What does Optimized Theming mean?

To optimize means, “to make as effective, perfect, or useful as possible”, while theming is used to “create a unifying or dominant idea”. So Optimized Theming is to create an effective dominant idea.

Now what does this have to do with websites?

In the world of Optimized Website Design, content is your weapon, it is what you use to identify and present a need and apply a solution to fill that need. This is a natural extension of your keyword research process as your optimized theme will surround and reinforce your best or primary targeted keyword phrase.

As an expert in your field, you would pick a specific topic to focus your content. For example, a doctor may pick a specific ailment for his dissertation, while an auto mechanic might pick a specific repair to write about.  To define this methodology a doctor writing about psoriasis would hesitate to include a lot of information about the heart and cardiovascular system, or the mechanic writing about tire repair, would be less likely to be talking about the proper operation of the cooling system.

Skin disease and heart disease would be two different dominant ideas, as would be tire repair and anti-freeze. Your primary keyword phrase is your dominant idea or theme.

Focusing on a dominant idea or theme, is the first step. Next comes the optimization process and is where you build supporting content to make your case. A good word count target would be in the area of 500 to 1000 words. As an expert in your field, it would be relatively easy to come up with 500 to 1000 words of content, and in reality, you may have much more.

For a web site, or web page, much more than 1000 words may be daunting, and cut down on the number of people that will actually get to the end.  This means editing out the superfluous content or embellishment  and stick to the facts as much as possible.

Your content should be focused on the dominant idea or theme of your targeted phrase. You can always create more pages later on, to either go into detail or write about related themes as they pertain to your dominant idea. Cirelle can help provide unique supporting content, optimized to your theme.

Why is this important?

This brings me to the search engines. Search engine algorithms (of which there are many) take into consideration foremost, quality focused content. This allows the algorithms to identify the focus of your web page, and consequently will provide your content to their users when a search is done for your keyword phrase.

Their (the search engines) business is to provide links to quality content based on the user’s search criteria. If they produce junk results or unrelated results, users will go somewhere else to get their information. Hence search engines will reward a web site with a top link for well optimized, themed content.

Remember, you are the expert, your content should reflect this. Being the expert you will find less (if any) need to copy and paste from the work of others and your content will be unique, in presenting an optimized themed web page.

In your efforts to improve your search engine ranking, a little bit of bad advice is all it takes to turn you into a Search Engine Spammer.

Everyone wants to be on the search results first page, and some go to great lengths to get there including the use of deception.

Purposely designing a web page to deliver different messages, one for the visitor and one for the search engines constitutes search engine spamming. This includes embedding text in the HTML code in an effort to hide text, creating invisible text such as very tiny text and or coloring the text to match the page background, keyword stuffing, HTML Comments, doorway pages and so on.

Search engines need text (usually 500 to 1000 words targeted to and supporting  your keywords works best) for inclusion into their index.

Let’s say you have a home page which is composed of one or more images or a flash presentation, or your logo as part of a collage of images showing your product or service, but little actual text. Search engines may not properly index this type of page.

You might think having a bunch of text will spoil the look of your landing page, so you look for alternative ways to get your keywords on the page like, “I can use the image Alt tag for my text” or “I could make the text real small and the same color as the page background”.

First of all, the image Alt tag is designed to be used by accessibility software, for the visually impaired to explain what the image is about. This would be a quick sentence such as “Image of a red apple” or “Attractive bowl of fruit” for an image of an apple or bowl of fruit respectively.

Tasteful use of keywords in an Alt tag is acceptable in a properly themed web page. Stuffing this tag with 500 or so words or repetition of your keyword phrase, will likely be seen as a Spam attempt and result in a penalty.

Second, making the text real small or the same color as the background (to make it invisible), is one of the older tricks in the book. Google and others routinely penalize sites using this technique resulting in very poor rankings.

Being penalized for spamming is not the worst that can happen. Search engines have been known to outright ban domain names for routinely spamming.

One way to determine if you have been banned is to search for your domain name. If your domain name is not returned, you probably have been banned or never indexed.

If you’ve been banned from a search engine, you have little recourse except to get a new domain name as your domain may never be indexed again. In some rare cases, Google has lifted a ban if the site owner proves (with proper documentation) the ban is unwarranted.

When designing your web pages, allow for the inclusion of properly themed text supporting your chosen keywords, be the authority on the subject, and make sure your content is unique.

Remember the mission of the search engines is to give “Their Users” the best experience possible with quality unique content. Ranking well is the reward you receive for providing quality, unique, properly optimized content.

What are “Primary Search Results”?

Primary Search Results (PSR) are the subset of all results returned by a search for a given keyword phrase.

When I do a search on Google (for anything) and Google reports, say, 100 million results, what gets returned is more in the range of 500 to 600 results (give or take), as the actual results you see. You may see repeats beyond that.

I had a recent experience where I was trying to resolve a chirping sound coming from the serpentine (accessory) belt in my car. The chirp only happened when the car was cold and disappeared when it warmed up. Very annoying, so I was determined to find out if there was a solution on the web. My wife calls it the “Answer Box”.

In the process of searching for a remedy, I was willing to view hundreds of pages  of search engine results. The chirp was annoying!

After clicking the next page a couple of dozen of times (getting into  page 60 and 70), (more…)

John Lennon wrote the song Imagine, where he suggested we imagine such things as, no heaven, no countries, no possessions.That was years ago. This is today:

Imagine there’s no money
It isn’t hard to do
Lot’s of traffic daily
But no conversions boo hoo…

Unless your website is a hobby, chances are you would like to use it as a venue to sell your product or service. The only way to do that is to have a decent conversion rate.

Conversion Rate: The ratio of visits to action where someone buys something from you, joins your program, etc…

It has been said a conversion rate could be in the order of 3% to 20% on average. What is usually omitted is the process to reach your targeted audience with the right message. (more…)

Guest Post: This article was written by Jeremy Burchard, an expert
in the Web Search category at www.yoexpert.com

Ever since Google became one of the most powerful companies in all of Internet commerce, websites and companies have been clamoring to figure out how to make search engines work for them by optimizing website content. Think about it: the search function is the crux of the Internet; it’s the heart of the internet experience.

Remember some of the first-generation engines like Lycos and Ask Jeeves (now simply Ask.com in the U.S.)?  The nature of typing a few keywords into a box and having a search engine “go get it,” or asking a question and getting an answer, is what the information superhighway is all about. On the other side of the coin, being a content provider and optimizing website content for your visitors is one of the only ways to ensure that yours is the product Lycos is getting, or the answer Ask.com is giving.  (more…)

Moe was talking to Larry about his website but was dismayed… I don’t know Larry, I got the hosting, got a good price too, only $1 per year, went on-line and they let me build my own site with great picture at the top, I can change the colors and it even has a flash movie. They got this really cool feature where you can say click here to skip this intro, all kinds of add-ons for advertising. I can also put all kinds of ads on it so I can start making some real money. Larry asks, “so what’s the problem Moe?”. Moe responds, well Curly said he tried to find my site on Google, but my site didn’t come up.

You should treat your on-line business like any other business giving it the same care. Getting cheap, cutting corners shows in more ways than one, but the major downside is your potential customer may see this downfall and wonder… (more…)

You’re standing around at a gathering sipping on a cocktail when someone walks up and asks; “So… How’s Your Uniques?” Smiling you respond, they’re doing just fine, as a matter of fact, I just had them cleaned last week! I suppose I will get a few more wearings out of them when the weather gets warmer. Standing alone again, you continue to sip your cocktail.

Knowing some basics can help you understand the type of traffic you’re getting to your website, Random or Targeted.

While unique visitors represent new visitors, you also need to watch the return visits. Say you have 10 unique visitors to your site, and the total number of visits is 10, this looks like nobody is returning and you may consider (more…)

It has been said, computers are expensive paper weights, dumber than a box of rocks, as worthless as teats on a bull.

All this changes when you have some decent software running on them, because now they become capable of, decision making, sometimes called “thinking machines” (you have to have some really good software for this), gateways to a wealth of information. Your website or web page is software, simple software, but software none the less.

Let’s take a look at search engine spiders. They are housed in expensive paper weights and come to life because of the software which makes them “a spider”. Now they become less of a paper weight, but the box of rocks thing… well…  like the dog running around the house looking for bacon treats, yelling bacon, I smell bacon, gets to the bag of treats and yells out “I Can’t Read”.  Well spiders can’t read either. They are good collectors of bits and bytes which get stored in a database somewhere for further analysis. How this process happens (more…)

Site Review? We don’t need no stinkin’ site review…

I’ve heard folks indicate no matter what they do they never come up in the search engines.

A Site Review can reveal different components affecting your ranking of which you are unaware.

This is common, after all, do a search on anything (keyword of your choice), when the results come back, look at how many results have been found. Sometimes these numbers are in the millions.  You can see this, it’s usually located near the top of the results page.

So you’re looking at the top ten results and there are millions of other results, just divide those millions by 10 and you will get an idea of how many pages you have available. Ok, now how many pages are you going to go through to find what you are looking for?

These folks may in fact be indexed and living somewhere in the myriad (more…)

Keyword choice is important when you are building an on-line venture. We have said it before, most folks start their on-line venture by getting a domain name, get some hosting, throw up a few pages with colors, images and usually little content then pick some keywords out of a hat and expect the Field of Dreams syndrome to kick in. That is, “if you build it they will come”.

Unfortunately, this is usually a poor approach. You might get lucky… Do you feel lucky?

We’ve pointed out in the article Keyword Research, You Ask Why? some of the pitfalls of playing “Pick a Card, Any Card” with your keywords. The reason for this is, although your keywords may be relevant to your product or service, they may fall short of (more…)