Home: Message List - Event: Search Engine Optimization

Event: Search Engine Optimization

CommunityTeam — Thu, 01 May 2008 17:26:37 GMT

Community Members,

Please join us in welcoming Matt Krop to your Small Business Online Community. Matt is here to answer questions on Search Engine Optimization. Today, Matt will be using the screen name SEOGuy.

About Matt
Matt Kropp is the Managing Director of iCrossing's Chicago office. iCrossing is a global digital marketing company providing best-in-class digital marketing services including paid and natural search marketing, Web development, social media, research and analytics. In this role, Matt leverages his 12 years of interactive marketing experience to provide strategic direction and tactical execution of search marketing programs for Fortune 500 clients. His responsibilities include natural search optimization, paid search management, local search optimization & management, content development, tracking and analytics.

To all Community Members
If you have questions for Matt, post it here by simply hitting reply and then refresh your browsers often to view Matt responses. The event will be moderated to queue the questions for our guest. After a question is posted it may be delayed and/or moved into a queue. You do not need to repost. Your question has been received but is in a queue waiting for the guest response. Matt will try to answer as many of your questions as possible. Please note, Matt will first answer the pre-event questions that community members were kind enough to ask in advance.

Remember the community guidelines; stay on topic and be professional.

So, what's your question?

Re: Event June 2nd: Search Engine Optimization

traff20 — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 15:27:24 GMT

Hi,

The SEO optimization is difficulty for everyone. But it's was need for every small business running correctly,
I mean building traffic is another important component for every small business.

Great solution will be helping other to grow.

Thanks
http://www.squidoo.com/busy_lens

Re: Live Now: Search Engine Optimization

mthomas — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 05:58:35 GMT

Hi,

While on online keyword research tools, I have used both Keyword Discovery and Word Tracker, and have got varying results. I have been looking for improved results wit respect to the time for refreshed data. Our marketing guy was recently mentioning about the ispionage.com solution, and how they refresh it on a daily basis. I found that they have a free trial as well. But as I am trying to get reviews on this keyword research solution by visiting forums and groups, there seems to be very less mention of the ispionage service around. Any thoughts?

Re: Event June 2nd: Search Engine Optimization

SeoGuy — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 04:46:13 GMT

That is quite a list of questions. I will do my best to answer them all:

Search engines will only index a certain amount of content from the page titles and meta tags. Try to keep them between 150-250 characters. The actual limits vary by engine. Keywords at the end of exceeding long titles and tags will be ignored. SEO best practices recommend targeting 2-3 keywords per page.

Ideally, you want your <meta keyword> tag to include the same unique keywords as in the title. When on page elements like page title, meta tags, on page content and header tags all support the same keywords, the page is considered more relevant by the engines, The more relevant the page, the higher in the results the page will be displayed.

Revising keywords and meta data will help SEO if you follow best practices.

A site map helps SEO as spiders look for a sitemap to begin their crawl. It looks like Google is indexing all the pages of your site (6 pages), so a sitemap wouldn't provide much help. It is very helpful for larger sites.

Having multiple domains pointing to the same site can actualy hinder SEO efforts and reduce the vistis from SEO. It depends on how you have the domains set up.

Re: Event June 2nd: Search Engine Optimization

blesstech — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 23:21:14 GMT

Can you please visit www.alquranacademy.com and suggest how we can improve our keywords and meta tags?

If meta tags or key words are long, it means key words towards the end will be ignored by Search Engines?

Is it recomended to have unique keyword/meta tags for each page on website (we have only unique titels)?

Is revising keywords and meta tags content too often helps or hampers SEO?

How is site map helpful for SEO?

How having multiple domain names (pointing to same site) can help in getting more visits and more hits in SEO?

Please respond.

Re: Live Now: Search Engine Optimization

SBOCTeam — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 21:04:35 GMT

Matt, on behalf of the SBOC Team and the members of the Small Business Online Community, we wanted to say we appreciated your time today and your professional responses to user questions.

Community members, while our session with Matt has now concluded, please feel free to discuss today's session and the questions answered. Again, if you'd like more information about Matt and iCrossing, visit: http://www.icrossing.com

Thanks again,
The SBOC Team

Re: Live Now: Search Engine Optimization

SeoGuy — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 21:01:52 GMT

Clnshirtz, if this business listing is your only web presence, I'm not sure what Yahoo would allow you to do to drive more traffic.

You mention you get 500 visits a month from the page, but how much business do you get? Are you tracking sales back to the page? If those 500 visits are converting to customers, I wouldn't change anything. If 500 people are looking at your page and going somewhere else, I'd recommend building your own site and taking charge of this channel. The end result you want is shirts on the hanger, not visits to a web page.

Re: Live Now: Search Engine Optimization

SBOCTeam — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 20:48:53 GMT

clnshirtz is asking:

I would like the expert to look at the 'site' we have http://local.yahoo.com/details?id=1003232

1 and tell me a few things:

1. Is there anything we should do on the current site to improve traffic?
2. If we had our own site, would they expect our traffic to go up much (we get 500 visits a month)
3. Does putting coupons and specials on your site increase the hits you get?

Re: Live Now: Search Engine Optimization

SeoGuy — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 20:43:22 GMT

That is a great question.

At its most basic, natural search results should be the most relevant to your query. The algorithm tries to match the best webpage to the keyword entered. If they fail to deliver on this, people will stop using the engines and they would soon be out of business.

Paid search listing can be purchased by the keyword, so the relevance is not as tight.

Before clicking on a site, read the description that appears below the listing. This will tell you what the page is about. Also look for the bold keywords in the results and descriptions. If your keyword appears many times, its a safe bet that the page is a good match.

Re: Live Now: Search Engine Optimization

SBOCTeam — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 20:32:25 GMT

Matt, can't thank you enough for your great answers.

MetroGal wants to know:

As a consumer that is trying to search the web, how can I be smarter about identifying the most relevant websites for me?