As noted in the previous post, we’ve decided to let potential customers know of our memberships with prominent search engine marketing optimization and interactive marketing organizations in Atlanta, Georgia and the U.S. in general. Choosing a long term business partner is always a tough call – the smarter the choice, the greater the gains.

Atlanta SEM/SEO memberships (PART II):

MarketingPower.com

The AMA’s website, MarketingPower.com, provides marketing professionals and AMA members with the information, products and services required to succeed in their jobs and careers. As a member with MarketingPower.com we’ve made a lot of new and valued contacts. It’s a marketing community that gives members a chance to share their knowledge and to learn from experts and innovators in meetings, workshops, and seminars in Atlanta.

Tagonline.org

Membership in TAG has put us in a good company of like-minded marketers, tech leaders, and industry pioneers. TAG is an unmatched way to network with peers, excel professionally, find a partner or hire an employee, and hone our skills.

Prsageorgia.org

The Georgia Chapter of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) is the second largest chapter of public relations professionals in the United States with approximately 850 members. It is an organization dedicated to developing and enriching the professional lives of Georgia’s public relations practitioners. We’ve been to many exciting seminars and sessions held by The Georgia Chapter of the Public Relations Society of America where a number of search engine optimization, public relations, and affiliate marketing topics were discussed.

If you are interested in finding out more about our SEO services in Atlanta, please read our Atlanta Internet Marketing article.

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Today we are opening a rubric about internet marketing & SEO organizations in Atlanta, Georgia. With this rubric we seek to educate our potential customers of the ways we work and partner with other online promotion organizations and agencies in Atlanta, Georgia to provide customers top quality SEO. Choosing a long-term business partner is always a tough call – the smarter the choice, the greater the gains.

Atlanta SEM/SEO memberships (PART I):

Atlanta AiMa

Founded in 1999, the AiMA is a dedicated group of new media and interactive marketing professionals focused on providing the Atlanta Internet Marketing Community a place to network, share, and learn about proven leading-edge interactive strategies and tactics. Through AiMA we’re meeting with smart, savvy Atlanta SEO and SEM professionals.

MarketingProfs.com

Founded in June 2000, MarketingProfs.com is an online publishing company based in Los Angeles, California. Even though MarketingProfs are thousands of miles away from Georgia, we’re proud to be a member of the organization that provides marketers with both strategic and tactical marketing know-how and information.

Marketing Profs community unites internet and offline marketing professionals in medium and large corporations who collaborate, share, learn, and network together through a combination of provocative educational events, articles, and commentary.

Creativityatlanta.org

To advance and enrich the expertise in search industry, we’ve joined Atlanta advertising community. Atlanta Ad Club is acting as a catalyst for idea exchange, professional development, and creative energy. Atlanta Ad Club is a local member organization of the American Advertising Federation (www.aaf.org).

If you are interested in reading more about our SEO services in Atlanta, please read our Atlanta Internet Advertising article.

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Many of our customers get confused about the term “Off-page Optimization.” The fact that there is still a great deal of confusion about this topic motivates us to publish more information about off page SEO so that more and more small business owners and web developers can be better at SEO and enjoy its benefits.

So What is Off-Page Optimization & Why Do We Need It?

Off-page optimization refers to links from other websites that point to your site. For a site to achieve high search engine results (10-1 positions) search engines must regard yours as an “authority” website.

The term “authority” in SEO refers to links from outside pages (other websites) that point to yours. Not every type of link carries the same weight though. The more inter-connected your links are with websites that relate to your industry, your interests, your business, and your topics, the more authority you have from a search engine’s perspective.

A critical error that many make is thinking that off-page optimization means simply exchanging links with other websites (link exchange), but link exchange is much less valuable than it once was. Search engines consider one-way in-bound links much more significant than the reciprocal links gained in a link exchange agreement.  Search engines are smart and have a technique to uncover reciprocal linking and don’t assign these links as much value as a one-way link.

The interconnection or linkage with other websites in this case means websites linking to your site without a specific request to back-link (or link back). These links are non- reciprocal.  This hints to the search engines that your page must offer some real value, because another site owner felt compelled enough to share it with his or her audience without getting anything in return.

The art of attracting one-way inbound links is the topic of our next discussion. In brief, you can buy links, rent links, or bait for links. Generally however, your website must provide high value in order for other website owners to feel compelled to link to your pages. When your content is great, the link building task will be much easier.

There’s a debate over which is more important: on-page or off-page optimization. The answer: you can’t have one without another

Hopefully explains the concept and the value of off-page optimization. If not, check out our “WHAT IS SEO?” section for more details or drop us a line via the CONTACT FORM.

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On page optimization refers to a number of markup and content elements on a website. First off, when we talk ONPAGE, we mean on the actual webpage. Whatever task the SEO specialist undertakes, he or she is making it to the website coding. The SEO modifies and edits the markup.

It does not take a rocket scientist to understand on-page optimization because it mostly deals with the content and the Meta tags of your website. A critical mistake that many make is considering that content is just a bunch of keywords or that is should just be some sort of filler for the pages.  The keyword and topic-rich content of your website is a hallmark for a search engine that must determine what your site is about, but it’s also the force that will intrigue and convert customers and keep them coming back.

On-page optimization may not boost your page rank, but it surely can make your website more compliant to the standards of the major search engines. On-page optimization makes your site crawlable and easy for search engines to index.

Search engines can’t read images and other types of multimedia (video, audio, flash etc.). Thus, the text is often the most critical element that causes your site to rank well for your target keywords.  Search engines look for various clues within the markup on the page to determine the most relevant keywords on a website.

TITLE TAG: First they search for the title of the page.   A title tag offers the most important hint about the content on the page. 

HEADER TAGS: Headers (or headlines) are supplemental to the title, so if the same keyword is contained throughout those tags, you get relevance credits from search engines.

URL (page address): Search engines also scan the URL of the page itself. So it is important that those URL’s contain the keywords you are targeting. Search engines think that if the same keyword phrase appears in the title tags, the header tags and the URL, then there is a strong likelihood that this is keyword phrase defines the topic of the page.

Meta tags: Even though some search engines don’t regard meta tags as crucial to indexing and ranking, they still play a significant role in on-page optimization. Some search engines still use them to display your page in their lists. Try to make them different for every page on your site.

Hopefully, on-page optimization makes more sense now. If not, check out our “WHAT IS SEO?” section for more details or drop us a line via our CONTACT FORM.

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This week we have seen so many problems related to internal website structure that I thought this would be an important topic to discuss. If webmasters and site owners had more practical knowledge, these little issues that turn into big optimization problems could easily be avoided. We’ve decided to share this week’s top issues in hopes that those tips will help others avoid errors on their sites.

Mysite.com and www.mysite.com:

Search engines may see your website differently than you think. Check if search engines see mysite.com and www.mysite.com as the same site.

Flat Structure:
Ideally, your internal site structure should not be the same for every page on your site—especially if you have different sections on your site.

Many content management systems highlight recent content without placing much emphasis on your featured content. If you have important content, make sure that it is easy to access. Also use your site statistics to place more link weight on your most popular or most profitable content.

• Create a section related navigation that promotes other offers inside that section of your site, without heavily crossing over to other sections
• Actively guide users from within the content area of your site. These links will drive conversions and help funnel PageRank through your site
• Highlight featured content

There are many ways that a site can waste link authority:

• Printer friendly pages
• Individual post pages in forums
• Archive vs active content forum threads
• Endless cross referencing, heavy internal tagging, and user generated tags
• Other cross referencing content sections that create thousands of thin content pages

If you have thin content portions of a site or duplicate pages, get rid of them or use robots.txt to prevent them from getting indexed.

If you have more pages than link equity, you need to build links. Another thing you can do in the short term is to publish more content per page and structure your internal links to place more link weight on your most important pages.

Two more things worth considering here are to 1.) Limit template related duplication, and 2.) Temporarily publish fewer pages until you build your link authority and clean up the supplemental index issues.

Sitewide Outbound Links:
If you minimize the number of sitewide outbound links, this will keep more of your link equity flowing internally. For many sites, it does make sense to link out to resources or to sell links. If you are selling links, try to price at a higher price point and sell fewer links. This will improve your internal to external link ratio and hold your PageRank up higher.

Internal to External Link Ratio:
Make sure you have many internal links on each page. If you do not have many, perhaps you can duplicate your header navigation in your site footer.

Isolate Noisy Pieces of Your Site:
One last consideration is to isolate the noisy pieces of your site. Use subdomains to divide your content by content types. For example, if you have a great blog and add a forum to it you would probably be better by off placing the forum on a subdomain.

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