Another mistake many sites make is not having enough real content. Maybe you think your customers don’t want content. Or maybe you think your field or the way you have your web site set up doesn’t lend itself to producing good content. Recognize these for what they are: excuses. Web surfers go on the web looking for content. If you want them to visit your site and link to you – thus increasing your traffic and possible conversions – you need to offer them some value. That means content. Can’t think of any way to add content to your site off the top of your head? How about a glossary of terms for your field? Perhaps a frequently asked questions page makes sense. You might even be able to come up with some how to articles. The list can go on and on, if you get a little creative. 12. Tag, you're it again Use descriptive title tags on all of your web pages to show what the page is about. Limit these to 59 characters. Add descriptive description tags to all web pages, and limited to 150 characters. Your content is worthless if visitors can’t find it. If they can’t find you in the search engines, that reduces their chances of being able to find your content. And they won’t be able to find you in the directories if the spiders can’t crawl your site. Back in July, directory Land ran an article that listed some of the reasons a site may be uncrawlable. These include: * An incorrect robots.txt file. * Using session IDs or too many variables in your URLs. * A convoluted navigation menu. * Too much use of Flash, graphics, or AJAX. 36.What Every directory Optimization Company Should Know about Keyphrase Choice Knowing the Prospect There are many powerful and specific keyphrases available from which a directory optimization company can choose to bring traffic to your site. But marketing on the Internet should go beyond traffic for the sake of traffic and instead focus on getting the right traffic. A directory optimization company can target a phrase that is very popular, but 90 percent of those searching on it will not be true prospects. Or, the company can target a phrase that might be less popular in general but that is more likely to bring in the right types of prospects. Guess which is easier. Guess which is more effective. For the best results when marketing on the Internet, you can segment your prospects in three ways: * By geographic region * By level of service desired * By place in the buying cycle If you’re a regular reader of our SEO Chat newsletter, you probably saw in a recent Spotlight that Google is now treating domains and subdomains a little differently. What this means is that, if SEO considerations dominated whether you split up your content among several subdomains (i.e. trying to get as many spots in the SERPs as possible) you need to change your focus. Instead, look at it from your visitors’ point of view. Does it make sense based on the kind of content to split it up among several domains or subdomains? By Geographic Region If your business only offers services in a particular part of the country, then you don't need to be marketing on the Internet with generic phrases that will bring in people who cannot take advantage of your company. A knowledgeable directory optimization company will suggest specific phrases with geographic modifiers to bring in the traffic that will be most helpful for you. Costly SEO Mistakes You Must Avoid - A Question of Content Some of the issues surrounding content also deal with other areas of concern. For example, you want to make sure your website looks fresh and that you address your customer’s concerns, right? The firm had pages where customers could leave feedback. Imagine her surprise when she saw that they had let some extremely negative feedback from one of their customers sit on their feedback pages for at least a year! Somebody should have noticed that content and addressed the issues it raised. For example, the keyphrase "real estate agent" may bring in a great deal of traffic, but if you are in Georgia and the searcher is looking for a home in California, this isn't helpful. Instead, your directory optimization company would target "Atlanta real estate agent" and you would see true leads coming to your website. What about getting a link to your site from Wikipedia? The vast majority of articles in that volunteer-edited online encyclopedia do link to relevant web sites. However, Wikipedia uses rel=”nofollow” on those links, which means that they don’t get crawled by the search engines. On the other hand, those who read the article might choose to click on one of the reference links to find out more information, and a rel=”nofollow” certainly doesn’t prevent that. Just remember that if your link isn’t truly relevant, it can be removed by one of Wikipedia’s editors. Are you using images on this page? Images can really help you add more key words. Make sure you have a key word in the filename of all your images. Boost both your SEO and your page’s accessibility by adding key words to the ALT tags of your images as well. Finally, add key words to the title attribute of your images. Now let’s look at your links. This is the web after all, and everyone links to everyone else (well, ultimately anyway). So, do you have key words in the anchor text for links that go to another site? How about key words in the anchor text for an internal link from the page? If you publish lots of content, you may find that some of your authors will submit articles that link to other articles that appear on your site. This is a good thing. Next, make sure that you have key words in the title attribute of all the links targeted in and out of the page. After your first usage of the key word in the page’s first full paragraph, you can begin using it in ways that are designed to draw the eye: bold (second paragraph if possible), italic, and in a subscript/superscript. It also makes sense to use key words as part of your URL (a directory name, file name, or domain name). But do not duplicate the key word in the URL, or – you guessed it – you might set off over-optimization warning flags. By Level of Service Desired Another way to target your keyphrases when marketing on the Internet is by the level of service desired by your customers. For this, your directory optimization company will want to find out from you (or your sales department) what types of customers you attract. Naturally, if you shouldn’t waste time submitting your URL to the search engines, you also shouldn’t waste money on having someone else submit your web site to the search engines. Don’t do this even if they say that they’ll submit it to thousands of directories and directories. That strategy might have worked five or more years ago, but it certainly doesn’t work today. The problem is, most of the directories you’re likely to get your site submitted to this way are link farms, and those do get penalized by Google. The only directories which I have consistently heard might still be worth submitting to are DMOZ and Yahoo’s directory. For example, if you are an email marketer that offers high-level packages and when you are marketing on the Internet you use the phrase "email marketing," you will again be attracting a large amount of traffic that is not really interested in your services. Your directory optimization company should instead be targeting a keyphrase like "premium email marketing," which may be less popular but will still bring in more leads than the generic phrase. Likewise, submitting your URL to directories is a waste of time. They’ll come and index it soon enough; sooner than you might think, in fact, if you get some good links from other sites for the spiders to follow. That’s assuming you’ve set up your site so that they can crawl it (more on that in a bit). By Place in the Buying Cycle Your directory optimization company should be asking you what your goal is for marketing on the Internet. You may want to be the information source when someone is looking for your type of service, or you may instead want to be the destination when a prospect is ready to close the deal - or possibly a combination of both. Make no mistake; good backlinks are worth their weight in gold. But the good ones take real time and effort to generate. The ones that you’ll be getting for your $50 or $100 will be unrelated to your content, and therefore not counted as particularly valuable by the search engines. Besides, if your site suddenly gets tons of backlinks, that’s going to look very suspicious to the search engines, and could result in a penalty. So if you are a real estate firm that is marketing on the Internet, you have two directions in which you can go. Your directory optimization company can target phrases like "Atlanta real estate," which will bring in prospects that are early in the process and looking for general information about the area. In this case, you would want to make sure you have whitepapers and other informational pages available on your site. Costly SEO Mistakes You Must Avoid - Wastes of Time and Money
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