Earlier, keyword placement just meant putting the primary and secondary keywords anywhere and everywhere within the blog and blog posts with the ultimate goal to increase the volume of the keyword in the blog. But, this is not the scenario anymore. Doing something like this would simply make you seem like a spammer. Search engines have got smarter and are able to distinguish well between genuine content and spam. So avoid using the age old SEO tactics and read on, to find out how to, and where to put keywords in your blog, in order to optimize it for the search engines the right way.

Titles

The titles are the first things the search engines crawl. By titles, I mean the blog’s title and its pages and posts titles. So keep them straight forward yet compelling to increase your click through rate on the SERP. The titles also most probably get used as the text by people who recommend or link to your blog or blog post. That means they may serve as the anchor text which is vital in your blog’s off page SEO.

Post Body

You should keep writing your post body with your targeted keyword and while doing this you should ensure that not to stuff with keywords nor diluting it. You can use keyword density checker tools to ensure the correct keyword density to allow search crawlers access your whole content.

Images

Unlike the early days of blogging, images provide high value in terms of SEO today. Even though image search accounts to a minor share, it is not negligible. Considering the competition, every little chance is important in SEO right?

Three different ways you can implement your keywords in images are:

• Using the keyword as the file name of the image before uploading to your host.
• Placing the keyword within the alt tag of the image. Restrict the alt tag to less than 5 words.
• Ensuring that the text that wraps the image in your post has related keywords or its synonyms.

URLs

When you Google for a keyword and keen observe the results, you can make out that the search engine places the webpages that have the searched keyword in the URL that appears at the end of each result.

Taking this into consideration, many blogging CMS/platforms have come up with something called ‘Permalink’ (permanent link) which is the URL we can define for the particular page or blog post. Make use of this feature to modify your URL in such a way that they contain the keyword or its synonym. Keep the keyword short (less than 5 words) and meaningful (avoid using date of posting) not only for the search robots but also for humans.

About the author:
Tim Wilson works as content manager for HostPapa, a web hosting Canada company serving over 100,000 customers. Since launching in 2006, HostPapa has offered reliable, budget-friendly, easy-to-use Canadian web hosting solutions for small to medium-sized businesses.

The post 4 Places to Put Keywords in your Blog for Optimum Search Results appeared first on AddMe Blog.

Small businesses and online marketers looking to cash in through the Internet must be familiar with search engine optimization, SEO. SEO looks to maximize a website’s visibility through strategic use of keywords and key-phrases that boost a website among a search engine’s rankings. When potential customers search for anything, search engines generate a giant list of websites that seem to match the search terms. To organize these results, search engines use complex algorithms and website info to determine a website’s place on the list.

Small Business Limitations

Small businesses have limited financial resources. To grow, a business website must squeeze maximum profit from every dollar spent on website and SEO costs. SEO firms offer services promising to enhance search rank and overall business visibility. However, the owner(s) of a small business may not have sufficient funds to risk hiring a full-service SEO firm. This is not to imply that SEO should be ignored. On the contrary, SEO should be a high priority for a small business trying to expand its customer base. Today, an Internet presence is as important as a physical address. But unlike a physical address, a small business can deftly move to more profitable real estate with relatively little cost and hassle, all by making the best of SEO and other e-marketing methods.

SEO Firms and Workshops

Despite the limited budgets of most small businesses, SEO firms can still be useful in boosting a website’s online reputation. A business can hire a firm to provide an overall strategy, leaving details and implementation out of its service package. This strategy is then implemented by the business owner, not the SEO firm. This method lets the business get the “gist” of an SEO firm’s expertise while limiting costs.

An SEO workshop may be worth the investment in time and money. If possible, research the speaker and topic(s) before attending. An industry expert has to be relevant to your niche and target demographic. What works for one type of website or business may not necessarily work for another. Ask SEO workshops about how to translate high rank into revenue. High rank in search results does not guarantee business success if there are no sales corresponding to increased online popularity.

SEO by Yourself

Without a firm, a small business has to generate their own content and SEO strategies. Fortunately, this is not very difficult. Google and Bing offer free SEO Guides to anyone who is interested. Studying and understanding these guides goes a long way to increasing a website’s rank and search result placement. Find other examples and illustrations of good SEO to help your business. Competing business websites, popular blogs and conversations with more experienced SEO professionals will all help.

When creating content for an SEO strategy, slow and steady wins the race. Constantly increasing popularity is better than being “hot” one day and “not” the next. Reputation for quality and expertise is not built up quick. While generating such a reputation — and a corresponding fan/customer base — sales will also increase gradually. From a long-term perspective, this slow growth is better than rapid and flashy expansion. A gently increasing clientele gives the business owner/webmaster slack and time to test new pricing and customer service strategies. A website or pay processing system may be overwhelmed if it is not designed to handle a sudden influx of orders, sales and/or visitors.

Find a Partner

If you lack the funds to hire an SEO firm, but don’t want to do the work yourself, another option may be to find someone to partner up with. Maybe you know a friend or acquaintance who is well-versed in SEO. Ask them to help you with SEO and offer them a small equity in your business. It may sound like a huge risk to you, but the potential benefits that may come from it, is even greater.

Get a Loan

The problem that many businesses have is that they lack working capital to grow their business. At some point, you have to make a decision to grow your business one way or another. Running your business on status quo isn’t going to grow it. In fact, when times get tough, your business will suffer against those that took a chance to grow their business. People generally do not like the idea of taking out a loan, but putting money back into your business is an investment. SEO is an investment that you should strongly consider.

The post SEO Options for Small Business appeared first on AddMe Blog.

Flash may be an impressive addition to any website, but it should not be the developer’s main focus. Be cautious with web developers that seem to think that flash is the only important element in web developing. Flash animation does absolutely nothing to increase a website’s rating, and the huge bandwidth needed to display one can reduce the website’s loading speed to a crawl.

Web developers must also include the right amount of backlinks in the website. Web designers who have an affinity for overusing images may also not bode well for the website’s search engine rankings. Remember that keywords in anchor text are one of the most vital pieces in SEO. Finding the middle ground between artistic design and functionality is the best way to approach SEO development. A webmaster who has no idea in how an organized HTML code looks like may find some difficulty with this issue. A sloppy web developer that creates intangible HTML code is the worst kind. Not only is it unprofessional, the website will also suffer greatly from this as a messy code can exclude it from search results because search engines have difficulty reading the codes.

JavaScript, like Flash, is another thing that search engines are not very fond of. Sites that overuse JavaScript, especially a JavaScript that has not been encoded properly will totally leave that site hanging in the wind. Web developers must also be aware that over-optimizing a website is just as worse, maybe in more than an under optimized one. Keyword stuffing of the content can land the website in hot water and be labeled as using “black hat SEO” tactics which can lead to a permanent ban on search engines.

Developing an SEO-friendly website is a must for any webmaster, and finding the right web developer for the job is just as important. Always check the portfolio of the developer and look at some of the sites they have previously worked on. It appears that when it comes to advertising a website, all traditional rules in advertising go out the window. Many website owners and developers would attest that SEO is the main driving force in search engine ratings and the higher the ranking the better chance of being discovered by users which equals to better web traffic and that is the quality of a successful website.

About the Author:
Sandie McGrey has been in Search Engine Optimization industry for 10 years. Her inspiration to succeed is Eric Schiffer. At present, she works as an SEO Manager in New Jersey.

The post SEO-Friendly Tips on Choosing Your Next Website Designer appeared first on AddMe Blog.

The internal linking structure of a site is also noticed by search engine spiders, primarily for the search spiders to determine the usability of the website. The search engines want to rank pages on websites that will provide visitors with a good experience so that the search engines look good for pointing the user in the right direction. Website visitors want to quickly find what they are looking for on a website and the links are what guide them. If the linking structure and navigation isn’t user friendly it makes conversion that much more difficult.

Previously, Google had set a limit on the number of links that should be on a page since too many links appeared spammy and a way to try and gain a search engine advantage. However, this limitation has been lifted because Google realized that in some cases it does make sense to have a lot of links on a page from a usability perspective. Usability should trump SEO every time.

While it’s true that there is no longer a preferred limit on the number of links on a page in the eyes of Google, it’s still advisable from an SEO perspective to avoid having too many unnecessary links on the pages of your website. According to SEO Moz, too many links is roughly defined as more than 100 on a page. SEO Moz states:

When search engine spiders crawl the Internet they are limited by technology resources and are only able to crawl a certain number of links per webpage. In addition, search engine algorithms divide the value of some popularity metrics by the amount of links on a given page. This means that each of the pages being linked to from a given page are also affected by the number of links on the linking page. For these reasons, we recommend you include less than 100 links per page to ensure that they are all crawled, though if your pages have a high page authority, search engines will usually follow more links.

If you have a large, well established website and it’s necessary to include a large number of links for usability purposes, there is no problem in doing so. However, if your site is on the smaller side there is no reason to have an abundance of links, so it’s still best practice to limit the number of links that are on each page of the site. Links on a page can add up quickly, so it’s recommended to use a tool that will provide you with the number of links that are on each page of your site.

If you find that many pages have a lot of links (more than 100), it’s worthwhile to do what you can to trim it down without sacrificing the usability of the site.

The post Is There Such a Thing as Too Many Links on a Page? appeared first on AddMe Blog.

When building business ratings locally, first step you should always be registering in Google Places. Registering is easy- just make sure you have your address listed on every page and in the title of the contact page. When utilizing Google Places, mention areas, streets, and nearby shops that are local to your business. For example, use references like, “Across the street from the Starbucks on West 3rd Street and Santa Monica” to further assist potential customers in understanding where you are on the map. Try and be as obvious as possible when doing so – Google knows exactly where things are but people often do not.

Sample search displaying local search results

Utilizing local SEO creates less competition in the same space. Searching for something specific like a hairstylist locally by a specific city or county is much less difficult than searching for one nationally. You should have luck in working with neighboring blogs, websites, and community pages that know your business from word of mouth or seeing it in the neighborhood. They can link mentions to your website, making it visible to the people you’ll want to see it. In addition, obtaining backlinks from local sites by sponsoring an event or donating to charity is also a key move in excelling in local SEO. People like supporting small businesses, so always ask for positive reviews and direct people to these pages as much as possible. The more positive reviews you have, the more new customers will want to visit you. This technique is also better for the wallet. Local websites may not offer you advertising space for free, but they will surely allow you to buy a banner or text link for much less than a bigger, national site.

It is apparent that the smart phone is becoming a key source to search for local businesses. Listing your business on a local map is an excellent decision for small companies that want to be found by people on-the-go that are in the need of a specific good or service at that immediate moment. Ensure you have a mobile version of your website that is readable and reliable on smart phones or this may sway potential customers away. Encourage customers to “check-in” when they visit your business – this will show up on their Facebook page along with your “Place.”

The post Local SEO: The Key to Growth for Small Businesses appeared first on AddMe Blog.

Some companies will never be ready for SEO, and others just aren’t ready right now. Here is a basic checklist to determine whether SEO is a good fit now, or if other marketing channels are a better choice.

Are the On-Page Factors There?

SEO is often thought of as link building. This is a simplistic view of a practice that can be very technical, complex, and elegant at the highest levels. For the sake of discussion, we will simply note that on-page factors, or on-site and on-page SEO, should be in place before any sort of off-site promotion takes place.

These factors include:

• Optimized title, descriptions and categories for targeted keywords.
• Optimized images including keywords in file names, alt text descriptions and occasionally captions when it makes sense.
• Proper URL structure (in many content management systems, that means replacing post ids in the URL with post names or something similar) and internal linking strategies.
• Keywords in the proper h1, h2, h3 etc headings when appropriate.

If a page is optimized properly for all of the above on-site factors, it will respond better to off-site promotional efforts.

If a business site cannot reasonably fit most of these factors into their current design, their marketing budget may be better spent elsewhere.

Is There a Need?

In some markets, a full-on SEO campaign may not be necessary. In industries where there is little competition or search volume, you may be OK with just the fundamentals. This can include on-page optimization and adding content on a regular basis. In this case, a business may actually be ready for SEO from a technical standpoint, but wouldn’t benefit too much from a dedicated campaign.

Does Anyone Know We Exist?

SEO is a fickle game to play. Even the most ethical methods can eventually run afoul of search engine algorithms that are becoming increasingly advanced and have wreaked havoc on thousands of online businesses in the last two years alone. Establishing a brand and building an audience outside of search can better prepare your business for an SEO campaign.

The reason for this is simple. SEO leads many business owners to become infatuated with the free traffic that takes relatively little work on their part to get. As a result, many stop looking at other traffic sources that often take more work.

If their business website is someday filtered or penalized by an algorithm change, they are in serious trouble. It is important to build a minimum viable audience that is not dependent on SEO before starting an SEO campaign of any sort.

If you do not already have an audience (that buys) that can get you to your break-even point, SEO may best left to another day.

Conclusion

While there is rarely any drawback to ranking well in search engines for relevant terms, it is important to recognize the potential of your SEO campaign. Is there a market for your service or product? Have you done enough research on your market and keywords?

Instead of taking the time to prepare your site for a full SEO campaign, take the time to ensure that your business is shored in terms of other traffic sources as well as conversion rates. When these are in place and optimized, you are ready to compete for search engine rankings and traffic.

The post Is My Business Ready For SEO? appeared first on AddMe Blog.

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While it seems like it might be an easy feat since Wikipedia content is added by users, unfortunately the opposite is true. Sure, it’s somewhat simple to set up a page for your business and add in some links back to your website but there is no guarantee that the page will remain active. Each page is carefully reviewed by an editorial team. Wikipedia prides itself on being a non biased source of information where people can share helpful information with one another. It’s not meant to be another avenue to market your business with. So, if a page appears to be created by a business and is dedicated to promoting that business and its products or services, it will be taken down. Wikipedia can trace the origin of the page via IP address and if it was set up by a business or its marketing company and is overly promotional it will be removed.

Plenty of businesses have Wikipedia pages though, so what’s the problem? Well, what these businesses have in common are that they are typically large corporations that have a large user base that is willing to create content on their behalf. If an outsider (like a client or customer) is creating the page or adding content to the page, that is acceptable. While a huge, trusted corporation like Apple can easily get unbiased content written on its behalf, it’s doubtful that a small business owner can, which is why those pages often get removed.

While it may be nearly impossible to get a Wikipedia page active on behalf of your small business, that doesn’t mean that you can’t obtain any inbound links to your site from Wikipedia. It just takes a little more effort. The most natural and appropriate way to generate links from Wikipedia is to establish your business as a thought leader and a resource. If you are creating and publishing great content on the web that is non promotional, it will be linked to and shared across the web, on sites that may include Wikipedia.

Despite the fact that it is difficult to get a small business page to stay active on Wikipedia, you can try. Your best bet is to reach out to your community and ask for contributions from them, so that all of the information isn’t coming straight from you. That way, it’s more natural.

The post How Do I Get Wikipedia Links? appeared first on AddMe Blog.

Search engine submissions have been on the downward trend since the early 2000′s. However, many people still utilize submission services to save time and increase exposure across the smaller search engines.

During the 90′s to early 2000′s, search engine submissions were the talk of the town and it seemed to be the fastest way to get a site indexed by the search engines.

These days, it’s a very different story. With the advancement of search engine technology, the time it takes to discover and index new web pages has drastically changed. Back in the days, it used to take weeks, if not months, to get a new site indexed in Google or Yahoo. But today, it can take as little as a few minutes to hours before a new page is indexed.

To understand the purpose of search engine submissions, one needs to understand what search engine indexing is. To be indexed by a search engine means that the search engine has crawled your web page and it has been added to the search engine’s database. Once indexed, links to your site may appear within the search results when someone runs a search for keywords related to your niche.

3 Ways a Website is Indexed by the Search Engines:

• You can submit your URL directly to the search engines.
• You can submit your URL to the search engines via a web program or software.
• You can let the search engines find your site.

In regards to the 3rd point, you may be wondering how in the world a search engine would find your site when you haven’t submitted it. Well, there’s 2 possible ways.

The first way is by crawling the web and discovering new links. If you happen to have gotten a link from a site and Google crawls it, there’s a good chance your site will get indexed fairly quickly.

The second way is more theory than hard truth. Some SEOs believe that when new domains are registered, the registrars share this public data with the search engines. A new domain registration would be the signal for a new website or just a domainer purchasing a new domain.

Either way, the search engines will crawl the domain and check to see if indeed there is a site there.

If you don’t mind submitting to one search engine at a time, you can visit each search engine individually and submit your URL.

• Submit to Google: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/submit-url?pli=1
• Submit to Bing: http://www.bing.com/toolbox/submit-site-url
• Submit to Yahoo: not necessary because Yahoo gets its search results from Bing.

If you prefer not to go through the tedious task of submitting one at a time, you can use a free search engine submission tool online. These web-based programs allow you to automatically submit to multiple search engines using a single submit form. Here’s our very own search engine submission tool.

If you’re in no rush to get your site found, you can just let the search engines find you naturally. Articles are like food for the search engines, so they love to find fresh and unique content.

The post Search Engine Submissions in 2013 appeared first on AddMe Blog.

Standing out in a crowd is a difficult task, but new blogs are started everyday that go on to become social hubs and sources of influence. Successful bloggers often have a plan and an understanding of what the right move should be. These five tips will help any new blogger find their way towards success.

1. Focus on Building an Audience

Every day, millions of people use Google, Bing or Yahoo to find information on all types of topics. Because of this, many bloggers start optimizing their blogs for search engines, and not for people.

This is an approach you should avoid.

People make links, share on social bookmarking sites and social networks, and they leave comments and spread stories by word of mouth. People make up an audience.

Look at two important resources for guidance.

One is Facebook. When starting a Facebook Page, one of the available tabs says “Build an Audience”, which is code for “run ads”. The key word is audience. An engaged and responsive audience is the most important factor in a blog’s success, so optimize for people.

The other is Google Analytics. The traffic statistics are presented as “Audience Overview”.

2. Learn the Basics of SEO

Your main focus should be creating content for people, but this does not mean that Search Engine Optimization is to be ignored.

There are a handful of steps that a new blogger should take to set up their blog for maximum search engine exposure without using shady tactics.

• Keyword research using Google’s Keyword Tool to find relevant terms with reasonable search volume. Anything over a couple hundred searches is plenty.
• Optimize the meta title tag and meta description to include your targeted keywords.
• Emphasize your keywords in the content by using an H1 or H2 heading title tag.
• Optimize your images by utilizing the ALT tag.

SEO can be far more advanced and complicated, but the fundamental basics are good enough for most bloggers.

3. Design is King

Powerful and engaging content are vital, but an ugly design will never entice users to bother reading what you have to say. Take the time to find a clean and easy to navigate theme that is free of clutter and any other confusing elements.

Making sure that your blog is also set up to recycle visitors through social sharing and eventually email opt-ins is an important element of blog design. Take the time to measure social sharing and email opt-ins to make sure your design is optimized for both audience experience, as well as retention.

4. Master the Art of Writing Headlines

It does not matter what masterful point you may make in your blog posts if nobody bothers to read them. Headline writing is key to getting clicks from search engine users, as well as social media and (eventually) email subscribers.

Headlines are far more than article titles. Learning how to write effective headlines can lead to spikes in traffic and significant buzz around a new blog.

There are a number of resources to help you learn to write good headlines, but the best resource is practice. Before publishing an article or post, write several headlines, narrow down the best two or three, then work on those until they’re perfect.

Headlines are often the key to new blogs generating off-site discussion and achieving near instant success.

5. Be Yourself

It is fine to be a novice on some, or even all, of the topics your blog covers. Not everyone is an expert, and readers can tell when a blogger is faking expertise for whatever reason.

However, bloggers who are genuine and are obviously putting in the work to learn more and present useful content in a unique way will eventually become an authority on their topic.

More importantly, they will earn the trust of their audience and build a brand. When a blogger becomes seen as both a person and a brand, the ultimate success has been achieved.

Building Something Worthwhile Takes Time

Popular blogs do not sprout overnight. Not usually. To grow a blog, it takes a clear and focused plan, patience and determination to make something that others believe is special.

As a final tip, a successful blog requires a certain level of daring. Great design, slick headlines, and an engaged audience are all more likely to happen when you dare to make something great.

The post From Nobody to Influencer: 5 Tips to Building a Successful Blog appeared first on AddMe Blog.