Never, EVER pay incoming links.  The links you’ll get will not be from quality sites and could end up hurting your search engine ranking instead of helping it.

We have a client who, before coming to us, bought into a link building program.  The company promised over 1,000 inbound links to their site.  Once they had signed on with us, we checked out some of the sites that were supposedly linking to her site.  About 20% of the sites listed didn’t exist.  Most of the other sites were just pages and pages of links…not what we’d call a ‘quality source’.

Search engines realize that many of these ‘link farm’ sites provide illegitimate links, and will punish sites who utilize this technique.

Pictures are a great way to show readers what you’re saying.  But to a search engine, a picture is not worth a thousand words.  In fact, it can be worth none if you don’t set them up correctly.

So here are 3 simple tips to make sure your images are giving search engines all the info they need.

1. Use the Keywords in the File Name
If you own a bakery and all your picture’s files names are: IMG002.jpg, IMG003.jpg, search engines will have no idea what the picture contains.  Make sure your file names include the keywords used in the rest of your site.

Bad: IMG002.jpg
Good: strawberry-jelly-filled-doughnut.jpg

2. Use Descriptive Alt Tags
Alt tags are additional tags in the coding that tells what the picture is.  All too often people don’t know what they’re for, so they are left blank.  If you don’t know how to use an alt tag, ask us!  They’re so important to the SEO of your site.

Bad: <BLANK ALT TAG>
Good: Enjoy a freshly baked Strawberry jelly-filled doughnuts!

3. Find the Right Image
We can’t stress this enough: Use content that will speak to people, not search engines.  Build your site around people; write your content for people; select images for people.  Use images that speak to the content you’re writing.  It will draw people in to your site in a way that words alone can not.

Enjoy!

www.MozartFest.org

And they do.

Now, because of the strategic keyword placement in their URL, most search variants of Physical Therapy McHenry land them on the first page of Google!  And that was basically the only SEO work we did on their site!

We did the same thing for another client (KoverAll).  We chose keywords that matched their business that people would be searching (Crystal Lake Painting) and they began to get calls before we had even finished building the site!

We’re not saying that we can guarantee a top page search result, no one can accurately make that claim, but what we are saying is search engines put a great deal of weight in your URL, and if you’ve got your major keywords in your domain name, you’re setting yourself up for good things.

Last week: Domain Expiration Length

Below are some of the before and after shots, but we must warn you, their old site is quite frightening.

Enjoy!

See it live!  USA Global Logistics

Our first topic (and one of your first step if you’re starting a site from scratch) is domain registration.  If you have a site, you’ll need a domain.  In the past, SPAM websites would register their site for the least amount of time, conduct their shady business, then abandon the domain.

To show search engines that you’re fully committed to your site, it’s a good idea to extend your domain’s expiration date to 5 years.  Then, every year, renew it for 1 more year.  This way, you’ll always have a 5 year buffer for your domain’s expiration!  This extension will help search engines differentiate your site from temporary sites.

We hope we’ve been able to shed some light on this concept and maybe we’ve been able to introduce some simple to your SEO!

The Bottom Line: If the energy you put into your website is focusing on getting a top result in search engines, it wont.

​The Solution: Focus on people.  If you focus your website energy into reaching people and giving them a solution they need, the search engine ranking will fall into place on it’s own.

In the spirit of staying people-focused rather than search-engine-focus, we are going to start a blog series on SimpleSEO – everything you need to do to effectively build your online presence and reach people.

​We’re very excited about this and we hope we can peel off a few layers of confusion surrounding SEO and help develop a clear vision for your online presence.

If you’re finding that your site uses some of the out of date and bad practices, you’ll want to consider updating your site.

Your site might be out of date (or bad) if…

• Paragraphs are all in caps, bold or italic
• Links are default blue (purple if you’ve clicked on them)
• Links a broken (go nowhere)
• Graphics take forever to load
• Thumbnail images are nearly as large as the full-sized images they link to
• Images have no alt tags
• Any text on your site blinks
• Your site has a page counter (105 visitors since 1994!)
• ANY horizontal scrolling
• Borders are turned on in tables
• Site is built with frames

These are just a few things to watch out for.  If you’re not sure if your site is bad or outdated.  Feel free to contact us and we’ll let you know – gently.  If you’re just now realizing that you need to update your site, check out the competition we’re having.  Who knows, you might win.

For example, the bounce rate on our home page is 40%.  All that tells us is that 40% of the people who come to our site don’t view any other pages.

While this initially sounds like a bad thing, it’s not always.

For instance, we try to include contact info in the header or footer of every site we make.  This way, if a visitor is only looking for your contact info, they don’t need to visit other pages.  The land on a page, see the contact info – the very thing they were looking for – and leave.  Their action gets logged as a bounce, but in reality, the visitor found exactly what they wanted.

I use this example to illustrate that there are other factors to look at when looking at your bounce rate.  A good rule of thumb is any bounce rate above 70% is bad AND any bounce rate below 30% is bad.  You want to shoot between 35% and 55%.  But you also want to look at where the traffic came from.

If you have a high bounce rate and your traffic is coming from online advertising then you might not be delivering what your ads boast – or at least it’s not readily accessible.  Try featuring your site’s hot spots around the content of your online ads or direct the ads to landing pages directly associated with the product or service you’re selling.

If you’ve got a bounce rate below 30%, this can be an indicator that no one is finding you through organic searches.

See how your site traffic is finding your site before you worry about your bounce rate.

One of the most biggest things search engines look at when determining your rank is incoming links.  The idea is this: website A thinks site B is great, so they link to it.  Search engines interpret that site A thinks site B is a good, credible site and takes that into account when determining B’s rank.  So it makes sense to assume that if sites A, C, D, E,F….Z all link to site B, then site B will thrive in the search rank.

Right?

Sadly, no.

While search engines do rely heavily on the incoming links to you site, the inbound links all have to be from credible websites.  What makes a credible website?  We’ll go deeper into site credibility in the next couple days, but in the meantime, here’s what you should take home: Do not use any paid backlink service.  Many of these services guarantee hundreds if not thousands of links to your site, but the incoming links are far from credible.  Most of the linking sites are simple database sites filled with pages and pages of links to sites.  Incoming links from sites with bad raps could severely damage the credibility of your website.

The character of a man is defined by the caliber of people he surrounds himself with.  The same can be said about your website.  What kind of company does your site keep?