Online Marketing Sydney, Internet Marketing Australia Freestyle Media

Did you know as of April 11th there was no longer a need to manually submit your sitemap to search engines. The major search engines agreed on a sitemap format. You can now add a simple line to your robots.txt file and let the engines know where your sitemap resides on your website.

Iinclude a similar line to this:
Sitemap: http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

Here is a forum post about this

Robots.txt has traditionally been used to tell search engine spiders where go and where not to go on your website. This change in the robots.txt file allows you to tell the spider where to look for the sitemap file.

For more information about a robots.txt file just go to www.robotstxt.org

Immediately when I heard about this new second level domain (Example.au) opening I thought wow what an opportunity for search engine marketers. I couple of things are going through my mind and I will take you through them and would be keen on your feedback.

1. Which domain will be priortised over which? - When it comes to SEO most SEO’rs prioritise .com over say .biz and .net. I myself believe that Google has a preferece towards .com domains over the other ones. So, will Google rank .au over .com.au or the other way around??

2. What a branding opportunity! - There are so many domains out there that big businesses have been trying to get a hold of and havent been able to. Now is a great chance. In my mind Weetbix.au is better than Weetbix.com.au as there are less characters and it seems more local.

What do you think?

I had a great time talking at the Sydney seminar for ANTOR. I was fielding a lot of questions in regards to Google Adwords and I think this might be an opportunity for everyone to ask away. So if you have a question post it as a comment and I will answer it to the best of my ability.

Listen to me at The Search Engine Summit Conference

As you can probably tell, I’m really ramping up my speaking engagements this year.

In March I will be presenting at the Search Summit – the Australian search marketing conference.

Personally I’m excited to be part of a line-up which includes guys from Google, SEO, 24×7 Real Media and News Limited’s Digital Media arm. We’ll be exploring all nooks and crannies on how to get the most from your search engine strategies.

Unlike past Australian search Events this one is focused on delivering content not just to novices but is also offering high level strategies to media savvy pros who already have their toes in the water.

As you know, I believe your search engine position is one of the most highly valuable online marketing tools in your arsenal. We industry bods are getting together to ensure we are making the most of the offerings in our market. Hope to see you there.

For more details or to register for the seminar, visit http://www.searchsummit.com.au/

Freestyle Media number 1 spot for “Online Marketing Agency” in Google Australia

Redeveloping your website can be a real challenge when you assume your web designers and developers understand search engine marketing. Unfortunately this is not usually the case. Most designers are great at making pretty pictures and developers are great at making great technology. But pretty pictures and great technology don’t necessarily give you great search engine results. I have come across many designers and developers in my time and following are the main problems I encounter when building a site that you want to rank well in the search engines.

1. Too much Flash with keywords inside it – Websites with too much flash kill the opportunity to gain great results in the engines. The flash also contains all of the keyword text. This is exceptionally unfriendly to the search engine as there is no way to browse the text. The designer will tell you, “We will be using the latest technology in flash, you will be cutting edge!” I like flash but only moderate amounts used for promotion or product demonstrations.
2. No text – Sites that have little or just 1 paragraph of generic text. Google only reads text, pdf’s and word docs. The designer will usually tell you, “Your web design has visual impact because of all the flash.” Unfortunately it will have no impact with Google.
3. No Sitemap – There wasn’t a sitemap. Some developers will tell you that this is just old school and you don’t need it anymore. I assure you that adding a sitemap to your website will improve search results.
4. No web page theming – Firstly a definition, Web page theming is structuring a website into different sections with specific themes so that a search engine can interpret and rank/categorise the pages accordingly. The search unfriendly sites I see are structured in a manner that is great for human browsers and ignore search engines. I always think about the search engines and the user at the same time and develop a structure which brings about a happy medium. Developing your site into themes and topics allows you to deliver the best site for human and search engine browsers. The read the words and browse and the search engine can categorise your site and browse.

3 Ways to Avoid Developing your New Website into a Search Engine Nightmare

1. Check the designer and developers Competency of search engine marketing – Ask your web agency if they understand search engine marketing. All of them will say yes because you are talking usually to the main salesperson. Ask to see some result in the search engines of website they have redesigned. Type in the main keywords for the site and see where the site that was redesigned ranks. They are no good if:
1. No listings – They cant show you a listing
2. Non competitive terms – the terms which they used to show you results were just the brand name of the product and not a generic keyword. E.g. if they were showing you a Nike site and they typed in “Nike” that is no good. Instead if they typed in “sport shoe” and showed you number 1 listings, then you are on a winner.
2. Check that the Content Management System is Search Engine Friendly – Ask your agency what CMS(Content Management System) they use. Get them to show you examples of websites they have built using the CMS and what sort of rankings they have achieved in the search engines. A CMS system can make or baek your searhch engine results by the following things:
1. Too much junk in CMS – If the CMS is dumping huge amounts of content and code into the page, this can ruin your results since Google doesn’t understand code its looking for text.
2. URL formats not compliant – If the CMS formats the URL and filenames of pages with too many query strings e.g. (ThisGreatPage.aspx?id=pinkelephany&Page=ContactMyMum&Query=NotSearchFriendly) All of those query strings will clog up the search engine and it will assume you are just content spamming and treat each of your webpages as a single page. I.e. the search engine will chop off the querystring elements and just assume that there is one page there, even though the query string elements allow you to see different content.
Optimal website search strategy is to assign 2 -3 keywords per webpage
3. Structure your site for the engines – I know the pain you have gone through developing your sitemap and thinking through all of the content that you want the use to look at. What I want you now to do is look at your sitemap and think about all the content you want the search engine to look at. Key things to do:
1. Choose your keywords – First you need to figure out which keywords you are targeting. Your agency should be able to help you with this if you haven’t done any search engine marketing before.
2. Choose your high ranking pages – Since you know which keywords you are targeting, you now need to decide which pages you want to target these keywords and rank highly in the search engines. These will need to be specially developed and your internal linking needs to be structured to give these pages the highest number of backlinks.
3. Homepage vs Subpage organization keyword assignment – The strategy with keyword assignment for web pages is to choose 2 – 3 keywords per page. The normal trap people fall into is assuming their homepage will target all of the keywords. Your homepage needs to be treated just like another page it should have some main generic keywords assigned to it and just target those. (See diagram below)

Optimal strategy for Keyword assignment of website pages

Choosing a competent online marketing agency to build your website

If you are encountering any of the above problems with your current web agency I would suggest building your website with an Online Marketing Agency. The difference is that a web agency can build your site but an online marketing agency can save you money by building your website to be search engine friendly. Save yourself the cost of rebuilding your website and work with an agency that understands how to build a website that is search engine friendly. Contact Freestyle Media, a competent Online Marketing Agency (h
ttp://www.FreestyleMedia.com.au) or call Fred Schebesta on 02 9818 7300 to discuss your website requirements.