Tag Archives: SEO Tips

SEO Tip of the Day: Gather the Most Online Real Estate for Your Brand

Now that you’ve created and generated a thorough sitemap and have a strong structure for your website, Google crawlers will begin to explore and index your site.  A well-organized website will yield two results in Google when your brand name is searched.

Google allows a maximum of two results per search per page (domain) for any site.  Filters for webmasters treat sub domains as a folder, and all sub domains are considered by robots as the integral part of a parent domain.

Only two search results are  shown per domain / per search result page.  No matter how high a level of SEO relevance the pages of your site may have, this limit of two not only prevents Brand A from monopolizing the entire first page of results, but also keeps competitor Brand B from gaining SEO ranking from Brand A’s name or keywords.

On Google, a competitor may not sabotage another brand’s opportunity of achieving organic SEO rankings. This filter came into place after early webmasters exploited search results using the SEO relevance of their sub domains to include growing numbers of pages in Google’s displayed results.  Because Google does not support black hat SEO, it bases results on algorithms to prevent webmasters from unethically monopolizing top ten Google search results.

Beyond your brand’s website URL, it is important to create profiles on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube and other various social media networks.  When choosing user names and URLs for these sites, remember the tips we mentioned in regards to optimizing URL and search results.

Other ways to help your brand take up as much online real-estate as possible:

  • Maintain a blog that links to your home page.  Place strategic links within blog entries.  For instance, if you sell a variety of toys, write a blog about a specific toy, and link to the specific toy’s page within the blog so readers are directed to the product.
  • Join blogging networks such as Digg and StumbleUpon
  • Regularly generate and publish press releases to PR Newswire and PR Log

Taking up online real estate in your company’s name is a great way to organically dominate the first page of search results and make sure competitors aren’t capitalizing on your company name.

Below is what an ideal first page result would be when someone searches your brand:

The first two results will be your website URL’s maximum 2 results per search.

The next eight results will be various press releases that your brand is mentioned in, social media sites, video results from your YouTube channel, blogging networks linking to your blog, and your Twitter page.

For a visual example, Google search “Blue Interactive Agency” and pay attention to the green font URLs, as they show you what site is generating the result.

More questions? Comment below or start a conversation with Blue Interactive Agency on Facebook.


SEO tip of the Day: Create and Submit a Sitemap

You’ve chosen keywords, decided on a URL, and have a general outline of all the pages that will exist within your site and the organization in which they will branch out and link, but you still have to create a sitemap page for your website.

A sitemap is similar to a table of contents. It is an organized tree listing pages of your website that are public and accessible to both users and search crawlers. The general outline of the various sections of your site is a perfect blueprint for creating a site map.

Using a sitemap is vital to the success of websites, especially if your site is new or has a significant amount of updated or new pages. Although spiders will continue to crawl and index sites that do not have a sitemap, the importance of sitemaps increases as it is user-friendly and becoming the standard means by which a webmaster submits websites to search engines.

Typically a sitemap is listed in a hierarchical fashion with primary categories broken down into subcategories and a clear display of how each section links to others. Sitemaps not only organize your site for users, but it helps search engine robots see and find what pages exist on your site.

Two types of sitemaps exist: the HTML sitemap, and the XML sitemap. While an HTML sitemap is created primarily as an organization system for human internet users to read and view the breakdown of a website, an XML sitemap is created in code specifically for web crawlers to read and understand the breakdown of pages and structure of a site.

Of all the “white hat” SEO tips and tricks for optimizing a site, the creation of a sitemap is the most crucial and underestimated organic SEO strategy. If you choose to incorporate the use of a site map on your website, it is imperative to generate an XML sitemap in addition to the HTML sitemap in order for it to be picked up by search engines such as Google.

While there are a number of benefits to using a sitemap such as simplified navigation, one of the greatest aspects of sitemap generation is the ability for you to let search engines know right away about any updates or changes on your site. When you update your sitemap and submit the new one for search, the changes will be indexed faster than if you hadn’t used a sitemap. Outside of SEO purposes, maintaining a sitemap helps your pages stay organized and you can keep on top of assuring no links are lost or broken.


SEO Tip of the Day-Optimize URL and Search Results

Today we have a few pointers on optimizing search engine results and organizing categories within your site.

Best practices for search-friendly pages include keyword placement in URLs, and titling your site’s pages in ways that are friendly for both humans and search engines.

One topic per page.

If you have a variety products or services, devote at least one page per topic. You may have a page that outlines your products and services, but from there, link to individual and specific pages for each product or service. 

For example, imagine a website that sells all kinds of baseball bats. The page showcasing the general selection should have a URL along the lines of “yourwebsite.com/baseball-bats”.  From there, we find subcategories of baseball bats for children and baseball bats for adults. 

Provide Clean, Readable URLs (For Humans and Search Engines)

When a user selects baseball bats for adults, the URL should then read something along the lines of “yourwebsite.com/baseball-bats-for-adults”, and the ones for children? “yourwebsite.com/baseball-bats-for-children”, of course.

Skip the Fancy Characters

The only special characters to include in a URL are hyphens.  Hyphens act as spaces, separating words and allowing search engines to read a URL.  If instead the URL read “yourwebsite.com/baseballbatsforchildren”, a search engine crawler would view the URL as one long word. In that case, when a human searches for the term “baseball bats for children”, the above URL would not show up in search results.


SEO Tip: A Keyword Focused Title Tag on Every Page of Your Site is Critical

When users are searching for a product or service, unless you are a household brand/name, it is unlikely that they will be searching for you by name, and therefore may not find you. For this reason, it is a smart SEO strategy to avoid using your company name in your title tags.

A unique and keyword focused title tag should be present on every page of your website for SEO purposes. Should you deem it necessary to place your company name within a title tag, you should place it near the end to make it less prominent in search results.When the title and meta tags appear as a search result,the sharp keywords will pull in readers faster than the name of your company, which could be unfamiliar to a user.


If you want your page to still be indexed but do not want any link juice being passed to it:

Anytime you link to that particular page, through header menu, footer, or any links, simply add a rel=’nofollow” tag to the hyperlink. The tag will ensure that search engines do not follow that link, passing link juice from the current page to that page.

Know that the page will be indexed and crawled through sitemap submissions and other methods, it just won’t have a valuable Page Rank, because it does not need it, and the link juice will be distributed to the more important pages. If you are curious what your competitors have no-followed, try installing the no/do follow plugin for Firefox, it will color coordinate links that are either followed or no-followed.