St. Petersburg Web Design Blog

Archive for the ‘Search Engine Optimization’ Category

XML Site maps are 5 years old and we are still amazed as people who are using their site maps effectively. As the lady in the video below also points out, often times a poor sitemap.xml is an indicator of a poor web site plan. ie, sometimes more content isn’t better.
She also touches on a great point, using other forms of XML, namely RSS feeds can be a link building machine for a web site. Others sites that are focused on providing users the latest from the blogging world, or even better are focused on providing the latest info from the specific niche you are in, will provide summaries and links to your articles and pages. This not only builds links but it also can generated a little targeted traffic occasionally.

This will be a two part series, next week will tell you about an instance where you may NOT want to have a “properly” implemented sitemap…

Any of my SEO clients and many regular readers here know that researching what phrases people are actually searching for and how tough the competition is for those phrase is a very important part of any SEO campaign.  It usually the first step, in fact.

This video has some tips about how to gain a little more insight on how to get some keyphrase ideas.  More importantly, it has some off hand advice, which is actually great about integrating analytics and paid advertising into continuing campaigns.

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Some times when your hard work pays off, it’s good to lean back and admire what you’ve done for a moment.  This post is one of those moments.  We’ve made learning how search engines work and how to best use the info we gather, a priority for over a decade.  For the last eight years, we’ve had some great successes with the search engines.  Since most traffic to a web site comes from a search engine and the overwhelming majority of that traffic comes from the first page of search results, you can see how this greatly benefits our clients.

There are two points to consider when viewing this list.

First, it was compiled on 07-05-2010 and the search engines change their rankings all the time.  We keep on top of this but lack of resources by certain clients may cause them to fall in the rankings.  Of course some client are putting more resources into their search engine marketing efforts thus their ranking will improve.  Once you learn how to get a web site ranked well, it’s just  a matter of putting the right amount of resources into it for the keyphrase you want to rank well.

Secondly, there are numerous web sites that are doing even better than these but larger clients often request a non disclosure agreement.  there are several reasons for this.  Like if they are a web design company or an seo company.  Sometimes they are in a completed unrelated industry, they just don’t want their competition to read their web designers blog and learn their custom strategy.  I can’t say I blame them.

Here’s a short list of some of our most recent search engines successes:

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The rumors are that Google’s “no follow” crusade is back firing for them. If you believe the rumors, Google is having trouble finding content. Google has always been about incoming links, a little less for the last year or so, but for competitive key phrases, it’s obvious that the sites with the most inbound links will have a better chance of ranking higher for their desired key phrases, no matter what the folks at Google say. Here’s Matt Cutts Google’s spokesman on the subject of do follow links and no follow links:

Our take on why no follow links are more valuable than Matt says and more insight after the jump…
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We’ve had another search engine success with a new web site. This is a new web site, targeting a fairly competitive keyphrase: Florida Data Services.  It has done so with some success and again just minimal effort.  It’s true “Florida Data Service” isn’t the most searched for keyphrase out there, but it highly targets the market this web site is seeking to capture.  Withing 5 weeks this site shot straight to #2 on Google.  Yahoo, Go.com, AltaVista, AllTheWeb.com seem to be madly in love with the web site, as it’s #1 on these search engines for several key phrases.  This is usually an indicator that it will be #1 on Google for at least some of these secondary key phrases in the near future.

This site has had no more than our Basic SEO Package.  That worked out this time because we were able to find a niche without a lot of competition.  For more more popular key phrases, some variation of our Advanced SEO Package is usually needed.  But consistently, we’ve proved that if your willing to put the resources into it, we can get you the top spot on Google for just about any search phrase you’d like.

All my clients know I’ve been saying this for years.  “Put your #1 key phrase in your domain name.”  Well it looks like everyone else is catching on.  I’m sure these gentlemen can explain it better in their interview format: