Busby SEO Test

Google just rolled out a new feature in Gmail — Themes. This has been talked about for quite some time, and you can tell they have been working hard on it. Gmail fans have been building unofficial extensions to spice up their inboxes for a while, but up til now themes haven’t been an integral part of Gmail. Apparently a lucky few Gmail users had a “Themes” tab pop up under settings. No longer do you have to suffer through the boring-if-functional standard Gmail interface for the 16 hours a day that you keep the page loaded. - Busby SEO Test

Themes allow you to customize the look and feel of your Gmail account. To choose a theme, click a thumbnail on the Themes tab of your Settings page.

In some cases, you can also customize by location. Some themes change during the day, and we use the location information you provide to correctly time these changes with your local sunrise, sunset, and/or weather. If you select one of these themes, you’ll see a Country/Region drop-down menu appear. Select the country you want, and then enter a city in the field provided. If you don’t enter a city, or enter an invalid one, we’ll set your location to the capital city of the country you selected. When you’re done, click Save.

by Busby SEO Test

Busby SEO Test | How good is your Web site?

Is your Blog up to par?

There are actually websites that will measure the ranking of your website. For those of you that don’t know what page rank is, it’s a tool put together by Google that determines the effectiveness or efficiency of your Web site.

The higher your page rank, the higher your Web site is listed in the various search engines, and that means more traffic to your site. This, in essence, means more people are looking at your site, your products, your services, thus putting more money in your pocket in the form of paying customers.

If more people are going to your Web site then less traffic is going to your competitors’ Web site. Unfortunately most people don’t even know what page rank is but those visitors that do will place your website in a higher esteem than your competitors and feel that your content is much more valuable and insightful.

Now you are probably wondering how page rank determined? And more importantly how do you increase your page rank?. Well, let’s look at the first part of that question.

One way to help determine your page is when another site links to your page with a back link. The more back links you receive from other pages the higher your page rank. It’s a good idea to make sure the back links are coming from sites that have content on the same theme as yours.

This process can get quite involved and a little messy because all back links don’t carry the same weight or force. The higher the page rank that a link is coming from the more beneficial it is in terms of boosting your page rank. So if you get links from a lot of pages with low page ranks it will not have as strong an impact as a few pages with higher page ranks.

Now this is the complicated part: If you have a page that has a page rank of 7 and it is already linked to 10 or 15 other pages then it will not be any more beneficial to you than a page that has a page rank of maybe 3 or so. There is only so much linking that a page can do. It’s almost like the law of diminishing returns, in other words after awhile it begins to have the opposite effect.

Another way to improve your page rank is through the use of web directories. Not only will this increase your page rank but it will also increase the traffic to your site. So if you submit your site to a large number of Web directories you will be able to increase your rank. There are a number of web directories you can submit your website or blog to.

There’s a host of other items that will definitely help you to increase your ranking and the general traffic flow to your Web site. Also if you are curious about the page ranking of your own site you can see exactly where you stand by doing a Google search for page rank. This should help you to find some of the sites out there that measure page rank. Once you find a site all you have to do is put your own URL in the designated box and you will have your answer. A page rank of 6 or higher is very high.

When talking to clients about marketing their business online I am asked “How do you get to #1 on Google?” While this article is not specially about how to become #1 - I will explain what the process is and what’s involved.

Despite our widespread acceptance and use of the internet - I am always surprised by how many people really have no idea what SEO (search engine optimization) is about. They instinctively know WHY they like to click on that first listing in the natural results; but they don’t have the first clue HOW it got there. Making matters worse is the fact that the internet world is largely unregulated and still being figured out - so it seems that everyone has their own “best practice” and definitions of things like SEO. Busby SEO Test

I usually tell clients that their intuitive feeling of WHY they trust that first listing is that - simply put - it’s the best result for the phrase you type in. People seem to understand that. However most people don’t really understand why one site would be better than another so here goes with a layman’s explanation…

What is SEO, really?

SEO is the process of configuring a website so that it has a chance to show up in a search result for a particular phrase. In other words it is our way of telling Google, Yahoo, or MSN what we think our site is about. Many of the search engines have a slightly different formula for how they determine these results. But the short version is that they look at different factors of each website page, rank them and then give those results to you. Busby SEO Test

Why is SEO Important?

One word sums it up - competition. Depending on what study you read, there are as many as 20 billion web pages being indexed at any given time. The major search engines do their best to go through these pages and catalog them so that they can tell you about it if you use their website to search. With so many website pages out there competing for similar phrases it is absolutely critical to make sure you are using every tool at your disposal to make sure your customers can find you when they are looking. Busby SEO Test

OK, So What Should I Be Doing for SEO On My Site?

The good news is that doing SEO correctly is not complicated. The bad news is that it is time consuming and requires regular attention in order to maintain results. Our advice is to ethically follow these simple guidelines for best long-term results:

Good site structure - as simple as this sounds many people overlook this. Every day we see sites with heavy flash animation, dated frame designs, pages that don’t work and broken links. The bottom line is that if you can’t easily navigate a site without problems chances are the search engines can’t either. And if a search engine can’t go through your site you have absolutely no chance of showing up for a key phrase - no matter how pretty the flash.

Good meta-data - Clients often draw a blank with this one. Meta-data is geek-speak for the page titles, page descriptions and keywords that you enter for each page. Each page on your website should have a unique title and description that summarizes what that page is about.

We often see 2 problems with meta-data. The first is that it is simply overlooked. I am stunned at how many sites have www.yoursite.com as the page title for every page - that’s wasting prime online real estate.

The 2nd problem is spam. Putting in a page title or description that does not accurately match what the page is about is considered “spamming” a search engine. Doing this will get your page thrown out of the index and ruin any chance of showing up for a key phrase. Relevant content - People seem to understand that good content is really what they are looking for when they search for something. By “relevant” we mean that the content is specific to the topic in question and recently updated. More and more we are seeing sites that have regular updates or blogs showing up higher in the search results than sites which have larger quantities of older, “stale” content on them.

Our recommendation is to add well-written, grammatically correct and spell-checked content to your website on a regular basis. This ensures that, over time, your site will become a “resource” to those looking for phrases related to your business.

Responsible link building - This is perhaps the least understood part of SEO. In a nutshell search engines consider a link from another website to your website as a popularity vote. Think of it as power rankings for websites. In general the more sites which link to yours, the better; as this shows your site is relevant to the given topic. Busby SEO Test

Sadly though link building, like keywords and meta-data, have been abused by many site owners with schemes such as link farms where sites are setup simply to house links to other sites. We encourage careful and responsible link building with sites that are related to yours or through appropriate directories and article banks. Busby SEO Test

So there you have it - SEO explained for people with real jobs. Like most things it’s not really that hard but it requires discipline which is where most people get off track. If you would like help with SEO for your website, or other online business needs we would love to hear from you.

by Busby SEO Test