SEO Plans
| Advanced (up to 1 year) | Premium (up to 1 year) |
| Initial Search Engine Optimization Report Search engine page optimization for up to 25 keywords Meta tags optimization including title, description 6 key phrases optimization Search engine optimization for up to 25 pages Detailed keyword analysis to define the targeted key Manual submissions to Google, Yahoo, MSN and DMOZ Site content structure/navigation review Website current rankings in search engines and directories Live website analytics software (Ranking Reports) Major directories category submission Reciprocal linking with websites and directories on your industry (25 Page layout and site structure recommendations Traffic analysis Keyword research analysis campaign to obtain the most targeted terms for Monthly review of campaign + ranking report Google Site Map |
Initial Search Engine Optimization Report Search engine page optimization for up to 50 keywords Meta tags optimization including title, description 15 key phrases optimization Search engine optimization for up to 50 pages Detailed keyword analysis to define the targeted key Manual submissions to Google, Yahoo, MSN, DMOZ, Ask Jeeves, All The Site content structure/navigation review Website current rankings in search engines and directories Live website analytics software (Ranking Reports) Major directories category submission Identify competitors back links Reciprocal linking with websites and directories on your industry (50 Page layout and site structure recommendations Traffic analysis Keyword research analysis campaign to obtain the most targeted terms for Monthly review of campaign + ranking report Google Site Map |
Site Analysis for Search Friendly Optimization
(Basic, Advanced and Premium)
- Evaluation of site for search-ability and ease of
navigation - Provide recommendations for pre-optimization
- Make development modifications to maximize engine
spidering capability
Stage I – Analysis & Research (Basic, Advanced and Premium)
- Establish goals:Is the goal to get people to call, ask for information, buy products online,
sign up for a newsletter, down load white paper, or all of the above? We
will ask you to fill out a questionnaire at the start of SEO portion of our
project to obtain initial background and clarification of your internet
goals. This will also help us determine the amount of writing, rewriting,
and/or editing necessary to achieve maximum Web site visibility. - Research to build new key word phrases and page
content:New key word phrases and page content will be recommended for your approval
based on selected target audiences, direct internet competition, tracking
reports, and research of popular search words for your target audience. - Edit copy:Once key word phrases are chosen for each page to be optimized, these key
words can be integrated into the copy. This may require rewrites, or simple
editing. - Optimize html code:This includes creating title tags, headings, image alt tags, and hyperlinks.
This is an important step in helping the search engines properly classify
and index the site. - Provide tracking code:Tracking code will be provided for placement on all-important pages for
tracking clicks, visitor behavior, and sales conversions or other
transactions.
Stage II – Link Building & Other Optimization/Marketing
Efforts (Advanced and Premium)
- Link Campaign:We can help you begin a link building campaign once the site is up and
running. This should be an ongoing process to find the best sites for
complimentary links, article listings, industry specific directory
inclusions. This effort can greatly improve your ranking on many of the
major engines. - Internal Links:A site map and keyword rich links should be built into your content where
search engines can crawl and index multiple pages on your Web site. - Additional Marketing Options:At this stage, we will recommend additional marketing options (i.e. bid for
placement, email marketing, etc.) to further efforts for attracting
target audiences to your site, keeping them there, and getting them
to come back.
Stage III – Reporting and Follow up Maintenance (Advanced and Premium)
- Tracking Reports:We will create a series of three tracking reports beginning with a week
following submissions, then one month following, and again in 30 day
increments. These reports will include: tracking of rank positioning on the
major engines/directories, evaluation of visitor traffic and audience
behavior, link profiles vs. competitor links, and documented trends and
changes in your target market. With these reports, we will provide an
analysis and action item list to further/continue efforts to reach your
online goals. - Schedule for ongoing Web Marketing Maintenance:It is important to establish a regular schedule for monitoring traffic
trends, competition growth, and changes in targeted audience behavior. This
historical mapping of your audience’s behavior will be a guide for managing
updates and modifications to your site that are critical for maintaining a
competitive edge and continuous ROI growth. We will recommend a schedule for
periodic reporting and ongoing marketing efforts.
Disable session IDs passed via URL
URL based session management does not only have additional security risks compared to cookie based session management, but it can cause also real problems when search engines index your pages. Your visitors may send an URL that contains an active session ID to their friends or they may save the URL that contains a session ID to their bookmarks and access your site with the same session ID always. The same way your visitors can store URL’s with sessions ID’s, search engines may index them as well, this means new users will access your site with an older session ID. But not only that, most search engines want to provide relevant results for their users, so different pages (URL’s) with the same content can be penalized or even banned.
We must all admit, SESSID or PHPSESSID added to the end of an URL doesn’t look very nice and it’s even not easy to remember. For this reason and all the above, you should disable URL based session management on your sites, and keep session ID’s in cookies instead. Granted, if you disable session ID’s in the URL, it can become a usability issue, because all visitors must have cookies enabled to make use of any code that requires sessions, like login scripts, but there are other ways to manage this internally.
The easiest way to prevent session ID’s added automatically by PHP to all of your URL’s, is to disable them system wide withing a .htaccess file. This file, containing one or more configuration directives that apply to that directory, and all subdirectories thereof.
Notice
Works only on Apache HTTP Server.
If you do not have a file called .htaccess in the root folder of your website, please create one and add following code to it:
|
php_value session.use_only_cookies 1 php_value session.use_trans_sid 0 |
Some server configurations won’t allow you to change PHP settings within your .htaccess file. You can have the same result if you store the configuration to a regular PHP file, that you include (once) on top of all other script files of your website. Simply add following code to the file:
|
<?php if (function_exists (‘ini_set’)) { //Use cookies to store the session ID on the client side @ ini_set (’session.use_only_cookies’, 1); //Disable transparent Session ID support @ ini_set (’session.use_trans_sid’, 0); } ?> |
An additional step is required if you already have indexed pages on search engines with session ID’s added to the URL’s, or if you know that people could have bookmarked them. You can do it even to simply prevent this from happening. The same way the above, always included, PHP file works, you can redirect pages with a session ID attached to it’s URL to the same page with no ID, and send a “301 Moved Permanently” header. Sending this header, basic visitors won’t notice anything, but search engines will know next time they crawl your page that the URL is wrong and moved to it’s new location with no session ID attached and update their listing. Either you include the above code to the file or not, following code will help you a lot:
|
<?php //Determine current URL $URL = ‘http://’.$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'].$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']; //Decode and clean URL $URL = urldecode ($URL); $URL = str_replace (‘&’, ‘&’, $URL); //Check if PHP is not in safe mode, //and PHPSESSID is passed via URL if (!ini_get (’safe_mode’) && preg_match (‘#’.session_name().‘=([^=&\s]*)#i’, $URL)) { //Remove PHPSESSID junk and unneeded characters (”&” or “?”) at end of URL $URL = preg_replace ( array (‘#(\?|&)’.session_name().‘=([^=&\s]*)#’, ‘#(&|\?)+$#’), ”, $URL); //Send Moved Permanently header @ header (“HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently”); //Redirect to clean URL @ header (“Location: “ . trim ($URL)); //End current script exit(); } ?> |
If you already have indexed pages on search engines, the update can take some time, specially on Google. It will happen in time, you can’t expect results within minutes. Maybe Yahoo! and MSN will update their index sooner, Google however needs more. It’s worth to do it, you won’t have just clean and aesthetic URL’s, but also better search positions and higher Pagerank if you are lucky. The redirect to your clean URLs is done dynamically, that’s why we use PHP, it’s not hard coded and does not require to update all files like most other solutions available on the internet.
MSN (Live) Rules
Microsoft has recently re-launched its search engine under the name “Windows Live Search.” Previously known as MSN Search, Windows Live isn’t as popular as Google but it has a large enough market presence to warrant careful optimization efforts.
So what does Windows Live want from the sites in its index? Here are some guidelines:
1. First, review the general guidelines for all search engines
2. Limit web page size
MSNbot prefers short HTML pages with about one topic per page. According to Windows Live guidelines, an HTML page without images should only be 150 KB. This is a good guideline to follow for search engines in general. Keeping your pages focused on one or two specific topics is more likely to achieve high rankings for the keywords on those pages.
3. Flat navigation
Windows Live Search prefers sites with a flat navigation, which means that all pages are fairly easily accessible from the main page rather than hidden in a deep hierarchy. Try to make your web pages no more than three links away from the main page of your site.
4. Review your web site description
If your site is listed in the Open Directory Project (DMOZ), Windows Live will display the description you have on ODP for your site in its search results. If you want to prevent this from happening, use the following tag:
If you include the above tag on your web site, make sure you create a good meta description tag with relevant keywords as an alternative.
5. Update your site often
An extra tip for Windows Live: Keep your site fresh! MSNbot tends to re-index sites with frequently updated content more often.
Yahoo Rules
Like Google and Windows Live, Yahoo wants informative, content-rich sites in its index. To improve your chances of ranking well on Yahoo, follow these guidelines:
- First, review the general guidelines for all search engines
- Meta tags
There’s been much debate about the usefulness (or uselessness) of meta description and keyword tags. Since Google doesn’t index them, many webmasters have abandoned the practice of creating meta tags for their sites.It’s time to reconsider both the meta description and meta keywords tags! Yahoo indexes and uses both – especially the description tag. To give your site the best chance with all three major spiders, craft a relevant, keyword-rich description and a keywords tag filled with your most important terms. Yahoo encourages webmasters to create a different meta keywords tag for each page of the site rather than using a general set of terms on all pages.
- ALT tags
Accurately describing images on your site using ALT tags can help those who use text browsers view your site. It can also boost your rankings. Yahoo indexes ALT tags and recommends using relevant keywords when creating them. - Unique content
Like other search engines, Yahoo would like sites in its index to have unique content. If you have many duplicate sites, consider removing them before submitting to Yahoo. This guideline also applies to the two other crawlers – MSNbot and Google.
Yahoo says it best in their guidelines: Create “pages designed primarily for humans, with search engine considerations secondary.” Ultimately, every search engine would prefer if webmasters followed this golden rule.
Google Rules
More than any other search engine, Google is helping webmasters and search engine marketers keep better track of their sites in Google’s index. The past few years have seen a variety of tools and help from Google aimed at making it easier for site owners to get their web site indexed and ranked.
But before using the many resources that Google has available, make sure that your site is compliant with Google’s technical and quality guidelines. You can access the full list here.
Important Google guidelines:
- Review the general guidelines for all search engines
- Create a Google Sitemap
Google now offers a variety of tools to communicate with site owners. One of these – Google Sitemaps – can help you tell Google’s spider which pages you’d like included, their importance and how often you’d like your site revisited.For more information, visit Google’s Webmaster Tools.
- Use relevant keywords on your pages
Ask yourself how you’d like your customers to find you and make sure that these terms are included on your pages. You can use Google’s Webmaster Tools to see which keywords are viewed as important for your web site by Google (choose “Page Analysis” under the “Statistics” tab). - Use text, not images or Flash
Don’t hide your keywords inside images or Flash files. Search engines can’t see this text, which means that it doesn’t add any relevance to your pages. - Use Lynx to check your site
Google offers a very useful tip for webmasters: Use a text browser, such as Lynx, to check how search engines view your web sites. If you see that your keywords are hidden behind JavaScripts or template files, redesign your site so that it becomes easily accessible to a search engine spider.
If you’d like to have your site indexed and ranked by Google, we recommend making use of the numerous resources Google now has available for web site owners:
- Google Webmaster Tools
Includes Sitemaps, Page Analysis, crawl statistics and other tools - Google Help for Webmasters
Comprehensive FAQs for web site owners - Google Webmaster Blog
This is an official blog maintained by Google for webmasters. It includes tips, latest news and updates - Google Webmaster Discussion Group
This discussion board is moderated by Googlers. You can ask general questions and talk to other site owners about Google indexing and ranking issues - Matt Cutts
Matt Cutts, a software engineer at Google, blogs about Google, SEO and other things. Unlike the Google Webmaster Blog, Cutts’ blog is unofficial, but it still has plenty of useful insights and tidbits.
Resources
SEO Resources & Guides
- Search Engine Watch
- High Rankings - Discussion Forum
- Search Engine Forums - very high volume boards, sometimes hard to find the true nuggets
- SEO Forumz - A good place to find alternative opinions and information
- Virtual Promote
- Art of Business Web Site Promotion
- Webcom Guide - Publicizing Your Web Site
Search Voyeur Sites
Discover what people are searching for on the web
- MetaCrawler Metaspy
- CNET’s Search.com “snoop”
- The Lycos 50
- Overture Search Term suggestion tool
- Overture Spanish Search Term suggestion tool for Spain (Español)
- Overture French Canadian Search Term suggestion tool for Canada (français)
- Overture Search Term suggestion tool for France (français)
- Overture German Search Term suggestion tool for Germany (Deutch)
- Nu Blue - Keyword Suggestion tool (Google & Overture)
- Understanding and comparing web search tools - last updated Feb 1999
- Wordtracker
- Trellian Keyword Discovery Service
- Self SEO Keyword Suggestion Tool (Info from both Wordtracker & Overture)
- Keyword Research Tool (Search by either Keyword or Domain name)
Search Engine Ranking Tools
Discover and track where you’re site ranks.
- LinkPopularity
- Nu Blue - Search Engine Satutration - number of pages indexed
- Self SEO - Number of Pages Indexed
- PositionAgent - no longer free, it is part of the tools offered by Submit it!
- WebPosition - some consider this controversial
- Digital Point - keyword tracker (free service)
- Check Rankings - Automated keyword tracker (free & paid services)
- Page Rank Comparison - Compare PR between sites for a specific search term
- Page Rank Look-up - Compare PR between specific pages
- Google Page Rank Report - Check PR for mulitple URLs at one time
- Sitenng - SERP Tracker, SEO Analyzer & more
Site SEO Analysis Tools
- Xenu - Web Site Link Checker
- Dead-Links.com - Link Checker
- Nu Blue Link Suggestion Tool
- Search Engine Techniques Assistant
Search Engine Spider Emulators & More
- SEO-browser.com - free text only browser and more
- Crawler Simulation
- Keyword Density & Stopword, Noun and Verb Density Analyzer
- Marketleap Search Engine Marketing Tools - large collection of tools
- Search Engine Spider Simulator - Outstanding Tool
- Link Checker & Link Text - Outstanding Tool
- Keyword Density Checker
- Search Engine Friendly Redirector Checker - Outstanding Tool
- Rank Checker - Mike’s Marketing Tools
- StarGeek - Code to Text Ratio Checker - Outstanding Tool
- Code to Text Ratio Checker
- Keyword Density & Prominence- Ranks NL
- Robots.txt Validator- Search Engine World
- Robots.txt Generator- SEO Chat
- Free SEO Friendly 301 Redirection Service- 301url
E-mail Newsletters
- The Search Engine Report Newsletter
- WebPromote Weekly
- Searchday- another SearchEngineWatch newsletter
