Following are the basic SEO techniques. SEO techniques starts with selecting your business, business name and registering the domain name and does not end even with the completion of the site.
Choose the Right Domain Name
Having your primary keyword phrase or two in your domain name certainly helps with your search engine ranking. Certain search engine or directory algorithmns may factor in the occurence of a keyword in your domain name.
Pick a Reliable Host
Technical factors such as a slow connection to a website’s server can affect search engine ranking. The search engine spiders may not be able to successfully index a site whose servers are always bogged down, with a connection that goes on and off intermittently. In fact, if the search engine spider is unable to connect to your host server, it will not only NOT list your site, but remove any old listing of your site that may already have been in the database. Picking a reliable host is a very important decision you should make.
If your site is hosted on a free server such as Geocities.com or Angelfire.com, it will make your search engine promotion campaign an even tougher one, though not entirely impossible. Search engines may limit the number of accepted pages from a given domain. In addition, since many unscrupulous webmasters have used free-hosted sites to spam indexes, search engines tend to stay wary of sites hosted on free servers. Some may not even accept them. Sharing domains under the same IP addresses with spammers can get your search engine position penalized or your entire site banned.
Define & Focus On Your Target Audience.
Who do you want to reach? Click-through rates are not necessarily a site’s measure of success. Sure, you want visitors to your site, but you want targeted visitors who are looking for the products and information you offer. You optimize your webpage with the intent to connect a searcher with his intended topic, and to add value to the search index. If people are finding your site, but the site does not satisfy the searcher’s needs, he will simply hit the back button and look for another site that will. Focus on your target audience and work your site concepts around this. Develop a profile for the typical target user that you are trying to reach, indicating what that users needs would be and how your site could fulfill them.
Choose Specific Keyword Phrases
Always think about satisfying the intent of the searcher. Do not simply use keywords because they are used at a higher frequency, or are more popular than others. Always determine first on relevance of the specific keywords to your site, not potential traffic. Less traffic that buys more is often better than more traffic that buys far less.
Consider your Page Size & Design Layout
Complex pages that take a long time to load might time out before the spider can index everything. For the benefit of your visitors and the search engines, limit your page size to less than 60K. Your page size plus the size of all your graphics should not exceed 50K to 60K. If the page size is too large, many people on dial-up connections will leave before the page fully loads, and it can be a search engine indexing hindrance as well.
Use the Tools below to help you determine Page Size:
HitBox Resources - Provides Total Page Size and breaks it down to HTML size and Image size when the Load Time Checking option is marked. Estimates the download time on varying connection speeds.
Webpage Size Checker - Gives Total Webpage Size, Visible Text Size, Size of HTML Tags, Text to HTML Ratio, Number of Images, Largest Image Size, Size of All Images, and total Image and HTML size.
Click for more WebPage Design Tools. Once you’ve determined the page size and found it over the suggested size limit.
Keyword Placement
The location of a prime real estate impacts its marketability. Keyword placement on your webpage works the same way. Your page title is a great place to work in your keyword phrases. Make sure you make your page title as descriptive as possible with your keyword phrase or two worked towards the beginning of the page title.
Work your primary keyword phrases along the topmost of the page’s html content, as close to the beginning of the page as possible. As mentioned, search engines may grab the first 150 - 200 characters of a given webpage, so you want to strategically place your keyword phrases along the first lines of text on your webpage. Headline text along the first lines work well. Headline text are marked by use of H1 tags. Sample:
< h1> This is Headline Text </h1>
Mention your primary keyword phrases along the textual content of your webpage, keeping note that text that appears early in the page counts more than those appearing later on. Although some search engines may only count a unique word on a page twice, in general, search engines do like long pages content rich in meaningful text (not randomly generated letters and words). Incorporate your primary keyword phrases along the textual content of the page in a normal manner that works with the flow of text. Use subject headlines marked by h2, h3, and so forth to also highlight important keywords for your webpage like this:
< h2> This is a Subject heading < /h2>
Be sure to add supporting textual content after your headline text and subject heading to add relevancy to your marked keyword phrases on the page.
Utilize MetaTags in your HTML coding. These are HTML tags that tells search engines how you want your listing to appear in the index. They do not hold any “special powers” over search engines, as explained in later paragraphs. But it is still a good place to work in your primary keyword phrases.
To summarize keyword placement tips, work in your primary keyword phrase or two in your:
1) page title
2) first lines of text in Headline
3) along the normal flow of your page’s textual content
4) in your page’s meta tags.
Search engines will visit your URL collecting words, links, and file information. It indexes all text, ALT text for images, links (hrefs and images), anchors, titles, description and keyword meta tags, applet and ActiveX object names, the page URL, the host name, and the domain name.
Keyword Density
This is the ratio of a keyword or keyphrase to the total words (depth) on a page. Working in your keyword phrases throughout the page’s textual content is a good way to increase keyword density for your keyword phrase in question. Again, there is emphasis on working in the keyword phrases into the normal flow of the content, not useless repetition. You can perform manual keyword density counts by copying the body text that appears on your HTML into a Word file, then use the word count tool. Then count the occurrence of your keyword phrase, and divide those by the word count total. Example, you have 100 words on your page, with 5 occurrence of your keyword phrase … say, “Mouse pads”. The total percentage would then be 5% for “Mouse pads”. A keyword density between 3% to 5% falls along the recommended lines. Have at least a minimum of 100 words on your webpage if possible, not just lists of keywords but actual and quality content.
Keyword Proximity
This is the closeness of keywords to each other. As a general rule, place your keywords as close together as possible and make sure the sentences come out legible and clear. Say you were optimizing a webpage for the keyword phrase “computer parts”. Between the two sentences: “XYZ, Inc. sells quality computer parts at affordable prices in the Bay Area.” and “Looking for affordable parts for your computer? XYZ, Inc. now serving the Bay Area!” … the first sentence would fare better in search engines since your targeted keyword phrase is closer together than in the latter sentence.
Name your filenames with a keyword & make use of alt text for images
Every little detail counts, even things such as filenames. Say you have a site selling pet collars. Instead of naming an image as logo.gif, try working your keyword into the filename, like petcollarlogo.gif.
Name specific HTML page file names with a keyword as well. So if you have a page on dog collars, name it dogcollars.html … a page on cat toys, cattoys.html, and so on and so forth.
Search engines do not see the images on your webpage. But some do read the image alt text (alternative text) within and index those. Image alt text are seen as the webpage as loading and when a mouse arrow hovers over it. Work your primary keyword phrases within these brief, alt text.
Create a Descriptive Page Title
The page tags in your
portion of the HTML source coding. Its outward appearance displays itself on the top blue bar of a browser when a webpage is open. If you look up at the top blue bar of this browser you’re using to view this page, you’ll notice it reads: Create a Descriptive Page Title. This is the page title for this given webpage. When people add a webpage to their Favorites folder in a browser, the page title is also saved.
Format your MetaTags properly but Realize they have no Magical Powers
MetaTags offer search engines information about your webpage, and some display this information in the search engine listings. There are various MetaTag elements out there, from the author content, to copyright information to revisit tags. But the ones that really count are your Meta Description Tag and your Meta Keyword Tag. Both should be inserted in the
section of your webpage HTML file.
Validate your HTML & Check for Broken Links or Missing Images.
Improperly formatted HTML can have one or both of the following effects: your webpage will not display correctly on browsers, and/or search engine spiders may not be able to index your webpage properly. The bottom line is that you want your webpage to look presentable when displayed on all types and versions of browsers, and at the same time, you don’t want to present any search engine indexing problems to crawlers with improperly coded HTML.
Understand the Importance of “Site Stickiness”.
Look at the finished product and see it from a third person’s point of view. Search engines are now able to calculate the amount of time a surfer spends on your site after finding your link on a search. The longer surfers stay on your site, the better it is for your site’s ranking since this means that your site has satisfied the intent of their query. However, if people are backing out of your site after clicking on your link to find other more relevant sites, it could be that your webpage is not offering enough relevant data for your surfers. Be sure your site appeals to the viewers’ eyes, is easy to navigate, and satisfies your target audience’s search queries.
Create a Search Engine Friendly and Visitor Friendly Website
Some questions to ask yourself about your site:
Is it relatively easy to navigate? Can people get around different pages of my site without getting lost?
Is there a uniform look to my site?
Do I have any typographical errors or misspelled words on my site?
Are there any broken links or images that I should be aware of?
Is my load time too long? Do I need to trim my image and file size?
Does my site look good to my target audience?
Does my site present a theme that can leave a mark in my visitors’ minds?
Are the terms and wording I’ve used on my site easily understandable to my target audience?
Will my site be the kind that will have visitors returning to it for more?
If it is an online store, do my visitors feel safe anough to hand me over their credit card information?
Am I a bit too verbose on my page? Should I trim down on excess text, and highlight only the important messages?
Is my site easily viewable to all types of web browsers and screen sizes/resolutions?
Develop your Link Popularity.
The connectivity of webpages has become an important factor used by search engines to rank sites. Link popularity is no longer the mere number of sites that link back to yours, but it’s also how relevant those sites are to your site’s theme and focus. Finding inbound links is a task that many webmasters may find daunting, and even elusive at times.
Some Link Popularity Tips:
1) The worth and relevance of the site linking to you is taken into account when search engines factor in the popularity of your site. Try to get your website included in popular sites and directories like DMOZ and Yahoo! Human-reviewed directories like these are considered “heavyweights”, and a link from them is valued by search engines.
2) Search for sites that link to your competition. Submit your URL to these sites if they offer an “Add your URL” feature, or e-mail them to consider linking to your website. Personalize your e-mail! Tell them how much you enjoyed visiting their site, what you liked about it, why you think they should link to your site, and how you feel your site would complement theirs.
3) Look up websites that are in the same field as yours, and offer a request to trade links. Again, make sure you personalize your e-mail. You may also want to include an explanation on the benefits of Link Popularity. Consider creating a separate links page on your site that will serve as good hubs for related outbound links. You can use this page to display your reciprocal links.
4) Another helpful way to develop your link popularity is to go to any given search engine and type in “[your keyword] Add URL” or [your keyword] links page” in the search field to display the search engines’ listings on related sites that has a links page or ADD URL links on their site. The more relevant the sites are that are linking to your site, the better it is for your site’s ranking.
5) Make sure you interlink your webpages together. Use text links with keywords in the anchor as much as possible. Search engine spiders may follow links to other webpages of your site and index those as well, boosting the link popularity of your indexed webpages.
Google, one of the search engines that has greatly used this link popularity concept to rank its pages says, “Google makes use of PageRank in determining how sites rank. PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves `important’ weigh more heavily and help to make other pages `important.’”
AltaVista themselves say, “The connectivity of pages, including not just how many links there are to a page but where the links come from: the number of distinct domains and the “quality” ranking of those particular sites. This is calculated for the site and also for individual pages. A site or a page is “good” if many pages at many different sites point to it and especially if many “good” sites point to it. “
Written by SEO Tipster on July 26th, 2005 with no comments.
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Are directories still good thing for your SEO? Are those still used for search by people? There are so many search engine directories popping up earch day. Find out whether it is good use of your time to put some efforts to submit your site to search directories for SEO purpose.
Stats on my websites shows that around 80% of the traffic comes from search engines but to my surprise some traffic (around 3% to 5%) do still come from the directories I have submitted my sites. I know 3% to 5% is not a very big number, but still it shows that some people still use directories for search.
So I would say, submitting your site to at-least free directories does make sense with respect to giving traffic to your site.
But free directories are disappearing these days and more and more directories are becoming paid submission directories. Is it worthwhile to submit to paid directories? To be frank, I rarely received any traffic from any paid directories (except yahoo directory) on the web. But then, why should be submit our sites to paid directories?
Paid directories themselves do a lot of SEO work and get a lot of back links (paid and up-paid), making their parge rank moving towards north. So submission to paid directory only make sense in terms of getting RELEVENT-HIGH-PAGE-RANK-BACKLINK. For new sites, paid directories getting listed into search engines quite fast and help getting better ranking (due to high-page-rank-backlink).
So what are the most important free directories I can submit my site?
There are not many free directories left. Here they are:
Open Directory - The most importa free directory. May take a long time to get listed.
JoeAnt - This is free directory if you become the edior of the directory.
AbiLogic - Free directory that usually includes sites within one month.
Gimpsy - Free directory that only includes sites that are some how interactive.
Index Unlimited - Free but requires a reciprocal link.
SEDir - Free but requires a reciprocal link.
NetInsert.
Skaffe - Free if you become the editor of the directory.
SiteRanking.com - Free but requires a reciprocal link.
Web-Beacon - Free if you are a volunteer editor.
Web World - Free directory that can take up to 6 months before your site is included.
Written by SEO Tipster on July 26th, 2005 with no comments.
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