need again. In rare cases, this might even cause completely unique, valuable material to be excluded from the visible SERPs.

The Treatment: Don’t let your users get away with it. Force them to create new, interesting, unique content when they post material on your site by creating new fields, unique categories, encouraging (and possibly even rewarding) more depth and detail. If the standard job listing looks like this:

• Company Name
• Industry
• Job Title
• Job Description
• Compensation

Make yours look like this:

• Name of Hiring Manager/Job Poster
• Company Name
• Company Website
• Company Type (Inc, LLC, Corp, etc.)
• State of Incorporation
• General Industry
• Specific Niche
• Job Title
• Field of Specialty
• Basic Job Requirements
• Advanced Job Requirements
• Desired Skills
• Desired Experience
• etc…

When you craft a more interesting, robust form, two things happen. First, the number of people filling them out goes down. Normally, this is bad, but in these scenarios it can actually work in your benefit as those users creating less interesting content (generally the drones sent to post the same thing far and wide without thought for relevance or quality) drop off, while more dedicated users persist. Second, your site goes up in quality because the content contributed has gone up – and the signal to noise ratio increases.

Results: Less duplicate content and more unique material means that you’re in the engines’ good graces. You might even find that you’re outranking the competition because you have higher quality, more detailed listings (even on the duplicates), along with more ways to sort, search and organize the data. Visitors win because they have better listings and more information. Posters win because they get to be specific and provide details that can help close the deal. You win because your site has the best version of that content on the web.

And you didn’t even have to open your mouth and say “Ahhh…”

p.s. While laid up on my couch the past two days recovering from a cold, I’ve been addicted to medical mystery programming (and chamomile), hence the cheesy formatting

SEO remains one of the most cost-effective marketing strategies, especially over the long haul. If your site and the pages on it have historically responded well to desired search terms, you should be tweaking your site to speak to the changing market. Here are seven inexpensive strategies to help you win during these challenging times.

Understand the changing landscape

Have the needs of your prospects and customers changed during the downturn? Are there products or a segment of you business more suited to these times than before? Do you need to change how you position some of your offerings? Are the keywords used by your prospects changing? What words are your prospects including now including in their searches that they didn’t include before? The primary words used in queries may be the same, but the long tail of those queries may be different. Does your site speak to the changing long tail?

Tweak existing content

Likely, there are many pages on your site that should be modified to speak to these tough economic times and the changing long tail. Adjust and expand the copy to ensure it resonates well with your prospects’ concerns, and also with search engines when those prospects search for solutions using long-tail terms that reflect those concerns. For some hints on optimizing page content, see 10 Copywriting Tips for B2B SEO.

Beef up relevant content

In addition to tweaking existing pages, you should consider adding more optimized pages to your site’s architecture. Perhaps there are products or services you haven’t strongly promoted but now are in strong demand. There may be some offerings you previously only mentioned in a passing sentence or two that now deserve an organic landing page or perhaps several pages. There are a lot of ways you can quickly add more optimized content to your B2B website, including product/service pages, case studies, white papers, etc.

Manage your landing pages

What would happen if you increased your site’s traffic by 10% or converted just 5% more of your site’s traffic? Chances are you have a lot of potential traffic that isn’t converting, both on your site and in the SERPs. Make sure you understand and manage your site’s landing pages. First, know what your search engine results look like for each desired search term. Remember, you may rank well, but does your search engine result drive click through? Second, look at your organic landing pages. Your search engine result may drive click-through, but is the searcher landing on the right page? Will that page entice them to take action? Do your bounce rates indicate a problem? Solutions to these problems don’t cost much, and they can have profound positive effects.

Drive traffic to your channel partners

Many B2B products and services are sold through channel partners, like distributors and reps. During tough economic times, these partners often pull back in terms of marketing investment, further exacerbating the crunch you may already be feeling. You may not be able to force them to spend money or take action, but you can do your part to drive more qualified traffic to channel partners. It’s probably one of the least expensive and smartest things you can do. Again, when creating or revising pages for channel partners, keep in mind the long tail and how it might be changing in your industry.

Establish thought leadership

People still buy during tough economic times. It’s just that every purchase or investment undergoes far more scrutiny. Fear of making the wrong decision (risk) is a primary motivator in B2B purchase decisions. Thought leaders are perceived experts. Businesses want to hire experts. Experts get paid more, and they get recruited from further away. Why? Because in going with an expert, the perceived risk is lower. One of the least costly ways to begin to establish thought leadership is through blogging. Done right, B2B blogging can both greatly enhance your perceived expertise and offer a way to get found for desired and changing search terms.

Build your links

Quality links drive traffic and enhance the perceived credibility of your site, both in terms of prospects’ perceptions and in terms of search engines’ perceptions. For advice here, I’ll turn to a couple of Eriks. Erik Ward’s recent article on building links during a recession is good advice. And Erik-Jan Bulthuis recently had a great article on B2B link building.

We know that timing and layers all play their role, but knowing when to do something and how are the true qualifications of developing results that transcend just being a part that ultimately serve the whole. Building and leveraging website authority is on of such things which is why we encourage you to follow the links to these posts from the past for further elaboration on the topic.

• Authority Sites and Authority Site Building (how to leverage website authority)
• Phrase Rank and Trust Rank (Looking beyond just links)
• Don’t Just Build Links, Build Trust
• How to Improve Search Engine Placement (and Develop Authority) for Your Site
• Combining SEO with Time and Authority

It’s not just about code, links or content it’s all about building website authority and gaining the trust of search engines.

Once authority is attained, all of the SEO techniques and tactics you glean from other facets of search engine optimization work that much easier. Particularly when targeting moderate to competitive phrases since most of the keywords you simply mention on a page become low hanging fruit and rise to the top of the SERPs (search engine result pages) based on the virtue of the reputation your site has accrued.

It’s not always the tip of the iceberg that matters, its what is beneath that you should concern yourself with. They always say age before beauty. Well in this case it’s build authority and trust before trying to scale competitive rankings.

There is no shame in being where you are at, you just need to know so you can gauge the impact your website has, so you can condition it into a website capable of attaining the lofty goals you establish, despite how competitive the arena may be.

Search engines deliver pre-qualified traffic based on the premise that anxious consumers are already searching for products and services. However, depending on their needs and objectives, the urgency of the situation and the appeal/solution presented from your pages, each facet must create the perfect synergy to yield a successful return on investment.

It is easy to get tunnel vision and overlook the basic needs of your preferred audience or rely on one marketing method instead of diversifying your approach. Fortunately websites are scalable as well as content and design are pliable to accommodate change.

Below are three primary factors that search engines reward with links to articles that provide more depth about the topic. In summary, by successfully managing chronology, topical relevance and search engine trust your web pages will always hit their mark in the top 10 and rise to the top.

The Three Primary SEO Factors Are:

Time - the longer your online the better. Credibility and trust are often synonymous variables when algorithmic assessments scrutinize your website.

Resources:

• The Best SEO Strategies Mature Over Time
• Building Link Popularity One Link at a Time
• With SEO Time and Authority are on Your Side

Relevance – Does your site have 1 page or 100 pages on the topic?, 10 quality links or 10,000 low quality links? All of this matters to search engines. With every node of search engine algorithms, there is another layer of redundancy to cross reference that variable with another to ascertain validity. If you want to acquire a top ranking, your content must have relevant context to deliver to the end user, otherwise your pages will be overlooked as the optimal solution to the majority of keywords that convert from consumers search engine queries.

Resources:

• SEO Design, Relevance and Appeal
• Quality Score and Relevance Score
• Developing Topical Link Weight for Internal and External Links

Trust - just like in the real world, you have to earn it. This by far is one of the most human aspects of search engines, trust equals traffic, trust equals engagement and trust equals authority. Although you can expedite the process, you still have to develop key indicators over time consistently to gain the approval of instantly ascending the rankings unchallenged, which is a by product of search engine trust.

Resources:

• Link Building – Uses Pages with Trust Rank for Internal Links
• Phrase Rank and Trust Rank
• Don’t just build links, build trust

What does amazing imply to you, would that mean tripling your traffic within 3 months? Increasing lead generation by 400% or having a popular authority site that catapults everything you publish to the top 10, 20 and 30 results without effort?

If so, then think ahead of the curve, plan for the future by viewing each page of your website as a holistic piece of the puzzle and above all else add quality content frequently to stay in the graces of search engine spiders as they crawl the web for useful information.

We hope you enjoy the resources, there is no substitute for quality. So, instead of trying to rank before you understand the needs of your audience, take a step back and think about the long-term benefits of your optimization strategy if you want long-lasting SEO results.

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