If you have three priorities, you have none.
A very simple rule of thumb when you are thinking about optimizing your site: focus tightly on aspects that affect your bottom line. If you want to rank for 10 keywords, chances are that you will rank for none. Or they are so broad that they won’t affect your bottom line.
Use Google.com/Trends and other keyword research tools to find out what users are searching for the most, and confirm what you want to rank for.
Yesterday, Google made a huge announcement pinned as a fundamental shift in search. Google Instant was unveiled, which takes the letters you are typing and predicts what you are searching for. It then serves a search result page in real time as you type.
The impact of this on SEO is not yet fully known, although some speculated that SEO is dead. However, that situation has been widely debunked. The basic principles of SEO (covered on this site) still apply.
By now, everyone in the US should have access to Google Instant. You simply need to be logged into your Google Account (or stay logged into your Gmail) and start searching.
And if you hate it, you can instantly turn it off.
There are two key points to how search engines get information about your site. You can use this information to update your site at the correct times and avoid downtime at the worst possible times.
First they crawl, then they index. Crawling is done by spiders (or also called robots) that automatically view all content & follow links on your website.
While crawling involves exploring your site and indexing is saving that data on their servers for quick retrieval. Many web servers track when your site is visited by a spider. If you don’t have that insight into your log files, you can get the information in a roundabout way following these quick steps:
1. Search for your site.
2. Click on the link that says “Cached”
3. View the date & time of the last crawl at the top of your framed in page.
Bing shows this as well:
So now that you know how to find when your site was crawled, create a simple spreadsheet to keep track. Get a good idea of frequency and you will know the best times to update your content, make server upgrades or any other changes you have planned.
This question came to me yesterday, so I thought it would be good to address it here.
“A client wants to put all releases on press release websites for the sole purpose of improving their SEO. How does that work?”
In a word, no. The content & links contained within a press release are not going to affect your site’s organic ranking. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do them.
Press releases can generate additional content on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) and another opportunity for your content sites to dominate the available real estate. Press releases can also help journalists, news papers and digital content sites to find out more about you and put that content on their site. These third party links do help SEO, but it is a very roundabout approach.
In conclusion, do press releases, but don’t expect them to give a major boost to your ranking.
There are many ways to make certain words or phrases stand out. They stand out for users, they stand out for search engines too. For phrases you want to stand out:
1. Put it in a header or sub-header (more to come on this later)
2. Bold
3. Italics
But use these wisely. If you put everything in bold or italics, nothing will stand out.
If you are unaware of what an anchor tag is, it is simply the text you click on. In both internal and external linking, the anchor text you use can be very important. If at all possible, the text should contain your targeted keywords.
If you doubt the power of anchor text, simply do a search for “Click Here”. The answer may surprise you; but once you stop to think about it, it makes sense. Think about how many hundreds of thousands of websites out there say “Click Here to download the latest version of Adobe Reader” or something similar.
Bottom line: Be deliberate & smart with how you link to other pages knowing that it is being paid attention to and it affects your rankings.
To keep the spirit of this post succinct: no one likes stale content.
Update your website regularly.The search engines love new content and consider the site to be relevant and new, and therefore, rank the site higher.
Here are a few ideas for fresh content:
1. Literally rewrite the content at regular intervals
2. Integrate a Twitter or Facebook feed
3. Integrate a news feed
4. Keep a blog either on the home page or linked from the home page
5. Include a calendar of events
Whatever it takes, keep the content updated.