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Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide from Google

Google put this document online a long time back, but I’m sure there are a lot of people who have never read it. For a free consultation on how we apply these SEO techniques for your website, call Curved Marketing at 512-322-9566.

As you develop your website, you add a new graphic here, an image there, maybe a video, a new cool snippet of javascript, maybe a little flash and pretty soon, you have created a slow-loading website one little piece at a time.

It’s easy to get into adding a little bit to your site frequently. You find cool new things you want to share with users. Those little facebook, google plus and twitter icons and plugins for your blog, a cool new flash header you’re sure your visitors will just love and of course you have to add that new video you just made.

Adding freash content to your website is a great way to improve your rankings in the search engine. But add that new stuff on new pages you add to the website. Don’t keep over-developing your home page or any other page. If you slow down your website, your rankings will suffer.

Take a fresh look at your website. Look at each item. Ask yourself, “Do I really need this here?” and “Is the time it takes to download this worth it if it is going to affect my SEO efforts?” Trim the fat and you’ll be much better off.

There are some really big companies online that could use this lesson. Those slow-loading flash ads on some news sites, sports sites, gaming sites and others are annoying to users. Those ads that expand when you mouse over them might look cool, but they are annoying to your users and they slow your website down.

Most importantly, they do not convert any better than an adsense text ad that loads really fast. I’m not saying start promoting adsense instead of the ads. But use the fastest loading ad possible, not the one you think looks really cool. Your conversion rate will actually improve.

Related articles

• Web design tips – things to avoid (marketing.yell.com)
• Flash and SEO: why it’s best to keep it simple (marketing.yell.com)

1.) Sales / SEO Text for Web Pages: I have 30 years of sales experience with 15 of those being in online sales, so I do not just write keyword-rich content; I also write content that converts into leads or sales. We can provide the content to you in a text or word document or we can edit the content directly into your html or asp templates. We optimize each web page for keywords, titles, and description, insert links and images, basically designing each page to help you improve sales and do better with the search engines. $50-100 per page depending on length and complexity. Extremely long pages or glossaries may warrant an additional fee.

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3.) Code Cleanup: We go over your website code line by line and get rid of any garbage or unnecessary code. This helps your website work properly and it loads faster if optimized. Both very important to both the search engines and to your sales. Code Cleanup runs $50-$75 per page depending on the amount of work that needs to be done. If we are writing the content, a reasonable amount of code cleanup is included at no extra charge.

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My answer: Subdomains are like standalone websites without the advantage of having a real domain name. You can build whole sites on subdomains, but they won’t help the website on the actual domain and the subdomains carry less weight than a site on an actual domain name. /folders help add content to your website. If what you want to put on the subdomain isn’t to help your website, then it’s better to get a domain name for that content. Google has been wavering on how they treat subdomains.

So I looked it up on the Google Webmaster Blog just to be sure.

Subdomains vs. Subdirectories

What’s the difference between using subdomains and subdirectories?

When it comes to Google, there aren’t major differences between the two, so when you’re making that decision, do what works for you and your visitors.

In addition to those considerations, if you use Webmaster Tools (which we hope you do!), keep in mind that you’ll automatically be verified for deeper subdirectories of any sites you’ve verified, but subdomains need to be verified separately.

So, they are the same from an SEO perspective, at least for Google. Remember, you need traffic from other search engines as well. The Google Webmaster blog only applies to Google Optimization. The advice that Matt Cutts gives us is also only about Google Optimization.

Some search engines may treat subdomains as separate websites and subdirectories or folders as part of the actual website. So the safer way to go for SEO purposes is to use subdirectories or folders for content you want to be seen as part of your website.

This is from Matt Cutts on how Google treats subdomains and subdirectories;

My personal preference on subdomains vs. subdirectories is that I usually prefer the convenience of subdirectories for most of my content.

A subdomain can be useful to separate out content that is completely different. Google uses subdomains for distinct products such news.google.com or maps.google.com, for example.

If you’re a newer webmaster or SEO, I’d recommend using subdirectories until you start to feel pretty confident with the architecture of your site. At that point, you’ll be better equipped to make the right decision for your own site.

Remember the KISS principle. keep it simple and stupid. The more you complicate your SEO efforts, the more likely you will make a mistake.

In addition to that, Google has changed their policy on subdomains more than once. They have always counted subdirectories as content for your site. Do you really want to put all that effort into building subdomains just to have them change that policy again?

I recommend subdirectories / folders if you must use them at all. For most websites I put all of the web pages in the root with folders for images, docs, scripts, styles, etc. It makes it very easy to work on your website when you do it this way.

Excessive folders with different keyword names can make your URLs seem like spam. I can’t prove that is a problem, but anything that looks like spam, smells like spam and tastes like spam is probably spam.

What experience have you had with subdomains vs. subdirectories? I don’t mean just in Google. How do they do for you in Yahoo and Bing or other search engines?

1. Affiliate Marketing

2. Bicycle Parts

3. Homes for Sale

Affiliate Marketing – in Google, skipping wikipedia entries, the number 1 site was http://www.affiliatetips.com/ which has 39 Errors, 3 warning(s)

Bicycle Parts – the number 1 website was http://www.bikepartsusa.com/ which has 164 Errors, 45 warning(s)

Homes For Sale – number 1 site – http://www.realtor.com/ – 161 Errors, 14 warning(s)

I could check the top 10 and likely hit 10 out of 10 with errors like those. I’m not saying you should not strive for good code, but for anyone to tell you that it has something to do with SEO, ask for proof.

Code does have something to do with SEO if there is a lot more code than text in your page, (code to text ratio). Code does have something to do with SEO if it somehow slows down the load time of your website, somehow hides the text, or causes other problems that make users leave your website right away.

But as far as W3C compliant, show me proof that it matters.

SEO Service Provider takes all of those headaches and deals with them for you. We have the experience to deal with all of the things you need to do to be successful in your online business. We’ve already hired the Article Writers, the Bloggers, the Content Writers, the Designers, and our SEO/SEM and Internet Marketing Professionals have years of experience with sales both online and offline.

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LINK BUILDING SERVICES – There are a lot of ways to get more links to your website. We will help you get those important links. Click here to learn more about our Link Building Services.

WEBSITE CONTENT SERVICE – Our Content Writers know how to write optimized content for your website on any topic to help you rank better in the search engines. More importantly, we know how to write text that helps you make more sales. Learn more about our Website Content Service here.

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1. SALES: The text content is what your visitors will read when they find your website. It has to be interesting and informative. It also needs to guide the reader where you want them to go. Getting a reader to click the “buy” button or the link you want them to click on is our goal. It is the website content that will do that, not the pretty design and graphics.

2. LINK POPULARITY: If the content in your website is well-written, original, interesting, and informative, people want to bookmark it and they want to link to that content from their own websites. Organic Link Popularity can easily be achieved with well-written, original content.

3. SEARCH ENGINE RANKINGS: Again, good, orginal content comes to the rescue. Search engines do not rank you well for your keywords and phrases due to the pretty design or graphics you have in your webpages. The search spiders or bots read the webpage content to decide if that text is relevant to your chosen keywords and phrases. Your website content must be informative and interesting as we stated before, but it also needs to be optimized for the keywords and phrases that will bring you more traffic from the search engines.

Use the form at the bottom of this page for a free website content quote or to ask any questions you may have about website content. You can also call us at 786-317-8774.

Providing your visitors with a lot of great information is a really good idea. It encourages them to return and link to the content you provide on your website. And if that content is optimized properly, it will help you rank better with the search engines. All good!

But if those pages of content serve no purpose other than to provide informative content and help you rank better in the search engines, then you are missing the boat.

Search engines crawl and index web pages, not websites. That means a properly optimized web page will rank for the search terms targeted for that page. Which means, when a searcher types in a key phrase you rank for and click that link, they will go directly to that page, not to the front page or home page of your website.

So many people have their minds set that all of their visitors will enter through the front page, then navigate their way through their website the way they intended them too when they built the site.

More often than not, this is not the case. They may land on any page in your website, therefore, every page in your website is a possible landing page for the search engine user.

Is every page in your website ready to close sales or generate leads? That is the question you need to ask yourself. Do not answer that by saying there is navigation at the top or the side of the page and that is enough to get users to click to where you want them to go. Never just depend on your website’s navigation links that are sitewide to get users to do what you want them to do.

You need calls to action within the text on the page and at the end of paragraphs that lead the user to where you want them to go based on what they just read.

So if you have a lot of informational web pages in your website and want those pages to perform better, give us a call at 786-317-8774. I’d be happy to give you a free consultation and help you improve your sales.

It has been proven that content gets crawled by the search engines faster with sitemaps. Get your sitemaps installed today! Call 786-317-8774. 24-hour turnaround time.

There is a basic structure that has worked for me as a guideline.

1. First of course, the code in the web page needs to be cleaned up. All unnecessary code should be eliminated, put into external files, etc.

2. You need to identify one master key phrase for that web page to target.

3. Type that key phrase into the google keywords tool.

4. Make a list of 5-10 phrases that google tells you are related to that master key phrase.

5. Name the html file the same as your master key phrase, like “bicycle-parts.html, bicycleparts.html, or bicycle_parts.html

6. Rename all of your images based on the keyword list you made. use the alt tags for related phrases that also descibe the image.

7. Use the title tag in the source code. Give it the same name as the file name or a variation such as “Parts for Bicycles”.

8. Write a description tag that makes people want to click over to your website, like; “We have the lowest prices on the web for bicycle parts!” This is the text you see below a link in a search engine results page whenever you search for something. If your description is better than those who rank just above you, you still might be the link they click on if they like the desciption.

9. Do not stuff a bunch of keywords and phrases into your keywords meta tag. Use only words and phrases and variations of those words and phrases that you will actually be using when you write the content for that page.

10. Start with an H1 tag at the top of your page. Use the master key phrase or a variation of that phrase here as well.

11. There are 3 type of people who will visit your page.

Type 1 - Knows exactly what they are looking for and does not need a lot of information before they are ready to buy. So you will write the first paragraph of text to summarize what the whole page is about. Then you need to put in a call to action at the end of that paragraph or just below it.

Type 2 - needs a little more information before they are ready to commit to anything. Write another two paragraphs that go into a little more detail than the first paragraph, then add your call to action at the end or just below those two paragraphs. Do not use the same words in the call to action that you used after the first paragraph. If that did not get them to click the first time they read it, it won’t likely work the second time you say the same thing. If you said “click here for more info” at the end of the first paragraph, say something like, “see how this product or service can help you” at the end of the two paragraphs you wrote for type 2.

Type 3 - is the type of person who is going to read every single word on the page before they will commit to anything, so write another three paragraphs just for them. Then add a brand new call to action at the end of the last paragraph or just below it.

This pyramid approach to writing sales text has proven successful time and time again.

12. You should have your keyword list memorized as you write the text. Use your master key phrases at least 3-4 more times plus use each of the related key phrases from your list a couple of times each. But most of all, focus on how to use them in such a way that you are closing the sale. Converting sales is more important than the right keyword density, but both can be achieved if you set your mind to it.

Your web page may not be one that you can use the 1 paragraph, then 2 paragraphs, then 3 paragraphs method. This is just a suggested guide. You do need to address the three types of visitors and target each of them in the way suggested. A little info for type 1, then a call to action, a little more detail for type 2, then a new call to action, then more detail for type 3 and another call to action.

If you build each web page using this as a guideline and you know how to write compelling content, you will rank better and convert more sales.

We optimize and write your web page content for you for as low as $50 per page.