Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Factors Affecting SEO Techniques

1. Domain & File Names:
Choose your site domain name that contains words from your primary keyword phrase. Your domain name should also be easy to spell and easy to remember. You keyword phrase also should in many cases go in your file name.

2. Keyword Phrases:
Use keywords that are being searched for. You can check your keyword phrases with either the Search Term Suggestion Tool or the Overture Keyword Popularity Tool to find out how often they are being searched. You can also look at Google AdWords Keyword Suggestions for suggestions for different keyword phrases. - Add keyword synonyms to your content. - Put the keyword phrases in the Title tag . - Insert the keyword phrases in a h1 tag at the beginning of your page. Keyword synonyms should be put in your h2 & h3 tags. The h1, h2, h3 tags are used for titles and subtitles in articles.
Make sure you use your keyword phrases from the page you are linking to, in your anchor text on the site map.

3. Keyword Density:
Keyword density is a very important part of search engine optimization. Keyword density is the percent that your keyword or keyword phrase are of your web page text. You may want to look that your competition to see what keyword density they are using. To high a keyword density will be considered search engine spam and can get you blacklisted.
Your keywords should be toward the top of your page and your keyword phrase be in either every paragraph or every second paragraph depending on your paragraph length.

4. Bad Techniques:
Bad search engine optimization techniques can get you blacklisted from a search engine. Some techniques that are considered spam are cloaking, invisible text, tiny text, identical pages, doorway pages, refresh tags, link farms, filling comment tags with keyword phrases only, keyword phrases in the author tag, keyword density to high, mirror pages and mirror sites.While these techniques might work to give you a higher ranking for short time in the long run they will hurt you.
Google has a good article on Google information for webmasters that is very imformative if you are considering Getting a SEO Company to so work on your website.

5. Title & Meta Description Tag:
Construction of your title tag is one of the most important things you need to do. Each page should have a different title with 2 or 3 of your keyword phrases at the beginning. When search engine results are displayed the title is the first thing people see.
Below the title is a description which will be either be taken from your meta name description content=”Description phrase” or from the first sentence on at page. You description should also have 2 or 3 of your keyword phrases at the beginning as so should your first sentence.
You should have a different title, description and first sentence on each page. You many also what to try shorter titles with only one keyword or keyword phrase as this will raise you keyword relevance. Also you can consider putting your domain name at the very end of the title.

6. Meta Keywords Tag:
The meta keywords tag is not as relevant as it used to be and some say Google doesn’t ever look at it anymore, but put it in anyway. This tag should be different for each page.

7. Author & Robots Tags:
The Author Tag should contain the name of the company that owns the site. This tag will help you get a top position for your company’s name.
Use a generic Robots Tag on all pages that you want indexed. This instructs the robots to crawl the page. The following is the generic robots tag.

8. Quality Content:
Quality content will bring people back and as people always want to tell others about a good thing it will get you forward links from other sites. Your content should be written with your keyword phrases in mind.

9. Quantity Content:
The more the better. Just remember your content will need to be both quantity and quality.

10. Changing Content:
You can do this by hand or with a script. For example you can have a php script that draws five paragraphs from a pool of twenty paragraphs when the content is different each time the php page is accessed.

11. Avoid Dynamic URLs:
Are you pages via php, asp, or cf? Some search engines may have a problem indexing them. Create static pages whenever possible. Avoid symbols in your URLs like the “?” that you will often find in php, asp or cf pages. Static pages are the best.

12. Frames:
Many search engines can’t follow frame links. Make sure you provide an alternative method for the search engines to enter and index your site.

13. Site Map:
A good menu system is really a site map. A well constructed menu system that is on each page and contains a link to very page on the website is all you need.

14. Site Themes:
All of the top 3 search engines look for site themes or a common topic when they crawl a website. If your site is about one specific topic you will rank better than if you have more than one theme or topic on your site. By using similar keyword phrases in each page the search engines will detect a theme this will be to your advantage.

15. Site Design:
You may think, what does site design have to with search engine optimization. Well if your website has a bad color scheme that is hard to read, is not organized, is a cheesy looking site, then all your site optimization has been a waste of time. Make your site attractive to the viewer, make things easy to find, have you graphic header and menu bar the same place on each page.
These things will keep your visitors on the site and bring them back. A well optimized site with a high search engine results position that is ugly and is hard find information on, will not keep the visitors your optimization has brought to the site.
Use W3C Link Checker to make sure all your page links are good. If you have broken links on your site this can effect the ranking you are given.
Put a proper doctype on each page. If you don’t have a proper doctype on each page Internet Exployer will go into quirks mode and display it different.
Use The W3C Markup Validate Service to verify that your pages are Validate HTML or XHTML code. The W3C validation will verify that your HTML or XHTML is not broken. This validation show you any broken code that could cause your webpages from displaying properly in all the different browsers and browser versions.

16. Separate Content & Presentation:
Put all your presentation code into Cascading Styles Sheets (CSS). This separates the presentation from the content and makes your html files up to 50% smaller. It is reported that the search engine bots prefer this and the more content you have compared to presentation in your file, the better you get rated.

17. Robots.txt File:
While this file is not really required it should be included so that the search engine bots don’t get 404 errors when they look for it. Just include the following 2 lines and drop it in the root.
User-agent: *
Disallow:

Friday, August 17, 2007

SEO Techniques

SEO Techniques
SEO is the abbreviation for Search Engine Optimization. SEO consists of many techniques, that you apply to your website to help influence the search engines to not only rank your site with a higher ranking, but more importantly to rank the keywords you have carefully chosen that are relevant to your site. This is a technique used to maximize a site's exposure in different search engines. SEO techniques are classified into two broad categories:

1. Black Hat SEO Techniques
2. White Hat SEO Techniques

Black Hat SEO Techniques
Black Hat search engine optimization is customarily defined as techniques that are used to get higher search rankings in an unethical manner. These black hat SEO techniques usually include one or more of the following characteristics:
- Breaks search engine rules and regulations
- Creates a poor user experience directly because of the black hat SEO techniques utilized on the Web site
- Unethically presents content in a different visual or non-visual way to search engine spiders and search engine users.

Top 5 Black Hat SEO Techniques

1. Hidden Content
The basic principle of Hidden content is that within the code for the site there will be content stuffed with keywords, this content will not be visible to the end user of the site. One way of doing this is by using comment tags.
Comment tags look like this; The real purpose of comment tags is for developers to add in useful reminders within their code explaining what that piece of code does.
Here’s an example of the comment tag being used correctly,
Another popular way of hiding content is the use of the "noscript" tag. The "noscript" tag should be used to inform a user that a script is being used but their browser either doesn’t support the script language used or they have that function turned off.
Here’s an example of the "noscript" tag being used correctly,


Here’s an example of the "noscript" tag being used as a black hat SEO technique again in a bid to
promote a hypothetical page but this time targeting car hire,
Other HMTL tags misused in similar ways include the "noframes" tag and hidden inputs in forms. Content can also be hidden from the end user by using CSS, excessively small text and coloured text on the same coloured background. All of these techniques are frowned upon by search engines and if detected can mean your website will be penalised or even banned. To the untrained eye it can be very difficult to spot the use of some of these techniques.

2. Meta Keyword Stuffing
There are two Meta tags that are generally used to inform search engines of the content on the page. They reside between the "head" tag of a page and when used incorrectly they can alert a search engine that a site is using spam techniques in an attempt to improve its ranking. Meta DescriptionThe meta description should be used to describe the content of your page honestly and concisely and be 1 or 2 sentences, 3 at most.

3. Meta Keywords
Meta Keywords should be a short list of words that inform of the main focus of the page. Meta keywords have been so misused in the past that there are few if any search engines that take any heed of them.Here’s an example of the meta keywords being used in the correct manner.

4. Doorway or Gateway Pages
Doorway or Gateway pages are pages designed for search engines and not for the end user. They are basically fake pages that are stuffed with content and highly optimised for 1 or 2 keywords that link to a target or landing page. The end user never sees these pages because they are automatically redirected to the target page. Off-the-shelf SEO software often encourages the use of gateway pages as do SEO firms that don’t know what they’re talking about. Search engine spiders are being enhanced continually to detect these pages and will get ignored or worse still, flag your site up as being spam and ban you all together.

5. Link Farming
In the real world if you were to build your house in a bad neighbour hood then your house would be affected by its surroundings. The same is true of the virtual world. Link farms or free for all (FFA) pages have no other purposes than to list links of unrelated websites. They won’t provide you with any traffic and you run the risk of having your site banned for participating. Don’t participate in link farming.

White Hat SEO Techniques
A SEO tactic, technique or method is considered white hat if it conforms to the search engines' guidelines and involves no deception. White hat SEO is not just about following guidelines, but is about ensuring that the content a search engine indexes and subsequently ranks is the same content a user will see.

Top 5 White Hat SEO Techniques

1. Quality Content
When we first started looking at SEO as a separate entity to website build there was one phrase that we would continually hear, “content is King”, and it’s true. There is nothing more valuable you can do to optimise your site for search engines than offer unique well written content. A search engines aim is to serve up what it believes to be the most appropriate website for any given search to the end user.
Imagine we are the end user and we are searching for a portable air conditioner for hire. We go to our favourite search engine and search for the phrase “portable air conditioner hire”. In this imaginary scenario let’s assume there are only 2 websites that target that phrase,
Website 1
Website 1 consists of a single page with 3 paragraphs of text. The text tells us that the company does portable air conditioning hire and give us a phone number to call.
Website 2
Website 2 contains 30 plus pages all focusing on various portable air conditioning units that we can hire, costs and technical explanations of how portable air conditioning units work.
Which website do you think the search engine is likely to offer to the user first? It’s a rather obvious example but it illustrates the importance of good content so your priority should be good quality content.

2. Use Structural (Semantic) Mark Up and Separate Content from Presentation
Semantically structuring your mark up helps search engines understand the content of your webpage which is of course a good thing. Making proper use of heading elements is essential because search engines give more weight to the content within the heading elements.

Using CSS to separate the design elements from the content makes for much leaner code and makes it easier for search engines to find what they’re looking for, which is content. Remember content is king!

3. Titles and Meta Data
Providing pages with proper titles and meta data is essential. As discussed in the top 5 black hat SEO techniques section the meta description and meta keywords elements have been so misused in the past that Search Engines now regard them as less important, it’s still important to use them and use them properly. Titles however still carry a lot of weight and when we think of semantic mark up it is obvious why. The title of anything is a declaration as to what the content might be, so make sure your page titles are a true representation of the content of the page.

4. Keyword Research and Effective Keyword Use
Create your website with keywords and key phrases in mind. Research keywords and key phrases you think people might use to find your site. Single words are not always the most effective target, try multi-word phrases that are much more specific to your product/service and you’ll be targeting end users that are much more likely to want what you are offering.

Use the keywords and key phrases you’ve identified effectively throughout your website. Assign each
page 2-3 of the keywords you’ve identified and use the keywords throughout all the important
elements of the page. Those are,
Title
Meta Description
Meta Keywords
Heading Elements "h1" "h2" "h3"
Text
Alt Tag
Title Tag
Links

5. Quality Inbound Links
Having inbound links to your website can be likened to having a vote for the good but there are good links and bad links so therefore votes for the good and votes that are bad. Good links are links from other web pages that are regarded highly by the search engines and are contextually relevant to the content of your page. Bad links are links from web pages that aren’t regarded highly or potentially banned by search engines and have no relevance to the content of your page.

For example;
Imagine we have a website that sells telephones.
Link A: Link on the homepage of the British Telecoms website. = Good
Link B: Link on John Smiths Beer and Ale appreciation links page = Bad
The amount of quality inbound links to your site therefore have some relevance on how high up the search engine your site is placed. When sourcing links you should be thinking of quality over quantity and deep linking to pages within your website not just the home page.

Monday, August 13, 2007

Importance of SEO for a Web Site

In order to achieve the benefits of search engine optimization, an effective SEO strategy is necessary. One of the biggest SEO strategies is link popularity, keyword research and website marketing.

Doing the proper research and finding the correct keyword combination will bring the top rankings in the search engines and a traffic that is targeted to your site, and the added benefit is that it is free traffic. As you heard many time before Content is King, your content should be structured to include the keywords that are relevant to your site, and your website needs to be SEO optimized so the search engines can spider it with ease. All the other pages on your site should revolve around a central theme and all be related in some way.

When visitors come to your website the text on the home page should explain and reflect the theme of your site and all of the other pages should relate to it. Search engine optimization or SEO is the hottest way to drive targeted traffic to your website. Your investment in the future of your website will be worth while. The reason you need to optimize your site is to get rankings in the search engines, by concentrating on search phrases and by promoting these keywords you will begin to build our rankings in the search engines.

Billions of sites are updated daily and they all need to be crawled on a daily basis. You can purchase high PR links and shorten the waiting period of getting your site in the Search Engine Result Pages. Check you site for broken links, not having links that work will have a negative effect on your sites ranking if the links stay broken for a period of time.

High quality articles are quickly snapped up and published prolifically. Every time you write an article and you get it published you receive another link pointing back to your site which will in turn increase your link popularity. Traffic is generated to your website from your signature box.

This article can be freely published on a website as long as. With this wonderful innovation in web writing, each article will surely be given ample attention in terms of engine optimization and accessibility. The natural listing depends on the optimization techniques employed on and off the web site. A single article can be reprinted hundreds of times, and each time is another link back to your site. Ensure that each web page of yours would focus on a particular keyword or key phrase. If there is an article in that page, make sure that the article will only discuss and include one keyword or key phrase from the list you have made.

Getting more traffic is pointless if your site isn't an efficient sales machine. Since there are only a "handful" of search engines that everyone uses (the major ones), this is where we place our best promotional efforts. If you encourage them to link to your site, join your newsletter, read your articles, and so on, then the traffic will increase your search engine popularity. If you only sell product, then that is what you get money for products. Traffic is a must if any online business is to succeed.