There are many components to search engine optimization, that’s true, but when it comes to optimizing your website a Blog should be one of your primary daily weapons. Why? For many reasons. I know blog posts (such as this one) tend to get long and complicated and, in many respects, are indistinguishable from articles but a Blog is not the same as an article page.
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| I remember the days when‘SEO’ as such used to be easy: you had someone with a website who wanted it to be indexed by search engines. He would come to us. We would agree the cost. We would add it to the search engine database of sites to crawled and six to ten weeks later, presto! The site would show up.
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| Every year I see the same issue. The year begins with a flurry of interest in SEO as webmasters and website owners alike (and the two are not always one and the same) realize that unless their website is visible on search engines for particular search terms they are trapped in an effort of spending money to buy-in traffic from adverts and PPC campaigns.
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| After Microsoft Yahoo! is the other company we all love to hate. A pioneer of the internet age with as many ‘firsts’ under its belt as MS had on the personal computing side it nevertheless has lurched from one disastrous acquisition after another, launched service after service which it then had to close down (Yahoo Premium Music Service, Yahoo Photo Service, Yahoo Mash…the list is almost endless) and has failed to do anything that gets its user base excited and increases its share of the online search market.
A study in August last year showed that Google carried out 37 billion searches that month, while Yahoo did only 8.5 billion and things have not got any better. While Yahoo websites still continue to be the most popular websites in the US (much more popular than Google’s) they fail to capitalize on this in terms of either search or revenue.
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| As I am writing this the Fed has released $700 billion and the Bank of England has approved another $150 billion in an effort to restore public confidence in the international banking system and unlock markets which are experiencing a freeze.
On the face of it none of this has anything to do with eCommerce, SEO or getting traffic to your website. Nevertheless the global credit meltdown is having a serious impact on websites’ traffic figures and it is all down.
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By David Amerland
This is a funny Blog post because the headline says it all. There is not a single person anywhere on the web who does not want their website to be on Google’s first page for at least one relevant search term. Now here is the funny thing, Google wants the same thing too which begs the question, why does it not happen?
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| By David Amerland
If you have Google Analytics installed on your website then you’re one of those addicted to monitoring the daily spikes and dips of your site’s vital statistics. Spikes are, inevitably, received with a sense of delight and the confirmation that all the effort, hard work, blood, sweat and tears that have gone into optimising your website is at last beginning to pay off. Dips on the other hand have a tendency to produce heart-stopping disappointment and the belief that there is something seriously wrong with the world if online users cannot understand value and search engines cannot deliver traffic to a site worthy of it.
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If you’re anything like the majority of website owners who come to us for help you have done the usual stuff to help your website show up high on search engine results:
- You have created some links
- You have dropped in a little content
- You have looked at the meta tags
- You have considered buying links
Depending on how desperate you are and how your site is going you will also have probably considered buying links and considered buying some automated traffic in order to raise its Alexa PageRank and its standing with search engines.
All of this will also have paid off only in small ways which is why you are now at a crossroads where you are considering that the time is right to get some professional help for your website and get it optimised so that you get the kind of traffic you need in order to survive or, conversely, if things have reached the point of no return you decide that it’s high time you gave it all up and went back to your day job.
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It is a sign of our times and the maturity of the web that while the web works globally and search engines can serve up your website anywhere in the world the real power lies in their ability to serve things up locally.
Looking for a pizza restaurant in a specific area of Manchester, UK, for instance is not going to benefit you very much if what comes up in your searches are pizza restaurants in Manchester, New England. This is exactly why the optimisation of your website plays a vital part in your ability to show up in your area and increase your prospects’ ability to find you when they look.
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