St. Petersburg Web Design Blog

Archive for the ‘Search Engine Optimization’ Category

Here’s a video of Matt Cutt’s, who is Google developer’s spokeman. He addresses a question I’ve heard many times before. He’s not being totally honest though. In his normal fashion he’s giving an answer to a question in a way that addresses the question, but gives advice that most beneficial to Google, not the web site owner. Here’s the video, after the jump we’ll have the info he didn’t give and shine a little light on som things to better help web site owners instead of Google.

What’s missing from his answer? As usual with Matt, it’s a straightforward answer: Continue reading “Great Content or Lots of Links?” »

Try out Google Page Rank Checker by clicking the icon above

Well this is an easy question. Not only can I answer it easily and quickly but I can point you to a few tools that can help you measure the page rank of any web site you view in your browser.

Google’s Page Rank is a number form 0-9 that Google places on every page in it’s index (or database if you prefer). The higher the number the more important Google thinks your web site is. In addition to 1 – 9, there is the additional ranking of n/a that means the page is not in Google’s index, either because it has come across it yet, Google thinks it’s not important enough to include or it has been banned.  Here’s how Google explains it:

Continue reading “What is Google’s PageRank and Why is it Important?” »

One of our web sites,  the Florida Fishing Blog,  has made it to #1 on Google for the key phrase “Florida Fishing Blog“.  Not a lot of people search for this term but it is the targeted niche key phrase for this web site and not much effort has been placed into the search engine marketing for this website either. This target was chosen as part of a grander plan campaign focus on Florida Fishing and even grander, Florida.

Obviously the Florida Fishing Blog is related to the phrase  Florida fishing and thus related to the search term Florida.  Now when ever I need another related link to a clients web site that is in some way related to Florida (almost all of them are).  It’s nice to have an ever expanding stable of web sites that are all related to a phrase and or word that are ready to be used at any moment.

Another search engine success!

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.

Continue reading “Key phrase research tricks and more” »

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:

Continue reading “Web Sites on the First Page of Google” »