The Rank Magic Blog

Eight Typical SEO Mistakes ...
And What To Do Instead

November 27, 2007 ::: There are quite a number of common mistakes people make when considering SEO for their websites. Here are eight to avoid, and what to do instead.

Mistake: Design and develop your web site without considering SEO.
Instead: Make sure your web site design is search engine friendly, so search engines can easily get to every significant page on your site. Avoid all-Flash sites, Flash navigation, frames, and graphical text. Do keyword analysis first, because often the keywords you find you need to target will influence the pages you need on your site. And they will certainly influence the content.

Mistake: Use the same Page Title tag on every page. And include your company name at the beginning of it.
Instead: Craft a unique Title tag for every page, using the most important keywords for the page in the Title tag. Use your company name only on your home page Title tag. If you must use it on other pages, place it at the end of the Title tags.

Mistake: Target general keywords that are extremely competitive because they get a lot of searches.
Instead: Target more focused keywords. It's better to rank #4 for "adoption lawyer" than #50 for "lawyer". In the end, the former will generate more traffic to your web site.

Mistake: Request links with your URL in the anchor text. (Anchor text is the text in the link itself that someone clicks on.) E.G., www.RankMagic.com.
Instead: Use almost anything else as anchor text. E.G., Small business SEO company.

Mistake: When link building, request the same anchor text from all linking web sites.
Instead: Vary what the anchor text says to include your most important keywords.

Mistake: Request incoming links to your home page.
Instead: Request incoming links to all of the pages you're optimizing. And make sure the anchor text contains at least one of the keywords for that page. E.G., Improve your link popularity. Consider offering anyone who might link to you a choice of what to use for anchor text.

Mistake: Expect fast results.
Instead: Understand that organic or natural SEO doesn't happen overnight. It takes a minimum of 2-3 months to see any results at all, and full realization can take a year or more.

Mistake: Optimize it and forget it.
Instead: Periodically check that people are still searching for your keywords frequently, and see if new keywords have become more popular. If so, adapt your SEO strategy accordingly. Also, check your rankings occasionally (annually, semi-annually, quarterly) so you'll know if they start to slip. New, aggressive competition and search engine algorithm changes might result in your rankings dropping. If you don't check, you can't react to it. Check your site logs to make sure your traffic is steady or increasing. If it drops, you need to fix something.

The Big Google PageRank Slap

November 21, 2007 ::: The recent update of Google PageRank displays has slapped down a lot of sites that had been enjoying high PageRank (PR) scores. A link to your site is treated as a vote for your site, and increases your "reputation", which iin turn nfluences your rankings in the search engines. But then a lot of high PR sites started selling links, and that compromised the value of inbound links in general. So Google's latest update attempts to discount paid links and also penalize web sites that sell links by reducing their PR scores.

So far, any drop in PageRank doesn't seem to correlate well with a reduction in your position in the results. That's because the displayed PR is old, rounded off to the point of virtual uselessness, and may not really relate to the "true" PR that Google uses in its ranking algorithm.

Now some SEO experts are saying we should ignore PageRank. But they're ignoring the "perceived" value of a high PR.

Read the full article here.

Social Media Marketing

November 14, 2007 ::: If you're young and hip, you don't need an explanation of what social media is. For those of us with a few gray hairs, its essentially any of a number of web-based opportunities to create, post, or react to news, information, web sites, pictures and videos. Examples of social media applications are Wikipedia (reference), MySpace (social networking), Facebook (social networking), Last.fm (personal music), Faves (social bookmarking), LinkedIn (business networking),  YouTube (social networking and video sharing), Second Life (virtual reality), and Flickr (photo sharing). I use LinkedIn and am particularly fond of Faves.

Increasingly, web site owners are trying to leverage visibility on social media sites to help their search engine rankings. If you're tempted, here's some sage advice from Search Engine Land:

Grade Your Web Site

November 12, 2007 ::: Website Grader is a free SEO tool that measures the marketing effectiveness of a website. It provides a score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social media popularity and several other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective. It provides some interesting (and occasionally valuable) insights into areas that can benefit from additional attention. (Caution: the bottom of the report promotes an SEO advice service for which they charge money. You don't have to take advantage of that to receive the full report, though.)

Optimizing For Local Search

November 6, 2007 ::: Local search may be used by going to local.google.com or local.yahoo.com or local.live.com. More commonly, if you search for a business and include a town or zip code in your search, you'll find "local results" at the top of the listings. Showing up there is a little different from showing up high in the normal rankings.

At the recent Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose, the Local Search Marketing Tactics session presented some concrete steps to improve organic local search results. Here are the headlines, but check out the article on Search Engine Watch for the details.