SEO Tip: Don’t Use Too Much JavaScript

Searchbots are not designed to read, follow or index JavaScript code. If your website contains a few lines of text in the JavaScript code, chances are the searchbots will ignore the entire block of code along with your text.

JavaScript menus are the same as Flash menus; unreadable. The search engines will not follow your page links. It is best to avoid JavaScript menus entirely. If you feel you must have the multi-tier drop-downs, provide HTML text links in the footer or in the content of your home page. Some of the AJAX menu and billboard slideshow code now includes unordered lists of HTML links, and is advertised as being ’search engine friendly’. If the links appear within JavaScript those lists are almost certainly being ignored by the searchbots.

Try to keep the use of JavaScript to a minimum. If the use of JavaScript is unavoidable consider creating an external JavaScript file and link to it.

SEO Tip: Choosing the Right Keywords

Keywords are the cornerstone of your search engine optimization. Getting them right can mean the difference between being a nobody on the Internet and coming up as the first site on Google.

Brand Keywords are associated with your company’s brand, or the product line your market. Many website owners will target a short tail keyword like ‘widgets’, where including the brand XYZ to create ‘xyz widgets’ would increase their visibility immediately.

Regional Keywords associate your location with a product or service you market. Targeting ‘vancouver widgets’ would be more effective than targeting ‘widgets’ alone, and a long tail term like ‘vancouver xyz widgets’ could yield even more traffic.

Demand/Supply Ratio We look for keywords with a high demand (heavily searched) and low supply (not promoted heavily by competitors’ sites as yet). This approach provides the most traffic over the shortest time frame.

» Hire a Vancouver Keyword Research Professional

What is Google PageRank?

According to Google, their PR value defines the “uniquely democratic nature of the web” and “using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value.” Google considers links from one web page to another as a ‘vote’ for the linked page’s content. Google believes that a link from a relatively obscure website should carry a lower value than a link from a leading authority site. The relevance of search phrases and traffic also determine the value of the referring page. Google PageRank is the ‘weight’ Google places on a specific web page, based upon it’s authority, keyword relevance and traffic.

Google PR is expressed as a numerical value on a scale of 0 to 10. If a website has a PR0 to PR2, chances are it’s a new website. Websites with a PR3 to PR5 are fairly well established. PR6 websites are generally well established and have a lot of high-quality links to them. You won’t find many sites in the PR7 to PR10 range.

Is Google PR the ultimate measure of a website’s value, quality of content and linkability? Absolutely not! Some of the most useless link farm sites ever constructed, the ones that sell their PR6 links offer no content of any value to anyone, just pages and pages of exchange and affiliate links. Other beautiful blogs and sites with hundreds of well-written carefully researched keyword-rich articles will still receive a PR0 after a several  years on the web.

When we look for naturally occurring links we do consider the PageRank of the site, and particularly the page we’d like our article published on, but PR is only one of the many considerations.

» How Google PageRank Passes from One Page to Another

» Hire a Vancouver SEO Professional

It All Begins with Keyword Research

If you target the wrong keyword search term, and rank #1 on Google, Yahoo! and Bing for that keyword, but nobody is actually searching for that keyword term, you’ve wasted a lot of time and money. You won’t receive any traffic from that top-5 ranking. Keywords with high search volume represent the ways your target audience is searching for information about your product or service.

We take a reverse engineering approach to build the keyword lists we target for our clients. Once we know what your customers are looking for all we have to do is target those keywords in your content, article distribution, press releases, pay per click advertising and link building strategy.

Need some help with keyword research? »

What Happens If I Discontinue My SEO?

One of the most popular questions I’m asked is, “What would happen to my rankings and traffic if I discontinued my SEO plan?”

Most of the sites we work on have never had great rankings before, and most have been inactive, without any new content, for a long time. With the addition of fresh new SEO article content, on-page SEO for existing content, a new blog, social media marketing and link building, search engines will often respond with a very favorable ranking increase within the first 90 days. After that initial peak we work on developing steady sustainable growth in rankings and traffic.

The explosive initial increases won’t continue over the long term and the steep angle on the graph will level off somewhat. It’s common for website owners to consider discontinuing the SEO program when the slope of the curve levels off a bit.

We’ve tracked the rankings of clients with a short term agenda and those who stayed the course with a long term strategy for over eleven years. After aborting the program, the work done in the previous months will continue to yield dividends for a while longer. Rankings will often increase for a while. Web site owners will therefore feel they made a sound business decision, but with no further SEO, new content or online marketing the inevitable decline in rankings and traffic begins. For very competitive industries websites can lose their rankings very rapidly. For certain niches, or for sparsely populated regional keywords the first page rankings may last for many months.

» Vancouver SEO services

The Ideal Web Site – Part 4 of a Series

The Ideal Website is Attractive Enough

Effective Internet marketing follows the 80/20 rule; where 80% of your investment is ‘Super SEO’ (promoting the hell out of your website and brand online) and where only 20% is the website itself.

• A pretty website without top rankings on Google, Yahoo! and Bing/MSN is pretty much useless.

• An award-winning website without traffic just plain sucks. They cost more money and take more time to design, so without traffic (sales)  they become a bigger liability.

• A drop dead gorgeous website that does not convert visitors into qualified leads or customers has failed as an advertising and marketing medium. Period.

An attractive website is only worth a damn when it provides a positive return on your investment.

Are we against sexy design and design awards? Absolutely not! My own epiphany came about seven years ago when one of our clients received a beautiful award for the website we developed for them. My customer called me to congratulate me on the design achievement, but then lamented over the site’s poor performance on the bottom line. I reminded him that we had proposed an aggressive SEO and online marketing campaign but he had declined. On further reflection I realized it was my fault. I’m the internet marketing professional, I know what really matters when it comes to ROI and I hadn’t absolutely insisted on a program to drive traffic to their site. I had allowed the client to invest their entire online marketing budget on an award-winning design and there had been nothing left for assuring the site had traffic or the ability to convert traffic into customers.

A good website is ‘attractive enough’ that visitors feel they are dealing with a solid, reputable company. When search engine rankings and other sources of traffic are in place, and the site is generating enough sales to more than offset the cost of additional design, it may be time to revisit the design with a facelift. If your site isn’t in the top ten ranking positions for all of your primary keyword search terms, put your money into SEO, social networking and link building, not a flashy media presentation few people will ever see.

» Need a website makeover?

Bounce and SEO

High bounce rates can hurt your search engine rankings. A bounce is a visitor that takes a quick look and then returns to the search engine to try the next search result. A high bounce rate is an indication that tweaks need to be made in order to more effectively engage the visitor. Google and other search engines take bounce rates into consideration in their algorithms. Why include a website into the top 10 search results when the visitors come right back to try again? The relevance of the site for the keyword search terms comes into question when that happens.

Your ultimate goal is to convert a visitor into a loyal visitor or customer. A loyal visitor or customer is someone who visited your website, likes it and found the information they were looking for. They then returned more than once, probably bookmarking the site in their Favorites. After a few visits they made a purchase, requested information or clicked through on an affiliate link, and they will probably do so again in the future. To accomplish this the site must be user friendly. It must be easy to navigate, easy to search and demonstrate to the visitor that they will find what they are looking for from the home page forward.

Real customers are already actively searching for what you sell on search engines. They are looking for information to help them make a quality purchase decision. They need to be converted into a customer. Effective analytics can provide the conversion ratio information needed to tweak your web site for improved results you can see on the bottom line.

Get your FREE first SEO consultation.

[Posted with MacJournal]