Posts tagged: SEO

AdWords, Day 2

April 2, 2009, by No comments yet

So, far the AdWords campaign has almost 1500 impressions and four (4) clicks.  Now, that is not many clicks, but I am still happy.  For every click that comes in, they have the potential for passing it along to someone else.  So, while I have only a few on Day 1, I am looking forward to Day 14.  Hopefully, the total traffic to the site,not just from AdWords, will have increased.  As it stands now, we have already received our highest daily total on record – ten (10) hits.

I’ll take it.

More Search Engine Optimization [SEO] Suggestions

October 14, 2008, by No comments yet

I have been working on a total plan of attack with respect to getting my employer’s website higher up the Google Search rankings.  In addition to my previous post, here are some other suggestions from Mountain View, Calif.

If you are looking for suggestions about META descriptions, Google recommends the Open Directory Project.  Type in a search term and see what others have used to describe their website.

[Updated] Google Webmaster Tools

October 9, 2008, by No comments yet

I manage several sites, for work, church, clients and personal.  One of the most important things that needs to be done (besides CONTENT) is to work at getting the search engines to notice and return relevant results from any of those sites.  Recently, I have been making changes to my employer’s website and came across some tidbits fromGoogle.  In no particular order, here they are:

  • Get as many high value links to your site as possible.  High value meaning sites that are “real” and not just landing sites filled with advertisements.
  • Create a Sitemap.  Follow the Sitemap Protocol as this is what Google prefers.
  • Do not use iFrames.  They may be difficult to crawl.  I have begun removing those few we use and replacing them with pages that have the same layout.  This way the iFrame “effect” is largely maintained but with each page of content having its own link off the main page.  I also took the effort to leave the command to download all my images from the main page.  This way, the new pages load faster and it looks more like an iFrame.
  • Recreate your sitemap when you change your site.
  • Add the sitemap location to your Robots.txt.  Something like this: Sitemap: http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml
  • Speaking of that, make sure you have a Robots.txt file.
  • Give each page a unique title.  Use the organization’s name if necessary, but change the rest, e.g. thisMInistry.net – About Us and thisMinistry.net – Blog.
  • Use the Google Webmaster Tools if you can.  Free analytics and site recommendations from the largest search engine can’t be ignored.

I’m not sure what results we will get from these changes, but I suspect there will be positives.  If nothing more than indexing of our iFrame pages, that will be more than enough.  We use them in order to present content in a small area that can be viewed on all monitor sizes.  The image download I mentioned above it because many still use dial-up connections.

Together, these changes are intended to help others locate our site and services more easily.  Anything that I can do to make that possible is important.

Case in point is that I spoke with a service provider this week about increasing our visibility.  One of the other things he mentioned is social networking sites.  Now, my employer has little/no interest in social networking sites, so I was a bit skeptical.  However, he told me that sites like YouTube help because they are (the above mentioned) high value links.  YouTube is well respected and links to your site carry weight.  I may not want to host videos of my youth group on YouTube, but it would work fine for my employer who can take advantage of the increased visibility.