Tag Archive for: search engine optimization

SEO in Fortune 500 Companies? Not Always Good

,

It appears that Fortune 500 companies on the whole have not caught up to the internet marketing needed to rank well for their primary keywords.  And many of them still don’t use pay per click marketing, even though the combination of the ones that do spend about 3 and a half million dollars daily for their keywords.

The interesting thing here is with those millions being spent, you’d think they would put the money into SEO to push their primary keywords to the top of the listings, but it appears that they are not doing this.  The companies are still improving on their listings, but it’s still a minority that are even breaking the top 50 in the SERP list for their primary keywords.

MediaPost has an article with details on the exact figures involved in the Fortune 500 SEO results, as well as their PPC figures.

/0 Comments

SEO for Huge E-Commerce Sites

Doing SEO for a massive site can be complex.  In the case of a large e-commerce site, you have a ton of pages with the different products.  How do you organize the categories do good SEO for all these pages?

This is a full project to do solid SEO, but some critical elements must be kept in mind.

  • Google likes unique posts, good content
  • Duplicate pages can hurt rankings
  • You don’t need to have top listing for every one of your 10,000 pages

By looking at these concepts, this means that using the 80-20 rule is a great approach for doing good SEO for a huge site.  Chances are 20% of your products produce 80% of your revenue.  Focus on only these elements.  Make these pages have solid content and fine-tune the on-page SEO here.

By doing this, you don’t spend so much time on the other few thousand pages, and the results are worth it.  In addition to this, try to be careful about categorization – it can hurt to have categories cross each other to make duplicate pages.  For example, having a clothing store with a leather category and a shoe category could have the same page in both “leather->shoe” and “shoe->leather”.  There are ways to avoid this, although my recommendation is to initially construct the categories in a way that this never becomes an issue.  By taking care of this up front it will help with many potential duplicate content issues.

Beyond these details, keeping great SEO for the site in general will always help.  Following all these tips will increase your traffic and listing positions.  For more details on SEOing e-commerce sites, check out this article by Eric Enge on Search Engine Land.

/0 Comments

Universal Search – The Next Step in SERPs

,

The search engines evolve, as does most modern technology.  The latest revision in search engine result pages is the “universal search”.  This is the displaying of results for searches in not just web site links, but images, maps, videos, blogs, and more.

The universal search allows a large breadth of information to be given that is relevant to any search done.  For SEOs, this means adjusting approach on how to get relevant information out onto the web.

When trying to publicize information about something you want people to discover, to make sure you can be found by different areas within this universal search you’ll want to make sure you go across multiple areas with your information publication.  This can be done through audio, video, blogging, social media – or getting creative and doing it in unique ways.

It all comes down to doing good marketing, just online.  As the web evolves, so must our online marketing.  For more good information on the universal search, check out this article by Ron Jones at Search Engine Watch.

/0 Comments

SEO Strategies vs Tactics

In SEO, many people often think of the different types of SEO tactics that are put into play without ever really putting together a solid strategy.  Knowing how to distinguish which tactics should be used for which market is a great skill.  It’s something that is not focused on by all SEOs, but it really should be.

Beyond that, after determining which tactics are best, one of the best abilities to have is efficiency at various tasks.  Knowing how to balance your time for each need that your projects require is a very valuable asset.  Stephan Spencer described it very well in his article on Search Engine Land, I highly recommend viewing his tips on all of these often missed elements of SEO.

/0 Comments

Forbes Talks About Value of SEO

,

When a major magazine that focuses on large businesses and exchanges of huge numbers of money talks about how important SEO is, you know that it’s worth knowing about.  Forbes put up an article about search engine optimization and gave a few really great tips.

The article mentions how there are over 12 billion searches each month and that most people never look past the first page on their searches.  Because of this, being on the first page of results for your market is becoming more and more valued and valuable.

The tips they talk about are details such as content, keyword organization, and even speed of the site itself.  The other element I was happy to see mentioned was the reminder to never forget the visitor directly.  I’ve often told people – top listings don’t matter if no one wants to stick around when they visit your page.  Because of this, good web design and focus on attractive details to the customer is important.

/0 Comments

SEO and the 80-20 Rule

The 80-20 rule is one that applies to several areas of business.  This includes SEO.  There are some elements in SEO that take a large amount of time and effort, especially in areas like building backlinks.  In this case, deciding on which 20% of these can provide 80% of your SEO value can save lots of time while not cutting many results.

In addition to this, when you have hundreds (or thousands) of pages on your site, it’s important to try avoiding the duplicate content penalty where possible.  To do this, each page must be unique and have valid content.  With that many pages, even with a full staff it still takes a lot of time.  In this case the 80-20 rule can be applied to choose the most important of your site’s pages and make sure they’re prepped to be crawled fully by the search engines.  You can find more detail on how to apply the 80-20 rule to SEO from Eric Enge at Search Engine Watch.

/0 Comments

Web Design With SEO

,

SEO, by its very nature, requires changes to the construct of the web pages in the site being optimizated.  Because of this it’s usually easier to integrate SEO with web design on the initial construction of the site.

By doing this in combination, the decisions of which pages to create can be more targeted from a marketing perspective, and this can make a well-ranked site look good instead of just “adjusted”.

The key to this is finding a web designer and an SEO expert that can work well together to make this process seamless.  Or else to find an SEO expert that also does web design (as TMO does).

Attention to these details was pointed out by Last Click News.

/0 Comments

Negative Attention Can Mean Positive SEO

,

Most companies perceive getting negative attention or negative reviews as a purely bad thing.  However, any type of attention is good for SEO.  It will build up links, it puts eyes on the company.  And in the case that the bad review or bad attention is a minor part of what is overall a good reputation for the company, getting eyes on the company (even in this way) can be a very good thing.

Also, a balance of positive and negative attention tends to make a company look more legitimate, so this can also make this negative aspect bring positive points.

For SEO, any links that point back to the site (even if for negative reasons) will increase PageRank and sometimes may even affect keyword ranking in a good way.  I wouldn’t recommend searching for negative attention, but getting some is not always a bad thing.  SEO Consult in the UK has more details on why this is.

/0 Comments

How is SEO for Bing different?

Usually in the SEO world, Google comes first.  However, as Microsoft adjusts its approach, it seems that Bing is starting to get more ground.  So how is Bing different than Google when it comes to SEO?

Michael Carden-Edwards from Coast Digital explained it well: Bing needs a lot of the same things Google does, but just focuses on some key elements more heavily.  The primary areas that Bing checks are the following:

  1. Domain age – Bing likes well-established sites, it shows that there’s some experience behind the site.
  2. Quality links, both inbound and outbound – This is one area that differs from where most SEOs focus on, by looking at quality of outbound links as well as incoming links.
  3. Substantial content on each page – At least 300 words for any page that you want ranked on Bing.  It appears Microsoft is going to reduce ranking for shell pages that don’t offer much information.
  4. Title tags – This is the one major element that fits for all SEO, and stays the same with Bing.  Keep them relevant and with your keywords, it will help.

Even though Google is still king, Bing is starting to become a bigger source of traffic than before, and it’s worth knowing how to rank in their listings to keep traffic up.

/0 Comments

Duties of an In-House SEO Employee

As SEO becomes more prominent, more companies are turning to it to increase their rankings on the search engine results and to drive traffic to their site (to increase business).  The choice for these companies is to either hire a qualified SEO company or to hire an in-house SEO guru.

Unfortunately many companies still don’t realize the amount of work involved when asking one person to handle all of the SEO work.  Patricia Skinner from Search Engine Journal does an excellent job of outlining all of the responsibilities any in-house SEO will hold in this article.  She clearly shows that it’s something that does take time, and covers details on what to do for a company that wants quick results when you have work that isn’t always quick to show results.

/0 Comments