These are just a few of the things I’ve heard from friends and clients regarding search engine optimization, pay per click and marketing online.  With internet marketing, search engine optimization, and pay per click, there really is no “one size fits all” solution…  Each case has to be looked at individually, and then monitored for results, and tuned and it’s ongoing efforts re-evaluated, etc.

These are also just a few of the topics I’m going to be covering this evening at the US-75 Business Professionals Learning and Networking Group.  If you can make it, we’d love to have you, and I’ll be covering these and a wide variety of other topics, and would be happy to answer your specific questions and address any issues you might be having and help you get a grasp on what your options are, how they will benefit you, and what you can expect with diffferent kinds of marketing campaigns, etc.

When I first start on a site, especially if it’s already built, there are a few things that I check for,  www. vs non www, i.e. checking that only one version of their site resolves, or make the appropriate entires into their .htaccess file and creating 301 permanent redirects, and insuring that they have either 100% uptime or 99.9% uptime.   A few of the clients I’ve picked up over the past year have had hosted applications for  their professions (i.e. online scheduling systems, or industry related services as a hosted application) and have found a few with DISMAL uptimes….  97% uptime, 98% uptime, etc.   A few percentage points as far as uptime can have huge consequenses as far as the ability to rank a site.  It a search engine spider goes to your site repeatedly and the pages either take a long time to load, or even worse, your site is down, you need to do something immediately about it, or assume you aren’t going to rank where you want to rank.

There are a few tools out there and uptime monitors you can use to over time, find out your actual availablity.  One free one is www.uptimedog.com .  When checking uptime, the more frequently they check, the better off you are.  The paid service I’m using now checks every 5 seconds.  I’ll find out what the name is and update the post with it, but I’ve found that a few of the sites I was working on wouldn’t rank regardless of what I was doing because of their downtime…  The paid service I use is called Service Uptime.  it’s very reasonable, will send e-mail notifications, and it’s been a HUGE help, both from my own standpoint, and being able to provide documentation to my clients from a neutral third party.

You need to make sure you have a hosting company who either has 100% (or 99.999% ) uptime or find one who does.  It’s not asking that much these days for those percentages of uptime.  Check to see if your hosting company has SLA’s (service level agreements) in regards to uptime, or see if they monitor or guarantee in any way.  If not, find someone who does.  The hosting company I use has awesome uptime, and I frequently have clients move over to them now.  The hosting I use and recommend can be found here.  I’ve used it for the past years and host literally hundreds of sites on it, and it’s rock solid, good uptime, and very reasonable.

If you have a question you’d like answered post it here and we’ll get it answered for you…  What’s been on your mind?  What is holding you back?  Also, if you have a question that may need a personalized answer, or if you have a question which we may need to clairify, please use the e-mail address that is easiest to contact you with, so that we may give you the fastest answer.

We also have a similar post about internet marketing.  If you have an internet marketing question post it here:  http://coolbubba.com/blog/what-is-your-number-one-question-about-internet-marketing/150/

If  you’ve been on the fence as to whether or not to implement breadcrumbs, there is now evidence that this may help you in the SERPS (search engine results pages) as well.

Time to roll them out for multiple reasons.

Site usability, the possibility of better crawlability, and better rankings.

Two interesting posts…

Breadcrumbs are an alternative form of navigation, as explained here.  You can see an image of what they look like, which is easier than explaining them.

This post from Rob Hammonds blog identifies a search he came across in which the breadcrumbs were listed in the SERPS (search engine results pages).

The short of this is that now, not only are breadcrumbs beneficial to your visitors in terms of navigation, they could help the crawlability of your site as well as help to get more of your pages indexed, among other things.

This site talks a bit more about it, and in more detail what affects it might have, or things it could affect:

http://actionableinsights.covario.com/601/google-following-the-breadcrumb-trail-new-breadcrumb-display-may-have-impact-on-google-ranking-algorithm/

Mike

Just to quickly recap, if you haven’t registered a domain name, you would want to include your keywords in your domain name if possible.

Now, the most important part of incorporating your keywords into your page would be your title tag.  This is one of the things that tells  the search engines what your page is about.  This is limited to 65 characters in Google.  You would also want to include your main keywords first here, with out keyword stuffing, or going overboard.  For example, if yor company name was Widget World and you sold blue widgets, you wouldn’t want your title tag to read “Widget World – Blue Widgets, Red Widgets, Orange Widgets, Widgets, and more Widgets.”  You would want to include your main keyword first, and then maybe another keyword or two and then your company name.  In this example something like “Blue Widgets, How to find the best widgets – Widget World.”  You want to incorporate you best keyword first, and then a variation thereof, and then your company name.

Another common mistake is having either no title tag or the same title tag for each page on your site.    Home Page, Welcome to our Home Page, Untitled Documents, etc. are the WORST things you can have.

In short, incorporate your primary keyword and a variation thereof, possibly a secondary keyword and then your company name.

In last week’s e-mail, we also discussed the importance of your meta description and meta keywords tags.

Now, we have your page text.  You want to include your keywords in the body text of your page.  Having your keywords in images that are not crawlable by spiders doesn’t help, as well.  You would want to include your primary keywords as the first words on your page, in H1 tags, and then naturally incorporated throughout the text on your page.  There is no magic number for keyword density (or the amount or percentage of text that is your actual keyword), but it is important to include your keywords predominantly on your page.

The on page search engine optimization of your pages will be greatly helped out by following these few simple guidelines.