Back in Action

As of late, things have been very busy for the Rank Seeker staff. We are feverishly working to build out our new site. We have received an unexpected number of great comments towards our new site and the work we've been doing, thank you!

Yesterday, a friend refered me to a CNN Article. The article is written about a man, Daniel Kovach, who makes over $10,000 a month with a scholarship web site. His web site is unique in that it has used an unconvientional method of finding visitors. Kovach, has built his site to directly target search engine terms that are popular amongst searchers but have very little competition, such as "The White Man's Guide to Getting a Minority Scholarship." By targeting many of these smaller markets he has gained a tremendous market share from the other scholarship sites, which are all competing against themselves and have to forfiet many of the search results to the competitor.

I highly recommend that newer web sites that wish to get into national markets, first look at targeting the 2nd and 3rd teir terms which will come much quicker in a SEO campaign, and once these terms are met, the bigger terms will come much easier.

In a Flash

The first developments of the vector-based web application were started in the early 90’s by a man named Jonathan Gay and his company, FutureSplash Animator. In 1996, Adobe Macromedia acquired FutureSplash and changed the software name to Flash 1.0. Since its release, Flash has become a popular tool for adding animation and video to web pages.

Flash animation allows developers to add interactive components to web sites without compromising the size of the site. This allows developers to add animation and video content that can be downloaded and viewed quickly by slower internet connections. This is important for most online companies who want the assurance that their website can be viewed by all visitors without great delay. If the site is too large due to animation and video, slower connections may not be able to access the site.

Growth in bandwidth technology and the decreasing rates in DSL and cable internet connections along with the development of higher quality video at a smaller size are changing web design as we know it. Developers can design web sites with fewer limitations. In the near future, expect web design to include many more interactive features which will bring the consumer closer to the seller.

Keyword Popularity

Most businesses struggle to develop a successful internet marketing campaign due to their incorrect determination of keywords. It is a highly overlooked subject that can be the key to your company’s online success. As a result, it is very advisable to ask your SEO specialist to research the keyword popularity, which is the number of search inquiries for phrases related to your business.

For Example,
Scenario: You own a bakery in South Boston which sells specialty baked goods. Most people would expect you to optimize your site for the keywords “Specialty Baked Goods.”

However, after a thorough analysis of recent search terms, it would be best to target the terms that best define your business as well as have the highest search requests. The term bakery has over 230,000 monthly search requests and would be our suggestion as your starting point. Speciality goods, receives under 100 searches every month; therefore, making it an ineffective search term.

In conclusion, defining the most effective search terms at the beginning of an SEO campaign can make a large difference to both your bottom line and ROI associated with your web development project. Keyword selection is just the beginning of your SEO project and does not guarantee success, but it will put you in the right direction from the start.

Things to Consider for SEO

1. The first step in creating a well optimized website is to identify your audience. This step is very important and something that can easily be over looked when starting a webpage.

2. Research the area of which your page is being built. Find out who your competitors are and where they are listed in Google.

3. Determine which keywords people are using to find your topic. If you’re a realtor in Boston are more people searching for “homes in Boston” or are they looking for “real estate in Boston”?

4. With these factors in mind, create a list of keywords ranging from most important to least important and use these as targets to determine where you would like to be listed in Google.

5. Build your page to impress each keyword. And what do I mean by impress? I like to look at SEO is being an audition. In this case, Google is the producer and your website is the actor. When Google calls you to the stage it is important that they have you applying for your most qualified part. You wouldn’t want to be a Boston real estate company and come to find that Google thinks you’re a Boston general contractor. To prevent this, there are a number of easy steps that can be used to help present your site to Google but before you do so, make sure you check out Google’s Guidelines at http://www.google.com/webmaster/ for helpful suggestions.

WANTED: Search Engine Ranking

If you're searching for the infamous search engine ranking, you'll first want to know he isn't at the local pub waiting for you. With 9 billion websites on the web, search engines have their work cut out for them. A new website may not be noticed for months even years by some search engines.

It is very important to know that even with the best search engine optimization, it takes months to achieve recognition by the major search engines. Search Engines gather a large amount of data about your site from a number of areas including; content, meta tags, links, outside links, content of outside links, social networks, classifieds, and more. All this information is taken and processed to build a search engine identity for your site. The more information you provide the search engine that is related to your target keywords, the higher you will be ranked. But just like a new website, the more information you provide, the longer it takes to for search engines to find. Outside links, can take years before they are found.

Search Engine Optimization is like an audition to a very large producer. Decisions are not made quickly, they want a strong background of proven work in the field, and they will require a number of casting before making their selection. Search Engine Optimization is a process that takes time and with show results with patience.

The Importance of Content

With the growing use of Flash Design and fancy imagery for web pages, content has become brief or non-existent. Many times, important content is placed within the Flash documents or images to give the page viewer a dynamic statement of the sites purpose. Often, these statements contain important keywords that are relative to the site and great for optimization. The sites viewers learn the sites purpose from these important statements but do the search engines?

A search engine uses a search tool called a "spider" or "bot" to read web pages. These spiders do not view, they read, unlike a typically viewer, a search engine spider only reads the code which viewers "view" the result of. Search engine spiders quickly read through the code to gather information about the site and its material. If you have ever read html code you will have noticed that a majority of the code is code building the site structure, then the text and the text. Images and Flash may have a large impact to the design but typically are represented by a small piece of code. This is because image and Flash files encompass all their material within the file and not the code. This also means that a spider will only see a single file and none of the material that is in it. To provide some incite to the content within an image file you can add an additional piece of code called an ALT tag which gives a label to the image which is not seen when viewing the site. These tags are very important and should be used whenever possible but they hold very little weight when compared to real text.

The best way to create rich content for optimizing a site is to use keywords frequently and to label your most important keywords with styles. Just as a well done Flash document impresses the viewer, text that is labeled with important tags such as; bold, Header 1, and Header 2 are given more weight by spiders. Text that is a within a hyper-link is also given greater weight as it is thought to be more important. When writing material for a site it is important to use specific keywords wherever possible. Frequently used words and phrases are noticed and generally a well optimized site will repeat its keywords and keyword phrases at 4% ratio to other words.

RankSeeker Launch

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