If you want to know how good an online PR company is at dealing with SEO you type ‘online public relations’ into Google and make your choice from the first page.

You already know that I know my SEO and it should not come as a surprise that Pamil Visions is ranking on the first page in Google for ‘online public relations’ – but we are not the only company on that page.

For the sake of the argument I will compare my company with other two present on the first page in Google to see which one would make the best choice as a PR+SEO vendor.

Top Three Companies for “online public relations”

The top three companies ranking for ‘online public relations’ are toprankblog.com, pamil-visions.com and cyberspeaker.com. You will probably see them ranking differently, depending on your geo location – from where I search toprankblog.com is the third result on the front page after online-pr.com (which is a PR resource and not a PR company); pamil-visions.com is the forth result and cyberspeaker.com ranks first on the second page. Results preceding cyberspeaker.com are either PR distribution sites or subdomains of a common shared platform like blogsite.com that cannot be accurately analyzed without access to their analytics.

According to Alexa, this is the percentage of search visits that came to toprankblog.com, pamil-visions.com and cyberspeaker.com from a search engine.

Clearly, there are more visits from a search engine to toprankblog.com than to pamil-visions.com, whereas cyberspeaker.com doesn’t even make the chart. Toprankblog.com does a better job at attracting search engine traffic than any of the analyzed sites.

The “Site Appeal” Test

I always said that rankings don’t matter if you cannot make people stay on your site. The most important factor when it comes to optimizing a site is the “appeal.” SEO can boost you in the SERPs, but it is up to you to make the sale – it is up to you to keep a visitor on your site, to make that visitor spend time there browsing and taking the actions you desire.
Measuring bounce rates gives a pretty accurate idea on site appeal.

Pamil-visions.com does a better job at keeping visitors online, despite the fact that its bounce rate over the past three months was greater than 50% – 66.5% to be more exact. But compared to 78.1% for toprankblog.com 66.5% is much better (with bounce rate a lower number is better).

However, bounce rates may and may not be relevant. Good SEO means more search traffic and sometimes search traffic is less targeted than other types of traffic.

Analyzing the “time on site” for these companies may be a better indication that people are enjoying the site:

Surprisingly cyberspeaker.com does make the chart and wins at this category, while pamil-visions.com comes in second and toprankblog.com is the third. Cyberspeaker.com hardly gets any visits, but obviously when that happens the visitors “stick” around. However, in this situation, the time on site for cyberspeaker.com is hardly an indicator. The site probably gets 10 visitors per day – if one of those spends 20 minutes on site, the graphic above makes sense. However, we have to choose from a site with a decent number of daily visitors: pamil-visions.com has clearly better times on site than toprankblog.com

The “In-Links” Test

According to Alexa, pamil-visions.com has only 81 links in (multiple links from the same sites are only counted once), while toprankblog.com has 3238 and cyberspeaker.com 169. However, for the same sites Yahoo Site Links shows 613 in links for pamil-visions.com, 5628 for toprankblog.com and only 18 for cyberspeaker.com. The winner is toprankblog.com, followed by pamil-visions.com and cyberspeaker.com

And the winner is: toprankblog.com!

Although it is losing the time on site and bounce rate tests, toprabnkblog.com is the site with the most traffic. How do they do it? Obviously not only via search engines, where pamil-visions.com almost equals its numbers, but via other referring sites as well. Considering the large number of links, we can easily assume that these send an important percentage of the visits to toprankblog.com too. Social networks also play a very important role.

The reason why toprankblog.com is so popular is also the brand man who owns it: Lee Odden. Another very important aspect is that toprankblog.com is mainly focused on SEO, with PR as a secondary discipline, whereas pamil-visions.com has different priorities.

Post from: eWritings - Online Public Relations

How to Select a PR Company That Knows SEO

The search engines take into consideration the entire content of a Web page. That’s why the image and sound files you display on a Web page should be related with its topic.

The best way to define this is “harmony.” The search engines want you to create harmonious content and not a soup of mismatches. Just like algebra where you group like objects together, on a web page you don’t mix the apples with the pantyhose.

“But, hey there, wait a minute,” you say. “How can the search engines judge what I display on my pages since we all know that they only read text?”

In fact, they need your help to understand images and other collateral files and that’s the advantage you have over the bots.

You have to apply the most basic SEO principles to help the bots understand the content of the image and sound files. You need to target keywords and write, yep, you guessed it, text.

Use keywords to name the image files. This works pretty much the same as naming HTML files (this topic will be analyzed in a following article).

For example an image file called cloudy-sky.jpg will usually rank higher than cloudysky.jpg or cloudy_sky.jpg. That’s because cloudy-sky has a more logical spelling (for both the search bots and the people) than cloudysky or cloudy_sky. There are SEO voices that say that Google doesn’t parse keywords in URLs when they are run together, but I wouldn’t count on this as a general rule. There are enough exceptions.

The image file name is not the only factor to making images rank.

The search engines look at the content around the images (and video and sound files) to judge their content. They take most of the information they need from that text. So it is important to have the content and the images interrelated.
For example,the image below will show you what Google displays in its image search results when someone types in Mihaela Lica.

The first three images do represent me, but most of the results are “related” to my name, which used in the search query box, becomes a keyword phrase. The only other “human” picture aside those representing me is a photo of the Italian actress Maria Riboli. Because I posted her picture in an interview on my blog, Google indexed it in its image results and it associated it with my name.

I uploaded the picture with the same file name as received from Maria, so from this point of view the image was not optimized. No wonder that the Google image bot is a bit confused.

But the image is properly optimized: it has an alternative text (“alt”) attribute — and a title tag.

<img width=”189″ height=”282″ border=”0″ style=”margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer” alt=”Maria Riboli.” title=”Maria Riboli.” src=”http://www.ewriting.pamil-visions.com/img/mariariboli_7268.jpg” />

But the search engines, although they do take those elements into consideration, place more weight on the text content around the image than the text placed on the image itself.

The keyword “Mihaela Lica” is in the immediate vicinity of the image depicting Maria Riboli. So the Googlebot returned the most logical guess possible for the association of that image.

If you go back to image showing the Google results for “Mihaela Lica” you will notice that the URL listed under Maria’s picture is http://www.ewriting.pamil-visions.com. This is the URL of the personal blog of Miheala Lica, the main website that Google associates with that name.

Now look at all the other images listed in the search results for that name. Obviously Mihaela Lica is not a cup of coffee, so the logical conclusion would be that my name is present on the page where that image comes from. Take my word for it: my name is there either in blog comments or possibly in the very text of the blog entry.

All these elements prove that, although they don’t ignore your HTML image optimization work, the search engines place more weight on the content around the images than the content on the images themselves.

This is the reason why you should write a snippet that summarizes the content of the image, in the immediate vicinity of the image. This is also why you shouldn’t stuff your ALT and title attributes with keywords.

Google uses other algorithms to rank images.

The primary purpose of inserting ALT and title attributes for images is to explain the content to the users, not to the search engines.

If the search engines don’t place so much weight on ALT attributes and image titles why should you include them? First for accessibility reasons. People who are surfing with their images turned off will still know what the image is all about. Then, if you use correct descriptions for your images, the general SEO scores for the Web page as a whole will be higher. That’s because you will have created that harmony between text, images and site that the search engines are looking for in order to rank your website.

A correctly optimized image from an HTML point of view would be:

<img src=”http://www.yourwebsite.com/img/image.jpg” alt=”Your keyword focused image description.” title=”Your keyword focused image title” width=”100” height=”100”/>

where you replace width and height with the actual sizes of the picture you want to display on your website.

Also, “keyword focused” doesn’t mean that if you have a picture of a strawberry you write “SEO chart.” Describe the picture. Write “fresh strawberry” or, if you insist on including “SEO”, find a way out like: “fresh strawberry adds beauty to SEO content.”

Remember:

• use keywords in the image file names
• do not unite the keywords but separate them with dashes, not underscores
• include keywords in the image ALT attributes
• include keywords in the image title tag
• place the image in the immediate vicinity of keyword-related content
• keep the number of unnecessary images per page as low as possible (unless you are displaying a photo gallery or product search results)

Post from: eWritings - Online Public Relations

SEO – Optimizing Graphic Images

The Robots, also known as Web Wanderers, Crawlers, or Spiders are programs that traverse the Web automatically to look for information of various types. Search engines use them to index web content and this is what we will discuss in the article below.

There are two ways to “talk” to the robots: by adding a meta tag or by adding a special “instructions” file called robots.txt. These instructions will tell the search engines where they may or may not go, but they cannot “protect” your site from “bad” bots used by hackers and spammers to collect information about your site. The point is: if there is anything you don’t want to go public, just don’t publish it on the Internet.

Using a Robots exclusion meta element will stop the bots from indexing your pages (but not from crawling your site).

This is how you should write this tag if you need it:

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, nofollow”/>

Evidently this tag is not recommended for websites that need to be indexed in the search engines and need high rankings.

The tag is supported by many search engines, including Altavista. Google also supports a “noarchive” extension.

When you use a robots.txt file the meta robots tag is not necessary.

I recommend that you use that instead of the meta robots tag, because the information you can include there is more relevant for the search engines.

It works pretty much the same as the meta tag, but it’s more flexible and gives you more control on what you want to have scanned and indexed and what you want to keep out of the reach of the search engines.

To create a robots.txt file you simply create a .txt document with this name and write in the commands.

To disallow all robots from your site:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

To allow the robots to index everything:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

It is not in your interest to let the robots index everything: you only want them to index relevant information. So if you have a folder that contains an old archive of your website or something else that shouldn’t appear in the search results, like vacation pictures or powerpoint presentations to customers, you need to disallow access to that information in the robots.txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /folder/

If you want to exclude a single file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /folder/file.html

If you use many images on your site and you want them indexed in the Google search results:

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Allow: /*

You should also include in the robots.txt file the path to your standards compliant (http://www.sitemaps.org/) sitemap. This will help Live (http://www.live.com – powered by MSN) find your sitemap and include your most relevant Web pages into its results

Sitemap: http://www.yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml

To summarize, the robots.txt file will then contain something like this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Allow: /*
Sitemap: http://www.yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml

The robots.txt file goes in the root level of your domain. It should not be renamed. The path to it to the search engines will look like:

http://www.yourwebsite.com/robots.txt

More information on the robots exclusion standard can be found at: http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/robots.html

Image courtesy: eVisibility – from the page: Robots.txt Protecting Since 1994

Post from: eWritings - Online Public Relations

The Robots Meta Tag and Robots.txt File

The funniest story today comes from Submitfrog.com – a company that proclaims itself the “genuine” Google PageRank increaser guru on the market. The company published a press release (no more and no less) through newswire service eMediaWorld. This “press release” – more a ranting article – answers the “one million dollar question”: “how to increase Page Rank?” You’ll never guess!

You can get highly relevant text links for your website from http://www.submitfrog.com at a very competitive price.

Amazing, simply amazing! I am so grateful that I’ve finally learned the secret. But wait! I am obviously wrong, I know nothing, because Submitfrog would never reveal its secrets of the trade:

There are literally thousands of webmasters and online business owners who would love to learn how SubmitFrog.com develops these incredibly desirable, TOP DOG Permanent links. The truth is we won’t tell you our secret tactics, developed over 14 years. Not a chance, so don’t bother asking!

Please note the “top dog” figure of speech that frankly let me speechless, but not enough to forget to tell you that Submitfrog has no PageRank whatsoever. The site is not even listed in Google for that matter, although the copyright states 2002-2009. The header of the site says “established 2004” – is it just me or do you smell a rat too? I was able to find press from these guys, self submitted of course, that dates back to October 2008. Despite their efforts to gain links and get their site listed in Google, the great search engine still ignores them.

To make a long story short, here are the questions: would you trust an SEO company that promises to “increase your PageRank” when their own site has no PageRank?

Would you trust an SEO company to do ANYTHING for you, when their own site is not even listed in Google? (Click on the image below to enlarge):

These are just two of the aspects you should always check when you hire a company to do SEO for you.
If you ever wondered what is a “snake oil SEO salesman” Submitfrog is your answer.

Note: links to Submitfrog.com were purposely left out.

Post from: eWritings - Online Public Relations

Defining Snake Oil SEO Salesmen

Introduction: Natural Language SEO

On-site SEO includes: optimized content, well-formed HTML code and creating Web pages that are both usable and accessible, basically designing with Web standards.

These guidelines are as powerful today as they were yesterday — if not more. But the difference today is that you can no longer go around misusing these techniques. To be taken seriously by the search engines you have to create content for the people. This is what the search engines – or, more precisely, what the people using the search engines — really want from you.

Don’t ignore the technical factors that help the search engines categorize your website properly and show it as a possible resource in their search results when people type in a certain keyword phrase or even search queries based on natural language.

Natural language is what most of the search engines are aiming for. The system, called semantic search, will deliver search results based on actual questions, sentences and phrases, and not on keywords. For example, you will ask “Who is George Bush?” and the search engines will be able to come up with relevant questions about both Georges, the father and the son.

Semantic search engines will need words too in order to deliver results. That the words get together in intelligent phrases… it is not the point. For any web page to appear in the search results for a particular query, the words people type into the query box need to be found in the content of the page too. Or at least words that are synonyms and make sense. Words that meet the user’s expectations. Content.

The traditional SEO ways are timeless: write relevant content with relevant titles. And if you remember the websites vs books analogy I made in another article, you’ll understand that, as a matter of fact, SEO is not reinventing the wheel, but applying common sense principles that were always used in publishing.

That the tools used in SEO have other names than what you usually find in books… is a matter of semantics.

What SEOs call key words or tags, editors call terms or phrases that classify the content.

What SEOs call site maps, editors call table of contents.

The list could go on. The point is: when done right SEO has a positive impact on your site.

I am not going to debate here SEO ethics. I am, however, going to give you some timeless tips to improve your sites for the visitors, for the Web, for the search and for yourself.

What follows is a series of articles that give you tips on something that can already be called “SEO stereotype:” optimizing page titles, optimizing meta data and, of course, all the HTML code with its tags, comments and attributes. Today: optimizing page titles.

The Page <title> Tag

Just the same way it appears at the very top of your browser, on-site SEO starts with the page title. This is not a headline, or the visible title of an article, but the title displayed by the browser on the upper left corner of your screen.

The <title> tag is contained in the <head> section of an .html page. It is a stand-alone element and not really a meta tag, but it is the most important step you need to take in optimizing your website, whether it’s a blog or static Web page.

This tag is what Google and the other search engines index in their results to link to your website. It is the “first impression” and your only chance to make the Google user click on the result pointing to your website. This is a mirror of the quality you offer on your website.

Here are guidelines:

• Do not stuff your page title with keywords.
• Do not leave it empty either. If you do, your link will appear in the search results as “untitled document.”
• Do not write page titles that are longer than 67 characters (including spaces). It’s OK if you do, but it is pointless. 67 is the maximum number of characters Google will index and if your page title is longer it will appear truncated in the search results. Yahoo! is more tolerant (about 76 characters) so if you optimize your site for Yahoo! feel free to go over the 67 limit.
• Write appealing page titles that summarize the content of the page.
• Use simple language and try to give a logical meaning to what you write: a natural flow of the language, even when you use keywords. If you write in English you could use the Emotional Marketing Value Headline Analyzer from http://www.aminstitute.com/headline/index.htm to determine what emotion you trigger inside your visitor’s heart with the page title you choose.
• Put your best foot forward: When you are targeting keywords, try to begin the page title with them – it will help gaining a higher ranking in the search results.

There are three styles of titles: informational (business style), teasing (polemic style) and cute (entertainment style).

Examples:

• How to Write Blogs – Informational
• To Blog or Not to Blog? – Teasing
• Blog-a-boo! – Cute

Each style has another purpose. Each of the above titles will appeal to different audiences. Your challenge is to find the style that is most appealing to the audience you want to target, and then go from there. Keep in mind that good titles will also be used by bloggers and other Webmasters when they link to your page or blog, so make them stand out. Oh yes, and don’t forget the keywords.

You need basic HTML skills to be able to optimize your page title (and your website in general) without help. When you don’t use content management software, you’ll have to make the changes manually using a HTML editor. The page title tag can be found in the <head> section of the HTML code. No matter what software you use to make the changes, this is the place where you’ll need to make your edits.

If your pages don’t contain the <title> tag, then you will have to add it.

So add after the <head> and before </head> the following:

<title>Your 67 characters, keyword rich, logical and appealing title</title>

Remember:

• the title needs to be appealing to the Web surfer
• the title needs to flow logically – so use natural language
• the title needs to contain the most important keyword phrase for the Web page, however, it should not be stuffed with keywords
• it should be related to the content of the page
• unless it is the “About Company” page, you do not need to put your company’s name in the title. It is pointless. The search engines are smart enough to recognize the name of your company from the copyright notice you place in the footer of your website and they will rank your site automatically when someone searches for your company.
• avoid cluttering your page title with needless characters and pointless words (avoid clichés and jargon)

Examples of bad Page titles:

• Welcome to Company (do you really want to rank for “welcome”?)
• Keyword, another keyword, more keywords, keyword again, keyword variation, keyword synonym, keyword plus keyword, etc
• ALL CAPS PAGE TITLE: VERY BAD IDEA

Post from: eWritings - Online Public Relations

Traditional SEO Techniques: Page Titles

Google News and Yahoo! News generate thousands of unique visits each day for a site. Many news publishers fail to understand these two channels, others simply don’t know how to apply for inclusion and how to create a site that qualifies. This is possibly one of the hardest SEO challenges for any news publisher.

In an interview for Ojr.org back in 2008, Google News’ Daniel Meredith stated that “Google News is “in the top five” news portals worldwide. In the same interview, Meredith also advises what news publishers can do to improve their sites up to the point that their sites look better in the eyes of the Google news bot and the editors: original content, multiple authors, proper attribution and response time.

As you see, only news publications with multiple authors get Google’s blessing. Clearly this raises problems for independent bloggers, but this also shows one possible trend for 2009 (already predicted by a few media experts): bloggers will get organized. Too many talented authors go unnoticed because Google doesn’t pay attention to single author news sites and blogs.

One of my 2009 resolutions is to get Pamil Visions’ new news site (in work, not online yet) included in Google News, Yahoo! and Topix. I’ve done it in the past for customers (confidential SEO contracts) and it’s time to do it for my own company as well. From idea to result I’ll have to walk a long way – it’s always hard to promote new sites (new domains). Although requesting inclusion is easy, all requests are subject to editorial approval. I am counting on the quality of the content I will produce to achieve my goal, but as you already know, content alone is not enough.

With very good web hosting (thus server response time) in place, what follows are the steps I will take, steps you could also follow to get your sites included in Google News.

1. Hire two more writers, to get the “multi author” aspect covered (we are already a team of three). Create author profiles for all the authors. You can apply for a position if you are familiar with issues such as online PR, SEO and social media.
2. Create original, non-duplicated content: from editorials to startup reviews, and publishing news from the field the site will cover.
3. Choose a news template for the site – blog templates are usually not accepted (unless the site has the popularity of ReadWriteWeb for example). I’ll go with Revolution News, because I have already purchased the template and it is very easy to work with.
4. Write content rich articles: which should include minimum 250-300 words in the body, images and if possible videos.
5. Article frequency: add at least 3 high quality articles a day, if not more.
6. Set the of the html page to the title of the article – this will show Google that the content of each page is unique.
7. Set the url structure in the CMS (I’ll use WordPress) to search engine friendly permalinks.
8. Create a Google sitemap.
9. Write an organizational About page and add an organizational Contact page.

In addition to these steps, there are some more “tricks” to make a site fit for inclusion: at least 100 articles before completing the request for inclusion and care with the number of advertisements published on the site. Too much advertising might determine the editors reject the application.

If this occurs it is not the end of the world: the Google News editors usually give a reason for rejecting an application. Correct the issues and resubmit.

Google News inclusion has obvious SEO advantages: sites indexed in Google News have more chances to occupy the first positions in Google’s Web search SERPs as well. News sources are also quoted by other sites, thus receiving more links.

Some more tips: on news sites article updates should be avoided, because Google News scans every URL only once. So make sure the information you publish is correct from the start. Try to get as many feed subscribers as possible.

Once you comply with all the above rules, inclusion in Yahoo! News and Topix (via Feedback button in the footer of the site) is really easy.

Post from: eWritings - Online Public Relations

SEO Challenge 2009: Get a News Site Included in Google News

$375 for a Google sitemap and a Yahoo! sitemap is an exorbitant price! Believe it or not, there are so called SEO companies ready to charge such a price and enough website owners who fall for the scam. This article explains why you should not pay for Google sitemaps.

SEO Scammers Approach Their Victims Via Email

Although unsolicited, we cannot consider the following email “spam.” The sender approaches the website owner individually, with a business proposition. The problem is not in the approach, but in the “offer.” The sender sells something the receiver can get for free.

A client received today an email with the following content:

As I was on http://www.webiste.com this morning, I was unable to locate a “Google Sitemap file” on your website.

I am not referring to a regular “site map” for people to visit online, but rather to a script which helps Google to read and index your website’s overall content. I advise you to visit us online where we explain clearly what a “Google Sitemap file” is and what you need to do to get one: http://scamsite.com/google_sitemap.html

A Sitemap file is a “code” placed in the root directory of your website which captures all the crucial information about your website, thus facilitating the crawling and indexing process for Google.

Give Google easier access to your site: Get a Google Sitemap file!

We offer a full turnkey service, including Google and Yahoo Sitemap files creation + registration. Visit us online for more details.

Regards,

Naturally, I visited the site linked in the content of the email and I finally landed on a page that featured the following prices:

Google Sitemap file = $250
Yahoo Sitemap file = $125
Google + Yahoo Sitemap files = $375

Note the screenshot below.

This is what I call SEO scam.

Free Google Sitemap Generators

My client was smart enough to ask why I haven’t developed a Google sitemap and if this was something he should worry about. Personally, although a Google sitemap cannot hurt, I do not recommend it for sites that are smaller than 100 pages, don’t have frequent updates and are already indexed for all their selling keywords in the top ten Google results.

I explained to my client that a Google sitemap, although it doesn’t hurt, it is not a “must have” for his site. I also advised him not to pay for a Google sitemap that he himself could create by visiting a site like http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ which offers for free all the sitemaps the email scammers want charge him for.

xml-sitemaps.com is free for sitemaps of up to 500 pages and offers for sites that need sitemaps larger than 500 pages an “Ulimited sitemap generator” that can be purchased for as low as 19,99 USD.

Other free Google sitemap generators:

http://www.sitemapdoc.com/
http://gsitecrawler.com/
http://www.neuroticweb.com/recursos/sitemap/

Other sitemap generators just “pretend to be free” – they require you to add a link back on your site or request that you place a script on your pages. Don’t use these tools: avoid giving link juice to sites unrelated to yours and most importantly avoid adding scripts that could be used by these entities to infect your site with malware.

Why Not to Pay for Google Sitemaps

To call a scammer by his name, there is something wrong in this equation – note my comments in purple, bold.

Google Sitemap file = $250 – for sites under 500 pages, this can be created free at http://www.sitemapdoc.com/ for example

Yahoo Sitemap file = $125 – Google, Yahoo! and MSN use the same sitemap protocol

Google + Yahoo Sitemap files = $375 – you don’t need two separate sitemap files.

Both Yahoo! and Google provide clear information for webmasters as to what steps are needed to submit a sitemap to Search Engines.

Visit Yahoo! Business http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/smallbusiness/store/promote/sitemap/sitemap-06.html to learn how to submit to both Google and Yahoo!

Google provides clear information about which types of sitemap formats are supported by Google:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=34575

and how to submit a sitemap:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=34575

In my experience, it takes less than an hour to create and submit a sitemap to both engines. Less savvy webmasters might need more time, but the procedure is simple, especially after reading all Google instructions, which are very clear.

To help MSN and other search engines find your sitemap, simply add this line to your robots.txt file: Sitemap: http://www.yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml

I hope the information above will safeguard you against paying hundreds of dollars to so called SEO companies that are ready to bill you for things you can really do yourself. Also, remember that if your site is built correctly and indexed in the top ten results of Google’s SERPs, you don’t need a Google sitemap.

Other articles you might find useful:

Read Rand’s advice on Google sitemaps for more details on this topic.

Self hosted Wordpress users can use this plugin http://www.arnebrachhold.de/projects/wordpress-plugins/google-xml-sitemaps-generator/ to generate Google sitemaps for their blogs. Wordpress.com users can add to Google sitemaps in other supported formats (see Google links above) as described here.

Blogger.com users can add a sitemap to their blogger blogs by following these steps.

Dave Weiss advises how to create Google sitemaps for TypePad.

Post from: eWritings - Online Public Relations

Don’t Pay for Google Sitemaps

I could actually write a book only about this as it is the single most important element to getting your website found.

Okay, I give up. Content is king

Every time someone says “Content is king” I involuntarily shiver because it’s such a cliché. Although it is a cliché, that phrase does help people understand what the whole ”content” idea is coming from. Content is, indeed, the most important factor and the place to start when undertaking an SEO optimization project.

“Content”, however, no longer refers just to the text on a page. It certainly encompasses text but also includes other collateral, like images, movies and .pdf files – and includes the concepts of accessibility and usability too. Creating content that people cannot easily access and cannot use is pointless. Creating content that isn’t explained properly is just as much a disservice to your potential audience: if you’re not doing your job explaining your pages, people who really want to buy your products or services might not ever find you, and maybe they were looking for exactly the goods that you have, at the price point that you’re selling them. This means there are two losers: your potential buyer, and you.

Search engines follow people, so you need to follow the people too. To do that, you need to understand people. So put on your amateur psychologist’s cap and start thinking about the people you think would want to visit your site and perhaps, buy something from you.

To be accessible for all, your content needs to fit well into the general design of the site, to be readable and comprehensible.

You already know that people are different, but did you know that the Web users do not read Web pages the same way you read a newspaper, a magazine or a book?

The most appropriate term for how the Web users read the Web would be “scanning.” And the scanning begins when they click on your link from a search result, and continues once they hit your page.

So let’s start by understanding that Web readers are different and let’s prepare the content for their needs and not for print.

Write “scannable.” 80% of the Web users do not read the texts on the Web pages they visit. They “scan” looking for precisely what they were searching for. They look for that particular key phrase that brought them to your website.

How to Write Compelling SEO Copy

The answer to “what makes people buy” is quite simple: trust. People make a purchase based on personal motivations, and trust is the most important factor in this equation.

How the content on your pages is written and the general look and feel of your website need to make people trust you.

When your visitors see that you understand what they need and that you are ready to respond to these needs, they will buy from you.

To build trust, you need to provide accurate information on your site. The smart buyer will double check the information anyway — so stay away from paying people to give you false testimonials. Do not lie to your visitors.

People take action when the product you sell and the way you sell it respond to a need they have. Avoiding pain and trouble are other strong motivations. Even gaining pleasure is a need.

Learn to know your visitors. Anticipate their wishes. What motivates them? What makes them tick?

You need to answer these questions in your Web copy. You need to be clear and obvious: you have less than 10 seconds to convince your visitors that you know your business and that you mean business. Understand where they want to go, and take them there.

Let’s say you sell Web hosting services. Obviously, you are not the only one doing that: you have to compete with thousands of companies who are all trying to do the same thing. In order to compete, you must find a way to prove your value and become the number one choice for your visitors. You need to find a hook.

Why would anyone choose your services? To figure that out, you need to find out what people are looking for in a Web hosting company.

Most of your clients might not understand complicated descriptions and technical terms. You certainly need to list them in the features, but in order to de-mystify your business, you should start with the benefits.

Your visitors will want easy setup, instant access to their accounts, free stuff and reliable customer support. They will also want to be sure that all private data is secure and that no one has access to the information that is saved on your server. All in all, what they really want is a hassle-free, reliable service.

List all these benefits at the most visible location on your website and link to the shopping cart first and then to the “features.” Your links after you enumerate the benefits should look like: “Buy Now ¦ Features”

If you take a look at the most successful businesses in your field you will notice that they target their content on what people need, providing information that lets them take action. None of these companies starts selling with a “Our company is the best hosting service around…”

Instead they write something like: “New customers get free domains, unlimited email accounts, etc.”

Free and unlimited. Two powerful words.

There’s another powerful word: the personal pronoun “you” and by “you” I don’t mean you, silly, but them.

Leave the self-praise for the About page and write the rest of the content to answer the needs of them, the visitors, and show them the easiest path possible so they can take action.

You don’t write content for the Web as you write for print media, not when you want to sell something. If there’s a similarity in writing styles, I would get you to think about radio ads. They have 15 or 30 seconds to get a key idea into your head before the music starts playing again. You have about 10 seconds worth of scanning from a visitor before they decide your site is worthy of their time, or if it lacks merit. So focus on readability: write in short paragraphs (not more than one idea per paragraph), using plenty of white space to allow an easy “scanning” of the page, use bullets to list important features and benefits and bold or italicize the ideas you want to highlight.

Break your text with headlines and sub-headlines. They should make sense and not be used for SEO purposes. It is recommendable that you use keywords in the titles and sub-titles, but don’t abuse this and don’t over-saturate the readers. Your readers should not feel that you are using keywords: the keywords should be natural extensions of your writing.

Start with the conclusion: this is a very good technique that Web writers borrowed from the traditional media. This writing style is called the inverted pyramid style and it leads people straight to what you want them to know and do.

Because Web users read in an “F pattern” the main ideas of the page should be concentrated in an area they actually read. The call-to-action should be there. You tell people first what you want them to do, and then you give them details.

When you tell people what you want them to do, you shouldn’t boss them around. You tell them first why you’re taking them down a particular path.

“With the newest Web hosting package you get even more free tools and resources than anywhere else plus an unlimited number of sub-domains and forwarding email accounts. All at a promotional price that will remain unchanged for the whole duration of your contract. No hidden costs, no recurring fees.”

I’ve highlighted the main keyword phrase. It is located in the first paragraph of the content, pretty close to the beginning of the sentence. Note that the keywords appear only once. The search engines will scan the rest of the text and determine the relevancy of each word you use.

To announce the new Web hosting package a good headline (<h1>) would be:

New Web Hosting Promotion Gives You More Free Tools

Part of your targeted keyword phrase appears in the <h1> too. Note the relationship between the title and the paragraph: the title is 100% relevant to the content. Also note that both the title and the first paragraph place the accent on the benefits, on what people actually get and need rather than technical details. The first paragraph also makes a promise of quality and reliability.

To maximize the SEO effect, link the “Web hosting package” key phrase in the first paragraph to the actual product page. A possible way to write that link:

<a href=”http://www.yourwebsite.com/hosting-promotion.html” title=”Discounted hosting plan.”>Web hosting package</a>

All the content on that page should reflect quality and reliability. It should answer questions clearly and concisely. Questions you anticipate, answers that will convey trust and lead people to action.

Write for the People

People. People. People. The Internet may be a network of interconnected machines, but at the end of those machines are the people, and they are the fundament of the Web. They are the heart of the Web 2.0. When you touch this heart, you become part of this amazing living organism. That is the best optimization you can do.

Remember:

• write in radio style and write clearly, concisely and accurately. Get to the point.
• do not deceive your customers, do not mislead them. They’ll blow the whistle on you if you do.
• build trust and rapport: keep your promises, provide excellent customer support. If you don’t, people will find out about it.
• write simply, write well, make the content personal and credible

Post from: eWritings - Online Public Relations

How to Write Compelling SEO Copy

A standard misconception is that SEO prepares a site to rank high for the keywords that have the most relevance. Yes, this is one of the reasons to do SEO. One of the less important reasons.

The most important reason is to prepare the site for the public.

But, as the public will use search terms to get to a site, keywords play a very important role in ensuring findability.

They are called keywords and this is exactly what they are “keys.” As they place your site on the right shelf in the Internet library, the keywords are also the keys that open the doors to your online store. They let people in. But as any “keys” they need to be the right ones to really open any door.

You think that your best keyword is “fishing apparel” – because this is what you sell. Apparel means “clothing in general.” Now, do you honestly believe that people looking for fishing clothing will type into the Google search query “fishing apparel?”

You see, “apparel” is way too technical for the typical user. It doesn’t speak the plain language. It is not bad to target this word as a “long tail” but don’t make it the main keyword phrase of your website. Try to rank for “fishing clothing” instead.

It works in design, it works in SEO too: keep it simple.

Key Words Vs Keywords

When you use fancy keyword suggestion tools, you are always tempted to pick the keywords the return the greatest number of searches and start optimizing your website for them.

So you will see that “fishing gear” returns far more results than “fishing clothing.” And you will probably want to rank for a keyword that brings you more hits, more potential buyers.

But you see, this keyword phrase is not your key word. Because “gear” deals with technical equipment. Sure, people interested in fishing gear would probably be interested in fishing clothes too, but you are not selling gear.

Targeting keywords that are not relevant for the content of your website is deceiving. You deceive your visitors, for making them enter into your shop when you actually don’t sell that special offer, and you are deceiving the search engines for making them deliver irrelevant results to the users. This is bad SEO.

Aside irrelevant traffic and some Alexa ranking boosts, these keywords will bring nothing. They will not bring the ready-to-buy customer to your site.

Unless you sell ads space on your site, you have no reason to worry about how high the traffic numbers are. But even then you should not deceive the search engines and the visitors by creating a scrap site (a site that compiles content copied from different sources on the web) or by trapping them into a page with no relevancy for the search.

Look for the right keys – those key words that your potential buyers are really searching for.

You can rank on the first page for many keywords, but when they are irrelevant for your target market they are not “key” words.

How to Identify the Key Words

Know your market. This is the golden rule and with it starts everything: business planning, website development and SEO.

By knowing your market you will be able to identify key words that are relevant to your site, in common use and not too general.

Let’s say you sell wedding dresses. The key phrase “wedding dress” is, of course your main concern, and it is also very competitive.

Even using a free tool like Aaron Wall’s SEO Book Keywords Suggestion tool you will notice that the estimate monthly searches number is huge.

Then, a search in google.com will reveal a high number of results for this particular term.

Of course you want to be on the first page for your most important key phrase and you can compete for that position – and you should compete. But ascension in the SERPs (search engine results pages) is difficult and it needs its time.

You could rank faster for less competitive terms, and these are the “long tail” terms, words that describe a product more specifically.

Examples of “long tail” keywords for a site that sells wedding dresses:

• casual wedding dress
• plus size wedding dress
• cheap designer wedding dress

These terms are less searched for than “wedding dress” and if you perform a Google search you will also notice that they deliver less results.

Less results for a key phrase means more chances for you to rank high for that particular term.

The more long tail keywords you target, the greater your chances to increase targeted traffic to your site. Targeted traffic means visits from real people who search for particular things from what you have to offer.

A very important factor you need to consider when you target long tail keywords, and keywords in general, is how to identify your real competitors. The sites that rank on the first positions are not necessarily your competitors.

For example, Wikipedia ranks on the first page in Google for almost every keyword you could think of. But Wikipedia is you competitor only as far as SERPs are concerned. It will not try to sell anything and it is pointless to even try to steal Wikipedia’s thunder. Better create a page that is valuable enough to be linked from the Wikipedia related pages. That will bring you some good targeted traffic, but not necessarily buyers, since the Wikipedia is just an information source and not a market place.

Once you identified you real competitors you need to start analyzing their sites and SERPs to see what they do and how to differentiate yourself from their services. Once you know the difference you’ll also have the answer to a very important marketing question: why should someone buy from you?

Unless you are in a franchise business or have the same supplier you don’t sell the same wedding dresses. So take a look at your products, compare them to what your competitors sell and then create a list of attributes that portray similarities and differences. Maybe your competitor sells lace wedding dresses and so do you, but your power-seller is a vintage lace wedding dress.

You got a long tail keyword phrase right there and targeting that will eventually bring you advantage over your competitor.

With vintage lace wedding dress you already have a good description of your product, you target your competitor’s keywords too and if your site gets more links and more popularity for the particular page that displays the vintage lace wedding dress you will rank higher in the SERPs for “lace wedding dress” too. You just need to convince the search engines that your website is better. Keywords alone will not do the trick.

To get more popularity you’ll need to create an exceptional web page – one that really shows the beauty of the dress, one that visitors will like to bookmark and vote for on social networks like StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit and so on.

It’s part of SEO to promote a site on various channels: article directories, press releases ezines, social bookmarking sites. But it is not part of SEO to abuse these channels.

If you want the visitors to like your site and to buy from you, you have to match their search criteria, not only in terms of “keywords” but also in terms of expected quality.

When you target and really want to sell “vintage lace wedding dress” make sure your customer will not land on something that looks sloppy and cheap like http://www.denisebyrd.com/

Customers looking for “vintage” expect quality and luxury. Something more like http://www.maggiesottero.com/ , which has a quality design, a design that inspires trust and concern about quality and customer satisfaction.

Remember:

• the key words you target need to match customer’s expectations
• do not target keywords that are irrelevant for your site just to get traffic on your site
• know your market first and then start keyword research
• keywords alone cannot put your site at the top of the SERPs
• ranking for irrelevant keywords doesn’t generate sales

Important SEO Pointers

SEO is not all about keywords. SEO deals with content structure, site logical structure, user trends, user behaviors and market analysis.

Web 2.0 SEO deals with many aspects of website development, but most importantly it prepares the field for what marketers call seller-buyer symbiotic.

Because web design it’s not enough. A website has to be beautiful, usable, accessible and SEO ready. But a website has to be, above all, useful.

• Who, aside yourself is going to benefit from it?
• Who, aside yourself needs it?

Answer these questions, honestly, and then, only then, start working.

Don’t worry. There are answers. You just need to approach the market with a realistic attitude. You also have to understand that being on the Web means competing against millions other entrepreneurs who, just like yourself, want to make the best out of their online presence.

SEO is a necessity because it interacts with all aspects of online marketing.

Once again: SEO is pointless if the market is not ready for what you have to offer, if you are not ready for the market. OK: if your website is not ready.

Search engines follow people. This is the main rule of the Web 2.0 SEO. In fact, all other rules are just subsets of this rule. Just like all roads lead to Rome, search engines follow people! So make your website ready for the people.

SEO is an integrated part of what modern marketers call online marketing. As you will see below, you cannot do SEO without marketing anyway. Integrate SEO with your online marketing strategy from the first stage of a project in order to cut costs and maximize your website’s potential.

Remember:

• SEO should not be an attempt to rank in the search engines for Web pages that bring no real value for the users. Many people have a hard time accepting that their websites lack value. But one thing should be clear from the start: without value there is no point in doing SEO.
• SEO will not force a visitor to buy a product from you, but it can prepare the scene for you to display your best products, in the best package. It opens the doors to your online store or services, but it is entirely up to you to make the sale.

Post from: eWritings - Online Public Relations

Key Words Vs Keywords

To understand the idea of web accessibility we first need to understand its purpose: to improve the accessibility of the websites for people using different devices, not just web browsers. These include, but are not limited to: mobile phones, text-to-speech software, text-to-Braille hardware and other hand-held devices.

Contrary to popular beliefs, web accessibility is not exclusive to people with disabilities, but it is aimed at improving the web for all the users that need access to information on the Internet.

Although W3C, the entity that first started the Web Accessibility Inititative (WAI) is pretty clear in its guidelines, there are still many misconceptions about some aspects related to accessibility. I will try to address some of these in a series I call “Demystifying Accessibility Myths.”

Today I will speak about the use of “alt text” – that piece of code that explains the content of an image for people who have images turned off in their browsers.

To correctly place the alt attribute into an image source, your code will look like:

<img src=”http://yoursite.com/image-name.jpg” width=”100″ height=”100″ alt=”compelling image description.”/>

Use of Alt Text Is NOT Synonym with Accessibility

“Always use alt text” some so-called accessibility gurus will tell you, but the truth is that the use of alt attributes is not always compliant with the W3C accessibility standards.

An image description is only valuable when it completes the text on the page. If the image repeats words that are already present in the context, the value of the alt attribute is close to zero. For the visually impaired users repetition can be confusing, especially when the web coders forget to add that simple dot to end the description of the image.

In many situations we deal with websites using graphics that have no meaning whatsoever: empty images acting as “spacers”, horizontal lines and other elements of design. These are exceptional situations when alt must and should be omitted.

However, depending on the markup used to code the sites (for example HTML 4), omitting an alt attribute could cause the site to no longer comply with the W3C HTML validation standards. Valid HTML is important to help the browsers understand the web pages so it is not synonym with accessibility, but it is generally agreed that valid HTML is one step closer to complying to the WAI rules than broken code.

HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language, so logically something needs to “read and understand” that language. Unlike people, browsers do not have dictionaries. They follow some rules and when the language they suppose to be reading is misspelled or incomplete, they cannot make any sense of the content and they will display the pages with errors of layout or sometimes they will freeze and not display the page at all.

Many web designers still ignore the importance of valid HTML saying: “it’s not the code that matters, but the way the page looks in the browser.”

OK, in which browser? How many do you know: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc. Invalid HTML will look and act different in each of these browsers. Invalid HTML will even confuse user agent devices used by people with disabilities. So it is preferable to keep your site HTML compliant.

A missing alt attribute is not a critical error, but it is an error nevertheless. So, how do you keep a site accessible when an alt attribute would only be detrimental for accessibility purposes but the absence of the alt attribute will create HTML validation problems?

Well, if the only problems on your site are the alt attributes then focus on accessibility. Non-passing a HTML validation test because of such minor errors will not affect your site’s look in any browser. If you include an alt attribute that has no meaning whatsoever you only hurt the users. What would an alt text saying “empty gif.” bring of value to the page? Who wants to know that you have an “empty gif.” on your site anyway? How is this relevant to your message and to the content of the page? Such alt attributes are useless.

If on the other hand you want to keep your site HTML compliant no matter what, but you also want to adhere to the WAI guidelines as closely as possible, then opt for a different site design that doesn’t require clear pixels and empty images or ask your web coder to use HTML5 or XHTML2 where omitting alt attributes will not generate HTML validation issues.

Alt Text Is Not SEO

Alt text is also useful for the search engines as it will help the bots understand the content of an image. There are no search engines able to index images based on pixel data. Until this technology is perfected the only ways to make a search engine correctly index an image is to provide the right image files names, proper alt attributes and to ensure that they blend harmoniously with the rest of the content on your page.

“Alt” stands for “alternative” hence “instead of.”

As you could see above its main purpose is not SEO. Of course, your SEO efforts can benefit from the use of alt attributes but don’t mistake using “alt text” for an SEO magic answer to your ranking problems.

Do not stuff the “alt text” with keywords, do not place there descriptions irrelevant for the content of the image – these are not good accessibility practices and in the long term they might even hurt your SE rankings, as any form of spamming does sooner or later.

UPDATES:

• Learn how to Create Effective Alternative Text at WebAIM.
• See how blind people use the Web.
• See if your site passes the Section 508 checklist.
• View examples of punctuation in alt text and why you need punctuation.

Post from: eWritings - Online Public Relations

Demystifying Accessibility Myths: The Alt Tag Attribute