Don’s and DO’s SEO!!

Ten Tips to Targeting!
Author- Dante A Monterverde

1) Don’t assume you will be able to optimize your site entirely on your own or believe you can just hire an SEO company down the road.
Do an analysis of your business and its major keywords. Are you going to be able to rank for highly competitive keywords on your own? Should you hire an SEO company, this decision needs to be made early in the process, not later.

2) Don’t begin your website design and development with out considering and AEO plan. Do complete a keyword analysis first and determine what kind of keyword-rich content you will need to develop in order to rank highly. Make sure your graphic designers know witch keywords are going to be targeted on each of the pates they will design – it makes it easier for them to match the overall theme of the content and keywords to the site’s design, broadening the SEO impact.

3) Don’t forget about your secondary pages. In many cases these pages can rank just as well as your main index.html page. Do spend ample time developing these pages.

4) Don’t repeat the keywords you have on your index.html < Title > tag on your secondary pages’ < Title > tags. Do spend time developing separate keyword-rich < Title > tags that match the content on the keywords you are targeting on your secondary pages.

5) Don’t list your company or domain name first in your < Title > tags. Most likely you are already ranking well for your own company or domain name. Do place your company or domain name at the end of the < Title > tag if you absolutely need it to appear in the headline within the search engine results pages (SERPs)

6) Don’t target general, highly competitive keywords. Do target keywords derivatives that get traffic and are not as competitive. It’s better to rank #3 for “blue soft widgets” than #30 for “widgets” even if the main keywords get more traffic. In the end landing the top 10 or top 5, even for less competitive keywords will generate more traffic overall.

7) Don’t forget the sitemap and making your website search engine friendly and crawlable. Do submit your website to Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo Site Explorer and take advantage of their resources.

8. Don’t make the mistake of driving all of your incoming links to your main index.html page. Do create a balanced link program that not only generates incoming links to your main index.html pages but also to your secondary pages. If you have useful content or tools on your secondary pages, websites will link to them.

9) Don’t Request the same anchor text on all of your incoming links, as this looks very unnatural to the search engines. Do offer anyone who wants to link back to you with a variety of anchor text. And, of course, match the anchor text with those keywords you are targeting for that specific page. If at all possible, try to stay away from getting incoming links displaying your domain name. Instead, try to get people t olinke to you with keywords and keyword phrases.

10) Don’t assume you can complete initial SEO campaign and think you’re done. Do perform regular and ongoing keyword research to make sure you are still targeting the correct keywords; perhaps there are new keywords to target? Do follow up on uyour link requests and maintain an ongoing link campaign. Do implement an analytic program and track the amount o traffic you are generating from the organic search engine listings. Are these visits leading to sales or conversions? If so, its your best interest to up your SEO efforts and ride the momentum.

There are many mistakes that webmasters and website owners make when implementing a new ongoing SEO strategy. That’s why its difficult garnering and maintaining organic listings on the major search engines. While this is only a sample of some of the more common mistakes, this list should provide you with a starting point of how to begin and what to avoid.

2008 Back to Marketing Basics!

A big welcome to “next year”! We made it through last year and here we are DAY TWO of 2008 CONGRATS!

So after blowing off the dust on my desk and cranking up my computer I decided to tackle my emails which were not many because lets face it… everyone was out too everyone except the people at Media Post and Advertising Age that is. My mailbox is crammed with predictions and trends for 2008. So crammed in fact that it is going to take me a week to get through. I did however stumble upon this quick research Brief by the Center for Media Research.

This quick survey “Top Marketing Trends for 2008” was conducted by Anderson Analytics. They surveyed 1700 MENG (Marketing Executives Networking Group) member and concluded the following key areas for 2008:

1- Marketing basics (60% "Very Important") which include specific concepts such as customer satisfaction, customer retention, segmentation, brand loyalty and ROI were of greatest interest.
2- Search Engine Optimization (42%) had relatively wide appeal, and cut across marketers in all fields.
3- "Green Marketing" (32%) was another important emerging concept and it was identified as the trendiest marketing buzzword.

To read the complete PDF report, please visit Anderson Analytics here.Hope you enjoyed this quick post. As always feel free to comment.