seo strategy | Iuvo Omega Ltd.

Absolute Links vs. Relative Links – SEO Value (UPDATED)

April 17, 2014 By admin 1 Comment

The debate between absolute links and relative links continues to live on in the SEO world. The individual significance of each has been contested, but it is widely regarded that absolute links provide better overall SEO value than relative links. Here is why:

Much less chance of having broken links when moving documents or pages
Crawlers cannot mess up your site links
The source code more often contains the full domain name
Visitors will are more likely to bookmark your website since it is more recognizable

But first, let’s see what’s what.

Absolute links are there to show you the location of a document, for instance. It includes the clues such as the protocol needed for getting the document, the server to get it from, the directory where it is stored as well as the name of the document itself.

On the other hand, relative links have a slight starting advantage in the race, as the server already “knows” where the document is, and thus, the complete URL of the file is not necessary.

Many believe that absolute links have less potential for getting messed up when search engines index your page because some relative links can be missed by the crawlers. It shouldn’t really make a difference, but many conclude that this is reason enough to use absolute links whenever possible.

Furthermore, content scrapers and RSS services may “re-purpose” your content legitimately (or not). Should that happen, you would need absolute links in order to get back what is yours by attributing a proper backlink to your site.

Moreover, if you use relative links to your website page, the search engine may not recognize you as the domain owner and crawl over to the similar website address. This could lead to the drop in back linking and subsequently to losing search engine rankings to your competitor (which is not what you want).

Therefore, use absolute links over relative and be thorough in doing that. You can never be too diligent when it comes to your business, so do what you can to help it thrive.

If you’d like our help with that, contact us today and let’s chat about it!

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Incorporation Of Company Branding And SEO (UPDATED)

April 17, 2014 By admin 2 Comments

SEO is not an exact science. This becomes apparent when trying to incorporate both SEO and branding into a strategy. This process is finicky, to say the least.

On the one side, SEO deals with the placement of keywords and phrases.

On the other side, branding deals with company loyalty and culture. Incorporating both sides dilutes the prominence of both. But eliminating one or the other may not meet all strategic and marketing goals.

Once again, it should be emphasized that SEO is a series of guidelines rather than an exact science. Having said that, the following recommendation can be used to satisfy both sides of the equation.

In general, keywords and phrases (i.e. SEO) should remain the focus of any early-stage company while the incorporation of company branding should appear later in the evolution.

The reasoning is pretty straightforward. At first, no one knows the name of your company, but perhaps they are searching for your products or services. In other words, you want to target keywords and phrases that focus on your offering rather than your company.

For example, when you first open a restaurant, it is unnecessary focusing on your future customers to know the name of your brand, without familiarizing them with the food and drinks you are actually offering them. Since they haven’t actually heard of you yet, and associate nothing with your “brand”, you must make use of SEO. Your dishes and beverages will be your keywords, pictures and videos of the ingredients and your kitchen and restaurant areas a way to show what you have to offer instead of just telling. Once people are attracted to the bits and pieces of your business that you market to them, you start building loyalty and credibility, and correspondingly branding becomes more important.

It’s at this point that you may want to incorporate corporate messaging to strengthen the relationship with customers and instill trust in your brand. If you strive to be the leading restaurateur in your town, you must have a review section where the customers you have drawn leave comments about the food and drink quality, about the service, about the atmosphere… Brand image will be very important to you, so a comment section will give you valuable feedback on how you are perceived. You can even start a blog on your website page, detailing certain aspects of your workdays. Your workers can write it. You can also develop a close relationship with your customers on social media, since you can inform them about novelties introduced just for them and they will give you their stamp of approval (if you do your job properly).

One final thought about branding: If a searcher types in the name of your company, they are likely to find your website anyway. This is mostly due to anchor text and backlinks. Therefore, optimizing for the company name is rather insignificant in most cases. What you must concentrate on is defining the way people see you, the way they remember your products and services even if they don’t know your website address. Once you build a reputation, your name will come as a search engine result because Google values quality marketing content above all (as you can read in one of our previous blog posts).

If you are unsure of how to do that, call us and we will chat with you about it!

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Strategic Use Of Images In Search Engine Optimization (UPDATED)

April 17, 2014 By admin Leave a Comment

When assessing page structure and layout, there is a subtle, yet strategic way to use images in an SEO-friendly manner (beyond ALT tags) which improves your search rank while allowing you to integrate the necessary marketing message(s).

Confused?

Let’s look at an example:

Suppose you operate a travel site and you want to optimize a given page for the term “Las Vegas Hotel”.

Suppose that you also want to include an enticing marketing message such as “Book now and save 20%!”.

The aforementioned tagline lacks descriptive text but possesses persuasive characteristics. Moreover, your picture is relevant to whatever text you have on your website. That is the first rule of choosing an appropriate picture. When you’ve done that, you can deal with the SEO aspect of its use.

However, there is much more SEO involved with this picture than you would think at first glance.

In order to prepare the image to be used with the content, start with its name. By naming the picture properly, you will take the chance of letting the Google know what the picture is illustrating. Insert a keyword relevant to the content into the picture name and help Google search engine recognize your content and bump it in its ranking.

Next, you need to consider the size of the picture you want to insert in your content. The faster the picture loads, the better for you, since people get impatient when having to wait for anything, really. Therefore, it would be smart to optimize the image size (upload a large image but set it to be shown as a small one) per your site’s capabilities and avoid future headaches.

Make your website responsive, that is, make your visitors comfortable with using your site on their not only computers but also tablets and mobile phones. Your bounce rate will be lower if people can properly see whatever it is you want them to see.

Add OpenGraph and Twitter Cards for your picture to make sure the picture will be included in your social media posts and use higher-quality pictures, because not only will they look better to the algorithms, but also to the naked human eye.

In other words, images are a great place to insert marketing messages that lack necessary keywords and phrases. Leveraging this technique will ensure that descriptive text is indexed while less marketing jargon is overlooked.

Since a picture paints a thousand words, use relevant images whenever possible. The combination of keyword-rich content and enticing messaging will satisfy both sides of the strategic equation and ultimately better the final score.

If you are having trouble with SEO on your website, drop us a note and we will chat about it with you for free!

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