Internet Marketing, Web Design, SEO, Web 2.0 Optimization
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SEO for HTML5
01 month ago
HTML5
HTML5 is the 5th version of the computer language that is used to create web pages. HTML5 is designed to bring about several improvements for users. There are various new tags that are supposed to be very helpful for web design specialists who want to be able to classify their content. It offers some great alternatives to both Silverlight and Flash and HTML5 is SEO friendly, especially in terms of indexing and crawling. One of the greatest advancements is its usability with mobile devices. All the advancements sound wonderful; the trouble is that the internet browsers have not yet caught up with the latest features and HTML5 codes. They can render the language, but not all browsers are totally compatible with it.
HTML5 Web Design
There are several new elements provided in this upgrade that are advantageous. The <aside> tag allows for tips or sidebars. This is for content that is related to the main content but not necessarily part of the main document. The <canvas> tag allows for displaying graphics; even though it is primarily a container, JavaScript can still be used to render any 2D images and shapes. And <figure> is used for a diagram, photo or some other sort of illustration within the site’s content. And to add a caption for a figure you can use the tag, <figcaption> inside the figure element. While the changes in this language are beneficial for a web designer, it doesn’t eliminate the use of tags from prior versions of HTML. Some of the header tags are still preferable. For instance <h1> is still used within the ne <header> and the information that is secondary is still signified with the <h2> tag.
New Tags and SEO
There are some tags that will be important for the SEO specialist. These will be important aspects of the web design portions of an SEO campaign. To signify a block of content that is self-contained use a <article> tag to warp the article. A <section> tag can help divide a blog post or an article into section. These tags act somewhat like chapters in a book. For wrapping sections of headings use the tag, <hgroup>. This will be useful when there is content that has a headline and a sub-headline at the top. As an example, this tag might look something like this:
<hgroup>
<h1>Primary Headline</h1>
<h2>Tagline or sub-headline</h2>
</hgroup>
To enclose the site’s navigation use <nav>. This tag can be used any place on the site. A <header> tag can contain navigational information as well. The header tag has two possibilities. It can specify a header to a single page, or it can specify a header of an article or a section that is a self-contained piece of content. The <header> tag can also contain branding or a document’s main headline. The <footer> tag is similar to the <header> tag in that it can signify the <footer> for a single article; or it can be for an entire HTML document. The <footer> tag can contain meta-data and specifics like author of an article, or it can contain footer navigation.
These tags are all very important for SEO specialists who are working on website design as part of a web marketing campaign.
How HTML5 affects SEO
The shift to using HTML5 will no doubt be a slow one; but very beneficial. The newer tags allow for a new structure for each page and with the changes each part of the page now has a separate tag. Most of the tags that have been mentioned are bound to affect SEO in various ways. Some of the other tags such as <dialogue>,<audio>, and <video> tags will help to separate content into clearer categories. And as pages use HTML5 more frequently, search engines are likely to pay a lot more attention to the changes. The adoption of new tags will help search engines segment the material on pages. For example, using the <article> tag helps to clean up the HTML code and also reduces the need for <div> tags. Search engines can now place more importance on the content inside the <article> tags rather than comparing it to other sections on the page. And the new <footer> tag can isolate important information that can be beneficial to an SEO campaign too. This allows for more flexibility as each footer (or header) can be used for each section and more than one time on a page. This can be advantageous.
What is Dwell Time?
22 months ago
Dwell Time is another way to measure your site’s bounce rate that will give you deeper insight into how your visitors interact with your site. Using SEO best practices can get a site or a page at the top of the search engine result pages; and that is indeed the goal. And while it is very important how a search engine views your site and ranks it, the web crawler is not going to order your products, call for your services or show a true interest in your content. While we always want to practice website optimization, we need to remember that the point of the website is to interact and connect with our audience. Dwell time is not directly used in any matrix that helps rank the site any higher in SERPs. However, dwell time and bounce rate is a measurable activity that can help us know if a page is a success with its intended audience. Running Google Analytics is a tool that can clue web design professionals in on how effective the page or site is with the audience. Dwell time is simply how long visitors spend on the landing page before clicking the “back” button, closing the browser or entering a different URL. This is a very useful metric that can help SEO specialistsmeasure the quality of the site’s content and effectiveness.
Dwell Time
Standard and Actual Bounce Rates
Finding a standard or actual bounce rate is relatively simple. Calculating a bounce rate assumes that a person visits a web page through performing an organic search, or another link. Perhaps the page is low quality and loaded with ads and the visitor clicks back in a matter of 5 or 6 seconds. This is considered an “actual bounce” as there was very little dwell time on the site. If another person clicks on a site via an organic search and finds an interesting blog or site and spends about 20 minutes reading all the information before clicking back to get off the page, this is also a bounce. But this is a “standard bounce” since the visitor spent 20 minutes in dwell time. Due to the dwell time even though this is a standard bounce, it is not recognized as a negative blemish to the search engines.
How to measure your Bounce Rate
Technically, the bounce rate is determined by calculating the percentage of visitors who leave the page compared to the total number of visitors to the page. When you divide this out, you will get a decimal number, such as 0.5999. This decimal is then multiplied by 100 to change the number to a percent. So if you got 0.5999 when you divided, just multiply it by 100 so that your bounce rate would be 59.99 %.
What your Bounce Rate tells You
If a site has a very high actual bounce rate it may indicate that the site needs to undergo some changes. Even though a low bounce rate does not guarantee that the site will be successful, but you want to strive for the ideal situation: a low bounce rate and a high conversion rate.
A high bounce rate may be an indication that there just needs to be some changes in logistics. Perhaps it indicates there needs to be some changes in web design NJ, or just some minor changes to the site. It is certainly a good time to reevaluate the site to make sure it meets the goals for a successful SEO campaign and is also effective with the targeted audience.
How to reduce your Bounce rate
Relevant content is one way to ensure that a visitor stays on the landing page long enough to gather the desired information. If you design your site and include instructions or information such as “how to choose interior paint colors,” make sure that this is indeed the content included on the page. You want the page to deliver the desired content. A long loading time or too much third party content can add to a negative bounce rate. Make sure that any third party content adds to the website and it is relevant to the page, or it can turn visitors away. The site design is also very important. It needs to be appealing to visitors without being overwhelming. And it needs to be designed so that it is easy to navigate and easy for visitors to find the desired information.
SEO Tip # 15 Using Web 2.0 to Promote a Website
21 year ago
Image via Wikipedia
I would like to welcome you to my fifteen SEO tip of the day; here I will discuss the benefits of using Web 2.0 to improve your SEO.
Web 2.0 is a broadly defined category of sites, all of which share the characteristics that they allow users to interact with each other, share content… such sites include things like many popular social bookmarking and social media sites, as well as sites like Squidoo, and blogs; as a rule, Google likes web 2.0 sites and they tend to value content that is created on such sites highly and value links on these sites as well. It is important to note that not all web 2.0 sites are equally useful for SEO, and you should evaluate each site on its own merits; Facebook, for example is a great place to engage with your friends while not the best place to get good backlinks (most of your Facebook profile is not visible to Google and hence links posted on your wall do not help your rankings), Squidoo on the other hand is a great place for you to create good content as well as a great place for you to get top quality backlinks to which Google will give value. The fact of the matter is that there are currently tons of web 2.0 platforms (too many to list) and new platforms are being created all of the time, there are also many new niche web 2.0 sites that cater to certain industries, you should do your own research and find the right web 2.0 platforms for you that will help you promote your site.
SEO Tip # 3 Value of Internal Linking
21 year ago
by Moshe
in Uncategorized
Image via Wikipedia
I would like to welcome you to my third SEO tip of the day; here I will discuss the use of internal linking.
Having a good internal linking structure is an extremely valuable aspect of SEO, and if you have not done so yet, I advise you to examine the internal linking structure of your site. Internal linking is the way that all of the pages of your site link to each other and the way that new pages that you create link to existing pages and get links from existing pages in order to give these new pages some link juice. Internal linking is valuable both from the user perspective (users must be able to easily navigate to all of the pages of your site) as well as for search engines (in order for Google to fully crawl your site it must be able to find each page, adding links within your site will help accomplish this). When I create new pages I like to make sure that that page links to at least 1 or 2 other pages, and also that I add links to this new page on a few older pages that have already gotten indexed. Another good idea is to look at your pages that have the highest page rank and to try to add links to new pages there, this will help to raise the page rank of these new pages and will get them indexed faster. (An internal link does not give the same benefit as an external link, but an internal link is still very valuable). The most important thing to remember is this, from your homepage you should be able to navigate to every other page of your website within a few clicks.
I Hate Spam Comments!
81 year ago
by Moshe
in Uncategorized
Image via Wikipedia
This blog does not receive many comments, all comments are heavily filtered, spam is deleted… by the time the comments arrive to me for approval they are relatively few in number. Despite this, every day I receive at least a few spam comments! Ironically these comments are often left in response to a post that I wrote a while back entitled “How to Write a Blog Comment”. In this post I explained the things that went into a good blog comment and what a comment required in order to get approved by a blog owner (mainly the comment needed to be on point, unique, and had to have a real name as the author!) Oh yes, the other thing that a blog comment required in order to get approved is good grammar! (*If you are not comfortable writing in English, Do not leave long blog comments! A blog comment that has bad grammar/is poorly written will not get approved!) Yet despite this, I still get spam comments. Have I not made the instructions clear enough? Is there any other information that I can provide in order to aide you in leaving good comments? Please, please tell me!
Parents on Facebook
41 year ago
Kate, author of Arguing with a Doughnut, presents A Journey of Your Parents Joining Facebook.
Many of you probably have parental units on Facebook at this point. It happened, there’s no turning back. Let’s go on a journey, friend.
First, you get the request. There it is. Staring at you. If she managed to upload a photo, it’s a picture of your mom, smiling, at YOU. If she didn’t, it’s that pathetic cut-out silhouette. Either way, you can’t NOT be their friend. You can’t. It’s your MOM. You don’t want this to happen:
So you cave. And suddenly you realize you’ve got all those PHOTOS from undergrad.
Before you know it, your mom has discovered the photos too. Then your dad.
And no matter how much you tell them it was years ago, you get the feeling that you’re just worth less to them.
Then they start posting the pictures. Not the cute ones either, the ones where you’re twelve and awkward and trying to forget the “bangs” that you thought were cute.
All your friends think it’s “hilarious”, your mom thinks it’s “sweet”, and your dad “likes” it.
After that comes the day you realize you can’t post “GETTIN’ MAH DRINK OOOOOOON” and all the cursing your friends do on your wall has to be deleted and that reference to all the hot tail you got last night? Forget it.
Then it happens.
The worst of all possible things.
You meet someone.
You like this person, you really like this person, so you figure it’s time to become friends.
And then your mother friends this guy or girl. And then your father.
Game over. Admit defeat. Your Facebook profile has become nothing more than a way to (accidentally or deliberately) feed information about your life to your parents, who are endlessly curious about what “butterface” means.
Kate is the author of Arguing with a Doughnut, a blog that prides itself on being really silly. Please do swing by and check it out for all-original content!
The SEO big picture
21 year ago
One of my favorite lines from a book is the opening line from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”. I find this quote to have much wisdom for human nature, and I find that upon analysis it lends useful insight into the world of SEO, although (even though it might be sacrilege to rewrite a classic line of literature) it may need to be rewarded, “All successful SEO strategies are alike; all unsuccessful SEO strategies are unsuccessful in their own way”. What I am trying to say (however colorfully) is that there is no single recipe that will allow you to be successful in your SEO efforts, there are many different ways to have good SEO and there are many techniques that will allow you to rank well for your keywords and get quality, targeted traffic. Although there are a few best practices for on page SEO that it is recommended all webmasters follow, proper meta tags, well written H1 tags, alt tags for images… when it comes to off page optimization there are many ways you can achieve success, you can go the traditional link exchange route, posting thousands of links… or you can write articles, post blogs, write guest blogs, you can become active on the leading social networking and social bookmarking sites, or you can do web 2.0 optimization etc… We recommend that if you want to achieve SEO success you should probably follow a couple of these methods, and become proficient with them! The other thing that we recommend is that you stick to what you know best, your business, and hire a top SEO firm like NETLZ to do what we know best!”
Promoting individual blog posts
111 year ago
In order to have a successful blog there are two things that you need, the first is quality blog posts, your goal is to have real people visiting your blog in order to get information, entertainment… Writing quality blog posts should take about 40% of the total time that you dedicate to your blog. The second thing that is required in order to have a quality blog is blog marketing; the marketing of your blog should consume the remaining 60% of the time that you allocate to your blog.
Blog marketing can be further broken down into two parts; the first of these is submitting your blog to active blog directories, and active participation in blogger communities such as Blog Catalog… Being active in these directories/communities will help improve the general visibility of your blog, and the benefit of these is that you only have to submit your blog to them once and after that each blog post you write will be indexed and posted. The second method by which to market your blogs requires more hands on attention and can be more time consuming than the first, though it is necessary, this method is marketing (promoting) of each individual blog post that you write. The marketing of individual blog posts can be done in a few ways, greater participation social networking, so that each blog post gets added to your Facebook wall, or gets tweeted… A second way that you can market individual blog posts is through social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Stumble Upon… but beware that you cannot be the only person leaving all of the bookmarks b/c this will cause your account to get flagged and all your bookmarks to be deleted. There is also a community that I like called Blog Engage, this is an invite only blogger community and combines some features of traditional social bookmarking sites with a few added benefits. (If you wish to be invited to join this community please let me know via comment and I’ll invite you).
In addition to these methods of marketing your blog and individual blog posts there are also methods such as using subscriptions to promote your blog, and using the RSS feed…
How do you promote your blog? What is your favorite blogging community? Please share with us by leaving a comment below.
What is content?
91 year ago
“Content” seems to be the buzz word of the year, all I constantly hear is content this… and content that… but what I do not hear is, what exactly is content?
When dealing with online jargon, the word “content” refers to anything that you post online for others to see, so if you post a new Tweet, that is content, or if you write a blog, you have just created content, or if you post a video on You Tube of your friend falling off a chair… you get the idea right?
In recent years the amount of content on the web has exploded, and the importance of content rich sites has increased. Whereas it was once OK to create a webpage and rarely update it with new content, today it is recommended and expected that you update your site often. If you are in a competitive industry my advice to you would be to generate as much content as possible, write blogs, post articles, create videos…
What kind of experience have you had with content creation? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below.
How to write a blog comment
212Writing blog comments is one of the leading methods through which you can generate backlinks (this is a statement that is disputable and is not one of the issues that will be discussed in this blog post. For the record, I hold a neutral position as to the link building and SEO benefit of blog comments, but I do believe that comments help drive traffic to blog posts and are interesting to read, and so I invite you to comment on any of my blog posts). The topic that will be discussed here is the writing of quality blog comments, or rather how to write a comment that will get approved.
Throughout my SEO work I manage many different blogs on many different topics, these blogs receive tons of comments and in any given month I approve hundreds of blog comments, and report thousands of others as spam, or delete them, given this I feel that I am qualified to discuss this topic. The first and most important thing in a blog comment is, you should always (always!) use your real name in the “name” section of the comment form; I realize that the name will become anchor text for your link, but if I see a comment with the name, “Laser Hair Removal NJ” or “Modern kitchen showroom in New York” I am far less likely to approve the comment than if the author had used their real name. Oh, and as far as any link benefit that you might potentially get from anchor text, a higher approval rate for comments is more beneficial.
The second thing that I would urge you to do is to please, please, please, do not copy/paste the same comment to a bunch of different blogs! I monitor comments on many blogs and I often see the exact same comment being posted on each blog, word for word. I realize that this is probably done by a spam bot, but I’ve known webmasters to do this, with the misguided belief that more comments will be approved… I implore you, I like to approve comments, and I want to approve more comments, so if you are going to take the time to post a comment, please take an extra 20 seconds to skim the blog post and to leave a comment that relates to the post.
The next tip that I can give you regarding blog comments is to not waste your time leaving comments like “Good job” or “great post” even if these comments are not flagged by the blogs’ spam filter many blog owners are unlikely to approve such comments, and I know that I often flag such comments as spam.
There are many other tips that relate to the posting of blog comments, be positive, stay on point, do not try to include 10 links in the comment etc… and many more tips, but here we are nearing commenting tips that are (or at least should be) common sense, and I will not devote time to such tips at this time.
Do you have any advice regarding how to write blog comments? Please leave your response as a comment. LOL