From the obvious to the “Hey-I-never-thought-of-that-great-idea-before”, here are 10 of the top tips on how to optimize your website for its turbo-charge rocket ride up the search engine rankings.

Be bold. Use the <b> </b> tags around some of your keywords on each page. Do NOT use them everywhere the keyword appears. Once or twice is plenty.

Deep linking. Make sure you have links coming in to as many pages as possible. What does it tell a search engine when other web sites are linking to different pages on your site? That you obviously have lots of worthwhile content. What does it tell a search engine that all your links are coming in to the home page? That you have a shallow site of little value, or that your links were generated by automation rather than by the value of your site. Here is an example of deep linking, in this case to my personal happiness workbook.

Become a foreigner. Canada and the UK have many directories for websites of companies based in those countries. Can you get a business address in one of those countries?

Newsletters. Offer articles to ezine publishers that archive their ezines. The links stay live often for many years in their archives.

First come, first served. If you must have image links in your navigation bar, include also text links. However, make sure the text links show up first in the source code, because search engine robots will follow the first link they find to any particular page. They won’t follow additional links to the same page. You can see this in action at the link to the home page on this web site monitoring page

Multiple domains. If you have several topics that could each support their own website, it might be worth having multiple domains. Why? First, search engines usually list only one page per domain for any given search, and you might warrant two. Second, directories usually accept only home pages, so you can get more directory listings this way. Why not a site dedicated to gumbo pudding pops?

Article exchanges. You’ve heard of link exchanges, useless as they generally are. Article exchanges are like link exchanges, only much more useful. You publish someone else’s article on the history of pudding pops with a link back to their site. They publish your article on the top ten pudding pop flavors in Viet Nam, with a link back to your site. You both have content. You both get high quality links. (More on high quality links in other tips.)

Titles for links. Links can get titles, too. Not only does this help visually impaired surfers know where you are sending them, but some search engines figure this into their relevancy for a page.

Not anchor text. Don’t overdo the anchor text. You don’t want all your inbound links looking the same, because that looks like automation - something Google frowns upon. Use your URL sometimes, your company name other times, “Gumbo Pudding Pop” occasionally, “Get gumbo pudding pops” as well, “Gumbo-flavored pudding pops” some other times, etc.

Site map. A big site needs a site map, which should be linked to from every page on the site. This will help the search engine robots find every page with just two clicks. A small site needs a site map, too. It’s called the navigation bar. See how the second navigation bar at the bottom of Last Minute Florida Villas is like a mini-site map?

There you have it: 10 of the Top SEO Tips.

There is a lot more to search engine optimization, and there are always more details when looking at an individual site. But these tips should help any website significantly improve its rankings.

SEO Fargo is here to help in any way possible. Please scour our site for more free and useful information. If you are interested in our consulting services please visit our contact page.

Increased Web Traffic + Increased Product Exposure = Increased Sales

Why?

Having your website listed near the top in free search results of Google, Yahoo and Live.com means you have a far greater chance of being found by your Internet customers. Harnessing the power of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) will push your website up in page rankings and drive more targeted keyword traffic to your pages.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Facts

• 80% to 90% of ALL website traffic originates from a search engine such as Google, Yahoo, Live.com
• 70% to 80% of people using search engines DO NOT go past the 1st page results (top 10 results)
• A 1st page position on Google will generate thousands of unique visitors to your website
• Natural Search Engine results are more than twice as effective as Pay Per Click advertising
• Search Engine Optimization offers the most cost effective method of promoting your business online

Key reasons why Search Engine Optimization will pay off

• Immediate dramatic increases in Internet website traffic and inquiries
• Free search engine results deliver visitors who are seeking your product or service
• Build brand and credibility, through a trusted, White Hat SPAM Free SEO approach
• Key focus on delivering quality content to your audience, plus basic on-site changes

SEO Fargo provides expert advice, analysis of Internet marketing opportunities, article authoring, submission and blog posting to drive traffic and sales. In many cases, Fargo Search Engine Optimization can deliver strong results quickly.

SEO Fargo is here to help in any way possible. Please scour our site for more free and useful information. If you are interested in our consulting services please visit our contact page.

Please don’t just focus on your home page, keywords and titles.

The first step of selling your product or service is to have what they are looking for or convince the customer they need what you are selling. Of course, SEO (search engine optimization is the first step. But SEO can’t keep your visitor to stick around your site or make them buy anything. It is always necessary to think of ways to retain your visitor and convert them into a customer. Motivate them to buy a product by offering clear and unambiguous information. If you have to sell more than one product of service, provide all of the necessary information about this in one location or with easy to follow links. Allowing for easy navigation to information or other products will ensure better retention.

Find ways to understand your target customer

The best first step in website design and SEO is to define your customer or target customer from the very beginning. If you design a website and think will attract clients, but you don’t really know who your customers or clients are or what they want to buy, it is unlikely you will make much money. Website businesses are an extension or replacement for a standard storefront brick and mortar business. One step would be to send an email to your existing clients and ask them to complete a short survey or even while they are browsing on your website. Ask them about their choices in products of services. Why do they like your products and what features do they recommend to others? Do you offer discount prices or offer coupons through your store? Are your prices lower than your competition? How does your shipping price compare? Do you have better customer service? Are your product descriptions better and contain more information? Do you offer a return policy or guarantees? Get to know your customer by check credit card records or ask your customer to complete a simple contact form with name, address, age, gender, etc. when they check out. Contact is crucial.

Give enough contact information

While selling online from your website, your customer can buy your products 24 hrs a day 7 days a week. Not to mention they might be thousands of miles away. Always provide adequate contact information, preferably on every page of your website like on the header, complete with mailing address, telephone number and an email address that reaches you if ever they shall need to. People may need to contact you about sales, general information or technical problems on your site. Make sure to have all emails or contact forms forward to your most frequently used inbox. To make things easy for customer to buy online provide enough options like credit card, PayPal or other online payment service.

SEO Fargo is here to help in any way possible. Please scour our site for more free and useful information. If you are interested in our consulting services please visit our contact page.

Search engines are the muscle behind the Internet. They are the single largest driving force in bring you and your business traffic. So it is very import to know how these search engines actually work and how they present information to the customer initiating each search.

When it is boiled down to it there are basically two types of search engines. The first is search by robots called crawlers or spiders.

Search Engines like Google use spiders to index websites. When you submit your website pages to a search engine by completing their required submission page, the search engine spider will index your entire site. With the help of a ‘spider’ an automated program run by the search engine system. The spider visits a website, read the content on each page, the site’s Meta tags and also follow any of the links that the site connects to. The spider then returns all that information back to a central depository of clearing house of data, where the data it is then indexed. It will visit each link you have on your website and index each of those sites as well. Some spiders will only index up to a certain number of pages on your site, so don’t jump the gun and create a site with 500 pages!

That spider will then periodically return to the sites to check for any information that has changed. The frequency with which this happens is determined by the moderators of the search engine. The more frequent the information is updated the more likely the spider will return to search again.

A spider acts kind of like a book where it contains the table of contents, the actual content and the links and references for all the websites it finds during its search, and this process may index up to a million pages a day. So don’t copy content.

Example:  Excite, Lycos, AltaVista and Google.

When you search on Google looking for it to locate information, it is actually searching through the index which it has created and not actually searching the Web. Different search engines produce different rankings because not every search engine uses the same algorithm to search through the indices.

One of the things that a search engine algorithm scans for is the frequency and location of keywords on a web page, but it can also detect artificial keyword stuffing or spamdexing. This is were people are purposely trying to add in more specific keywords in the attempt to trick the search engine. The algorithms analyzes the way that pages link to other pages in the Web. By checking how pages link to each other, an engine can both determine what a page is about, if the keywords of the linked pages are similar to the keywords on the original page and so on.

SEO Fargo is here to help in any way possible. Please scour our site for more free and useful information. If you are interested in our consulting services please visit our contact page.