|
|
8 Essential SEO techniques
1) Title Tag - The title tag is the most powerful on-site SEO technique you have, so use it creatively! What you place in the title tag should only be one thing, the exact keyword you used for the web page that you are trying to optimize. Every single web page should have it's own title tag.
2) ALT Tags - ALT tags were meant to be for text browsers because the images didn't show in text browsers and the ATL tags would tell the visitor what it's about. You should put your main keyword(s) in the ALT tags, but don't over do it because you could get dropped in the results or even worse banned for life!
3) Link Popularity - Link popularity is the most powerful SEO tool out of all them. Most search engines don't even consider web sites if there is not at least one or two links pointing to the web site. Having another site(s) link to your web site is important when it comes to getting your site a good ranking. Your keywords should be in the links you get and keep the keywords short. When you receive requests for a link exchange, check the site out before linking with them, check for spam (Repeat keywords, hidden text, etc.).
4) Keyword Density - This is also vital and should be used with research. You should use the keyword(s) once in the title tag, once in the heading tag, once in bold text, and get the density between 5% to 20% (Don't over do it!). Also use your keyword(s) both low and high on the web page, keyword(s) should be in the first sentence and in the last one.
5) Page Size - Your web page's speed is important to your visitors and the search engines. Why? Because the robots will be able to spider your web page faster and easier. Try your best to keep your web page over 5k and under 15k in size.
6) Rich Theme - Search engines are looking at themes more and more. Build content (Articles, FAQ, tips, etc.) much as possible and keep the web pages around 200 to 500 words. Create content that's related to your market and link them out to other related content on your site. Try to get 200 web pages or more.
7) Web Site Design - This is also important, if you want to get indexed! Text content should out weigh the HTML content. The pages should validate and be usable in all of today's leading edge browsers. Stay away from flash and Java Script, search engines dislike them both a lot.
8) Insite Cross Linking - This will help you get all of your web pages indexed by the search engines. Your web pages should be no more than three clicks away from the home page. Link to topic related quality content across your site. This will also help build you a better theme through out your web site. On every page you should link back to your home page and your main service(s).
Matt Colyer is the owner of the Superior Webmaster. He also is a php, CGI and ASP developer.
Increase Web Site Sales with a SEO Proposal - Part 1
You can easily get confused by all the search engine optimization companies and SEO experts that offer SEO services. It's hard to know who to trust or what should be included in a SEO proposal. I will endeavor to clarify some of these points for you in this article, so that you can make the best choice when looking for SEO services. I don't profess to be a search engine optimization expert but have attained top rankings for my own site plus some of my web site design clients.
Search Engine Marketing 101: What Search Engines See When They Visit Your Web Site
If you have a Web site, have you ever wondered what a search engine sees when it visits your site to add the site to its index? Do you know that it doesn't see the beautiful graphics or the fancy Web design? Do you know that it only sees the source code, or the "skeleton" of your Web site?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - Fix Your OnPage!
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is something you should be aware of before creating a site. Make sure you've done careful researches on the best keywords to use. Using the wrong keywords would eliminate your site from search engines forever!
Search Engine Spiders Lost Without Guidance - Post This Sign!
The robots.txt file is an exclusion standard required by all web crawlers/robots to tell them what files and directories that you want them to stay OUT of on your site. Not all crawlers/bots follow the exclusion standard and will continue crawling your site anyway. I like to call them "Bad Bots" or trespassers. We block them by IP exclusion which is another story entirely.
Search Engine Marketing: 20 Nitty-Gritty Strategies To Compel People To Link To Your Website
You don't have to be a rocket scientist to know that having quality inbound links from websites with high page ranks can help you attain high rankings in all the Search Engines.
Is Something Missing From Your Keywords Research? (Part 1)
As you may already know, keywords are an essential part of search engine optimization (SEO). And the usual approach recommended to finding the right keywords to target with one's site involves the ideas of demand, supply and KEI (and/or CID). I would like to propose that one thing is missing in this research approach.
Build Link Popularity The Smart Way
A Brief Introduction To Link Popularity
Keyword Demand Isnt Enough
I get half of the world traffic for the term "dirtbagging," on one page of my backpacking site, but that only means ten visitors a month. Without decent keyword demand you can't ever get much traffic. Total demand is just one factor to consider, though. Here are some others.
Going To Market: Keywords and Backlinks, Part 1
As I waded into the 'Make Money Online' waters on the Internet, I felt I needed to do some research on what keywords might help me generate traffic for my websites. I am very, very new to this whole Internet marketing arena but at the simplest level it seems that the keys to generating income are:
Supply & Demand - Stop Attacking Good SEO Companies!
As I read the latest news online about what Google has done to many webmasters all over the world, I am left discussed towards some of the comments people are making against SEO Companies.
How To See What Pages Of Your Site Google Has In Its Index
There is a lag time between the indexing or updating of your site, and the time it takes to show new results in the database. Depending on your site, where it was linked from, who it was linked from, and who knows what other factors, the amount of time varies.
Offpage Optimization: Does Article Marketing Cut the Mustard?
For those who haven't heard: article marketing is the new offpage optimization strategy that works like magic and won't cost you a dime. What's the strategy? You create an arsenal of short, well-written keyword articles aimed at your target customer and include your URL at the bottom.
Without Conversion Rates You Don’t Know If You’re Mickey Mouse Or Mickey Mantle
I couldn’t agree more with the headline of this article and it’s one I’m afraid I can’t take credit for. I found this line in Paco Underhill’s book, Why We Buy – The Science Of Shopping, and found myself comparing many of the things he has measured in the retail world to the tests I’ve done with online, visitor-based activity. The conversion rate on a website is easy to measure. Unfortunately, businesses too busy concentrating on their bottom line most often overlook it. The point of this article is to define what a conversion rate is and show you how you can begin to start improving your own website’s conversion rate and therefore your bottom line. At the same time, I will relate my observations to Paco’s on offline retailing.
Linking for Traffic not Positioning!
With more and more experts and search engine enthusiastsclaiming the right way and the wrong way to handle linkswapping, link exchanging or reciprocal linking!
How to Prevent Duplicate Content with Effective Use of the Robots.txt and Robots Meta Tag
Duplicate content is one of the problems that we regularly come across as part of the search engine optimization services we offer. If the search engines determine your site contains similar content, this may result in penalties and even exclusion from the search engines. Fortunately it's a problem that is easily rectified.
Search Engine Optimisation: The Soon to be Impossible Dream!
There are today search engine and internet marketing services, in fact a new industry has materialised to exploit the fear of low search rankings.
Google PageRank Explained
PageRank - an exclusive technology developed by Google which can have a major impact on the success of your website. This article will attempt to explain the concept of PageRank and how your ranking can be improved without spending any money at all.How is PageRank beneficial?Google refers to the technology as a way of evaluating the usefulness, importance, and quality of a website. The PR of a webpage can mean different things for different people.For a webmaster, a high PR is a sign of accomplishment. It shows that your website is moving in the right direction and has the potential to become successful. PageRank also directly effects your Google search engine listings. Acquiring a higher PR than your competition could mean more traffic for you, and less traffic for your competitors.Visitors to your website probably won't care about the page's rank (most surfers have no idea what PageRank is). However, visitors who understand PageRank may use your PR as a sign of how credible your content is. Would you rather use the information from a website with 0 PR or a website with 5 PR and hundreds of other websites linking to it?How is PageRank determined?PageRank is basically determined by backlinks. A backlink is when another page links to your page. For every page that links to you, that page is "voting" for you. The more votes you get, the better your PageRank will be. However, it gets more complicated than that because some votes weigh more heavily than others. The weight of the vote is determined by the PageRank of the page linking to you. This means that a couple links from pages with high PR could be more beneficial than hundreds of links from pages with low PR. But it gets even more complicated - each page can only transfer so much PageRank. The set amount of PR that the page can transfer must be split up between each "vote" that the page gives out. This means that a PR 7 page could actually give out as much weight per vote as a PR 3 page if it had too many outgoing links.How can I improve my PageRank?There are many different methods to obtain quality backlinks to your website. You will find that some methods work better than others depending on the subject and popularity of your site.DirectoriesSubmitting your website to directories is one of the best ways to increase your PageRank and even get some traffic at the same time. But submitting your site to just a few directories won't be good enough. You need to sit down and spend the necessary time to submit your site to a large amount of directories. This may seem like a painstakingly long process, but you'll be glad you did it when you notice results. I have taken the time to make a large list of free directories with high PageRank which you visit here. Although directories with low PR may seem like a waste of time, you should submit your site to them too because it still helps and they could eventually become a high PR site which charges money to submit to.Link ExchangesA very common practice to improve your PageRank is a link exchange. This is simply where two people link to the other person's website. It's best that you only link exchange with someone who has at least as much PR as you and the subject of the two websites are similar. If you receive a link from a website with a subject which has nothing to do with yours, you'll find that very little if any PR will actually be transferred to you.Forum SignaturesIf you are an active user on a forum or message board, it would be wise to put a link to your website in your signature. This could help improve your PageRank if the forum has a high PR, it could help improve your traffic from the forum members seeing your signature, and your site could get spidered more often because it is linking to a forum (forums generally have a lot of new content every day and search engines love new content).Buy AdvertisingAlthough it isn't the best of choices, many webmasters will buy text link ads on websites with high PR. Although this can be effective, it can be very expensive and only a temporary thing. If you purchase text links for just a couple months, after the months are over you won't have the backlinks which were giving you the "votes" you needed to keep your PageRank. So you have now spent a large amount of money on text links, but in the end you're right back where you started.ArticlesThis is a method which not many people know about. Basically, you write articles about the subjects you know a lot about. You then let other people use these articles as long as they provide a link back to your site. If you wrote a quality article, you'll find many websites will want to use it, thus giving you plenty of backlinks. This method can work well with anything which you develope and give away for free such as scripts, web design, etc.Stay On Google's Good SideThe most important thing to remember when trying to increase your PageRank is to not cheat and to always follow the rules. The people which run Google aren't fools and they have many ways of catching cheaters. Don't even think about using any of the "link farms" or trying to hide keywords on your pages. If caught, you may not get unbanned for many months.Make A Quality WebsiteIf you have a quality website which your visitors enjoy going to, then you will receive backlinks without having to do anything. Websites will link to you with the intention of informing people of a helpful resource, or showing off a cool new website they found, or any other reason other than trying to increase your PageRank. If you build it, backlinks will come...
Microsofts New Search Engine
I tried out Microsoft's new search engine (beta version) the other day. They have been working on it quite secretly now for almost a year. It has been rumored to be a Google killer once in full public release. They say its accuracy and ability to return relevant results will far surpass any other search engine on the Internet. That remains to be seen. I tried various combinations of single, double, and triple word/phrased searches to inspect the results.
Speed Indexing - 3 Steps to Getting Your Website Listed in Google Quickly
Getting your website listed in Google quickly simply requires that you know what Google is looking for and how to apply that to your site. Fortunately, what Google is looking for is pretty easy to understand and use in your marketing plan. Start with these suggestions as soon as possible so you will increase your traffic. Consider the following suggestions to get your website listed with Google, and listed as well and quickly as possible.
Google Website and Web Page Indexing for Dummies
You may have heard how important it is to have your website optimized for search engines, especially Google, which is currently the most popular worldwide. The reason for this is so your website will be ranked high in the search engines and people will see your site first, click on it, and increase your traffic and ultimately your sales. You might think this all sounds like a wonderful idea and want to get your web site optimized for Google, but you may have no idea how to go about it. Don't worry, getting your web page ready for the Google search engine is not as difficult as you might have thought. Google has a system called PageRank? that ranks the different web pages according to different standards. When you learn the standards you will know how to best optimize your page to get a high ranking in Google.