SEO Tips N Tricks

This will be pretty short today as this writer is hitting the proverbial wall.

Content is so much easier to write when quality keywords are available.  Not only are the new ones localized but the phrasing separates one from another to avoid repetition. Moving on, I see better rankings ahead for clients overall.

Ok, well not really. The clients that I worked on today were interesting. Went from real estate and houses for sale in Burnaby, BC to (briefly) to Houston Attic Insulation to a rush of a wedding videography company covering places like Napa Valley and San Francisco. It’s nice to be able to get a variety of clients because I learn about the topics as well as the region. And as I have found out, a little knowledge in life goes a long way!

In the matter of rankings, it seems to be very important on where your outside links are coming from. When dealing with the rankings for ten different sites dealing with a placement option site and being able to rank on the first page in search engines, the outside linking seems to do a world of good. Just one with a lot of links in is getting more than 70 first page placements within a short amount of time after the links were made. Seeing this, I would suggest finding well ranked and well credited sites to place links to sites that you happen to be working on.

Just a brief note about reworks. How many times do we rework a client before we are unable to do anything for them? Not that I’ve had to do that as of yet, but I was just kind of curious. I see how some need reworks because the content is bland. But then again, when it comes down to it, what matters more, the keywords or the content? I would think the keywords, but then content keeps them around…

Well, the wheel in the sky keeps on turnin’…

” The difference between a mountain and a molehill is your perspective.”

–Al Neuharth

Ok, I don’t know who Al is but I loved the quote because it means that nothing is insurmountable because everything depends upon how you look at a particular situation. To one person, an incident or a pile of work or…anything, really,  can always be looked upon as either good or bad. What might be something easily rectifiable for me may not be for someone else and vice versa. You can’t change people’s minds all the time, but maybe you can get them to see it from another perspective.

When I’m reworking content that hasn’t ranked well for some reason, I try to take a more positive approach and ask myself why it’s not working. I try to look at it from a fresh perspective and see what I can do to change it. Of course some are more difficult to write than others. There are certain MLMs that may never work because of the type of business. There are some that just might need a little more creativity.  There are some days when I think that I can’t possibly add anything new to a rework. In that case, maybe trade with someone.

Everyone sees things differently…it’s learning how to deal with that, realize it and move on for the best that will eventually solve problems.

Propagation is some tricky business that you’re bound to run into while working on sites. New domains mostly. With a site on Chico life insurance and it was still stuck on a Godaddy landing page. After asking for the info to be changed, it usually takes about 1 full day before the site moves over. Strange thing is that it took about an hour. Hopefully they all transfer over that quickly, but it’s not likely to happen.

We got handed out today a pretty informational packet on SEO from www.sitepronews.com, and the one that stuck with me through this afternoon was the original meta tag….I had no idea that if the meta tag is too original like the content then it can actually hurt the seo ranks…. so all in all today I was just trying to use original ideas on the company and create a unique original meta tag

I notice some clients have quite a few keywords. Now, this is not a bad thing as the more they have, the higher they should rank. However, when many of the phrases are repetitive (i.e “home based business California, home based business, Toronto, home based business Cucamonga, etc.), does it really benefit them? Yes, localized keywords help, but when a client has 40 keywords and nearly half are almost the same thing, does it really help them out in the long run? I suppose we’ll have to wait and see if the strategy pays off in the long run…

Many of us use photshop on a daily basis, some of us rarely have to use it, and if you do its real quick and simple. Well lets create a simple header with text only and a reflection of the text underneath it. Messing around with this a few times today, I have come up with a couple easy ways to get the job done. Add the background color that you wish to reflect upon, then add the text that you wish to reflect. For simplicity lets use a black background, with white text. Now duplicate the text layer, select it and rasterize it for editing, then go to transform and flip vertically. This will invert the text upside down. Drag the flipped layer below the original text. You can scale it down to about half the height, and drag the bottom corners out just a little to add perspective. Now select pixels and add a black to transparent gradient on it. Next you might notice the reflection is still to clear. With the pixels still selected, go to filter/blur/motion blur and make the angle 90 degrees, and distance pixels anywhere from 3 to 11, you decide. The first one that I completed looks something like this.

We’ve initiated a new format for the client SEOs which deviates only slightly from the manner in which we were writing before. Added to the beginning is a few short paragraphs about the company as well as a few bullet points summarizing what they do and their locale. I think it’s pretty helpful as a lot of people will usually primarily scan the first few paragraphs so this creates a new challenge to hook people in immediately by telling them what the company does. Hopefully they’ll continue reading after that for the wit and wisdom that is our content!