SEO - Search Engine Optimization in Boise

Ask a random person on the street in Boise what’s SEO stand for and chances are good Search Engine Optimization will not be at the top of the list. In fact, if you ask people in Boise what Search Engine Optimization means to them, you’ll get a variety of responses.

Boise is a unique market in that businesses are not as technically savvy as say on the east coast or Silicon Valley. Due to Boise being primarily an agricultural state and the mass employers being government related Boise certainly does have some challenges when it comes to being a technology leader. However that isn’t to say that there aren’t some technologically savvy businesses within Boise as there are many. Although specific names will not be mentioned the participants at Tech Boise include many of these forward thinkers within the Boise region. The problem that we see is that companies coming from outside areas, namely Utah have many dominant Search Engine Optimization firms. Search Engine Optimization also referred to as SEO is a series of processes taken to build up positioning within a search engine.

The gap that we see with traditional businesses here in Boise is that the education within the tech space is limited and that the term SEO or Search Engine Optimization is nonexistent. In fact we have two interns that are at the top of their classes with Boise State University, and both business major who have prior to working for us never heard the term SEO. While Pay-per click advertising is known and taught, the idea that natural positioning within the search engines through Search Engine Optimization was a foreign concept. Our goal is to change that so when outside companies come into the Boise area to preach Search Engine Optimization services, Boise residents know that companies here in Boise exist that can perform their SEO services.

In helping to bridge this gap we are going to be partnering with several of our clients and other technologically proficient companies here in Boise to hold educational seminars. The basis of these seminars will be to bring business owners up-to speed on what resources are available to them. As we have built up our business here in Boise we have seen that despite having a tight knit community, we lack the education sharing that needs to take place. Search Engine Optimization is just one example of concepts not grasped by many; others include social media optimization (Web 2.0) outside of the top three including Digg, StumbleUpon, Twitter and many others. Stay tuned as we post these seminars on our website and on the social networks to bring Boise an unparalleled educational series.

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Published: October 30, 2008
By: Ajay Shah

This article is filed under:
Business | Search Engine Optimization

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RSS and Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a system for delivering web content directly to internet users. The concept behind RSS is eliminating the necessity of having to constantly check various websites for updates. With an RSS, time is saved through the convenience of having content automatically compiled into a user’s RSS reader (such as Google Reader). Unfortunately, you must have an RSS feed on your website to have the capability to post updates.

Web pages with RSS capability are typically denoted by a button somewhere beside the content that says “subscribe to this page” or something similar. Also, users of the latest versions of Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer determine an RSS page by the appearance of the orange RSS icon in the navigation bar. Users can subscribe to their favorite RSS enabled website by simply clicking the orange RSS icon.

Now that we have considered the benefits and implications of RSS for the web user, we shall now look at it through the lens of the small business owner. RSS is a growing need within the web world where top news sources and top companies are posting blogs. For a business owner, having an RSS feed will contribute to a strong presence on the web. Additional benefits of an RSS feed include announcing upcoming events, listing new items for sale, listing clearance items, listing specials, and anything else beneficial to an individual or a business. An often overlooked benefit that an RSS feeds provides is that it helps with a website’s search engine optimization.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a series of practices that enable a website to become prominent in search engine results. An important component in SEO is link building, by having an RSS feed, you are able to capture many outside links to your website. Search engines look to outside links leading to your website as building credibility and thus, will place your website higher in the relevance of certain search terms. RSS can help you build links due to the fact that your feed has the ability to be easily implemented in third party websites who enjoy your content.

Another way of using RSS content to optimize your site is by placing widely searched keywords that relate to your core business into RSS feeds. Perform a Google search on your core business and take note of the common keywords you find in the results. These are the words that you need to include in your RSS content for successful SEO.

RSS is beneficial to both the web user and small business owner alike, because it essentially opens up another channel of communication between the two. Search Engine Optimization in conjunction with an RSS feed expands that channel and brings your website into the forefront of the internet. If you want more information or if your website does not currently have an RSS feed but you would like one, please contact us at Info@seyboldinc.com.

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Published: October 27, 2008
By: Ajay Shah

This article is filed under:
Blogs | Search Engine Optimization

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RSS - Improving the SEO value of your Website

Real Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds regularly deliver updates from web pages in order to give you the most recent information without having to search through different sites. RSS used in conjunction with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can help maintain a high placement in search engine results. Two major benefits of RSS when used with SEO include: 1) Search engines pick up on the most up to date content. 2) RSS is easier for search engines to read as it is written in XML over HTML.

First, RSS feeds benefit SEO in that it allows search engines to pick up on the most up to date content from the web. Whether the updates are additional products and services or an additional blogs, the updated material can be found by search engines which can help result in higher page placement.

Real Simple Syndication uses an XML format which is much easier for search engines to read as opposed to HTML. XML allows search engines to crawl faster through content than it would if HTML was used. However, because XML is not readable for typical web users, the entire site cannot be formatted in XML.

Search engines will find any RSS content that is related to the search query before it finds any HTML content. If the engine is able to find RSS content that is similar to HTML, the engine will list the RSS results first. Online presence for any business must be accompanied by RSS in order to maximize any SEO value your website has.

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Published: October 23, 2008
By: Ajay Shah

This article is filed under:
Blogging | Blogs | Search Engine Optimization | Tips & Tricks

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Boise Website Design

In Boise you can find a number of website design companies. From simple website design with static HTML pages to full enterprise level and custom content management systems. In Boise you can find them all, but only a handful can provide truly valuable business insight as well as website design services.

In this blog post I want to take a moment to help my readers understand the difference between strategic website design and website design that simply is beautiful design.

Begin With a Goal

Whether you are a retailer or sell business-to-business in Boise, the best website begins with a solid foundation of what precisely you expect it to do for you. As a retailer it may mean an online transaction, but isn’t a visit to your physical store just as nice? As long as the cash register rings it’s all the same - right?

So let’s thin about that conversion path: Home Page > Category Page > Product Page > Shopping Cart .. ?? Store Directions.

This is a fine result provided you built it into your plan. All to often a visit to a Boise store cannot be attributed to a specific event. The merchant is completely unaware as to how their customer found them unless it is overtly stated that the sale began online. Since this is the case it is good to start with a goal and attempt to account for happy accidents in the process.

Next up: Search Engine Optimization

If you build it, they will come. This may be the case in baseball, but definitely is NOT the case on the Internet. Draft a marketing plan that includes your website and design it to allow search engines to crawl it with ease. There are many talented website design firms in Boise, but when selecting a website design company make sure you think about how you expect your website to “get found” before they begin coding.

On this site there are several articles on search engine optimization, so you should be able to get a pretty good idea of what a good website design company in Boise should do to make you successful. If you are still lost or confused, simply drop s a line for a no obligation consultation.

Lastly: Have Your Website Design Fit Your Audience.

A customer in Boise is different than a customer in Iceland. I think we can agree. So designing your website for a Boise, 35 - 50 year old mother can be challenge. Make sure you have the right people in the website design team. Do they think like your target audience? Can they write for the audience? Do they represent the demographic you are seeking to attract? These are important questions to think through - before you start!

Conclusion

Certainly we do website design; we hope to earn your business. But most of all we hope you will take our advice and think about how you approach your website design project before you select just any website design company in Boise or beyond. The engagement can be positive or a complete waste of money. We’d rather see you get what you pay for and have an excellent experience that turns searchers into visitors and visitors into buyers. This is what we do every day for our clients - we hope to do it for your company as well.

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Published: October 20, 2008
By: George Seybold

This article is filed under:
Search Engine Optimization | Website Design

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SEO: White Hat vs. Black Hat

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a series of practices that are used to get a website the highest possible placement within the search results. There are many way of performing SEO, however there are both ethical and non-ethical practices that are being used. Ethical SEO involves the use of ‘White hat methods’ as deemed by Google, which is considered by search engines to be the proper way of optimizing one’s website.

‘Black hat’ practices are considered a non-ethical way of optimizing a site and if detected by the search engines, will cause your website to be banned from the search results altogether.

Although, some SEO methods are claimed ‘Gray hat’ labeled as in between Black hat and White hat, Google does provide clear guidelines on what is and what is not acceptable. Thus, when choosing an SEO firm it is vital to understand which practices the firm undertakes. As a Google Certified company, Seybold Scientific understands the Google platform. Through this knowledge Seybold Scientific knows what it takes to optimize a site through White hat practices.

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Published: October 20, 2008
By: Ajay Shah

This article is filed under:
Search Engine Optimization

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sIFR, Spiders and Googlebot

Webcrawlers, spiders, or a Googlebot, for example, is a search engine crawler. Googlebot periodically traverses the web in record time, indexing content, links - everything contained in page source code - and storing it in Google’s search index. Then, when a user visits Google and enters a search phrase, the index, filtered by the algorithm, is what the user gets. Please note: there is some delay in this process since the results you’re getting are from the index and not the live web.

When your web developer codes your site and pages you must be careful that he or she knows what “trips up” the spider. For example, the spider can not read Adobe Flash content typically. Now there are ways to enable a spider to “read” the content, but it has to be done through an XML file fed into the Flash. If it is not created in this way then the Googlebot does cannot read it.

At times we work with a technology called sIFR. sIFR lets you use your favorite font on your websites by cleverly working with Flash, JavaScript and CSS.On Weyerhaeuser’s iLevel website we used sIFR technology to employ a font used throughout the offline marketing materials - a font defined specifically in the brand guidelines. On the Performance Tested Lumber page the headline is an example. The font used is not typically found on computers and we wanted to maintain brand consistency so tFIR was the solution to the problem.

The point is that using rich media technologies, Flash, or writing the code in incorrectly will cause the Googlebot to abandon your page, which makes all of the search engine optimization effort for not.

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About This Post
Published: October 19, 2008
By: George Seybold

This article is filed under:
Search Engine Optimization

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Twitter SEO Value Revisited

I seem to have created a little controversy, in Twitter, to some of the comments of the above post. I wanted to take the time to make it clear that I do not mean to say that Twitter has no SEO value.

Indeed, syndicated links can provide some ‘link juice’ which can be seen as a potential SEO advantage. For those of you unaware with this concept, the idea of syndication is that RSS feeds (which do not have the ‘nofollow’ tag) can in fact be used to provide some RSS value to the links you post in Twitter.

I have made an effort over the past couple days to find a single URL that has been indexed as a result of a single syndicated RSS feed. So while some people, as I have said before have had some varying amount of results providing direct SEO value from Twitter, it proves to be an inefficient venue.

This means that syndication of Twitter is not a widely developed idea. It might be a great idea for someone to develop a chatter application, but even then we are limited to the potential hope that this will be picked up by the search engines. In short, it seems like a lot of effort to propagate a link, and resources are probably better utilized if your goal is SEO.

Hope for the future? Absolutely. One potential, most likely move, is Twitter will begin to use bit.ly exclusively for their URL shortening services. For those who are not aware of this relationship, bit.ly is a product of Summize, which has been purchased by Twitter.

This as I understand will have some serious SEO chops. Bit.ly analyzes all shortened URLs through Open Calais (developed by some friends of mine at a company I used to work for), and making this data available in public RSS feeds. As Thomson Reuters, and Bit.ly, look to find other ways of presenting this content and creating toolkits for development teams through Open Calais, the possibilities could be mind-boggling.

There is a serious future for it.

That said, Twitter remains primarily a way of building your relationships online. As an SEO tool it remains pretty inefficient. Would I say not to use it? Never. Twitter is a valuable marketing tool, and its influences will grow over time. There is no doubt about that fact in my mind.

However, I would, as a seasoned Product Manager, suggest tempering value vs. effort when pitching it as an SEO application in your organization or to a potential client. I believe that you risk creating expectations, or potentially creating a project where effort exceeds the return.

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does Twitter have any SEO value?

“…does Twitter have any SEO value?”

This question came to George via Twitter last night about the value of using Twitter as a part of your SEO strategy. Twitter is a great social networking tool to create relationships with your ‘followers’ about the activities of your business.

From a structural standpoint, Twitter creates a “nofollow” tag advising Search Engines to ignore all posted links. While it is not primarily an influential SEO tool, it is an invaluable SMO (Social Media Optimization) tool.

Twitter and other social media tools, like Twitter, are primarily extensions for your branding and awareness strategy, which will allow you to manage your credibility as a source for influencing the generation of SEO opportunities.

From a traffic perspective, many bloggers and businesses are using Twitter as an incremental source of traffic and link juice with varying degrees of success. Twitter’s primary benefit is the ability to create a viral marketing tool delivered to a willing audience.

Take, as an example, @ricksanchezcnn. In July Rick Schanchez of CNN began to use Twitter as a means to communicate with and market to his viewers. As a result he has claimed to have seen a rise in his ratings as a result of the interactivity between himself and his viewers via Twitter.

Rick Sanchez has been able to convert his Twitter activity to an increased audience. If you follow Mr. Sanchez, you will notice that his posts are not just questions about news items. Often times you will find him posting about his family time, or impressions of something he just saw on TV.

Social Media tools allow you to put a personality behind your brand, learn more about your customers through interaction. When thinking about Twitter as a source of traffic, think about how your personality builds the type of goodwill and awareness into business.

It is telling how the further we stray from the corner store, Social Media has inserted those concepts and values that made the corner store the engine that drove our commercial decisions.

In short, Twitter is not an SEO tool. Twitter is one of the great online PR and marketing tools that can be used to build your brand and client base through “word of mouth” and personality.

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SEO on a Shoestring

Many small businesses do not rank high enough in the search engine results pages (SERPs) to be found. Yet, more than 70 percent of internet users start off with a search engine before they buy a product or service. To put this in perspective, there are 157 million active internet users in the U.S., and 127 million of them are active search engine users, according to Nielsen//NetRatings. Can you really afford not to be exposed to such a massive audience?

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Published: September 24, 2008
By: Ajay Shah

This article is filed under:
Business | Search Engine Optimization | Search Marketing

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Smart Web Content Writing Can Greatly Increase Your Link Popularity

One of the most important roles that search engine optimized content plays for your website is raising your page rank and search engine rankings. Web content writing that is informative, easy to read and easy to understand is one of the best methods of increasing your search engine rankings. While website content that is optimized for keywords leads to raising your search engine results page rankings, another major way by which content helps in increasing your page rank is back linking.

Search engine algorithms pay considerable importance to the number of back links that a site has in virtual space. Web content writing, which includes articles and blogs can be posted on other websites with a back link to yours. On the other hand, you can also allow people to use your web content for free if they provide a back link to your site. The key here is to provide content that is valuable to a large group of people. Writing blogs is another method of quickly increasing the number of your back links and increasing your page rankings.

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About This Post
Published: September 21, 2008
By: George Seybold

This article is filed under:
Search Engine Optimization

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