7 Step SEO Evaluation

We can answer these questions and more with a website evaluation package. email us

8-10-09
Why use Social Networking Sites? We Can Tell You Why in a Free 15 Minute call.
Email us at info@zddesign.net to schedule a time and day.

One of the main reasons is traffic of course. Sites like Digg and Stumble can drive1,000 – 50,000+ unique referrals within 1 week. On the down side visitors through these types of social networking sites can average time on your site at only a few seconds per visit, browse little more than one page and have a high bounce rate.

So, why is it worth it to take your time to sign up with Digg, Stumble, Delicous, Twitter and so? And should you submit your web pages?

1. Traffic spikes help to slowly build your level of steady traffic. It’s generally the case after a large traffic spike hits, you get a portion of those people either returning, linking to your page spreading your ideas to others - when this happens traffic levels increase marginally or sometimes dramatically (though not as often) after each spike.

2. When people do link to your content from traffic spikes, your traffic not only increases steadily over time but your search engine rankings begin to rise as well. Even if the links you acquire are not 100% targeted anchor text, you still get a bump in search engine “importance” or weight so that your content has the ability to rank higher than it did before.

3. Some visitors will bookmark your site they find interesting or useful via these social networks. Resources that are of more use are bookmarked by more users. Thus, such a system will "rank" a resource based on its perceived utility.

4. Can create a lot of backlinks from other sites, which is more valuable in the long run than than the initial traffic it brings.

3-10-09 from sem-pdx event in Portland
SEM-PDX Searchfest, 2009
Posted: 10:02 PM CST



We made the rounds at the Portland Zoo today. I think I see Josh and Leo in this shot, Todd, Scott and Rand in the back. Lots of strategies for SEO/SEM and a multitude of other things. Some great speakers and food was good too. What a great crowd, and what experience was in the room... The Pope of SEO Danny Sullivan was there, "We're not worthy." Gonna have to crank up that PA next year buddy.

SearchFest 09 presented multiple informative learning tracks, workshops, and panel sessions designed to provide direct insight into the most up-to-date strategies and technological advancements in online search marketing. Industry experts and thought leaders from around the country came to deliver in-depth presentations ranging from basic SEM fundamentals to specific advanced techniques.

Highly recommend checking out www.sempdx.org for upcoming events.

12-08 from seo book
A Spring Clean For SEO, Even Though It's Winter
Posted: 03:09 PM CST

An SEO strategy is an organic process.

Your SEO campaign should change focus as your popularity grows. The SEO approach for an established site can be quite different to that of a new site, mainly because, with an established site, you can leverage the power of your inbound linking.

Google favors the already "rich". The Google algorithm reinforces the establishment. If your site has become "the establishment", you may only need to work with Google, rather than against them, and high rankings should be yours with little comparative effort.

So, how often do you revise your SEO strategy? How often do you tweak and review old content? Has your SEO strategy become a little broken over the years? Try to make an audit part of your SEO process.

A spring clean for SEO :)

Here are a few ideas on what aspects to review in an SEO audit.

1. Aggressive / Non Aggressive
Are there areas on your site where you pushed the boundaries? Did this pay off? Does it still pay off? Have you used SEO strategy that worked well in the past, but the algorithms have since changed? As a site becomes more established, aggressive strategy becomes less necessary. It can also cause credibility problems.

What do I mean by aggressive?

Let's consider SEO copywriting. Sometimes, people go overboard with their copy. They cram their copy with keywords, which can often result in a page which reads poorly. The webmaster was trying to achieve high keyword density scores, and took it a little too far. In light of the weight now given to inbound links in the algorithms, this is pretty much a redundant tactic.

SEOBook.com ranks highly, for thousands of competitive keywords, because of the number and quality of the inbound links. We write on topics that we think will interest our readers. Long term credibility outweighs any limited benefit we'd get from aggressive on-page SEO tactics.

Weigh the need for aggressive tactics vs the benefit.

2. Untrustworthy Design & Format
When someone arrives at your page from a search, does your page look credible? Does it answer the search query? Does it convince people to take a desired action?

Check your pages for the basics. Check grammar, spelling and make sure the call to action is clear.

Is it time for a fresh design?

3. Re-balance Your Linking
Where are all your links coming from? Are they all reciprocal? Are they all coming from a narrow range of sites?

Look to diversify your linking patterns. Are most of the links pointing to your home page? You should have external deep links pointing to internal pages, too.

Stuntdbl has a great post on link balancing:
Examples of Link Equation Balancing:
(or If your site has….You should:)

• 1000 IBL’s from 500 unique IP’s…
_consider buying a run of site text link with your targeted text
• 70% reciprocal link…
_only get one-way links and slowly dispose of your reciprocal links
• 10k IBL’s from 10 unique IP’s…
_get many more one-off links
• 90% deep links to the homepage…
_compartmentalize your site and get more deep links
• 80% identical anchor text…
_use synonymous terms and switch your anchor text


4. Duplicate Content
Duplicate content can cause you problems, because the Google algorithm disqualifies same or similar content, in order to provide a diverse set of results.

Google provides a useful checklist for reviewing and eliminating duplicate content.

5. Forming & Maintaining Alliances
Is part of your SEO strategy to form alliances? Alliances are important because they extend your marketing reach, and provide you with links. Hook up with suppliers, vendors, partners, the local chamber of commerce, etc. Networking, quite naturally, results in links.

How often are you forming new alliances? Have you neglected any old alliances?

6. You Wrote Something Remarkable, But No One Noticed
If you've got remarkable content, you deserve links and attention. But what if you've been over-looked?

This is a perennial problem, and it is difficult to solve. People are short of time, and there is a lot of content fighting for attention.

One way is to go where the action is. Part of your SEO strategy should be involving yourself in the community, and if that means posting on other peoples sites, particularly the big community sites in your niche, then that's what you do.

Provide genuine value to those sites. Rewrite your article, put a fresh spin on it, and place it on those sites, if possible. So long as you get people's attention, and they follow the links back to you, then all is well.

Sure, you lose a level of control. But the alternative is to remain invisible.

7. Adwords Experiments
Are your title tags and descriptions all they could be? Are they optimized for maximum visitor response? How would you know?

One way is to run an Adwords test. Take the title and description from your high ranking SEO pages, and run an Adwords campaign using slight variations. This way, you can explore more enticing title and description tags, without compromising your rankings. Consider changing you title and descriptions, or write new pages, if the Adwords copy provides equivalent or better results.

8. Balance Content Writing And Link Building
A successful SEO campaign needs both. You need to weigh your time between the two, depending on where you get the best results. Linking is always worthwhile, but if there's not much on your site worth linking to, then you've got a problem.

Have you noticed a pattern of linking? For example, when you produce new articles, certain sites have a habit of linking to you? Look to monitor, cultivate and nurture those relationships.

What topics have typically earned you the most links? Do you need to adjust your focus?

These tools should help:

Link Analysis Tool, BlogStormUK see www.seobook.com

11-08
The Relevance of SEO Today

In modern times, millions of people across the world use the Internet every day to search for different products and services. In this ever-increasing ocean of data in the virtual space, in order to ensure that your business site draws the optimum quantity of target audience, achieving a high rank in the leading search engines play a significant role. Search Engine Optimization, commonly termed as SEO, may be simply defined as the process of maximizing quality traffic to a website. The primary objectives for SEO are to ensure that the website is able to reach its target audience and that maximum number of people searching for related services and products find what they are looking for therein. Today, with e-commerce gaining increasing popularity, no matter whether you are launching a small business enterprise or a big one, capturing the virtual market in cyberspace plays a crucial role in determining your organization’s overall commercial success. Having your website rank high in the leading search engines ensure that users searching for the products and services that are similar to what your website offers will come across your website fast and also at the very beginning of their search. Higher the number of website visitors, higher is your chance of finding relevant customers willing to buy your products and greater are your chances of gaining an edge over your commercial competitors. Realizing this need for achieving high ranks in search engines, ZD Design offers a variety of services geared towards helping their clients to form clear objectives and goals for their websites, understand what exactly prospective customers are looking for and keeping a regular record of the results achieved.

Just as in other forms of business enterprises, in cyber space also, effective marketing is one of the primary steps towards achieving optimum commercial success. How well a website is structured, designed and informed with relevant content play significant roles in assisting its effective internet marketing. Realizing these requirements, the internet marketing strategies developed by ZD Design are focused towards helping their clients in spreading their business message to the target audience, regularly measure the results of their marketing outcomes and upgrade their website content depending on these recorded results.

How well a website is designed, structured and provided with relevant content go a long way in determining how much of target traffic it will draw and thereby, how much of commercial success it can eventually attain. In order to maximize visit from the target market, the website design should be engaging, in coherence with the content and relevant to the overall business goals of the company. In order to achieve the optimum results, website development should be performed keeping in mind optimum user satisfaction, attracting the user into exploring further aspects of the website and finally, contributing to the overall sales generated. When the website design is thoughtfully done keeping both the company’s objectives and the potential user’s requirements in mind, chances are higher that visiting the site would prove to be a positive experience for the user. This, in turn, increases the likelihood that an interested user may turn into a prospective and satisfied customer.

9-08
What are Web Standards?

There are many things that are covered in the W3C standards that are not tested by the validator. One of the most important is semantics: that HTML tags should be used for their proper purpose. Paragraphs are paragraphs, lists are lists, headers are headers, and tables are for data and not for page layout.

A related aspect of web standards that is not fully tested by the validator is the separation of presentation from structure and interactivity. That is, keeping the CSS and Javascript out of the HTML. There are many reasons to do this, including better accessibility and easier maintenance. (This is partially tested by the validator for certain doc types that don't allow inline event handlers and presentational HTML such as <font> tags).

Does it matter for SEO?

It's pretty clear to me that search engines wouldn't care that much about web standards either. However, it could be that they have some things in common with things that search engines would care about.

SEO Experts:

* Does semantic mark-up matter for SEO? Could it matter more in the future?
* Is there any SEO advantage in using CSS instead of tables for layout?
* Are there any SEO benefits in separating presentation, structure, and interactivity?
* Could web standards be used as a quality indicator?

What are web design best practices?

Web design best practices include web standards but go beyond to include general methods for coding web pages. This would include things like simplifying mark-up, re-ordering source code, accessibility, cross-browser and cross-device compatibility, etc. All of these are good things to do with a web page, but they have very little to do with validation.

Does it matter for SEO?

It seems to me that accessibility for humans and accessibility for search engines have a lot in common. If a disabled person using a screen reader or text-based browser find their way around your site, then bots will be able to as well.

More questions for the SEO experts:

* Do search engines ever look at browser compatibility?
* Does too much code or too much presentational mark-up affect crawling in any way?
* Does source code order matter?
* Are there any ways in which the way a web page is coded impact SEO?

We can answer these questions and more with a website evaluation package. email us