No, your Web designer does not understand SEO!

It's a perfectly natural assumption, so if you think your Web developer (designer, master, or whatever other term he or she goes by) does or should understand Search Engine Optimization (SEO), you're in good company. You're wrong, but in good company.

It's a simple fact, but critical to understand: The people building your Web site almost certainly do not understand how to optimize your site so that it will rank well in the search engines.

Please, Web developers, don't write and tell me that you do understand SEO. After all, there are a couple of possibilities:

• You actually do know SEO; I'm not claiming there are no SEO-savvy Web developers just that they are a very rare breed
• You only think you know SEO

Unfortunately SEO has become such a hot topic that Web developers now all say that they can handle your SEO for you. Firstly, it's another great revenue source. Perhaps more importantly, though, if they don't claim they can help with your SEO, another firm down the street will.

It's simply not true, though. How do I know this? Well, I've worked with many, many Web designers, and have rarely found any with more than a rudimentary understanding of SEO (an "enough to be dangerous" level of knowledge). Even the ones who know it "well," don't know it that well.

In addition, in my role as an ecommerce consultant, I've worked with literally hundreds of businesses, large and small. Many of these businesses come to me after it's dawned on them that perhaps their Web sites are not ranking well in the search engines because their Web designers actually know next-to-nothing about optimization.

But I've even had Web developers admit to me that they don't know much about it. ("Yes," the owner of a large development firm once told me over lunch, "we sell SEO services, but I can't say we really know much about it.") Furthermore, I've worked with Web designers on projects, providing them advice on how to optimize mutual clients' sites, only to notice later that one of the services promoted on the designer's Web site is, you've guessed it, Search Engine Optimization. I occasionally have designers come to me for training, when they have already been selling the service for some time.

Also consider this. Why should a Web designer understand SEO? SEO is actually a complex subject that takes a long time to learn well. I've been doing it for years, and still learn new things every day. SEO is difficult because the laws are hidden; the search engines don't really want you to know too much about the subject, and they're constantly changing the rules, too. It's like being an engineer without fully understanding the laws of physics ... and in any case, the laws change every Wednesday. So SEO is difficult, and takes a long time to learn well.

Web development is also a complicated subject. I know how to create Web pages ... but I would never claim that I'm an accomplished Web designer! Yet for some reason we're expected to believe that every Web designer is also an SEO expert.

Now, this is of more than merely academic interest, because if you think that your designer will get youir site ranked well in the search engines, you'll be disappointed. And if you actually pay for the designer's SEO services you'll also be just a little poorer.

[examiner.com]

9 Reasons Your Website Can Have a High Bounce Rate

Bounce Rate is one of the SEO key success factors that are always under the close radar for web analytics professionals and there are enough reasons for webmasters and Internet marketing professionals to be concerned about high bounce rates. With the increasing awareness about web analytics and businesses taking their web presence more seriously people are now interested to look into more than just the unique visitors and page views and I can vouch for the fact that this would contribute highly towards the overall improvement in the quality of WWW.

What is Bounce Rate?

Bounce Rate can be simply defined as the percentage of website visitors that leave the website directly from the page they enter without clicking through to any other page of the website.

Let's take a look at some of the factors that can be identified as possible causes of high bounce rate:

Internal Factors Affecting Bounce Rate:

• Web Design and Usability: Presentation is important. If your web design is cluttered, have some colors that really hurt the eyes, full of jumping flash animations or has some other design flaw that makes your visitors feel uncomfortable you can be sure that the page would experience a high bounce rate. On similar note if your users need to spend time trying to understand your website or comprehend the features you provide, even if your content is the best in the world your bounce rate would tend to be on the higher side. Here are some site usability checking tools. Provide easy to use interface with a nice design and good content your visitors will stick.

• Website Content: Make sure your content adds some value to your visitors and also the content and information flow is good enough to carry your visitors from one page to the other. You might have good content but if there is no spontaneity in writing and if the information flow is not proper, after reading the first page your user would think “what next?” This is the point they bounce off your site. Ensure that your content is written well and give prominent clues to your visitors as to what is the next step .Your website is like your home, if you want your guest to see the entire house you need to take them around, when your visitors come to the door and you don’t invite them in they are likely to leave from the door itself. So use your content wisely to invite them in and keep them entertained.

• Website Navigation: Somewhat similar to the point we discussed above. Navigational issues are one of the key factors that contribute to the bounce rate. If you want your visitors to move around your website provide them with a clear intuitive navigation structure. Don't leave anything to their guess work.

• Technical Issues: There can be a wide range of factors under this. Think if you land up on a page part of which shows some PHP code instead of the data that it was supposed to pull from the database. Aren’t you likely to feel bad about it? If you have got a fancy ActiveX component on your webpage that requires your viewers to download some other file to get it to render properly, how many of them do you think would do that? Most of these visitors would add to your Bounce rate figure.

Marketing Factors Affecting Bounce Rate:

• Wrong Keyword Selection: Search marketing is one of the key avenues through which any website gets a large chunk of their traffic and the entire search marketing game is based on keywords. What happens if you chose the wrong keywords?Well if you choose the wrong keywords and start optimizing your website for the non relevant keywords (which is tad difficult with modern day search engines) or show up on search ads for non relevant keywords ( which is very much possible) all you get are some non targeted visitors who are looking for something different from what your website has to offer. Result: High Bounce Rate.

• Ad Copy: Ad copies represent your website in the paid search results. If this representation is not aligned to what your website has to offer it is definitely going to boost up your bounce rate. At times novice search marketers would create alluring ad copies to boost CTR and increase the number of visitors but if the communication in your ad copies is not in line with the content on your page you can't retain them.

• Page Title and Meta Description: You can say this is the organic counterpart of Ad Copies. Search Engines typically display the Page Title and Meta description in the organic search result snippets. If the message in page Title and Meta description is not in line with the content of the page, high bounce rate is a big possibility.

External Factors contributing to High Bounce Rate:

• Occasional Irrelevant Results from Search Engines - Well, irrespective of all the advancement that the search engines have done at times they still throw in a few irrelevant results and if your site is one of those results you will definitely get a few extra visitors but they will definitely be bouncing off.There is not much that you can do about this. You can still find out those unrelated keywords that are driving traffic and investigate the reason on how search engines are relating to your site for those terms and then try to eradicate the cause.

• Improper External Link: A very rare situation, but might happen. If an external site links to your site using an anchor text that's not related to your website, this link would drive traffic that come to your website with some expectations but would find different content - Result: bounce off. Here are some tools to explore and validate outbound links.
  
  

[searchenginejournal]

SEO Ranking Factors for 2009

Search Engine Marketing and SEO have always been very dynamic fields. Search engines make changes all of the time. Sometime they announce their changes, sometimes we are left to guess at them. In either event, more often than not, we are left largely to our own devices in terms of assessing the impact of these changes and what to do about them - if anything.

This makes sessions related to ranking factors pretty popular at shows like SMX Advanced. This year was no exception and I was able to get a few minutes with one of this years speakers, Rand Fishkin, to chat about the state of SEO ranking factors.

One of the more interesting things Rand and I agreed on was the fact that it's 2009 and a lot of today's fundamental ranking factors, are very similar to the same stuff that worked in 2005, 2006, 2007 and so on. In other words, a lot of the basic things have been pretty consistent.

That said, I thought it might be useful to run down a quick list of some of the things that matter most and least in terms of ranking in 2009. We’ll start with the Important Things:

Title tags - This one is a no brainer. Good title tags have long been recognized as one of the single most important on page SEO elements of any web page. What makes a good title tag? A good title tag specific to each individual page is absolutely essential. Beyond that, as Rand pointed out, having your 'important terms' appear early in your title tag also has a significant impact.

Anchor Text - Anchor text is the visible text of a link. Having inbound links is the overriding number one search factor but not all links are created equally. Say you have people linking to your page about blue widgets. If the text in their content reads "Fantastic Blue Widgets can be found here!" it makes a big difference in which words they link to your page. If they link the words 'Blue Widgets', it's going to do you a lot more good than if they just link the word 'here'.

This is important to keep in mind with your own internal linking too. Avoid using generic, nondescript terms like 'home' and 'here' and 'main' when you link to your own pages.

Quantity of Domains Linking - This one is interesting. if you have 10,000 inbound links and your competitor only has 7,000 inbound links but still seems to outrank you consistently, this could be the reason. Number of links is important, but the number of unique domains those links are coming from is also very important.

You may have 10,000 inbound links but maybe your links all come from 5,000 unique, separate domains. Your competitor may only have 7,000 inbound links but if they have 6,000 coming in from separate domains... they will get you most every time.

Social Media/Mobile - we talked a little bit about social and mobile. Social and to some extent mobile too can be hard to quantify. The fact of the matter is though, these are absolutely 2 hugely explosive categories. Facebook, Twitter and other social giants are continuing to grow in users and usage. Effective social media management can be a tremendous source for generating buzz, those all-important inbound links and just plain direct referral traffic.

Those are a few ranking factors Rand and I discussed as important, so what are some things people might be spending too much time worrying about? Here are some of the things we talked about in terms of being 'not so important':

H1 Tags - A couple of years ago, making use of H1 and H2 tags on selected areas of your HTML code kind of came into vogue. The rationale was the search engine spiders interpreted H1 tags as a signal that 'hey, this text is important because it's bigger'. Of course the proliferation of .css meant that you could throw H1 tags pretty much anywhere and everywhere on your page and just take care of how things looked to people with stylesheets.

That this was ever an effective ranking tactic or strategy is somewhat debatable. However, currently, while H1 tags aren't going to hurt you, they don't seem to be much of a factor.

Keyword Density - This one might surprise you a little bit. Keyword density is kind of a joke. It is in fact NOT desirable to work 500 instances of your target keyphrase into the text of your target page. I know this seems counter intuitive to some, but I for one was very glad to see this claim supported by some data in the Ranking Factors session.

If your page is about Blue Beach Widgets, you have Blue Beach Widgets in your title and you have pages linking to your blue beach widgets page with the terms 'blue beach widgets' in the anchor text THAT is good.

You do NOT have to whore out the content of your page to have 'blue beach widgets' repeated 50 times in the description. I know you have seen these pages... they look like:

This has to stop people. It makes your site read like a bad skit on the Muppet Show. This kind of thing makes me cringe, and it's ruining the Internet. Well maybe it isn't ruining the Internet like MTV ruined America, but it does make for some horrible web pages. I still hear SEOs talking keyword density to site owners. If you are a site owner and some SEO comes talking to you about increasing your keyword density, do everybody a big favor and throw something at them. Please.

W3C Validation - Ah, my old arch nemesis W3C Validation. If I've said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times... but I’ll say it again: if you want your site to validate W3C, by all means... do that. If having code that passes W3C validation makes you sleep well at night, then, my friend... you go get that done. I am all for people having W3C valid code, if that's what they want.

That said.... in terms of SEO and search engine ranking, the simple reality is: IT DOESN’T MATTER. It never has mattered and I daresay it never will matter. Can it hurt you to have valid code? Certainly not. Should you pay a designer and extra 30% to design your webpage to be 100% W3C compliant and valid? That’s up to you. But before you do, consider this: of the top 100 websites online, MAYBE 8 (and I am being exorbitant in that estimate) of them pass W3C validation. Amazon doesn't pass, eBay doesn't pass, Twitter doesn't pass, heck neither do Google, Yahoo or even Microsoft’s new Bing.

Oh Yeah!!!!If your page renders in all the browsers, if you don't have a bunch of broken links, in other words if your webpage looks like a webpage and can be read... that's all you need here folks. Search engines could not possibly care less, in other words if "document type does not allow element "div" here". They just don't. They never will. W3C might help get you listed in some directories (maybe?), it has some practical applications in terms of accessibility, and you could maybe argue that it can help you diagnose some page render/load time issues. Personally I think it’s most common application however is to inflate the bottom line estimate for web designers that can talk you into a cup of the W3C Validation Kool Aid.

So there are a few things Rand and I discussed that matter more and matter less in regard to search ranking factors in 2009. I'm sure we left plenty of things out, so if you want to add your opinion to either list, feel free to do so in the comments section.

[webpronews.com]

Google Chrome SEO Toolbar with Page Rank– An Easy Way

A while ago, Google launched smart, stylish and faster web browser, Google Chrome, and after its launch, many more users downloaded it, and considered switching to it.

Being an SEO Consultant so I needed an SEO toolbar for web browsers like Firefox and IE. But unfortunately (and surprisingly), Google did not launch its toolbar for Google Chrome.

So here is a very easy way to have SEO toolbar for Google Chrome.

• Download and install Google Chrome developer version. If you have installed, ignore this step.
• Learn how to change Chrome to Chrome Developer Version.
• Add -enable-extensions parameter:

1. Right click the Chrome icon in your desktop, and then click Properties.
2. Click Shortcut tab.
3. Add '-enable-extensions' parameter in the Target field.
   

• Download these two files from the following address and save them at your desktop.

1. http://www.2shared.com/file/6242345/4c394a8f/Bookmarks.html
2. http://www.2shared.com/file/6242381/e7e1c19a/Bookmarks.html
   

• Just go at following address:
• In WindowXP : "C:\Documents and Settings\\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default" {Replace username as per your profile name}
• In Windows Vista : "C:\Users\\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default" {Replace username as per your profile name}
• Copy both the downloaded files and just paste them in Default directory.
• Then just refresh it and open Google Chrome.
• Make sure your Google Chrome browser always shows the Bookmarks bar. If not, click menu: Tools -> Always show bookmarks bar.
• Your chrome bookmark bar (See red blocks) will become SEO toolbar.

[searchenginejournal.com]

Title tags, anchor text 'most vital in SEO'

The most important ranking factors in search engine optimisation(SEO) include title tags, anchor text, unique inbound links and use of social media and mobile advertising.

This is according to Rand Fishkin, a speaker at the recent SMX Advanced event, and Mike McDonald of WebProNews, who also concluded that the least important ranking factors are H1 tags, keyword density and W3C validation.

When it comes to using title tags in an effective way, it is advisable to insert key terms as early as possible into each tag and to ensure every website page has its own relevant title tag, Mr McDonald and Mr Fishkin stated.

"It's 2009 and a lot of today's fundamental ranking factors are very similar to the same stuff that worked in 2005, 2006 [and] 2007," Mr McDonald remarked, adding: "A lot of the basic things have been pretty consistent."

Earlier this month, a poll by Forbes.com found that SEO, pay-per-click ads and email marketing are seen as the most effective online marketing tactics when it comes to influencing brand perception by senior marketers.

[directnews.co.uk]

SEO is the best way to generate online sales, Forbes

The best way for marketers to generate sales online is to start with search marketing techniques, according to a new study from Forbes.

The study reveals that 48 per cent of marketers believe that search engine optimization (SEO) was the best method for generating conversions online.

More than one-half of marketers with budgets up to £1 million agreed. For both small- and large-budget marketers, site or page sponsorship and SEO were considered the most effective ways to build a brand online.

The next-most-effective conversion tactic for smaller marketers was e-mail and e-newsletters, followed by pay-per-click and search ads, behavioural targeting and page sponsorships.

For larger marketers, the list of effective online tactics was nearly the same, except search and e-mail were flipped. Pay-per-impression ads were also more effective for larger marketers.

To build, maintain or change brand perceptions required different tactics, however. Pay-per-impression ads came next on the list for big spenders, while the more budget-constricted focused on e-mail newsletters, pay-per-impression and viral marketing.

In anticipation of the end of the recession, marketers are changing their spending priorities in the six months after March 2009 to feature more viral marketing, SEO, behavioural targeting and pay-per-click, according to the study.

Jon Smith, head of Aedgency Cashback said, "Smith said, "Search Engine Optimisation takes time and effort, but the rewards of a successful strategy are more customers, more revenue and dominance over your market.

"Web users seldom search beyond the first results page and if you don't have at least one of the coveted twelve positions you can bet your competitor will have. From this perspective, investing in effective SEO is business critical."

Source:[utalkmarketing.com]