Ideas for Business

Link building is one of the most important things a webmaster can do. On-page SEO factors are important, of course, but it is difficult to achieve high rankings for most search terms today without some kind of inbound link strategy. That involves searching out places to put your links and ensuring that you have the proper anchor, that your links point to the right pages on your website, and that you don’t do too many too fast.

Because Google places such a high priority on inbound link quality, it is necessary to evaluate your linking strategy to ensure that you are helping, not hurting, your website. PageRank is based in large part to the number and quality of inbound links. When one site links to another it is considered a vote of quality.

Because of this, when you link to someone else’s site from your own you are essentially helping them rank better in the search engines by providing the proper anchor text and linking to the right page from the right page on your site. That link could potentially earn them money. That’s why many webmasters have started selling links and link buying has become its own industry. But if you buy and sell links and Google finds out then you’ll be penalized. It’s a never ending game based on one fact: Links are like currency. Pure gold. Money in the bank. Build enough good ones and you’ll earn your keep.

“If Ihad to pick only one thing to do with my web site to improve it’s search engine visibility, what would it be?”

It’s a question that comes up often and most people asking it expect that there’s one right answer. The trouble is, as web sites and situations are different, so is the “just one thing” answer. It really depends on the situation.

Picture this: A web site with 10,000 pages, 6 years old, 25,000 inbound links and publishes new content daily. Yet the site gets less than 5% of all traffic via organic search. Why might that be?

The “one thing” could be navigation that blocks search engine crawlers from finding substantial portions of the site’s content. It could be that the first 40 or 50 characters of each title tag is hard coded with the site name and nothing else or not title tags at all. It could be many things. 

The challenge is to find out what the issue is, or more likely, what the numerous “things” are, that all contribute collectively to poor performance in search engines. Then, recommend a course of action to fix and maintain.

All that said, if I HAD to pick one thing, it would be to make sure a site is crawlable by search engine spiders. If a search engine can’t find the content, it doesn’t matter whether you use keywords in the right places and frequency, execute internal links perfectly or any other tactic. The content that can’t be crawled, simply won’t be included in search results. At least not in a meaninful or useful way.

Solving such a problem, if it exists, will not only help PR and news related content, but overall company web site visibility.

To see if a site is properly indexed by search engines, the site webmaster can make some comparisons between the known number of pages being published to the web and the actual number of pages found on a search engine such as Google. In addition to that, the site could be validated via Google’s Webmaster Tools which would then provide insight into any crawling errors by Googlebot, Google’s software that visits web sites to supply content for Google’s search results.

Most PR professionals are not in a position to be assessing the health of the web hosting server, content management system, templates or database that make the corporate site work. Ensuring a web site is being properly crawled and indexed should be handled by properly trained and experienced staff.

To help convince those staff to do this kind of work, be sure to check out the following articles on making your web site crawler friendly visit “Ensure Your Site Is Crawlable“, “SEO Tip: Let the Spider Crawl” and “6 Tips for Google Webmaster Tools“.

This post is the first Basic SEO Tip for PR practitioners in a series of 10, “Top Ten SEO Tactics for PR Professionals” to be published over the next 2 weeks.

            Subscribe to this Feed

© Online Marketing Blog, 2009. | SEO Tactics For PR: If I Could Only Do One Thing… | No comment | http://www.toprankblog.com

Over the next 10 business days I will be posting a series of SEO tips focused mostly on how to employ search engine optimization tactics for online PR benefit. This Top Ten SEO Tactics for PR Professionals series is centered around a presentation I am giving at the PRSA Digital Impact conference. If you’re attending that event, you’ll get the best of both worlds by reading this series as a compliment to the in person presentation.

Driven by customers and the consequences of not doing so, the public relations industry has warmed in recent years to the power of search engine optimization for growing the impact of pull based PR efforts. Now more than ever, journalists, bloggers and industry influentials use search engines to find subject matter experts, research companies, locate past media coverage and to track topical trends.

A recent survey on journalists’ use of search by TopRank reports that 91% of those journalists, reporters and editors surveyed use search engines to do their jobs.

Traditionally, search engine optimization efforts have been managed by corporate marketing departments – either in-house or through an outside agency. However, will all the opportunities to create value in the form of increased online brand visibility, reputation management and internet based media coverage, public relations deserves a seat at the corporate SEO table.

To achieve that, it’s important that PR professionals understand the foundation of SEO tactics as well as the business benefits for PR efforts as well as to the larger organization.  The upcoming series of posts will outline SEO and PR tactics with the most impact, how to choose the best keywords, on page SEO and link building best practices as well as measuring the value of SEO to public relations efforts. It will also cover when PPC is a better fit than SEO, how to combine SEO and social media promotions and the finer points of selling the benefits of SEO to decision makers.

Corporate web site optimization projects require an equal measure of search engine knowledge, understanding of corporate messaging and ability to appreciate and acquire links from credible sources. By learning the fundamentals of SEO and the possible impact on public relations effectiveness, PR departments can demonstrate their competitive advantage.

Keep in mind that while these explanations and examples will be centered around PR and news content, many of the SEO  and social media marketing tactics can be applied to any kind of content whether it be job listings, FAQ/Knowledge Base info or products/services. As each article is posted, I’ll link to it from the list above.

            Subscribe to this Feed

© Online Marketing Blog, 2009. | Top Ten SEO Tactics for PR Professionals | No comment | http://www.toprankblog.com

While I’m still under water sifting through the sites applying for Free Conversion Rate Testing it’s great to see Tom offering his own Free Online Marketing Offer from 2bscene.

I’d really rate Tom and 2bscene, so if you’re in the market for some free online marketing help (and let’s face it, in this economy who isn’t?) head on over to get details of how to apply.

Great offer Tom.

View Comments (0)

Your permalink is the complete long URL that you use for the address of your individual blog posts. An example of a permalink is:

http://www.smallbusinessmavericks.com/internetmarketing/seo-for-small-business/can-a-sitemap-get-your-website-indexed/04/28/2009/

Let’s walk through it line item by line item:

• The domain name URL - This is simply your domain name. If your visitor is sitting on your home page, this is the URL that would show in her browser. In my case, that URL is http://www.smallbusinessmavericks.com/. It’s important to understand, however, that this address is the URL of my website, not the blog.
• Blog Address - If your blog is your website then it may sit on the root domain. That would be the above-mentioned URL for my home page. But if your blog is a part of a larger website then it will have its own folder and will look something like this: http://www.smallbusinessmavericks.com/internetmarketing/. internetmarketing is the name of the folder where my blog sits. Yours will be something similar, but you should name that folder something related to your niche and put an important keyword in it. This will help you with SEO.

Everything that follows from here pertains to the individual blog post. There are several ways you can go. First, you must decide whether you want to include the category name in your permalink. I have chosen to do that and you can see the category name in the permalink to the above blog post. It’s the part of the URL that reads seo-for-small-business/. The category name isn’t necessary, but it can further help identify to your readers the nature of your post.

After the category name (should you decide to use one), there are generally three other protocols in popular use:

• Date protocol
• Number of post protocol
• Post name protocol

It is generally accepted not to use all three protocols, but you can, technically. They can appear in any order, but I’d prefer to put my post name closer to the beginning to make good use of my keywords in the domain name. Analyzing the above URL, you’ll see can-a-sitemap-get-your-website-indexed/. That’s the name of the individual blog post. After that, the numbers represent the date of that blog post. The number of post protocol is generally a 3 or 4 digit number, like this: 231. That represents the 231st blog post you wrote on that blog.

Which of these protocols you use for your blog depends on factors that are important to you in perception and ranking with the search engines. However you do it, just know that you have options.