Search Friendly

Search Engine Optimization - 10 SEO Steps To Perfection - Part 3

Today im going to be talking about the need for SEO relevant links.

SEO relevant links are a massive step of SEO. Seo relevant links help google and other search engines find your website, and rank it on the weight of the links it has. E.G if the BBC.co.uk had a link to your website, google sees that link, sees its from a top respected domain with allot of visitors, is linking to your page, which must mean the BBc thinks your site is an important site, so the link weight is high. BUT there is a twist to this.

SEO Relevant links means exactly that, links from relevant sites.

For example say you were selling computer parts. you had your site SEO’ed for all your computer keywords. now if you were to get a link from a highly ranked Sports website, this is unrelevant content, so the link weight decreases. but say you had a link from a hardware reviewer, this link is more relevant, so the link weight is higher.

Google has unoffically talked about this in a few videos available from google video about how they rank websites, and SEO Relevant links is a big part of this.

I recommended for getting decent exposure in google is to have around 100-200 SEO Relevant links.

What do you guys think?

Search Engine Optimization - 10 SEO Steps To Perfection - Part 2

Today i am going to talk about Title Tags and Header tags.

This is probably the second most important step in Search Engine Optimization.

When google looks at your page, the first thing it sees is your title tags. Its very important to have keyword relevant<title></title> tags, and not just tags like “web hosting” which would return over 200 million results on google. You should have relevant tags such as “UK Shared Cpanel Web Hosting” which will give you a higher ranking, and a more specific type of viewer.

The next thing you need to do is use the <h1></h1> tags to do the same thing as the title, tell google what it is this page is talking about.

You also need to use the <h2></h2> tags to split up the content further, e.g. if your talking about a web hosting, put the keyword relevant tag in <h1></h1>, then you may talk about the control panel, put that in the <h2></h2> then you may want to talk about the operating system, split the content up for more relevancy.

Google is a document reader, googles bot reads your site as if it was reading a book. therefore we have to structure your site for search engine optimization is this way. a chapter header is an important part of a book, and its the same with a web page.

Search Engine Optimization - 10 SEO Steps To Perfection - Part 1

This is the first part of a series of 10 covering Search Engine Optimization, the 10 steps to perfection.

What aspect of search engine optimization im going to talk about today is Content Relevance.

The first thing to note about content relevance, is that content is the only part search engines can see, eg if you had a red peice of text, all that goole etc are going to see, is the title text, and not the colour.

The second thing to note is that if you have a link from a related site, its going to do more for you than a link from a site that covers a completly different subject.

When writing your articles, make sure you cover your main subject in the text. for example, if you were going to make a site on Computer reviews, make sure that you pick your keywords, and use them in the content of your page.

This is the most important step of your search engine optimization, CONTENT CONTENT CONTENT. i cannot express this enough, having a site full of images means google isnt going to see allot on your page, but a 6 paragraph content section is going to do allot more for your ranks.

Search Engine Submission: is it still necessary?

When the Internet was young, not so long ago, there were lots of search engines and the conventional wisdom was that one of the first things that you needed to do was to submit your site to all of those search engines. But what about today when a handful of search engines dominate the scene; is search engine submission still important or even necessary at all?

A short answer to both of these questions is a qualified “no.” The major search engines such as Google, MSN, Yahoo and Ask.com (Ask Jeeves) all employ robotic programs “bots” which scour the Internet looking for data (sites) to add to the search engine indices. Whenever they visit a web page they look at the links on that page and follow them. If they follow a link to a new site, that site is then included in their data base. In addition, the bots periodically revisit all the sites that they know about.

If you are curious or want to know how often the bots are visiting your web pages, then look in your statistics information (provided by many hosting firms) or look in your site’s traffic logs. Yahoo’s bot is called Inktomi Slurp, Google’s is Googlebot , MSN uses the MSNbot and Ask.com’s bot is called Askjeeves .

Suppose you have just constructed a new site. How do you make sure that it gets picked up by these “bots”? The best thing to do is to find a site that is already included in the search engines and get a link from that site to yours. Your web designer or even hosting company may wish to link to you. Perhaps one of your friends or colleagues has a website in operation, ask them for a link. Perhaps you have an existing site; then by all means link to your new site.

During the infancy of the Internet search engine submission companies used to warn clients that they had better sign up for a monthly submission program because search engines sometimes “lost” sites or would not find your new material. In the same way that a single submission to search engines is hardly necessary, monthly submissions or submissions of individual urls on a particular website are no longer necessary.

Due to the revisiting patterns of the robots you don’t have to worry about resubmitting your site. If you have some new pages that you want to be included in the search engine, then just make sure that you have easy to find text links to those new pages. A site map page with text links to all of your pages is the best way to ensure that the bots will follow and index all of your pages.

It is rare that a site gets dropped from a search engine, though it can happen if your site violates the terms of service of the search engine, or is down for a prolonged time due to server problems. If you are not sure whether your site is in a particular search engine you can find out by making a search: site: www.yoursite.com . If nothing turns up then your site is not yet in that search engine, or if it had been in that search engine, it is no longer there.

Similarly, if you are not sure how many of your pages have been included in each search engine, make the search: site:www.yoursite.com and the number of results will give you an idea of how many pages are included in that particular search engine.

Despite all that I have said, I have come across sites that had been in existence for a while and still were not “found” by the major search engines. In such cases the best thing to do is to make a few manual submissions at these locations:

http://www.google.com/addurl
http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html (and click on the Submit your site for free)
http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx

In the rare case where you suspect that your site may have been dropped from a major search engine such as Google, due to a violation of the search engine’s terms of service the best thing to do is to fix what is wrong and make a re-inclusion request. Google has a special url for this: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35843

So, in summary, don’t worry about search engine submission to the main search sites, the busy bots are doing most of the work.

How to increase link popularity

There is a term used in the optimization industry- “content is king”. This is very true. SE’s (Search engines) love content, especially regularly updated content. With this in mind, you must remember that “links are queen”. Having inbound links to your website is a very important factor of the SE’ s algorithms, if you want to increase your visibility on SE’s then you must increase the amount and quality of the links that point to your website. For many small to medium companies the cost of paying for a full time link building campaign is far too expensive.
Companies, webmasters and web site owners should be constantly trying to improve link popularity (inbound links to their website), an increase in inbound links will cause an increase in visibility on the SERP’s (search engine results pages).

The times of “a link is a link” have however passed. Reciprocal links should only be arranged with websites that are about the same topic or share similar content. Websites that reciprocate links with websites that are not similar are deemed as artificially trying to increase link popularity by the SE’s. One way inbound links are more valuable than reciprocals, and remember that it is the quality of links that also bears more weight. One link from an authoritative site with high PR (Page Rank) is worth many links from that friend of yours that just built his personal website!

Anchor text- This is the word or words that are used to link to your website. e.g. “seo consultant ” is anchor text that actually points to my home page www.j-dunn.co.uk. This is often called the links “title”. Use the keywords that you would like a high ranking for as the anchor text.

For instance Smith LTD sell widgets of all shapes and sizes. They would like to rank well for the term “plastic widgets”. They start submitting their website for inclusion in free web directories. When asked for the anchor text or links title during submission it would be far more beneficial to use the text “plastic widgets” rather than Smith LTD.

With all this in mind you should start your link building campaign as soon as possible? Google will spider links to your website several times before accepting their importance, this process is known as “waiting for the links to mature”. This can often take several months.
So, here are my top 10 ways to get inbound links to your website.

1) Submit your website to free web directories. (Make sure you submit to the right category).

One of the most important free web directories to submit to is www.dmoz.org (the open directory) DMOZ is used by Google for all of the contents of their Web Directory. Many SE’s and directories also use DMOZ results for their directories. Google also gives a link to your site from DMOZ a lot of credit. Beware DMOZ is edited by humans and getting listed can take anywhere from 1-18 months, so the sooner you do it the better!
2) Submit your website to premium & paid web directories. (Make sure you submit to the right category).

3) Request website visitors link to your site.

Visitors to your website are there because they are interested in the content/products/services of your site. Ask them to link to your website, webpage. You can even supply the HTML code for them to link to your website. E.g. if you would like to link to this page please use the following code:

4) Write and distribute articles.

Write articles about your product & related services then submit them to article distribution websites. This is a very effective way of getting inbound links. The idea is you place a link to your website at the bottom of each article, then when webmasters use your article as free content for their website they must include the link at the bottom of the article.

5) Exchange links with other similar websites (reciprocal linking).

6) Contribute in forums.

Many forums allow you to place a signature at the bottom of every post. Place a link to your website with the use of anchor text and gain a link for every post you make. Also you may post links to your website in the main topic part of the forum. Do not spam though- Only post links when it is appropriate. It is better to be a good contributor to a forum than spam the forum with un relevant links.

7) Create a blog.

Create an informative blog about your product or services. “Bloggers” are linking fanatics. Get other “bloggers” to link/reciprocal link to your blog and then place links from the blog to your website.

8 Answer questions in Q + A websites.

It is easy to answer questions in places like Yahoo! Answers or Google Groups and provide links to relevant resources. (e g your website!)

9)Paid Links.

Some websites allow you to buy links from their website for a specific length of time.

Generally this is done from websites with high PR (Page Rank). And the purpose of it

is to increase a websites Page Rank.

10) Develop an easy to link to, informative site.

This goes back to “content is king”. If your website is of high quality, good information with no grammatical or spelling errors then web site owners will naturally link to your site.

Article wriiten by Jon Dunn. SEO Consultant, UK. Visit www.j-dunn.co.uk for more SEO Articles.

Blogging For Business? Does it Work?

Blog is abbreviation of weblog. A weblog is a journal that is frequently updated and intended for general public consumption. Blogs generally represent the information or personality of the author or the type of business or web site.

Nowadays blogs are very popular medium to express opinion, information, history and many more details. Previously blogs are just created for biography of author, famous personality and personal information only. Now blogs are increasingly use by the business community and also by multinational companies.

Now top SEO companies offers companies to prepare business blogs as a powerful tool for search engine optimization for promote their business websites and hence business. SEO blogs are very effective way to explore information about your business, products etc.

One can describe as many information in their blogs in search engine friendly waywhich might not possible to mention in their company’s website. For example if you are manufacturer of some industrial product than in your corporate website you can give details about your company profile, product information, services and other such information while in blogs you can write any information related to your product.

The purpose of preparing blogs means you can include as many topics related to your products and business, from invention of product to most modern technology, formulation, various processes etc. This help you to get better listing in search engine result pages as well as generating more natural traffic to your website related to your business. A properly written Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Blog is an indeed ROI (Return on Investment).

In case if you are launching some new products or something different and you want to domestically or internationally promote your business, blogs are very right and beneficial approach for marketing your products. The major advantage of blogs is all search directories and search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN and the others are looking for fresh and new information that is frequently updated, there for chances to get fast listing are more, sometimes in a few day but not always.

Google find daily and updated content, the more often their search spiders will visit your business blog, resulting in top search engine ranking.

Things you can write in Business Blog for Top Search Engine Ranking

For instance, a manufacturer can include following pages related to the business in their blogs,

• History or invention of product
• Stage wise manufacturing process
• Quality, type of material
• Industry wise various applications
• Comparative advantage [ with other competitive products ]
• Latest market trend and technology
• Packaging details
• Rules and regulation in case of import and export
• Major Constrains
• Business Opportunities
• Domestic and global market
• Basic Tips for buying, caring, storage etc

Who should select blog for their business?

• If you have appropriate information to make people aware about your product
• If you would like your website to have top ranking positions in Google, Yahoo, MSN and other search engines
• If you’re unhappy with the results and ROI from internet marketing

Why you should opt to prepare blog for your business?

• For higher search rankings on Google with no paid submissions
• Search engines will most likely position you top with fresh content
• Create visibility with information to generate natural traffic to your website with top search engine ranking and thus great chances for receiving more business enquires
• Google will take only few days for fresh information to be appearing on search result pages.
• Business SEO blogs should be viewed as an additional and parallel solution to fortify communications and ideas to your prospects, suppliers, business associates, customers etc., while at the same time helping your website in the search engines.

Why blogs are Search Engine Friendly?

Blogs are search engine friendly because the text,links are rich, updated frequently, no images or graphics or any plug-in controls, use of CSS, in other word it is fully text or content base and therefore easy for search engine to crawl or search. Optimizing a blog is similar process as optimizing a website. Blogs gives more scope for generating number of search engine friendly keywords and keyword phrases.

You can get good ranking if you follow some basic rules in your blogs. Here are the most important rules to follow to get your posts listed for keywords of your choice.

• In blog domain, use your primary keyword
• In title and header tags of your blog, use most important keyword or keyword phrase
• In the body text, use secondary keywords and keyword phrases
• Use your keywords in the page name and anchor text of links
• Make sure search engines can spider your blog easily
• Update your blog frequently

A Few Mistakes in Search Engine Optimization

In Search Engine Optimization, SEO, there are many mistakes to be made. Below is a list of a few most common mistakes that website owners do.

Badly Designed Websites
If your website is designed badly i.e. lack of proper navigation, using frames to save on design times, and large graphics which takes more time to load, and reduce text that you would use instead of the image, these all makes effect on listing in Search Engine. Search engine spiders can actually be blocked from crawling sites that are not well-designed. Therefore a proper web design is very important part of search engine optimization.

In many sites, images and other script languages are used for fine looks. These are good but not crawl-able i.e. not advisable for search engine optimisation. Try to make your useful links in HTML rather than using images or use of other web script languages. If your page layout change then place HTML link on bottom of your page. It is also good chance to use keywords in anchor text.

Large image size will cause more time to download page, people don’t have time to wait for long time. Make your images in more pieces so it will take less time than single image. Try to make low resolution file where high resolution graphics are not required. If it is essential to use large images then consider using thumbnails and open it in separate page. This may give additional benefit of creating more pages and more text that spiders and bots crave.

Badly written of Content
If we have to rate single largest factor for high ranking in search engine i.e. “content”.

Clarity of content written in site is a very important aspect for search engine spiders, search engine and directory users. If your content is badly written and not relevant to what you want to find for or content which are never updated, than your site is neither search engine friendly nor user-friendly. Well-written content is what search engine spiders feed on, and content is the key to high rankings. In addition, your content absolutely must have targeted keywords and phrases. If content is written properly, you can make more targeted keyword and appropriate phrases.

Ideally, you will use those words throughout your copy frequently and may also include them in bold or italics to show search engines that those words are very important in the scope of the page!

Absence of targeted keyword and phrases can break your site. When users go to search engine and type particular keyword related to your site, but if you have not entered that keyword in your body text than your site will not come in listing.

Another common mistake made by some SEO professional is their choice of keywords placed in the META keyword tag. Make sure it might seem logical to your content.

Any irrelevant keyword or phrase can increase your ranking but think about it – even if you succeeded in ranking well for such a competitive term that you don’t want, how many of the people visiting your site as a result of this search would leave as soon as they see your home page? That’s right, because most of them don’t find what exactly they are looking for. Misspellings, odd spacing, and product feature-specific variations should also be considered. Thorough keyword research can save money and future disappointments.

Does it become clear now that targeting such a generic word is a waste of time? What you need to do instead is optimize your site for search terms and phrases that are highly targeted to your precise business. Use a tool such as Word tracker to find what people are actually typing in to the search engines to find goods and services similar to yours and concentrate on ranking well for those terms. The more qualified your site visitors are, the more likely you are to convert those visitors into paying customers.

Replica of Content
Do not copy content from other’s website. When Search engines compares your site with other site; if your page is updated later that it consider your site as spamming and it may result into penalty or low ranking of your site. If you use duplicate pages means if you prepare more than one pages with different name and link but if content in page are same search engine will considered as trick and it definitely affect your ranking.

Also, search engine algorithms have become smarter and are now checking that sites contain highly relevant content before including them in their index.

Improper use of Meta Tags or Site without Meta Tags
Without Meta tags or improper Meta tags can misguide search engine for irrelevance search that may cause improper listing of your website. Meta tags are used to include Keyword and description tags. It is reserved part especially for search engines. Meta tags help search engines for quick search. It is also helpful to increase ranking in search engines. Make sure to include these Meta tags in all page of your site, and target them for each individual page.

If your website is good in content and also have proper keywords, but not place page title or not used descriptive and appropriate page title than it might harm your ranking. It is better to have different title on every page also use descriptive page title.

Use your title tag, URL, and H1 tags when optimizing site. In a website these are the three most simple and most important for search engine, when it comes to search engine optimization.

Absence of Sitemap for website with more than 10 pages
Without sitemap, user need to search entire site for the content he is searching for which is very tedious and sometime user may quit without going further. For the reason it is very important to prepare sitemap in the website to help searcher and search engine. Sitemap assist web crawlers in indexing websites more efficiently and effectively. Sitemap provides structure of entire site in one page which is very useful for search engine optimization. The sitemap drives the search engine to go directly to the page instead of search for links. This helps a lot in optimization of website in search engines.

Google has introduced an option for generating sitemap of your website. Google sitemaps is an easy way to tell Google about all the pages on your site, which pages are most important to you, and when those pages change, for a smarter crawl and fresher search results.

Google Sitemaps also answers questions you might have about how Google sees your site.

Page Cloaking
The website that contains contents that is specially designed for the search engine is called cloaking site. The search engine checked IP address and keywords of the search query. There are cloaking techniques where the homepage is altered to each and every keyword to make search engine think that your site contains very relevant contents especially designed for the queried keyword or key phrase. Cloaking can result in a penalty that may damage your business as well as ranking.

Over optimisation affects your web site
When you put weight only on search engine ranking then it becomes over optimisation. When you prepare content in your site with more numbers of keywords i.e. keyword stuffed body text; having a too high keyword density may cause an over optimization penalty. This also applies to your page title, your Meta description and Meta keywords, as well as the ALT attributes of your images. That means you can not place stuff of keywords as body text in the site. Therefore, avoid optimizing your pages very much by all way. Try to make website for human being rather than making for search engine robot.

Absence of Back Links or broken links
Your site must be link properly. For example if you open some page in new window and there is no back link or any navigation in that page to return main page than it is just as a deserted island. The other example is if you have placed banner of some of your partner or relevance to your business, when user click on that link and you have not place back link than user may not find way if he wants to back to your site.
It is a good way to link sites that are related to your business and ask them to link of your website. But take care of proper linking. Try and think in terms of traffic and avoid the page rank trap. If a link will bring your site traffic then go for it. If you are in a highly competitive market try to build quality links.

Inadequate Marketing Plan
Ranking will not help if you don’t know what your target market is. Your ranking has to lead with proper marketing strategy that hit your target audience and not just useless hits. Before spending time and money a perfect marketing plan is essential.

SEO - Tips to Optimize Your Webpage to Compete for a High Ranking

Search engine optimization (SEO) is very important to websites. If you rank high in search engines, your website are shown to a huge number of target users.To start with, you have to pick a list of target keywords. Try the google Adwords: Keyword tool for selecting the best keywords for your site.

Remember, be specific with your keywords! eg trying to rank well for “web Development” is going to be hard, but trying to rank well for “asp.net web development” is easier to achieve.

Go to google.com, search on the target keyword your website has planned to work on. Then check the top ranking website, learn from it, and do better.

How to do better? Here’s some basic practices…

1. place your optimizes keyword in titles, and make sure you have 1 title per page. to do this all you need to do is use the <h1> tag in very top of the page.

2. place keyword phases in a paragraph or 2 of text at the top of your site.

3. On your web page, set your first graphic with ALT set to your target keyword

4. build a text based sitemap, add ALT if it is an image

5. OPML / RSS site map

6. bold or underline keyword (1 or 2 times only)

7. The key word/phrase should be used again very near the end of the page.

8. try to register a good domain name with keyword (I guess keyword in subdirectory is ok)

9. navigation menu on the right, since google bot looks from top and left.

Keyword Rich Content For Search Engine Optimization SEO

Search engines love content. Graphics may make your site look great, but a nice picture does not attract a search engine. Or a searcher for that matter. Good, relevant content does.
Search engines aren’t all that different from people. When faced with a ton of choices, they want to know which sites are the best. And, the best sites are the ones that give the most accurate and relevant information.

Good content serves three main purposes:

1. Search engines will rank your site higher for keywords and phrases included within your content.

2. Users will return to your site, and recommend it to others

3. Other sites will link to you, which will improve your linking popularity and make your web site visible to the spiders.

But, how do you get good content? Simple. You write it, or get someone else to write it for you, using keywords and phrases your visitors will actually use on a search query.

Feeling a little hot under the collar? Relax. It’s not as difficult as it sounds. Anyone can learn to write for crawler search engines. It just takes a little planning, detective work and focus. Ready to begin? Follow the steps below and you’ll be writing like a pro in no time.

1. Determine which keywords and phrases you want to target

Before you sit down to write anything, you’ll need to decide which keywords and keyphrases are relevant to your site. One of the best ways to do this is to use the Word Tracker keyword tracking service at www.wordtracker.com. Word Tracker receives its data from the Dogpile and Metacrawler search engines and estimates search counts for all other search engines based on its market share. You can sign up for a day, a week, a month or a year.

Another good way to find keywords your visitors are using is to look at your site’s server logs. These will tell you what phrases people are using to find your site. Some keywords will be too competitive. For example, the keywords “real estate” will return hundreds, if not thousands of search results, and may not place your site near the top, but “Houston Real Estate” or is more focused and targeted to a particular query.

If you want your site to be included in local and regional searches you may want to design your site with local searches in mind, even if you also market globally. How do you do this? Just include local keywords such as address, city, state, province and zip code in the header or footer of your web pages. For example:

XYZ Business Consultant, 3657 Acacia Avenue, farnham, Surrey gu12 6rg. Tel: 01252 746 895. Located in Aldershot Surrey, UK.

That way you have a much better chance of getting a first page listing on a localized search.

2. Scatter your chosen keywords and phrases throughout your text.

Let’s say one of the keyphrases you want to target is “cotton duvets”. You’ll want to weave this phrase throughout your copy without making it sound stilted or contrived. Remember, you still need to persuade your prospects to buy your product, so don’t be tempted to write paragraphs like this:

“Our cotton duvets are the softest cotton duvets around. Check out our affordable cotton duvets in our online cotton duvet store now.” While it’s obvious what your keyphrases are, the two sentences don’t exactly encourage your visitor to place an order. Be subtle. Use your keywords to emphasize your point and insert them where they naturally fit, without compromising flow and readability.

3. Review your headings, titles and hyperlinks

Use your keywords in headings, subtitles, page titles (found in the blue bar at the top of your Web browser), bold face and hyperlinks, because these stand out to the search engines. For example, returning to the cotton duvets you may want to change your “contact us” hyperlink to “contact us now about our luxurious cotton duvets.” Or, “learn more about how our cotton duvets can keep you warm and snug this winter”

4. Post keyphrase-rich, informative articles on your site

Another great way to fill your site up with keyword-laden content is to post relevant, informative articles. Every article you post on your site adds more content–content that the search engines thrive on. And, if you write each article as if you are giving the spider a good, healthy meal full of essential keywords, they’ll devour every word, and index it for future use.

You can also post your articles on article directories such as GoArticles, Article City or IdeaMarketers that offer free content to ezine publishers and website owners. That way you’ll spread the word about your site, get some great back links and even free publicity.

5. Publish a Newsletter or Ezine

Newsletters and ezines are another way to add content to your site. If you’ve written articles already, you get to reuse them, and you can create a newsletter archive section on your website.

6. Post a blog or weblog

Blogs or Weblogs are frequently updated journals. that point to articles elsewhere on the web, and to existing on-site articles. The popularity of blogs have spawned blog services such as Typepad and Blogger which make it easy for non-techies to update their sites and add them to an existing web site. Because both the search engines and your site’s visitor’s love new, updated information, blogs can be a great way of adding content to your site on a daily basis. You can use a blog to announce company news or comment on industry news, announce new product details or to create a “brand” or “personality” for your company.

Before you begin publishing your blog, think about what you’re customers want to know. Then, answer their questions on a daily basis. It won’t be long before you’ll have them, and the search engines hooked.

How To Plan For Search Friendly Websites

So you have a fantastic website but no one ever visits. You may ask? Why? Your website should be designed with search engines in mind. Too many web designers are graphic artists that excel at image manipulation, but lack a basic understanding of search engine optimization. Web design and search engine optimization (SEO) should not be mutually exclusive. Webmasters should have a clear understanding of both design techniques and how the search engines work.

Incredible graphics on a website without any traffic, will do little to fill the coffers. Follow these basic guidelines to ensure that your website will be visited and attractive.

1. Navigation
Both humans and crawlers (search engines) need to be able to navigate your website. Avoid using technology that prohibits the search engine’s ability to spider web pages. The majority of search engines have the ability to follow the links on a website if you use standard HTML. Observe normal convention and make the links obvious and available to all website visitors.

2. Easy to Read
Fonts should be legible and webmasters should utilize white space judiciously. Text on the web page should be easy to read.

3. Speed
Avoid using overly large graphics that are slow to load. Remember you only have mere seconds to capture the visitors attention, do not waste precious seconds with web pages that are slow to load. Search engines too will become impatient and give up on your website if it takes too long to view the content. As a result you should avoid using free hosting services that might be unreliable or slow to respond if you receive any web traffic surges.

4. Consistency
Your website should maintain a consistent look and feel. In other words, all the pages on the website should have a similar look, color scheme and navigation.

5. Above the Fold
The most important information on the your web page should appear above the “fold”. This means that the website visitor should be able to view the most important content without having to use the scroll bar.

6. Contact Information
Include corporate contact information on the website. This lends your company credibility, anyone can pretend to be anyone or anything. Including contact information on a website shows that you are a serious and legitimate business entity.

7. Avoid Javascript /Ajax
Javascript and Ajax are cool, but they are not search friendly. It is best to stick with good old HTML. Search engines at this point are unable to spider the website contents that are displayed using Javascript. This is also true of websites that are dynamically updated with Ajax. Chances are the body of your website will help your website rank well; do not waste the search engine opportunity by using Javascript or Ajax.

8. Meta Data Matters
Each and every web page on the website should contain a unique title and description. Many search engines extract meta data from the website header and use it to classify and categorize the web pages listing. The web page title and description should relate to the webpage contents.

9. Keywords Naturally
Use website keywords and keyword phrases in the web copy in a natural way. Search engines are starting to discern unnatural text, machine generated content and content that is cobbled together by a bot. Write your website’s content for humans not search engines.

10. Web Page Focus
Each web page on a website should focus on one or two keywords or keyword phrases, no more no less. The keywords should be incorporated into the meta tags, and web copy.

An optimized website can bring search traffic and visitors who have a natural interest in your product or service. Optimization should be part of the design process. Before hiring a web designer make sure they understand both your design needs and search engine optimization.

How To Pick Your Keywords

Keywords have turned into big business on the internet. If you pick the keywords that your customers are typing in, then your product is finally exposed to your perfect customer. That keyword is gold. Either you have run out of keyword ideas, you don’t know where to look, you haven’t had time, you need an easy to use tool, whatever the reason, I’m here to help.Let me give you THREE sources that will help you pick the PERFECT Keyword.

1. Google AdWords: Keyword Tool - This is Google’s Adword keyword tool. It allows you to look at keyword search volume, Cost and add position estimates (for paid listings on google), Search volume trends (eg when britney spears cut of her hair, the search volume shot up, and then shot down again, this tool shows that), and any possible negative keywords. This tool is probably my favourite, as its free and more relevant to my Search Engine Optimization ( SEO ) Than Overture is for me.

2. Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool - This is a keyword suggestion tool from Overture (yahoo) many SEO experts use this, but it boggles my mind why use a tool for yahoo when most people use google. I can understand that if your targeting women, yahoo is the site to choose (most women use yahoo, whilst most men use google).

3. WordTracker - Word tracker is probably the leader in keyword selection, but it will cost a low monthly fee. It’s worth it if you make ONE sale that covers the cost of Word tracker.

SEO - Get Your Site Out of the Google Sandbox Fast!

Is your new site sitting in the infamous Google “sandbox”? There is a way to get it out fast, as well as getting all of your other pages indexed!How?

Write an article on your site topic and upload it to your website. You can either put it on your index page, or place a snippet of the content with a link to your new article on your index page. Then - submit your article to all the free article directories you can find. It doesn’t even have to be a long article - just as long as it offers value to the reader.

Submitting your article to the free article directories also means that you get instant valuable back links to your site which is vital if you want to rank well in Google.

How do I know whether my site is in the Sandbox?

If your site is in the sandbox, if you do a search for http://www.yoursite.com in Google, you will probably just see this kind of information displayed on the results page:

http://www.yoursite.com

If your site is indexed in Google, the results page will look like this:

http://www.yoursite.com Your site description and what your site is about will appear here.

Google can show you the following information for this URL:

· Find web pages that are similar to www.youresite.com
· Find web pages that link to www.youresite.com
· Find web pages from the site www.youresite.com
· Find web pages that contain the term www.youresite.com

You can also do a check at http://www.uptimebot.com to see how many of your pages are indexed by the search engines.

Proof that this method works?

I recently registered two new websites and linked to them from one of my sites that have PR. Doing a search for them showed that both of them just showed up as http://www.mysites.com which means that they were not indexed yet. Checking on Uptimebot it showed that Google had one link for each of them, but no additional pages.

After writing an article related to the one site, I uploaded it to my site and submitted it to the various article directories. The next day’s search showed that my site was in the Google Index because it was showing the additional information about my site, and a check on Uptimebot revealed that I now had all of my pages (20) indexed in Google.

Now that I know this method works, I will be doing it for my other sites as well. Don’t you think you too should get writing?

How Search Engine Work to List Website?

To learn about how search engine works, we have to first understand what is search engine? There are various definitions of search engines given by universities and search engine developers. The most commonly used definition is.

A search engine is a program designed which helps to find information stored on a computer system such as the World Wide Web or a personal computer. The search engine allows one to ask for content meeting specific criteria (typically those containing a given word or phrase) and retrieving a list of references that match those criteria. Search engines use regularly updated indexes to operate quickly and efficiently.

There are two types of search engines i.e. Robot based search engines and Human edited search engines. Now we will explain you in details about working of the both types that is essential for the SEO Company to optimize the web site by search engine optimization strategies to generate better result.

Robot based search engine:

This is also known as crawler, spider or ant based search engine. These are based on information that is collected, sorted and analyzed automatically from the website by indexing spiders. A software program, (known as a “robot”, “spider” or “crawler”) reads or indexes the web pages, follows links between pages and sites and collects information stored for later use. The information collected is analyzed into an “index” which is a large database of all the sites the crawler visited and read. A Web crawler is one type of bot, or software agent. In general, it starts with a list of URLs to visit, called the seeds. As the crawler visits these URLs, it identifies all the hyperlinks in the page and adds them to the list of URLs to visit, called the crawl frontier. URLs from the frontier are repeatedly visited according to a set of policies of search engines.

Using combination of policies web crawlers are behaving such as :

• Page selection policy to state which page to download
• Page re-visit policy for checking any updating in web pages
• Politeness policy that states how to avoid overloading websites
• Parallelization policy that states how to coordinate distributed web crawlers.

Human-powered search engines:

This type of search engine relies on humans to submit information that is subsequently indexed and catalogued. Only information that is submitted is put into the index. You submit a short description to the directory for your entire website or SEO writer writes one for websites they review. A search looks for matches only in the descriptions submitted for search engine marketing.

It is very important to know that how sites are listed in search engines. The spider crawls in the web site starting from known pages and follows all the links in the sites. The spider also visits the pages which are submitted manually. Search engines are trying to encourage site owners to pay for the privilege of having their pages to visit by spider.

In both type of search engine, when you search for any word or specific query, you are actually searching through the index created by search engine. The results produced by the search engine will depend on the contents or website Meta tags, text, images etc. A good site, with good content, might be more likely to get reviewed.

Specific page’s relevance ranking for a specific query depends on the factors such as page relevance to the words and concepts in the query, its overall link popularity and whether or not it is being penalized for excessive search engine optimization (SEO).

The index of search engine is large database of information which are methodically collected and stored by search engines. The search result pages are depending on these indexes. Search engines frequently updates these indexes as there are thousands of new sites added everyday. Since the search results are based on the index, if the index hasn’t been updated since a Web page becomes invalid the search engine treats the page as still an active link even though it no longer is. It will remain that way until the index is updated. When you add or update content in your website and resubmit it in search engine, the search engine stores updated information in its database. But updated result will only appear when search engine updates its index.

Sometimes when you search in different search engines the same search shows different results. One of the reasons is all search results page depends on the algorithm to search through indexes. All search engines use different algorithm method for search. The algorithm is what the search engines use to determine the relevance of the information in the index to what the user is searching for.

When search engine gives page rank it gives special weightage on keyword that appear first in title, Heading Tags, Bold face, description, Alt tags in images, keyword and keyword phrases in meta tags.

One of the elements that a search engine algorithm scans for is the frequency and location of keywords on a Web page. Web pages with higher no. of keywords are typically considered more relevant. For example, one method is to rank hits according to how many times your keywords appear and in which fields they appear (i.e., in heading tags, titles, Meta tags or plain text). Another method is to determine which documents are most frequently linked to other documents on the Web. Another common element that algorithms analyze is the way that pages link to other pages in the Website. By analyzing how pages link to each other, an engine can both determine what a page is about and the link pages (match keyword of original page and link page) and whether that page is considered “important” and deserving of a boost in search engine ranking.

As far as the user is concerned, relevancy ranking is critical, and becomes more so as the total volume of information increasing with the growth of websites. Most of the people have no time to go through scores of hits to determine which hyperlinks we should actually explore. The more clearly relevant the results are, the more we are likely to value the search engine.

How Site Structure Can Effect Your Search Results

Site structure is a big part in not only Search Engine Optimization ( SEO ) , But also making a very user friendly navigation system that’s easy to remember.

Some people over-do the navigation on their site using bad url’s or non optimized url’s. an example of these are:

• http://www.mysite.com/content.php?id=3

This is a non optimized url - i recommend looking at my The Power of Search Engine Friendly URLs post to combat this issue

• http://www.mysite.com/site/uk/products/computers/

Although your content is sectioned, which is good for your search engine optimization ( SEO ) , a user is never going to be able to remember this url if they want to come back. i recommend reducing this url to something like:

• http://www.mysite.com/products/Computers/

The country specific details can be dealt with in code, or for Search Engine Optimization ( SEO ), you should buy the .co.uk Domain for the UK sector.

The /Site/ folder is useless there are so many websites out there that section off their main website into a folder, it is pointless and also effects the ease of use of the navigation for the user.

This shorter structured type of URL is good for Ease of use, AND for sectioning off products for better seach enginge optimization, without overdoing it or going too far.

The other important thing to note about search engine friendly URLs , is your site should handle chopped url’s. for example if you have the path:

• http://www.mysite.com/products/Computers/

A user should be able to remove /Computers/ and see a list of all products on the url http://www.mysite.com/products/

Search Engine Optimization ( SEO ) is always a balance, you wouldn’t want to over-do it and make a page impossible to use for your users, you need to make a compromise with Search Engine Optimization ( SEO ) and ease of use.

The Importance of sitemap for website promotion

A sitemap is a web page that lists all the web pages on a website, typically organized in hierarchical way. Sitemap helps visitors and search engine bots to find pages on the site.
Sitemaps improves search engine optimization of a website by making sure that all the pages can be found. Sitemap is very important when a website uses flash or script menus that do not include HTML links.

How to prepare Search Engine Friendly Sitemap?

• Having text links of most important pages, it may have links to every page.
• Write short description related to link to inform visitor about your website.
• Provide a pathway for the search engine robots to follow in order to reach your most important web pages.
• Give your visitors the information about your site and show them how to reach the page they are looking for.
• To help automated search engine robot about what the page is about, write important keyword phrases in the sitemap text and hypertext links.
• Help search engine robots to find by giving link of static web pages instead of link to dynamically generated pages. The search engine may not otherwise find your page.
• It is good habit to have sitemap even for small website, adding a sitemap for visitors and for the search engine robots becomes the part of overall search engine optimization strategy.
• To make your sitemap most attractive to the search engine robots and visitors it is better to include meaningful text along with the page URLs and links. Use keywords in that text including appropriate content for each of the pages to which you link.
• Try to make easy navigation of your site; it is easy for search engine robots to find on your site, it increases chances of being positively listed in their search results. Having a number of properly interlinked web pages within a website would indicate to the search engine that the information architecture of the site is reliable and this would help you to achieve Top ranking in search engine.
• It is also very important for the sitemap to be in the main site directory so search engine spiders can easily find sitemap page and follow the links to assure your main site content is instantly accessible to spiders and visitors.
• Other important aspects in sitemaps, the link color for visited links should be different from that of non visited links so that visitors understand which pages they have already seen and thus, save time and sustain interest of visitor in your website.

What is Google Sitemap?

• Google sitemap is a tool established by Google to arrange an entire website in index order and keeping the latest update information on a website, easier on search engine. By adding a list of all the pages on your website, along with when those pages were last updated Google is able to easily update in its index.
• The goal of sitemaps is simple to provide website owners with a method of getting more pages in Google’s index and notifying Google about any recent updates. The problem with this is that Google is already fairly competent at indexing the majority of a website and predicting when a site is going to update itself. The result is that most website owners found it to be a lot of work for relatively little benefit.
• A final point to the importance of a sitemap - Google in its Webmaster Guidelines recommends that sites should have a sitemap.

A sitemap also helps you in planning your site before even you start developing it. Once you decide which pages you want, your job is actually made very simple when you start designing the web pages. A site structure helps in understanding the number of pages on the website and how they would be laid out. Thus, another important point is that a sitemap should actually be the first step in planning for a website.

Therefore the other most important reason the sitemap is vital because it helps the visitors to understand the website structure and layout and thus, quickly gain access to what your website has to offer.

Get Listed in Google in 24 Hours

So, you launched your new site. And you are waiting for the traffic to come. An waiting, and waiting, and waiting,…
It currently takes Google 6 to 9 months to index any new site. Yes, 6 to 9 months and that is not to rank that is just to be indexed. As a site owner you can’t wait that long. You can pay for search engine submissions but what if there was a FREE way to accomplish the same thing. And to have it take affect quickly.

Yes, there is a FREE way and it doesn’t involve any complicated programming or massive amounts of your time.

Find websites in your category and at least one that is a Page Rank of 5 or higher and get them to exchange links with you. It is that simple. I’ve found this also works well with sites that have been live for a while but aren’t indexed.

(Google has a system to give every site a Page Rank. You can download the google toolbar to view a pages rank here, http://www.google.com/intl/en/options/index.html.)

How do you find sites in your category? It’s easy. Go to Google and type in one of your search terms. Select some suitable sites and ask them to exchange links.

This is simple and it works every time.

What is the Google Sandbox Effect?

In the age of fair competition you may find it hard to believe that a search engine may hinder the appearance of a new website. This is what is currently believed to be happening on more Search Engines. Some SEO Guru’s have viewed Google as uncomfortable to rank newer websites until they have proven their viability to exist for more than a period of “x” months. Thus the term “Sandbox Effect” applies to the idea that all new websites have their ratings placed in a holding tank until such time is deemed appropriate before a ranking can commence.

However the website is not hindered as much as the links that are reciprocated from other users. Newer links that are created are put on a “probationary” status until again they pick-up in rank from other matured sites or placed directly by an ad campaign. The idea behind the hindrance is to prevent a fast ranking to occur on a new website. The usual holding period seems to be between 90 and 120 days before a site would start obtaining rank from reciprocal or back linking.

Some advice has been given to have companies you are going to reciprocate back add your link first to the website. This may help grandfather your site in, thus reducing the waiting time associated with “new” websites. People have noticed a 0 page rank when first signing up and receiving a bolstering 7 page ranking after 4 months. Why the delay? The fact is, that if people realized how easy it would be to get a high ranking, would that take away the credibility of the engine. It depends on whom you ask, but it does seem to be happening frequently to newer web sites. Do not discontinue back linking, your rank will eventually appear.

What to think about when purchasing a domain name.

SEO is never easy, trying to improve search engine rankings is just like a rubics cube. A puzzle that can keep you occupied for hours. How many times have you heard a SEO ‘er say “They keep changing the rules?,” and the frustrating part is…they don’t even tell you what the rules are in the first place!

It’s a proven fact, in trying to improve search engine rankings, that growing your site through link popularity, by slowly acquiring incoming quality links, adding small amounts of fresh relevant content on a regular basis, using proper keyword density and placement, along with making your site “sticky” so your visitor’s stay longer.

But now, there’s something else that you have to know about!

Google is starting to weigh in heavy on domain names. Not what your domain is, or how long you’ve had it. Google wants to know how long you plan on keeping it, as in, how long is it registered for!

They’ve begun NOT giving as much consideration to domains registered for just a year, thinking they might be spammers, making a quick hit and then they’re out of here. If they see you’re registered for 5 years, then you must be a serious business that has planned on being around for quite a long time.

Helen Thomas, one of the all-time great White House correspondents, would always be chosen by President Reagan to ask questions at press conferences. Here’s why:..She found out that the President had a fondness for the color red. So, Helen started wearing a red blazer to press conferences and he would always pick her out of a press room packed with other reporters.

So, in other words… put a red blazer on your web site, drop £40 registering your domain name for several years and show Google, along with other search engines, you are serious about sticking around and wanting to improve search engine rankings.

The Importance Of Relevant Content on sites that link to you.

There has been a lot of to-ing and fro-ing in the search engine world of late and there are lots of conspiracy theories between SEO ‘ers as to why these things happen.

It is easy as a SEO web master to get caught up in these webs of intrigue.

You get email notes about them, you view so-called ‘ SEO experts’ thoughts on bulletin Boards - hey you probably even read things in newsletter articles!

Well I hope so anyway….

The big drive for SEO web masters currently appears to be content and link building.

While link building is important I don’t believe it makes Queen. Maybe a Prince. Content and links DO go hand in hand but, without relevance, your only building a short term linking strategy that wont affect the relevance of your site to the keywords you want to be listed under.

If your site is about finance, then finance content is best supported by finance link exchanges. Relevance!

If your site is about finance, then finance content supported by casino link exchanges from a PR8 site while in the short term may help,? but all the signs are saying this is not a long term strategy.

Okay, so what is the best strategy?

Keep EVERYTHING relevant. It is that simple.

Make sure that you only swap or link to sites that are relevant to the content on your pages. Yes I am suggesting link exchanging on pages of your site not a links page.

Links pages seem to be being abused. There are rumours that pages called links, resources or partners are not passing
page rank. You could be wasting your time building links that are not giving you any benefits!

Delivering relevant links from relevant content is the future.

Look at sites such as www.bbc.co.uk or www.independent.co.uk. News sites have the right idea. They have 2 or 3 relevant internal links to other articles on the same topic or links to internal tools that are related. These usually can be found at the right hand side of the article.

They also then have web links or external links to sites of interest that are related to the topic. These are relevant!

Another benefit of this is that with a content rich site you can add hundreds of links quite legitimately and really add some value both to your Rankings and your users.

With a content-poor site it is difficult, you have to add link pages or create a links directory. A five page site will need to add 10 or 12 good link pages to compete and even then with algorithm changes, this may not be prudent.

Having a site with 400 pages means you can easily add 3 links per page, so you have 1200 link options straight away.

Hopefully this explains that relevance runs a close second to content.

Always bear in mind when writing SEO content that relevant links will not only boost your search engine rankings, but you will also add a service to your visitors.

The Power of Search Engine Friendly URLs

I recently invested quite some time into generating search engine friendly URLs for several of my websites to increase my ranking and to have more pages indexed. I can highly recommend to look into this if your own website does not have Search Engine friendly URLs. Especially Google (the most important search engine nowadays) can be very picky in regards to URLs that are not Search Engine friendly.
Example (the 2 URLs below bring you to exactly the same page):

http://www.mywebsite.com/ShowCategory.php?CategoryID=13

This URL is not Search Engine friendly and search engines will eventually ignore any page behind it or rank it much lower in search results. Visitors will have difficulties to remember this URL. These kind of URLs often come from dynamic database driven websites. Each page is dynamically created when requested. Look at the forums URL this moment, too. It is dynamically created and not very friendly to search engines or the visitor. You get the idea.

http://www.mywebsite.com/Web-Hosting/

This URL is Search Engine friendly and search engines will spider the page behind it easily. It is keyword enriched to increase search engine ranking. Overall - this URL is easy to be spidered and easy to remember by a visitor.

For one of my own sites I was able to increase the number of pages indexed from 36 to over 150 pages - just by making the URLs search engine friendly. The additional pages were ignored by the search engines because they could not read the URLs properly. The domain used in my example went from 20 pages to 80 within 2 weeks and should go to over 120 pages indexed (by Google) with the next Google update.

How do you make your URLs search engine friendly?

Your web host/web server needs to support the Apache Web Server module “mod_rewrite”. This module allows to rewrite URLs a certain way. By using a “.htaccess” file you can give the web server the necessary commands to work with Search Engine Friendly URLs.

If you need some advice on a host that can provide this service, i would personally reccomend Power-core.co.uk , they are one of the better UK Web Hosts at providing Customers with specific needs. a smaller host is always better for more freedom in website help, a larger host wont waste time on such things, but smaller firms choose to do this to provide a better hosting environment.

How does this really work?

In general - you are faking the nice clean looking URLs and fool search engines and visitors to believe that the URLs of your website are Search Engine Friendly.

Search Engine Friendly URLs work in 2 steps.

1) Your site needs to display the se-friendly URLs.
2) mod_rewrite and htaccess ‘translate’ the Search Engine Friendlyv URL and redirect the traffic to the ugly looking Search Engine Friendly URL in the background (invisible to anyone). You will need to setup the htaccess file with the command how you would like the URL to look like and what does it translate to (a certain ugly looking dynamic URL).

The code that generates the URLs dynamically needs to be adjusted to match the rules from your .htaccess file. You upload the code changes and the htaccess and off you go.

Can every website be modified?

Most websites with dynamic URLs can be modified if the server environment meets the requirements. Each website needs to be looked at separately to get the best results.

The learning curve on creating Search Engine Friendly URLs can be quite challenging. Spend the time and resources on creating Search Engine Friendly URLs. The results can be overwhelming.