Today, as I was doing my usual somewhat coherent hunt through Wordpress plugins, I happened across a great little contact form utilizing AJAX and JQuery to achieve some snazzy effects. While SimpleModal Contact Form (SMCF) (contributed to the WordPress Community by Eric Martin) doesn’t allow much out of the box customization in terms of fields you can add or messages displayed straight from the admin, it’s nonetheless an impressive and slick tweak you can make to your wordpress blog or website that will enhance your visitor’s contact experience from first setup.

SMCF even checks for required fields, displays a thank you upon click ’send’ and more.

And, with the built in Wordpress Plugin Editor and a text editor, you can customize to your heart’s content – as long as you know a little php and CSS, the rest is pretty much gravy. For further customization info you can visit the WordPress Plugin Page for the SimpleModal Contact Form and refer to FAQs.

This is great for SEO because it allows fluid interaction between a visitor and a website. Your point of contact should be dynamic or all-available, meaning that it doesn’t take a user away from the page they’re on and disrupt their navigation experience.

Occasionally I hear someone talk about copying relevant content from other sites to bulk up their website. While it’s great to add syndicated feeds of new article excerpts, photos, or tweets from others online, when you do so you typically link back to their website. Simply copying someone else’s writing is not only unethical — it will not give you an SEO boost, and may in fact hamper your long term efforts.

Unscheduled Creighton Interruption!

Unoriginal content on your website will actually negatively affect your search engine rankings, unless you use the “rel=nofollow” modifier when linking to these pages (in which case it won’t hurt you, but won’t help you expand your site’s reach). The “nofollow” tells Google “hey, we know this page isn’t original. But, we think our visitors will find it useful. Don’t penalize us for copying content and don’t add this page to your index, please.”

As though Google trolls through and simply counts the number of pages you have, cataloging them mindlessly to show to anyone who might possibly want to find a BIG site. It might work for about a minute, but Google has a brain or two on the case for just this purpose. They quickly push the earliest-published version to the top of their rankings.

NOTE: If you have hired help to build content, be sure it is completely original. A good writer will charge around $30 for a quality, unique 750-word article. Always check your content against what is already available online.

To check your content, go to www.copyscape.com. Make sure that your content is relevant to your field, and that it matches your site theme. The search engines know when you are using copied content, and they can tell where it came from and when!

The best way to increase your content with useful information is to hire freelance writers who are knowledgeable in your online market, and find a great editor to help your articles and copy stand out from the crowd. Only a library of original content and webpages (published and found FIRST on your website) will bring you a boost for SEO.

Happy SEOing!
Tanya

Search engine optimization in its earliest form (let’s call this SEO 1.0) was all about matching titles and domain names to products & keyword search phrases, making the site as easy as possible to crawl for Google and other engines. While these basics are indeed important to start with when building your online market, much more can be done. The businesses who still use this antiquated approach to optimization are probably looking for a 2.0 version, but end up spending up to $1,000 per month for 1.0 tips. How do you make sure your SEO company is using 2.0?

SEO 2.0 is all about improving your rank on search engines for relevant and appropriate reasons. Say you go to a job interview. Just because you dress nicely doesn’t mean you’re going to get the job. It might help, but you can’t just be an “empty suit”.

In the same way, having basic SEO practices in place is a good idea, but will probably not give you a major boost in engine ranks. Today’s SEO 2.0 focuses on how your website “behaves” and interacts with users. How do your users navigate your website? Are there sufficient incentives to staying on the site longer, keeping customers poking through your pages out of curiosity, pleasure, or need? Are your page titles accurate? Do you have unique content? These are the starter questions for SEO 2.0, and Google Analytics can help you get some answers.

Gone are the days of simply needing an excellent domain name. Google and others have caught on to the tricks and techniques used by websites looking for false leads, and they simply don’t work as well. Start looking at where your traffic is coming from, how much time visitors spend on the site, and what they are interested in when they get there.

Happy SEOing,
Tanya

Optimizing your website for Google and other search algorithms

Ever wonder where Google gets its search results? Here’s how it works:

They guess.

Google tries to automatically find every webpage in the world and present the most relevant pages in its search results.

The first rule of SEO: make yourself easy to find.

By looking at these sample search results, we see that for every website, Google displays the same “template” of information. This template includes:

1. A webpage title.
2. A page description or excerpt.
3. The webpage’s URL.
4. Supplemental info such as date of last update, number of authors on a forum thread, etc.

The Current Google Template (06/01/2009):

Google's Default Template as of June 1st, 2009

This means that your website needs title tags, meta description tags, easy to understand urls (static or dynamic), and (for best results) newly published text, images, videos, or other media on a regular basis.

Google is going to make a guess about your website no matter what, but they are biased toward trustworthy websites. (This is because they want to have trustworthy search results for Googlers.) If your site is ‘what you see is what you get’, Google considers it trustworthy.

This is the second rule of SEO:

WYSIWYG
(follow the Google Template)

Websites that give users ‘expected’ results (i.e. a hyperlink takes them where they think it will take them or info-rich, easy to scan descriptions) are more usable, more trustworthy, and so more likely to be at the top of Google’s results.

A good SEO helps you choose what info Google will display in its default template when it finds your website to draw you the most traffic appropriate to your stated goals. Google guesses, unless you tell them otherwise – and you can tell them otherwise! The easiest way is with Google’s webmaster central toolkit.