Texas SEO

Search engines, the great equalizer

June 30, 2008

Search engines really are the great equalizers aren’t they?

Think about it for a minute. Before the advent of the internet, it was nearly impossible for the little guy to compete with large corporations in the same field. Without millions of dollars, you simply couldn’t compete with their advertising budgets or their market share.

But with good SEO, all websites really do have the same opportunity. You have the same avenues open to you as giant corporations when it comes to optimizing your website. Sure, they can still spend millions on inbound link campaigns and other paid SEO techniques, but you can still compete if you work on every avenue of your SEO that you can.

Yup, you have the same opening to get a number one listing as they do. All you have to do is work for it.

Posted by Texas SEO under Search Engine Optimization | Comments (0)

Optimize a website

June 29, 2008

How important is it to have good content on your pages? If you ask several different SEO ‘gurus’ you’ll probably get several different answers. Some will tell you that title tags and metas are of the utmost importance, some will tell you that they aren’t important at all.

The reason you will get different opinions is simple. Because page optimization and optimizing the content within your site is just one factor in that site’s overall SEO. Actually there are over a 100 different factors that affect your search engine ranking and your overall SERP placement. Getting to the top of the search engines is not as simple as just adding the proper keyword density to your website.

Nope. You need the other factors to be included as well. That is if you want to compete.

One of the mistakes many firms make with their website is that they have an inhouse SEO expert that is tweaking the content of their pages day in and day out, but not doing much else. The same can be said for many work at home site owners. Changing a little text here and a little text there, but not working on any of the other important ingredients in the SEO recipe.

When working on your overall search engine optimization, remember to consider these other factors. Remember to balance your time. Put just as much time into working on your inbound links, etc. Because if you only focus on the content of your pages, you’re only focusing on less than 1% of the optimization your web pages need.

Posted by Texas SEO under Search Engine Optimization | Comments (0)

Off to Houston

June 28, 2008

Today I’m running off to Houston to do some business. So I don’t have a ton of time to write, but I wanted to pop in for our loyal Texas SEO readers.

Just a quick thank you to all that visit our SEO blog. In a very short time you have helped this site grow.

A big Texas Yee Haaww to ya’ll!

See ya tomorrow!

Posted by Texas SEO under Search Engine Optimization | Comments (0)

Making progress, good or bad

June 27, 2008

Some terms are extremely competitive, especially when you’ve got a site sitting on the front page, but you’re now trying to get that brass ring and take it to the top.

Now it all comes down to fine tuning the page in question. Now it comes down to making minor changes and tracking your progress. Good and bad. Sometimes you can see these types of changes effect your posting on a daily basis.

But be careful. Because floating around on page one can be caused by other things as well. Just because you made a change yesterday and dropped from number four to number five doesn’t mean that your SEO effort was wrong. No no no. Fluctuations are a normal part of the ebb and flow of the SERP pages and your effort might have been the correct one. You might just need to wait out the current flux.

My suggestion is that you hold off for a couple of days before changing anything again. Time and time again I’ve seen pages float back to the top, in a position better than they were in before, once the dust was settled. After you see that your position is fairly stationary, you can then make more adjustments to see what effect it has on your result position.

Be careful with your efforts. The page one juggling act can be a tricky one. Make ONE change at a time. Just one. Then see what impact it has. If you don’t like the result, change it back.

Little by little, you can see what works for your website, and you can obtain top position if you keep working at cracking the safe.

Posted by Texas SEO under Search Engine Optimization | Comments (0)

Tracking your progress

June 26, 2008

How well are you tracking your optimization progress?

If you hired an SEO firm, they should be providing you with regular progress reports. These should not only show where your pages are sitting in the SERP’s, but should show you the reasons WHY. More specifically, the report should tell you what factors your search engine optimization experts have added in order to bring you the results you have. Good or bad.

But what if you are doing all of the SEO for your site yourself?

Are you tracking your progress? Keeping a record of all the changes, additions, etc?

It’s important to track your efforts because you need to know what is working and what is not. Most of the actions you take are going to show up pretty quickly. With a little experience you can actually see what changes have affected your placement and why.

The biggest thing these days is working on your inbound link structure. So this is something you can monitor very easily simply by keeping a record and watching your backlinks by using a backlink tool. I happen to like Backlink Watch , but there are several good sites out there offering similar services.

By keeping a record of your efforts, that is, where and when you placed certain links, coupled with checking them with a backlink tool and then evaluating position changes, you can start to pick up trends. You can use this info to work on good inbound links from similar sources if you see that it is effective.

The reverse is also true. If you see that your rankings are dropping, you can evaluate the actions you’ve taken and do some damage control.

Either way you need to be watching your movement in the engines at all times. Because if you are not, your competitors are.

Posted by Texas SEO under Search Engine Optimization | Comments (0)

Take Small Steps

June 24, 2008

So your website has a page that is doing well, but not sitting at the number one spot. Maybe you’re sitting on page two for a term that you’re working on.

Page two is good. Page one is better, obviously. But making the move from page two to page one can be tough, and a bit risky if you don’t know how to do it. Many webmasters and site managers see the page two listings and instantly start making a bunch of ‘optimization’ changes to get that page hopping up to the front. But what they get, more times than not, is a page that falls in the ranking rather than going up.

Why?

Most of the time it’s simply because they lack the experience to know how to make the adjustments it takes to transition from page two to page one. They assume that if they take a look at the pages sitting above them and mimic what their competitors have done that they will overtake them instantly.

Not true.

Moving from page two in the SERP’s takes a bit more than just revamping the site and copying your competition. Remember that you are dealing with algorithm’s here my friends. Equations that use a multitude of factors to position sites on the SERP pages to offer the best quality content to their searchers. Your factors in the algorithm are different than your competitor’s. Though you are competing for the same keyword or phrase, the ingredients you are using to get there are probably different than their ingredients.

In an algorithm, you can change different factors and still come up with the same answer. You can change different pieces of the algorithm, giving more weight in some areas and less in others, but overall, come out with the same numeric value. In simple terms, 2+2=4 but so does 3+1.

Make sense?

Now how this affects your site in regard to tweaking your content to move up the scale can be tricky. What are your site’s strengths? What are it’s weaknesses? Do you know? More importantly, does the person handling your SEO efforts know?

This is huge, because tweaking the site to move up the SEO ladder may not require one bit of tweaking in regard to the actual content. Your content may be perfect. You may need to work on your inbound linking. Or you may need to work on your outbound links. Or, it might just be a matter of domain age. Or, it might be none of these. It might be one of many factors involved in the overall search engine optimization of a web page. But knowing what these factors are and where your site’s strengths are in each are super important.

Because changing any of them without knowing what it might do is just gambling. Not good SEO.

Don’t gamble with your SEO efforts. Know your website’s strengths and weaknesses when it comes to it’s overall search engine performance. Make small changes where necessary, and take small steps. Wait to see how these small changes effect your positioning, and then start the process all over again.

Work at moving up one position at a time. Sooner rather than later, you’ll find yourself sitting at the top.

Posted by Texas SEO under Search Engine Optimization | Comments (0)

Page Optimization

June 23, 2008

We covered keyword separation a few days ago. So today let’s cover optimizing the layout of a page.

First off, think about the websites you use every day. What do they look like? Are they big, cluttered pages. A mile of tangled mess that you have to sift through to get to what you are looking for?

Probably not.

It’s more likely that the sites you love and use on a regular basis are fairly simple. Short and to the point. Easy to navigate and you can get right where you are going, right?

No, I don’t have a crystal ball and I am not some sort of mind reader. What I am basing my assumptions on is the research of some of the largest websites online. If you take a look at the big boys of the web, Google, Skype, Digg, Facebook, etc you’ll start to see a trend that is no accident. All of them are fairly light pages that are super easy to navigate. They all keep everything separated from everything else, optimizing each page to be covered by the human eye in seconds and finding what you’re looking for without much effort.

These companies have done the market research for you my friends. They have spent millions and millions of dollars doing surveys and assessments to find out what works for people. To find out what people like and what they don’t. I’m sure Google alone has a larger budget for this kind of research than most websites have for operation each year. And take a look at the Google page. A teeny little 3K web page that loads like lightening.

If you look at screenshots of their humble beginnings you’ll see it wasn’t always that small. They have fine tuned the site to it’s optimum. And its the most used website in the world.

So back to the topic. The point of all this is that you should use what these web Goliaths know and make your site flow. Make each page easy to navigate, and keep them short and sweet. If you need more pages to cover your products or services, that’s a good thing. Optimize each page and you’ll grab even more of the keyword gravy train from the SEO Cafe. That’s top listings in the search engines for those that aren’t here in the office every day to hear my funky lingo….

Till tomorrow folks. Keep on optimizing those sites. You can take your site to new levels with good SEO technique.

Posted by Texas SEO under Search Engine Optimization | Comments (0)

Link Building or Link Blasting?

June 22, 2008

You’ve probably heard that it’s a big part of your overall optimization to work on link building. That is, working on obtaining good inbound links to your site.

But ask yourself if you are really link building, or are you link blasting?

Now link blasting is not a term that is commonly heard in link building campaigns. Many of the lesser SEO companies will tell you that they need a budget to get the maximum link structure possible, as quickly as possible. Requiring your company to pay more up front for link building services most of the time.

Understand that link building is not completely about quantity. Though the numbers matter, it’s equally important to review WHERE the links are going to come from. Bad inbound link strategy can result in getting your site removed from the SERP pages, rather than performing better.

The search engine spiders want to see quality when it comes to your inbound links. So your link strategy needs to be worked around this. You not only want more links, you want them to be from sites similar to yours. Offering similar services, or sites that are considered authorities that link to similar sites within your field.

Going deeper into this, you also want these sites to be considered high quality, or authority sites. These are sites that are trusted by the search engines, and they don’t hand out links to just everyone that asks for one. However, one of these links is worth 20 random, low quality links. These are the links you want.

The days of writing an article and submitting it to an article submission service are quickly coming to a close. The algorithms are getting smarter by the day. To get top listings is also getting more difficult daily. Smart SEO today focuses on where the links are more than the quantity of links you have.

Work on good inbound linking. Not link blasting. Simply posting your link to a million unassociated websites is not going to help much. But getting some of those tougher, high quality links will take your site higher in the result pages.

Posted by Texas SEO under Search Engine Optimization | Comments (0)

Web Pages, not Websites

June 21, 2008

How well organized is your company site or blog? Were you told when it was designed that your website was optimized for good search engine performance?

But was it really?

Remember this: Search engines crawl and index web pages. Not websites.

Now this is where it might get confusing to the non SEO (search engine optimization) oriented person. You see, your website is only a bunch of pages to the engines. Each one unique in and of itself, based on the content it offers to your users and their searchers. Yes, the hope and goal when each site is built is that the search engine spiders will crawl and index the whole website. But more than that, you need to understand that each page needs to be optimized individually for maximum SEO, and the best SERP (search engine result pages) placement for your business website or blog.

What this means to you and your company site is this. Many websites are constructed as a big, mixed presentation of all the products and services your company provides. I see it each and every day.

However, SEO is not done this way effectively. You cannot optimize the site well if all of the products and services are a big hodge podge throughout the pages. Instead, you should target one term you desire for each page. Splitting off different products and services to their own page.

Let me give you an example. If your company sells household cleaning products, you need to split them off into sections, possibly even a page for each individual product. Totally depending upon the desired keywords and phrases you wish to obtain.

My advice, almost always to companies wanting to get the best SEO performance out of their website or blog is to split things up where ever possible. Focus on one product, one service, one keyword, or one keyphrase. Build your pages around each and optimize them as individuals. This is how you get the best SEO for a website. By considering the SEO for each page. Not just the site as a whole.

Think small. Keep each page focused and keep it clear. Your overall SEO efforts will show in the long run. In those tough to crack SERP pages.

Until next time. Keep checking in on us here at Texas SEO.

Posted by Texas SEO under Search Engine Optimization | Comments (0)

Welcome to Texas SEO

June 20, 2008

Welcome to www.texasseo.net

Based in McAllen, Tx., Texas SEO is the only name you need to know to take your website to the top of the search engines. We have been in business for more than 13 years. Constructing and optimizing thousands of company websites and business blogs for top search engine ranking.

Even better, we know how to optimize your traffic as well. Getting you the listings you need and the customers you want. Traffic is good, targeted traffic is much better.

Here at Texas SEO we know how to optimize your business website to reach visitors all over the great state of Texas. It’s your home, it’s where you do business, and we are here to help you reach the audience you desire.

Contact Texas SEO today and take your company to the front page.

Call (559)761-0910 today for a free consultation.

Posted by Texas SEO under Search Engine Optimization | Comments (0)