The Rank Magic Blog
SEO Tip: Issue a Press Release
September 26, 2009 :::
Issuing press releases to online press release services has a
number of potential benefits for you.
-
If you include a link to your web site (you
should always do that!) people who read it may become intrigued and click
over to your site. That's the first step to them becoming a customer.
-
Google News and Yahoo News (among others) will
see your press release and register the link to your web site, helping your
rankings.
-
A journalist may see your press release and
decide to talk with you about one or more articles they're working on, and
cite you as an expert.
 There are some good places to learn about writing
press releases --
here's one. Search Engine Watch has a good article all about
press releases
and SEO. Use one of your important keywords in the press release subject
or heading, and include at least one link to your web site, preferably an
internal page that's optimized for the keyword phrase you used in the press
release heading. If you can work that link into the body text of your press
release, so much the better.
If you want to get a few more solid links to your
web site, consider writing a good press release. If you don't feel you're that
good a writer, fins a good copywriter to help you. We have some great
copywriters as strategic partners who have worked successfully with our
clients. Submit your press release to some online press release distribution
sites like AddPR,
PRweb,
The Open Press, and
PRleap.
 September 20, 2009 :::
Google seems to be focusing on small businesses lately. They're trying to
inspire more enthusiasm over their
Local Business
Center, and they've announced that users in the US who have opted in
to receive newsletters will now get a monthly email report on how their
business listings performed on Google during the previous month, including
how many times the listing was seen, how many people clicked to the website,
and more.
You can also get tips for optimizing business listings and other Google
products that can help small business owners will be explained.
September 14, 2009 :::
Just published an article about how to make sure your email address
represents you well. It's often the first impression a new customer or
prospect gets about you. Here it is:
|
 We
all know how important first impressions are. Today, your e-mail
address may be the first thing anyone knows about you. And what it
tells them may surprise you.
Most
people recognize that having a return e-mail address of
sweetcheeks75@whatever.com
isn’t as professional as your name at
yourname@yourcompany.com.
But there are many other ways to have an e-mail give a less than
professional impression of you.
I’m
always surprised to be handed a business card from a small business
owner that proudly displays the address of their website but lists a
non-matching e-mail address. If you have a website, you should by all
means have an e-mail address that references your website even if you
prefer to retrieve your e-mail through
Hotmail or
Gmail. Your web
host can provide an e-mail alias that forwards your
e-mails to your Hotmail or Gmail account. All of your customers still
know you as a
steve@onecoolflowershop.com
without knowing that your e-mail is really being forwarded to
studmuffin@Hotmail.com.
Such e-mail aliases are usually offered as a free service by the
people who host your website.
Perhaps the most egregious e-mail address to use is an
AOL e-mail address.
Fair or not, many people view AOL users as clueless novices who don’t
know any better. In many cases that’s far from the truth, but you
don’t want to be painted with that brush. Fortunately, AOL is aware of
this problem and is now offering something called My eAddress.
This service lets you register a domain name and use it with your AOL
account so that
bob4583@aol.com
can become
bob@superdupergarage.com
even if you don’t have a website.
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September 10, 2009 :::
The folks at
SEOmoz have been conducting a demanding study of SEO rankings
factors, and recently came up with some interesting conclusions. Here are a
few that struck us.
-
Heading tags aren't as important as they used to be. They're still
worthwhile doing, but they're not as helpful for rankings as they once were.
- They confirmed the value of placing your most important keywords at the
beginning of your
title tag.
- Google has changed their policy such that using the "nofollow" tag to
sculpt your PageRank, or concentrate it on your optimized pages is no longer
advised.
-
Image alt tags are more important than previously thought for
rankings.
- The
keywords meta tag seems to be used by Yahoo, but not by Google and
Bing. With Bing about to provide organic results for Yahoo next year, the
continued usefulness of this tag is doubtful.
- There is some indication that manipulative links in footers may have
automated penalties applied to them in Google. This warrants further testing,
but might change how many web sites employ such links. For now, SEOmoz
recommends no more than 25 such links in page footers as a rule of thumb.
- Using Javascript
or Flash
for navigational links is a bad idea, and leads to lower search engine
rankings.
- Traffic – the number of visitors that come to your site – is
not a factor in search rankings.
|
September 3, 2009 :::
A client of ours sent us an article from the industry website
Furniture World. He told me it made him laugh since we'd just been
through a very similar situation, explaining SEO to his web designer on a
conference call. The article is basically an abbreviated transcript of a
conference call among a furniture store owner, his SEO consultant, and his
webmaster.
Check it out here.
MicroHoo - The Microsoft/Yahoo Search Deal
 September 1, 2009 :::
Yahoo and Microsoft have finally partnered in a search agreement, one
that's been expected ever since Microsoft tried to buy Yahoo for 44.6
billion in early 2008. It seems that
Microsoft will power Yahoo Search and Yahoo will become the exclusive
search advertising (pay per click) provider for Microsoft’s search engine
Bing.
 Suddenly,
the Big Three search engines are only two, with results in Yahoo and Bing
being essentially identical. There may be some slight differences, so we'll
continue to track client results in both Yahoo and Bing (as well as several
others, of course). In terms of techniques for optimizing web sites, we
don't anticipate any change.
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September 2009
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