Angry Birds, Bing and SEO

OMG, OK, it’s been eons since I posted, my SEO sisters and brothers. Eons. I know. Hey, life happened. My SO had gall bladder surgery after suffering nearly two months with the damn thing. Then the holidays. Then New Years, new courses. And I went up to NY to teach SEO.

Alright, anyways, I like playing Angry Birds. Yeah, it’s not like I have more important things to do, because I do. But sometimes you have to be creative in different ways. Like trying to figure out how to kill those &#$*@%^ pigs with the fewest birds possible. And cussing severely when you spend more than one week stuck on a level.

So, I did watch the Super Bowl, only because I wanted the darn download code. I didn’t get it, but I did whip out my trusty Android phone and did a search on Angry Birds. Bwahahahaha!!!!

I got the latest download, “Ham ‘Em High.” WHOO HOO!!!

Started playing. And promptly lost.

Then, I went back into a different level of Angry Birds and started playing. Now when I lose, which is frequent, the little annoying “Level Failed!” screen has a new twist…a great one!

You can now smash a little button on the far right, labeled bing. Next to it is a clever little sign, taunting you by saying “Need Help? Find Tips!” And when you do, my fellow Angry Birders, you are taken directly to Bing search results for Angry Bird walk throughs and solutions.

Slicker than owl poo poo, my friends. Check it out!

That’s just a cute, cute way of using SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages; remember, I said I would keep SEO simple) to help us Angry Bird-deficient players cut our learning curve. Maybe. Hopefully.

I haven’t looked at the solutions, because I am incredibly stubborn, and am determined I’m going to beat this damn thing on my own terms. With what little Angry Bird intellect I possess.

Hey, if you’ve tried the solutions, tell me what you think!

Until next time my SEO-lovin’ comrades,

Laters,

Nancy E. Wigal

Search Engine Academy Washington DC

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Spiders in SEO!

Howdy ho SEO folks,

Welcome back to another post in “SEO Made Simple.” Let’s discuss spiders today. No, not the 8-legged creatures that creep me out. They do seriously bad give me the willies ever since I got bit by a %$&*@# wood spider back in the 80′s and was sicker than sick for a month. Man, I was on antibiotics that were epic and legendary in their medicinal strength. I felt like someone had taken a baseball bat and beat me black and blue all up and down my right side. Dayum.

Anyways…I digress. The spiders I’m talkin’ about today are good spiders, even in my book. Nancy, WTH are you talking about anyways, spiders and SEO?

Ummkaaay…these spiders are not real. They are ones and zeros. They are software. Specifically, they are software programs that “crawl the web” (hence the nickname spiders) looking at web pages. Why? Because these little suckers can index your web page content. These are good things, peeps.

They’re also called “crawlers” or “robots.” Whatever you wanna call them, they follow links to web pages. They look at these web pages and determine if they should be indexed. You can think of them as scouts. They are out there, all the time, looking at old and new pages, sending them to Google’s algorithm to see if they’re worthy of mentioning in search engine results.

It’s kinda like baseball scouts. They go to games at the high school and university level, as well as overseas baseball academies, and they watch ball players to see if they’re worthy of drafting or signing to either major league or minor league baseball contracts. Make sense to ya?

So these here spiders send your web page data to a giant Google database, where the information about the page is stored. One of the first things search engine spiders look for when they land on your site is a little file called the “robots.txt.” Without getting technical or fancy, this is a little file that tells the spiders which pages the web site owner wants to considered for search engine results. You most definitely want this to say “follow,” not “no follow.” Just go with me on this for right now. We’ll cover the robots.txt file in an upcoming blog post of “SEO Made Simple.”

You can help these good little spiders find your web pages in different ways. First, make sure you have a site map. I already talked about that, read what site maps are all about.

Next, be sure you have text links on all of your web pages. Guess what? I also already covered those as well in a fabulous little post called “What Are Text Links?”

And for heaven’s sake, if you do nothing else this week…check and make sure you have your robots.txt file in order, ummmkaaay? Great!

Until next time, my fellow SEO warriors,

Laters,

Nancy E. Wigal

Search Engine Academy Washington DC

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Why Does Everyone Get So Excited About Page Rank?

Happy November everybody. I hope it’s all going well for you out there in the web world. Today, my SEO pupils, let’s talk a little bit about Page Rank. Wow, it gets capitalized…must be important.

Um, well no, not really. Let me explain. First, let’s go back in ancient history, which for the internet, is about 10 years or so. The Stone Age, if you will.

Google made up something called page rank. It’s supposed to be just one way to determine how important a web page is. That’s page, singular, not web site. Keep this in mind, umkay?

What exactly is Page Rank? Well, it’s only one of about 200-some elements Google uses. It’s used to evaluate links – which ones are most important, and which web pages are important because of those links, alrighty? Again, it’s just ONE way of determining how important a web page is. It’s not the quantity of links – it’s the QUALITY. Repeat that. QUALITY.

This is what PR looks like on a browser tool bar!

So, each web page on your site is evaluated and is given an individual Page Rank, or PR, as it’s fondly referred to. So, one page could have a PR of 4, while other pages may not have any PR at all. Make sense now?

Well, here’s the thing, my fellow SEO disciples. It’s old when you see it on your browser tool bar – like, a few months old. Now, what good is a metric like that? Not much. So, it’s nice, it doesn’t hurt, but you shouldn’t focus your SEO strategy on PR.

What’s more important, you may ask? Glad you did. As always, one of the things Google is constantly consistent on is good content. Read that again, peeps. Good. Content.

What else? High quality, inbound links from relevant, authoritative sites that complement your lovely web site. Back to content – updated content is always good. Those search engine bots can’t get enough of updated, relevant, good content. It’s like they’re on crack, and they’ve stumbled onto the mother lode when they find sites that update content as regularly as possible. So, help out a content-addicted bot, won’t ya?

Keep working on making your website as user-friendly as possible, so you convert more visitors to buyers. Notice how we haven’t said a word about page rank?

However…if you’re still not happy, go read Google’s FAQs on page rank.

Until next time, my SEO sisters and bros,

Laters,

Nancy E. Wigal

Search Engine Academy Washington DC

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SEO Jobs…Cos It’s A New Career, That’s Why

What’s up SEO pros…and those who wanna be. I hope all is well with you. Well, it’s been awhile since I posted for ya, but all’s I have is time anyways, so it’s all good. K, we’re gonna go off the res today. Let’s talk about SEO jobs.

I know some of you are already in the biz, either in-house or as a hired gum. You can stop right here if you want. Or not.

So maybe some of you are curious about SEO jobs – is it a career, can you make a living, is there a demand? Yes, yes and yes.

SEO is a growing career field, peeps. There are about 800-some SEO jobs according to a fast search I just did. This includes all kinds of positions – marketing, web management and editing, just to name a few.

Check out some of the salary ranges for those of us with SEO skills – up to $90K. Sweet, huh? You bet!

So where do you get SEO training? You can teach yourself. Start diving into online resources that offer SEO training. There’s a buttload out there.

Or, you can learn SEO in a face-face workshop at Search Engine Academy Washington DC. If you’re not here in DC, check out our other Search Engine Academies across the U.S., Canada, Australia and Malaysia.

We have two, three and five day SEO training and certification courses for ya. We offer you six months mentoring, free (best word in the language) after you complete one of our courses. You get a buttload of bonus stuff as well. We show you cool SEO stuff like:

Basic and advanced keyword research

Web analytics

Pay Per Click

Writing sales copy

Submitting your sites to directories and engines

Personalization of search

Social media

and much more.

So, the bottom line is peeps, if you’re interested in SEO jobs and training, there are resources to check out. If you contact me to register for one of my courses here in our nation’s capital, I’ll give you an additional $200 discount off the early bird registration price. The catch is, I’ll ask you a question about this blog post. But no worries, it’s an easy question and answer.

K…now we go back to making SEO simple for you!

Laters,

Nancy E. Wigal

Search Engine Academy Washington DC

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What Does My Competition Have To Do With SEO? Part 6 – Usability

Good morning, afternoon, evening SEO bros and sisters!

I hope all is well with you. Today, we are gonna talk about making your competition absolute chumps by outdoing them on your website usability.

I know…you’re asking WTH does SEO and usability have to do with one another? Oh, plenty…plenty! Read on.

First, do we all know what usability is? Yes? No? Well, let’s go over a nice little definition of it anyways, just so we’re all on the same page or screen, in this case.

In keeping with the principles I’ve established for SEO Made Simple, I’ll make usability real simple: it’s how easy your website is to navigate and be used by your target audience. It’s designing the layout, links, content and navigation such that your visitors are happy to stay, happy to bookmark your wonderful site, and by gosh and by golly, tell others to come visit your site to see with their own eyes!

What are some usability issues that impact your SEO and vice versa? Let’s look a few for a hot minute or two.

Links – I’ve said it once, I’ll say it again: internal linking is a great thing. Remember I said Google loves it. Well, your visitors do too. Be helpful – plan your site layout and navigation with links along the top, left, bottom and most importantly – in the content as text links. Make it very, very easy for your visitors to find your most important pages – you know, those money-maker pages, umkay? Great.

Text – make it an easy to read font. Don’t use Times New Roman; save it for the office report. Use Verdana or Tahoma. Heck, Arial works just fine, too. Definitely don’t use fancy script. Ugh, my eyes are searing just thinking of that.

Page background – there is no acceptable color, other than white or something that’s so close to white your eyeballs and mine can’t tell the difference. And by the way, ditch the cutsie background patterns. Please, I need to read what you’re offering. I don’t need to see dancing kittycats or flying teacups. Seriously.

Nothing screams “RANK AMATEUR AT WORK HERE” like a black background and red, yellow, green and white text. Oh yeah, real impressive.

Extremely onerous registration forms – wow, who just loves to fill out page after page of information about your third cousin’s second brother’s daughter? Yeah, count me in. Want to lose paying customers? Ask for crapulous information on the sales form. Keep it to what matters, which is contact information and credit card numbers.

Hey, do you know how you can easily tell where your visitors are bailing out of your site? Go to your Google Analytics account and set up funnels. Stay tuned my SEO comrades. I’ll talk about that one day down the road.

Lack of information – otherwise known as “content.” You know, that stuff that really matters – the words that tell me what I need to know about your products, goods or services – especially the price. Put it right out there, podna. Don’t be afraid of your price point. Don’t make me go through multiple pages; I’m gonna get more and more PO’ed the further you force me into your site with out revealing the goodies. Just sayin.

OK, I want to keep this simple. I’ve covered some of the more common usability issues. However, if you’re hot to read more, check out this blog post that has a buttload of references about lots and lots of usability issues. It’s all good reading, peeps!

Until next time…check your usability. Then come on back for more SEO Made Simple.

Laters,

Nancy E. Wigal

Search Engine Academy Washington DC

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What Does My Competition Have To Do With SEO? Part 5 – Links

Howdy doody my SEO friends! What’s shakin and bakin with your websites today? We’re talking about applying SEO to your website to jump over the competition in search results. There’s a lot of elements, but today we’re going to go over one of the most important things you can do for your website that will make it look good for the search engines. Ready?

Links. Yep, links – to and from your site, and within as well. Stay tuned, here we go!

Google places lotsa emphasis on links. Whole lots. Why? Because they’re Google. So, we are going to go along with the gospel according to Google, which is links.

First off, having your website pages linked from another website is pretty darn good, as long as the other site is reputable, like yours, and isn’t selling links. Don’t ever do that. Ever. Google knows those sites and will not look upon you favorably, i.e., boost your web pages in its search results. So don’t buy links from other sites.

Next, putting links to great websites from your pages is also very copasetic and mellow with Google. So go out and find really nice websites and let them know you’re linking out to them, and oh by the way, you’d sure appreciate the same kind of link love, as we call it.

Finally, you can increase your chances of leapfrogging over your competition in search results by linking your own web pages to one another. This does a couple things. First, it makes Google happy, and if there’s one thing you should know about SEO, it’s about making Google happy, who can make you happy by boosting your website’s ranking in search results.

Next, you really, really help out your website visitors because in addition to the navigation bars you have so thoughtfully provided on your website, you’ve given them even more and easier ways to find the other important pages on your website. So it’s all good!

Until next time!

Laters,

Nancy E. Wigal

Search Engine Academy Washington DC

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What Does My Competition Have To Do With SEO? Part 4 – Images

Howdy ho, my SEO friends. Welcome back to another post of “SEO Made Simple.” We’ve been going over the ways you can optimize your website to get ahead of your competition in search engine results. We’ve already talked about keywords, tags and content.

Now my SEO-savvy amigas and amigos, let’s talk about optimizing your images for a hot minute or two. But first, let’s make sure you know that the search engines like Google do deliver image search results, right? Righto.

So, in the game of SEO, every component you can optimize on your site is helpful. Sometimes very helpful. And since you know that you can optimize your web site images, this could be one more way you can out rank your competitor’s website.

How do you optimize an image? First, you don’t have to use the selected keyword for your page. You can use a synonym or another similar term to your keyword, because the search engines understand those relationships, hooray!

Depending upon what software creation tool you use, it allows you to put that term or word into the image so the search engine crawlers can find that term as it relates to the content and selected keyword for that page.

Pretty cool, huh? It certainly is.

So now you know! Get cracking on reviewing your website and see which images need to be optimized. It just may be the ticket to pushing your website above your competition in search engine results.

Until next time, happy SEOing!

Laters,

Nancy E. Wigal

Search Engine Academy Washington DC

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What Does My Competition Have To Do With SEO? Part 3 – Content

Good day, SEOers!

I hope you are well, and that your site is making money for you – or generating more phone calls and emails. However you measure ROI, it’s all good.

Well, this is a continuing series on how SEO can boost your website in search engine results over your competitors. We’ve had a lovely time talking about keywords and tags.

Now let’s talk about the meat and potatoes – or if you’re vegetarian – soy/tofu and rice – of your website. Whoops, sorry. Trying to be funny.

It’s called content. Right now, you’re either saying “Yay!” or “Ugh.” I’m guessing the latter, having talked to lots and lots of business owners. But think about this for a hot minute. Would we have the internet if we didn’t have content? No, we wouldn’t. And content is more than words. Content can be:

Paragraphs on a web page

Blog posts

Videos

Podcasts

PDF files

White papers

Images

FAQs

And so on. And the point is, it can all be optimized, to some extent or another. And in the race to top your competition in search engine results, no matter what kind of content you use, apply SEO!

Well OK…how do I do that? Select the keyword you’re using for a particular page of content. Use that keyword in context, in moderation, throughout the content. Don’t overdo it.Then upload the page. Repeat for other web pages on your site.

What does this have to do with my competition, you may ask? If your competitor hasn’t optimized her site very well, or in a long time, this could help you. Doing nothing isn’t the answer. Doing something, or in this case, multiple somethings, to optimize your website can boost your search engine rankings in the long run.

So, as we say around here, “git r done!” Go forth and optimize your content, comrade SEO!

And hey…don’t hesitate to contact me with your SEO questions or comments. I’m always happy to hear from you!

Laters,

Nancy E. Wigal

Search Engine Academy Washington DC

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What Does My Competition Have To Do With SEO? Part 2 – Tags

Howdy SEO folks. Howzit goin? OK? Good. Well, back to SEO made simple for you, the beloved, valuable reader who doesn’t have time to wade through SEO technical terms.

Now, about your competition and SEO…we already talked about keywords, so let’s get into tags. Your competitor has really sunk a lot of effort into optimizing her site, and it shows, because she consistently comes up higher in search results over your site. But no worries, we’re gonna fix you up, one post at a time.

OK, those meta tags and keyword tag. They need to have your keyword term in them. Because if yours don’t, but your competition’s web pages contain the keywords, there’s a good chance that this is hurting you in search results.

So remember…use the keyword term in:

The title tag – the page or website title

The keyword tag – use the keyword you selected for the particular page

The description tag – as part of your description, use the keyword for that selected page

I can hear you now – so, will this vault me over my competition? Maybe. However, there are multiple website elements you can optimize. The more you optimize, the better your chances are of coming up higher consistently in search engine results. And that’s a good thing, my SEO sisters and brothers.

Stay tuned! We’re gonna talk about content, images, links, usability and more to show you how SEO applied to your website can help you overcome the competition in search engine results. Until then, be well and stay happy!

Laters,

Nancy E. Wigal

Search Engine Academy Washington DC

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What Does My Competition Have To Do With SEO? Part 1

Hola, fellow SEO peeps. I know, it’s been awhile since I posted. Life, ya know?

Alrighty, enough excuses, let’s get down to SEO business here. Hey, let’s talk about SEO and your competition for a hot minute, shall we?

Lots of businesses with websites wonder how the hell they can come up higher in search engine results over their competition. The short answer is, it depends on lots of things. SEO things, that is. But you knew that.

So let’s take a few minutes of your valuable time and see what you can do to leap frog over your competitors. Remember, I’m keeping it simple.

First, have you looked at your keywords lately? No? Hmmm…too bad. Because I bet your competitors are using the keywords you need to put in your content.

Go eyeball your competitor’s keywords right now. Then come on back and read some more. Oh wait, I hear you saying, “But Nancy, how can I do that?” Easy, I say. Piece of cake, piece of pie, piece of…no, never mind that.

Bring up your competitor’s website. Pick a page – any page, or just stay on the home page. Whatever. Look at the top of your internet browser. See a word that says “View”? Click on it. Now, click on “Page Source,” or “View Source.”

Ta da!! Now, look for the competitor’s keyword tag. Wow, what is she using? Why, she has keywords that your target audience uses when they search the internet for your business! Are you using these terms? If not, you might want to seriously consider content with these keywords and putting those pages up.

Look through her other pages. Hey, if she’s SEO-savvy, her pages are all optimized. But are yours?

Well fine, you say. I’ll do that. Anything else, or am I done now?

Bwahahahaha…no my little SEO friend. You’re not. But remember, I’ve said your keywords are the foundation of your website. And you really, really have to know which keywords your target market uses to find your business. So, no my SEO child – we’re just getting started.

Stay tuned for Parts 2 through 7 on out-SEOing your competition. I’ll keep it simple, promise. In the meantime, get cracking on those keywords!

Laters,

Nancy E. Wigal

Search Engine Academy Washington DC

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