Monthly Archive for February, 2008

When It Comes to SEO, Rely on Your Good Friend, the Directory

Published on February 28, 2008 in Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and from HTI. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , .

Before the close of this month, we at Visible Shops would like to impart another great guideline for link building. As you may remember, PageRank is Google’s ultra-important algorithm for determining a website’s placement in search engine results. High-quality inbound links have the largest influence on PageRank.

One type of website that you should definitely have link to you is the directory. Online directories do not get a lot of web traffic, but Google’s PageRank loves them. Why? Because they are monitored and controlled by human users, and they are exceptionally organized by systematic categories. For these reasons, directories are regarded as relatively trustworthy and dependable for determining a website’s relevance for certain categories.

Make sure to submit your website to popular directories, like Yahoo’s. You may not necessarily receive numerous visits from these sites, but receiving inbound links from them will help you out in the SEO department.

How to Create a Google AdWord Ad That Works

Published on February 25, 2008 in Uncategorized and from HTI. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , .

Aside from working on SEO and having your website appear as early as possible in organic search engine results, there’s always AdWords. This product of Google allows for your ad to appear alongside organic search engine results (often at the right-hand side). AdWords ads can become invaluable, as many Internet readers often resist going to even the second page of organic search results.

Before you write out your ad, however, take a look at the following tips to maximize its effectiveness:

  1. Ad space is precious, so try to drop as many “filler” words, like “an” and “the,” as possible.
  2. Use important keywords in the ad. Google will automatically highlight those target keywords, and it will make your ad more conspicuous.
  3. Put brackets (“[ ]“) around the keywords so that the ad only appears when those keywords are searched. This is ideal if you do not want your ad to show up for only partial matches in target keywords.
  4. Create a landing page that is linked to the ad. Linking to the homepage may not be the most useful page for a reader with a specific interest. Cater to that interest by designing an ad hoc page.
  5. Sell! Just like with a traditional marketing ad, use powerful, vibrant language to get attention, and sell a great benefit or unique quality. “Free shipping” or “40% below retail value” are great examples.
  6. Track your both your ads’ return of investment. That’s right: both. By testing two ads at the same time, you can look and see what works and what doesn’t. Look at how many click-throughs you get. Always choose the stronger ad to live on, while creating another rival ad for experimentation. This process will allow you to continually refine the quality of your ads.

Remember, Google receives the king’s share of search engine action on the internet. Working on SEO, while rewarding, often takes a long time before you see results. Advertising with Google is an excellent way to quickly develop a strong presence on the web.

Nofollow Tags and How They Benefit You

Published on February 21, 2008 in Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and from HTI. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , .

Everyone hates spam. (I do not speak of the canned meat product. And I will not judge you if you like it!) Even on the apparently limitless Internet, spam seems like a waste of space and time.

The blog, in particular, has been a target of these abuses. Imagine posting an entry and then you receive an alert in your email about a comment. You eagerly log back into your blog to view substantive comments, and all you see is “Come visit my site for the cheapest computer games!” It also mucks things up for blog readers who are following a thread of comments on an entry, and they have to scroll past the keyword-packed, completely irrelevant spam posts.

Google, of course, has been on top of this problem for some time now. The search engine cannot get rid of spam comments, but it can at least ignore them in regards to SEO. Whenever Google sees the attribute (rel=nofollow”) in a hyperlink, that link will receive not contribute to the ranking of the website in search engine results. This way, spam criminals will not reap any rewards from abusing blog comments, backtracks, or referrer lists. The actual HTML coding around the link changes, with a nofollow tag inserted.

A number of popular sites have instituted this measure, including WordPress, LiveJournal, Blogger, Flickr, and MSN Spaces. The attribute can be used in any area of the site where another user can insert a link (such as a referrer list), but the comments section is perused the most by readers.

In all honesty, the blogger will have little to do. The biggest step is to choose a site whose software uses the nofollow tag automatically. Take the time to review all the different sites available for blogging, see what they have to offer in terms of spam protection and SEO allowances, and then make your choice.

The Two Things You Need for a High Google Ranking

Published on February 18, 2008 in Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and from HTI. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

Google’s search engine, as you may know, is the most popular search engine on the web, and it dominates in relative market share by 46.47%. If you want to direct a high volume of web traffic to your site, you will need to get on Google’s good side.

You may not believe it, but there are only two features you need to factor in when working on a high Google rating: 1. PageRank and 2. Incoming Text Link Keywords.

PageRank is an algorithm that is mostly determined by the number and quality of inbound links to the website in question. The reasoning behind this is if a lot of websites are linking to you, then you must be important. Try to get as many quality pages to link to your website (hopefully, these pages will have a PageRank of at least 4 or better). Also, it’s best to get these links to the same page on your website–usually the homepage.

Secondly, Google indexes incoming text link keywords to determine the relevance of your site. As stated in our previous blog post about inbound links, get the other site to link to you by using a keyword phrase in the text link. Avoid image links as much as you can. And make sure that the page they’re linking to has the keywords present in the text of the page. Otherwise, Google will not index it. Finally, make the wording precise as much as possible.

There are other elements that contribute to Google’s algorithm, but these two are by far the most important. Keep these two factors in mind whenever you optimize your website for search engines.

Online color usage search tool

Published on February 14, 2008 in Design, Resources and from HTI. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

When starting a new design, usually one of the first orders of business is establishing a basic color palette. Sometimes a client provides one as part of their branding guidelines, sometimes it’s up to the designer. Regardless of the situation, chances are you’re initially going to be spending a fair amount of time choosing colors.

That’s where colorlovers.com can make your life a little easier. In addition to lots of nice user submitted palettes, their Trend section uses a color slider to search for examples of color usage for both magazines and websites. With the web quickly becoming saturated with 2.0 widgets, it’s nice to stumble across sites like this that harness those tools to create something useful.

One caveat… the color search seems to work much better with magazine colors than websites for some reason.