Erin Taylor Design

Google AdWords Accounts

Setting up a Google AdWords account is pretty easy. The hard part is finding the time to manage your account. There are many different methods of management for AdWords and other Pay-Per-Click campaigns.

One method that really makes sense to me is to monitor the account for one or two month, find what days and time produce the best conversions, then set a time frame in AdWords so that your ads only appear during your peak times.

Pay close attention to your bounce rate for each keyword and filter out the keywords that result in high bounce rates. Also check for local settings.

Being creative while managing your AdWords account can save you money on clicks and produce better conversions. But you have to stick to it to be more successful than the next guy that quickly reads his reports and adds money.

Posted in Pay Per Click, SEM, SEO | No Comments »

Hiding Alt Attributes

I recently had a customer request that the alt attributes not display when his mouse cursor hovers over an image. But I want to get the best possible organic search rankings I can get for him. Link building will come next and we are working with the content, meta and page titles. My thought was not to rid the site of alt attributes, but rather hide them from being seen in Internet Explorer or any other browser that displays alt attributes.

Which brings me to one of my problems. Alt attributes being displayed as tool tips in the browser. I had a quick look around and found something that I really already knew about alt attributes. They are alternate text attributes, meaning if the image does not display, the alt attribute will give the reader an idea what the image is supposed to be and for screen readers. Should alt attributes be displayed in the browser if the image is correctly displayed? Fire Fox and Flock do not display alt attributes. Some sites that I visited are saying that this behavior is a bug with the browser. Its been that way in Internet Explorer for as long as I can remember and they have not corrected the “bug” in the multitude of versions of Internet Explorer. I don’t think it is a “bug”.

So here is the consensus that I gathered from the web, my co-worker and my own thinking. By adding an empty title for an image attribute (no space), that overrides the alt attribute from displaying in Internet Explorer, and without the risk of causing lowered search rankings. Keep in mind that the keywords used in the alt attributes read natural and give meaning to the image. Not Keyword Stuffing!

Posted in SEO, Web Design | No Comments »

Basic SEO

For so long people have been wanting to get higher and higher rankings on Google, Yahoo, MSN… The rest. I first ask them how is their natural rankings? How was your basic SEO done? I pop open their current site and take a look at their title tag and their meta tags, and most of the time they have default title tags and the same meta tags on all pages.

At least they have something right? Well not so sure. If you want to rank higher that your competition you have better have the basics done.

Start out by building what I call a keyword document. Start with MS word or any text editor and start with the page name. Either use the file name or what the page is titled on the link to it.
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Posted in CSS, Clients, SEO, Web Design | No Comments »

Is Google really devaluing directories?

Is Google really devaluing directories?
OK, Google dropped the mention of adding you website to relevant directories (DMOZ, Yahoo! Directory,…), but is Google devaluing the relevant links and lowering your ranking because you are listed in a directory.

In the Google Webmaster Guidelines, Google has dropped the suggestion that webmasters submit sites to relevant directories, DMOZ, Yahoo! Dir, botw, as well as others.….
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Posted in SEO, Web Design | No Comments »

Testing Blog editor with Flock

I have tried this with another domain that I help manage, and it worked great.

First you have to have the web browser Flock, then set up your blog site information. Works pretty nice.  If you haven’t tried Flock, download it and try it sometime.

No other news to report. Still liking my new job. I worked last night on a script that will make things go a little faster with optimization of customer sites.

Learning some new software for optimization.  It is called Market Samurai, it is still in the beta stages and has some bugs.  Once they get things worked out, it will be an SEO’s dream. More on that later.

Tags: flock, work

Posted in Personal, SEO | No Comments »