A common question we get with clients is why specific content pages might show up in the search engine results pages (SERP), but not the home page. The answer to the question actually first needs to nip the whole idea that having your content pages showing up on the first page of any search engine is bad. There’s no reason to prevent the search engines from indexing your site’s content pages, so you shouldn’t try and stop them; valuable traffic frequently enters websites on content pages in the search engine results.

As much as it would be ideal to have your polished branding be the only entry point into your site, the reality of it is that there’s no way to make your home page specific to all the phrases you want to show up for. That’s what the SEO content pages are for, to increase your chances of being ranked on all those specific key phrases. That’s not to say you can’t target 1-3 specific phrases for your homepage, in fact we encourage it through use of the title, META, h1 tags, bold emphasis, URL optimization, content, etc. But you can’t expect your home page to ever be the most relevant result for the dozens of phrases you’re targeting with your SEO campaign. If you don’t want the specific content pages to show up in the results anymore, they can be removed from the site and eventually the search engines will phase it out of the natural rankings. But you will lose any ranking associated with it, because that’s a page that the search engines value highly enough to rank for a reason.

Pay-per-click is the only way to force the search engines to connect a phrase to your home page. Optimizing your home page for the 1-3 phrases that are most critical to your business is the best way to go about promoting yourself to the search engines for natural ranking.

It is a myth that submitting hundreds of search engines makes any difference in the search engine rankings. If you’re marketing with us, when your site goes live we submit it, as a courtesy, to four major engines: Google, Yahoo, MSN, and DMOZ. There are other smaller engines that you can submit it to, but these four account for over 90% of the search volume on the internet so they are the only ones we bother with. Aggressively re-submitting your site to any of them also makes no difference; one time is all they need to include your site in their indexes. Multiple re-submissions can actually get your site blacklisted from the engines if done to an extreme.

It’s very important that you have a lot of content on your website, whether your site is for a book store or something more visual like an art gallery. The reason is that the search engines can’t see content that is not written out! And how are they going to index your site for the things you want to show up when you are virtually showing them a set of relatively blank pages?

Our goal with SEO content is to establish your website as an authority, one that the search engines will happily promote, by making your site a great resource to web surfers. By installing lots of pages of uniquely branded relevant content, your business will be taken seriously by Google, Yahoo, and the other search engines.

For some businesses in some industries, all it takes are several pages of finely-tuned SEO content to see first-page results on the SERPs. By targeting specific key phrases with their own pages of content, we make sure that the information on your site not only educates your visitors (and helps persuade them to choose you for their needs), but that it also is indexed properly by the search engines so that more natural (organic) traffic will reach your site in the long-term.

SEO content is a “white hat” technique that only adds value to your site. We don’t recommend (or engage in) keyword stuffing of your content. The search engines are getting very good at figuring out what kind of content is copied and pasted, derived from other pages, etc. So those who have the best writing in their industry are usually rewarded, so long as that content is installed on your website properly, which is an art form in and of itself.

If you have any additional questions about SEO content creation, we are happy to provide you with a free initial marketing consultation. Simply fill out one of the forms on our site.

There are several things that will help your cause with Google, Yahoo, and the other search engines when you are picking out a domain name. There are also a number of things that are critical to consider for your branding. Marrying these two sometimes contradictory marketing facets can be tough. Ultimately, your domain will probably embody more branding or SEO optimization, but the best names do both. Here are four guidelines to help you ensure that when you pick a domain, you choose having taken both sides into consideration.

1. Is the domain name short?

The shorter your domain name, the more likely it is that it is easier to remember, quicker to type in, and faster for the search engines to see your content. Every character counts! Make your domain compact.

2. Is it easy to remember?

This kinda goes hand in hand with the first consideration. Still, there will be cases where your short domain is just tough to remember. Avoid abbreviating words in your domain name; that’s a common way to make short domains harder to remember than they need to be. Also, dashes can make the difference between someone finding you or finding your competition (by using the non-dashed version)! So if your domain contains dashes… well it better have some PRIME keywords in it to justify the damage it will do to people trying to find your site for a second time or off the top of their heads from a radio ad you placed.

3. Does it contain highly relevant keywords?

This is the most important thing from a search engine optimization standpoint. If your domain contains your most important search phrase, it already sets you up as a potential authority on whatever it is you’re in business for.

4. Is it an established domain?

This is often overlooked, but those who spend the time to hunt down an existing relevant domain (or entire site) with existing links and buy it out will be handsomely rewarded. Your new content will get indexed faster because of the trust built up with that domain to the search engines.

Hopefully these tips help you land that dynamite domain name you have been looking for that will not only brand you well, but also help drive some free natural traffic your way through SEO. If you have any questions, we do offer domain name consultation as a service to our clients. We’ll give you a free initial consultation if you fill out one of our forms.

Question: Should I Target my SEO Content Towards Small Niches?

Answer: It depends. Especially with phrases that don’t return a high number of pages (under 500,000 results), content aggressively targeting these specific niche key phrases can make a big difference. The only thing that’s important after considering that; do these phrases also yield a high enough search volume that they will generate consistent useful traffic? That’s a more difficult answer to ascertain, as some phrases will generate a high ROI but very low search volume, while others are the other way around. We recommend going for the phrases that yield a larger search volume first while still making sure they are highly relevant to your business. You can always add additional content later to continue to build your site as an authority on the niche you serve.

For professional assistance with setting up the SEO content on your website, please contact us; we’re happy to provide a free initial consultation on your marketing.

SEO Content Targeting Niche Demographics by BigSERP.Com

As SEO practitioners, there’s often a good reason to exclude a certain search engine or site spider from looking at your pages. For example, some people who do not want their site archived over time by Archive.org will take action to block them from doing so. That’s where the robots.txt kicks in; set one up on your server, and most websites will adhere to your commands as far as what they are allowed to spider on your site. If you wish to prevent a specific site spider from indexing your website’s content, then configure your robots.txt file this way:

User-agent: Name_of_Robot
Disallow: /

Here are some of the most common site robot names that you might want to exclude:

Archive.org: ia_archiver
Google: googlebot
Yahoo: Slurp

 Regardless of what you’re trying to do with robots.txt, the most important thing is to make sure you’re doing it right. A small typo in your config file can cause disastrous results. So make sure to use the following resources to set yours up properly.

For thorough lists of robots files you can exclude, check these sites:

http://www.hostsun.com/gr/bots_index.php

http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/active.html

For thorough documentation as to how robots.txt files work, and how to properly set them up, check out these sites: 

http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/faq.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots.txt 

If you aren’t using Archive.org while performing your domain name SEO research, then you certainly should be… or maybe not for long? It looks like some clever chap has found a way through robots.txt to undermine the Internet Archive Wayback Machine so that the site history cannot be viewed. I won’t go into too much detail because it is a site that we are considering purchasing, however there are some interesting entries in the site’s robots.txt file:

Disallow:/cgi-bin
Disallow:/cgi-bin/link.cgi
Disallow:/cgi-bin/links.cgi
Disallow:/cgi-bin/Links.cgi
Disallow:/cgi-bin/Count.cgi
Disallow:/cgi-bin/ls1.pl
Disallow:/servlet/UserPrice
Disallow:/servlet/PrivateSale
Disallow:/servlet/buyDomDLS
Disallow:/ticker.jsp
Disallow:/searchAdvanced.jsp
Disallow:/searchPrice.jsp
Disallow:/searchPremiums.jsp
Disallow:/searchRegister.jsp
Disallow:/jsp/search_advanced.jsp
Disallow:/jsp/search_advanced_text.jsp
Disallow:/jsp/search_category.jsp
Disallow:/jsp/search_expired.jsp
Disallow:/jsp/search_keyword.jsp
Disallow:/jsp/search_letter.jsp
Disallow:/jsp/search_namefind.jsp
Disallow:/jsp/search_pricerange.jsp
Disallow:/jsp/search_similar_domains.jsp

It looks like a lot of these entries are referring to apps that crawl the web looking for expired domains, or domains for sale. At any rate, for the price this particular site owner is asking for the site in question, this use of robots.txt to prevent prospective buyers from seeing the history of a site seems a little shady. We’re still thinking about buying the domain because it’s a great name, but it’s more difficult to gauge the value of a site we don’t know the history of. And just the fact that this owner would go to such lengths to prevent people from seeing the history of the site does not reassure BigSERP’s confidence in a possible transaction.

What this means is that people parking domains, buying sites for resale, or vulturing for deleted sites now have a powerful tool in their arsenal to potentially deceive honest people looking for a good name. Who knew, it turns out robots.txt is more valuable than just a piece of code that most sites ignore!

How do I write effective HTML title tags?

In less competitive industries/markets, sometimes all that’s needed for first-page placement on key terms is a simple website with plenty of SEO content and… correctly labeled title tags! When done right, your page title tags (along with the META keywords and description tags) assist the search engines in properly indexing your content. On the other hand, if handled poorly or without thought, title tags can be one of your worst SEO enemies, causing your pages to either be misinterpreted or worse yet be thrown into duplicate content filters. Both of these things result in the search engines disregarding your pages when they consider the most relevant sites for the key phrases that are most important to your business. With so much riding on this 63 character HTML element, let’s make sure and get you off on the right foot with configuring your title tags. Here are some helpful SEO tips that will optimize those tags for you:

1. Be wary of the length of your title tags. On the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP) of most of the major search engines, the title tag is used as the first line to identify your website. This line is typically in bold face, and hyperlinks to your site. Now all the search engines have different line character limits before they begin to truncate your title. That’s why it’s important to get the most vital keywords into the first 63 characters. There’s a good chance that everything after that will be replaced by ellipses.

2. Don’t put your corporate branding first. There are exceptions to many rules, and there is one in this case, but unless your company name is already extremely popular and competitive as a key phrase, there’s no reason to put your company branding first and foremost in your title tag. Best practice is to put the company name at the end of the title, after a dash. This way, your site has the best chances of being indexed for the actual key phrases that people are most likely to type into the search engines. And your pages will still get indexed for your company name, especially if it’s a unique one.

3. Prioritize your key phrases. For each page of content, which should be written to emphasize a main key phrase, and several secondary phrases, you should configure the tags to reinforce the importance of those phrases. Always place the most important key phrase, in the exact order that it is typed into the search engine, in the very front of your title tags. Then use commas to separate out the remaining key phrases that are relevant to this page of content, ordering them from most important to least.
(Note: Something that’s at least fun to consider with this is checking out your competition for specific key phrases. If you type in a phrase, and notice that your competition is showing up for that phrase, and all of their titles begin exactly the same, you may want to try and at least switch up the first key word so that when your page displays differently from the crowd. What usually works best is to add original content pages of all kinds of different variations of the phrases you want to show up for, so that increases your chances of having your page appear differently than the others in the SERP.)

4. Use synonyms and stems. The search engines are pretty smart these days. Most of them can equate “websites” with “site,” “sites,” “website,” “web pages,” and so on. So don’t be afraid to use stems of words or synonyms in the second half of your title tags. For example, you could use “car website” early on in your title tag, and then use “car site” later on. Definitely do a little research on your competition and see what synonyms and stems they are having success using, and then do some of your own experimentation. If you need help determining what search engines consider synonyms, Google actually has a cool feature built into it. If you place a tilde (~) in front of a search term, the SERP will return a page full of relevant sites with the synonyms highlighted.

5. Eliminate unnecessary words. Connectors like “the,” “for,” and “a” are disregarded by many search engines, so there’s no need to waste precious real estate in your title tags for them. Eliminate them wherever it makes sense to.

6. Don’t completely ignore formatting. In the end, the title tag is what searchers are going to see as the representation of your page. So when you’re finished considering all the previous tips, give your title a final look and see if there aren’t a couple of small formatting touches you can make to polish the look of the title up. Adding a colon or a connector here and there can make a comma-separated list of keywords look more like an ad, and will increase the chances that once you actually get on the first page, that someone will clickthrough to you.

If you utilize these tips to the fullest, and get plenty of practice, your content will be indexed properly, and will receive the best consideration by the search engines for placement in the SERP. Don’t forget to check out the other free SEO tips provided on BigSERP.Com, and don’t hesitate to contact us if you need professional assistance with optimizing your entire site’s title and META page tags.

Boring as they might be at times, still one of the biggest tools in your lead generation arsenal these days are forms. Forms not only give you a way of contacting your visitors, they can also be powerful pre-qualifying tools. For newbies, the key is making sure you don’t make a colossal mistake like asking for too much from your visitors. In fact, figuring out just the right amount of information to ask for is crucial to your online business.

As a general rule, concerning the information required on your lead generation forms, the more data you ask for up front, the less likely someone is to fill out the form. So logic dictates that you should figure out what you really need from your visitors. If you need more than a few fields of information from the visitors you’ve driven to your form from a landing page or other marketing (some forms, such as those that add a visitor to an email list, should only require 1 field!), then you should break apart your form into several, more easily digestible forms.

If you offer many different services, and want to offer them on the same page, there are some really cool things you can do with interactive forms. For example, you can ask for basic contact information on the first form. Then, on the second form, you can ask a question that qualifies your visitor. Based on the answer to that form, the next form can be customized to ask just the right follow up question.

So to sum it up, definitely don’t ask for too much information from your visitors. Whenever possible, stagger larger forms into multiple smaller ones. And finally, use the power of scripting to make interactive forms that make your visitors feel like they are only entering in information that pertains to what they are looking to buy from you!

Should you need professional assistance optimizing your website’s forms, the SEO analysts of BigSERP.Com offer their expert services at a competitive rate, and always with a free initial consultation.

This tip is for those of you running an online business that has managed to achieve the holy grail of internet marketing: first page natural placement for terms that are highly relevant to your products and services. Some frustrated site owners, out of concern for a lackluster website design, or a re-branding of some sort, will make the worst mistake possible… they will mess with success! Anyone who has learned this harsh lesson first-hand will tell you that it doesn’t take much for the search engines to re-index your site. And once your site goes into that re-indexing purgatory, who knows how long it’ll take to get back. If it gets anywhere near where it was before. Trust us, it’s not worth risking first page placement to rebrand your site, or tweak with your tags.

Here are just a few things that can cause your site to be re-indexed:

1. Changing page tags, including the page title and META tags.

2. Completely changing the content on your home page, especially if that content contains links.

3. Changing your homepage layout, especially if it reorders your links and content on the page.

So be ultra careful whenever you change any of these things, because once you lose that prime positioning, it is very hard to get back. This is especially true for sites that do not have a ton of inbound links established.

Our recommendations are for you to consult with a professional. Often times, the best solution involves developing another site and using your old one to boost the new one, or taking position reinforcing measures before making major changes to your site. But the best course of action is always found after carefully considering your business and its marketing goals. Please let the SEO experts here at BigSERP.Com assist you with a free consultation. We can turnaround your current campaign, or custom design a successful solution from scratch for you.