Categories
SEO

Optimizing your URLs

A study by MarketingSherpa demonstrated that the URL affects searcher clickthrough rates in the Search Engine Results Pages. More specifically, the study shows that short URLs get clicked on twice as often as long URLs. Here are the best practices to get the best out of your URLs:

  • The fewer the parameters in your dynamic URL, the better. One or two parameters is much better than seven or eight. Avoid superfluous/nonessential parameters like tracking codes.
  • A static looking URL (containing no ampersands, equals signs, or question marks) is more search optimal than a dynamic one.
  • Having keywords in the URL is more optimal than no keywords.
  • A keyword in the filename portion of the URL is more beneficial than in a directory/subdirectory name.
  • Hyphens are the preferred word separator, although underscores are gaining acceptance over times past . So if you have multiple-word keyword phrases in your URLs, I’d recommend using dashes to separate them.
  • Stuffing too many keywords in the URL looks spammy. Three, four, or five words in a URL looks perfectly normal. A little longer and it starts to look worse to Google, according to Matt Cutts.
  • The domain name is not a good place for multiple hyphens, as it can make your URL look spammy. Although that said, sometimes a domain name should have a hyphen, as the domain faux pas ‘arsecommerce.com’ demonstrates (you may not get this joke if you don’t recognize Queen’s English!).

Source: Search Engine Land

Categories
Business Internet SEO

Increasing online registrations

Patricia Hursh wrote a good blog entry at SearchEngineLand.com about online registrations and downloadable asssets. Online efforts are designed to generate leads and a good way to generate those leads is to give an incentive to people to enter their contact information. Most of the time, the incentive will be a downloadable eBook, or white paper, or report; call it whatever you want.

Patricia presents 3 proven method to increase registrations:

  1. bundle information – you may want to mix what you’re offering. It can be a white paper plus the recording of a webinar. Or a report with a podcast. By doing so, you create a much higher perceived value.
  2. offer multiple media formats – you want to leave people the choice to either read, watch, or listen. Various formats can be, video clip, podcast, webcast, product demo or a simple text document.
  3. test names and descriptions – you can improve response rate by testing names and descriptions. By doing so, you might find out that “product demo” generates much more registrations than “virtual tour”
Categories
SEO

How Search Engines Work With Duplicate Content

A good post over at SearchEngineLand.com shows how search engines determine duplicate content.

search engine duplicate content

Categories
Business Internet SEO

8 Press Release Tips

Rebecca wrote a good post over at SEOmoz about online Press Releases. The post is quite lengthy so I just picked what I think are the key points:

  1. Spend a lot of time on the headline. It may be your only chance to sell the news to your audience. The subhead/summary should enhance the headline.
  2. The body should answer who/what/where/when/why.
  3. Include 2-3 quotations from principals. The media and bloggers are attracted to these.
  4. Use a journalistic voice (just the facts).
  5. Don’t sell—this isn’t an advertisement.
  6. Know which keywords and phrases you want the press release to rank for, and only focus on 2 or 3 keywords/phrases per release.
  7. Use the keywords in the headline, subheader, and early in the body of the release.
  8. Link back to the relevant pages in your site using the keywords as anchor text.

Read the full post here.

Categories
SEO

The basics of SEO

I can’t get enough of these “basics of SEO” type of posts. I know everything about it but every time I read them it gives me new ideas.

Danny Dover posted on SEOmoz a great entry called “the beginner’s checklist for small business SEO”.

It’s not a goldmine of information but it definitely can help in your local SEO efforts.

Click here for full article.

Categories
SEO

Original ways to create backlinks

backlinksRand Fish with SEOmoz posted a very interesting entry titled “Who Has the Best Link Building Techniques?”

The goal was to let his readers come up with some original ways to generate links. There are some very good ideas out there…. and some crazy ones too.

Read the post and especially the comments to find out new ways to build backlinks.

Categories
SEO

7 reasons why you don’t get much traffic from search engines

Search Engine trafficSEOmoz had a great post highlighting 7 very reasons why your search engine traffic sucks. While this will not change the face of the SEO world, I think it should be an interesting read for someone who wants to learn the basics of SEO.

I’m just going to mention these 7 reasons and you can read the original post should you want to learn more about one particular topic.

Categories
SEO

Is this link building technique really working?

BacklinksI recently recommended that we use blogs versus “normal websites” for some of the World Franchising Network websites, including, 100 Top Franchises, Minority Franchising, and Hottest New Franchises.

My goal is to set up these 3 blogs on 3 different servers and link them back to our main website, WorldFranchising.com. Why hosting them on different servers? Simply because Google is smart enough to realize when websites are hosted on the same server and linking back to one particular website.