Optimizing your website for search engines is crucial nowadays to get found on the search engines. We all know the higher you rank, the better exposure you get, which could mean potentially more business. So you go out and hire a company to optimize your website, and slowly find (if they did it properly) that your website now begins to show on the first page or second page of Google for your main keyword. “Excellent!” you say proudly. Since you’re now ranking on the first or second page of Google, business will begin pouring in and you’ll soon be a multi-millionaire, right?

Well… not necessarily. After you website has been optimized, you need to determine how effective the optimization strategy is. This is done not by simply going to Google and searching your keyword, but by monitoring your website statistics, or traffic. I get at least 20 emails or phone calls a week from people who are totally confused by their website statistics, and believe with all their hearts that their traffic is excellent and they have every reason to feel happy and proud of what the optimization company has achieved for them. This is always the part I hate… having to burst their bubble.

When reading your website statistics (or traffic report if you will), you need to first understand what you’re looking at. Most website statistics programmes offer colourful charts and graphs which is great, but don’t get distracted by them; look at the actual data in the tables. These are some of the main things you need to look closely at:

1. unique visitors
2. total visitors
3. most popular pages
4. visit durations (how long people spend on your website)
5. external links to your site (other websites that had a link to you, that people clicked to arrive at your website)
6. which search engine robots or spiders are visiting your site, how often, how much bandwidth they used
7. what keywords people typed into a search engine to find your website

One of the main misconceptions I hear every day is “look how many hits my website got this month”. THIS IS IRRELEVANT. I cannot stress this enough. A “hit” on your website (or web page) measures how much content was downloaded when the person or visitor arrived at your page. Here is a simple example: You have 1 page that serves as your website. This 1 page consists of 4 images and of course, the HTML page. When I visit your website, it will be counted as 5 hits- 1 hit for each image that was loaded on the page, 1 hit for the page itself. This has nothing to do with traffic itself, does not give you any information on how popular your website is, and most importantly, DOES NOT MEASURE VISITOR TRAFFIC! I know of a couple of dishonest search engine optimization companies that will report traffic “increases” to their clients by sending them a report of “hits”. Hits always look more impressive as this figure is usually in the ten’s of thousands for a proper website, if not more. This misleading figure is usually misinterpreted as visits of traffic. I’m sure you’ve heard many people throwing around the term that their website got thousands of  ”hits” this month- unless they’re actually talking about visits, they have been mislead to believing this is actually the number of visits.

Which website statistics programme should you use? This is always tricky because there are so many excellent ones out there for free. Google Analytics is a simple enough one to use, but it requires javascript code to be entered in the footer of each page you want to track. I highly recommend a programme called “AwStats” . Awstats also requires installation if your hosting provider does not already offer it, but it is well worth it. It is 100% free to download and install, and shouldn’t take an experienced developer more than 10 minutes to install on your hosting package.

In short, make sure you understand your website statistics before jumping for joy at all the new traffic and visitors you’re getting, and most importantly, don’t confuse hits with visits!

Ranking your blog on Google is not as complicated as you may think. As blogs have become popular as a medium to drive traffic to your website, more people are now asking” How do I rank my blog on Google?” and “I thought blogs were search engine friendly, so shouldn’t my blog rank on Google?”. The answer to these questions is yes- and no.

Blogs are designed to be search engine friendly by allowing you to “tag” your articles (or posts) with keywords. There are also many plugins available for blogs (especially WordPress) that add the well known “meta tags” fields to your posts, which help in terms of search engine optimization. However, this is not all. By just adding search engine optimization plugins and thoughtlessly tagging your articles with keywords will not achieve the desired results; a lot more thought and knowledge needs to go into optimizing your blog. Think of it this way: you have the car, now you need to select the right type of oil and gas to get the car going at optimal performance.

Start by tagging your articles correctly. This means you need to select as few as possible keywords as tags for your articles. I know what you must be thinking now: ” Is this guy crazy? I’ve heard the more keywords the better!” or ” I want to rank for multiple keywords, so I’m going to use as many as possible”. If you do this, you may as well forget about ranking your blog on search engines.

Tag, or keyword, selection is crucial to ranking your blog well on search engines. If your article is about website design for example, tagging the article with “e-commerce” or “CMS” is quite pointless- you’re better off writing dedicated articles about those topics. Yes I know, E-commerce is a type of website, but it technically has nothing to do with the article topic (website design). Search engines are not as intelligent as people think they are: they follow specific rules when indexing and ranking websites. In the eyes of the search engine, “E-commerce” is different from “website design”. I know if you perform a Google search on “website design” you will find links that mention “E-commerce” as well- this brings me to the second point: description and content.

Your blog’s text content (i.e. your article) needs to be written in a search engine friendly way to start ranking on search engines. This means you need to select a topic and stick to that topic in the article. If you have a lot to say on a similar or related topic, write a dedicated article for that. After you have written your article, try and ensure your main keyword shows around 5-7% of the entire text body. Also, make sure your article page is named after the main keyword. These 2 points greatly help your chances of ranking well.

Lastly, refer to my other article about starting a blog for a list of repositories and directories to submit your RSS feed to. After all, you need to get the word out there that your new blog exists!

Many clients of mine ask about blogs- “what is a blog?” “how can it help my website rankings?”. Well, the answer, in short, is: a blog is a type of website meant for articles. It is completely editable (meaning you can add new articles, categories, etc yourself via an online administration area) and has the potential to reach millions of people around the world in a relatively short time frame.

As websites become more and more crucial to a business’ marketing plan, a blog can compliment your website nicely by allowing you to post discussions and thoughts on topics of your choice. Blogs have an RSS feed link built directly in, which allows people to subscribe to your blog to receive new articles whenever you write them. How does this help your website? I’ll explain…

Simply creating a blog and writing your everyday thoughts may be fun (if you have the time), but that does not help your website, or your website rankings on search engines, at all. You need to create a complimentary blog website for your main website. This means the articles should be about what you do, or the products you sell, for example. This helps in 2 ways: since blogs are designed to be search engine friendly, they usually get indexed (i.e. read) by the search engines rather easily and quickly. They also allow “tagging” of articles, which means you can specify keywords for the article to help get it ranked. This is where the basic principles of search engine optimization come into play: make sure you select targeted tags or keywords for your articles, and try and choose 1-2 tags or keywords per article. Spins-offs the tags are fine and don’t worry about pluralizing keywords.

Creating categories is crucial, and making sure the categories are clear and precise makes all the difference. In blogs, like WordPress for example, if you create a category you must create at least one article within that category, or the category will not display on the front end of the website. You can provide a short description for the category if you like, this also helps the search engines when they visit your blog.

Now that you have your new blog set up and ready to go, how do you start getting it ranked on the search engines? There are a couple of ways, but the main methods I use are:

• In the URL bar of your browser, you will see a little ‘RSS’ sign or text in the corner. If you click that, it will display your articles as an RSS feed. Alternately, you can also test out the RSS feed link by typing in “feed://YOUR DOMAINNAME/DIRECTORY THE BLOG IS INSTALLED IN/feed/. Our RSS feed is: feed://evolutionindesignz.com/blog/feed/, for example.

• Now that you have your RSS feed address, submit to to as many RSS directories or repositories as possible! A good site with a comprehensive list is http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-submission.htm. Another excellent site to submit to is http://www.digg.com. You can also use automated  software to submit the feed; many of them are free. Don’t forget to submit it to Google as well!

• Submit the normal URL (e.g. http://evolutionindesignz.com/blog) to as many search engines as possible. Again, there are many online services that submit URLs to many search engines for free, or you could use purchased software as well.

Once all this is done, monitor your blog’s traffic. It usually takes a little while before you start showing up in search engines, directories, etc and it all depends on how popular your topics are. Remember to be patient and keep writing new articles, and eventually your blog should start doing well on the search engines.

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So what is a blog, and what is an RSS feed? RSS simply stands for “Really Simple Syndication”.

As people are becoming more web savvy, they are learning of more ways to get their websites noticed, and most importantly, found on search engines. Most people are now familiar with search engine optimization or SEO, but more and more people are now blogging and creating RSS feeds.

Why is an RSS feed important, you ask? Well,  to put it as simply as possible (keeping true to the simplicity to RSS), an RSS feed allows you to literally broadcast your information across millions of web portals, websites, blogs, directories and more. An RSS feed will also help your search engine rankings, as you are no longer relying only on Google and word of mouth to bring traffic to your website. By listing your  RSS feed with directories, you are becoming more “searchable” on the internet- and chances are your RSS feed will be listed as a result for a search… somewhere.

Blogs are important  because they do alot of the work for you. A wordpress blog, for example, will generate an RSS feed automatically, by specifying a path to your blog in feed format, which begins like this: feed://companyname.com/blog for example. You can then copy this link and submit to to hundreds of directories and RSS repositories to get your information listed and ranked. The key to good rankings is:

1. Keep your information up to date,
2. Add new information as often as possible
3. Add relevant “tags” to your articles
4. Try and write the content in search engine friendly format

The last 2 points require a bit of search engine know-how, but to explain: a tag is literally a quick one word description of the content/subject of the article. Try and choose tags that ONLY deal with the content of your article, don’t try and use tags just to get ranked… this never works because the search engines will read the text content of your article, then look at your tags (or vice versa) to see what matches. If you write an article about “Website design” and you tag your article with “hosting companies” you won;t go very far…

Writing content in a search engine friendly way is a little tricky. Keywords must be decided upon before writing the article, and then carefully placed throughout the text content. You don’t want to use your selected keyword too often as this results in “keyword saturation” (yes, this is a real term!) and search engines don’t like that.

in short, use an RSS feed to help increase your rankings and drive more traffic to your website. Make sure to plan your articles properly and write them with care, then be sure to submit the FEED, (not necessarily the link to the blog) to RSS repositories, feeds and directories. Most importantly be patient- results take time but stay the course and you will see results.