Friday, July 18, 2008

Matt Cutts Shares Top 5 SEO Techniques

In a recent interview to USA today, Google Guy Matts Cutt shares top five SEO techniques that works well for search engine rankings or we can say ranking in Google. Matt Cutts also make a point to all webmasters not to overdo the techniques as that may lead to penalization or being banned in the search engines.

The top 5 SEO Techniques are:

Spotlight your search term on the page:
If you want to be found for your keyword(s), make sure that term is on the page you want to rank. The term should be at the top as well as peppered throughout your copy. After all content is the KING.

Fill in your TAGS:
The two most important tags are Title and Description b/c that’s what is displayed on the search results.
Get other sites to LINK to yours: This is one of the most important of the 100 factors Google considers when ranking sites.

Create a blog and post often:
This can help you get links.

Register for free tools:
Matt Cutts recommends using the tools at google.com/webmaster, as well as creating sitemap (XML, HTML & Text).

From the above five SEO techniques (mentioned by Matt Cutts), one thing is clear that Google still consider links to be one of the important factors, but not encouraging for link building. Hence, give more importance to your content and try to increase the number of quality links.

Thursday, July 10, 2008

SEO Techniques for Web Designers

A beautiful design of a website can attract the users, but if it not properly optimized then no one will reach to the website to see the design. That means first we have to create a path. Once the path is created and visitors are coming to the site, then only we can speak about the design. An SEO (Search Engine Optimizer) optimizes a website that will help maximizing the site's exposure in search engines. But some of the seo knowledge will help the designers to make the website search engine as well as human friendly.

Here are some useful tips that will help designer to make search engine friendly website:

1. Try to focus on plain websites. It loads quickly and easily crawl by search engines.
2. Choose page name relevant to the page content and should be human-friendly. Also avoid underscore, use hyphen between the words.
3. The page should be content rich and keep the content inside the P tag.
4. Avoid use of table. If possible replace the table using div.
5. Optimize the images used on the website. It will help to increase the loading speed of images.
6. Add alt tags to the images and it should be relevant to the images (no spamming).
7. Avoid use of javascript. The javascript creates problem in crawling the pages by search engines. Use external javascript file.
8. For better navigation, use bread crumbs.
9. Create sitemap for a website. It help robots to go to any page from this page.
10. Do not add CSS in the web pages. It will make a web page heavy. Use external CSS file.
11. Remove useless text from the page like comments text.
12. Avoid use of frame.
13. Use text navigation instead of image navigation. Text navigation will help users and search engines to navigate easily and it will help to increase ranking of the page in the search engines by a particular keyword used as anchor text.
14. Keep the page size not more than 30-50 kb.
15. Use heading tags for the target keyword of the page and also for the heading of the page.

Wednesday, July 2, 2008

How to Improve Your Google Page Rank!

It is indispensable to have a high Google page rank (PR) for you website. This is because in order to get traffic to your site it has to be attractive to the search engines. A high PR is an indication that it is. When you consider that the most successful internet marketers achieve only 3% of conversion to sales from those who visit their websites, then the importance of a respectable page ranking and the attendant traffic becomes very important. By the way, the less successful internet marketers get only 1% conversions and those who get less usually give up on their internet marketing efforts.

Having established the importance of a good PR so that you have a good chance of exposure in top search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc and therefore a greater possibility of sales, you must optimize it for the search engines. This can be regarded as the main goal of the website owner and the webmaster. To get onto the first page of Google's search results for the keyword or the keyword phrase it what it's all about. At worst your site should be appearing on the second or third page. If it appears on any subsequent page you can pretty much accept that your website is invisible to the search engines.

It is therefore imperative to work hard to improve your Google PR. Put another way; you must not upset the Google search engines. It is not enough to work hard making your website interesting and informative. You have to make use of the best practice search engine optimization strategies to allow you to feature high in Google.

There are many SEO techniques for getting your website on top of search engine result page but there is no single best technique. You will have to take a multi-pronged approach. Use two, three or even more of these SEO techniques and you will achieve success in time.

Behind every successful website rated high on Google lies plenty of keyword research and keyword targeting. You should analyze the keyword density to sure that your content has just sufficient keywords and phrases, not too much. A 1-7% keyword density is about right. Experiment carefully and see what effect various densities have. Be careful of keyword stuffing. Google hates that and will blacklist your site.

Great content is critical to the success of your site for Google. Never forget this. Google uses "bots" or scripts that crawl through the websites seeing what is there. Original and unique content is the best. They also base your ranking on your traffic. Also work on getting links pointing to your website. Google PageRank is based on how popular your site is too and the number of inward back links is a definite indication. Remember that the more credible the site that linked you up the better. Credible websites have wait for it higher Google PR. Another way to get more links in order to improve your Google PR is to post your link in blogs and forums.

These are the SEO techniques used by webmasters to build the PR of the sites they manage. They also submit articles to article databases which have the website link attached to them. Also submit in directories to increase the PR as well as the link popularity. Anyone may use these articles as long as they include your URL at the bottom. Over time these articles propagate and earn you valuable back links. These are the tried and tested white hat SEO techniques that build Google PR.