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Booyah SEO had the pleasure of working with The Denver Egotist on their new site launch.

First, you have to check this site out if you are in Denver and do anything online in marketing or advertising.   We recommend joining the site and subscribing to the RSS Feed as the site produces a lot of great content and local advertising news.

Second, the team that collectively worked on the website was great.   Even though we donated our time and expertise, they were a model client as they took the time to understand our recommendations for SEO and implemented them perfectly.

Lastly, thanks for the ‘props’ on the site – http://www.thedenveregotist.com/editorial/2010/february/17/people-we-need-thank

For SEO, our friends at Denver’s Booyah Online Advertising generously donated their time and expertise. Man, did they kill it. Our traffic increased 20% month-over-month out of the gate – typically a time when a site can falter because of the transition. Additionally, our keyword rankings held steady and improved overall with the new site. It’d be very easy to make up some compliments about Booyah because they did the work pro bono, but we can genuinely say it’s been a serious pleasure working with them through the process. It was easy and understandable, and we’d highly recommend them to you.

Hyperlinks are the basic connector, the basic relationship, on the Web. For the foreseeable future, they’re going to be the easiest way for a computer program to judge the importance and trustworthiness of a Web page.

Submitting links to your web site to external sites is very important to a successful Internet marketing strategy. However, the links that you include in your web site’s content are just as important. If done correctly they can increase the exposure of your content.  In some cases internal links can be more important than the link that brought the visitor to your site in the first place.

10 Internal Linking Rules For Website Design

1. Make sure links actually pertain to content on the site instead of just trying to lure traffic in with the illusion that the visitor is going to find what they’re looking for in your content.
2. Don’t include misleading keywords in your links. This could be considered false advertising. Don’t use keywords that lead the visitor to believe that you are selling roses and then when they click on the link they find that you don’t sell roses, but you can suggest they buy the daisies that you do sell.
3. Do not link to generic pages that only give vague information about a keyword or that simply let the visitor purchase an item that pertains to the keyword used in the link. Try to come up with some valid content that will make it worthwhile for the visitor to pursue the link.
4. Learn how to optimize your content and links in order to maximize search engine rankings. You don’t have to be an expert on SEO (Search Engine Optimization), but at least think about how your links will rank in a keyword search.
5. Include links to your own website’s content in the content of your website. By doing this you increase the visitor’s exposure to your site’s content exponentially.
6. If you modify or remove content from your website that you had previously included links to, make sure you go back and review those links to determine if they are still valid.
7. Try to remain within a reasonable limit when including links in your content so you don’t overload the visitor with clickable text. Including 75 links or less in a large article is a general rule to follow.
8. If you include linkable images in your content always enter ALT text for the images in case the visitor experiences a browser malfunction and can’t download the image properly. If you include ALT text that will be displayed in this scenario they will be able to tell what type of information the link will take them to.
9. Including links in the header of a page is more important that including them in the footer, because often times a visitor won’t scroll all the way to the bottom of the page and will miss any links provided there.
10. Provide descriptive text for your link instead of entering the actual web address (http://www.example.com) that the link targets. This will help the visitor to decide if the link will actually provide them with the specific information that they’re looking for without having to decipher a cryptic web address.

If you haven’t been looking at the latest news in Internet marketing, Bing is the brand new search engine from Microsoft and takes over from the previous search engine, Microsoft Live. Bing will crawl, analyze and index billions of web pages and other Internet content to make sure it returns the most relevant results for its users.

From the outset, Bing is boasting to being a decision search engine, which brings back search results that will quickly answer your search question. Bing hopes to improve the satisfaction of searchers by finding the answers to user’s questions in an easier and faster way. Their search results also categorize the results in different ways to other search engines to make it more user friendly.

But as a new search engine comes along to compete with Google, search engine optimization companies are desperate to find out what they look for when ranking websites. Although it is very early days for the search engine, there are a few things that SEO and Internet marketing companies have already noticed in terms of website likes and dislike.

Copy is Key:

The amount of text on each web page seems to play a big factor for Bing, especially compared to the other major search engines. Web pages with at least 300 words seem to benefit from the new search engine.

A Good Title Goes a Long Way:

Relevant titles are crucial for Bing as it favors titles that correlate to the subject very well. You must make sure these titles are correct in order to stand a chance in Bing.

Domain Age Helps Your Ranking:

Bing seems to enjoy a domain that has been registered for many years, as it seems to show experience. This may mean that purchasing an old domain name may really help.

Links Out of the Website:

Many of the major search engines, including Google, don’t seem to like outbound links as it will reduce your Page Rank and give it to other sites. Bing on the hand seems to love these links out of the website.

Blogging is Bad News:

Surprisingly, Bing seems to have a low opinion of bloggers and doesn’t seem to rank them highly. This is especially true when bloggers try to battle with the major websites for space when recent news events occur.

Anchor Text Always Rules:

Providing quality anchor text is key in all search engines, as one of the measurements of the quality of the website is the inbound links. Making these are correct is crucial for all search engines.

Few Internet users are fully aware of all that goes into the results page they view after performing a search. The complex mechanisms, which govern what they see when looking for information or products, are the result of two activities. The first is by search engines, like Google, who analyze each website to extract key elements used to give it a rank. This can mean the difference between popularity and obscurity, as low ranked sites are not visible on the first page of results, meaning they will get fewer visitors and fewer customers. From these search engine activities, the second factor of SEO, or search engine optimization developed. This is the designing of a website in such a way that makes it come out in the top returned search results, preferably the first page, when Google or other search engines are used to find information. This is achieved by various techniques such as careful placement of words and key phrases, hyperlinks, meta tags, images, links and HTML and other forms of coding.

Estimates of just how many searches are performed every day vary, but with the rise of Internet availability and use, the figures are well into the billions. When a search for the any information is performed, search engines take the information an Internet user provides and compares it with its own data, then gives back results showing the sites most likely to contain useful information by matching some or all of the words entered in the search box. Data is collected by search engines using spiders, highly complex automated programs which read all the information on a website and then assign it a rank. The spider downloads it onto its own servers, and through a process described as crawling, which take all the relevant information on site to be cataloged by another program called an indexer. They work constantly updating search results by adding new data and start again as soon as one cycle of scanning is finished. Search engines use programs known as algorithms to rate the information they gather, the details of which are highly guarded secrets within the industry.

The technique of SEO appeared for the first time more than 10 years ago. Danny Sullivan, the editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land, mentioned it in his blog which comments on news and information about search engines. By 1995, SEO was a known means for getting high results with search engines and the race to produce the best results for clients of SEO firms had begun.

Analyzing your website traffic statistics can be an invaluable tool for a number of different reasons, but before you can make full use of this tool, you need to understand how to interpret the data.

Most web hosting companies will provide you with basic website traffic information that you then have to interpret and make pertinent use of. However, the data you receive from your web hosting company can be overwhelming if you don’t understand how to apply it to your particular business and website. Let’s start by examining the most basic data—the average visitors to your site on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.

These figures are the most accurate measure of your website’s activity. It would appear on the surface that the more traffic you see recorded, the better you can assume your website is doing, but this is an inaccurate perception. You must also look at the behavior of your visitors once they come to your website to accurately gauge the effectiveness of your website.

There is often a great misconception about what is commonly known as “hits” and what is really effective, quality traffic to your site. Hits simply means the number of information requests received by the server. If you think about the fact that a hit can simply equate to the number of graphics per page, you will get an idea of how overblown the concept of hits can be. For example, if your home page has 15 graphics on it, the server records this as 15 hits, when in reality we are talking about a single visitor checking out a single page on your website. As you can see, hits are not useful in analyzing your website traffic.

The more visitors that come to your website, the more accurate your interpretation will become. The greater the traffic is to your website, the more precise your analysis will be of overall trends in visitor behavior. The smaller the number of visitors, the more a few anomalous visitors can distort the analysis.

The aim is to use the website traffic statistics to figure out how well or how poorly your site is working for your visitors. One way to determine this is to find out how long on average your visitors spend on your site. If the time spent is relatively brief, it usually indicates an underlying problem. Then the challenge is to figure out what that problem is.

One of the best ways to drive traffic to a web site is by providing quality content that is both informative and useful. This will inspire other sites to link to the site if the content provided is relevant and trustworthy.

Providing useful content and gaining trust and respect from other sites dedicated to the same subject is important for building a successful link building strategy.

Here are TEN TIPS on how to construct your content for link building opportunities:

1. Always publish content that is relevant to the targeted market. Try to help meet an aspect of the market’s needs through information or guidance. Your content should always be factual and helpful.
2. Make sure your content contains useful information and is targeted at the topics that frequently attract the most links.
3. Create linkable content that meets the targeted market’s needs. This will make your content more appealing to the most influential linkers in the targeted space of the website.  Try to insert the human element into what you publish.   The content should begin and end a conversation that the user is having in their mind.
4. Sell the company, but don’t use this as an opportunity to pitch products. Instead write on topics that illustrate your professional competence, domain of knowledge, authority of expertise along with the core values of the organization.  Try to make your article educational, entertaining, or otherwise interesting to your target audience.
5. Publish content on the company’s own site as well as off-site in areas that foster traffic about the topic on which you are writing such as trade journal sites, industry blogs, and RSS feeds that pertain to specific subject matter.
6. Always focus on the benefit that your content will provide to the reader. Does if offer a solution to a problem or provide advice on certain situations that is important to the reader? If the reader doesn’t perceive the content as useful then no one will want to link to it.
7. Figure out who the audience of the content will be and then focus on what will most likely catch their attention and stir them to take action by clicking on a link to the site.
8. Try to get links to the article submitted to established, respected sites in the field of interest where your article resides.
9. Participating in established industry forums and guest blogging on industry blogs can help to reach your audience. This will build trust in the content that you provide and make it more attractive to the reader if they already trust the source of the information.
10. Pay close attention to the types of sites you submit links to. You don’t want unsavory sites to be associated with the content that you provide. One example would be a link farm. While you will receive inbound links to your content, some search engines may not be as likely to give your site a high ranking because of the source of the inbound link.

Publishing robust, informative content is one of the best ways to drive traffic to a web site. Always make sure that the content is relevant to the intended audience. It should provide a service to the reader. If you build trust with your reader then you will be more likely to receive their support in the future. Make sure the content is factual, educational, and helpful and you shouldn’t have any problems driving traffic to your site.