Search engine optimization is hot among businesses within all sectors.  No matter what industry you may be in, increasing your natural rankings within Google should be somewhat of a focus for your internal marketing manager.  At Trinity, our job is to ensure the quality of our client’s search programs, primarily on the natural side of the house.  The only way to keep your rankings however is to follow the algorithm and ultimately understand the factors that are paramount in SEO trends.

This year has been an interesting one to say the least with Google.  The BIG change was dropped in May, when many sites were given a “N/A” for pagerank.  Much different than the “google sandbox” (ie where your site sometimes sits when it is new to the index), the sites that were discounted included sites that allowed “manufactured” links within their webpages.  Also discounted to a higher degree was that of reciprocal linking.  Often a staple of online marketing and link building, the value that the reciprocal linking practice provides has been reduced greatly from the past.

So where does a SEO go to get results?  Glad you asked…Here are what we see is teh emerging trends today in SEO - but by tommorow, they may have changed so research is key.

1. Daily content

It seems like a no-brainer but you would be shocked to know how many sites sit without being updated for months.  At Trinity, we have seen first hand how powerful this is.  In our SEO engagements, a large portion of our work is centered around content development.  We syndicate the content on the web, bookmark it in social sites, and then re-formulate the content (so its unique!) for publishing purposes on our client sites.  No matter what you sell or offer on your site - write about it daily!  Include RSS feeds to help with content integration from the blogosphere.  Create a blog and use the “tag and ping” tactic to inform technorati and other news sites of your content.  Following these processes is a must for high rankings.

2. Widget development

Ok, you may have to outsource the development of this one, but by creating a widget and marketing it online, you can literally have thousands of links coming to your site.  Think through what type of widget may make sense for your business from a marketing perspective.  Get creative!  Is it a functional tool?  Daily content updated via xml?  Joke of the day?  It really doesent matter.  All that matters is that it is unique, catchy, and marketable - both on your website and via viral marketing on the web.

3. Back to basics - Keyword selection and HTML

Lets not forget SEO 101.  Make every page unique.  Make every page’s meta data unique.  Target terms that have less competition but a high volume.  Use phrases within your title tags segmented by “|”. Looking for a great tool to help you in identifying the best terms to target?  Download the SEO for firefox tool and see what wonders it does for your keyword research. Get it at http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html

There’s so much more, but this is enough to hopefully get you down the right path with SEO.  Drop me a line if you would like to learn more or just talk shop..

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“What can we do to get our PageRank higher”?  These words are said to me at least once a week from clients, partners, and friends alike.  Google, by applying a measurable ranking to a webpage and by making it visual to anyone with a Google toolbar, has created an environment in which search optimization projects are frequently judged by this performance indicator.

But the question lies…How really important is PageRank to a website?

Lets not forget, pagerank is only one singular factor in the Google algorithm.  Primarily a measure of inbound links from on topic websites, pagerank does a good job of showing the level of percieved “authority” that is provided to a website.  But in doing research lately, Im realizing that it seems to be devalued within the latest tweaks by Google.

Look at Red Envelope.  When searching for “gifts” they show up on the first page.  Looking at their page rank - they have a page rank of 1.  Maybe this is an update or data center bug etc. - but this shows that pagerank is not the primary element to improving natural search.

The Trinity Insight website is another great example.  We have a pagerank of 4, which for a two year old site is not terrible but also not amazing.  However, we rank in the front page and even top three for our target keywords of ecommerce consulting, ecommerce strategy, etc…

The secret you ask?  Content.  Continuously updated, on target, and of good quality.  Dont get me wrong, pagerank and links are vital to natural search - just dont get consumed by thinking of increasing pagerank by adding inbound links when you should be considering your user experience and what content you can provide to better serve your core demographic.


Migrating a blog from the new version of Blogger is not easy.  In an effort to test out alternative tactics for link building/SEO tactics, Trinity has migrated to this new blog which is run on the word press platform.

Needless to say it wasnt easy.  Hunting for WP plugins to handle the new Blogger version was pretty tough…

The tactic that we are integrating into our SEO methodology is called “Tag and Ping” - a process in which blogs serve as a mechanism to build authority status within defined categories.   Its progressive and not utilized by most SEO’ers or businesses

Interested in learning more?  Shoot me an email…

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