aaron dalrymple dot com

Here is an article that sums up the “struggle” that many suppliers perceive to exist. In the search world it’s evident by the fact that hotels try to limit (via Cease & Desist) what keywords resellers/packagers buy in pay-per-click ads. It’s really pretty ridiculous, imagine if they tried to tell agents that they couldn’t advertise in the newspaper anymore…

From HotelMarketing.com:
Say no to “lowest rate guarantees”

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Tagged as: Travel Marketing, SEM, Online Marketing

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Here is a great article on press releases. The one place they are not dead is online. Google and Yahoo news sites are a great way to pick up traffic outside of the traditional press release methods. More on SEO Press Releases later…

The Press Release is Dead (Will Somebody Please Tell the Clients?)

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Tagged as: Marketing, Online Marketing, PR

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Here are links to all ten steps in one convenient post:

1- Analyzing The Competition
2- Title Tags
3- Meta Tags
4- Copywriting
5- Sitemaps
6- Site Architecture
7- Site Navigation
7.5- Dynamic Content and JavaScript Issues
8- Submissions
9- Link Building
10- Updates and Maintenance

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Tagged as: Search Engines, SEO

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Updates and Maintenance

After a program is set up, the real fun has just begun. A successful program requires regular maintenance. If someone in your organization isn’t solely dedicated to managing your search engine marketing programs, someone should spend at least several hours per week maintaining the optimization program. Here are some of the main elements to maintaining an SEO program:

• Keep Content Fresh -Keeping content fresh on your site almost always gives you a boost in the search engines. In an effort to keep their indexes current, search engines will favor pages that are updated frequently.
• Updating for Search Engine algorithm changes - Search engines are constantly tweaking and changing their ranking algorithms to “improve” the quality of their listings. Updating pages has to become a routine done at least monthly to keep up. The person in charge of maintaining the search engine campaign should follow industry news/updates and continue to analyze competing sites and top placements. Here are some suggested publications, blogs and resources:
• Planet Ocean Search Engine News
• WebProNews
• Webmaster World
• Search Engine Roundtable
• Search Engine Watch
• GoRank
• Building New Content - Generally, one page can only be optimized well for 1-3 phrases. The more pages produced, the more keywords that can be covered, increasing organic search engine results, traffic and conversions.
• Re-submissions - Resubmissions generally aren’t necessary for the major search engines and directories. However, they may be necessary if your site falls completely or nearly completely out of the listings. If your site has fallen out of a search engine or has lost all of its good rankings, though, it’s a good idea to rework each page and try to determine what the problem is before re-submitting to an engine.
• Reporting and Tracking - The reporting tool of Web Position Gold is extremely useful for monitoring your listings as well as your competition’s. I feel that it is important to note that one should try to avoid getting ““bogged down in the details”” of tracking though. Meaning, search engine listings are extremely dynamic and can swing back and forth very widely. It is important to monitor and report so that you can measure your efforts, but I try to analyze results by looking at overall exposure - how many top-ten listings, total listings, etc. as opposed to focusing too narrowly on the fluctuation of individual listings. Most importantly, watch conversions.If you run your report a least one a week you’ll see shifts in your rankings pretty quickly and can make adjustments to your pages as necessary.

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Tagged as: SEO, Optimization Tips

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Here is a great white paper I ran across on link building from Text Link Ads. Very insightful and detailed - and worth a read for anyone working on a link building campaign:

Link Buying Guide from Text Link Ads

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Tagged as: SEO, Link Building

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Link Building

Part of any search engine optimization campaign should include a long-term aggressive link building campaign. This means finding high quality sites where you can purchase, request or trade incoming text links. Many engines, especially Google, put a lot of value on both the quality and quantity of incoming links to your site.

To the search engines, incoming links validate your site and indicate that your site’s content is worthwhile. What those links “say” about you matters too. This is measured by the linking text (known as the anchor text) used in the text link to your site.

Incoming links should include your top keywords in the linking text when possible and point to similarly relevant pages on your site. Hundreds, even thousands, of incoming links may make the difference in top Google rankings for the most competitive keywords.

To find relevant directories to submit to, searching Google for ‘Add URL” is a good way to start.

There is evidence that links that are traded (reciprocal links) aren’t valued as highly by the engines as “natural” one-way links. The best links are usually links that others included on their site just because your content is so darn good. Some go make some darn good content!

Other methods of link building may include article/content production, press releases, producing an RSS feed, submitting to forums and blogs, etc.

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Tagged as: SEO, Optimization Tips

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Submissions

The right way to get a search-engine listing is not always just to submit to the search engine. It’s NEVER going through a service that guarantees submissions to hundreds of search engines each month. Don’t even be tempted by that sales pitch. Both Google and Yahoo “prefer” to find your site while they’re out crawling other sites. This usually is accomplished through links.

Here is the strategy that I use for Google and Yahoo… After a new site is fully optimized, I will link it up from another site I manage or try to get 1 or 2 listings from a high quality directory (probably paid directories) using my keyword phrase. I will then wait a few days to see if Google’s Spider will automatically pick it up. The big search spiders are pretty active; they usually find it on their own. After the few days have passed, I’ll go ahead and submit the root domain of the new site to Google and Yahoo. This method has proven successful in getting pages ranked a little quicker than just submitting the page from the beginning because it gives the search engines a keyword link from a popular site to follow as well as a new submission.

Here are the submission URLs for Google and Yahoo:
http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl
http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request

Another way to improve your chances of making it into the Google and Yahoo engines quickly may be to buy some Google Adwords and Yahoo Sponsored Search (Overture) advertisements. Usually an investment of $50 each is enough to get your site listed initially. However, be aware that it may drop out of the index fairly quickly if you do not also work to obtain other outside links.

Just Released: Google Sitemaps
Google has recently released a beta version of Google Sitemaps. I haven’t seen any reliable info as of yet saying that Google Sitemaps are worthwhile or not. I tend to be skeptical of anything Google does to “help” webmasters. But, we are testing Sitemaps and will keep you posted on our results. There’s a lot of buzz about them going on mow and if you do a web search you’ll find a lot of discussion. Here is the link: Google Sitemaps

Remember, you can’t predict or guarantee placement in the Search Engines, and sometimes placement takes a while by any method. So be patient; you may have to wait weeks or months before you show up in the index. If your site does not show up in 30-45, definitely go through your site and look for anything that may be holding it back.

Also be aware that Google has a habit of putting you in their index fairly quickly but not giving your site decent rankings for up to six months. SEO experts call this the Sandbox Theory. Meaning, if you search for your domain (www.yourdomain.com) you’ll find your pages, but they’re not found when searching for your targeted keywords, or any keywords for that matter. Unfortunately this is just a fact of life.

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Tagged as: SEO, Optimization Tips

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Ok, so I’m squeezing in a half step here. It’s a note on dynamic content and JavaScript related to site architecture and layout.

Dynamic Content
Search engines may have a hard time indexing dynamic content. If a URL contains ?, %, etc., some search engines may not index that page. For SEO purposes, it’s a good idea to use static html whenever possible.

A recent “Google Insider” over at WebmasterWorld.com also posted that, “so many sites use ‘&id=’ with session IDs that Googlebot usually avoids URLs with that parameter.” So take a close look at the URLs in the address bar of your browser if you are having a hard time getting good search engine positions.

JavaScript
Whenever you have to use more than a few lines of JavaScript on your page, put it in an external .js file and refer to it with the “SRC=” attribute in your SCRIPT tag.

The tag would look something like this:
<script language=”JavaScript” xsrc=”scriptfile.js” mce_src=”scriptfile.js”></script>

You want to keep the readable copy-to-code ratio as high as possible. Some engines may quit crawling a page after so many characters, so too much JavaScript may keep some engines from even getting to the actual content of the page. To see what the search engines see, simply load up your URL over a live internet connection and view the page source.

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Tagged as: SEO, Optimization Tips

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Site Navigation

Navigation in an SEO site must strike a balance between being spider friendly and being user-friendly. It’s important to remember that even though the pages are search engine optimized, if a user can’t navigate around them, all of those extra eyeballs won’t translate into sales.

I prefer to use either a side navigation bar or a top navigation bar. Make use of style sheets (CSS) to make the links attractive and consistent with the design of the site (make sure your CSS are kept in an external file as opposed to in the head of each page). You should try to use keywords in your navigational links that correspond to the pages that they’re pointing to.

It also makes sense to use of a lot of page cross linking within your site. This, again, has a two-fold purpose. It lets your visitors find where they’re going as well as makes your page all the more spider-friendly for the search engines. Links, specifically text links, are how the spider finds your pages. And as an added benefit, in some search engines (Yahoo!), link text that contains keywords seems to give that page a boost as well as the page it’s linking into. So make liberal use of text links wherever practical.

Another great place to make use of keyword text links is along the bottom of your page in a footer. This is spider-friendly and gives your users an easy way to navigate when they’ve finished with the page they’re on. The bottom of a page is also a great place to merchandise offers, similar products, different date ranges, etc.

Breadcrumb navigation achieves the same thing, especially on a site that is more than a couple of pages and/or directories “deep.” If you’re not familiar with breadcrumb navigation, see this link.

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Tagged as: SEO, Optimization Tips

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Site Architecture

• Page layout
  Generally, simple is better (we’ll talk more specifically about navigation in step 7). I generally like to keep the tables simple, use text links wherever possible (text links along with style sheets can be used to make pages that look good as well as give us the linking text and search engine friendliness that we a’re looking for). We want to be sure that we use our keywords toward the top of the coded page. So if we have a page with a left-hand navigation bar, we need to make sure that navigation table cell has keywords in the very top.
• Directory Structure and page names
  Whenever possible we want to put all of our important pages in the root directory of our domain. This communicates to the search engines that they are important pages and there is some evidence that the further down in the directory tree a page is, the less important the Search Engines will deem it to be.Using your keywords in your directory and page names (within reason) seem to be of little importance to the engines. However, doing this, again, within reason, doesn’t seem to hurt and may marginally help in rankings.
• URLs
  One thing to remember when choosing a domain name is that all domain suffixes (.com, .net, .us, etc.) are viewed equal by the search engines. So don’t be afraid to grab one of those other top-level-domains to use for SEO. However, be aware of how it looks to the customer. You may be able to get keyword.tv,– but that may send up a red-flag to the consumer that is used to seeing commercial sites with a .com.A quick search in Google for a term like “Caribbean Travel” will reveal that Google is paying attention to the keywords in your domain. In fact, a recent Planet Ocean study revealed a 100% correlation between keyword domains and top rankings in Yahoo! and a 64% correlation in Google. So, go after domains that contain your best keywords if possible.

  Another advantage of having keywords in your domains is that it makes incoming links that contain those keywords much more “natural.” We’ll talk more about link building in a step 9.

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Tagged as: SEO, Optimization Tips

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