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5 Things to Keep an Eye on in the SEO World in 2005....
After the latest PR update at Google and MSN’s beta search going live, there is one thing for certain in 2005: the world of search is in for some major changes. There has been growing speculation around the SEO world that reciprocal linking is a...
General SEO guide
SEO Optimization techniques Below are some techniques/guidelines that help in your page to become S earch e ngine o ptimized. The ‘crawlers' or ‘spiders' that a search engine send to your site are not able to view all the...
SEO Success: Step Three is Creating Long-Term Popularity
Finally, after the hard-core efforts that are directly related to generating traffic to your website, you next step is to develop a strategy that creates follow-on, long-term traffic. Several methods exist for this Tier III strategy:
- Taking the...
The 3 Most Important SEO Marketing Secrets
Follow these three easy marketing secrets and enjoy success as you watch your site climb in the SERPs.
a) Your SEO Marketing Strategy Should Target The End User
Most SEO Marketing strategies may work dramatically in the short term but fail...
There Should Be More to your SEO Consultant Than Rankings
There Should Be More to your SEO Consultant Than Rankings
By David Leonhardt, SEO Consultant
Perhaps one of the biggest misconceptions in SEO is that ranking at Google and Yahoo is all that counts in search engine optimization. Potential...
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Website Optimization - A SEO Specialist Reveals All
Website optimization is the first step in promoting your
website. Those with foresight and deeper pockets will have a
SEO-savvy webmaster (such as myself) build the website that is
optimized from the start. Otherwise, a website may need a
SEO-facelift later to help it be digestible to the search
engines - and to make it obvious to the search engines that the
keywords you are trying to be found under are truly relevant to
your website. Like any specialty, performing website
optimization involves skills, special tools, and a willingness
to keep up with current changes in the market.
Unfortunately, hiring an SEO expert can be quite expensive. For
those who want to do it themselves, here are the steps.
BOOKMARK THESE TOOLS! YOU WILL need them!
The first step in website optimization is to make
sure you have well-formatted HTML. I would encourage you to use
the following tool to check this: http://validator.w3.org/ Do
your best to get your website as close to conformance as
possible.
If you use CSS, then use a CSS validator at http
://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator-uri.html There is
rarely an excuse for not having it validate here.
If you follow most of the suggestions for having valid HTML
code your web pages will be more digestible for the search
engines, as well as being much more cross-browser compliant.
You should also do this after any significant edit of the web
page - to ensure that it is still compliant.
The second step in website optimization is to
work on the Meta tags and the title tag for each page in your
site. These are in the header of your web page document and need
to be tailored to attract users who type in one of a select
group of keywords. If you need a tool to help generate these,
use this meta tag generator tool here (http://www.spiderweblogic.com/HTML-Meta-Tag-Generator.aspx)
that I built.
The title tag:
The title tag is, of the three, the most important for the major
search engines. Don't make this too long - normally no more than
6 words. But have your most important keywords here. Some SEO
specialists advise that even the order of the text here is
significant. They suggest that if you place your company name in
the title, that it should be placed last so the other keywords
are being considered with greater weight.
The meta-keywords tag:
This is now of lesser importance than before, due to abuse by
webmasters to achieve high rankings. However, it is still
important and is required by many of the smaller search engines.
Make sure that you don't repeat any keyword or keyword phrase
more than three times. That would be considered Spam (bad SEO
tactics) by the search engines. Remember, your visitors will see
the title of the web page. Make it useful to them as well.
The meta-description tag:
This is of higher importance than the keywords tag. Several
search engines use it when they show your listing. It needs to
encourage your potential visitors to visit your website. Of
course, having keywords in here is important. But keep the
primary purpose in mind as you write it. Here too, you should
make sure that you don't repeat any keyword or keyword phrase
more than three times.
Each page in your website needs its own tailored title,
meta-description, and meta-keywords tag. These need to be
focused on the keywords you are trying for. (These are the words
or phrases you want to be found at when people are doing
searches.) These shouldn't normally be the same on every page.
They should be customized to the content that is on that page.
You should also keep your visitors in mind as you write them.
The third step is to work on your content -
especially on your home page. Ideally you would have between 800
- 1200 words of text. It should have your most important
keywords at the top, middle and the bottom of the text. If
possible, use an "h1" tag at the top for your title - and have
your most important keyword imbedded in it. Also, have some of
your keywords in a sentence or phrase that is bolded. Keep it
natural for your visitors to read. If it doesn't look natural,
you will loose any visitors you have attracted.
The fourth step in website optimization is to
edit your links and your images to make full use of the "title"
and "alt" attributes.
Text links can have a "title" attribute. The content is to more
fully describe your link. When you put your mouse over the link,
the content of the "title" attribute is displayed. I would
encourage you to tailor the description so that it contains at
least one of your keywords - but keep it accurate - that it
really does describe the link. It
must make sense to the common
user.
Images HTML tags can have an "alt" attribute. It is used to
describe an image when you put a mouse over it. It is also used
for different devices for seeing impaired. Also, it is used when
the user decides not to show images with the web site. They will
see this text instead. (It is the "Alternate Text" for the
image.) Try to incorporate some keywords here too - but keep
with the spirit of being the "alternate text" for the image.
If you are using tables, you may even include a table "summary"
attribute. The purpose of this attribute is to assist for those
with disabilities to understand the contents and structure of a
table. Keep all summary comments within that purpose - and add
keywords only where appropriate. Note that these summary
attributes may cause your web page validator to spit up an error
- but this is newer item that is encouraged.
The fifth step is to have a good menu system or a
site map. Search engines follow links to find the different
pages in your site. If your navigation is one of those
JavaScript drop-down menus or Flash menus, the search engines
may not find all of your pages unless you have an alternative
non-JavaScript link path that they can follow. If you use the
fancy JavaScript links, you should have a hard link to a site
map on every page. The site map should have a real
non-JavaScript list of links that the search engines can follow
to map out your whole site. As a standard policy I tend to avoid
the JavaScript links in the menus.
OPTIONAL: If you haven't chosen a domain name yet, you
may strongly consider having your top keyword phrase in the
domain name, with the words separated by dashes. This is an
excellent idea, but not always feasible. Many companies already
have a domain name selected, or prefer to use their company name
as the domain name. This is a business decision left up to the
customer.
THINGS NOT TO DO: Don't create and market mirror sites
though to accomplish this trick either. Sites that are identical
in content, but have a different domain name are considered SPAM
(bad/taboo) by the search engines. They don't appreciate such
tricks, and the ranking of both websites will suffer for it.
Also, don't get too crazy with stuffing keywords where they
don't belong or by repeating keywords or by having keywords in
hidden layers. Search engines don't like that and will ban your
site.
SEO SOFTWARE TO BUY: I have used SEO Studio to do
website analysis during my optimization. This has been an
invaluable tool for analyzing how saturated my keywords are in a
particular web page. It is reasonably priced and I have been
very satisfied with the performance. It is easy to see such
things as keyword density relevance for the whole web page. It
also is helpful in showing where the keywords are not (and can
be). You will learn a lot about website optimization just by
using this tool!
NOW WHAT? After all this "Search Engine Optimization"
you need to do a human review your website - is it
natural/useful/helpful for the human visitor? Remember, getting
website traffic is only half the game. This site needs to
quickly convert them into paying customers.
Once it is "Optimized", then you need to let the search engines
know that you exist. Only after it is ready should you tell them
about it. But this is a subject for another article. Do a search
of different article warehouse or SEO news sources. You will
find a lot of information on this.
WEBSITE OPTIMIZATION NEWS SOURCES: Since there are new
quirks in the website optimization and website promotion that
come out all the time - some that apply to all search engines,
and some that apply to a particular one, it is wise to keep up
to date. I strongly encourage you to join a couple of relevant
mailing lists!
I really like the news sources from Entireweb.com. If you
submit a site through them, I would encourage you to accept
their free newsletters. They have great content. http://www.entireweb
.com/submit_site/
Another place to get really great articles on website
optimization or promotion is http://www.SiteProNews.com
They also allow you to subscribe to their articles. Do this!
If you are serious about keeping up with your website
positioning, keep up with the news. You will find these
resources invaluable!
About the author:
Robert Fuess is a veteran website designer who specializes in
making dynamic search engine optimized websites.
Los Osos Website Design | Free Teacher
Websites
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| Search Engine Optimization, Google Optimization - SEO Chat |
| Search Engine Optimization, Google Optimization - SEO Chat. |
| www.seochat.com |
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| Search engine optimization (SEO) is a subset of search engine marketing, and deals with ... The term SEO can also refer to "search engine optimizers", ... |
| en.wikipedia.org |
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| SEO Home |
| Mentor an SEO Scholar! 8/7/2006. Click here to learn more. ... 55 Exchange Place New York, NY 10005 (212) 979-2040 info@seo-usa.org ... |
| www.seo-ny.org |
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| Webmaster Help Center - What's an SEO? Does Google recommend ... |
| Ask your SEO firm if it reports every spam abuse that it finds to Google ... Ethical SEO firms report deceptive sites that violate Google's spam guidelines. ... |
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| Aaron Wall's SEO Book.com |
| Aaron Wall offers search engine news, reviews of tools, and an ebook for sale. |
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| SEO Today |
| Provides articles and information about the search engine optimization and marketing industry. Latest articles can be sent via email. |
| www.seotoday.com |
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| SEO: See what people are saying right now on Technorati |
| See all blog posts tagged with SEO on Technorati. ... This page shows everything that has been tagged with SEO. To contribute to this page include this code ... |
| www.technorati.com |
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| Seo: See what people are saying right now on Technorati |
| See all blog posts tagged with seo on Technorati. ... Professional SEO Marketing Firm www.cherryoneweb.com - Cherryone is a SEO firm that gets results for ... |
| www.technorati.com |
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| Pages tagged with "seo" on del.icio.us |
| 秋元@サイボウズラボ・プログラマー・ブログ: あのライバルは SEO で抜けるのか? ... L'aggiornamento di un SEO | Articoli Webmarketing | Webmarketing.HTML.it ... |
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| Seo Administrator - seo tools, seo software, optimization software ... |
| Seo Administrator is an integrated suite of web promotion utilities that cover all aspects of website optimization and promotion. |
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| Search Engine Watch is the authoritative guide to searching at Internet search engines and search engine registration and ranking issues. |
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| A leader since 1996, search engine submission, search engine optimization, free search engine submission, site submission, and website promotion. |
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| This page describes the term SEO and lists other pages on the Web where you can find additional information. |
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| Search Engine Roundtable ::: The Pulse Of The Search Marketing ... |
| A well-rounded view on search engines and search engine marketing from five segments of the Web population represented by senior members of the major ... |
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| Search Engine Optimisation Marketing & Pay per Click Advertising ... |
| Offers search engine marketing and paid search engine advertising. Australia. |
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| Submit Express - Search Engine Placement, Optimization, SEO Marketing |
| Search engine optimization services with guaranteed Top 10 results. Submit your website URL to 40 major search engines for FREE ! |
| www.submitexpress.com |
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| SEO Analyzer - SEO Tools - Nashville SEO, SEM, Internet Strategy ... |
| The SEO Analyzer is a FREE tool that uses a sophisticated algorithm that detects how optimized your web design is for search engines. |
| sitening.com |
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| Weblinx Limited - SEO Company for UK Search Engine Optimization. |
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| Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO |
| I believe that Google is the only search engine that will confirm to webmasters ... If you pick a bad search engine optimizer (SEO) and they make a ton of ... |
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