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Improving Spiderability

admin — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 10:48:48 +0000

How to Improving Spiderability

No one can find my site, what do I do?

In Part #1 of this article, I talked about content development, page titles and their enormous impact on a site’s placement and efficacy in the search engines. In this follow up article, I will step back and discuss issues that relate to the indexability or spiderability of your site. Now that you have all that great content in place, it is time to make sure that the search engines can find it.

What is spiderability and why is it so important?

Let�s start with a definition of spiderability (synonymous with indexability).

Spiderability: A measure of how well a site can be indexed (or crawled) - by a search engine (SE) spider (the software program that SEs use to gather information off the web).

Whether or not (and how well) your site is spiderable will have a direct impact on your site�s search engine rankings, making this factor one of the most important in search engine optimization. A site must be built in a way that allows the search engine spiders to crawl the entire site, gathering all of the site�s relevant information/content, not just that of the home page.

What can I do to improve my site’s spiderability?

Here is a list of the top five issues related to spiderability. You can check these against your site to determine areas of potential improvement. In addition, I offer solutions for each spiderability problem just under its explanation.

Frames � A site built using frames has a distinct disadvantage in the search engines. If not coded correctly, the SE spiders may not be able to find your keyword-rich pages of content.

Solution: Do not design or build your site using frames. If your site is already built using frames, consider a re-build or make sure that the proper work-arounds are in place to ensure spiderability.
Image-Based Navigation � Ask your web developer if your site has image-based navigation. SE Spiders can not follow these links and are therefore stopped from ever getting any farther than the home page if there is no alternate method for them to follow. (Solution shown under #3 below)JavaScript-Based Navigation � As with #2 above, you will need to ask your web developer if your site�s navigation uses JavaScript. As with image-based links, the SEs will not follow the JavaScript links, providing a barrier to the SE spiders.Solution: A simple set of text links along the bottom of your site�s pages will correct both problems #2 and #3. See any page of my site for an example of this work-around in place. The SE spiders can follow these text links, allowing them to index deeper into the site�s content.
CSS and JavaScript code embedded in the page � SE spiders are only interested in the visible body text of your web pages. They are not interested in the style sheets or JavaScript. Often, these sets of code appear in the section of the site�s code, increasing download time and pushing the keyword-rich content down further in the code.Solution: JavaScript and CSS code should not be embedded on each page, but instead put into an external file that is simply referenced in each page of the site. Doing so has several advantages, but one of the most compelling is that your site’s keywords and content all move up, up, up in the code, signaling to the search engines their importance and boosting your site’s relevancy ratings.
Lack of Site Map � A site map serves not only to aid the site user in finding the needed information as quickly as possible, but it ensures that the SE spider is able to follow text links to all the main pages of your site.Solution: Create a complete site map and include a text link to it along the bottom of every page in your site.

I think you got a pretty good idea about Spiderability and how to improve it. we SEO101 would like to help you if you have any questions.

Tags: SEO, SEO101, Improving+Spiderability, Spiderability, Google+Bots, Google+Spiders

Update Web Content

admin — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 01:54:23 +0000

How To: Update Your Web Site’s Content

You know you need to update your web site’s content. You know all the reasons why it’s so important. And yet, it just doesn’t happen, or not very often, anyway.

The search engines love content and the only thing they love more than content is new content. They reward sites that regularly update their content with higher rankings. Users love sites that regularly update their content and respond by visiting more often. There is only upside here. So, let’s give them what they want.

Here are ten great tips and ideas about ways to make regular updates to your site as painless as possible.

News Column – These can include: new product/service announcements, new contracts secured, new hires, internal promotions, notice of new web site content, announcement of awards or certifications received, and notice of newsletter posted or sent. Best of all, these updates can be very fast as they can be just a few words/lines of text that link into the relevant page of your site.
Portfolio of Projects – Each time you complete a major project, you can showcase the work with an online portfolio page. This will also help in subsequent marketing as you can lead your potential customers through the site and talk about the work you have done with a great visual aid.
Blog – A blog can be a great way to stay in close contact with your site users. A blog can added to your site for little or no cost – try this link to learn more: http://wordpress.org.
FAQ Section – You are likely asked the same types of questions by customers and potential customers over and over again. Write out your answers to those questions and update the list regularly as new issues arise.
How-Tos – People are online looking for information and solutions to the issues they face. By writing how-tos related to your business, you are providing the valuable information users seek and establishing yourself as the expert in the field. (see this article as an example)
Before & After Stories – What is better than a before and after story? People love them. They can be a very effective and interesting way of demonstrating in concrete terms the benefits of your product or service.
Case Studies – Case studies are the perfect way to feature your business’ successes. You can state the challenge you faced and detail the solution you provided.
Monthly Newsletter - Many businesses write some type of regular newsletter to their customers already. Make sure that the newsletter gets added to the site regularly and that an archive of past issues is maintained. If you do not already write a monthly newsletter – this would be a great time to start! You can communicate important information while maintaining regular contact with your customer/client base.
Statistics Related to Your Business – Statistics are interesting and people like them. They can make your business or industry more real to your customers and highlight the importance of your products or services.
Customer Stories – These can add a concrete and personal touch to the site’s information about its services /products. You simply feature a customer, interviewing them about their use of your service or product and its impact on them. This idea has the added benefit of contributing to great customer relations.

Making it Happen

The best way to ensure that these content-building ideas get past the idea stage is to assign it to someone in your office – make it a line item in someone’s job description about which they must regularly report. You’ll want to choose a good writer, someone that enjoys doing it so that there is plenty of enthusiasm for the project, and someone that is in the thick of what is going on with the organization to help stimulate ideas and ensure that the important issues are covered. Set concrete goals for content delivery, such as one new piece every week.

If you have no such person on your staff and you know that it just isn’t going to be you, you can always hire a professional copywriter to help you out. We are happy to recommend some great ones. If you have an ongoing contract with the copywriter, you will have a built-in schedule for the updates. Keep in mind, though, that a copywriter does need input from you, the business owner or manager. So you will need to allot some time for that.

Final Hint: Take this article as an example. It serves the same purpose for my site that the above ideas would for yours. It helps my clients and other web users by providing useful and relevant information and it keeps my site fresh with new content.

Tags: SEO, SEO101, Update+Web+Content, Content, Website+Content, Update+Website+Content, Search+Engine+Optimization, SEO+Tips, Updated+Content

How People Can Find Your Site

admin — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 16:52:56 +0000

Let’s look at how your site or blog can be found through search engines and what you can do to improve your changes of being found. After all, your goal is to be found, right?

Look at Competitor’s Web Pages

What are people using for keywords to find your competitors? If your keywords bring up other search results than your blog or site, then what are they doing that you aren’t?

You can learn a lot from studying your competitors, what they are doing, and what they are doing right. Some search engines make it even easier for you. Search for your product line or subject and when you see a description that matches your interests, click on “Find Similar Pages”. Also check the links offered below for the most attract attention to themselves.

You can also use tools like Search Engine World’s Keyword Validator to find how their page measures up to yours.

By studying what your competitors are doing, you can improve your own blog’s keywords frequency and density to help search engines put you in the same search results as your competitors. The more you learn about what they are doing, the better your chances of doing it one step even better, helping you rise up naturally through the search engine page ranks, putting your blog in the front of the pack.

Categorize Your Website

Search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Altavista offer long lists of potential sites when searched. Others categorize their listings like a directory, similar to a yellow pages directory. These include DMOZ Open Directory and All The Web. You can search their site and get specific results, but the better technique is to “drill down” through their categories, getting more and more specific as you move down through the lists.

Directories like DMOZ can be very helpful in determining what category your blog belongs. Browse through their categories that apply to your site and check your competition. Are they dealing with the topics you are? Is their focus narrower or broader than yours? This may or may not be the appropriate category for your site.

To help people find you, it helps to be in the category they are searching. Think about it. Where would you find your topic if you were looking in a library or bookstore?

Keep a running list of the words and phrases you see repeated over and over again. Consider how they apply to you. We’ll discuss how to maximize your coverage in a moment, so keep collecting this information as you gather it and begin the process of understanding how people will search for you.

Tags: SEO, SEO101, Site+Submission, Finding+My+Site, Search+Engine+Optimization, Search+Engine+Tips, Keywords, Directories

How People Search

admin — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 16:46:25 +0000

How People Search the Web

Did you know that 53% of websites are found by word-of-mouth? Yes, the old gossip method still works. There are many ways of spreading the news among friends, relatives, clients, your industry, and the general public through links on your blog or site or just by telling people about some cool site you’ve just found. While this is the most successful method, the rest of the world finds you through search engines. Let’s look at how your site or blog can be found through search engines and what you can do to improve your changes of being found. After all, your goal is to be found, right?

How Do You Search?

Think about how you search the web. Do you start out vague, guessing at possible keyword combinations? Or do you think it through to come up with the specific phrase or term to narrow your search immediately? Do you often search within those results (refining your search) or start over? How many pages of the results do you go through before you start over or just give up? Do you start with Google or Yahoo, or another search engine? Which search engines are people using the most?

Answering these questions tells you a lot about how people search and about how people would search for you.

Keywords play an important role in your search engine ranking, representing the words that users will use to search for your site. Think about the words you would use to search for your blog. What are the descriptive phrases? Do you have those words in your blog content?

If you talk about or sell toothbrushes, but never mention “teeth”, aren’t you missing something? As professional nature photographers, we redid our main website recently and realized that most of our web page articles and images were related to travel and not so much to nature, so we rearranged our material to be more specific to travel, with nature as a side line. Examine your own site to match what people search for with what content and keywords are featured on your site.

Tags: SEO, SEO101, How+People+Search, Search+Google, Search+Engine+Optimization, How+Search+Engine+Work, How+Search+Engine+Search, Web+Development

How Google Ranks Websites

admin — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 12:30:58 +0000

You might have heard about it this June, but I thought it bore repeating. The secret is out on much of what Google uses to rank your website on their search engine. Google’s patent for their search engine ranking technique was made public last March.

Links

Links have always played an important role in determining citation value. Incoming links help judge the value of a document. The more citations, or links, the more important and valuable it must be. But Google adds some criteria to those citations.

In the past, the number of incoming links scored high, but a judgment on quality of the incoming link source was added to the mix. If the linking page and site had a high page rank value itself, then clearly, it knew a good thing when it linked to it. Still, this link quality aspect became harder to define as so many sites were joining the web and the quality became diluted.

Historical factors now play an important roll in addition to the number and quality of the incoming links. It seems Google’s method includes counting the moment a new site is discovered and applying an “aging process” to the site. Google monitors the link as it changes over time, the speed at which the site adds incoming links, and the life span of the link. It isn’t about having thousands of sites that link to yours, but about building those thousands of links over time.

The “aging process” that monitors the history of the links and site helps to combat spam sites. Spam sites tend to come and go very quickly, building links fast through their spamming techniques, then closing down and moving on. Thus, the older the site and the links coming into it, the more “points” the site may get. The shorter the life of the site domain, no matter how many millions of links are coming in, the less Google is interested.

Google monitors the historical value and the slow building of value of incoming links, and they also monitor the changes in the link anchor text over time and throughout the site.

Consistent link anchor text scores low. This is considered “Anchor Spam”. What this means is that if you use the same text in a link, such as perfume sales consistently through your site, then it won’t score very high. If you vary the link anchor text, especially over time not just within the same page, your odds will increase as Google monitors the changes in links over time. Generally, it is recommended to change the keywords in your anchor text around the top 5-10 keywords, to maintain consistency with keyword rankings and link rankings.

So the perfume sales might include link text such as:

cologne market
perfume market
cologne sales
fragrance sales
sales of fragrance

This changes the whole landscape. The idea of link exchanges and link spam as a method to attract Google’s search engine bots just doesn’t work. Age before linkage.

WordPress Blogroll Tip

The WordPress Links Manager allows you to set your blogroll links to change randomly with each page view. If you have a huge list of links in your blogroll, consider setting this to random so the links will change, appearing less like link exchange spam. Check out the other options in Links Manager for only showing updated links and other features.

Google also states very clearly that exchanging and buying links won’t work. They know the tricks and techniques. Also, getting links from documents that have no content, just links, also won’t work. Links without content won’t score high.

Now, does this mean that if you link to a page and they link back to you, your scores will go down and it might be considered link spam? No. The other criteria goes into effect to help offset this normal linking techniques. But it does impact the concept of the Blogrolls, which are sometimes considered link exchange lists. So choose your link exchanges wisely and avoid hundreds of links from your site to others, or being on a list of hundreds of links.

Domain Age

One of the other criteria is the age of the domain. Again, driven by spam sites which pop up and die off quickly, the age of the domain is usually a clue they tend to be in for the long haul.

This causes some problems. If you change your domain name, then are you back at the bottom of the barrel? Well, maybe not. If the rest of the criteria stays the same and your content maintains consistency, as does your traffic and incoming links, then this might just be a temporary drop and the rise will happen again soon.

Many hosts offer special rates for long term hosting and domain registration. Consider registering your domain for at least two years, five is better. This means you need to make sure that the domain name you choose is one you can live with for two to five years. You can change hosts, but the domain registration needs to stay the same, and stay in your name over the long haul to score points with Google.

Click Through Rates

The click through rate (CTR) of your site may play an important roll in adding up good points on your Google Search Engine score card. The CTR is the rate that people click “through” to your site. Referrer statistics are the numbers and methods visitors use to visit your site. This information tells the site administrator, and Google, from where did you arrive from to land on this site. Did you click through from a search engine (which one), directly, from another site (which site), or, as revealed in the patent, from the cache, temporary files, bookmarks, or favorites of your Internet browser.

The click through rate is also based on the CTR of the advertising on your site. The more ads which are clicked, the higher your score.

The CTR is also monitored for fresh or stale content - in other words, are they visiting new content on your site or old posts or articles? Trends and seasons are also taken into account as certain subject matter gains precedence with the time of the year and the current fad.

Trends, Fads, and Seasons

Built into the Google page ranking technique is the ability to track current and historical trends, fads and seasons. If your site deals with beach wear, the odds are that it will have more traffic during the beach wear season of summer than it will into the fall and winter. This seasonal traffic is taken into account and you may not lose rank when the traffic dies down seasonally.

It also tracks whatever is hot in trends and fads. Right now, everything to do with Hurricane Katrina is hot, hot, hot, but a couple years ago, everything and anything to do with protecting you and your home from biological terrorism was top of the list. Paris Hilton was top of the charts for a long time, doing battle with Britney Spears, but now, both of them are old news.

This is an interesting aspect of page ranking. If your site continues to push keywords long past the fad’s life span, then this could be seen as keyword spamming. Yet, using trends and fads keywords as they come and go could attract attention. Luckily, the rest of the criteria in the page ranking evaluation can help to clear out abusers of keywords related to the current fad or current event.

Posting Frequency

How often you update your pages and add content is monitored over time. It isn’t just how much but when. If you update or add hundreds of articles within a very short time, this is suspicious, but if you rarely update your site or add content over time, then your ranking will probably drop. Finding a happy medium is still a hit and miss angle, but the information seems to point to consistency not just random spurts of energy.

If you consistently add content once a week, and it stays steady, then it is seen as stable. If you add content consistently every day, and then it drops to nothing, then this change indicates an instability. If you do hit and miss content updating and additions over time, and then suddenly post a ton of activity, this can also be seen as instability and suspicious. Steady and consistent, no matter how frequently, adds weight to the score.

Many researchers say that frequent new or updated content carries more weight than infrequent changes to the site. I could find nothing in the patent that lent proof to that theory, but showing consistent activity does work.

A “stale” page is one that is old and rarely attracts interest. A “fresh” page is one that is new, and will be watched to see what kind of interest it may attract. By updating a stale page on your site, you may attract new interest by rewriting or structuring the information and keywords to attract more attention, breathing life back into the page. Google monitors this “refreshing” of pages to show activity and an increase in interest, scoring high.

Not all “old” pages on your site need updating. If it is still attracting decent traffic, then leave it alone. It is working for you.

The patent also reveals that stable pages that are working which suddenly attract a “spike” in the number of incoming links or click throughs may be an indication of a change of site ownership or spamming. Google evaluates not only the content but the historical changes in the content of the page and the site and if the changes are dramatic and sudden, then the site will rank lower. Stability over time scores higher.

Keywords Still Play a Roll

Keywords and keyword density still play an important roll in evaluating the content and content history. Putting keywords in titles, links, headings, tags, and throughout the page is still critical to the success of your site’s page ranking and keyword ranking results.

Changes to keywords, by arrangement, closeness, and inside of links, titles and headings are also monitored, much like link anchor text. Consider reviewing and updating your keywords and checking their density and use throughout your site on a regular basis, if search engine page ranking is important to you.

In upcoming posts, we’ll discuss how to maximize your keyword density in your blog posts.

Rank by Traffic, User Behavior, and You

Like other comparative search engines, Google’s patent also tells of how page rankings are compared across the board and monitored over time. The traffic is recorded and monitored. How much traffic each page gets as well as the overall site.

User behavior is checked. Google keeps track of how long visitors stay on your site and from what pages they exit your site. You also get points for bookmarking or adding to favorites.

Keyword search results are constantly monitored. What keywords brought the visitor to your site and what keywords they used to search once on your site.

But “you” also play a roll in determining the page ranking with Google. The domain registration information is checked and compared to the information on the site to make sure the two match. The address of the domain owner may help localize search results to that specific geographic area.

How you have your site hosted also is among the other administrative items checked off. Shared IP host addresses run a risk since they are shared. If someone else is using that server for spamming or other evils, you could also be punished. Dedicated hosting is very expensive, so make sure you choose a reputable host who is publicly and actively stopping spamming sites if you choose shared hosting.

The validity of the site’s code and structure plays a small part, but is still part of the criteria. Make sure your site’s code is validated, checked for errors, and friendly to search engines. Any errors in your page structure or code can easily thwart a search engine’s process through your site. Table designed sites rank low while CSS based designs are much more search engine friendly.

Spelling is still important. Not that Google’s patented page ranking process includes a spell checker - words that are not recognized get dumped. If misspelled keywords are among your missed spellings, then your site will be hurt in the rankings.

Tags: How+Google+Ranks, Google+Pagerank, Pagerank, SEO, SEO101

8 simple SEO tips for blogs

admin — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 12:03:26 +0000

Follow these simple rules for search engine optimization and your blog will rank much higher in Search Engines.

Use your primary keyword in your blog domain

The first thing to do is to ensure that your blogs URL contains the primary keyword you want to optimize for. Using the targeted keyword in subdomains also helps.For example, if you want to start a HTML tutorial site then the primary keyword you want your URL to contain is html. So choose a URL like www.htmlhelp.com

You can also use the keyword in subdomains like www.web-design.com/htmlhelp
Use your primary keyphrase in the title of your posts If your primary key phrase is html help make sure that the word html and help appear in your blog headers such as H1 and H2 tags as well as the title of each of your posts.
Use your secondary keywords in the body of your post

If you want to get listed for secondary keywords use them infrequently in the body of your post. The theory is that the more times a keyword appears within a Webpage, the more relevant the page is likely to be for someone searching those keywords.But do not overdo this by repeating the same keywords over and over again. Google bots can find out if a keyword is too frequent on a page and might just remove your site from their index.
Use your keywords in the anchor text of links Use your primary and secondary keywords in the anchor text of links when linking to other blog posts or to other pages of your blog. Keyword in links have more importance than simple text.
Make sure search engines can spider your blog easily

Make sure your navigation bar is present on all pages of your blog. Your previous posts or atleast the popular ones should be linked to all pages so they get spidered easily.
Get backlinks from other blogs

You need as many links as possible to link back to your posts or blog because it will help you build pagerank and get your blog to rank higher in search engines. The more links you have the higher your blog is ranked in Technorati helping your blog to be found easily.So how do you get backlinks?
- The first thing to do to get high-quality links is to submit your blog and RSS feed to blog search engines and directories.Start by submitting your blog to all the directories listed on this page:
  http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/
- Link exchanging with other similarly-themed blogs will help you to form richly interlinked networks or communities.
- If you find an interesting article on another blog, link to it generously. The trackback will become a link back to your blog.
- Lastly posting legitimate comments in response to posts on other blogs will help you get backlinks. Regularly post legitimate comments in similarly-themed blogs with high traffic to get many backlinks.
Update your blog frequently

Update your blog frequently using all the rules mentioned above and your blog will surely get top rankings in a short time.
Stick with your blog

Once you start posting on your blog, stick with the same domain or you could end up losing a lot of your traffic and regular readers.Also stick with the topic you selected for your blog. If it’s about pets don’t suddenly switch to another topic such as Gadget’s because you will loose traffic.

Tags: SEO+tips+for+blogs, SEO, SEO101, SEO+Tips

Ultimate WordPress SEO Tips

admin — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 11:56:07 +0000

So you think you’ve got the hang of the usual SEO. Links, content, usability. But what about WordPress?

There’s a lot of amazing SEO power built into WordPress. Unfortunately it doesn’t all come by default, and you might not know what’s best when it comes to templates and options.

This simple, easy to follow article will outline many WordPress SEO tips which people often forget to implement (even the most famous bloggers), or haven’t yet arrived at for some reason or another.
Permalink Optimisation

The goal: stick more keywords up into the URL and remove the faff which nobody uses, to make the URL seach engine and people attractive.

Include %postname%

Having keywords in your URL is an absolute must, especially when it’s as easy as WordPress makes it.
Get rid of useless tagsDon’t use %day%, %post_id% , %hour%, %minute% or even %second% in your permalink structure. None of these are necessary. Monthly posting archives are perfectly acceptable, but for the vast majority daily ones are not. Putting more /***/ rubbish into your permalink URLs will make it harder to see the URL’s boldened keywords on search engine results, less emphasis is placed on your post title keywords (which are really great).
Bonus tip: want to go really mad with your permalink SEO? Try dropping date tags all together for %category%! It does away with your neat date tags, though, so you could even try keeping %year% and %month%.
Stick with the structure you choose! Changing it will probably invalidate all of the links coming to you.
You better be using .htaccess, punk!

On my sites

The permalink structure is /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/, which is ideal! It keeps the blog neat, but means that all of the URL, with bold keyword matches, will show up in Google results, etc.

I’ve taken a different approach with Buster Studies, where I’ve decided to go for sheer SEOage, in the form of just %postname%. It really works, especially with some of the techniques mentioned later. Search refferals are sky-high for this very new site. I’m not worried about post-title clashes, because each post covers a different topic, and WordPress doesn’t ever let post slug clashes occur.

What’s that? You can’t use the calendar properly? Well it still happens to work for me when you want to look up dates like yesterday.
Page Titles

Unless you’re some kind of international superband with just a few letters for a name (Apple, IBM…), you’re very likely allowing WordPress to make a big mistake for you when it comes to your page title (the one within the title tags).

You don’t want a title like this:

Buster Studies » Kinetics: Collision Theory, Maxwell-Boltzmann Distribution

Why not? Well, to start with the key words are right at the end! You have to put up with Buster Studies » before your eyes can make it to the real juice!

In Google, when you do a search, searched keywords which appear in your title are made bold, and they sand out really well. You want as much of that as possible. Because Google truncates titles when they pass a particular length, you need your important keywords up front. Google might also be counting words which appear earlier in the title as more important.

The format I use for page titles on Buster Studies and Dech lets people see what the post is about first.

Kinetics: Collision Theory, Maxwell-Boltzmann Distribution · Buster Studies

Look at the top of the page. I even spice it up a little by loosing the common “»” for a lovely “·“.

Even better, the title of the post can be seen in Firefox’s tabs or minimised Windows windows easily.

The code you need to put into your template for this to happen:

< ###title>< ?php wp_title(’ ‘); ?>< ?php if(wp_title(’ ‘, false)) { echo ‘ ·###; ‘; } ?>Buster Studies< ###/title>
(remove the ###s and replace stuff with your own bits)

So just rearranging your title will shower your with some fantastic results.

On my sites

As I said, I use the technique above which throws out great, powerful titles like:

Ultimate WordPress SEO Tips · Fintan Darragh

Essay Notes: Arguments For/Against Regulation of the British Press · Buster Studies

What do you see first? Exactly what I want you to…

Post Titles

Keep it sweet

Keep your post titles nice and simple, and as straight-forward as possible. Sure, pack in the keywords, but do it smartly.

You have to blend readability with keywords. It’s easy to muck-up, but doing it right will help you loads.

Link to the bloody post!

If you don’t use your title to link straight to your permalink URL, the page where your post lives, you are stupid to say the least.

It’s naturally where users click, and it also is a keyword-rich inward link which should reinforce a good post title, page title and URL.

Some HTML might come in handy…

XHTML if you prefer.

On pages where a list of posts appear (like the front page), wrap the title in H2, H3 or H4 tags. This provides maximum superiority of linkage without going too far. Which ones you use depend on how many posts the page is showing (lower number of posts, opt for H2…).
On the post page, wrap it in H1 tags! It’s the page title, so it deserves to be wrapped up like that! You’ll benefit greatly from this when it comes to the search engines.
SEO mad! If you’re capable of bending WordPress to your will, try putting a link to your newest post in H1 tags on your front page! It works wonders!

On my sites

I use this very technique and it seems to be working very nicely indeed. Buster Studies uses the H1 as a front-page one-off link, and that seems to have a great deal of influence.

Final tips

Install the related posts plugin, and make it gurgle up a list of five related posts below your content for great deep linking and possible usefulness.
Exploit your category archives! They should have great urls and title tags, and offer great relevant deep linking. Also, use nested categories where it makes sense (see url).
Use Technorati Tag Generator.

Tags: SEO+Tips, WordPress+SEO+Tips, WordPress+Tips, SEO, SEO101

WordPress and SEO

admin — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 11:43:46 +0000

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. In the tutorial, there are some tips, tricks, and plugins you can use to help search engines find you, and index your pages better.

There is a big bunch of resources on optimizing your blog for search engines. I have tried to collect the best tips and plugins in this article.

These tips won’t flood your blog with visitors - no SEO tips will. Use these tips to improve your site, and fight for a lot of backlinks and visitors by writing quality content and putting a lot of work into it. It has never been easy to run a website, and it for sure isn’t getting easier.

There is a big bunch of resources on optimizing your blog for search engines. I have tried to collect the best tips in this article.

These tips won’t flood your blog with visitors - no SEO tips will. Use these tips to improve your site, and fight for a lot of backlinks and visitors by writing quality content and putting a lot of work into it. It has never been easy to run a website, and it for sure isn’t getting easier.

Permalinks

Use a permalink structure and be sure that the post title is in it. In the WordPress administration go to Options>Permalinks and select a permalink structure, or make your own. I use /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/ on this site.

Page titles

The title tag should show the title of the current post or page you are currently visitng. Eg. this page will have the title »WordPress and SEO | The undersigned«. In your themes header.php file you can do this by making sure that the title tag looks like this:

<?php wp_title(‘ ‘); ?><?php if(wp_title(‘ ‘, false)) { ?> | <?php } ?><?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?>

Headers

Search engines weigh headers (h1, h2, h3 …) higher than other content (p, li …), so it is important that you write good titles that also contains keywords that matches the content. The best thing is to only have 1-2 h1 tags on each page, eg. the blog title and newest blog post.

Alt tags

Use alt tags for your images, and be sure that they match what the image shows - this helps google image search and other image search engines.

Tags

The internet is evolving, and in this process tags is the next »big thing« - using tags makes sure to keep a lot of cross-linking from posts to posts, which eventually will let search engines dig deeper into your site.

Ultimate Tag Warrior

Related posts

If you read an article on this site, you will notice the recent posts list in the end of each article. This also helps search engines digging deeper into your site.

Landing sites

When visitors is referred to your site from a search engine, they are definitely looking for something specific - often they just roughly check the page they land on and then closes the window if what they are looking for isn’t there. Why not help them by showing them related posts to their search on your blog.

Landing sites 1.1

Google sitemaps

Google has a feature for webmasters, called Sitemaps. This helps google index your site, and lets you weigh what content on your site, you find most important.

Google Sitemaps Generator

Pinging aggregators

Use the feed feature! Set up your WordPress to ping a list of aggregators automatically in Options>Writing. A great list of ping services can be found here.

Valid markup

Be sure that your your site validates, this might not be the most critical point from a SEO point of view, but it might weigh some.
Avoid this

Google says you should avoid this:

Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
Don’t employ cloaking or sneaky redirects.
Don’t send automated queries to Google.
Don’t load pages with irrelevant words.
Don’t create pages that install viruses, trojans, or other badware.
Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines, or other “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
Tricks intended to improve search engine rankings.

Get backlinks

Write to your friends, to other bloggers, and trade links with them. Get a linking-network established, and make sure that some people link back to your site, using your blogs title or primary keywords as anchor-text. Amount of links and especially links from quality sites, helps you being placed better in search engines search results. When writing an article, be sure to link back to your sources (if these are blogs, in most cases, a trackback link to your blog will be shown on their site). Be sure to link to your blog in forum signatures, mail signatures etc. as well.

Update your blog

Be sure to keep your blog updated - no one visits a dead site. Eventually you can let del.icio.us post your daily bookmarked links to your blog - this helps making your site look active.

How to automatically post daily links

Stick with it

Stick with the same domain name, blog title, permalink structure etc.

Write quality content

Write quality content, it is the most important. Write quality content that people want to read. Stick to a few topics, and write mainly about those. Quality content might bring you to del.icio.us and digg.com as well.

Involve the reader

Encourage your visitors to comment on your posts and join the discussion. Involve the reader by writing to them. »You should«, »We could« and less using »I have«, »I did« etc.

Tags: WordPress+and+SEO, SEO, SEO101, Search+Engine+Optimization, WordPress+Tags, WordPress+Tips, SEO+Tips

Robots.txt for WordPress 2.+

admin — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 11:11:38 +0000

User-agent: *
# disallow all files in these directories
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /z/j/
Disallow: /z/c/
Disallow: /stats/
Disallow: /dh_
Disallow: /about/
Disallow: /contact/
Disallow: /tag/
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /contact
Disallow: /manual
Disallow: /manual/*
Disallow: /phpmanual/
Disallow: /category/

User-agent: Googlebot
# disallow all files ending with these extensions
Disallow: /*.php$
Disallow: /*.js$
Disallow: /*.inc$
Disallow: /*.css$
Disallow: /*.gz$
Disallow: /*.wmv$
Disallow: /*.cgi$
Disallow: /*.xhtml$

# disallow all files with ? in url
Disallow: /*?*

# disable duggmirror
User-agent: duggmirror
Disallow: /

# allow google image bot to search all images
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow:
Allow: /*

# allow adsense bot on entire site
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*
Disallow:
Allow: /*

Tags: Robots.txt, Robots.txt+for+WordPress, WordPress, SEO, SEO101

Remove part of website

admin — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 11:09:26 +0000

Remove part of your website from Google Index

Option 1: Robots.txt
Remove all pages under a particular directory (for example, lems)

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /lems

Remove all files of a specific file type (for example, .gif)

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /*.gif$

To remove dynamically generated pages, you’d use this robots.txt entry

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /*?

Option 2: Meta tags

Another standard, which can be more convenient for page-by-page use, involves adding a META tag to an HTML page to tell robots not to index the page. This standard is described at http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/exclusion.html#meta

Prevent all robots from indexing a page on your site

Allow other robots to index the page on your site, preventing only Google’s robots from indexing the page

Allow robots to index the page on your site but instruct them not to follow outgoing links

Tags: Remove+part+of+website, Google+Removal, Remove+from+Google, SEO, SEO101

Remove entire website

admin — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 11:06:38 +0000

If you wish to exclude your entire website from Google’s index

Remove site from search engines and prevent all robots from crawling it in the future

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Note: Please note that Googlebot does not interpret a 401/403 response (”Unauthorized”/”Forbidden”) to a robots.txt fetch as a request not to crawl any pages on the site.

To remove your site from Google only and prevent just Googlebot from crawling your site in the future

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /

Allow Googlebot to index all http pages but no https pages

Each port must have its own robots.txt file. In particular, if you serve content via both http and https, you’ll need a separate robots.txt file for each of these protocols.
For your http protocol (http://yourserver.com/robots.txt)

User-agent: *
Allow: /

For the https protocol (https://yourserver.com/robots.txt)

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Tags: Remove+entire+website, Google+Removal, Remove+from+Google, SEO, SEO101

Removing Old/wrong content from google

admin — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 10:58:26 +0000

Removing Old/wrong content from google

Create the new page
In .htaccess (if Linux) add a RedirectPermanent command
DO NOT DELETE THE OLD FILE
Update all the links on your website to point to the new page (change the link text while you’re at it)
Verify that no pages point to the old file (including your sitemap.xml)
Add a noindex,nofollow to the old file AND Disallow in your robots.txt
Submit your updated sitemap.xml to Google & Yahoo
Wait a few weeks
When the new page appears in Google, it’s safe to delete the old one

Googlebot and Robots.txt SEO Info

When deciding which pages to crawl, Googlebot goes in this order

Googlebot will obey the first record in the robots.txt file with a User-agent starting with “Googlebot.”
If no “Googlebot User-agent exists, it will obey the first entry with a User-agent of “*”

Google User-agents

Googlebot

crawl pages from our web index and our news index

Googlebot-Mobile

crawls pages for our mobile index

Googlebot-Image

crawls pages for our image index

Mediapartners-Google

crawls pages to determine AdSense content. We only use this bot to crawl your site if you show AdSense ads on your site.

Adsbot-Google

crawls pages to measure AdWords landing page quality. We only use this bot if you use Google AdWords to advertise your site. Find out more about this bot and how to block it from portions of your site.

Tags: Removing+Content, Content+Removal+Google, SEO101, SEO, Google+User-Agents, Robots.txt, Googlebot, Adsbot-Google

Wget Robot Exclusion

admin — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 10:50:38 +0000

It is extremely easy to make Wget wander aimlessly around a web site, sucking all the available data in progress. `wget -r site’, and you’re set. Great? Not for the server admin.

As long as Wget is only retrieving static pages, and doing it at a reasonable rate (see the `–wait’ option), there’s not much of a problem. The trouble is that Wget can’t tell the difference between the smallest static page and the most demanding CGI. A site I know has a section handled by an, uh, bitchin’ CGI Perl script that converts Info files to HTML on the fly. The script is slow, but works well enough for human users viewing an occasional Info file. However, when someone’s recursive Wget download stumbles upon the index page that links to all the Info files through the script, the system is brought to its knees without providing anything useful to the downloader.

To avoid this kind of accident, as well as to preserve privacy for documents that need to be protected from well-behaved robots, the concept of robot exclusion has been invented. The idea is that the server administrators and document authors can specify which portions of the site they wish to protect from the robots.

The most popular mechanism, and the de facto standard supported by all the major robots, is the “Robots Exclusion Standard” (RES) written by Martijn Koster et al. in 1994. It specifies the format of a text file containing directives that instruct the robots which URL paths to avoid. To be found by the robots, the specifications must be placed in `/robots.txt’ in the server root, which the robots are supposed to download and parse.

Although Wget is not a web robot in the strictest sense of the word, it can downloads large parts of the site without the user’s intervention to download an individual page. Because of that, Wget honors RES when downloading recursively. For instance, when you issue: wget -r http://www.server.com/ First the index of `www.server.com’ will be downloaded. If Wget finds that it wants to download more documents from that server, it will request `http://www.server.com/robots.txt’ and, if found, use it for further downloads. `robots.txt’ is loaded only once per each server.

Until version 1.8, Wget supported the first version of the standard, written by Martijn Koster in 1994 and available at http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots.html. As of version 1.8, Wget has supported the additional directives specified in the internet draft `

‘ titled “A Method for Web Robots Control”. The draft, which has as far as I know never made to an RFC, is available at http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots-rfc.txt

This manual no longer includes the text of the Robot Exclusion Standard.

The second, less known mechanism, enables the author of an individual document to specify whether they want the links from the file to be followed by a robot. This is achieved using the META tag, like this:

This is explained in some detail at http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/meta-user.html. Wget supports this method of robot exclusion in addition to the usual `/robots.txt’ exclusion.

If you know what you are doing and really really wish to turn off the robot exclusion, set the robots variable to `off’ in your `.wgetrc’. You can achieve the same effect from the command line using the -e switch,
e.g. wget -e robots=off url

Tags: SEO, SEM, SEO101, Robots.txt, Wget+Robot+Exclusion, Wget+Robot

Optimizing Images

admin — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 04:09:30 +0000

Optimizing through Image Sharing Sites

Here is the full Comparison Chart of Image Sharing Sites which I mentioned in my presentation on Optimizing through Image Sharing Sites at the SES Chicago ‘06 Conference. Also, here is my PowerPoint presentation on Optimizing Through Image Sharing Sites.

There are quite a lot of Image Sharing Sites out there currently, but only a few of them stand out as best-in-class for potential SEO benefit purposes. Read on for a few more notes about this.

Images in of themselves do not have good keyword content. The sites which got the most checkmarks on this chart had the most features for associating keywords with images including linking and other signals that search engines might use for ranking purposes. My assumption is that image sharing sites which have great SEO themselves would potentially provide the most SEO benefit if one optimized through them, and my experimenting with these sites appears to bear this out.

Flickr has the best SEO potential of all, with 23 and Fotki running in second. Flickr’s traffic and PR is higher than 23 and Fotki by a few orders of magnitude.

There can still be value from optimizing images through the other sites that I didn’t rank as high as Flickr. For instance, MySpace could still give some bang for the buck through users coming through that service IF you’ve already optimized your Flickr profile page and hyperlinked the titles of the photos you upload in there.

Flickr seems the easiest to use, though, because they have automated all the linking hierarchies and such which allow the SEs to easily spider the pages. If you had hundreds of images you needed to optimize, Flickr is also best-in-class for their great APIs which can help you automate image uploading and such.

One criticism I verbally delivered during my preso was for Flickr, or at least for Yahoo! — both Google and MSN properly have indexed Flickr pages in their Image Search results, while Yahoo has barely scraped the surface. 30 lashes with a wet noodle to Yahoo for not taking advantage of all this great info found in Flickr for the purposes of their Image Search vertical! Shameful!

Flickr pages ARE indexed nicely in Yahoo!’s regular web search results, though, and I would guess (hope) that they will soon beef up their image search results with Flickr’s great content.

I have earlier blogged a bit about image opimization through Flickr, if you’re interested. I’ve also previously blogged about general SEO of images, which cover some basic points.

Another great example I’ve previously cited is this wedding pic which has gotten some nice traffic and has been listed for quite some time as the Most Interesting picture for one of the most-popular keyword tags of “wedding”. Surprise, surprise, this pic shows as most popular in Google image search for “spinning kisses” keyword search. Now, wouldn’t it have been great if the photographer had used “wedding photography” or “wedding photographer” as their picture’s title instead of “spinning kisses”?

My most-popular picture from my flickr pix is this screen-grab of an odd swastika-shaped building on a US military base. This pic became my most-popular because I applied almost all the optimization tips that I mentioned in my presentation. Users have commented a lot on it, added it to their Favorites lists in flickr, and I even had a European news site mention it (and link over to it!). I linked over from it to my blog postings on Flickr geotagging and image search optimization, and got quite a bit more traffic to the blog site as a result. The image was a bit too offensive IMHO for me to throw it up on-screen during my SES presentation, though.

Instead, the example pic of mine that I used for my presentation flickr image was of beautiful Holly Hill House on Catalina Island, which I visited while on vacation back in the spring.

Tags: Optimizing+Images, SEO, SEO101, Image+Optimization, Image+Sharing+Sites, Image+Search+Optimization, Flickr

RSS and SEO

admin — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 03:50:31 +0000

RSS and SEO: Implications for Search Marketers

A lot of people mistakenly lump blogs and RSS together, but RSS has infinitely more applications beyond just blogs!

For example: news alerts, latest specials, clearance items, upcoming events, new stock arrivals, new articles, new tools & resources, search results, a book’s revision history, top 10 best sellers (like Amazon.com does in many of its product categories), project management activities, forum/listserve posts, recently added downloads, etc.

There are some important tracking and measurement issues to consider when implementing RSS:

You should be tracking reads by embedding a uniquely-named 1-pixel gif within the container. This is known as a “web bug.” Email marketers have been using web bugs to track open rates for ages.
You should be tracking clickthroughs by replacing all URLs in the containers with clicktracked URLs. You code this in-house or you could use a hosted ASP service like SimpleFeed to do this for you. (Incidentally, Feedburner offers imprecise counts based on user’s IP not on clicktracked URLs)
You should be tracking circulation (# of subscribers). Again, you could use a service like Simplefeed or Feedburner, which categorizes visiting user-agents into bots, browsers, aggregators, and clients. Bots and browsers don’t generally “count” as subscribers, while a single hit from an aggregator may represent a number of readers. This number is usually revealed within the User-Agent in the server logs… for example Bloglines/2.0 (…; xx subscribers). Today, tracking readership from clients is an inexact science. Hopefully in the future, RSS newreader software will generate a hashcode from the subscriber’s email address and this hashcode would then get passed in the User-Agent on every HTTP request for the RSS feed.

I consider personalized RSS feeds to be “best practice.” As of yet I’m not seeing much yet in the way of personalization within RSS feeds, but that will come I’m sure. It has to. Having only one generic RSS feed per site is a one-size-fits-all approach that can’t scale. On the other hand, having too many feeds to choose from on a site can overwhelm the user. So how about instead you offer a single RSS feed, but it’s one where the content is personalized to the interests of the individual subscriber. Yet if the feed is being syndicated onto public websites, you’ll want to discover that (by checking the referrers in your server logs) and then make sure the RSS feed content is quite consistent from syndicated site to syndicated site so that these sites all reinforce the search engine juice of the same pages with similar link text. Or simply ask the subscriber his/her intentions (personal reading or syndication on a public website) as part of the personalization/subscription signup process.

IMPORTANT: An often overlooked area of RSS click tracking is how to pass on the search engine juice from the syndicating sites to your destination site. Use clicktracked URLs with query string parameters kept to a minimum, then 301 redirect not 302. This is important! 302 redirects, also known as temporary redirects, can hang up the search engine juice. Search engines recommend you use 301 redirects, also known as permanent redirects. Surprisingly, Feedburner and Simplefeed both use 302 redirects. Tsk tsk!

Sites using your feeds for themed content to add to their site for SEO purposes could strip out your links or cut off the flow of the search engine juice using the nofollow rel attribute or by removing the hrefs altogether. Scan for that and then cut off any offenders’ feed access.

Some more “gotchas” if you don’t set things up right:

You should own your feed URL (unless you want to be forever tied to Feedburner or whatever RSS hosting service you are using). Remember the days long ago when people put their earthlink.net email addresses on their business cards? Don’t repeat that mistake with RSS feeds.
You need to proactively ensure your listings in the Yahoo SERPs display the “Add to My Yahoo!” link; don’t just assume it will happen. To do this, subscribe to your feed from your own My Yahoo! page (so you know you have at least one My Yahoo! subscriber), then set up your blog to automatically “ping” Yahoo! every time you post a new blog entry (I recommend using Pingomatic.com to do this because then it will also ping Technorati etc. for you too, all in one fell swoop, every time your make an update to your blog.)

Configure your website to allow subscribers to subscribe easily using your home page address if they don’t know your RSS feed address. That means putting tags in your HTML. For example:

Also add buttons to your web pages for 1-click adding to the most popular RSS newsreaders / aggregators, such as: “Subscribe in NewsGator,” “Subscribe on Bloglines,” and “Add to My Yahoo!”

RSS is great for link building. Any SEO worth his/her salt should be making use of RSS as part of a link building strategy, or at least making plans to use it soon. In addition to RSS, there are some other effective blog-related link building strategies, like:

Getting onto bloggers’ “blogrolls” (the list of their favorite blogs that they post on their site for all to see)
Getting links through “trackbacks” (excerpts of your blog posts that appear on other bloggers’ blog entries in a way that you initiate rather than them)

Tags: RSS+SEO, SEO, SEO101

RSS Feeds

admin — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 03:46:45 +0000

RSS Can Feed Your SEO Efforts

Documents for which there is an increase in the rate of change might be scored higher than those documents for which there is a steady rate of change, even if that rate of change is relatively high. The amount of change may also be a factor in this scoring. For example, documents for which there is an increase in the rate of change when that amount of change is greater than some threshold might be scored higher than those documents for which there is a steady rate of change or an amount of change is less than the threshold.

When search engine optimization experts read this, it merely confirmed something they already knew that even well-optimized content needs to be periodically refreshed in order to maintain top search engine rankings. However, if you are an SEO working on a contract, you might not have perpetual access to a client’s website. Optimum rankings will likely not hold up if the site stays static. RSS (an acronym for “Really Simple Syndication”) feeds are an excellent way to continually freshen website content without having to make periodic content updates.

“RSS is used to provide items containing short descriptions of web content together with a link to the full version of the content.” (from Wikipedia)
Most people reading this article understand the concept behind RSS and have seen examples of feeds on different websites and blogs. Easy-to-implement RSS feeds are available for any imaginable topic and having one or more feeds on your website will certainly enhance your visitor experience. However, RSS can also enhance your search engine rankings as well.
Savvy SEO’s know that they can boost site optimization efforts by creating RSS feeds containing top search engine results for the keyword / keywords they are targeting and adding them to the client website MSN, Yahoo News, and Gigablast all offer easy to use RSS feeds of their search results. Many of the blog search engines also offer RSS feeds of their results. Before placing a search engine feed on a website, be sure to check whether use of the feed on a website is restricted in any way some of the feeds can only be placed on “non-commercial” websites.
My experience is that placing a “keyword-targeted” feed on your webpage will greatly enhance your ability to achieve optimum keyword density for your targeted term(s). What’s more, assuming relevant content is available, a news feed is preferable to a search engine feed for SEO because news feeds are updated more frequently. Another valuable tool that I recently discovered is a service called RSSMix (http://www.rssmix.com) that can seamlessly blend together multiple feeds into one. That means if you are targeting several terms in your optimization effort, you can create one seamless feed featuring each term instead of using different feeds.
In some situations, it might be undesirable to show feeds over which you can not control the content. Fortunately, the remedy is simple. You can restrict the domain of the feed so that you are only showing results from an authoritative site (e.g. a government site). Or, you can only show results from your own site if appropriate. Restricting the domain thusly should not affect the SEO value of displaying the feed since the keyword densities should remain constant.
If you are adding RSS to your website for SEO, there is one important rule that must be followed: DON’T USE JAVASCRIPT! Javascript solutions are common and easy to implement. However, the javascript content won’t be indexed by the search engines and your page will not get SEO benefits from the feeds. ASP, PHP, and HTML alternatives for RSS are readily available.
RSS is one of the hottest phenomenons in the webmaster community today. RSS that benefits SEO is a topic that’s been very much overlooked. Implementing RSS into websites has become much easier so that even non-programmer hacks can do it with ease. RSS should be viewed as an SEO Best Practice for any website that will remain very static and should be strongly considered as a part of all SEO projects.

Tags: RSS+Feeds, SEO, SEO101

CSS Validation

admin — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 03:40:17 +0000

Why Validate?

Web page code can be submitted to certain pieces of software, the purpose of which is to ensure that the code follows either its own DocumentTypeDefiniton (otherwise known as a DTD or doctype) or a particular profile defined so as to comply with reasonably well-defined standards. The process of using such software is known as “validation” and the primary goal of validation is to ensure that the submitted code contains no obvious, facial mistakes. Validated code is much more likely to render properly in all browsers. Moreover, valid code, being standards-and-doctype compliant, is much more forward-compatible - meaning newer browser versions will be less likely to break it. Validation can catch many mistakes that are otherwise very difficult to spot, such as missing semi-colons or length units. Valid code can still use CssHacks, but also consider AvoidingHacks.

How to Validate:

There are two steps to validating web page code. First, the underlying HTML or XHTML markup must be checked. Even perfectly valid CSS may not have any idea what to do to a page with bad markup. You can go to http://validator.w3.org/ to validate both HTML and XHTML pages. Note that the doctype on your page, in addition to determining the RenderingMode of the browser, also determines which standard the validator will use in parsing the document. There is quite a difference between the various flavors of HTML and XHTML, so be sure you understand which doctype the validator will be using on your document and what implications that has for your document.

The second step is to validate your CSS. Once you have known valid markup, then you still need to check that you haven’t made any glaring mistakes in your CSS. You can go to http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/ to begin the validation process. Note you may choose to validate your CSS entirely separately from the referenced markup, and that you can submit to the validator either an independent CSS file or an (X)HTML document that itself contains or calls CSS. Unlike markup validation, in which the document itself determines which doctype is used, for CSS the individual submitting the document must select from the profile options available on the validator. Most likely you’ll want CSS 2 (the most current full standard) but the others may be appropriate for certain purposes.

What do the results mean?

If your CSS is valid, you will get a nice message from the validation service verifying that your css validates, and giving you permission to use the W3C certification icon:

Note that if you get a message with this icon and a note of congratulations, you have a valid, error-free page. Your page may still, however, contain various warnings. The most typical warning is that you have failed to specify a color with your background color, or vice versa. Warnings are not the same as errors, and a page with warnings but no errors is still considered a valid page. The warnings are there as a convenience to the author, to let you know that you may have missed something. Some unfixed warnings may very well have catastrophic results for users, and others may very well be ignorable. It is up to the author to determine which ones present serious problems and which ones don’t. If you don’t have any idea if a warning is a serious threat to your page, ask someone.

In the case of colors and background colors, it can be dangerous to specify one without the other. Let’s say, for example, that you have specified a white background color, but have not specified a text color. If the user is vision impaired, they may have set a user style sheet or other preference to display white text on a black background. However, your white background may override their background declaration (depending on how the various styles are declared), and the user will be left with their white text on your white background, making the content of the page invisible. So it is a good idea to go back and check. Frequently, color warnings appear in places where a given element will allow the background from a different element in the document to “shine through”, thus in effect taking on the background of that other element. It may often be relatively safe to leave these, but you will need to review your page and make your own judgement for each instance.

A Caveat:

Validation is not the be-all-and-end-all of web pages. A page can be invalid for some very good, thoughtful reasons. On the other hand, it is generally a bad idea to have an invalid page just because it is easy or because you happen to know a bit of invalid code that still works correctly in a particular browser. If you as the author haven’t carefully considered why you want an invalid page, you probably should clean up your code. But if, for example, you are using a CSS3 property, which you know won’t validate but which some newer browsers nevertheless understand, you may be well-justified in ignoring the fact that the advanced property prevents the page from returning a positive result from the validator.

Tips on fixing problems

If you go to validate a page and it comes up with 30+ errors, don’t panic! Most of the time a large number of errors is the result of a “cascade” effect from a single error earlier on in the page. For example, say you forgot to close a element. Since the span is still open, you could be inundated with errors about other elements on the page being invalid because they are not allowed inside a span. Close the span element and all of those errors will be fixed as well.
The most common error by far looks something like this: reference to entity “BV_Engine” for which no system identifier could be generated. What that means is simply that you’ve got a URL with an & sign in it that you forgot to escape. For example, . The & sign in this URL should be & - in fact ALL & signs in an HTML document should be escaped in this way to avoid causing confusion to HTML parsers. For the above example, replacing it with will fix the error and give you better browser compatibility as well.

Tags: CSS+Validation, SEO, SEO101

Press Releases

admin — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 03:34:36 +0000

Press releases to build back links

Another great way to build backlinks is the use of a Press Release. Like Article Submissions, a press release has the opportunity to be picked up and re-published on a wide variety of websites. Hence creating additional backlinks.

A press release is different from a standard article. A Press release is a News story about some event, some thing, or some one. It is a “news” story and must be written as such. In any news story or journalistic article, the basic WHO, WHAT, WHERE, WHEN, WHY and HOW needs to be addressed. Press releases also must be much longer than an average 250 –300 word article. A good press release will be a minimum of 500 words telling a complete story about the topic.

Yes webmasters you can write a press release.

Here are the basics of a good press release:

The Content of Your Press Release is crucial.

Remember the following points when writing your News press release.

Is your Press Release newsworthy?
The true reason of a press release is to tell the world a story or news. No Sales Hype, don’t try to make a sale, tell the story. The Who, What, Where, When , Why, and How.

Grab Attention in the headline and first paragraph.They should tell most of the story. Provide the details after the first paragraph.

Not everything is news. Think of your audience and write something they would want to read.

Make the Press Release create a visual image? Real life examples communicate the story.

Give the background details that are important to the story.

The Facts Ma’am Just the Facts. Don’t lie, Tell the truth. Avoid Hype, BS, exaggerations etc.

Use an angle.

Use active voice.

Don’t be wordy, write clearly and concisely

Don’t use unnecessary adjectives.

Beware of jargon.

Avoid the hype. The exclamation point (!) is your enemy.

Finally,
Your press release should end with a short paragraph that describes your company, products, service and a brief company history.

There are numerous Press release sites on the Internet. Each have some of their own guidelines. Get that press release submitted and get some additional traffic to your website as well a valuable backlinks.

Tags: Press+Releases, SEO, SEO101

Sitemaps

admin — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 03:32:46 +0000

Sitemaps and Google Sitemap

Sitemaps are a value internal linking structure to SEO. It also is very spider friendly and can increase the amount of pages indexed by the major search engines.

Now every site should have a sitemap. This should just be a page that has all the urls on the site. Some sites like this one, use the menu as a sitemap as well.

SEO101 would suggest learning a little more about your server stats by visiting a site like AdTrackzPro, to find out how you can tell when the search engines have spidered your sitemap and site.

Google has released its beta version of a new program called Google Sitemaps. Google Sitemaps (GS) is a tool that allows site owners to upload a sitemaps file (a file with a complete list of the pages of a web site) that Google will use to ensure that your site is crawled in its entirety. For web sites that have had trouble getting Google�s attention, this may be a great opportunity.

This is how Google describes the program on its web site:

�Google Sitemaps is an experiment in web crawling. By using Sitemaps to inform and direct our crawlers, we hope to expand our coverage of the web and speed up the discovery and addition of pages to our index.�

In addition to a deeper crawl/index of your site, GS provides valuable information that can alert you to problems with your site that may be blocking your search engine success.

SEO101 think that the statistics information that is available with GS includes:

Crawl errors
Search queries that return your site in the results
What Google knows about your site
Indexing information
Information about violations of the webmaster guidelines
robots.txt validation

This is a new and unique opportunity to get concrete information about your site that can translate directly into better visibility across all the major search engines, not just Google. And, best of all, participation in this new program is free.

If you want to learn more about Google Sitemaps, SEO101 recommand you to visit this link below.
http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/about.html

Google offers a way to submit your own site map directly to their search engine. Visit this link: http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login

If you are interested in asking any question about sitemaps, please contact SEO101. We would be happy to assist you in taking advantage of this opportunity.

Tags: SEO, SEO101, Search+Engine+Optimization, Search+Engine, Search+Engine+Submission, Search+Engine+Marketing, Keywords, Keyword+Search, Link+Popularity, Sitemap, Google+Sitemap, Robots, Robots.txt

File Sizes

admin — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 03:27:16 +0000

File Sizes and Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization and placement strategies are being applied by more and more webmasters, it is becoming more of a need than a luxury for competitive website owners to use effective search engine optimization, placement and ranking to remain competitive. Search engines couple with good optimization practices can provide your website with vast amounts of targeted traffic.

When it comes to search engine optimization, there are certain common mistakes that people make over and over again. The first step in any search engine optimization campaign is to choose the keywords for which you should optimize your site. If you initially choose the wrong keywords, all the time and effort that you devote in trying to get your site a high ranking will go down the drain. If you choose keywords which no one search for, or if you choose keywords which won’t bring in targeted traffic to your site, what good will the top rankings do?

You must know what keywords will attract your potential customers. Research, research and research keywords and keyword phrases so that you can properly optimize your website.

Tags: File+Sizes, SEO, SEO101

Getting Spidered

admin — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 03:18:29 +0000

Getting Spidered Quickly

Spider is the search engine industry’s “technical” term for a computer program that visits sites and then follows their hyperlinks–adding each page it finds along the way. There are very few true spiders on the web right now as most of today’s engines are satisfied just to search through results found in existing databases rather than designing software to go “out” on its own crawling the web

Links are what make the World Wide Web go round. Links are how we travel through the web pages of the World Wide Web. The indexing, or spidering, of links on a web page is like the indexing of pages that you submit directly to the search engines. In order for your link to provide link popularity back to your website, the page the link is on must appear in the search engine databases. The search engine robots must index the web page to be included into the search engine databases. If the web page is already in the search engine database, it is a matter of indexing the updated information on the web page and having that link show as a backlink in the search engine results.

Tags: Spidered, SEO, SEO101

Free Submissions

admin — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 03:12:57 +0000

Search Engine Submission Links: Free Submissions

These search engines and directories provide a free submissions page where you can submit your website and a few pages of your website to be included in their results. Marketleap recommends that you read the search engine’s submission guidelines and not submit your website unnecessarily or excessively.

If your site contains quality content, is relevant to searchers, and has a solid linking structure, you could be included in these search engines within six to ten weeks. None of these free submission pages guarantees that your site will be included. If you do not show up within eight to ten weeks, you can resubmit your website again.

You can read more about Search Engine Submissions with articles by Danny Sullivan from SearchEngineWatch.com

List of pages for free search engine submissions:

Yahoo Search Submission
http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request

Google/AOL/ Netscape/iWon
http://www.google.com/addurl.html

Open Directory Project
http://dmoz.org/add.html

Search It
http://www.searchit.com/addurl.htm

Splat!
http://www.splatsearch.com/submit.html

SurfGopher
http://www.surfgopher.com/addurl.htm

WalHello
http://www.walhello.com/addlinkgl.html

Tags: Submission, SEO, SEO101

Dynamic Sites

admin — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 03:11:25 +0000

Dynamic Sites and URL’s

As websites have grown larger and more complex, companies have begun using dynamic publishing systems to help them manage sites that contain hundreds or thousands of web pages. Popular programs by companies like Vignette, Microsoft, and Broadvision turn a website into a database driven application capable of publishing and managing large amounts of content. When websites use dynamic publishing, a web page isn’t built until it is requested from a user, guaranteeing that the content is up to date.

When these content management programs deliver information back to a web browser the links they create often contain many of the snippets of code they are using to assemble a page on the fly. This might include characters such as “?, $, @, %, &”.

When a search engine tries to read a dynamic link, it often stops when it encounters the characters that dynamic publishing systems use to deliver a page. This means that a search engine cannot easily crawl and index the website. This means that fewer pages of your website will be indexed by a search engine. This in turn means you will show up in fewer search results.

One thing that many people fail to realize is that search engines create multiple entry points into your website. While your home page may be the one that people find most often, websites that have lots of pages indexed will begin driving traffic to pages located deeper within the website.

These interior pages often draw much more qualified users because they are looking for information specific to a certain topic. Because they are looking for very specific information, they are also more likely to convert on a sale or action that you have prepared for them.

If dynamic publishing is keeping your content from showing up in the search engine database, these more qualified visitors often won’t find your website. It’s very important that as much of your website is visible to the search engines as possible if you hope to drive traffic from search engine marketing. Good link architecture can solve this problem in many cases.

Paid inclusion programs like Inktomi Search Submit or Index Connect guarantee that the pages you want search engines to index are included in their database. This means they don’t have to crawl your site and guess at what information is beneath the surface.

Instead, you are telling them the pages you want them to include and re-crawl on a regular basis. This even includes dynamic pages because you provide Inktomi with a list dynamically generated URL’s which it then knows will contain content and information specific to your website.

Dynamic publishing systems should never hinder the ability of your users to find you. If your website uses dynamic publishing, you need to understand if search engines are able to see deep within your website. A good way to find out is by using Marketleap’s Search Engine Index Count tool. This tool will show you the number of pages that your website has indexed by each of the major search engines. Once you see how much of your website is being indexed today, you’ll know how much of an issue dynamic pages are for your website.

Tags: Dynamic+Sites, Dynamic+URL, SEO, SEO101

Link Architecture

admin — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 03:10:25 +0000

As the Internet has become more popular, websites have turned to new technologies like dynamic HTML and Flash or well designed graphics to improve the user experience. Good navigation through your website isn’t just important to your users. Search engines use the links within your website to crawl and index the pages those links point to.

Ideally, a search engine should start at your home page and be able to crawl through your entire website. Search engines can crawl several types of links - standard text links, graphics with links and image maps contained within graphics.

These links give clear directions for the search engines to follow. They act as a roadmap of your website for search engine crawlers. Site Map pages are also valuable resources for search engines because in one central area the engine can see links to everything. The more of your website the search engine sees, the more times you will appear in a search result for a certain topic.

It’s very important that you have text links on your website that contain keywords that you are hoping to compete for. Search engines not only follow links, they also analyze the text within them to help determine a sites relevancy. Graphic links often don’t have any text associated with them, so the engines don’t treat them the same as text links made up of good keywords.

Search engines have problems crawling links contained in dynamic HTML, Javascript and Flash based pages. These technologies use languages and commands that a search engine spider can’t easily travel through. When a search engine sees one of these dynamic elements, it will usually stop crawling any deeper into your website. This topic is also covered in our article about Dynamic Pages.

If the search engine doesn’t index your entire website, much of the valuable content contained deep within will never appear in a search result. That’s why good text linking is so important. The more direction you give the search engines, the more likely they will follow your links and index larger parts of your website.

Think of it as building a nice driveway, parking lot and signs for your business. The easier and more convenient it is for search engines to get in and scan your website, the more traffic they are going to deliver to your website. The more copy and content the search engines can easily find, the more likely you are to reach your audience online.

For search engine marketing to succeed, good link architecture is essential. Not only does it create a consistent user experience that will make your end users happy, it ensures you are taking the right steps to be seen by search engines. Being seen is the best way to grow your online business. If people can’t find you, no matter how compelling your message, offer or service, your online business won’t find the audience that’s already looking for you.

Tags: Link+Architecture, SEO101, SEO

Keyword Market Analysis

admin — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 03:08:08 +0000

What is a Keyword Market?
In short, a Keyword Market is the total number of unique searches on the Internet that are relevant to your website. A Keyword Market is defined by the top-level or root keyword that is generally most relevant to your business. If you own a shoe store, “shoes” might be the top-level keyword for your market. “Shoes” of course is very general since there are many kinds of shoes for men and women. Top-level keywords may contain thousands of vertical keyword markets. Initial analysis on “shoes” will produce hundreds of verticals (running shoes, nike shoes, bridal shoes, golf shoes, etc.)

Understanding Your Keyword Market
Selecting the right keywords and phrases is critical to the success of any search engine marketing campaign. A thorough analysis of your keyword market(s) will ensure proper keyword selection.

Analysis involves the following:

Comprehensive Vertical and Lateral Keyword Analysis
Vertical and lateral keyword analysis refers to the discovery process you can go through to determine which Keyword Markets are relevant to your website. A vertical analysis looks at all forms of the word (singular, plural) and all the popular variations that are used in combination as a keyword phrase. A lateral analysis queries hundreds of other websites that deal with similar markets and extracts those keywords from the title tags, META tags and body text. The most frequent keywords end up at the top. Example is the best way to explain vertical and lateral keyword analysis. Let’s take the keyword search “basketball” as an example:

Vertical
basketball
basketballs
ncaa basketball
history of basketball
basketball pictures
basketball shoes
basketball drills
basketball rules
nba basketball
basketball camps
basketball court
dimensions college basketball
basketball history
college basketball recruiting
basketball cards

Lateral
sports
basketball
michael jordan
nba
jordan
ncaa
chicago bulls
sports news
slam dunk
vertical jump
hoops
increasing vertical jump
australian basketball
lenny wilkens
free throws

we utilizes WordTracker for vertical and lateral analysis.

Qualify relevant keywords for target audience
Qualifying keywords before making a final decision is where expert subjectivity is applied to catch what the technology cannot. After conducting a comprehensive vertical and lateral keyword analysis, we are left with an exhaustive list of keywords.

Most will be relevant to your site, but many will not be. It is important to remember that these keywords represent actual searches made by actual people. Qualifying for relevant keywords involves a thorough review of your keyword market and making sure all of the keyword searches are reflective of your target audience.

Total Keyword Popularity and Competing URLs
It is important to make an evaluation of how popular a keyword is (i.e. how many times is a keyword predicted to be searched in a 24 hour period) and how it’s popularity compares with the total number of competing URLs (other sites that are returned by the search engines for the same keyword searches). An analysis of this relationship will tell us where it is smart to optimize and where it is foolish.

The results of this analysis is cross referenced with your website content to determine the right page selections for optimization.

Tags: Keyword, Market+Analysis, SEO101

Forum Signatures

admin — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 02:52:32 +0000

Forum Signatures to build back links - Helping your Search Rankings

The barebones definition of a forum is the ability for people to start threads and reply to other people’s threads. However, most forum software provides considerably more than this.

Most forum software allows more than one forum to be created. These forums are containers for threads started by the community. Depending on the permissions of community members as defined by the board’s administrator, they can post replies to existing threads and start new threads as they wish.

Forum software can be broadly divided between those which allow visitors to post anonymously, and those which attribute posts to a registered username.

For username-based software, visitors register using a username and a password for validation purposes. In these types of forums, the members are often able to customise both how their posts display to others and how the board appears to them. Username-based software may provide for anonymity by allowing visitors to post without registration.

Anonymous forums may offer full anonymit, but no registration. In order to provide the same set of features as registration-based forums, anonymous forums especially in Asia use a system of tripcodes, derived by encrypting a plaintext password put in the name field. Although blog comment pages are not Internet forums, they often use the anonymous system for the sake of simplicity.

Backlinks are incoming links to a website or log. The number of backlinks is an indication of the popularity or importance of that website.

Search engines often use the number of backlinks that a website has as one of the factors for determining that website’s search engine ranking. For example, Google uses backlinks to help determine a site’s rank. To see a site’s PageRank, you need to use the Google Toolbar, view the bar graph indicating a website’s PageRank in Google’s directory, or download the PageRank plugin for Mozilla Firefox.

You can determine the approximate number of backlinks a website has when doing a search at Google by adding “link:” before the website’s URL.

Tags: Forum+Signatures, back+links

SEO cheating

admin — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 02:51:42 +0000

SEO cheating and getting banned from Google

Once you complete your new website, you want to let the world know who you are and where to find you. You do this by submitting your website to the many search engines available. The temptation to spam the engines at this point is high, and many people who find themselves in this position make all the wrong decisions.

Spamming the engines is honestly not the answer. The search engine spiders are far more intelligent than they were just a few years ago, and they will quickly pick up on your attempts to spam them.

Even those who do it ’successfully’ and think they are getting away with it, most likely don’t realize that they have already been caught, and that their site is being penalized in some fashion or form. And when they finally go too far, their domain will be banned

Also, for those who think they are getting away with it because their site is currently ranking highly, just remember that the higher you rank, the more likely you are to have your site reviewed by a competitor to see how you did it. Spam is not very difficult to spot, and if you are outranking someone in a competitive market through use of a spamming technique, the odds of you being reported are high.

I don’t know about you. But I couldn’t sleep at night like that.

The good news is that you can achieve high ranking without using any spam techniques at all. So why take the risk? You can be honest and still win!

Nevertheless, many people who are guilty of spamming the search engines don’t even realize they are doing it. So, in this segment, I’ll list some of the more common methods that people believe will improve their rank, but actually result in their ranking going down.

Tags: Cheating, SEO101

CSS Layout

admin — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 02:51:10 +0000

External Style Sheets are a must for fast loading well designed flexible websites.

In the last several years, sites with frames have been slowly burned at the stake by SEO’s. Redesigned, converted, noframed, and removed in order to accomodate a better design that will do well in the search engine. For the most part many of the techniques used to fix frames in the past are as not much more effective than the frames themselves. Adding links and content in the noframe section is not often a good solution and only a temporary patch at best. In most cases the best advice is to just not use frames period. I wanted to highlight a good advanced search engine optimization technique for fixing frames on websites. This technique is actually more a way to preserve the layout using frames while redoing all the code work. If you have clients or yourself want to keep the benefits of frames but not have the negative side effects there is a very good solution.

Fix Frames with a CSS Layout

Basically the trick is to work with the z-index and the images in the CSS. You tell it to have the content layer scroll over the shadows but under the main image. The benefits are: You get a fixed navigation and top header and scrolling main body. The code is super clean as all styles are in the CSS. Its works in IE6 and all other browsers (except IE5.x).

Pay Per Click

admin — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 07:40:53 +0000

What Is Pay Per Click?

Pay per click (PPC) is an advertising technique used on websites, advertising networks, and search engines. Pay per click advertising on search engines allows you choose keywords you would like your site to appear for when a search is performed. You decide how much you are willing to pay each time a person clicks on the search results. The more you are willing to pay per click, the higher your site will appear in the results for the keywords you choose.

Advertisers bid on “keywords” that they believe their target market (people they think would be interested in their offer) would type in the search bar when they are looking for their type of product or service. For example, if an advertiser sells red widgets, he/she would bid on the keyword “red widgets”, hoping a user would type those words in the search bar, see their ad, click on it and buy. These ads are called “sponsored links” or “sponsored ads” and appear next to and sometimes above the natural or organic search on the page. The advertiser pays only when the user clicks on the ad.

Which Search Engines Allow Pay Per Click Advertising?

There are hundreds of pay per click search engines.

Generally, the larger the pay per click search engine, the more you will have to bid to get to the top for your keywords. This is why it is worth investigating different search engines to find what it would cost to bid on your keywords and how much traffic they draw.

The largest companies in the pay per click industry are Yahoo! and Google. Google is not a pay per click search engine, but it does provide pay per click advertising in text ad boxes to the right of search results it delivers. It also delivers pay per click ads to other content sites.

To find more pay per click search engines, take a look at those listed in the box in the right column of this page.

These pay per click search engines are not as large as Overture and Google, but they are worth a look. As mentioned above, one advantage these search engines can provide is they generally have lower costs per click to rank for a keyword than the larger search engines.

In addition to the general pay per click search engines, you may also be able to find thematic search engines that serve your industry or specifically cater to your target audience.

Important Considerations

A very important point to keep in mind with pay per click is you must test, test, and test some more. Don’t start off with a major investment. Start with the minimum and see how the search engine performs in terms of the traffic it delivers and how well that traffic converts into paying customers.

An essential part of your testing is having a method in place that allows you to track your return on money invested.

For example, if your goal is to bring in new subscribers to your newsletter, you could direct visitors arriving from your pay per click link to a subscription form set up just for them. You can then monitor how many clicks actually result in a new subscription. As such, you will know how much you are paying for each new subscriber.

Before spending any money with a pay per click search engine, be sure they can answer the following questions:

How many searches a month are performed at the search engine?
What major search partners or affiliates does the search engine have?
How many searches are generated each month by the search partners or affiliates?
Is it possible to opt out of having your listing appear in the results of the affiliate sites?
What fraud prevention mechanisms are in place?
What is the procedure for filing a “fraudulent clicks” report?
Will an account be credited for fraudulent clicks discovered?
Is it possible to opt out of having a listing appear for searches originating from specific countries?
Is there a posted terms of service for search partners or affiliates.

Look for search engines that have very strict guidelines for dealing with their search affiliates. This is important because you want to be sure the search engine is working hard to prevent fraud among its affiliates.

For more information regarding Pay per click, contact SEO101.

Tags: SEO, SEO101, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine, Search Engine Submission, Search Engine Marketing, Keywords, Keyword Search, Link Popularity, PPC, Pay Per Click, Pay Per Click Search Engine, Advertising, Click Advertising, Pay Per Click Advertising, Fraudulent Clicks

ROI

admin — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 07:27:33 +0000

What is Return on Investments (ROI)?

In finance, rate of return (ROR) or return on investment (ROI), or sometimes just return, is the ratio of money gained or lost on an investment relative to the amount of money invested. The amount of money gained or lost may be referred to as interest, profit/loss, gain/loss, or net income/loss. The money invested may be referred to as the asset, capital, principal, or the cost basis of the investment.

ROI is also known as rate of profit, rate of return or return. Return can also refer to the monetary amount of gain or loss. ROI is the return on a past or current investment, or the estimated return on a future investment. ROI is usually given as a percent rather than decimal value.

Now lets talk about SEO. In the present Internet era, a number of websites are there to promote the businesses. There are a lot of Internet website promotion tools and services including search engine optimization. Search engine optimization has become a very low cost advertising method with a probable high rate
of return. Currently, the immense benefits of SEO services have made the competition in optimizing websites increase drastically. These effective methods can make your site to list among the top sites in the search engines. The high competition has also led to the rise of many different styles and methods of website optimization. Nowadays, many individuals as well as firms are offering various SEO services.

SEO101 thinks that one of the key benefits of SEO services is the excellent return on investment (ROI). Increased brand visibility, targeted traffic, and higher sales are some of the main benefits of SEO services. The files size can be made smaller by the proper validation and optimization of files during servicing of pages. Another benefit is the cost effectiveness. One of the most cost-effective ways of marketing is SEO. If a website is properly designed and optimized, it stays for a long term in the rankings compared to pay per click (PPC) option.

Most usually term keyword ROI is used in PPC marketing. However, it can be a valuable tool in organic SEO when estimating what products / keywords to focus.

Imagine a situation where you have done keyword research for a customer. Yes, you know approximately how much traffic each keyword provides. Yes, you know how competitive those keyword are. And yes, based on this information you usually prefer some keywords over others. Take for example two products related keywords:

1)Product A keyword is expected to provide 2500 visitors a day. KEI is 100.
2)Product B keyword is expected to provide 100 visitors a day. KEI is 90.

Based on this information most SEOs would prefer Product A keyword. It provides more traffic and has less competition. But how can you tell if it provides a better ROI for customer? SEO101’s solution is to calculate keyword specific ROI. The simplified formula is:

keyword ROI = expected traffic x target product/service gross margin

We usually ask customer to provide us gross margin for each product/service regarding the keyword research. If the figures are like:

Product A has a selling price of US$2/unit. Gross margin is US$0.70/unit.
Product B has a selling price of US$75/unit. Gross margin is US$25/unit.

Suddenly product B begins to look a whole lot more tempting. The calculations prove this:

Product A keyword ROI = 2500 visitors x 0.70US$ = 1750US$
Product B keyword ROI = 100 visitors x 25US$ = 2500US$

Of course, this does not give a real value to play with � only a portion of visits end to sales, price range affects to sales rate etc. However, this is a good indicator of potential monetary value of single keyword with certain amount of traffic. Like in PPC and affiliate marketing, the higher product specific profit is, the more affordable target it is. This is a valuable lesson to remember with keyword study.

As always, if you have any questions or tips on this subject, just contact SEO101.

Tags: SEO, SEO101, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine, Search Engine Submission, Search Engine Marketing, Keywords, Keyword Search, Link Popularity, ROI, rate of return, Return on Investments, Investments, Pay Per Click, PPC

Content, Content, Content

admin — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 02:56:39 +0000

Content is the major part in any SEO campaign

If you are creating a website or working on a site you’ve already created, the content of the site is one of the most important factors for successful search engine marketing. The pages you create should provide valuable information that references very specific terms and concepts that are unique to your website.

Text is one part of the content that is important for being found in search engines. Search engines usually read and index the first 500 words from each page they successfully crawl. The text within that span of words is one factor that helps to determine your relevance for a particular search term.

If you are successful at weaving your keywords into compelling copy (remember humans are your primary reader) you are more likely to be relevant for keyword searches. Once your site has been up and running for three months, run a report on your log files to determine what keywords people are using to find your site.

You might be surprised if the most popular keywords that do find your site don’t match up to keywords you already had in mind and were using. The web is a great educator about how to succeed. Your site might be very popular for search terms that you hadn’t thought of when you built it.

When people use search engines, they aren’t typing in generic terms that are hard to define and measure like “business” or “software”. People use search engines for very specific names and phrases, terms like “Inkjet printer cartridge refills”.

You wouldn’t have thought to include that specific phrase in your content because it doesn’t read very well. But if all those words are located in a web page carefully constructed to highlight keywords that are known to produce traffic, the likelihood that you will appear in a search result for a very specific search improves.

You must be diligent in understanding how people are getting to your site and focus on providing quality content that is geared towards the audience that is trying to find you. Be as specific as you can. You’ll improve the quality and quantity of visitors you get from search engines.

It’s also important to understand that you cannot trick the search engines. Flooding the engines with multiple versions of the same page, repeating the same term over and over - these tactics will only lead to negative traffic from search engines and the likelihood that your site could be banned from being listed in a search engine.

We mentioned earlier that the text on your website was one part of the content that’s important for being found at search engines. Another important part of the equation is your link popularity. By focusing on quality content, your website becomes more likely to have someone naturally link to it without having to request it.

Tags: SEO, SEO101, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine, Search Engine Submission, Search Engine Marketing, Keywords, Keyword Search, Link Popularity, Link Popularity, Content, Content, Content, Content

Anchor Text

admin — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 02:33:28 +0000

How Anchor Text Helps

If you have done some serious reading about your website optimization, you probably would have come across the reference to the phrase “optimization of anchor text“. This article shall discuss the definition and importance of anchor text and how you can use this powerful website optimization feature to get high ranking in search engines.

What is Anchor Text?

Anchor text is the visible hyperlinked text on the page. Let’s take this example:

“Please examine our SEO studies for validation to evaluate our search engine optimization capabilities.”

Here the words “SEO studies for validation” and “search engine optimization” are hyper linked to the hidden URLs “http://www.rlmeena.com/css-validation.html” and “http://www.rlmeena.com/seo-an-overview.html” respectively. The words within the hyperlink, “SEO studies for validation” and “search engine optimization“, are called the anchor text.

In a normally built site, anchor text is usually used to indicate the subject matter of the page that it links to. For example, the text “SEO studies for validation” indicates to visitors that they can expect to see content about studies pertaining to SEO if they visit the link. This pattern of usage has been applied in search engine algorithms to enhance the relevance of the “target” or the “landing page” URL for the keywords appearing within the anchor text.

Many people are trying to build as many inbound links to there sites as possible… Some have heard the recent news that a good anchor link on a powerful site could be all you need to quickly exceed past your competition in the natural search engine listings…

Just a note here that it is possible to over do it….

Don’t build links to your site with the exact anchor text in you link web wide, you could find yourself filtered out of search altogether…

Instead of building hundreds of inbound links to your site like this:

100 Links —–> “Keyword“

the links should instead be titles as a mix of different keywords but all revolving around the same theme like this:

25 Links ——> “Keyword”
25 Links ——> “Keywords”
25 Links ——> “Keyword Place”
25 Links ——> “Keyword Website“

Watch your search engine results and traffic increase when you utilize the power of anchor text hyper linking.

Anchor Text Enhances the Relevance of the Target Page

Please note that the keywords in anchor text enhance the relevance of the target page pertaining to the keywords used. While the relevance of the page containing the anchor text is also enhanced to some degree (because of relevant keywords appearing on that page), the real gainer is the target page URL. Use this knowledge to build the relevance of each page of your site, through optimized anchor text containing important keywords, relevant to the theme of such pages, from other pages of your site.

How to Optimize Anchor Text Within Your Site

Anchor text optimization can be deployed throughout your site to enhance the relevance of most of the web pages based on individual page content. You would be surprised, how easy it is, to find suitable instances of hyperlinking structures to make use of optimized anchor text.

when linking to internal pages, it is better to use the format:

Read all about Anchor Text.

Instead of

Read all about Anchor Text here.

The above example shows us that you can leverage the hyperlinking of important keyword phrases instead of hyperlinking unrelated text wherever possible. It is always a great idea to restructure sentences if keywords don’t fit in anchor text.

Note: SEO101 don’t suggest you to buy links or exchange link because it can harm your site in many ways. As Matt Cutts said that “The best links are not paid, or exchanged after out-of-the-blue emails, the best links are earned and given by choice.” and SEO101 is agree with him. Those people can probably guess that Google does consider buying text links for PageRank purposes to be outside their quality guidelines. Actually google conside it very seriously and in most of the cases google doesnt count their votes in ranking a website.

Read Page Links and Link Popularity articles for more information.

Link Popularity

admin — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 02:58:07 +0000

Everything You Need to Know About Link Popularity

The number of websites that backlink to your website is one of the factors that help search engines determine your relevancy for a search term. Link popularity and gaining new links from outside websites to your website have proven to be a popular concept for people seeking to improve their search engine rankings.

What is link popularity and how exactly does it work? Search engines don’t just look at the content of your website to determine if you are a match for a search. They also look at the number of outside websites that can validate, by linking, that you are a good match.

Search engines have also begun to rank the importance of the sites that backlink to you. This means if the New York Times backlink to your site, your credibility is higher than if Joe’s Online Newspaper provides a link to your website. Search engines also consider the text contained in the link that is pointing to your website. If the text in the links contains keywords you are trying to compete for, the search engines consider your site to have even greater credibility.

Since link popularity has become a factor that people feel like they have some influence over in determining their search engine positioning, many solutions have been proposed for growing your online link popularity. One of the more popular ways is also one of the least effective.

Several software programs have been written that help you create lists of websites in your space that might be willing to backlink to you. These programs also help you gather the email addresses for these sites and even help you craft an email requesting that the site add a backlink to yours.

The concept sounds good but the results are often mixed. If you use one of these tools and simply follow the templates they give you, your email will read like a spam message that won’t be taken seriously.

The best way to build long-term link popularity is to offer good content and features that provide real value to your audience. As people discover your website and realize its benefits, the likelihood of them linking to your website naturally increases.

There are several critical targets if you want to build up your link popularity without appearing to be a spammer. The first is good links from Yahoo and the Open Directory Project. Both of these sites are human based directories that have a lot of influence over search results. If your site is listed in the correct category and has a good description, backlinks from these two websites are seen as validating you are the real thing.

The second place it’s important to have a backlink from is topic specific or niche directories. These are websites that are dedicated to news and information that is an exact match for what you provide online. If you have a website that deals with tractor parts, being listed on sites that focus on tractors is very important. In the case where a niche website doesn’t know about your website, it’s okay to ask them to backlink to your website. But your message should be personalized to them and also tell them the benefit or feature their users will get from linking to you.

Another part of the web that helps build your link popularity is resource sites. Resource sites are lists of links that people put up on their own. These pages are often spread amongst friends and readers who find good information available from the resource. In order to reach this audience, a good PR campaign and press releases can ensure that these individuals know you exist and have a backlink to your website that they can easily include.

One of the most overlooked spots for building link popularity is backlinks from partners and vendors for your business. Because you already have a business relationship with these companies or individuals, you are more likely to be able to request and receive a backlink from their website. These websites help validate your place online and also establish you within a community of websites online. If you are visible to the community, you are more visible to the search engines.

Link popularity also starts at home. You must make sure your link architecture is solid and easily followed by search engines. That’s the first way that search engines see you. It’s also the way that visitors find information within your website. The easier you make it on your audience to find good information, the more likely they are to link to it.

The final way you can work to increase your link popularity is to participate in newsletters and online forums that relate to your website. You don’t want to just jump in and give a plug for your URL. You must participate in the discussion as an expert or authority who gives good advice. When you sign your name at the bottom of your posting, be sure to include a signature that includes a link to your website. If these forums and newsletters are archived and remain online, search engines continue to see them and the links they contain.

If your website doesn’t have a lot of content and you are wondering how you can build your link popularity you should think about building a tool or feature on your website that will be valuable to your online audience.

Link popularity will continue to be an essential factor in successful search engine marketing initiatives for the foreseeable future. Backlinks are a helpful tool for search engines trying to wade through billions of documents and find ones that are relevant to their users.

Internal Page Linking

admin — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 03:20:02 +0000

Internal linking raises your PR

With all the talk out there about linking, one might be under the impression that the only links that count are those from other websites. While these links certainly play an important role (as discussed in page links) in SEO these are certainly not the only important links.

One important technique that some webmasters still neglect to follow is the use of inter-linking techniques used throughout your site. Your inner pages are as important as your homepage or your products or services pages. All of these pages can be used as legitimate “doorway” pages that the search engines will like to see and will usually reward you for using them.

When you’re about to launch into your link work why not stop and consider the ones that are easiest to attain and maximize first. That would be, the ones right there on your own site and those which you have total and complete control of. Properly used internal links can be a useful weapon in your SEO arsenal.

The internal linking structure can:

Insure that your website gets properly spidered and that all pages are found by the search engines
Build the relevancy of a page to a keyword phrase
Increase the PageRank of an internal page

How is PageRank calculated?

In simplest terms PR is calculated by the sharing of PR from all the IBL links to your page. This is not strictly accurate because Google also uses the internal links within a site in the calculation of PR. Each link to a page carries with it and passes PR value to the target page. The PR points or value passed depend on the PR value of the page they come from, and the total outbound links from the page. It is generally agreed that a page will only pass about 85% of its value to the page it links to. So a PR5 page with a single outbound link will pass 85% of the value of a PR5 page to the page it links to.

But virtually no page has only a single link � remember internal links are also used in the total outbound link count � so the value passed to any page is 85% of the PR, divided by the total number of outbound links.

The question now becomes what is the PR point value of the different PR levels. Most observers believe that the relationship between PR levels is logarithmic rather than linear. In other words PR5 is not worth 25% more than a PR4, but may be worth 4 to 6 times more.

Here is how the internal linking structure can affect these areas and how to maximize the effectiveness of the internal linking on your own website.

Getting Your Website Spidered

Insuring that every page of your website gets found by the search engine spiders is probably the simplest thing you can do for your rankings. Not only will this increase the number of pages that a search engine credits your site with, but it also increases the number of phrases that your website has the potential to rank for.

We have seen websites that, once the search engines find all of their pages, find that they are ranking on the first page and seeing traffic from phrases they never thought to even research or target.

This may not necessarily be the case for you however having a larger site with more pages related to your content will boost the value of your site overall. You are offering this content to your visitors, so why hide it from the search engines.

Pages can be hidden from search engines if the linking is done in a way that they cannot read. This is the case in many navigation scripts. If your site uses a script-based navigation system then you will want to consider the implementation of one of the internal linking structure noted further in the article.

Additionally, image-based navigation is spiderable however the search engines can’t see what an image is and thus, cannot assign any relevancy from an image to the page it links to other than assigning it a place in your website hierarchy.

Building The Relevancy Of A Page To A Keyword Phrase

Now SEO101 thinks that anyone who wants to get their website into the top positions on the search engines for multiple phrases must start out with a clearly defined objective, including which pages should rank for which phrases. Generally speaking it will be your homepage that you will use to target your most competitive phrase and move on to targeting less competitive phrases on your internal pages.

To help build the relevancy of a page to a keyword phrase you will want to use the keyword phrase in the anchor text of the links to that page. Let’s assume that you have a website hosting company. Rather than linking to your homepage with the anchor text “home” link to it with the text “web hosting main”. This will attach the words “web” and “hosting” and “main” to your homepage. You can obviously leave the word “main” out if desirable however in many cases it does work for the visitor (you know, those people you’re actually building the site for).

This doesn’t stop at the homepage. If you are linking to internal pages either through your navigation, footers, or inline text links - try to use the phrases that you would want to target on those pages as the linking text. For example, if that hosting company offered and wanted to target “dedicated hosting”, rather than leaving the link at solely the beautiful graphic in the middle of the homepage they would want to include a text link with the anchor text “dedicated hosting” and link to this internal page. This will tie the keywords “dedicated hosting” to the page.

In a field as competitive as hosting this alone won’t launch the site to the top ten however it’ll give it a boost and in SEO, especially for competitive phrases, every advantage you can give your site counts.

Increasing The PageRank Of Internal Pages

While we will be discussing Page Rank (a Google-based term) here the same rules generally apply for the other engines. The closer a page is in clicks from your homepage, the higher the value (or PageRank) the page is assigned. Basically, if We have a page linked to from our homepage it will be given more weight that a page that is four or five levels deep in our site.

This does not mean that you should link to all of your pages from your homepage. Not only does this diffuse the weight of each individual link but it will look incredibly unattractive if your site is significantly large.

Figure out what your main phrases are and which pages will be used to rank for them and be sure to include text links to these internal pages on your homepage. It’s important to pick solid pages to target keyword phrases on as you don’t want human visitors going to your “terms and conditions” page before they’ve even seen the products.

If that hosting company noted above has a PageRank 6 homepage, the pages linked from its homepage will generally be a PageRank 5 (sometimes 4, sometimes 6 depending on the weight of the 6 for the homepage). Regardless, it will be significantly higher that if that page was linked to from a Page Rank 3 internal page.

How To Improve Your Internal Linking Structure

SEO101 find out many methods which you can use to improve your internal linking structure. The three main ones are:

Text link navigation
Footers
Inline text links

Text Link Navigation

Most websites include some form of navigation on the left hand side. This makes it one of the first things read by a search engine spider (read “Table Structures For Top Search Engine Positioning” by Mary Davies for methods on getting your content read before your left hand navigation). If it is one of the first things the search engine spiders sees when it goes through your site it will have a strong weight added to it so it must be optimized with care.

If you are using text link navigation be sure to include the targeted keywords in the links. Thankfully this cannot be taken as meaning “cram your keywords into each and every link” because this is your navigation and that would look ridiculous. I’ve seen sites that try to get the main phrase in virtually every link. Not only does this look horrible but it may get your site penalized for spam (especially if the links are one after another).

You don’t have to get your keywords/phrase in every link but if workable, every second or third link works well. Also consider what you are targeting on internal pages. If your homepage target is “web hosting” and you’ve linked to your homepage in the navigation with “web hosting main” which is followed by your contact page so you’ve used “contact us”, it would be a good idea to use the anchor text “dedicated hosting” for the third link. It reinforces the “hosting” relevancy and also attaches relevancy to the dedicated hosting page of the site to the phrase “dedicated hosting” in the anchor text.

Footers

Footers are the often overused and abused area of websites. While they are useful for getting spiders through your site and the other points noted above, they should not be used as spam tools. We’ve seen in our travels, footers that are longer than the content areas of pages from websites linking to every single page in their site from them. Not only does this look bad but it reduces that value of each individual link (which then become 1 out of 200 links rather than 1 out of 10 or 20).

Keep your footers clean, use the anchor text well, and link to the key internal pages of your website and you will have a well optimized footer. You will also want to include in your footer a link to a sitemap. On this sitemap, link to every page in your site. Here is where you can simply insure that every page gets found. Well worded anchor text is a good rule on your sitemap as well. You may also want to consider a limited description of the page on your sitemap. This will give you added verbiage to solidify the relevancy of the sitemap page to the page you are linking to.

Internal Text Links

internal text links are links placed within the content of your work. They were covered in last week’s article on content optimization, which gives me a great opportunity to use one as an example.

While debatable, inline text links do appear to be given extra weight as their very nature implies that the link is entirely relevant to the content of the site.

As noted above, simply changing your internal navigation will not launch your site to the top of the rankings however it’s important to use each and every advantage available to create a solid top ten ranking for your site that will hold it’s position.

They will get your pages doing better, they will help get your entire site spidered, they will help increase the value of internal pages and they will build the relevancy of internal pages to specific keyword phrases.

Even if that’s all they do, aren’t they worth taking the time to do right? SEO101 think you do.

Page Links

admin — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 03:28:43 +0000

Page Links and Linkbacks

Make it as easy as possible for other Web site owners to link you. One way is by creating a page that has ready-to-use “cut and paste” HTML linkback code that webmasters can grab and add to their pages, if they want to link us. In fact, we have no problems at all with linkback partners who wish to directly link to a button or banner image that resides on our server.

The way we see it, if someone is willing to linkback our site, then we’ll certainly willing to pay for the necessary bandwidth. If you require people to actually grab a button or banner from your site and upload it to their site in order to linkback to you, then you’re only adding another step. This may not seem significant. But we’ve found it can be for many site owners, particularly newbies. The fact is, most successful Web site owners tend to be busy and pressed for time. Anything you can do to save them an extra step is significant and, over the long run, will result in more linkback.

Another advantage of offering ready-to-use “cut and paste” HTML linkback coding is that you may find that a lot of Webmasters will link your site, simply because they like what you’re offering. If you run a useful, worthwhile site, you’ll find that a lot of other site owners will linkback you and not even ask for anything in return.

but now keep this in mind that buying links is not best solution to draw traffic or in some cases it can harm your pagerank.

As Matt Cutts said that “The best links are not paid, or exchanged after out-of-the-blue emails, the best links are earned and given by choice.” SEO101 is agree with him. Those people can probably guess that Google does consider buying text links for pagerank purposes to be outside their quality guidelines.

let us talk about why google consider it outside their guidelines to get pagerank via buying links. Google (and pretty much every other major search engine) uses hyperlinks to help determine link reputation. Linkbacks are usually editorial votes given by choice, and link-based analysis has greatly improved the quality of web search. Selling links muddies the quality of link-based reputation and makes it harder for many search engines (not just Google) to return relevant results. When the Berkeley college newspaper has six online gambling links (three casinos, two for poker, and one bingo) on its front page, it’s harder for search engines to know which linkbacks can be trusted.

At this point, someone usually ask: “But can’t you just not count the bad links? On the dailycal.org, I see the words “ponsored Resources”. Can’t search engines detect paid links? Yes, Google has a variety of algorithmic methods of detecting such linkbacks, and they work pretty well. But these links make it harder for Google (and other search engines) to determine how much to trust each linkback. A lot of effort is expended that could be otherwise be spent on improving core quality (relevance, coverage, freshness, etc.). And you can imagine how the people trying to get link popularity have responded. Someone forwarded me an email from a “text link broker” that included this suggestion:

Most people use words like, SPONSORS, PARTNERS, FEATURED, ADVERTISERS, ADS and other synonymous terms related to advertisers. Our suggestion is to use “different” titles for these ads. Something like RELATED SITES, COOL SITES, RESOURCES, ALTERNATIVE LINKS and so on.

A natural question is: what is Google’s current approach to link buying? Of course our link-weighting algorithms are the first line of defense, but it’s difficult to catch every problem case in adversarial information retrieval, so google also look for problems and leaks in different semi-automatic ways. Reputable sites that sell links won’t have their search engine rankings or PageRank penalized search for [daily cal] would still return dailycal.org. However, link-selling sites can lose their ability to give reputation (e.g. PageRank and anchor text).

What if a site wants to buy links purely for visitor click traffic, to build buzz, or to support another site? In that situation, use the rel=”nofollow” attribute. The nofollow tag allows a site to add a linkback that abstains from being an editorial vote. Using nofollow is a safe way to buy links, because it’s a machine-readable way to specify that a linkback doesn’t have to be counted as a vote by a search engine.

so SEO101 suggests to avoid buying links to get traffic because it is not very netural as well as reliable.

Search Engine Friendly

admin — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 07:23:50 +0000

Search Engine Friendly (SEF) Site and Search Engine Friendly Links/URLs

We live in a day and age where people use search engines on a daily basis to find information, products or services. Web site owners who offer these things want to be found in the number 1 spot for a particular keyword phrase or at least on the first page of results. In order to obtain these prized positions, the engines have to make the decision that your site deserves that prestigious place. As web site owners or those who are responsible for the overall success of a site, how do we help the search engines come to this conclusion? While there may be many pieces of the puzzle to accomplish this, one of the foundational things that can be done is to make sure your site is “search engine friendly“.

Search engine friendly means a page or link or site is friendly to search engines. Search engines should not have any problem indexing that link or page. SEO101 researched and find out that SEF is not very much different then its literal meaning. A page that can be found, that can be understood by mordern search engines, are taken as Search engine friendly page. But now SEO101 is going to talk about technical meaning.

What does that mean anyway - search engine friendly? Does it entail having an all text site because search engines love content? Does it mean sacrificing aesthetics because graphical components get in the way of search engines? Does it mean stuffing your pages with repetitive keywords or employing sneaky tricks? Actually none of these things are ingredients for a search engine friendly site. Additionally many are under the impression that one has to sacrifice the end user if they are to please the search engine. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Let SEO101 explain what exectly SEF means. Actually SEF is very closely reated to SEO. On today’s Internet database driven or dynamic sites are very popular. Unfortunately the easiest way to pass information between your pages is with a query string. In case you don’t know a query string is a string of information tacked onto the end of a URL after a question mark. For instance in the following URL,

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&q=rlmeena.com

the bolded portion is a query string.

So, what’s the problem with that? Well originally most search engines simply would not index such URLs. This has changed, and now all the major search engines do index such URLs. However they recognize such URLs as dynamic and they both do not want to crash your server, or get stuck crawling and endless string of dynamic URLs. So if your URLs appear dynamic they may either crawl them more slowly, and or only crawl them if they have sufficient incoming links. The longer the URL the greater chance that it won’t get crawled.

There is also the issue of session IDs, which won’t really be covered here but need mentioned. Many software systems, such as forums or shopping carts, require the ability to track visitors. This is most often accomplished with cookies, but when cookies are not possible (such as when the user turns them off or when search engine robots visit), the software falls back on appending a long string of numbers to the URL. This is a session ID. Session IDs are not only unfriendly, but they also tend to change rapidly for search engines, causing them to see the same content at multiple URLs. In fact session IDs in your URL can still effectively kill your chance of being fully indexed by search engines. So the solution to this is to identify search engines by their HTTP_USER_AGENT and turn sessions IDs off for them. Most better software pages made by search engine conscious developers include this functionality now, but you should always verify that it works.

You should also be concerned with user friendliness. URLs with long query strings are not only unfriendly to search engines, but also to users. A user will have a far easier time remembering a URL with real words in it rather than a URL with cryptic numeric data & variable names. Search engine friendly URLs also easily allow you to hide the type of server side programming you’re using by removing the tell tale extension (such as .php) from your URLs. This means you will be able to change your backend software at a later date without changing your URLs, and it may even provide a security bonus.

Let SEO101 give you some basic ingredients that constitute a search engine friendly site but in doing so, always keep this principle in mind - your web site is for the end user, not the search engines! What do we mean by that? It is quite simple. Search engines are not going to buy your products or hire you to perform a service. In other words, they are not going to pay your bills or allow you to earn an income. The end user will. It is the end user that you want to attract and as a result, covert to a customer. Therefore you should always design and market your site with the end user in mind. This involves the aesthetics of your site, its usability, the way it communicates and ultimately its ability to convert. Keeping this very important principle in mind, lets look at some key ingredients that make up a search engine friendly site.

Make Sure Search Engines Can Find You In The First Place

Seems simple enough, right? However, there are still people that launch a brand new site and then go searching for it on Google or Yahoo but are unable to find it. They submitted their site through one of those “add URL” forms or through a submission service but still do not show up in the search engine’s index. You will never get your site listed, at least long term, in a search engine by simply submitting it. Rather you need to get a link from a site that is already in the search engines and then the engines will find the link, visit your site and add it to their index.

How does one go about getting a link on another site? The easiest way is to submit your site to free directories like GoGuides, JoeAnt, Skaffe or Wow. Search engines regularly crawl these and other directories and will find your site once it is listed.

Another thing that we do is add a link to the client’s site in our client list, portfolio, press release section or even in one of our own directories. Either way, the preferred method of search engines is to find your site on their own.

Search Engines Crave Content

It is true that search engines like content or plain old html text. They do not recognize how aesthetically pleasing your site is but rather will digest the content of your site to understand its subject matter. That is not to say that you should sacrifice design for content. You can actually have the best of both worlds. There is a myth that one has to have all their content appear on the page before graphical components. That is simply not true. As long as there is good content within your pages, it doesn’t matter where it is - search engines will find it. So the challenge then is not “where” to place content but simply to have it in the first place.

In having content it is imperative to then have the best content. This is where creativity in presenting information comes into play. If your site offers information on a subject, then make sure you have the best info available on the Internet. If you sell a line of products, make sure you provide content describing the products whether that be in the form of convincing sales verbiage, product reviews, testimonials or all those combined.

Make sure your content is written in a natural language. In other words, make sure it is written for the end user in mind. Who is your target audience. Men? Women? Teens? Business owners? A geographical region? Whatever it be, write for that target audience. This is where a good copywriter that has some basic understanding of SEO will be worth their weight in gold. “What about my keywords?” you ask. There is no reason why your site cannot contain well written content designed for your target audience and at the same time represent your most important keywords.

Is Your Site Crawlable?

SEO101 probably stretching the English language using the word “crawlable”. What SEO101 is referring to is simply making sure that a search engine can find other pages within your site beyond your home page. This may sound simple enough but SEO101 come across many sites that in one way or another have stopped a search engine dead it its tracks at the home page.

There are a variety of situations that can stop a search engine from reaching the sub pages of your site. One of the most common is when a site uses a JavaScript navigation system such as with dynamic menus. While Google is working to overcome the inability to understand JavaScript, the other search engines simply cannot crawl links in these types of navigational systems. What should you do then? Get rid of the JavaScript? Certainly not. Rather, provide an alternate way to navigate the site such as a set of text links in the footer of your site. If your site has too many pages or sections to include a set of links in the footer, then build a sitemap with text links to every page or at least every major section of the site and then include a text links to the site map from your home page. You can also link to sub pages within the regular copy of your pages as well.

Another thing that will stop search engines from finding the sub pages of your site is requiring cookies or setting session ids. Sure cookies and/or session ids may be necessary to track visitor activity but you can make an exception for search engines. Search engine crawlers are like old browsers in a way. They do not like cookies. Don’t require them to accept them or they will simply leave.

Search boxes and forms are another obstacle to search engines. They cannot add a zip code into a form field or a keyword into a search query box. If these are the only ways to reach the inner contents of your site, then you will shut the door on search engine crawlers.

The basic idea of allowing a crawler to find the inner pages of your site is that each page should be unique to a specific subject, product or service. Therefore in most cases the more pages you have indexed in a search engine, the greater visibility you have because you have a better chance of showing up well for multiple keywords and phrases.

Use Unique Title Tags and Meta Description Tags

How often we come across sites that have the same title tag on every page. Usually it is simply the company or web site name. It is also very common in product database sites that use a run of site title tag or an include file for the info that goes between the opening and closing head tags in the html.

Whether your site is static or dynamic, it is of the utmost importance to have unique title tags for each page. Each page should be different, right? Then why not make sure your title tag coincides with the subject matter of the page? The title tag is probably the most important thing a search engine looks at out of all the other elements of your site. So make sure you are capitalizing on this by having optimized, unique title tags for each page.

While you are at it, each page should have its own unique meta tags as well. Sure Google rarely displays the meta description tag as the description of a listing that might appear in the SERPs but they still index it and Yahoo does use the meta description tag (at least at the time of this writing) as the description that appears in the SERPs.

Make Your Site The Very Best It Can Be

All search engines want to do is to be relevant and help their users find the very best sites related to their search queries. While some people do “trick” and “cheat” their way to the top, the web sites that ultimately earn the top positions and stay there are the web sites that are the best in their field. Never stop working to make your site better than all the others you are competing against. This is the best strategy in obtaining long term success not only in regards to search engine positioning but with your end users as well.

So in conclusion, according to SEO101, having a search engine friendly page simply means having a page that they can find, that they can understand, that provides a wealth of good info and that is the best in its field.

Tags: SEO, SEO101, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine, Search Engine Submission, Search Engine Marketing, Keywords, Keyword Search, PageRank, Google PageRank, Link Popularity, Search Engine Friendly, Search Engine, SEF, SERP, Search Engine Friendly URLs, Search Engine Friendly Links, Search Engine Friendly Sites, Search Engine Friendly Pages

Google Page Rank or PR

admin — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 02:53:49 +0000

Google PageRank or PR

WPR (website page rank) is a pure mathematical number based on the sharing of PR values between all the sites you link to and who link to you. That’s all it is. Just a damn number. But here on SEO101 we try to explain it although it depends upon a lot of factors. Now what Google tries to do with it’s SERPs is return the most relevant information or site. How can they judge relevance from a number? The answer is that the cannot.

So in addition to the PR calculated from a link their algorithms also calculate a relevance value for the link. It is mainly this relevance value that determines the place of the site in the SERP.

How do they calculate this relevance value. Well as far as we can tell they calculate it today from the anchor text used with each link. Maybe in the future they will use other techniques like the theme of the page that the link comes from, but today it appears that the main driver is anchor text.

Now as to your site dropping after it got a PR rating. There may be two possible explanations. The first is that Google always gives a new page extra attention or emphasis. If they have not yet updated the links I think they may even place all their evaluation on the on-page factors like title, heading and content. So if you page is reasonably optimized for these factors it will show up well in the SERPs while Google figures out the linking factors.

Once Google has checked and evaluated all the links them the page becomes part of the normal population and has to compete on that basis. You say you have 24 backlinks. That is not many. How many links do the sites that rank in the top ten have? Also what anchor text are your links using. Does the anchor text contain your prime keywords?

PageRank or PR relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”

Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query.

So get more links. Don’t worry about PR. Just make sure that you are using the right anchor text in links. But SEO101 don’t recommand you to buy links because mordern search engines don’t add any vote from these sites to your PR. SEO101 have a nice article about inbound links. We suggest you to read this article carefully.

If you have any questions regarding PR or WPR, feel free to contact SEO101. We would be happy to help you.

Tags: SEO, SEO101, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine, Search Engine Submission, Search Engine Marketing, Keywords, Keyword Search, Link Popularity, PageRank, Google PR, Google PageRank

Keyword Efficiency

admin — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 13:53:38 +0000

What is Keyword Efficiency?

On SEO101 we mention it several times that the wise choice of the keywords you will optimize for is the first and crucial step to a successful SEO campaign. If you fail on this very first step, the road ahead is very bumpy and most likely you will only waste your (or your client’s) money and time. There are many ways to determine which keywords to optimize for and usually the final list of them is made after a careful analysis of what the online population is searching for, which keywords have your competitors chosen and above all - which are the keywords that you feel describe your site best. All of this is great and certainly this is the way to go but if you want to increase your chances of success, additional research is never too much, especially when its results will save you the shots in the dark. Keyword Efficiency is all about how you choose right keywords and use them efficiently to make your webpage/website at top position in search results for that keyword. Keyword Efficiency is to know that are you stuffing your keywords in excessive amount on your page. Keyword Efficiency is to maintain keyword density in a certain range.

Dreaming High - Shooting the Top-Notch Keywords?

After you have made a long and detailed list of all the lucrative keywords that are searched by tens of thousands a day, do not hurry yet. It is great that you have chosen popular keywords but it would be even greater if you have chosen keywords for which top positioning is achievable with reasonable effort. Now Keyword Efficiency comes in picture. If you have many competitors for the keywords you have chosen, chances are, no matter how hard you try, that you will hardly be able to overtake them and place your site amongst the top ten results. And as every SEO knows, if you can’t be on the first page (or on the second and in the worst case on the third one) of the organic search results, you’d better think again if the potential gain from optimization for those particular words is worth the effort. It is true that sometimes even sites that are after the first 50 results get decent traffic from search engines but it is certain that you can’t count on that. And even if you somehow manage to get to the top, do you have any idea what it will take to keep the good results?

You can feel discouraged that all lucrative keywords are already occupied but it is too early to give up. Low-volume search keywords can be as lucrative as the high-volume ones and their main advantage is that you will have less competition. As a result of this, it is possible with less effort and within budget to achieve much better results than if you targeted the high-volume search ones. In order to do this, you need to make an estimate about how difficult it would be to rank well for a particular keyword.

Get Down to Earth

The best way to estimate how difficult it would be to rank well for a particular keyword is by using the appropriate tools. If you search the Web, you will see several keyword tools. Choose a couple of them, for instance Seochat’s Keyword Difficulty Tool, Cached’s Keyword Difficulty Tool and Seomoz’s Keyword Difficulty Tool and off we go. The idea behind choosing multiple tools is not that you have so much free time that you need to find a way to waste it. If you choose only one tool, you will finish your research faster but having in mind the different results that each tool gives, you’d better double check before you start the optimization itself. The Seomoz’s tool is a kind of complicated and if you want to use it you need to make several registrations but it is worth the trouble (and the patience - while you wait for the results to be calculated).

You may also want to check for several keywords or keyword phrases. You will be surprised to see how different the estimated difficulty for similar keywords is! For instance, if you are optimizing a financial site, which deals mainly with credits and loans, and some of your keywords are finance, money, credit, loan, and mortgage, running a check with the seochat’s Keyword Difficulty Tool produces results like these (the percentages are rounded but you get the idea): finance - 89%, money - 76% credit - 74% loan - 66% mortgage - 65%.

It seems that the keyword finance is very tough and since your site is targeted at credits and loans and not on stock exchange or insurance, which are also branches of finance, there is no need to cry over the fact that it is very difficult to compete for the finance keyword.

The results were similar with the second tool, though it does not give percentages but uses a scale starting from Very Easy to Very Difficult. I did not check all the results with the third tool, because it seems that the seomoz report on keyword difficulty for a particular word needs ages to be compiled but the results were similar, so it becomes clear that it is more feasible to optimize for mortgage and loan, rather than for the broader term finance.

You may want to bookmark some of these tools for future use as well. They will be very useful to monitor possible changes on the keyword difficulty landscape. After you have optimized your site for the keywords you have selected, occasionally check again the difficulty of the keywords you are already optimizing for because the percentages are changing over time and if you discover that the competition for your keywords has increased, make some more efforts to retain the gained positions.

SEO101 recommand you to read Keyword Density, Potential Keywords Research, Keyword Stuffing and Keywords Spamming articles to know more about Keyword Efficiency. Keyword Efficiency is not a stand alone subject but it is more related to all these. Always keep in mind that, Stuffing of keywords is not a solution to get good results, it is known as Keywords Spamming. SEO101 doesnot encourage you to use these black hat methods.

Tags: SEO, SEO101, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine, Search Engine Submission, Search Engine Marketing, Keywords, Keyword Search, Link Popularity, Keyword Population, Keyword Density, Keyword Frequency, Keyword Efficiency, Keyword Stuffing, Keyword Spam, Keyword Spamming, Keyword Optimization, Meta Tag Stuffing

Keywords Spamming

admin — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 23:58:26 +0000

What is Keywords Spam or Keyword Spamming?

Keyword spam is the excessive repetition of keyword on a webpage nomatter where those keywords are used. It is knows as keyword spamming if excessive amount of keywords are used in meta tags or content or elsewhere on a page. Now what we think, SEO101 define keyword spam as a term given to the excessive addition of keywords or keyphrases to a webpage.

This could be accomplished through a variety of means ranging from simply repeating keyphrases in your body text to using CSS to hide text off the site of your page. It is usually done using ‘hidden’ elements that are indexed by search engines but are not visible to users including Title, Meta, and Alt. Black-hatters have found that they can disguise keywords in the contents of the page by making the text the same color as the background and tucking it away at the bottom of the page. However this still takes up space so may be noticed by competitors, particularly if they type CTRL-A to highlight all the text on a page. It is also possible for search engines to detect text which is the same color as the background and this could flag that the page is using spammy techniques. MSN Search claims to automatically penalize these pages.

An extension on the hidden text idea is to hide the keyword spam using style-sheets (CSS). This gives the spammer great scope for stuffing keywords into important elements such as Headings without them being noticed. The following style will format all Heading 1 text as 1pt high white text.

H1 {
font-size : 1pt;
color : white;
}

This can be used to insert keywords in header tags on white background but i can be easily detectable by search engines, so SEO101 don’t appreciate and recommand you to use these methods for keyword spamming.

There are many other ways of hiding content from users such as Layers and IFrames while still having it visible to search engines. Remember that it is possible to detect the most obvious examples of spam although forcing search engines to parse style sheets and other structures slows down indexing so few, if any, search engines currently do this.

The reality of business means that SEO services can be a substantial investment to make. There’s little point in making that investment if the work could cause damage at any time.

Keyword spamming is effectively designing pages for search engines. What eflaunt do is help you design your pages for the visitor of your site, while keeping search engines in mind.

Search engines can easily spot pages that repeat the same terms over and over again and will regularly penalise these sites. In cases where the repetition is more subtle and search engines can’t automatically recognise the keyword spam, there is still the danger that your competitors will report you for spamming.

Reporting Keyword Spam

If you spot a competitor using obviously spammy techniques you can report them. Google and Yahoo! have web pages that let you specify the exact nature of the problem you have found.

Google <http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html>

Yahoo! <http://add.yahoo.com/fast/help/us/ysearch/cgi_reportsearchspam>

Obviously they won’t ban sites where there is no contravention so don’t waste time reporting all your competitors. If you have any questing regarding keyword spamming, you can contact SEO101 for further details.

Tags: SEO, SEO101, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine, Search Engine Submission, Search Engine Marketing, Keywords, Keyword Search, Link Popularity, Keyword Population, Keyword Density, Keyword Stuffing, Keyword Spam, Keyword Spamming, Keyword Optimization, Meta Tag Stuffing

Keyword Stuffing

admin — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 23:35:28 +0000

What is keyword Stuffing?

Keyword stuffing, AKA keyword loading, spamdexing or invisible keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing is an unethical Search Engine Optimization technique use to get a web page to rank well in a search engine.

This technique used by Web designers to overload keywords onto a Web page so that search engines will read the page as being relevant in a Web search. Because search engines scan Web pages for the words that are entered into the search criteria by the user, the more times a keyword appears on the Web page the more relevancy the search engine will assign to the page in the search results (this is only one way that search engines determine relevancy, however.) Search engines often penalize a site if the engine discovers keyword stuffing, as this practice is considered poor netiquette, and some search engines will even ban the offending Web pages from their search results.

Search engines scan and count the words used in the content and meta areas of webpages. The more times a keyword appears on the web page, greater Relevance is assigned to the page for those words or phrases, up to a point. Using a keyword over and over again may trigger spam filters and can result in web sites being Banned or penalised by search engines.

An over optimized page constantly repeating the same phrase may attract traffic, but it will not convince visitors to use its services. Keyword stuffing may work on some search engines for a time, but eventually the search engines will pick up on it and the page will be dropped from the index.

Keyword stuffing techniques

There are several methods of keyword stuffing. However, SEO101 is describing some methods but we strongly suggest you to avoid using these techniques. It can harm ranking of your webpage. SEO101 doesnot take any responsibility for using these methods anywhere on www.

Now one of the more common but easily detected keyword stuffing methods is to place excessively repeated keywords in the Meta Keyword Tag.

Other way is to insert repeating keywords within the input type=”hidden” field meta tag or the keyword tag so that the keywords are not seen by the user but are scanned by the search engine.

Keyword stuffing technique include invisible text, or hidden text or links. Making the font colour the same color as the page’s background colour renders the text invisible to the user. Invisible text can be found easily if the user highlights the text, use the keyboard shortcut ctrl+5 to highlight text on IE. This method is also known as invisible keyword stuffing.

However, search engines generally perceive keyword stuffing as spamming and treat content that includes keyword stuffing accordingly. Excessive use of keyword stuffing could lead to the removal of a site from a search engine’s listings. SEO101 highly recommands you Search Engine Optimization techniques to draw traffic to your website. Keyword stuffing is highly unacceptable on www.

Tags: SEO, SEO101, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine, Search Engine Submission, Search Engine Marketing, Keywords, Keyword Search, Link Popularity, Page Rank, Search Engine Ranking, Search Ranking, Frequency, Keyword Frequency, Keywords Spamming, Keyword Proximity, Keyword Ratio, Keyword Population, Keyword Density, Keywords Research, Potential Keywords Research, Keyword Stuffing, Keyword Optimization, Keyword Loading, Invisible Keywords, Invisible Keyword Stuffing, Meta Tag Stuffing

Keyword Frequency

admin — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 00:14:47 +0000

What is Keyword Frequency?

The first search engine optimisation topic most people come across is meta tag creation. Creating the right meta information is the be all and end all of traffic building as far as many webmasters
are concerned. Although there are many other areas we consider to be equally imporant - link popularity, site navigation issues to name just two, successful meta tag creation is still fundamental to the SEO process.

We have already covered the meta tag basics earlier, now we are talking about Keyword Frequency. Keyword frequency refers to the number of times a keyword or keyword
phrase appears within a web page. Many times it is considered as keyword density, but here on SEO101 we would like to discuss this topic as a individual article, although SEO101 tried to make it as simple as we can but if you didnt undestand any concept or anything, SEO101 advice
you to contact us for further clarification.

Keyword Frequency algorithms will vary from engine to engine. What page text is indexed will also vary. But, fundamentally, if your keyword (or phrase) occurs 5 times in every 100 words viewed by a search engine, your keyword density will be 5%.

Frequency counts will often vary depending on whether you selected exact matching on the first tab of the Page Critic screen. Frequency will also vary depending on whether you enable partial matching. In addition, if you perform a case-sensitive search by including one or more upper case letters in your keyword, then your frequency count may vary.

The theory is that the more times a keyword or keyword phrase appears within a web page, the more relevance a search engine is likely to give the page for a search with those keywords. Now this therory is no longer applied to modern search engines. Search engine like Google, Yahoo, MSN and AltaVista, consider this as a keywords
spamming or keyword stuffing.

You don’t want to go overboard with frequency since many engines will penalize you for “keyword spamming” if they feel you were excessive. In general though, SEO101 thinks that you should use your keyword in the document in as many different areas as you can, and as many times as is recommended for that engine.

Now lets talk about it some more here with SEO101.

Why is the keyword frequency so important?

Search engines like Google, Yahoo and AltaVista display results based on secret algorithms. No outsiders know the equations, but we all know that these are based mainly on keyword frequency and link popularity.

In general, SEO101 recommends that you ensure that the most important keyword or keyword phrase is the most frequently use keywords in a web page.

But be careful not to abuse the system by repeating the same keyword or keyword phrases over and over again.

Many “experts” would recommend a keyword frequency of between 3% and 8% (i.e. the keyword would appear between 3 and 8 times per 100 words in the document). In reality, you won’t be able to optimise every single page of your site so precisely, however this is a general guide used by many web marketing people.

Keyword Frequency Solution #1:

There are many free SEO tools like keyword density analysers or keyword frequency analyser, use these free tools for a quick analysis of your content page and take a closer look at results of keyword density of your page. Hopefully your page has readable
content, but the meta information has been primed according to the content - not the other way round. A quick analysis using the tool below shows the phrases we wanted to promote (keyword density, keyword
frequency, etc.) are around the 8% mark. This seems about right, although a mildly higher one would do no harm at all since the content is obviously related to the subject matter. SEO101 suggests if it is needed that you use more keywords in artice or you figured out your keyword frequency is exceeding the acceptable limit, then we think solution #2 might be a better option for you.

Keyword Frequency Solution #2: Keyword Proximity

Keyword proximity refers to the closeness between two or more keywords. In general, the closer the keywords are, the better.

For example:

How Keyword Density Affects Search Engine Rankings
How Keyword Density Affects Rankings In Search Engine

Using the example above, if someone searched for “search engine rankings” a web page containing the first sentence is more likely to rank higher than the second.

The reason is because the keywords are placed closer together. This is assuming that everything else is equal, of course.

Keyword Density

admin — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 02:57:24 +0000

Keyword Density and your Page Rank

Keywords and phrases strategically placed and crafted into your website can significantly boost your ratings in search engine results.

Keyword density refers to the ratio (percentage) of keywords contained within the total number of indexable words within a web page. In the context of search engine optimization keyword density can be used as a factor in determining whether a web page is relevant to a specified keyword or keyword phrase. Due to the ease of managing keyword density, search engines usually implement other measures of relevancy to prevent unscrupulous webmasters from creating search spam through practices such as keywords stuffing.

The preferred keyword density ratio varies from search engine to search engine. In general, SEO101 recommend using a keyword density ratio in the range of 2-8%. There is no hard and fast rule to deciede this number but from our experiance SEO101 can say this is a general acceptance of keyword density.

SEO101 Note: Using keyword more then this range is taken as keyword spamming and for that you can get yourself banned on search engines. there is a nice written artice on keyword stuffing. Please have a look.

Keyword density is important because search engines use this information to categorize a site’s theme, and to determine which terms the site is relevant to. The perfect keyword density will help achieve higher search engine position. Keyword density needs to be balanced correctly (too low and you will not get the optimum benefit, too high and your page might get flagged for “Keyword spamming“).

They are looking for an exact match to the keywords that they are programmed to look for, not something kinda, sorta, maybe. This means that if your heart’s desire is to be listed under “beaded jewelry”, you must make absolutely sure that this exact phrase appears generously throughout your site copy on every page of your site. Make it your mission to include whatever your top keyword or phrase is everywhere you possibly can; especially in the first paragraph and headline of your site.

Some choice places for keywords are above your site logo, in the subheadings, headlines, first paragraph, last paragraph, etc. Remember, in order for search engines to find you, a good rule of thumb is that the squeaky wheel gets the grease. The more places you can reasonably put your keywords, the easier you will be found. That being said, don’t go nuts and paste them in every nook and cranny. This is called ‘keyword stuffing‘ and search engines don’t look kindly on this practice.

The next place you’ll want to put your keywords is in the meta tags of your site. Meta tags are not scary, and even folks without any HTML experience can definitely learn how to use them. Depending on what HTML editor you are using, be it Dreamweaver, FrontPage, Home Site,Notepad, etc., you’ll find that you can switch between the design and code screens (this applies to WYSIWIG HTML editors only). What you will want to do is find the HTML code and go to the head, or beginning, of your HTML document. There you will find a space for the title, meta keywords and meta description.

Tags: SEO, SEO101, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine, Search Engine Submission, Search Engine Marketing, Keywords, Keyword Search, Link Popularity, Keyword Ratio, Keyword Population, Keyword Density, Potential Keywords Research, Keyword Stuffing, Keyword Frequency, Keywords Research, Keyword Optimization

Potential Keywords Research

admin — Sun, 14 Jan 2007 02:56:55 +0000

Keyword Research for Potential Keywords

Before you code a line, or write a single word down, you should begin doing your keyword research.

The first thing we want you to do is go to goodkeywords.com and download the tool they have there. It will help you to finding out potential keywords for your webpage or website. This software will tell you the number of times a keyword or keyword combination has been searched for over a time period.

While it shows a “number”, it’s not quite accurate. Overture gets about 8 to 10 times less searches than Google per month. It’s a good indicator of how popular certain search terms or keyword hold up.

Now your just starting out, and your chances of getting ranked highly for a generic keyword is very slim. Instead of trying to “optimize keyword“, try to optimize something a little narrower like, “Keyword Research“.

You really shouldn’t write for the engines. Write your content so it’s readable, fresh, and above all navigatable.

If you write about your keywords, and use them in your content you will be just fine.

Remember, sites that are written for HUMANS, with SEO in mind will do better in the long run, than sites that cheat.

Your ultimate goal when you do research for keywords (both high paying keywords and keywords that get a lot of traffic), is to find a happy medium between the amount of traffic you can expect if you rank well and the amount of competition you will have. If you can’t rank well for your chosen keyword, try to rank well for a keyword combination.

Now SEO101 is going to suggest you some very good tools and valuable information about how you findout which keyword/s can be good for your content pages or which you must avoid. Many search engine marketers and ad agencies offer keyword research services. Keyword research and analysis aren’t as simple as using the tools available at Overture and Google.
Web site owners must go beyond these tools and look at the big picture.

Keyword analysis can be performed on three levels:

Keyword research tools
Web analytics software
Site search engines

Data-mining all three levels provides site owners with the full perspective of how target audiences find the information on their Web sites.

Keyword Research Tools

Many of you probably already use the keyword research tools available at Overture, Google, and Wordtracker. By all means, keep using these tools. They provide great data for keyword research.

For long-term keyword analyses, we gather monthly data from Google, Overture, and Wordtracker. Additionally, we review related search results on Yahoo, Business.com, and Teoma. By researching all these resources, instead of just one, we can determine which specific keyword phrases are the most popular on all these Web search engines and look for a common denominator. we can also see subtle differences among the engines. Some searches are more popular on one engine than another.

For many sites, creating a keyword phrase calendar is a good strategy. The construction industry tends to be more active in warmer months than colder ones. The cold and flu season is coming up in the U.S., which has implications for pharmaceutical and health-related Web sites.

By creating a calendar based on keyword research over years, site owners know what pages to create for timely “natural” Search Engine Optimization (SEO) campaigns and what ads to create for Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns.

Web Analytics Software

We always use Web analytics software (WebTrends, HitBox, ClickTracks, Omniture, etc.) to review keyword phrases. For example, if a natural SEO campaign is successful, the Web analytics software will reflect that success in the following areas:

Top referring sites
Top referring URLs
Top search engines
Top search phrases
Top search keywords
Top entry pages

Additionally, Web analytics software can show if site visitors access the most appropriate pages or sections on the site.

Web analytics software can also reveal untapped keyword phrase. On our own site, we found one of the most frequently visited pages is an article containing graphic design tips. Knowing our target audience seeks knowledge about that topic, we can create an article series on the topic that will provide additional entry points to our site for optimization campaigns and provide additional opportunities for link development campaigns.

Site Search Engines

If you have a site search engine, helpful information to review includes:

Number of words entered in the search query
Average number of words entered in the search query
Average number of characters entered in the search query
Search terms that yield results but no clicks
Search terms that yield no results

One item we like to measure is search box length. Sometimes, search boxes aren’t long enough. When visitors enter several keywords in the box, they can’t see all the words they typed. On the flip side, some search boxes are too long. We try to determine, through focus groups and usability tests, the optimum length of the search box based on the average number of keywords and characters entered in search queries.

Need a starting point? Begin with the length of Google’s and Yahoo’s search boxes.

Another overlooked item in site search is those search terms that yield results but no clicks. In many of the search engines, we use meta description and title tag content for the search results. If we find a specific keyword phrase consistently yields the appropriate URLs in the search results, then we know the calls to action in the title tag, meta-tag description, or both might not be effective. We’ll then rewrite that specific content and measure the resulting CTRs.

What we find interesting is if we optimize pages for better site search engine conversions, Web search engine visibility increases, too.

Analyzing Keyword Research Data

By gathering and analyzing keyword data, Web site owners gain valuable insight to user behavior and ways to create a more user-friendly site that converts visitors into buyers.

Say a site owner discovers visitors are searching for a specific keyword phrase on Google, then arriving at a specific page on his site. He then discovers same keyword phrase is a heavily searched term on his site search engine. This data indicate visitors might not be arriving at the most appropriate landing page. Increasing optimization for other site pages may be necessary.

Compare site searches that yield no results with Web search engine data. If the Web search engines indicate a keyword phrase is popular, and the site search engine shows visitors have a genuine interest in a keyword phrase, you can create new information around a topic.

Conclusion

Seo101 make some tips to keyword research are:

Discover new keyword opportunities.
Fix missed keyword opportunities.
Generate a calendar of keyword phrases, some keywords are more popular at different times of the year.
Increase the number of clicks from landing pages to the site.
Increase the relevance of landing pages from natural SEO, PPC advertising campaigns, press releases, or offline marketing efforts.

Remember, keyword research and analysis is an ongoing process and SEO101 recommend you to use these tools and tips to achieve your goal. Your keyword research should be a factor in your meta-tag writing and your page titles and last but not the least your content.

Keyword

admin — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 22:23:36 +0000

Why keyword is very important in SEO?

Keyword is a word or phrase which implies a certain mindset or demand that targeted prospects are likely to search for. A significant or focus word selected by the searcher to locate materials in electronic databases. Keywords are drawn from a person’s natural vocabulary and allow you to type in any word you think defines your topic. Keywords are not the same as subject headings. Subject headings or descriptors are
drawn from a prescribed list of controlled vocabulary that is made by someone else. To do a subject search you must first look in the list of headings to determine which existing subjects are used for your topic and then search by those precise subjects.

SEO101 think a keyword as a word or words that relate to a particular topic. Keywords or phrases are used to construct a search statement to find information. A word or phrase used to focus an online search and to target advertising. Advertisers can purchase keywords on search engines to guarantee that their website information is displayed
prominently and/or display an associated creative.

Long tail and brand related keywords are typically worth more than shorter and vague keywords because they typically occur later in the buying cycle and are associated with a greater level of implied intent.

There can be many explaination about defination of keyword.

Now someone may ask what is keyword optimization?

SEO101 thinks that keyword optimization is the process of fine-tuning a web page to raise the prominence of specific keywords. For AdSense publishers, keyword optimization ensures that the AdSense crawlers select the most relevant advertisements for a page. The more relevant
the advertisements, the higher the click-through rates on the ads. Keyword optimization can also be used to target page content at higher-paying advertisements.

Keyword optimization is not a new concept, of course, it existed long before the AdSense program was developed. In fact, keyword optimization is one of the primary techniques for search engine optimization (SEO),
the science (although some call it a black art) of improving a page’s search engine
rankings. The techniques described in this article apply equally well to either use of keyword optimization.

Your keyword list will likely consist of single word or short phrases that you anticipate people will use to find your product or service on Live Search. Often, you will include many of the most general keyword and phrases. While these generate the
most impressions, these will often result in the fewest number of clicks on your ad. If you, instead, create more descriptive phrases for your products or services so your ads will appear to those who are more likely to be interested, you are optimizing your keywords.

When a search engine user types a keyword or phrase into the search field, the search engine tries to find an internet page that best matches the request for that given keyword. To achieve this it looks for the requested keywords to be repeated several times within a page. For example if someone was looking for information about Scotland-based fly-fishing holidays for Atlantic salmon, they
would probably enter �Fly-fishing
scotland atlantic salmon� as their keywords.

Google and the other search engines have to scour millions of pages on the web to find the handful of pages that best match this specific request.

The way they narrow down their options is to try and find a page which has all or most of these keywords in the pages title, metatags and body
text. After they have found as many pages as they can with this combination, they rank them on the results page based on the accuracy of the match (and some other criteria, such as how many third party sites link to the page. This is a subject for another article).

It follows then that you must try and think through what your customers will be typing into the search engines to find your site. Brainstorm all the obvious words and phrases. Pick the ones that are most relevant and then write an individual, highly targeted article for every keyword phrase.

SEO101 Note: Keep in mind that this combination of keywords will get your page a good ranking.

A few tips to maximize the potential of this process:

Avoid headings that don�t include keywords e.g. �Adventures North of the Border; The One that Got Away�. Traditional journalists often make this mistake when they write for the web because they have been trained to look for clever headlines with puns and wordplays.
Ensure that the article contains useful, accurate and relevant information for your visitor. Many companies advertising themselves as SEO experts will create keyword-saturated pages which have little relevant information for the visitor. These pages may get good rankings and traffic, but the customer experience will be so poor you will irritate and frustrate the reader.
Don�t repeat the keywords too often within a page because the search engines measure �Keyword Density�. This assesses whether the keywords appear too many times given the overall number of words on the page. This measurement was introduced to stop the so called SEO experts trying to trick the search engines with their keyword
saturated pages.
If you have a good webstats package it will tell you what keywords people are typing into the search engines to find your site. Look at these logs to help you decide what articles you should be writing.
Continually add new content. Google and the other search engines will visit your site far more frequently if there is new content to index.
It is important to note that successful websites get more traffic through their many individual pages than through their Home Page. Therefore treat every page as a landing page and ensure that someone visiting your site for the first time will have a good experience. Most important is enabling them to quickly and easily navigate to other areas of the site from any page.
Remember that over 80% of searches have three or more keywords

Having lots of keyword-driven content on your site is probably the single most valuable digital marketing activity you can undertake. Having a lot of very focused articles will build sustainable traffic, whilst turning your site into a valuable resource to which visitors will want to keep returning.

SEO101 have a very nice article on Potential Keywords Research as well as on Keyword Density. SEO101 recommand you to read these thopics also followed by Keyword Stuffing. These three topics deals which how you choose wisely you keywords and how efficiently use it in content without getting ban on search engines.

Tags: SEO, SEO101, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine, Search Engine Submission, Search Engine Marketing, Keywords, Keyword Search, Link Popularity, Keyword Density, Potential Keywords Research, Keyword Stuffing, Keyword Frequency, Keywords Research, Keyword Optimization

Meta Tag - Keywords

admin — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 02:51:06 +0000

Keywords Meta Tag are very key factor in SEO.

The importance of meta keyword tags fluctuates from month to month among different search engines. There is a debate in the Search Engine Optimization community as to whether or not they help at all on certain search engines. In fact, in the summer of 2004 it appeared as if they were losing importance altogether.

A meta keyword tag lists all the keywords for which you would like search engines to rank your site. Although not all search engines support this tag, you should use it for the ones that do.

SEO101 Note: Meta tags are hidden in a document’s source, invisible to the reader. Some search engines, however, are able to incorporate the content of meta tags into their algorithms. No engines penalize sites that use meta tags properly, so it’s recommended that you always include them.

This is what the meta keyword tag is all about! You don’t have to come up with any sentences, just list your keywords in order of importance. Include all your most important keywords. It’s recommended that you repeat the same keyword 3-7 times, but not in a row. Donot try to look like spam to a search engine. SEO101 recommands you to avoid repeating keywords more than 3-7 times, you can get penalized for that. Up to 3 repetitions are recommended but just don’t place them one after the other.

However, since you’ll NEVER be penalized on any search engines for using a small number of relevant targeted keywords in moderation, they can only help you. Avoid very general terms like “welcome”, “homepage” and also avoid “keyword stuffing” your meta keyword tags with too many keywords. Search
engines consider as spamming and your website can get ban on search engines. Just use relevant tags that apply directly to the content of that particular page, and limit yourself to eight or so phrases per page.

A proper keyword tag looks like this:

put your keywords in between ” ”

lets take example of SEO101 site

Here is a guidelines/tips for you from SEO101 to choose right meta keywords

Use it to list keywords
Limit it to 1024 characters
List keywords in order of importance
Don’t repeat the same keyword more than 7 times

Tags: SEO, SEO101, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine, Search Engine Submission, Search Engine Marketing, Keywords, Keyword Search, Link Popularity, Meta Tags, Meta Keyword, Meta Keyword Tag, Meta Description Tag, Meta Search Keywords

Meta Tag - Description

admin — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 02:50:38 +0000

What is Description Meta Tag?

The description tag is the paragraph that people will see when your page comes up in the search results, so spelling and grammar are important there too.

Your description tag should be captivating and designed to attract business. It sound natural when read aloud, and ideally will compel the reader to “act right now” and follow your link.

When a search engine displays the search results of a search keyword, typically you will see a clickable word or title for a site. You’ll also see a short sentence or paragraph describing the site. This short description may or may not be very meaningful, depending on the site and the search
engine. Some search engines try to create the description from content on the page itself. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn’t. However, the search engines that look at and use your description meta tag will display the site description YOU specify.

Without a description tag, search engines will frequently display whatever text on your page surrounds the query word, so that can leave you with nonsense in the SERP’s.

A meta description tag is a description of the page, and not of the entire website. Only on the index page is an “all encompassing” description tag appropriate. Just like your title, every page in your site needs a unique description tag in order for the search engines to be fully appreciative of what you have to offer.

According to study most of the morden earch engines vary in their preferred size for meta description tag. Try to use the smaller number, 150 characters, for your site. Never make your meta tag more than 250 characters long because some results pages will cut it off.

A proper description tag looks like this:

now you have to put a description of the page between ” ”

lets take an example of SEO101 site.

Now SEO101 warn you to avoid repeating keywords more than 3-7 times in your meta description. Some search engines consider it to be spam.

SEO101 make a guideline/tips to choose a right meta description

Use the meta description tag on all pages
Limit it to 150 characters
Include keywords
Don’t repeat keywords more than 7 times

If you have any query about meta description tag, please feel free to contact SEO101.

Tags: SEO, SEO101, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine, Search Engine Submission, Search Engine Marketing, Keywords, Keyword Search, Link Popularity, Header, Header Tags, Keyword Frequency, Meta Tags, Meta Description, Meta Keyword Tag, Meta Description Tag, Description

Meta Tags

admin — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 03:08:00 +0000

What are meta tags?

The Meta tag in html is not a required tag when you’re creating your web pages, many pages don’t use the tag at all. To put it briefly, the meta tag is used by search engines to allow them to more accurately list your site in their indexes. Sometimes.

If you simply produce your home page and register the URL with a search engine, or a number of search engines, their spider programmes will (eventually) toddle along to your site to index it. Now, each of the search engines does this slightly differently. Altavista for example will grab everything in your document and index it, but will only show the first 250 characters in its meta description. Consequently, if your site included say, ‘Thanks to:….’ right at the beginning, this is what Altavista would show in its description, and it wouldn’t give the viewer any idea of what your site actually covered. Of course, not all search engines work this way. We’d suggest you ferret around a little bit to see exactly how the popular engines work, and certainly the major two or three such as Google, Altavista, Lycos, Yahoo, Infoseek and Excite. It therefore makes sense to ensure that your opening paragraph is carefully written to ensure it accurately reflects what your site covers.

However, you may be able to exert a certain amount of control over how your site is indexed by the use of the meta tag. Here SEO101 should however point out that not all search engines use this tags - Altavista does, but Excite doesn’t, for example. Its not a total cure-all therefore, but you won’t miss out by putting the tag in, and it may well work well in some cases.

What does a meta tag look like?

You should insert the meta tags element at the top of your document, just after the element. It follows the usual form of tags, ie <blockquote><META name=”something” content=”something else”></blockquote> but note that you don’t have to have a </META> at the end of the tag, the way that you do with something like <BOLD> bold </BOLD>. However, make sure that each tag does not include any line breaks, since some search engines get a little bit tetchy about this. What can I include in a meta tag? There are basically four major <a href="http://www.rlmeena.com/meta-tags.html" title="Meta tags" target="_blank">meta tags</a> that you can use: <ol> <li><META name=”resource-type” content=”document”> The only resource type that is currently in use is “document” This is the only tag that you need to put in for indexing purposes, but use of the others is a good idea.</li> <li><META name=”description” content=”a description of your page”> Depending on the search engine, this will be displayed along with the <a href="http://www.rlmeena.com/title-tag.html" title="title" target="_blank">title</a> of your page in an index. “content” could be a word, sentence or even paragraph to describe your page. Keep this reasonably short, concise and to the point. However, don’t be so mean with your <a href="http://www.rlmeena.com/meta-tag-description.html" title="description" target="_blank">description</a> that its not an appropriate reflection of the contents!</li> <li><META name=”keywords” content=”a, list, of, keywords”> Choose whatever <a href="http://www.rlmeena.com/keyword.html" title="keywords" target="_blank">keywords</a> you think are appropriate, seperated by commas. Remember to include synonyms, americanisms and so on. So, if you had a page on cars, you might want to include keywords such as car, cars, vehicles, automobiles and so on.</li> <li><META name=”distribution” content=”one of several”> Content should contain either global, <a href="http://www.rlmeena.com/local-search.html" title="local" target="_blank">local</a> or iu (for Internal Use). We suggest you to read this article about <a href="http://www.rlmeena.com/local-search.html" title="Local Search" target="_blank">Local Search</a> and how it works. You will get a pretty good idea of what does local or global search does.</li> </ol> Are there optional tags? Yes, theres a whole bunch of ‘em. We’ve put in a couple of examples below: <ol> <li><META name=”copyright” content=”copyright statement”> Pretty obvious what this one’s for. It contains information about the copyright owner and a copyright statement.</li> <li><META HTTP-EQUIV=”varname” content=”data”> This binds the varname to an HTTP header field. An http server might use this to process a document. This one’s a tad more tricky. If you included the following example:<META HTTP-EQUIV=”keywords” content=”car,cars”>then, as part of a GET command the server would include the word car and cars in the HTTP response header.</li> <li><META HTTP-EQUIV=”refresh” content=”0; url=homepage.htm”> This can be used in the HEAD section of the index.html file to redirect it to homepage.htm. The figure after content is the time in seconds that the browser waits before moving on.</li> </ol> There are a few others that you can include, such as “revisit-after” and “rating” if you want to be really comprehensive. Other useful points <ul> <li>The description tag should not simply restate the <a href="http://www.rlmeena.com/title-tag.html" title="title of the page" target="_blank">title of the page</a>, it should describe the page and <a href="http://www.rlmeena.com/content-content-content.html" title="content" target="_blank">content</a>.</li> <li>The <a href="http://www.rlmeena.com/meta-tags.html" title="Meta tags" target="_blank">meta tag</a> can also be used in the creation of dynamic documents.</li> </ul> Meta Tags FAQ Can I put my competitors name(s) in my meta tags? Sounds like a good idea when you first think of it doesn’t it? Well, if you put your competitors names in your <a href="http://www.rlmeena.com/meta-tags.html" title="Meta tags" target="_blank">meta tags</a>, and someone searches for them, they may find you instead and buy a product from you, rather than them. Unfortunately, life isn’t that simple. In many countries like UK, where copyright laws are more strict, there are laws against passing yourself off as another company - you wouldn’t get very far if you tried to open a shop called Harrods, for example. You’ll find that putting in <a href="http://www.rlmeena.com/meta-tags.html" title="Meta tags" target="_blank">meta tags</a> is probably going to be regarded in exactly the same way by the British courts. (Please bear in mind here that we’re not group of lawyers, and not giving legal advice; this is just our opinion. There might be consequences.) <a href="http://www.rlmeena.com" title="SEO101" target="_blank">SEO101</a> suspect that you’ll find the same thing in other countries around the world, and you’ll end up in a whole bunch of trouble if you try and do it. Of course, there is nothing to stop you stressing the products themselves that you sell, in common with that of your competitors, in your <a href="http://www.rlmeena.com/meta-tags.html" title="meta tags" target="_blank">meta tags</a> and you may find that this works rather better than putting in their names anyway! Should I use commas or not? Some people say we do, some people don’t. But <a href="http://www.rlmeena.com" title="SEO101" target="_blank">SEO101</a> suggests you to use it if it is necessary. You wouldn�t find any contradictions about using commas in <a href="http://www.rlmeena.com/meta-tag-keywords.html" title="meta keyword tag" target="_blank">meta keyword tag</a> but if you think your <a href="http://www.rlmeena.com/meta-tag-description.html" title="meta description" target="_blank">meta description</a> will be more meaningful with use of commas or full stops, we recommend you to use them as <a href="http://www.rlmeena.com" title="SEO101" target="_blank">SEO101</a> never find any bad results or wrong review for using commas. Should I put meta tags on every page, or just meta tags on the home or index page? Put them on every page that you create and publish. Search engines will find all your pages if you have created good <a href="http://www.rlmeena.com/internal-page-linking.html" title="internal page linking" target="_blank">internal page linking</a> or you have a sitemap and if you want to stand a good chance of them ranking your pages highly, you’ll want to put the <a href="http://www.rlmeena.com/meta-tag-description.html" title="meta description" target="_blank">meta tag</a> element on each of them. You don’t need to use same <a href="http://www.rlmeena.com/keyword.html" title="keywords" target="_blank">keywords</a> and <a href="http://www.rlmeena.com/meta-tag-description.html" title="meta description" target="_blank">meta description</a> on all pages, they can differ from page to page according to your article content. Can I write and ask you questions about meta tags? Sure! If <a href="http://www.rlmeena.com" title="SEO101" target="_blank">SEO101</a> can answer them for you we’d be happy to make your doubts clear. Tags: <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/SEO" rel="tag" target="_blank">SEO</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/SEO101" rel="tag" target="_blank">SEO101</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Search+Engine+Optimization" rel="tag" target="_blank">Search Engine Optimization</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Search+Engine" rel="tag" target="_blank">Search Engine</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Search+Engine+Submission" rel="tag" target="_blank">Search Engine Submission</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Search+Engine+Marketing" rel="tag" target="_blank">Search Engine Marketing</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Keywords" rel="tag" target="_blank">Keywords</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Keyword+Search" rel="tag" target="_blank">Keyword Search</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Link+Popularity" rel="tag" target="_blank">Link Popularity</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Header" rel="tag" target="_blank">Header</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Header+Tags" rel="tag" target="_blank">Header Tags</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/keyword+frequency" rel="tag" target="_blank">Keyword Frequency</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Meta+Tags" rel="tag" target="_blank">Meta Tags</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Meta+keyword+Tag" rel="tag" target="_blank">Meta Keyword Tag</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Meta+Description+Tag" rel="tag" target="_blank">Meta Description Tag</a> </article> <article> <h1>Alt Tags</h1> admin — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 02:43:27 +0000 Why is alt tags are so important? Tags are <body>, <a>, etc. They’re also known as “HTML elements” within the DOM. Attributes are things like title=, alt=, etc. Properties are parts of CSS, for instance background-color in <body style=”background-color: red; font-weight: bold;”>. Those are the 3 things people get mixed up most often. The <a href="http://www.rlmeena.com/alt-tags.html" title="Alt Tags" target="_blank">alt attribute</a> is commonly, but incorrectly, referred to as an image’s “alt tag”. <a href="http://www.rlmeena.com" title="SEO101" target="_blank">SEO101</a> strongly contradict this statement. What we have figured out that it is not intended to provide “pop up” text or tooltips when a user’s mouse hovers over the image, though alt text has historically been presented in this way in some web browsers; HTML’s <a href="http://www.rlmeena.com/title-tag.html" title="Title Tag" target="_blank">title attribute</a> is intended for supplementary information that can be used in this way. (To use alt correctly and suppress the tooltip that some web browsers generate, a web author can use an empty title attribute.) alt is a required attribute. <a href="http://www.rlmeena.com/title-tag.html" title="Page Title" target="_blank">Title</a> isn’t required, but <a href="http://www.rlmeena.com" title="SEO101" target="_blank">SEO101</a> recommend including title. Title should be just a single word or phrase, whereas alt should be a sentence or two, describing what a missing image should result in, or a text-only browser or browser with images turned off should see. For some unimportant images you could put in alt=”", or navigation images, something like alt=”[Downloads]”. In the case of navigation images, you could make the title title=”click here to download”, since even though there is no rule on this in the specification, browsers generally honor title over alt when showing a tooltip/titletip. That small yellow box that comes up when your mouse cursor is placed over an image is called the <a href="http://www.rlmeena.com/alt-tags.html" title="Alt Tags" target="_blank">ALT tag</a>. very relevant image should have an alt tag with your <a href="http://www.rlmeena.com/keyword.html" title="Keywords" target="_blank">keywords</a> or <a href="http://www.rlmeena.com/keyword.html" title="Phrases" target="_blank">phrases</a> entioned in the tag. For example. <blockquote>The ALT description might be “Company Name Logo” instead of “logo.jpg”</blockquote> A proper ALT tag goes after the file name, and before the Align indicator like this: <blockquote></blockquote> As of early 2006, most experts claim that the ALT tag is no longer being considered for <a href="http://www.rlmeena.com/google-page-rank-or-pr.html" title="Page Rank" target="_blank">ranking</a> criteria by some search engines. We believe that since the ALT tags still do get indexed and show up when searched for, there’s no reason not to have them, and they still do help. Undeniably, they cannot HURT you, and they will still help you with some engines. <a href="http://www.rlmeena.com" title="SEO101" target="_blank">SEO101</a>’s recommendation is to continue to use them, but be sure to avoid “<a href="http://www.rlmeena.com/keyword-density.html" title="Keyword Density" target="_blank">keyword stuffing</a>“. According to google and most of morden search engine, more then enough keyword is considered as spam. Here at <a href="http://www.rlmeena.com" title="SEO101" target="_blank">SEO101</a> we strongly suggest you to put 8-10 most relevent keywords. Besides, who knows when the pendulum will swing back the other way? Tags: <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/SEO" rel="tag" target="_blank">SEO</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/SEO101" rel="tag" target="_blank">SEO101</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Search+Engine+Optimization" rel="tag" target="_blank">Search Engine Optimization</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Search+Engine" rel="tag" target="_blank">Search Engine</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Search+Engine+Submission" rel="tag" target="_blank">Search Engine Submission</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Search+Engine+Marketing" rel="tag" target="_blank">Search Engine Marketing</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Keywords" rel="tag" target="_blank">Keywords</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Keyword+Search" rel="tag" target="_blank">Keyword Search</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Link+Popularity" rel="tag" target="_blank">Link Popularity</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Alt" rel="tag" target="_blank">Alt</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Alt+tag" rel="tag" target="_blank">Alt Tag</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Alt+Attribute" rel="tag" target="_blank">Alt Attribute</a> </article> <article> <h1>Header tags</h1> admin — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 02:40:26 +0000 Header tags and SEO <a href="http://www.rlmeena.com/header-tags.html" target="_blank" title="Header Tags">Header tags</a> are part of your page copy, as they are visible text for your visitors. While some might consider the alt attributes to be part of your page copy, others won’t. They are taken into account by some search engines, but you need to remember that the primary reason for using them is for people with text only browsers, with images turned off, or with accessible browsers that are designed for the visually impaired. <a href="http://www.rlmeena.com" title="SEO101" target="_blank">SEO101</a> is trying to make it simpler to understand <a href="http://www.rlmeena.com/seo-an-overview.html" target="_blank" title="SEO">SEO</a> (<a href="http://www.rlmeena.com/seo-an-overview.html" target="_blank" title="Search Engine Optimization">Search Engine Optimization</a>) techniques. HTML header tags (<H1>, <H2>, <H3>, etc.) are more than a quick way to format text. Use them to define your page’s organizational structure and simplify page navigation. Well-written header text informs visitors and helps them navigate through your page - maybe keeping them at your site longer. Effective header tags will even increase your site <a href="http://www.rlmeena.com/google-page-rank-or-pr.html" target="_blank" title="Ranking">ranking</a> on most of the search engines. Don’t confuse header tags with the HEAD section of your Web page. Header tags belong in the BODY section of your document. Use the HEAD section for your <a href="http://" target="_blank">TITLE</a> and <a href="http://www.rlmeena.com/meta-tag-description.html" title="Meta Tags" target="_blank">META</a> tags. Think of header tags like the main section headers in a term paper outline. The major points go in larger text while subheadings appear underneath in smaller text. Here’s a sample of header text size: <h1>H1</h1> <h2>H2</h2> <h3>H3</h3> <h4>H4</h4> <h5>H5</h5> The most important header tag is the <H1> tag: its content should approximate the <a href="http://www.rlmeena.com/content-content-content.html" title="Content" target="_blank">content</a> in your document TITLE. Use the subheadings under the <H1> tag to indicate different document sections. Note that the section headers incorporate <a href="http://www.rlmeena.com/keyword.html" title="keywords and keyword phrases" target="_blank">keywords and keyword phrases</a> you would probably want to use in your META tag: Thai, Chinese, Thai cooking, Chinese cooking, Thai recipes, etc. That’s a good way to increase <a href="http://www.rlmeena.com/?p=71" title="SEO101 - Keyword Frequency">keyword frequency</a> on your page without <a href="http://www.rlmeena.com/spam.html" title="Keyword Spam" target="_blank">spamming</a>. This page structure divides the page into sections so visitors can scan it easily. If the page is long, consider using anchor tags for internal page navigation. Then a visitor interested in Thai recipes could jump there immediately. Easy navigation helps keep visitors on your site longer. They can quickly find what they need and avoid the frustration of getting “lost” on the site. Grab Visitors’ Attention <a href="http://www.rlmeena.com" title="SEO101" target="_blank">SEO101</a> tried to understand why people don’t read the same way online as they do in print. They’re more apt to scan a document quickly and move on if it doesn’t catch their interest. Web site visitors use document <a href="http://www.rlmeena.com/header-tags.html" title="Header" target="_blank">headings</a> and subheadings to scan the page for interesting content. Long pages full of unbroken text look pretty boring online, so use header tags to pique visitors’ interest in your content sections. Header content describes what’s on your page, so make sure it’s descriptive and compelling. “Become A Volunteer” is a pretty dry section header for a community service organization’s Web site. “How You Can Help Abused Children” describes the content in more personal terms - and tells visitors what their reward will be. Search Engine Spiders Use Them But remember that you can also use header tags to appeal to search engines. Some search engines analyze text inside header tags and use it to rank Web pages. They assume that anything important enough to put in larger text is also relevant to the page’s content. The <H1> tag is by far the most important: it describes the purpose of the whole site. Search engine spiders will use it to score your page’s relevancy. Make it a more succinct version of your page’s <a href="http://www.rlmeena.com/?p=16" title="SEO101 - Title Tag">title tag</a> and include important keywords. The sub headers decline in importance relative to their size, but they’re still useful: be sure you include keywords there too. Never use header tags as a substitute for the FONT tag. Use FONT tags or Cascading Style Sheets to emphasize words on your site. A search engine spider that finds this code: <blockquote><H1>Enroll Now!</H1></blockquote> would assume that your page is about “Enroll Now” and not about a cooking class or volunteer training session. HTML codes and keywords Although your header text is the logical place to include <a href="http://www.rlmeena.com/keyword.html" title="Keywords" target="_blank">keywords</a>, don’t neglect your <a href="http://www.rlmeena.com/content-content-content.html" title="Page Content" target="_blank">page content</a>. Even search engines that don’t place more weight on keywords in header text use keyword frequency as part of the page’s overall score. Sprinkle keywords and their synonyms liberally throughout your text and inside many HTML codes. But be reasonable too. You don’t want your content to sound stilted or repetitive. Too much repetition may get your page penalized both by visitors and search engines! So…make sure your alt tags are clear, consise and accurately describe the image they are attached to and you may experience higher search engine <a href="http://www.rlmeena.com/google-page-rank-or-pr.html" title="Rank" target="_blank">rankings</a>. If you have any query about this artices, please contact <a href="http://www.rlmeena.com" title="SEO101" target="_blank">SEO101</a>. Tags: <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/SEO" rel="tag" target="_blank">SEO</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/SEO101" rel="tag" target="_blank">SEO101</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Search+Engine+Optimization" rel="tag" target="_blank">Search Engine Optimization</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Search+Engine" rel="tag" target="_blank">Search Engine</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Search+Engine+Submission" rel="tag" target="_blank">Search Engine Submission</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Search+Engine+Marketing" rel="tag" target="_blank">Search Engine Marketing</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Keywords" rel="tag" target="_blank">Keywords</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Keyword+Search" rel="tag" target="_blank">Keyword Search</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Link+Popularity" rel="tag" target="_blank">Link Popularity</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Header" rel="tag" target="_blank">Header</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Header+Tags" rel="tag" target="_blank">Header Tags</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/keyword+frequency" rel="tag" target="_blank">Keyword Frequency</a> </article> <article> <h1>Title Tag</h1> admin — Sun, 07 Jan 2007 02:42:31 +0000 Title Tag is Key Feature in SEO In the early days of <a href="http://www.rlmeena.com/seo-an-overview.html" title="Search Engine Optimization" target="_blank">Search Engine Optimization</a> (<a href="http://www.rlmeena.com/seo-an-overview.html" title="SEO" target="_blank">SEO</a>), marketers focused on <a href="http://www.rlmeena.com/meta-tag-description.html" title="Meta Tags" target="_blank">meta-tags</a> as the primary way to attract search engine traffic. Meta-tags are HTML tags that help describe the document they are located within. Today we know that search engines not only look at meta-tags, but a <a href="http://www.rlmeena.com/content-content-content.html" title="Content" target="_blank">sites content</a>, <a href="http://www.rlmeena.com/internal-page-linking.html" title="Internal Page linking" target="_blank">internal page linking</a> and <a href="http://www.rlmeena.com/link-popularity.html" title="Link Popularity" target="_blank">link popularity</a>. Meta-tags are still an important tool for successful <a href="http://www.rlmeena.com/sem.html" title="Search Engine Marketing" target="_blank">search engine marketing</a>. Search engines focus on three primary tags to help them determine the relevance of a website for a particular <a href="http://www.rlmeena.com/keyword.html" title="Search Keywords" target="_blank">search phrase</a>. According to most of the marketiers the <a href="http://www.rlmeena.com/title-tag.html" title="Title Tag" target="_blank">Title Tag</a> is one of the most important tags for a search engine and <a href="http://www.rlmeena.com" title="SEO101" target="_blank">SEO101</a> is totally agree with them. The Title Tag should describe exactly what the document contains. It should contain keywords, but not repeats, of terms you hope to be found for. It should also be as readable as possible. You must consider that the Title Tag will be the first thing someone sees if you appear in a search result. <a href="http://www.rlmeena.com" title="SEO101" target="_blank">SEO101</a> seen it too often, companies or individuals focus on making sure their company name or proper name appears in every Title Tag on their website. Imagine walking into an immense library that contained millions of books all with the same title. You would go crazy and never find what you were looking for. The Title Tag should be no longer than 80 characters and should contain words and phrases that accurately describe the content of a page. Try to make the Title Tags located throughout your site unique and relevant. Every word in the Title should be contained somewhere in the page they are used for. Research has also shown that a call to action will usually produce more clicks than a basic description. take example of this page: <TITLE>Title Tag, SEO, Search Engine Optimization, SEO101

Remember to look at the log files of your website, with a tool like WebTrends, and determine the top keywords that people are finding your site with today. You can then fine tune your Title Tags throughout your website to reflect popular terms that you are highly relevant for. This will only show you the keywords you are performing well for today. There are likely many terms that won’t show up in your log files. You’ll want to research those using tools from Overture or WordTracker.

Make sure to use Good Keywords in title

SEO101 believe that most important part of creating a new page is choosing a good title. The title is difficult to change later as it is the way the other pages make references to your new page.

SEO101 made some guidelines/tips for you to choose a page title:

Choose names that are unlikely to be needed for another purpose. For instance, you could make a page for your favorite hints.
Capitalize your page titles. This is a style choice of course, but the choice has been made and the coweb will read more easily with a consistant style.
Do not concatinate all your words together. Those titltes are hard to read. They could be auto expanded, but they aren’t here. Again this is a style and implementation choice.
Make undefined links whenever you think of a topic that could use some coverage in the coweb even if you aren’t planning to define the page. This way when the page or one like it is defined your writing is structured around page titles already.

if you didnt understood anything under this article, SEO101 would be happy to guide you. contact SEO101.

Tags: SEO, SEO101, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine, Search Engine Submission, Search Engine Marketing, Keywords, Keyword Search, Link Popularity, Title Tag, Page Title, Title

Bold Text

admin — Sat, 06 Jan 2007 02:39:11 +0000

HTML tags for SEO emphasis

Some keywords should be bolded to point the search engines in the right direction.

When you are writing your web pages you will probably want to stress a certain word or two. Unlike header tags, using the or option in your html code to make a word stand out doesn’t carry as much weight with the search engines. Don’t discount it though because it does matter.

Any time you stress a word and make it stand out you are also stressing that word to the search engines.

Using Bold Text should be done whenever it fits into the flow of your content and will match the look and feel of your website.

SEO101 foundout that bold keywords in page content are considered more importantly then normal keywords, although keywords in normal size does weight but bold keywords weight more.

Bold text carries more weight than regular text. The same applies to italicized text, to a certain extent. We are currently testing these elements, and will update this page when the results are in. now bold text is given more weight than ordinary text but not as much as Header tags. As much as is reasonable, enclose the search term in bold tags when it appears on the page.

Now SEO101 want to make you clear that based purely upon our observation, bolding something isn’t magicially going to make a page start ranking if it wasn’t already ranking. There may be some minor effect, but certainly not enough to discount everything else that needs to be done to get a page to rank well.

At the end of the day if you write and format your text so that it looks good for real human visitors and stresses the things you want to stress to these real humans, it should naturally also help your ranking. In other words, think like a real people first.

Many WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) programs do this for you on the fly, but make sure you end up with clean website code.

Tags: SEO, SEO101, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine, Search Engine Submission, Search Engine Marketing, Keywords, Keyword Search, Link Popularity, HTML, Bold Text, Bold Tags, Bolder Tags

SERP

admin — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 07:02:18 +0000

What is SERPs?

The meaning of SERPs in SEO terminology is an abbreviation for “Search Engine Results Panel” or some times “Search Engine Results Page” which is in essence the organic search results we
all evaluate when we do a keyword search in any search engine. The following picture illustrates the Google SERPs which form the left hand organic search results:

SEO101 tried to figureout how does it affect SEO or page rank. A search engine results page, or SERP, is the listing of web pages returned by a search engine in response to a keyword query. The results normally include a list of web pages with titles, a link to the page, and a short description showing where the keywords have matched content within the page. A SERP may refer to a single page of links returned, or to the set of all links returned for a search query.

SERPs of major search engines like Google and Yahoo! may include different types of listings: contextual, algorithmic or organic search listings, as well as sponsored listings, images, maps, definitions, or suggested search refinements. The major search engines also offer different types of search, such as image search, news search, and blog search. The SERPs for these specialized searches offer specific types of results.

For more expert SEO advice on Google SERPs placement contact SEO101 for an informal discussion.

Tags: SEO, SEO101, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine, Search Engine Submission, Search Engine Marketing, Keywords, Keyword Search, Link Popularity, SERP, Search Engine Results Page, Search Engine Results Panel, Organic Search, Organic Search Results, Contextual Search, Algorithmic Search, Organic Search

Organic Search

admin — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 07:22:38 +0000

What is Organic Search?

An organic search is a process by which World Wide Web users find web sites having unpaid search engine listings, as opposed to using the pay per click advertisement listings displayed among the search results.

The field of search engine optimization, (SEO), is concerned with maximizing the visibility of a web site by making its listings appear more frequently and more prominently in organic search results. Some businesses base their SEO strategies on the successful insertion of their web site listing(s) into organic search results for various popular keywords.

They got the name organic listings because they are usually ideally unaltered by humans and not paid for.

Why Organic Listings Are “Pure”?

If people thought their searches returned nothing but a bunch of advertisements, they would stop searching. For that reason these organic listings are pure, or at least the search engines want us to believe they are pure.

Google has been praised heavily for returning what many have deemed the most relevant search results while keeping their revenue stream clearly isolated from the organic listing results. As time passes though pressures have degraded Google’s search relevancy.

Organic search engine optimization (SEO), also referred to as natural search engine optimization, is the process of enhancing your web site with the goal of increasing your visibility in the top search engines when specific keywords or phrases are searched for.

The overall SEO process involves a variety of aspects including keyword analysis and selection, web site optimization for optimal search engine positioning, search engine crawler inclusion, creating and submitting directory listings, link popularity enhancement and ongoing campaign reporting and maintenance. The end result is that people will be able to easily find your web site when searching for products and services related to your business.

Tags: SEO, SEO101, Search Engine Optimization, SEO Overview, Search Engine, Search Engine Submission, SEM, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Friendly, Keywords, Keyword Search, Link Popularity, Organic Search, Pay Per Click, Organic Search Engine Optimization

Vertical Search

admin — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 06:22:24 +0000

What is vertical search?

Vertical Search, part of a larger subgrouping known as �specialized� search, is a relatively new tier in the Internet search industry consisting of search engines that focus on specific businesses. While Google, Yahoo!, and the like will continue to dominate the online consumer search market, research analysts say myriad specialized search engines are emerging to address the particular information needs of niche audiences and professions.

Basically, vertical search is an oddly chosen phrase for specialized search tools. For example, instead of going to Google to look for a job, you would choose a specialized vertical search tool such as Indeed.com, LinkedIn.com, or SimplyHired.com. Your search results would come back more focused; instead of searching for that needle in a haystack, you would be looking for a much larger target.

Vertical Search tools have a few things going for them. Users can narrow their searches down much more effectively, as in my job example. Ads can be more targeted to searchers, making vertical search both lucrative and cost-effective, since click fraud would be at a minimum. And, because most of the vertical search tools are easy to use with simple, effective results returned, more searchers will tend to turn to them before a generalized search engine.

Local search is already a burgeoning subset, with Google Local and many newspapers offering this functionality (see www.wickedlocalsearch.com, for example). And in the topical genre, there is a host of travel search engines such as www.sidestep.com, www.kayak.com and www.travelzoo.com. This latter field, which comprises search engines designed to served the needs of businesses in specific industries, is still evolving as new technologies and innovative entrepreneurs create new opportunities.

Tags: SEO, SEO101, Search Engine Optimization, SEO Overview, Search Engine, Search Engine Submission, SEM, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Friendly, Keywords, Keyword Search, Vertical Search, Vertical Search Tools, Local Search

Local Search

admin — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 05:46:24 +0000

What is local search?

Local search is a query that uses a special type of search engine. The query includes not only information about “what” the site visitor is searching for (such as keywords, a business category, or the name of a consumer product) but also “where” information, such as a street address, city name, postal code, or geographic coordinates like latitude and longitude. These sites are primarily supported by advertising, but some accept payments from retail merchants and others wishing to be listed.

Various geolocation techniques may be used to match visitors’ queries with information of interest. The type of information and points of interest returned varies with the type of local search engine. Some sites, such as superpages.com (owned by Idearc Media) and TrueLocal, list local businesses, usually in a categorization scheme similar to (or actually derived from) a traditional Yellow Pages phone book.

Google�s changing the game of search engine optimization with their recent release of OneBox. Google OneBox appears at the top of results whenever a popular [city] phrase is combined with a popular search query.

For example: [Salt Lake City internet marketing] returns the following results.

How does this changes the game of SEO?

Well not only do you have to aim for top organic search results, but now you have a new algorithm in place to rank on local results such as Google�s OneBox. Google, Yahoo!, and MSN have always had local search but Google has been the first to implement theirs into the regular search results as well.

What can you do to optimize for local search?

Social Local Search - Submit your company�s listing to some of the top social local search sites. This article states social local search is up 44% in the past 12 months. Yelp, InsiderPages, CitySquares, Judy�s Book, and Mojo Pages are good examples of these.

Internet Yellow Pages - SuperPages, Yellowbook, InfoSpace, SwitchBoard are also good examples of these.

Local Search Engines - Submit your site to Google Local, Yahoo! Local, ASK, MSN Local, and TrueLocal.

Data Providers � Acxiom, GeoSign, and InfoUSA are two major powerhouses for supplying local search databases. Submit your company listings to these sites as well.

Contact information � Have a dominant address and phone number on your contact page and at least one other page, preferably the homepage. This information builds trust rank value in your Website as well.

Microformats � Microformats are an open format for data specification. hCard�s represent data about people and specifications. Visit microformats.org to learn how you can incorporate hCard�s in to your Website. One more search engines catch on to microformats this will be quite revolutionary for Local Search.

Meta data � Use geo meta data to tell search engines your location.

Code detailed below:

Tags: SEO, SEO101, Search Engine Optimization, SEO Overview, Search Engine, Search Engine Submission, SEM, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Friendly, Keywords, Keyword Search, Local Search, Google Local, Google Maps, Optimize Local Search

Contextual Search

admin — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 01:30:54 +0000

What is Contextual search?

Content search, directive search, contextual search and destination search are all names of a specialized type of search engine advertising that is often misunderstood. It’s hard to believe that marketers still ask to clarify the difference between Google’s AdWords and AdSense platforms, but they do.

It shouldn’t be surprising — in an industry that has grown from mere hundreds of millions to billions in a few short years — that one or two areas are still shades of grey for search marketers. The contextual web search allows you to search the Internet for web pages using a context-based query. Contextual search listings appear on content sites instead of Search Results Pages (SERPS). Advertisers bid on keyword costs is the key factor in Contextual search listings. In effect, with contextual search, all relevant text and other data is automatically categorized and set in context. With mechanical search names of people, names of places, dates, prices and other related topics to the original keyword query are potentially lost to the searcher unless specifically identified within the original search query. Now, they are related facts waiting to be exploited from within contextual search results.

Contextual search is the convergence of three dominant approaches within the major areas of modern information retrieval:

Intelligent text and data mining, enabling information discovery through automated concept modeling and exploration of patterns.

Flexible content structuring technologies, enabling XML schema independence and cross-connection of content from structured and unstructured sources and

High-performing search technology, enabling scalable and fast content gathering, processing and retrieval in face of exploding information volume and complexity.

Text and data mining are the automated discovery of new information by extraction of patterns and relationships between entities in text or structured data sources, respectively. They can, for example, be used to discover new patterns in consumer behavior, or help research in biosciences by exploring implicit links between concepts in scientific texts. The discovery is even extended to rich media.

The future of search is changing and we say that change is for the better and it is about time.

If you need more information or have some doubts, feel free to contact us on SEO101.

Tags: SEO, SEO101, Search+Engine+Optimization, SEO+Overview, Search+Engine, Search+Engine+Submission, SEM, Search+Engine+Marketing, Search+Engine+Friendly, Keywords, Keyword+Search, Keyword+Selection, Contextual+Search, Contextual+Search+Results

SEO An Overview

admin — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 14:35:41 +0000

An Overview of Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO), a subset of Search Engine Marketing, is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (”organic” or “algorithmic“) search results. SEO can target contextual search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

SEO101 is more emphasized on learning Search Engine Optimization from begining. More accurately this is a test website to learn how Google works and how we can get a good page rank in organic search results. SEO101 is a storage of best articles from WWW.

Now Submitting your web site is not enough. You will hear that over and over again. Unlike many others, this sales pitch is actually true. If your pages are not optimized, or you have not targeted the right keywords, you are wasting your money.

In future issues SEO101 will step you through some optimization techniques, tips and tricks, but remember that you can also get professional help, as there are many SEO experts and consultants that can offer their services.

According to us the best defination can be…

“Search Engine Optimization is a process of making your website search engine friendly and capable of ranking among natural or organic search results for your industry specific keywords“

SEO is equally important for any business requiring online presence, be it large or small, new or old. SEO is an ongoing process which needs investment in time and a keen interest in search pattern changes of the target audience.

SEO can help you reach a highly motivated target audience (proactive audience) through natural search engine ranking. Proactive audience increases website conversion rate resulting in a positive ROI.

SEO advantages

Cheap source of regular, relevant traffic

Results in a higher click through rate as compared to any other program

No recurring pay per click costs

Gives highest ROI in the long run as compared to any other online marketing vehicle

Generates brand awareness and recognition

Higher natural rankings builds trust among searchers

Results in a higher website conversion rate

SEO is marketing by understanding how search algorithms work and what human visitors might search for, to help match those visitors with sites offering what they are interested in finding. Some SEO efforts may involve optimizing a site’s coding, presentation, and structure, without making very noticeable changes to human visitors, such as incorporating a clear hierarchical structure to a site, and avoiding or fixing problems that might keep search engine indexing programs from fully spidering a site. Other, more noticeable efforts, involve including unique content on pages that can be easily indexed and extracted from those pages by search engines while also appealing to human visitors.

The term SEO can also refer to “search engine optimizers,” a term adopted by an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients, and by employees of site owners who may perform SEO services in-house. Search engine optimizers often offer SEO as a stand-alone service or as a part of a larger marketing campaign. Because effective optimization can require making changes to the source code of a site, it is often very helpful when incorporated into the initial development and design of a site, leading to the use of the term “Search Engine Friendly” to describe designs, menus, content management systems and shopping carts that can be optimized easily and effectively.

Truly ‘organic‘ search engine marketing improves your rankings while improving the quality of your overall Internet marketing campaign. Note that accomplishing each of these goals will improve the overall value of your site, too: Improved HTML code will increase usability; content will teach visitors more about your product; increased link popularity will increase the legitimacy of your site.

Now SEO101 is an effort to make things better.

Tags: SEO, SEO101, Search Engine Optimization, SEO Overview, Search Engine, Search Engine Submission, SEM, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Friendly, Keywords, Keyword Search, Keyword Research