• When A Client Shuts Their Eyes To Sound Principles •
• Bare Bones SEO Can Indeed Make A Difference  •

It is sooooo frustrating! I have proven to this particular client over the past year that search engine optimization WORKS! That is if the ‘bare essentials’ (Title tag, Description META tag and content) are properly optimized.  Then there is a darn good chance that great organic rankings will follow.

Before I get challenged on the above statement, yes … certain niches are extremely competitive and the most basic of optimization techniques won’t always be enough to rocket the site to the top-ten, but for the client I am referring to, they certainly could rule the roost with attention to basic SEO

I hope that you gain a valuable morsel of SEO fact by reading this article. If you are new to learning about optimizing your site, then please listen up.

You have a fighting chance of having good search engine rankings if you PAY ATTENTION to the optimization of your Title tag, the Description META tag, and to the use of your keyword phrase (with a few modifiers) in your content. It sounds too simple doesn’t it?

But this client was doing pretty well for the past year with their rankings.  They could have done a better job in composing the tags.  It was obvious to me they hadn’t paid close attention to my pleadings to not exceed 70-characters with spaces for the Title tag; and not to exceed 150 characters with spaces for the Description META tag.  (Guidelines for Google that I closely adhere to.)

However, in spite of so-so Titles and Descriptions, they were never-the-less seeing nice rankings for many of their targeted keyword phrases and nice traffic was coming to their site.  They loved it when they were out-ranking the “big-boys” in their niche.

Then, the client came to me for a website redesign. It was time, as the existing site was very amateurish looking. After careful consideration of what they wished to achieve via the site, I recommended they utilize a blog format because of the built-in CMS capabilities. We choose WordPress for the blog platform.

Everything went fine. It was up to my client to place the old web pages of content into new posts on the blog. I even made sure the All-In-One SEO plugin was installed. I explained how IMPORTANT it was to copy and paste the respective Title and Description tags from the old pages into each post.

I told the client they had great rankings before, and one reason was that their web pages were nicely SEO’d whereas almost all their competition ignored SEO techniques.

Guess what? The client was uploading the old pages, but also taking time to write new posts. That’s fine, that’s great. But, they ignored my gentle reminders to stop writing new posts until they had tended to the SEO tags. They evidently didn’t hear me. I gently reminded them over the course of about two weeks.

And Then I Received An Email Last Night …

I am chuckling some, as I awoke this morning to find an email from the client, all bent out of shape, asking me why a one page (under construction it says) website was ranking #2 for an important traffic-generating keyword that my client used to rank in the top 5 for.

So … I took a look. Yes, I too wonder why Google would rank this site—if you can call it that—number 2. I know it will drop out of sight in the very near future, but it is one of the things that sometimes makes you scratch your head in wonderment about rankings!

My client’s post, which they had neglected to optimize, was #19 for the keyword in question. I know why it dropped that far, and understand that the transition from traditional website to blog caused a bit of downtime, and then the client didn’t start getting the old pages back up for about two weeks, so a drop in ranking was inevitable. I am very sure they be ranked highly again in the near future.

Anyhoo … we’ve had a long talk this morning, and I politely told my client that I just don’t know how to say it any other way … attention to the ‘bare essentials’ of optimization WORKS. And if you ignore that, then please don’t even wonder why any other site is out-ranking you, even if the other site STINKS royally.

So, please heed my words of advice: Don’t under-estimate the power of the basic SEO techniques!

• Don’t Say “Click Here” … Utilize Those Precious Keywords •
• Your Visitors & The Search Engine Spiders Will Appreciate You •

There is a lot of neglect given to hyperlinks not only by newbies, but by lots of established internet marketers. I see it all the time. Most notably is the awful use of “Click Here” for the hyperlink’s content.

Why is “click here” wrong? Well, if you have the option of inserting some commentary if you will, whichs helps let your visitor know a little more about WHY they are clicking on the hyperlink, that just helps increase the interaction with your visitor.

Next, you want to insert your targeted keyword phrase into the hyperlink because you give the search engine spiders a good idea about what your page’s content is all about. Hyperlinks with keywords in them are great stuff to help with getting higher rankings.

Remember that it’s a lot of different components of SEO that ultimately adds up to the overall keyword ranking positions. Hyperlinks are just one part of the SERP’s puzzle.

Why You Need To Insert Your Keywords

When your visitors see a hyperlink that contains your targeted keywords (and maybe some additional descriptive text) more than likely they’ll feel compelled to click on it. I am assuming that your site is of an informational type, so your visitors have come to your site searching for answers, solutions, or information. So, stick it clearly under their nose! Write content rich hyperlinks to encourage them to click on them.

If a hyperlink happens to be one that leads to an affiliate product or website, can you see how important a well written, keyword rich hyperlink can be to help encourage your visitor to click … rather than the “click here” alternative?   

Short & Sweet or Very Descriptive

It’s up to you, but you can use just a few words, or your hyperlink can be quite descriptive. I know that the “norm” on most sites are rather short hyperlinks … but there is no rule to this, so get creative if you wish. Hey … if it might compell a potential customer to click on an affiliate product link (meaning you have the opportunity to make some $$ if they decide to buy), then what is wrong with getting very obvious and just a touch pushy that you want them to CLICK on your great hyperlinked text?

The typical way most folks utilize hyperlinks is something like this:
For more information, click here to learn about our New Orleans Getaway.

Getting a little more bold, yet creative, you could try something like hyperlinking an entire sentence, as example:
Sign up for my free Homemade Chocolate Candy Lovers newsletter and receive a valuable Hershey’s chocolate coupon.
Contact one of our Dental Sedation Consultants and we’ll direct you to a qualified Dentist in your area.

Can you see how using a hyperlink in a very descriptive way does have its benefits?? If you’ll notice, I’ve worked in a primary keyword phrase along with a modifier in each sentence. That’s good stuff for the spiders! In addition, you’ve really gotten across to your visitor exactly what will happen when they click the hyperlink. There’s certainly no confusion … you’ve helped push them into the action you desire

• You Can Get Your New Website Spidered Quickly Via An XML Sitemap •
• Each Search Engine Handles Submission A Bit Differently •

I wrote a post the other day about how neat it was to have my friend’s new mini-site spidered and ranking highly within 24-hrs after I submitted an XML sitemap to Google. I mentioned I’d explain XML sitemaps, so here’s the info I promised.

First let me say that I am going to offer information here for the beginner-to-average website owner, so won’t get into how to add coding to your robots.txt file. I don’t even go into that file (I probably could if my partner Damian the website designer and coding wiz taught me how–I just haven’t asked him.) I don’t want anyone to leave a message that I neglected to discuss other means of alerting the spiders that your site is ready and waiting to be crawled.

XML Sitemap Explained

In the simpliest way I can try to explain it for you, an XML sitemap is a (XML) file that lists URLs for a site. Included in this XML file is additional metadata about all the URL’s (your pages) on your site. You can create a more detailed XML sitemap that will tell the search engines how often content changes, how often you’d like them to come and crawl your site, as examples. Or you can submit a very simple bare bones sitemap.

I must mention that it is very important to have a well structured website to begin with. Meaning you have a very good cross linking of all the pages within your site. In addition, you should have a “Sitemap” page that has a link to every page on your website–much like a Table of Contents in a book. In doing so, the spiders have a very easy time of crawling your entire site. Do NOT depend upon an XML sitemap to take the place of proper website linking structure.

For an idea of what a clean and simple website “Sitemap” page looks like, take a look at the one I have on my SEO-Innovation.com website.

The whole idea of using the XML protocol is so the search engines can more intelligently crawl the site. However, let me state that there are many SEO pro’s that say there is no need to submit one, because if you have structured the links within your website cleanly and properly, you’ll get crawled by the spiders anyway. And I cannot argue with that.

However … as I have posted previously, why NOT submit an XML sitemap upon launching a new site? Why NOT do everything you can to alert the search engines that your site is live and ready for action! This is such an easy way for a web owner to inform search engines about all the pages on their site that are available for crawling.

To say it another way … web crawlers usually discover pages from links within your site and from other websites that are linking to you. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that support sitemaps to pick up all URLs in the sitemap and learn about those URLs using the associated metadata.

You must be aware that utilizing an XML sitemap does not guarantee that your site’s pages will be included in the search engines, but they certainly provide a way for those hungry spiders to do a better job of crawling your site.

OK, Let’s Start With Google

Do yourself a favor and submit an XML sitemap to Google. In case you are not aware, in most cases, Google will bring you the lion’s share of visitor traffic. Like 65% or more. So, I’m all for at the very least submitting to Google.

Let me emphasize that Google allows you to notify them via your Google Webmaster control panel that you have uploaded the XML sitemap into your root folder. Each search engine handles submission differently.

Here is all the information on Google you’ll need to know: Sitemap Protocol Overview & How-Tos. Briefly, Google will give you a unique file name for your XML file; you will create the file and upload it into your website’s root directory; and then you’ll click a box in your Webmaster control panel that says “yes, I have uploaded an XML sitemap”.

How To Submit to Yahoo!

Yahoo handles it differently. You can make a unique XML file just for Yahoo, upload it into your site’s root directory and then go here to submit your site’s URL to Yahoo: Submit Site to Yahoo
You’ll see two choices:
1) Submit a Website or a Webpage – skip this option.
2) Submit a Site Feed – this is what you want. (Please note under this option it says you can submit an XML sitemap.)

MSN Does Not Accept XML Sitemaps But Here’s What To Do

You have to depend upon MSN’s web crawler, MSNBot, to find your site all by itself. However if your site does not appear on Live Search, you can send them your site’s address (URL). Because MSN does not accept XML sitemap submissions, go here MSN Live Search and enter in your site’s URL.

How To Generate (Or Make) An XML Sitemap File

You’re in luck! There are a number of free online sitemap generating tools that allow you to quickly make one. Search online and check out a few of the sites to find a tool you feel comfortable using (some allow a more detailed file to be generated). Most sites have clear information on how to go about the process.

After you generate the XML file, you’ve got to upload it into your site’s root directory. (Sorry but I’m not going to go into explaining how to do that in this post.) Again, follow all the steps for each search engine after you’ve uploaded each file.

That’s about it. After you’re done … you ought to see your site ranking in the search engines. But exactly what position(s) you rank for … well that’s up to all the other SEO factors we have to take into consideration. Good luck!