SEO Mambo blog | Search Engine Optimization Tips, Tutorials, and Techniques

9 Steps To Improve your Google Page Rankings

noreply@blogger.com (InfoBlogger) — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 03:58:00 +0000

Steps To Improve Google Rankings

Today I wanted to share some basic steps to getting higher Google rankings for your blog.

I have follow these steps combined with My Crazy Simple 7 Step Plan To Promote A New Post steps to rank pretty well over the last 6 months, proof below :)

No one really know what step works best or what steps Google puts more weight on, but what I do know, is if you do them all you will see your blog ranking higher.

These are the 9 Steps I believe matter most when you want to boost your Google rankings.

1.Use Keywords In Title Tags.

Probably the most important and simplest

thing to do no matter what niche your blog is in. Your title tag must be consistent with content in the page or post for best results. This is a

“less is more” kinda thing, since having to many keywords in your title tag will have a negative effect.

2. Create Quality Anchor Text.

SEO professionals believe that having quality anchor text links coming into your blog is important and I agree with them. Since that is the link people chose to click to come to your blog. Keep your anchor text targeted to the page the link is going to.

If your anchor text link is for SEO Tips, then you want to make sure the page they go too is about SEO Tips.

3. Increase Link Popularity.

Link popularity basically means, how many links you have coming into your blog. The more incoming links you have the higher your Google rankings will be.

But, what is more important then the amount, is the quality of those links. Meaning you want to have high PR sites linking to you. So if you’re blog is a PR 2 then you want to share all PR links, but focus more on PR 2 and above.

I seen this in real time, I have about 8500 links coming in, yet I rank higher for many keywords then 2 of my competitors that have 20,000 and 100,000 links coming in..Why is that? Maybe I have more quality links coming in.

So Quantity is good, but Quality links are best.

4. Use Keywords In Body.

Make sure that keywords are within your body, top, middle and bottom. It’s important that the keywords used in HTML text on page match with keywords used in the site’s meta data and title tags.

Again, “less is more” DO NOT stuff keywords, Google will slap you hard for this.

5. Promote Your Internal Links.

Offer links that direct visitors to helpful, related content. This can be as simple as having a related post plugin to share 3-6 related post links after your readers read a post. You can also have links in your sidebar that shares the most important resources with your readers.

Internal linking is important to having your readers easily find the most helpful information quickly, and Google views on-site links as a sign that visitors like what they see and want to learn more.

6. Make Friends Within Your Niche.

Google likes to see links from blogs in your niche. If your blog about blog tips and you share blog tips, then other blogs in your niche will link to you, now if you blog about blog tips, yet you don’t talk about blog tips, then blogs in your niche will not link to you.

So Google views this as proof that you’re a good resource for blog tips, and a good place to send searchers to get more info on blog tips.

7. Hold Onto Old Links.

Google likes old links from one site to another, it shows a happy relationship between sites. The older the link, the more trust it has. Usually it takes 3-4 months for Google to see that link as a long term happy relationship.

8. Drop Your Page Load Time

This is become a big thing lately, getting your blogs page load time down as low as you can will make your visitors happy and now it makes Google happy. Having a page load time of under 3 sec seems to be a all around good time.

Again Google likes blogs that offer value to readers, the more value you offer the better your Google rankings. No one knows how important this is in rankings, but we do know it is now a criteria they look at, so why not drop your load time.

9. The Longer You’re Here, The Better.

The longer your blog has been online the better, I noticed a small difference in my rankings when my blog past the 1 year mark.

So be patient, if you can get past that one year mark, your rankings will get better.

How to use Meta Tags for Blog and Website Optimization

noreply@blogger.com (InfoBlogger) — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 03:33:00 +0000

Preparing your web pages with meta tags for effective search engine submission and ranking

Using MATA TAGS is the most important step in Search Engine submission. A Meta Tag is a special HTML tag that provides information about a Web page. It provides information such as who created the page, how often it is updated, what the page is about, and which keywords represent the page's content. Many search engines use this information when building their indices. The most important meta tags you need to focus on are the Title, Keywords and Description tags. So, lets get right into it!

Step 1: Prepare a list of Keywords and Key Phrases

What are Keywords?

Keywords are words that your customers would enter into a search engine to find your site. E.g. while searching for a web developer you would type 'web developers' , 'web designers' , 'web development companies' , 'web site development' as possible keyword searches.

Guidelines while preparing your keywords

1. Make a list of your target audiences - This must include all possibilities. Compiling a list of your target audience will help you know what they are searching for in search engines. E.g. Small businessmen, fellow web developers, corporates, professionals. Each of these target audiences will have different needs and interests which you should address in your web site.

2. While keeping in mind your target audience, make a list of keywords and key phrases that describe your site. Put yourself in their shoes and think of the words they would type in a search engine to find you.

3. Come up with as many keywords and key phrases as you can.

o As in the example I gave above, I would put 'web designers', 'web site development' , 'global web development', 'professional web developers', 'web promotion' ,'dynamic web site development' as possible key phrases.

o Use plurals - e.g. 'web developer', 'web developers'

o Use important words in different forms - e.g. 'develop web sites', 'web site developers' , 'web-site development' , 'developing web sites'

o Don't use the same word more than 4 times. Try using it in different forms instead. E.g. web site, web-site, web sites. Using the same keyword more than 4 times may be considered spamming in some search engines and may cause you to be blacklisted.

4. Keep your keywords meta tag length between 200 and 500 characters.

Step 2: Deciding on your Title and Description

What is a Title and Description?

Title - This is what appears on the title bar when you open a web site. This is also the link you see in the search results page of any search engine.

Description - This is the description of the site (1-2 lines) which appears along with the title in the search results page.

An example of a Title and Description

Title - Web site design and development, DHTML, Flash, Promotion

Description - Developing creative, innovative and cost-effective static and dynamic web sites. We believe in making your business succeed online by expanding your business to the Global Marketplace, find out what makes us so unique.

Guidelines while deciding on your title and description

* The golden rule while preparing your pages for search engine submission is that all your important keywords should appear in your title, description and content of your web page.

* Make sure that your title and description is populated with your most important keywords. At the same time it should be a 'grabber', as your potential clients will read your title and description and based on that synopsis of your site, decide to click and enter your site. Make sure that they are catchy and grab a person's attention.

* Keep your title between 15 and 20 words and your description between 100 and 200 characters.

While preparing your web pages remember to also use your important keywords in your alt tags. Some search engines also index the alt tags. An alt tag is a name given to an image that is used in your site. You can see a sample of an alt tag by pointing your cursor entheosweb.com on this page. In a second you'll see a box appear below. That's the alt tag. Don't underestimate its importance.

The next (optional) step in search engine submission is to use free online tools to make sure that your site does not have any spelling mistakes, dead links, HTML and browser compatibility problems. These tools also test your site loading time and give your site an overall ranking. They are very useful and will take only a minute of your time. This will ensure that your site is ready to be submitted to the search engines.

How to optimize your blog for better search engine ranking

noreply@blogger.com (InfoBlogger) — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 09:26:00 +0000

Basically, a BLOG is just a website that uses a content management system, so most standard SEO tactics apply. There are also optimization tactics specific to blogs.

Why optimize your blog?

Increase rankings of the blog on BOTH regular search engines as well as blog/RSS search engines
Increase traffic to the blog from multiple sources such as social search (Yahoo MyWeb, Google Personalized Search) and social bookmarking sites (del.icio.us, Digg, Furl or Blogmarks)

Consider keywords when writing your blog post titles. Some blog software allows plugins that can suggest keywords. Otherwise, you can use Google Suggest or one of these free keyword suggestion tools: Digital Point, SEO Book or Google AdWords Keyword Tool. Keywords should NOT determine your content (unless it’s an AdSense blog).

Optimize the template. Make sure post titles appear in the title tag and append the title tag (hard code) with the most important phrase for your blog.
Example: ” Interview with Brett Tabke – Online Marketing Blog”
Online Marketing Blog is included on every blog post title tag automatically.
Also use the blog post title as the permalink. If you’re using keywords in the blog post title, then they will occur as anchor text in the permanent post link. While you’re at it, just make the post title a permalink.

Make it easy for your blog readers to subscribe and include RSS feed subscription buttons or “chicklets” in a side bar or on a dedicated Subscription Info page. Here’s a handy RSS Feed Button creation tool.

Optimize Categories. When you create categories for your blog, be sure to consider keywords in the titles. When you post, be sure to default to a general category that is relevant no matter what the post is about. Choose multiple categories on each post when appropriate.
Social bookmarking sites can be excellent sources of traffic to your blog, so be sure to make it easy for readers to bookmark your blog posts. You can do this by adding some code to your blog template for each of the major social bookmarking sites. Here’s a tool for social bookmarking links. Here’s another tool that uses icons instead of text links.

Submit your blog to RSS and Blog directories. Also submit the blog to regular directories such as (DMOZ, JoeAnt, GoGuides, MSN Business Central, etc) that have categories for blogs.

Ping the major RSS feed and Blog search engines each time you post. This can be configured with blog software such as Movable Type or WordPress to work automatically. If you’re using Blogger.com, then you can do this manually with Pingomatic or Pingoat.
Comments and Trackbacks – Be sure your blog software is configured to send a trackback ping to blogs that you cite within your posts. Pay attention to press releases distributed by PRWeb. If you cite a release, and ping the trackback link, the press release will in turn link to your blog. This is better for driving traffic than for link popularity.
Make useful comments on other blogs. Your name will be linked to the blog url that you enter. Do NOT make comments that offer no value to the blog post. Do NOT use keywords in the field for your name, use your name or blog name.
Offer RSS to Email. Almost 30% of our blog traffic comes from readers that perfer to read blog posts via email. There are several free services available for this including: FeedBlitz (what we use), Squeet, Zookoda (this one is more for using blog posts as a weekly newsletter), RMail and Bloglet.

No matter how many optimization tactics you employ on a blog, there is no substitute for quality content. Blog optimization is only as effective as the quality and usefulness of the content you’re optimizing.

Essential Search Engine Optimization Tips, Tricks, and Techniques

noreply@blogger.com (InfoBlogger) — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 08:44:00 +0000

SEO also known as Search Engine Optimization is the art of sculpting an eye catching, awe inspiring, technically sound master piece in the middle of nowhere and creating carrot trails to lead to it!

Yes, Sub folders (Subdirectories) are better! Sub domains are history, according to a recent announcement by Google: They will only permit two sub domains per domain if the content on the sub domain is not above a threshold in uniqueness, independence and index-ability.
I have had the pleasure of flooding the first page of Google, MSN and more recently Bing! Hundreds dozens of times with hundreds of keyword stuffed sub domains before finally getting penalized and delisted for spamming, but it was well worth the quick buck!

Search Engine Spammers are always looking for a way to flick a switch and generate content in such a way that defeats the current spam checking mechanism of the indexing bots in order to get hundreds of thousands of pages indexed. Just such a way “was” dynamically generated sub domains, until the recent past, this technique was used to lay emphasis on the keyword at the very beginning of the page’s URL. I am by no means suggesting that this was all it took, but it sure was one dirty little trick to get ranked higher!
Sub folders or directories on any website have an aura saying “I am a part of this domain; I am a section that holds a lot of information about the topic” Google and Followers have finally realized that sub domains are not nearly as related to the domain as are subfolders (they did realize this, but now they are actually putting their knowledge to practice).
Hopefully, you realize that SEO is not science, but that does not mean that there are no techniques that involved that need to be employed. You should also understand that SEO is done per page basis of a website, the more the pages the more you will have to delve deeper. It is always better to derive common patterns and make use of server side technologies to do most of the work for you. I am assuming you already have a sitemap of your site and in case you don’t, don’t worry just Google up the term Google sitemap generator and you will have your sitemap in no time.
Ok, enough with the chit chat, let’s get down to business. First off let me just walk you through a quick step-by-step guide to reaching the first page on Google (the original key phrase and the site name has been changed due to privacy issues). Please do note that this may not work with all keyword composite phrase but in most cases it is a sure fire.
I am going to keep this really short, sweet, to the point and as summarized as I possibly can.

Onsite SEO Tips, Tricks & Techniques

By Onsite SEO I am referring to what needs to be done on ‘your site’, and by ‘the page’ we will refer to the page that needs to be in the top results of the search engine in question. Forget about using single word keyword, a phrase of two, three or four keywords arranged in a meaningful way is the new standard ‘keyword’.

High Page Rank (PR) link

Tip: Find the page with the highest page rank on your website (usually the first page or the homepage but can be a page where you have more relevant content) and place a link of ‘the page’ in the top 1/3 portion of the page.
Trick: You can Google for a PR checker and find thousands of websites that do a rank check if you provide them with the page URL, but suppose your site, like most of my client websites are more than a thousand pages, what do you do? Do you have an entire day to waste at the first step? Try this great time saver by ‘BTHOMSON’ (http://pagerank.bthomson.com/ ). Just upload your entire sitemap and you will get the page rank of every single page!
Technique: Search Engines dilute or pass on a factor of the page rank to the links from that page, don’t worry if all your pages have the same PR, or are not ranked yet, just place a link on the first page.

Hierarchy/Position/Name of ‘the page’

Tip: Place ‘the page’ being optimized on the same level (the same directory) as the high PR page and name the page as a slug of your key phrase (Ex: Keyword “Doctors in Dubai” Slug 1 “Doctors-Dubai” Slug2 “DoctorsDubai”), if that is not possible for some odd reason; place it directly underneath this level (subdirectory).
Trick: Search Engines do a pretty good job with breaking apart words from slugs. Just in case your keywords when slugged without ‘-‘, either look odd or mean something else as well just Google up the term, if in the “did you mean” you see your phrase that means your slug is ok! Otherwise use dashes between the keywords. Yes, Dashes are better than Underscores.
Technique: It is better if the page is in the root directory because the keyword will appear sooner in the URL. Dashes have always been more often used in file names and in breaking words in normal literature. Search engines recognize this, it is only a very slight advantage but why overlook even the minutest of details.

Page Title

Tip: Page title is like the punch line on an ad! If it does not prompt action or does not convey the message than you can pretty much invent a time machine and travel to the future to see yourself as the last visitor to your page ages ago. The title should be Relevant, Less than 90 characters, Title Case (Proper Case), Action Oriented and Meaningful. The title should be enticing and exciting yet it should not seem like a coffee’s commercial.
Trick: Use your strongest keyword first, use words like ‘find, locate, increase, view, uncover, buy etc.” to encourage action, Use Title Case for Titles (that’s what it is for!), don’t exceed 72 characters 65 is optimal including spaces, you might find your listing in the search results (SERP) as “…Buy a Wooden Ass…” instead of “Locate a Local Manufacturer and Buy a Wooden Assembly Doll House”
Technique: Search Engines Use Stemming to find similar words, in order to find out which of your keywords is the strongest, use Google’s traffic estimator tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/TrafficEstimatorSandbox ) use Google’s Keyword Relevancy tool to determine the relevancy of a particular set of keywords for the page (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal )

Page Meta Description

Tip: This is the text that (most often) appears right below the title of your listing on the search engine result page (SERP), Make sure it has your main keyword as close to the start as possible, Keep it less than 156 characters. Actionable, to the point, a “voila feel” imparting statement is best. Readable, can be proper case.
Trick: Try searching for your competitors and see what they wrote, don’t start copy pasting just yet, it’s not that easy. Look for the common among the top results; you need these words to establish your page as ‘amongst its equals’. 150 characters is the optimal length including spaces. Never have a grammatical mistake in the description Search Engines hate bad grammar! And so do most of us! We just don’t see a professional website as a professional website if it has grammatical or typo errors! Try looking at the “Searches related to” they always come in handy.
Technique: Search Engines either display the page’s text content or the Meta description, never both. They decide on which one to show based on the occurrence of relevant keywords in the description, they highlight parts of the description and title in bold if it matches the users query. If a user finds a bold in the title and in the description, it is really hard for them not to click!

Page Meta Keywords

Tip: 7-9 Keywords/Phrases Maximum. A Composite of 2-4 words, Relevant, Strongest First, Must be used on the page, Preferably Better than competitors, No long descriptions, No stop words included.
Trick: Pick a keyword! Search for it, open up the first 10 pages, collect their distinct Meta keywords. Open your page’s textural content, see if your content has those words, if it does not; place them in your content. Pick 7-9 Keywords that are common in your content and the collection.
Technique: Even though most search engines officially do not use this tag to position a page, they never say that they do not use this tag to evaluate the page.

Page Creation Date

Tip: Use the page creation date and last modified date in the Meta as well as imitate a news post by placing a <!—MM/DD/YYY–> between the </head> and <body> tag.

Trick: Google and Bing will pick up these posts like news if they crawl or index the page within a short span of this date. Better yet, you can actually dynamically put ‘today’ Date in both these fields as well as the date comment between the head and the body tags.
Technique: Latest and Updated content is what everyone including the search engines prefer! You would not want to see a page created in 2002 that says ‘latest trends in footwear’ or a page with information about the new initiatives and research in a medical field that was created in the last century. If we are not looking to right a historical document, we are all looking for online is what is ‘recent’, ‘latest’ or ‘current’. This is exactly the philosophy that search engines seem to try to satisfy.

Headings

Tip: Use H1 as close to the top of the page as possible, Nest it with one or more H2 and each of those with one or more H3. This will show that your content is very well defined and structured. Use strong keywords in all headings.
Trick: If you have a page that does not follow this pattern or if you can’t use this on your layout or you do not have enough content or even if it makes your content look bad; just make a CSS class that resembles normal content text Ex: if you are using Verdana 12px as your default font just make a class with exactly that specification, and set the font-weight to normal, reset the margins and padding as well as the line height and letter spacing. Apply this class to all H1, H2 and H3. Create another class that resets the inherent properties of a <p> ‘paragraph’ tag and renders it very similar to a <span>. Apply it to the <p> elements within your structure. Now for the application:
<H1>Search Engine Optimization</H1>
<p>
Is the process of creating a …
</p>
<p>
In simple words it is…
</p>
<H2> Elements of SEO <H2> are innumerable but…
I think you get the idea…
The above will be rendered as a plain text if you get everything right, which will not take much of your Layouts real-estate and will do the job.
Technique: Presumably a well defined structure to a document dictates that the content is well formed and easier to read with more precisely focused information within each division of the headings hierarchy.

Keyword Garnishing & Emphasis

Tip: Let us assume you already have a page that has approx 250-300 words as content. It should have all the keywords that you are targeting for this page evenly spread out throughout the page (don’t worry if you don’t have one yet, you can make one with this in mind).
Trick: Take a screenshot of the page and get a print, highlight the keywords that are already on the page. From a reference list of the keywords that you will be targeting for this page, mark out the ones that are not in your content. Now make simple sentences that follow the flow of your content using these keywords and place them where you see less of a cluster in your highlights.
Technique: Keyword density is one of the most important factors of getting a page ranked and listed higher in SERP. Simply put, Higher the density of targeted keywords, higher the potential rank for that particular area of your virtual real-estate. Mostly when we start to write content we have all aspects of the quality and SEO in mind but as soon as we go past the 100 words barrier we tend to loosen up on the technical aspects and we start focusing on the communicational aspects, this is alright as long as you don’t want anyone to read what you write but from Search Engines Optimization point of view, you definitely need to give it a technical revision over and over again. While evaluating content, a page that has the searchers desired keyword and/or related keywords spread over the entire document will have more weightage then a page that has or talks about the search term just in the beginning or just at the end or just in the middle.

Anchor Text

Tip: Hyperlink the evenly spread out keywords as Anchor text in your content to other areas of your site with similar content or internal FAQ or dictionary references.
Trick: You can either do a manual linking for each keyword or you can dynamically link all the keywords in your content to do a ‘search’ on your site. It will show relevant results keep the flow of the website and encourage page views. A word of caution: Do not and I repeat do not bombard your user with popup boxes, or fancy sliders and do not use JavaScript to perform the linking on the clients side, and limit the number of links from the page to less than 90 overall.
Technique: The web is a super-interconnected content library, bots and people alike love to surf and bounce around. This is only possible with the use of hyperlinks (one form or the other). Most people start from a search engine and after a short trip end up at the same one. The objective is to create a page that entices the users to delve deeper virtually lengthening their journey between the inevitable end points, that is the philosophy for most social networks (if you consider them to be closed systems in isolation) Anchor text is relevant in exactly this sense, it relates pages with a relevant context.

Alternate Text and Link Titles

Tip: ‘ALT’ attribute is almost obsolete in relative terms for modern browsers, ‘ALT’ is a must for images and ‘TITLE’ is a must for images as well as links. Use keywords close to the links or images in these tags.
Trick: If you are displaying the information about your product don’t just put ‘buy now’ in the title of your image or link proceeding to the buy page, you are wasting an opportunity to plant a keyword. Instead place an actionable keyword before, between or after the ‘buy now’ tip. Ex: If you are selling an e-book try using ‘Advanced SEO Tips – Buy Now’ as the Title and the ‘ALT’ the dual purpose text will allow for better understanding when images are turned off as well as give your page higher (virtual) keyword density.
Technique: Have you ever seen images showing up in the first few lines of something that you searched for on Google, This is exactly what they index to accomplish it. If your tip matches what the user is searching for it will be evaluated, both your page and the image will be rewarded for it.

Lists

Tip: Using unordered lists or ordered lists are very similar to using nested headings, as their purpose is to present to the point structured information to the user. Use lists roughly half way in your content, every point with one or two keywords. Do not finish your content off with a list; try to have at least a couple of lines as a conclusion to your list.
Trick: A table of contents is a list, or if the content has ‘tags’ associated you can display them using lists. You need to remember that lists can be virtually displayed in any way you want them to; they can be set to be rendered as plain text if that is what is required.
Technique: A list is most often used to pre-seed a users mind with concise information that they user will look forward to, or to provide point-to-point briefs of the subject. Search Engines use lists to determine establish relevancy of the content in the context of the list as well as the entire page.

Address Field Trick

Tip: Using the address field shows the ownership of the document to the Address in the field. You can establish a stronger reference to your company’s name by using this field (or to any other company for that matter).
Trick: Your content is about a company’s product usage tutorial, just use the address field to articulate the content to the ownership of that company. Need I say more? It’s not a major boost and is neglected more than it should be, but is worth the effort.
Technique: Address fields are not authentication by any means, but using this field does propose a stronger reference to the company relevant to the subject, besides that you have an additional place to place your keywords.

External References

Tip: Strong external references mean the world of a difference to a page, if you can establish references or links coming in from PR4+ websites, your page will be rewarded generously. Please note that link farms are not good sources of page repute.
Trick: Good quality content and lots of man hours submitting your article or product reference to the right places, there is no shortcut for quality references but you can improve the odds of getting a good external link by posting articles or their references directly in paid directories like YAHOO or human edited directories like DMOZ and online Article Sites and Wiki’s.
Technique: The PR system intentionally delegates the page rank of one page to all pages linked from it. Consider it like a high class shopping district, everyone affiliated will automatically get ‘some’ good repute.

Internal References

Tip: Use internal links wisely, pages that link to low PR pages on your website tend to dilute their own relevance.
Trick: Internal links to the strongest (PR Wise) pages on the website will establish a firm nesting for the page. If you’re pages are of low PR, minimize internal links. If they are of High PR establish dense interweaving.
Technique: PR dilution and delegation occurs much the same way for internal links as it does for external links. Strong references are rewarded by the Search Engines and weak references are fatal.

URL Rewriting

Tip: Use short understandable, keyword rich, Emphasize minimal Query String usage (visible), well structured and slugged URL’s.
Trick: Query Strings and poorly nested or structured pages within directories, folders or applications is one of the biggest disasters, it cripples and hinders a Search Engines ability to index your website and the potential pages within. Use keywords and imitate a filename instead of a parameter. Use MODREWRITE or URLREWRITING modules, controls and filters to your advantage, A Structure like http://doctor-dubai.com/directory/hospitals/Zulekha-Hospital.aspx is stronger than http://doctor-dubai.com/directory.aspx?category=hospitals&name=Zulekha-Hospital
Technique: Subdirectories and folders indicate structure and hierarchical, Search Engines love a well defined hierarchy, a definite structure and URL’s without the infamous ‘?’ question mark.

JavaScript, Flash & Misc Irritators

Tip: Do not load content that needs to be indexed by using Client Side Scripts, From an SEO’s point of view that is just murdering your page. Do not use Flash for text that can be displayed otherwise. Never use text in images if by any means you can do otherwise.
Trick: Put the text where it belongs, in your content. Images are for, well, images. Use overlapping DIV’s to place text on Image backgrounds, Load content text from the server side, not the client side. You can use absolutely place DIV over flash as well.
Technique: Even though efforts are being made to index text in images by search engines, it is hard for them to do so and is a long way off the front line. Efforts have been made in indexing AJAX enabled content but since the technology lacks standardization, it is really difficult for the search engines to establish the flow of data and its rightful position in the hierarchy of DOM. Adobe is helping Google and other Search Engines establish a firm indexing system for Flash content but it is still an initiative that requires a lot of time to be anywhere nearly as index able and searchable as plain old text.

Duplicate Title & Description Fix

Tip: Never have Duplicate Titles or Descriptions let alone content. Use page numbers and misc parameters to your advantage.
Trick: Most websites with search results pages will get higher listings in the Search Engines Results Pages if they use searched terms, page numbers and misc parameters to the results page in the title and the description of the page. This is a sure fire way of reducing if not eliminating duplicate titles and descriptions. Imagine how you would perceive two pages with the same title ‘Medical Survey’. Is the title meaningful? Yes! But does it tell you what it actually is? Use keywords in the title to differentiate pages. If there is no possibility of avoiding duplicate phrases, put in page numbers and misc parameters.
Technique: Pages that do not provide a meaningful context in the title to the proceedings are as ambiguous to the Search Engines as they are to the users.

Offsite SEO Tips, Tricks & Techniques

Links

Tip: Use well structured links on the right and relevant pages to refer to your page. A well formed link is like an ad and it costs you nothing.
Trick: Use Strong keywords and preferably parts of your pages title in the links from external sites, use titles if they allow you to. Links from “NOFOLLOW” website only mean little to the search engines. Try gathering links from websites that do not have such relations defined for external links. Do not use Query String parameters in your links; making use of URL Re-righting can help you do this.
Technique: PR dilution does not occur if a “rel=nofollow” tag is emphasized for external or internal links. Search Engines use such measures to allow the webmaster to take some degree of control over who gets to benefit from their websites rank.

Anchor Text

Tip: Choose a keyword for your external link that is weighed highly by the referring page and is preferable weighed strongly on your page as well. Make the anchor text ‘Actionable’. Don’t sound like a freebie, don’t advertise yourself. Make your contribution valuable.
Trick: Try using action oriented words (verbs) like ‘Find, View etc. If the page that is going to refer to your page is about ‘hazards of smoking’ then your page should be relevant to the context and your anchor text should be something like ‘View Hoax Medical College Research – Tobacco usage and Teen Smoking’
Technique: Anchor text is the first impression of your page to a particular instance of the Search Engine’s bot. It will evaluate your page based on this context.

Link Proximity to Keywords

Tip: Place your link near strong keywords for your page. If your link is to an article about Search Engine Optimization VS Optimizing User Experience then the preceding and follow up text should use keywords related to the topic.
Trick: Make use of sentences that you make from a list of keywords for your page. These will establish and increased relevance of your link to your content.
Technique: Keyword proximity is used by Search Engines to establish SPAM VS TRUE CONTENT. In early days, when such filters were not used a spammer could potentially use pretty much “ “ a blank space to create a link with gibberish text all around from a number of sources.

Social Bookmarks

Tip: The world is going social and this is your opportunity to access more parts of the world than ever before. Get on twitter, start tweeting about your product, Make a Facebook Fan page even if you are the only fan, start social bookmarking. Delicious, Digg and Stumbleupon are a good place to start.
Trick: Creating Fan Page and a Twitter blog are just the start, if you really want to run with it; ask all your friends to become a fan, ask everyone you know to socially bookmark it and place easily accessible bookmark links on your pages as well. Try focusing on one page at a time bookmark it everywhere and then move to the next one.
Technique: Social bookmarks are one strong PR links that not only send visitors to your site, but send strong reference to your pages as well. The more links you have the more you increase your PR.

Free Press Release

Tip: Submit a Free Press Release about latest Company, Event, Product developments regularly. By Regularly I mean even weekly.
Trick: Create a template for your Press Release and Schedule a weekly press release about anything that needs to be shared or is relevant to content on your page, create specially crafted landing pages to welcome the referred visitors. Press Releases are not only an advertising medium they are a source of free traffic as well has a few qualified links each. If someone big notices your release, you will be off to head start.

Technique: Hiring a professionals help is never a bad thing, but if you are looking into writing yourself than I suggest you do read the guidelines and tutorials on writing a press release. Imagine if your press release can make it onto Google or similar companies News! You get a permanent link from a highly respected website and all the exposure that you have been working so hard for.

How to Maximize WordPress Search Engine Optimization

noreply@blogger.com (InfoBlogger) — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 09:34:00 +0000

WordPress is a free, Web-based software program that anyone can use to build and maintain a website or blog. It was originally intended as an easy way to set up a blog. But, thanks to the efforts of a large “open source” community of WordPress programmers working to extend and improve its capabilities, WordPress has become much more than just a tool for bloggers.

WordPress is really a “content management system” - CMS, which means that it can be used to run full-sized, social media-rich business websites.

WordPress tends to be the one that many finally decide on. So what makes the WordPress CMS so different? To begin with, it is effective when building a site that you hope will deliver a very high impact. Simple to employ, it creates professional work every time. WordPress delivers the biggest advantage by helping you when it comes to attracting a much higher quantity of visitors towards your website. When you want to boost your search engine rankings, you want the type of features that come bundled in WordPress. However, you must understand how to best use WordPress SEO in order to maximize your success. Your WordPress blog has certain settings that need to be toggled in order to get the most out of what it can do for you. The odds of securing the upper placements from the great search engines, such as Google, rapidly go up once you concentrate on perfecting the tiny, yet critical, details. While most types of traffic that your website receives will be beneficial, this article will help you discover why utilizing the SEO benefits of WordPress will increase free, organic traffic from web searches.

The post title is the most important part of your WordPress blog when dealing with SEO, which is why it’s important to structure it the right way with targeted keywords. Such keywords must be involved in the comments of your post, and not just used in the titles. Your titles have to be unique and shouldn’t be repeated anywhere on your site because if they are, then the search engine’s would be confused when ranking your pages. Before you write your post titles, keep a list of keywords that are relevant to your site on hand which you can choose from. In addition to employing keywords that are specifically targeted, the title of your post needs to be inviting and exciting. When your potential visitor first sees your site link in the search engine results, your post title will be the very first thing that they’ll notice. Titles should be reader friendly and simple to comprehend. You can’t be vague with your titles, be very clear so that you achieve your objective easily.

You want to get indexed by Google? The best way to guarantee that is to have a Sitemap. Your indexing process will be able go much more quickly if you choose to utilize a plug-in for generating your Google Sitemap listing. This enables Google to easily find all of your site’s pages. It is also important to ping your news to other websites whenever you add new content to your site. When your posts are linked back by another blogger, you get some targeted visitors. The exposure from that is explosive and incredible. So take advantage of that. Whenever you post, ping immediately afterward.

When you write some new content, if it has any bearing on earlier material, then link to it. This will keep older content active and also help new visitors. To do this effectively, you can use a plug-in which will list related posts under each new post. Additionally, the number of related posts can be changed; this will give the search engines a more efficient way to archive your content.

If your goals are to have both your readers and the search engines happy, just be sure to use the tips offered in this article. I have created WordPress blogs for both fertility acupuncture San Francisco and for auto glass replacement with fantastic results. For useful knowledge and insight in the sphere of getting free website traffic – make sure to follow all the advice given. The time has come when proper information is really at your fingertips, do not miss out – take advantage fo the opportunity.

Search Engine Optimization Facts you must know

noreply@blogger.com (InfoBlogger) — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 06:37:00 +0000

Last few days, I was highly active in forums to know what bloggers asking about Search Engine Optimization . Then I came to know that bloggers were worrying about SEO and even opening threads for very basic SEO questions as mysterious things.

Now I have come quickly from there and writing this to you so that you can all get benefit & more search engine love.

1. How to optimize my blog images for search engines?

This is what the question I found many times in forums. A quick answer is, Give at least “Alt tags”, if you want to optimize your images for search engine. You can add captions and descriptions also for your images. In many cases, it is enough.

From Google, Below are some of the ideas to do image SEO:

Save the images with the relevant name. Don’t use numbers or irrelevant names.

Relevant Alt tag

Make sure to place the images near the relevant text.

If you want to optimize images further, you may even create an image sitemap and submit it to Google.

Haven’t heard about image sitemaps before? Google takes care about every bit part of your blog. Normally Google crawlers seeing our blog pages in just text version. But nowadays, blogs and websites show their content in audio, video and image formats. People more likely want to get their content in video & picture format. So that Google too.

If you create and submit video sitemap, Google crawls immediately and show your videos as video results in Google SERP. Same like that, you can create image sitemaps also. (You no need to create separate images like video sitemap. You can add your image details to your normal sitemap).

Anyway, make sure at least you provide alt tags for your images.

2. Do-Follow Comments in Blogs:

Can I make my blog Do Follow? Can I comment on Do-follow blogs? What the heck is this Do follow?

I see many questions such above arise everywhere. You can make your comments as Do-follow. It encourages others to leave a comment in your blog. Bloggers comment on your blog for the sake of Do-follow. After particular time, once your blog grown, if you turn back all comments to No follow, will it be a cheat? J If you promise your readers then keep your promise always.

Google Engineer Matt Cutts says here about using Do-follow comments in your blogs. If your commentator has spammy content or low quality content, then in most cases there may be a chance your do follow blog may loss reputation in search engine eyes. He also instructs you whether you should comment on do-follow blogs or not. He says that do follow blogs get more comments so the page rank juice passes through every blog link is low and you won’t get page rank as you would like.

3. How should I give Meta tags and Meta descriptions for all posts?

I often see many bloggers obsessed with these meta details. Trust me, there is no trick or best SEO practice you can do with meta data. Google evolved much in past years. Google doesn’t believe what you give in meta data.

Does Google Consider your meta keywords?

Google officially announced that meta keywords did not consider in ranking. But Google takes and uses your meta to show in Google SERP only if it finds your provided meta tags are much relevant and useful. There is no way that you as a webmaster can completely control that. So spending time on creating meta tags is not helpful in anyway.

4. I am getting fewer visits from Google. Why?

There can be many reasons. You may write fewer words in post. You may write non-unique content. You many write in competitive niche. You might be blocked search engines some way.

To receive traffic from Google:

Submit your blog in Google webmasters and keep looking daily whether your newer pages get indexed or not. If not, seek for reason. If your content blocked by robots file, Google webmasters will identify and show it.
Write focused content. Don’t write about everything you see. If you write in narrow niche, you soon start receiving huge visits from search engine.

5. Off Page Search Engine Optimization - SEO

Generally speaking, building backlinks is often called as off page SEO.

Off page seo is not a bloggers thing. You should not worry about off page SEO much. Off page seo only important for small business blogs & local business blogs.

If you write quality content in less saturated niche, you will get backlinks soon. It will boost your blog SEO. As a blogger, you can do something for off page SEO like writing guest posts & commenting on do follow blogs etc.

Link Building:

Bloggers take effort on building links. I know it is everyone’s dream, getting backlinks from all over online. Backlinks are the votes to rank high in search engines & even blog directories like Technorati. Link building can not easily achievable one.

Matt Cutts, who has been ranked recently in Top 10 SEOs in world, was asked about some link building techniques other than writing great content. He shared techniques but those techniques were just as we heard before from somewhere.

Why I am telling this is, there are no other great technique than writing best content. You may write resource contents, list posts or controversial topics as Matt Cutts recommended.

Often bloggers go for link exchange. Don’t get caught.

Don’t beg for links.

6. On Page Search Engine Optimization - SEO

Writing effective post titles, urls, keyword rich content often come as main issues in on page seo. Bloggers should write title and content for humans. Once you wrote whole post for humans instead search engines, search for how many times your important keyword available in your post. Many times. I checked it my posts. When you write content for humans and in focused niche, your content automatically becomes keyword rich content.

When we talk about on page SEO, surely we should talk about using links. As I told in second part of this SEO series, we should use interlinks and outgoing links only if it can be useful to readers.

Final Thought:

Bloggers should follow whitehat SEO techniques.

Bloggers should concentrate on what not to do than what to do.

Always learn from right SEO expert.

Link Building is the Key to SEO Success

noreply@blogger.com (InfoBlogger) — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 03:46:00 +0000

Note: In this post I will explain about importance of links aka link building for better Search Engine Optimization aka SEO.

I can see many bloggers have & express different opinions about using links in posts. Links become more important factor for search engines to identify every other page in online.

Especially bloggers should know what the right and wrong usage methods of links to optimize their blog for search engines. I discuss some of my best SEO observations about links.

Links in Blogs:

I think, we can split whole blog links as two.

1. Interlinks.

2. Links to outside blogs and websites.

In this post, I am using the term ‘Anchor text’. Soloseo describes the term as follows.

Anchor text is the visible text of a link. For example, if I was going to link to a friend’s blog, I might use his name for the anchor text.

Check out Todd Malicoat’s blog.

If I wanted to make the most out of my link for Todd, I would use a nice keyword for my anchor text, for example:

Check out Todd Malicoat’s blog on SEO Consulting.

Inter Links: Do’s and Don’ts

Ensure your interlink content is very close and useful to your particular content. When reader often find your interlinks as very useful, they automatically tend to click on your other interlinks.

How to make sure my links are helpful to readers in great way?

1. Don’t choose any text to make it as link, just for the sake of that text has some previously written related post. They distracted to some of your content (it may be good content) from what they really wanted to know. Don’t divert your readers from what they wanted to know. If you divert them, they won’t feel your blog as good one.

Readers become loyal readers only when they get what they really wanted to know not just when you show your other related best content. Instead doing that, link to that related post only if it related to the whole sentence or whole paragraph.

To make it understandable, I created one example here. See this image.

Here I linked the word “submit” to my previous post “How to submit your website in Google webmasters?”. But the whole sentence or whole paragraph do not relate with submitting in Google webmasters. The whole paragraph talks about the importance of submitting videos in youtube. So don’t link a text just for the sake of it has related content.

If your link is not going to elaborate or point out or explain or show example of what your sentence/paragraph talking, then don’t link to that page.

2. Don’t link your content that already known by your reader.

For example, I wrote detailed post about writing video sitemap but if I link the word “sitemap” with the previously written posts about how to create sitemap or how to create sitemap in thesis, there is no use. Because if someone who wants & comes for video sitemap post, then it is sure that he already created normal sitemap.

So when you interlink next time, think of it.

3. Don’t link to category pages and main home page often.

A bad linking strategy that is used by so many small bloggers. They don’t know about Google penalize for linking habitually to their own home pages and category pages. They believe, if they link their home page with popular keywords as anchor text, then Google will consider their blog for that keyword.

A bad guess! This is not 2000. We are in 2010. SEO strategies that were used in 2000 are not going to help you now.

I closely watched some blogs which used this bad interlinking habit, before and after the last page rank update. Some of them stayed in same page rank although they received more backlinks and some of them had gone down in page rank.

I think there is no reason to link home pages from your posts. Although you are talking about your blog, there you will need “your blog name” or “home page” as anchor text. There is no necessary to use any highly populate keyword as anchor text.

Google does not consider the anchor texts to your blog in blind even if it is used by other websites. Google consider it as Google bomb. Then how it is going to believe your own anchor texts pointing to your own blog?

4. Do not use any interlinking Plugins

I can see many blogs, wordpress blogs, use such plugins to automate interlinking process. The first two points I talked above won’t be checked by those plugins. As a human, you can only do best interlinks. You can use such plugins, when such plugins comes with “Artificial Intelligence”.

Outgoing Links: Do’s and Don’ts

Linking out is a great way to add quality to your content. When you link away to useful content, your readers land on-read-get the information they wanted to know. They remember your blog as a valuable one and remember you as a highly knowledgeable blogger.

How to make my Outgoing links as Useful?

* If you write some different “term” that can’t be understandable to your readers, and then link it to wikipedia or online dictionaries.

* If you find any text needs further explanation but you don’t have previously written quality post, then link the text to out.

* Use effective anchor text in outgoing links. Here “effective” stresses that text should attract your readers to know about or could be something reader already wanted to know about.

Do not make these linking mistakes:

* In blogosphere, it is a habit; bloggers always link out to their friends or to make friends. But it is not highly recommended. You should do this with much care. Don’t go over. If your readers don’t find the outgoing link as much useful, they don’t want to check all your links.

* Don’t make often your outgoing links to your own other blogs with popular keywords as anchor text. Google is not dumb enough to believe about what you say. Google can check your often linked-to blog’s domain ownership & server location. If Google finds all your outgoing links are pointing to same owner or same server location, you may get punishment.

Don’t you know Google can check this? Search engine journal lists 200 search engine ranking factors where you can find the domain ownership and domain ip neighbors.

Not linking:

I don’t want to stop talking at last paragraph. There is some more to talk.

Yes. I want to talk about ‘Not linking’. Still don’t get what I want to say?

If you want to mention some other blog, then link to their home page; don’t write as text like this: example.com. When your readers read that post, they will see that you want to mention about that blog but don’t want to link. Your readers will see you as a person who has ego or don’t have generous mind. Don’t loss value in your reader eyes.

Instead of that, if you really don’t want to pass page rank, use no follow in such links.

Some other Google’s thought on Links:

Effectiveness of Footer links.

How to link to a site in that I have personal relationship.

Final Thought:

1. Check all your links. Sometimes you may misspell it. Use broken link checker plugin or Google webmasters crawl errors section to find out your “not found” links.

2. You can’t make fool Google and your readers. So don’t link your home page or category pages or other own blogs often with popular keywords.

3. Use interlinks with much care. Think twice whether your linked to page useful to your readers or not. If you have relevant pages but not much useful, then link to another useful blogs.

4. Read my all posts in this SEO series for bloggers. Subscribe to get the posts straightly into your inbox. Watch my Youtube channel where I stored all the useful stuffs for bloggers.

Top 10 Essential SEO Techniques

noreply@blogger.com (InfoBlogger) — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 09:42:00 +0000

Note: In this post you will learn the top 10 essential Search Engine Optimization ( SEO ) tips and tricks for getting a higher search engine ranking.

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION ( SEO ) is a vast topic. There are whole websites and books out there devoted to the subject. The world of SEO is also constantly changing as search engines tweak their algorithms, and new search engines come and go.

However, there are some timeless Search Engine Optimization techniques that will always come in useful. Here are 10 top SEO tips that you can use to improve your website's ranking on the search engines.

1. Write good content
This is maybe the most important strategy of all. If your pages contain good, relevant, useful content, search engines will be more likely to rank your page higher for relevant searches. As an added benefit, good content will encourage more sites to link to your pages, thereby further increasing your search engine ranking.

It's also good to update your content regularly. Visitors like fresh content, so they will visit your site more often. More visits lead to more links to your content, which ultimately results in more traffic.

2. Do your keyword research
Don't target a keyphrase just because it sounds right to you, or because it gets a lot of searches.

Think about what you ultimately want visitors to do on your site (your conversion goals), then find out what keywords people search for when they want to achieve those goals. Use tools such as Google Analytics to see which keyphrases result in the most goal conversions.

Stay away from 1-word (or possibly even 2-word) keyphrases that have thousands of competitive sites in the search results. Instead, use tools such as Wordtracker and the AdWords Keyword Suggestion tool to find relevant niche keyphrases with high search volume and low competition.

For example, if your online store sells Mega Widgets in the Boston area, target the keyphrase "mega widgets boston", rather than just "widgets".

3. Use your keywords wisely
Once you have a good list of keyphrases, deploy them sensibly throughout your site pages. Make sure you've used your keywords in the following text blocks (these are in rough order of importance, most important first):

The title tag
The h1 and h2 headings in the page
Link text [ in links within the page, and in links from other pages ]
The page URL
Image alt text
Bold and italicised text
Also make sure your keywords have a reasonable density (i.e. they appear fairly often in the above text blocks — but not too often) and prominence (place them near the start of each text block).

Quick Info:
Make sure you use text rather than images in the page where possible. This is particularly true of navigation menus. If you must use an image, make sure it has keyword-rich alt text.

4. Get other sites linking to yours
Most search engines rank sites more highly if they're linked to by other, well-respected sites.

The key here is "well-respected". Just getting linked to from hundreds of reciprocal link pages is not going to do much for your ranking. Target a few relevant, good-quality sites and directories that are full of useful info and rank well on the search engines, and try to get a link back from them.

Some link directories let you submit your site for free, while others require a fee — either one-off, or recurring. While paying for submission can be expensive, it can be worth it, especially if you're running an online store that has a lot of competitors.

Getting links from other high-quality sites can be a challenge. Here are some tips:

Writing good content (see strategy #1) is one of the best long-term strategies for encouraging inbound links.
A "link to this page" function on each page of your site makes it easy for other webmasters and bloggers to link.
Get in touch with the site owner and strike up a friendship. You're much more likely to get a link back from someone who knows you.
If the site in question has useful content relevant to your readers, go ahead and link to that site from your own pages. This in itself might encourage a link back!

5. Structure your site for SEO
Your site structure can play an important part in optimizing your pages. Make sure your pages contain plenty of links to other important pages in your site, and that it's easy to get to all sections of your site via your homepage or navigation menu.

Not only does this make it easier for visitors and search engines to find your content, but it also helps to spread your site's authority score (such as Google PageRank) more evenly throughout your site pages.

A sitemap can really help here, as it lists all your site content on one, easy-to-use page — great for visitors and search engine spiders alike.

6. Analyse your site
It's important to track your site's SEO performance so that you can see if your efforts are paying off. Make use of the many free analysis tools out there, including:

Yahoo! Site Explorer — Lets you find out detailed search-engine-related info on each page of your site, including the most popular pages and the inbound links to each page.
Google Webmaster Tools — Gives you all sorts of details about how Google sees your site, such as problems crawling your pages and suggestions for how to improve your HTML.
Google Analytics — Reports on vital traffic data such as visitors, pageviews, traffic sources, keywords, and lots more. Also lets you set up goals so you can see how well your SEO campaigns are performing.
SEO Book and SEO Chat — these 2 sites offer a large range of free, Web-based SEO tools, many of which give you useful information about how your site is faring in the search results.

7. Keep abreast of the latest SEO news
Search engine algorithms change constantly, and it pays to keep up to date with the latest changes and SEO strategies. The following SEO sites are well worth bookmarking or subscribing to:

Search Engine Watch is a huge SEO resource, including articles and white papers on SEO and SEM (search engine marketing), as well as some busy SEO forums.
Matt Cutts' blog — Matt is a Google engineer, and in his blog he frequently discusses the latest changes at Google that can affect SEO.
Sphinn is a social bookmarking site for SEO topics. Great for finding out what's new and hot in the world of SEO.
SEO Book features a comprehensive, paid SEO training program, a regularly-updated blog, and some handy free SEO tools such as keyword suggesters and rank checkers.
SEO Chat contains a large number of SEO articles, a huge range of free online SEO tools, and a big forum community.

8. Avoid black hat techniques
SEO techniques come in 2 forms:

White hat techniques play by the rules of the search engines, and aim to create high-quality, relevant content.
Black hat techniques attempt to "game" the search engines by using techniques such as keyword stuffing (overusing keywords in a page), hidden text, and cloaking (presenting different versions of a page to real visitors and search engines).
Black hat SEO techniques can sometimes produce a short-term hike in traffic; however such sites invariably get weeded out — or, worse, banned altogether — by the search engines. Black hat SEO simply isn't worth the risk if you want to build a long-term stream of traffic from search engines.

9. Watch out for duplicate content
Search engines dislike pages that basically contain the same content, and will give such pages a lower ranking. Therefore, avoid duplicate content URLs on your site.

Many factors can result in a search engine seeing 2 URLs as duplicates of each other — for example:

Articles republished from other websites
Print-friendly versions of pages (make sure you exclude such pages from search engines with a robots.txt file)
Similar product info pages that contain very little changing content apart from the product name and image
Session IDs in URLs, or other URL parameters that result in different URLs for the same page
Displaying your site at multiple domains — for example, www.example.com and example.com. Choose one domain or the other, then use 301 redirects to ensure that everyone (including search engines) is looking at just the one domain.

10. Don't forget the description and keywords tags
Many webmasters overlook the description and keywords meta tags, but they can give your site the edge over your competitors. Pay attention to these 2 tags in each page.

The description tag should be a useful, compelling summary of your page content. This tag is often used to display a summary of your page in the search results, so it's worth making it keyword-rich and including a call to action.
Most search engines ignore the keywords tag these days; however it doesn't hurt to create one (if nothing else it's another chance to insert your keywords in the page). Some directories also use the keywords tag to classify sites.
Ensure that each page has unique description and keywords tags. If a search engine finds many pages with the same description and keywords, it can see those pages as less important.

Quick Info:
Make sure your description and keywords tags aren't too long — they should be 1 or 2 lines of text.

Search Engine Optimization is always a bit of a guessing game, with search engines changing their ranking algorithms constantly, but these 10 tips and techniques should be useful in any SEO situation. Good luck!

SEO for Beginners - What is Search Engine Optimization?

noreply@blogger.com (InfoBlogger) — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 08:56:00 +0000

Note: This post features an overview about Search Engine Optimization - SEO. It lets explore the basics of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). What is SEO, and how can you get started with improving your website or blog search engine rankings?

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION also known as SEO can seem like a black art to the uninitiated. Many SEO companies promise that your site will get a "top ten ranking" or a "number one position in the search engines". In reality, there are lots of factors that can influence your site's position in search results. What's more, that position can change on a daily basis: you may be number 1 one week, and number 15 the next!

In addition, SEO has a bit of a bad reputation. Many people believe SEO is simply a way to "spam" the search engines; to fool them into including a site in the top ten, even if that site has no useful, relevant content.

However, SEO in its basic form is simply about making it as easy as possible for search engines to find, index, and rank your Web pages based on their content.

This article cuts through the mystery surrounding SEO, and shows how you can start improving your search engine rankings today with some simple, ethical techniques.

How search engines work

Although search engines vary wildly in the details, most engines work in the following basic way:

1.They crawl your site's pages, following links from one page to the next and reading the content of each page.

2.They analyze each page, extracting information such as the page's topic and keywords.

3.They index your pages, which involves storing information about each page in the search engine's index.

4.They return your pages in their search results. When someone searches for something using keywords that match those of a page on your site, the search engine returns a link to that page in the search results.
The key point to understand here is that every search engine's job is to match the search phrase entered by the searcher with the best possible pages in the search results. They do this by looking at the words the searcher enters — the keywords — and comparing them with pages in their index. The pages that the search engine feels most closely match those keywords appear at the top of the search results.

The only way a search engine can do this is by looking at the content of your page - as well as the links that link to the page. Therefore it stands to reason that you should make sure your pages prominently contain the keywords and key phrases that visitors will be typing in when they're searching for your page content. This is the essence of Search Engine Optimization.

Quick Info:
Because search engines are computer programs, they have no idea how your page looks visually. This is why it's important to make sure that your page makes sense on a purely textual level — for example, you need to use alt attributes in your images, otherwise the search engine won't know what your images represent.

Identifying keywords and key phrases

So you know that it's important that your pages contain the keywords that people use to find your type of content. How do you find out what those keywords are?

This is where keyword research comes into play. The idea is to look at each page of your site, as well as your site in general, and identify suitable keywords and key phrases for each page.

Often the main keywords to use will be obvious, and will probably already be in your page content. For example, if you have a page on dog training, the chances are that the keywords "dog training" are somewhere in your page, such as the page title.

However, part of the skill of SEO is using brainstorming to produce a list of related keywords that visitors are likely to use. For example, suitable keywords and key phrases for your dog training page might include:

training dogs
puppy training
training puppies
obedience training for dogs
dog training techniques
...and so on.

Apart from brainstorming keywords yourself, you can use a couple of other techniques: log analysis and keyword suggestion tools.

Looking in your logs

Your traffic logs are a good place to look for keyword ideas. Most logging software and services such as Webalizer, AWStats and Google Analytics can show you what keywords people use to reach your site.

For example, you might find that you get a lot more visitors who are searching for "puppy training" than for "dog training". This might simply mean that your page or site features "puppy training" more prominently in its content. However, it might also mean that there's a higher demand for puppy training than for dog training, in which case it's worth optimizing your page further for the keywords "puppy training".

Using keyword suggestion tools

Keyword suggestion tools let you type in a keyword or key phrase, and they then produce a list of alternative phrases built around that keyword, based on what searchers actually type in. This effectively does the brainstorming for you; you can look through the list and pick the key phrases that most accurately describe your page.

Some popular keyword suggesters include the following:

Wordtracker has a basic free keyword tool, or you can get a free trial of their comprehensive subscription-based tool.
The free Google AdWords Keyword Tool. It's designed to help you choose AdWords keywords, but you can also use it to find keywords for SEO. It reports both the popularity of each phrase as well as how many AdWords advertisers compete for it.
Understanding niche keywords
A big part of successful SEO is understanding the importance of niche keywords. Consider the following two key phrases:

dog training
dog training milwaukee
"dog training milwaukee" is an example of a niche key phrase, because it's much more specific than "dog training".

Obviously a lot more people search for "dog training" than for "dog training milwaukee". However, for this very reason there are lots of websites optimized for the key phrase "dog training", which makes it hard for you to get your site into the top 10 for that phrase.

On the other hand, the number of websites that optimize their pages for the key phrase "dog training milwaukee" is likely to be tiny, so there's not much competition for that phrase. If your dog training service happens to be located in Milwaukee, and you optimize your pages for the phrase "dog training milwaukee", then you have a much better chance of making it into the top 10.

Furthermore, because you're attracting visitors that are actively searching for dog training in Milwaukee, your search traffic is going to be much more targeted, which means you're more likely to get a sale (or a newsletter signup, or whatever the goal of your website is).

Working your keywords into your page
You now know how to choose appropriate keywords and key phrases for each page of your site. How do you actually include them in your pages?

A Web page contains a number of textual areas where you can include your keywords. Search engines give some areas higher priority than others, and the exact weighting also varies from engine to engine. Here's a list of the main areas to insert your keywords, in rough order of weighting (most important first):

Your page title element
Your page's URL
The headings in the page (h1, h2 and so on)
The page's body text
The text inside any links in the page (as well as any links that link to the page)
The alt attributes in your page's img elements
The description and keywords meta elements

Your goal should be to insert your keywords into these areas in a natural way; if it reads oddly then you're probably overdoing it! For example, if you were optimizing your page for the phrases "dog training milwaukee" and "puppy training" then your page's title element might read: "Puppy training and dog training in Milwaukee".

Once you've inserted your keywords, you need to re-upload your site, submit the site to the major search engines (if they don't already list it), then sit back and wait! Monitor your page's position in the search results for your chosen keywords. It can take anything from a couple of days to a few weeks for the position to change.

This article has shown you some of the basic strategies of SEO. You can now get started with improving your site's search engine rankings. While you might not make it to #1 for all your keywords, with these techniques you should at least see some improvement in your traffic levels over time.