More traffic is always equivalent to better ranking and so we think.  This is not always true since many sites will swear by the truth that their ranking actually dipped even when user traffic has actually increased.  This phenomenon is sought to be explained by the principle of relativity which simply means that the performance of a site is ranked relative to the performance of all other sites existing in the online world.  This is the formula used by Alexa.

It is no secret that a good number of sites are being added daily to the whole lot already being ranked.  The entry of one or more “better” sites can directly affect the ranking of any site that has managed to position itself among the top.  Top-ranking sitesare always being challenged and it is a fact that some challengers actually succeed in eclipsing even those which appear to have securely  entrenched themselves.

Non-stop change generally characterizes the online world.  Nothing is ever permanent including site rankings.  Your site may be enjoying more visitors than ever before but it is highly possible that your competitor might just be enjoying the same albeit with a small incremental advantage over your site.  The smallest number difference matters and that is why the job of improving one’s site is a continuous process.

No site can afford to rest on previous laurels and neglect to maintain housekeeping or keeping one’s site in order.  Site owners should remember that ranking is not merely determined by the number of visitors but also by the number of pages visited on the site and how long their visits were.  The latter information reveals the level of quality of visited sites based on their ability to sustain the attention of readers.

Regardless of marketing initiatives used by sites, the level of content quality will always be a critical factor in the choosing process.  Site owners therefore should not forget the importance of what they offer as they promote their sites for user consideration.

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There is one definitive way of helping readers find your site and that is through the use of appropriate and most suitable keywords.  Majority of online users will not have any idea of the existence of any site when conducting a random search.  The bridge between the seeker and the site is the keyword or key phrase. 

Since keywords comprise one of the critical lifelines of a site, it is necessary to find words that will provide the highest potential of leading readers to a site.  With the exception of a few derived words that are clearly identified with a single entity or individuals, words used as keywords are for general consumption and thus can be freely used by anyone.  This is why correct word choice and word combination are often seen as the main ways to achieving keyword intelligence. 

Site owners will have to get those words that make sense in finding their sites.  Relevance is always a key factor.  Misleading words however are the bane of serious searchers. 

Intelligent keyword choice is only possible if a site understands its target.  Understanding means knowing how readers think, how they conduct searches, and how they make decisions in choosing the sites to visit.  This is one area where site owners have no power to dictate since these are spontaneous actions. 

Major search engines can provide a starting point in finding the right keywords.  They are able to record every search word or phrase used by readers and can provide an unbiased basis for making a choice.  What site owners should be interested in is the actual occurrence of the word or phrase in searches more than what could possibly be used.  It is very possible that the way of thinking of owners is quite far-off from that of readers.  This is where most sites fail in their bid to capture audience attention.

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PageRank is arrived at by considering the number and value of links made by other web pages to yours.  There is much emphasis placed on the value and where there is a need to qualify the numbers as they come.  Thus, credible back links are preferred over highly-suspicious ones.  This is one case where too much of a number can actually backfire and result to investigation. 

That said, we go back to how PageRank affects the way your site is perceived by readers.  Let us suppose that whatever commendable page rank you are enjoying is a product of honest work.  What does a high page rank say about you, really?

It many web pages are linking to your site, you are most probably offering content of high value either to the general public or a particular niche.  Since back linking is essentially an act of reciprocity, these pages that chose to link to your site expect to benefit as well from establishing an association with you as a credible source.  This simply means that you are slowly but surely establishing the reputation desired by any legitimate site. 

Numerous back links say that you are considered an authority on a specific subject matter and related sites seek to establish connection with you.  These sites are effectively saying that they recognize the validity of your contents and are thus not afraid to make their views known to other.  Quality back links are actually votes in your favor. 

Although high Page Rank does not always results to high search engine rankings, it is always a welcome development for any site that desires a credible position online.  Increased traffic and income can also result from a positive Page Rank.  A blog or a site stands to benefit from any action that will contribute to its goal of establishing reliable identity.

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Search engine optimization or SEO still remains one of the best propellers to high ranking in search engine listings.  It is no wonder then that website developers make it a point to know the parameters used by reputable search engines in determining the suitability of a web page to a particular query given by computer users.  Top ranking in these listings makes a site more visible because of the natural tendency of users to click on web pages that come out on top.

This is the very reason why websites are scrambling to obtain the top position.  For most users, top rankers are synonymous to excellence, quality, and appropriateness to their search.  Although this is not always the case because no search engine algorithm so far is considered 100% fool-proof, it would a safe assumption to say that a likely match should be found among the first page results.  This is of course granting that the right keywords were used or unscrupulous websites have managed to entirely sidestep the search criteria and obtained all the first ten slots for themselves.  Search engines are continuously introducing modifications so as to address manipulated rankings.

SEO makes possible the improvement of page ranking by making sure that a website will be seen by search engine crawlers.  This is the only way to ensure that human visitors will find the website among the millions of choices presented to them.  An optimized site will have more access to business opportunities which will never be available to obscure sites.

Optimization emphasizes the over-all improvement of the site including the physical presentation, the contents, and the right keywords that will help customers and search engines find it.  It will also involve providing links that will help the site accomplish its objectives.  It will also make sure that visitors are able to navigate the site easily and that pages load in the least amount of time possible translated into a couple of seconds.   The race to the top is not easy but it is a race worth running for websites who intend to make it big in the online environment.

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Who is not wary of bad PR? Everyone is! After all, if the hype gets bad enough, the effects on any company can be disastrous. That is why many companies spend a lot of time and effort on PR activities. But what if, despite your best efforts, you get bad PR? I am sure that your PR firm probably has contingency plans for such events but have you thought about using SEO to counter bad PR? (By the way, if you have not caught on by now, I am talking about Public Relations and not PageRank.)

According to Richard Gregory, you can make the most out of SEO in order to counter bad PR. Direct News has this report:

An effective search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy can aid firms when they are faced with a negative public relations (PR) situation, according to an expert.

In order for this to work in the most effective manner possible, the site notes, it is “crucial” for the firm not to wait for the crisis to break.

This is a brand new way of looking at things – at least for me. Did you know about this before? What do you think of using SEO for good PR?

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In my last post about images I gave some tips on how to optimise images. There is said that you should:

• Store images in a single directory;
• Use keywords in the file names; and
• Use Alt text.

These still hold true and are very sound ways to make sure that your images on your pages help your SEO efforts. Aside from these though here are more tips. They’re mostly common sense but like in most things the obvious once are the very things we overlook.

• Use relevant images only – Make sure each image you use is relevant to the content near it.
• Size matters – I’m talking about the actual size of the image and not the file size here. File size does matter but you want it to be smaller to make loading pages faster. On the other hand for the actual image size note that search engines think that the bigger the image is the more relevant it is to the site’s content. So do not go making a non-relevant decorative image larger than the important ones.
• Image quality is important – You want to choose good quality images over poor ones. The quality I’m referring to is the clarity, contrast, etc. Of course you have to compromise between quality and file size. Find the right compromise.
• Place important images at the top if possible – This affects not only SEO but also user-friendliness. However in cases where the images accompany a certain paragraph as illustration it is more important to place it near that paragraph since you want the image near the relevant text.

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Attention everybody: it’s time to take out your thesaurus.

We’ve known for sometime how Google uses synonyms to determine the context of the search terms entered by search users. Recently Google Software Engineer Steven Baker brought back the importance of synonyms to focus in his post “Helping Computers Understand Language”. There he discussed how Google recently analyzed just how well their synonyms system works.

According to Steven Baker 70% of search queries made in Google are actually affected by their synonyms system. However, most of the time we don’t even realize it because everything happens in the background. We tend to take the relevance of the results we get for granted, not realizing that a lot of analysis takes place to narrow down the index and spew out those results.

Furthermore Steven baker also said that they found out that out of every 50 queries made that are affected by Google’s synonyms system, only 1 returns a truly bad synonym. That makes for pretty good search results, don’t you think?

However, how should this information affect your SEO approach? Simple. As I said earlier its time to take out your thesaurus and start using more synonyms. Don’t get stuck with technical terms and use laymen’s terms in the same page. This will not only help Google contextualize your pages’ contents but also provide more keywords and key phrases, hence, increasing your pages’ searchability. So don’t get stuck using the same term over and over, expand your vocabulary and do better in SERPs at the same time.

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If you have been following various SEO blogs and web sites, then I am sure that you are familiar with the description meta tag. After all, it is one of the most basic (and important) considerations when optimizing your site. However, just in case you are not familiar with it, the description meta tag is basically what provides search engines (Google included) with the necessary information as to what a page is all about. You can call it a summary of sorts. In your HTML code, the meta tag is found within the tag.

So what should you bear in mind when using the description meta tag? Here are some tips, again from Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide.

Accurately summarize the page’s content – Write a description that would both inform and interest users if they saw your description meta tag as a snippet in a search result.

Avoid:
• writing a description meta tag that has no relation to the content on the page
• using generic descriptions like “This is a webpage” or “Page about baseball cards”
• filling the description with only keywords
• copy and pasting the entire content of the document into the description meta tag

Use unique descriptions for each page – Having a different description meta tag for each page helps both users and Google, especially in searches where users may bring up multiple pages on your domain (e.g. searches using the site: operator). If your site has thousands or even millions of pages, hand-crafting description meta tags probably isn’t feasible. In this case, you could automatically generate description meta tags based on each page’s content.

Avoid:
• using a single description meta tag across all of your site’s pages or a large
group of pages

The key here is in being as specific as possible. The idea is to provide Google AND your human readers with the necessary information they need to determine whether the page is relevant to their query or not. More than being specific, though, remember to give an accurate representation of the contents of the page. The last thing that a user would want is to think that a page contains certain information only to find out that they have been misled.

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We have taken a look at several reasons your efforts at SEO may not be giving you the results that you have been aiming for. Just to recap, we took a look at several things such as wrong keywords, infrequent updates, and lack of inbound links. You can probably say that these are quite on the technical side. What do you do if you keep on doing the right things with regard to these points but your efforts at SEO do not seem to be gaining you anything?

Perhaps you might be overlooking one simple aspect – your content. It might be simple but it is quite important as well. What do I mean? You may be using the right keywords and your content may be dense with them BUT if you do not provide interesting content, how do you think you can maintain the attention of your readers?

One problem that many people engaging in SEO practices have is that they tend to forget all about the “humans” who read their web site. What happens is that they tend to focus on getting the search engines’ attention. The result is dry and uninteresting content. Now put yourself in your readers’ shoes. If you visit a site which has great SEO strategy but does not really present the content in an engaging way, would you keep returning to that site? Probably not.

So if I were you, and I was not getting the results I want, I would check on my content. I would make sure that I am giving my human readers something useful, something to look forward to.

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So have you checked your keywords yet? Are you targeting the appropriate keywords for your web site or blog? If you are and you are still not getting the results that you are aiming for, then maybe you are still missing out on something.

Why don’t you check how regularly and how often you update your blog? E. Branter also talks about this point:

Infrequent Updates- Search engines have a passion for fresh content. They crave fresh content because it keeps their results relevant. For this reason, it’s crucial that you give the search engines the new content they desire. Updating your website regularly shows both the search engines and your website visitors that your company is active and worth their trust.

It is as simple as that. You need to always offer something new. For blogs, I suppose that this would be a bit easier. You can post every day, every other day, or even twice a week. The format of the blog is easier to update and by its very nature, you really should provide fresh content a lot. For web sites, you can create a page or a section where you can update the content regularly. Perhaps you can have a section for articles and you can provide fresh content weekly. You can provide a section for news and do the same, maybe on a more frequent schedule. You can even create a blog and use that to provide fresh content!

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