Here is a perfect example of a Yahoo store. This spy store or spy product site looks great. It’s is colorful and easy to navigate. Which is a must for the search engines and people. The tags seems to be set-up just fine. One problem though.. and this goes for e-commerce types sites. These descriptions are probably from the manufacturer. Meaning that there many sites that have this same content. So, fresh content will need to be added if organic rankings are to happen.

One thing about Yahoo store is that for $35 a month, you get hosting, a domain name, and the shopping cart. You can’t beat that with a stick. No merchant account? No worries, you can easily integrate Paypal into the store. Pretty cheap if you as me. I don’t want to sound like a salesman for Yahoo because I am not. But honestly. with the 24 hour support and everything else I mentioned $35 is worth it.

But back to the reason for this post. Yahoo store builder is SEO friendly, but you need to make sure you use all the tools at your disposal. Meta data is only good if you input it. Same for SEO friendly urls. You create them, so think carefully. If you have questions about how to do so, contact me.

In order for the page to be relevant the copy and tags must all reflect the same terms. So, a description tag for this site might read; “ABC Supplies carries a full line of solid oak wood office desks and accessories. All our desks are hand made and shipped from the factory.” You’re probably wondering why I added the information about being hand made. If I know it’s a selling point, adding it will help tempt people to click the listing. Adding the keywords as I did not only will make the page better because of increased relevancy, but also draw more attention to the ad.

If you don’t include a description tag, Google will pull content from your page. This means that it could pull content from your menu, sidebars or anywhere out of context. The description tag, when optimized and written well, will help increase click through rates. You can receive more clicks in a lower position if your description tag is written well.

Recently, a client of mine with an extremely large product database took the plunge and decided to invest in a java optimized server appliance from Azul Systems to help reduce item load times and streamline the user experience. The excessive load times were something I’d been griping about since day one, as all the traffic building efforts in the world mean little when people have to wait upwards of one minute for product photos to load. The internet has been called so by many other names, but most SEO�s and SEM�s know that �Short Attention Span Theatre� ought to be one of them.

I didn�t know what to expect from the investment and hoped for a sizeable reduction in load times. I�m not a Java guru, so a �compute appliance� was somewhat foreign to my uninitiated ears. Apparently, the client didn�t want to invest in new servers and this would allow them to make the most of the servers they already paid for while taking up less space. That�s all fine and good�but what can this thing do to enhance performance?

Here�s the technical answer, according to what I�ve been able to ascertain: �For Java based developments at the enterprise level, the computational power required to manage high level Java environments often prohibits single server operation and results in less than optimal performance from multiple server configurations. Azul Systems compute appliances solve this issue by performing the computational functions for the server, making quick work of even the most heavily trafficked applications at peak volume.�

�and here�s the real world, practical answer: This thing is fast. When bounce rates fall dramatically while page views increase exponentially, two things become obvious. A) The client needed a solution for their incredibly slow load times, and B) this was the right solution.

So how fast is a �compute appliance�? The �Vega 2 7200�, which is what the client purchased, can house up to 768 processors and 768 GB of memory. If you�re like me and thinking in terms of your home PC, those numbers are incomprehensible. All I can say is that the results produced in terms of my primary areas of concern are nothing short of astounding. Click a product on the site now and it shows up�immediately. That�s all I could ask for, because it makes my efforts in driving traffic substantially more productive (and valuable to the client). So, kudos to Azul Systems for their compute appliance. For being �one of the most cost effective options� (according to my client�s IT manager), it certainly exceeded everyone�s expectations.

Some tips like only letting people read only a snippet of the post off the home page of your blog and adding images are just a few good ideas. The posts covers several more ideas. One of my favorites is watching your bounce rate. The lower you can get your bounce rate the higher your page views can be. Test is the best way to find that out. Change your layout, add more related posts etc. What do you do to get people to few more pages? I’d love to hear about. I may even create a post on all the ideas I receive.

Head on over to your privacy settings in WordPress and permit the engines to index your site. If you found this tip helpful link to this blog… you’ll find many cool ideas here.

[tags]seo, WordPress, google[/tags]

Of all the tags you want to make sure you spend a little time on, the title tag is probably one of the most important tags there is. The title tag is the first tag the engines see. People make the mistake of either leaving them all the same for every page, stuffing them with too many keywords or both.

If you are trying to target more phrases or words with just one page, that’s fine, but remember, it comes at a price. The longer the trail you leave on the title tag, the less relevance to anything the search engines will give it, regardless of the order in which the phrases are used. Just don’t try to target everything you offer in one title tag. If you sell office furniture, you shouldn’t try to put “computer desks, file cabinets, office chairs” and so on in one tag. Each page is about a particular item and the tag should reflect it.

Here’s a classic example. Let’s say you were selling a solid oak desk and let’s say your company name is abcsupplies. We do some research and find out people search for “oak desk”, “solid oak office desks” and “oak office desk”. You wouldn’t have the title tag read “ABC Supplies: oak desk, solid oak office desk and oak office desk ”. There are several issues here. First, the name of the company should not be in front, it needs to be at the end. The sooner the engines find the terms, the better. The next problem is the repeating the word oak and desk is a bit much. It may not be spammy, but is less than ideal.

The best way to optimize this tag would be “Soild Oak Wood Office Desk by ABCSupplies” This places the company name at the end but now allows us to optimize for several terms in one sentence. This is not only effective for the engines, it looks good and can be read by visitors. It also makes it easier for people who bookmark the page to see easily what it is they bookmarked.

[tags]google, title tag, meta, seo[/tags]

In reality search engines find your site when they spider your link from a site they already regularly spider. This is how search engines such as Google prefer to find links. Could you pay a service to submit your site to engines? Sure you could. Why would you? You could go to submitexpress.com and submit your site to 40+ engines for free if you want. I wouldn’t do it more than once. Once the engines find you they come back. No need to resubmit.

The fact of the matter: 95% of the searches are done on Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. Submitting your site to 2000+ engines is pointless. Oh, and if you want to get your site on Google in 48 hours or less, Digg your site. It’s free, fast, and it works. Don’t pay for submissions, save your money for real SEO work.

[tags]search, engine, submissions[/tags]

You can always contact me here with any questions you may have. I will either answer them in a podcast or post the answers right here. So ask away!

[tags]podcast, mr seo, link buying[/tags]

• Not enough content on the page.

• Duplicate content – Either taken from another site or from the same site.
• Orphaned pages… Pages not linked to any other inside your site
• Titles and descriptions the same on every page
• All links to your site are reciprocals and possibly to bad neighbors
• A page that no longer exists may have an old cached version of itself in the supplemental listings

You should always look at a cached version of a page where possible. Supplemental pages tend to get indexed less frequently. Compare the cached date of you inner pages to interior pages. If the difference is in months, the pages are supplemental. You can see a cached version of a page by entering cache:www.yourd0main.com into Google’s search.

Note: A page in the supplemental doesn’t mean it will not rank. It will only rank if it is a term where Google has little or no results found in the main index.

[tags]Google, Supplemental, results[/tags]

Supplemental results are Google’s way of weeding out pages that are questionable or that have little value. Google determines this in a number of ways. I’ll talk about those in future posts. It use to be that new site were the only victim of the supplemental index, however this is no longer true. Pages of a site that show little worth (, repetitive tags, lack of content, stolen content) could fall victim.

New sites and sites recently re-designed are the easiest to fall into the supplemental. The culprit? Meta tags. Sometimes when a designer builds a site, he or she uses a page as a template, changing only certain items such as content and images. However, they leave the title tags and the rest of the meta data the same. When Google comes to index the pages of the site, it thinks these pages are all the same. So…they will not rank.

Sometimes developers are not responsible for providing content and to fill the blank space on pages, they use scrap or manufacturer’s content. Google knows the content is from another source, meaning it won’t allow that content to rank and will place the pages it’s on in the supplemental. E-commerce sites fall victim to this simply because many sites use product descriptions that are found on many similar sites.

Avoiding these common mistakes will save you some hardships down the road.

[tags]Google, supplemental, results[/tags]