Showing posts with label SEO. Show all posts
Showing posts with label SEO. Show all posts

Monday, July 19, 2010

Podcast 14: Guess Who Joins Us...



Our guest blogging cherry has been popped in emphatic fashion this week as Jared Thompson joined us on the show to discuss the topic of guest blogging - to talk about it ourselves would seem contradictory. Once Jared vacated the hot seat we delved into the alphabet soup that is SMO and SEO to hopefully enlighten you all and demystify the 3 lettered acronyms.

If, after hearing his dulcet tones and reading his guest post you want to find out more about Jared Thompson track him down at the following places
Jared Thompson - Design Juices
Follow Design Juices on twitter * Join Design Juices on Facebook



BLOG POSTS REFERENCED IN THIS PODCAST:
The Benefits of Guest Writing

What Does SMO and SEO Really Mean?

Do You Want to be a Guest Blogger



MENTIONS:








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Thursday, July 15, 2010

What Does SMO and SEO Really Mean ?


Online business owners are always looking to expand their business' growth, online presence, and profitability, but it can be difficult to do. In knowing how to optimize your website can help bring awareness to your business, while improving your business' online reputation. Knowing the difference between Social Media Optimization (SMO) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) helps in understanding how to make them work for your business. The ultimate question we all have been asking ourselves is, "What are SMO and SEO?"


Social Media Optimization (SMO)
There are many businesses who are improving their website's SMO without even knowing it. Today, many businesses are incorporating social media sites into the way they do business online. In knowing what Social Media Optimization really means and how your business can benefit from it, may change the way your business uses their social media sites.

What does Social Media Optimization mean?
Businesses who use media outlets found within social media sites, with the intent to bring unique visitors to their website's content, are boosting their sites Social Media Optimization. In other words, when businesses use photo sharing, social bookmarking, videos, and blogging as a part of their business' promotion on social media sites, Social Media Optimization is occurring. The main focus of SMO is to drive visitors to your website from places online, other than from search engines.

There are two main ways in which to improve your sites Social Media Optimization (SMO):

1. Social Media Features: When adding social media features to website content via RSS feeds, sharing buttons, polls, ratings etc. and also including the use of hosting sites for videos and photos, also known as third-party communities, helps in building your businesses Social Media Optimization.

2. Social Media Promotional Activities: Occurs when businesses are doing social media activities on social media sites, as a way to promote their website without promoting a specific product. When businesses blog, comment on other blogs, join in on group discussions, and update statuses on social media sites, they are also raising their website's SMO.

Social Media Optimization is a method used as a part of viral marketing, but instead of "word of mouth" by family and friends, it is done through various activities on networking sites such as, commenting on forums, photo sharing, videos, blogging etc. SMO is looked at as a major factor in gaining an online presence and is an important part of protecting and managing your sites reputation via search engine queries.


Search Engine Optimization (SEO):
Unlike Social Media Optimization, where you use social media sites to bring traffic to your website, SEO or Search Engine Optimization, focuses more on driving traffic to your website via Search Engines.

What does Search Engine Optimization Mean?
SEO is to increase the amount of traffic and the quality of visitors to your site by using un-paid or "natural" search results, within search engines. The key, is to have your website rank high within search engines, for the higher your site is on Google, Yahoo, etc. the more chances your site's traffic will increase.

Ways to improve your sites Search Engine Optimization (SEO):
Your websites content is crawled by search engine spiders on a regular basis for the purpose of indexing and ranking your site within search engines. There are many ways to improve your sites content which will in turn, improve your site's SEO. The better your website's content and coding, the better your site will be ranked. Here are two ways to increase your websites SEO, On-site and Off-site Optimization.
1. On-Site Optimization: Is when the information/content on your websites page (that visitors see) and the coding that occurs behind the scenes (that visitors do not see) are correctly done to meet search engine standards. In other words, if your website is coded properly and the content is filled with quality content, then your sites SEO should be good. In knowing how to properly use website coding can affect how your site will be ranked by search engines (Ex: html, CSS, etc.). In understanding what your website's content needs, for search engines to qualify it as quality content, is also very important in increasing your sites Search Engine Optimization (Ex: Site titles, keywords, descriptions, etc.).
For examples of how to improve your sites On-site Search Engine Optimization, visit the Tees In A Pod Blog Post 6 On-site SEO Tips You Can Use Today To Improve Rank!

2. Off-Site Optimization: Is when good quality backlinks are created on other sites that point towards your website. The more backlinks your website or page has, the more popular it is looked at by search engines. Keep in mind that page rank also factors into the importance of a website and that the number of backlinks a website has, helps search engines determine it's ranking. With that said, it is not just the number of backlinks that count towards how search engines rank your website, it is also determined by the quality of those links as well.

The best quality backlinks are called, "Anchor Text Backlinks", which are also known as hyperlinks or links that are created using HTML. These links use clickable text to drive traffic to your website.

Example: Tees In A Pod Facebook Page (This Text is clickable and is actually directing people to the Tees In A Pod's page on Facebook.)

How to create an Anchor Text Backlink?



***NOTE: Click above to get a larger view and then hit your browser's back button to return to post**

Anchor Text Backlinks should be placed on high ranking pages or sites that are related to your website. They are most beneficial to your site, when you use keywords you want ranked by search engines in the links "Title" and are relevant to the landing page. These type of links should remain below 60 characters.

Poor/Bad Quality Backlinks
When your website's link(s) are left on sites, pages or directories that have no real value to your website, they become bad quality backlinks. These links will lower your websites SEO and could possibly get your site banned by search engines, so be very selective in where your website's links are placed.


In integrating Social Media Optimization and Search Engine Optimization into how your business creates, promotes, and sustains it's website, will inevitably improve your sites ranking, reputation, and online presence. Get to know SMO AND SEO and watch your online business, continue to grow!


Did you find this article helpful?


Written By: Amanda Ryan, Creature Creations, Personalized Photo Gifts




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Sunday, July 11, 2010

Follow the Linker - Backlinks



"If you build it they will come" - an iconic line from an iconic movie alas sadly it doesn't hold true for your website. When you launch your site you need to get traffic to it..There are a myriad of ways of doing this but one way is backlinks. In this post I'll discuss a bit about backlinks, what they are and why you should be trying to get them.

What are they?
So, starting from the start, a backlink is basically a hyper text link from one site to your site. A hyper text link is written as follows in HTML
<[a href="http://www.fakesite.com/">Fake Site<]/a> (just ignore the [ brackets, they are there so the HTML can be displayed).
and the part that is clickable is "Fake Site". A link can have a few additional bits of information within the tags but stripped down to it's barest format the above is all you need.

Types of Backlinks
Do Follow - good for search engine results
No Follow - good if useful comment

Importance of Backlinks
Very important..the more dofollow links you receive the better rankings you will get in the search engine results (until Google tweak their algorithm which could happen at any stage)..Disregarding the search side of it backlinks from quality sources are still important as you may get lots of "ambient" traffic, people that happen to read your comment and get interested in in. Matt Cutts (the Google ninja) posted a video about it here which is really good stuff. 






In fact, all of the google webmaster series videos are insanely useful. Take a few hours to watch them and you'll learn lots very quickly..

This post was written by Rob from LadyUmbrella ladies t-shirts.

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Sunday, June 20, 2010

Robots.txt - Be Friends with It!


So, this is one of the first posts in what we here at Tees in a Pod affectionately called "SEO Corner". In a previous post we touched on 6 SEO Onsite Tips for your website and in this post we're going to expand on Robots.txt and why you want to be friends with it.

So, what is the purpose of the robots.txt file?
In a nutshell what a robots.txt file will do is tell the search engines what they are allowed to crawl and index on your site. The file is called robots.txt because it is created for the search engine bots and it must be a plain text file. All spiders will look for it. It is possible to give spiders info on each page of your site via the meta-robots tag but that is a lot more effort than having it all consolidated in one file.

Why Should You Use A robots.txt file?
As a site grows there may be directories on it that you want to remain private and unindexed by the search engines. The only way to stop the big, robots.txt obeying bots from crawling is to "disallow" them access to that directory or file via the robots.txt. Also, you might have one page for testing and one "live" page on your site. If google sees "duplicate" content you may get docked in the rankings - by excluding the test pages you will ensure that bots just crawl what you want them to crawl.

How Do You Use a robots.txt file?
Google, the King Kong of search engines have made it insanely easy to make sure you have your robots.txt file in order. If you have not yet accessed your webmaster tools do it immediately and explore. You will benefit your site and search results by spending an hour or two to rummage around and see how google sees your website - what errors does google see that you don't see?

During your rummaging around you should find the section "Site Configuration" which has the "crawler access" tab. It is in this tab that you make sure you have properly set up your robots.txt file.

Robots.txt files are written using what is called the "Robots Exclusion Standard" which is an agreed language for all search engine spiders. And, the good news it is very simple to understand. So, lets have a look at some code examples and make sense of robots.txt file..

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

In the above User-agent: is used to specify the search engine bot you want to give instructions to. The * symbol indicates that all search engine bots are to follow the rules of the robots.txt file. The disallow: command is used to list what pages all bots are to be disallowed from. The / symbol lets the bots know that all folders and files are disallowed. So, the above example would tell all bots to not crawl/index all folders/files on your site - possibly not the best idea. If you wanted all bots to access all folders/files the following would do the trick

User-agent: *
Allow: /

Now, lets go a bit deeper and we'll go through it line by line..

User-agent: * - talking to all spiders/bots
Disallow: / - telling them all they are not to crawl anywhere
User-agent: Googlebot - singling out googles spider
Disallow: /cgi-bin/ - telling googlebot not to crawl cgi-bin folder
Disallow: /privatedir/ - telling googlebot not to crawl privatedir folder

But, how can this be? The first two lines of the robots.txt tell all spiders to take a hike and then we have to tell google to take a hike again? The reason for this is because in line 3 we have addressed Googlebot specifically and given Googlebot license to roam all of our site. We then clip it's wings a bit and disallow googlebot from the cgi-bin folder and privatedir folder but it still has access to all other areas. From this you can see that once you address a bot specifically you give it access to all areas of the site unless you put some restrictions in via the disallow statements. To try emphasise this the below two examples mean the same thing:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

User-agent: *
Allow: /

In the first example we are talking to all bots and disallowing them access to nowhere, in the 2nd example we are talking to all bots and allowing them access to everywhere.

So, when is robots.txt really useful?
As mentioned earlier there may be areas of your site that you don't want bots to poke their noses in (private data etc). Now, lets consider the following scenario. You may have pages which have some ad sense info in their url which can get indexed and then be returned in the organic search results. However, when people click on these links you will get charged as it will be counted as a click. Robots.txt files can be used to exclude all files with certain parameters. This can be done nice and easily using the wildcard symbol which is *.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /*?

So, the above will tell all bots to steer clear of all files which contain a question mark (?). The wildcard matching symbol is very powerful to quickly eliminate files from the bots spidering duties.

Another use of robots.txt files is to restrict access to images. There are two reasons why you'd want to do this:
- If a bot encounters an error in an image (incorrectly titled, corrupted, etc)it will "self destruct" and not complete it's spidering mission. It will be less inclined to return to your site then which will result in less spidering and less search engine love.
- If you have a lot of pictures and all bots are indexing them then that will become a drain on your bandwidth resources. Some of your images might be found in the the google images search but how many conversions will you get as a result of being found? One thing that will be certain though is that if you have lots of images being crawled regularly your bandwidth usage will go up which may result in additional charges (or slower performance) for your website from your host.

I hope after reading this you have a better understanding of what a robots.txt file does, how to use it and why it should be used. I strongly suggest that you go to google.com/webmasters now and make sure you're robots.txt file is properly set up and let us know what impact it has on your site in the search engine results. If you have any questions regarding the robots.txt file please feel free to ask and I'd be more than happy to try explain for you.


This post was written by Rob from LadyUmbrella ladies t-shirts.
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Monday, May 10, 2010

Podcast 4: In 140 Character Bursts


This weeks podcast reveals the secrets you need to know if you want to sell anything online and dishes the dirt on:
- Twitter Strategy - why you should talk in 140 Character bursts
- Onsite SEO tips - be in the know about SEO
- Music from EleventyFour - you’ll love it
- Designing for a Cause - clothes for a cause
- Q & A



If you're subscribing via email and can not see the above player, click to load the post in your browser.


BLOG POSTS REFERENCED IN THIS PODCAST:
How To Use Twitter To Build Your Brand

6 Onsite SEO Tips You Can Use Today To Improve Rank!

Designing For A Cause


MENTIONS:




12:33 - EleventyFour - Irish singer/guitar player - with her song Friends.
Follow EleventyFour on twitter * Join EleventyFour on Facebook






Q&A Segment...

17:45 - Tobin Jones - Crock Tees
Follow Crock Tees on twitter * Join Crock Tees on Facebook




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Sunday, April 25, 2010

Podcast 2 - The Climax!


I'm sure our cliff hanger from our first podcast has got you all on the edge of your seats and by this stage you must be positively gasping for the conclusion of our introductory podcasts. Well, the wait is over as here it is, the climax you've all been waiting for...Enjoy! and make sure to subscribe so you don't miss out on next weeks bumper podcast..


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Sunday, March 21, 2010

6 Onsite SEO Tips You Can Use Today To Improve Rank!



This post will briefly touch on 6 onsite SEO tips you can use on your website right now to improve and help with your ranking in the search engines. Rather than being long and rambling the points have been kept as concise as possible to encourage further "googling" and a dialog between us and you. In our weekly podcasts we'll flesh out each of the below points and welcome any questions on them or any aspect of SEO that may be irking you.

1) Ensure there is a well written, non-duplicated attractive, title and description tags on every page which contain some of your keywords. Google does NOT like duplicate titles.

2) Use of h1 tags - only once per page and for key keywords. Google does not like more than one h1 tag.

3) Avoid use of "click here" or "more info" type of links as they don't give the search engines much information. Always use alt/title tags when linking and try link via a keyword.

4) Make sure that you have a robots.txt file - this way will ensure all pages get indexed and invites the spiders in to come crawling

5) Check that important images are labeled properly with the alt tag and name them according to your keywords. Why not put the images in a folder so that the img src looks like keyword/keyword - keep the search engines happy.

6) Use the footer on all pages to link your pages via keywords. It keeps users as it makes navigation easy and makes it easier for search engines to crawl your site as well as giving the search engines useful information about pages.

BONUS
Not really a SEO but will help get the onsite to sprawl to the offsite..prominently place your social media links so that people can fan/follow etc..just like you can fan and follow us on the Tees In a Pod Facebook Fanpage and the Tees In a Pod Twitter..

And there you have it, 6 hangers in the SEO cupboard that we'll dress up with more in depth SEO info in the coming weeks..but, for now, lets see some comments with any questions you may have, what you'd like us to cover in our podcasts or any of your top SEO tips - I want to learn too.. ole..


This post was written by Rob from LadyUmbrella ladies t-shirts.
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Friday, March 5, 2010

Tim Fox- Soge Shirts




Hey everyone I'm Tim from Soge shirts funny t shirt shop. My goal is to share with you some insights on how to get your online shop some major buzz once you have some nice products going. I love sharing tips on networking, marketing, and most important getting other people excited about your t shirts.

I remember first starting out in the t-shirt business being very excited, but really having no idea on what steps it would take to get our tshirts noticed. After months and months of running around like a chicken with its head cut off I began to find great tips online, began to learn from other successful online shops, and was able to start forging many mutual beneficial relationships with other shopkeepers.

They say its not what you know, but it is who you know. I'm here to answer the questions of networking that you might have to get the extra edge on your online shopping competition. Social media sites such as facebook and twitter can be key tools to getting your online shop where you want to go. I love social media so I am happy to answer any and all questions you have about it.

Thanks for checking out the blog and like the rest of our awesome gang I am happy to get to know you personally to ensure that your online shop is a success.

"You will never not work, if you learn how to network." -Tim Fox
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