If you are confused about terms like “search engine optimization” or having a “search engine friendly” site, then listen up! I am here to help.Depending on how long you have had, or considered having, a website online, you have heard terms thrown around like the above or even worse, acronyms! SEO comes to mind.
Really there is not that much to fear even if you have no idea right now what is really meant by having a search engine friendly site.
Here is what search engines like to have in their results when people type in keywords:
1. A site with lots of content.
2. A site with UNIQUE content (Original - meaning you wrote it or you paid someone to write it for you.)
3. Sites that are well organized link-wise (meaning simple navigation from the main page of your site to every other page of your site.)
4. Sites that have links pointing to them from other popular, relevant sites. (sites that are similar in content to yours but that are not in direct competition with yours in content)
5. Sites that change regularly (not static but always growing with new content on a regular basis)
6. Sites they can read. (search engine robots cannot read javascript for instance and therefore you get no credit for whatever content is in that application on your site)
7. Tightly themed sites. It is easier for an engine to rank your site properly (where you want it to be) if you are not all over the map in content.
Exception: Portal sites or directories. But this is an item for another article all together
What About The Complicated Stuff?
There really isn’t anything complicated about what the search engines want. But if you have stumbled into a search engine forum you were likely blown away with comments and tips that were completely over your head.
There is a difference between basic, standard optimization and the stuff they talk about in those forums. While visting SEO forums is good to keep up on new things as you go along, many people get confused and the forums are the breeding grounds for confusion when you are a beginner.
Try to learn advanced SEO from noted experts in the field rather than taking anything in chats or forums as gospel. A lot more people THINK they know what they are doing than actually do.
Remember that anything someone is willing to give away for free which, if it works, could be worth tens of thousands of dollars in high rankings resulting in high sales, is probably something that is old hat and not effective anymore.
But for now, you have a lot of work to do on the basics. The advanced stuff can come later. Relative to the advanced SEO, getting the basics right is the most powerful move you can make because you are going from zero to moving up in rankings by, many times, tens of thousands of spaces in a relatively short time.
Advanced SEO focuses on moving your site from high rankings slightly higher rankings.
Keywords
Your content is the most important thing about a website. It must be friendly to the search engines meaning no special java script or other stuff. Just good old fashioned HTML. You will do fine with PHP, SHTML, and other things, but for the purpose of this article, HTML is the way most people construct their sites.
You should use a good density of your main keyword phrase for each page of your site within the content. If you are going after a high ranking for the phrase “dog leashes” you need to have that phrase in the title of the page and throughout the content.
Programs that are great for analyzing your site and giving feedback on how to improve your rankings don’t come any more highly recommended that Internet Business Promoter from Axandra.
More Info: http://www.Axandra.com/go.to/jdh358
Nice thing about the software above is that it teaches you search engine optimization while it works on your site. So having it is like having a course on optimization while your site is altered for the best placement in the search engines at the same time.
The main recommendation I have for people starting to deal with optimizing their sites for the engines is to take things one at a time and get the basics down before you start messing with advanced strategies.
And when you start down that road, information you pay for is usually more accurate and more valuable than hanging around in forums. High rankings are worth a LOT of money and people don’t work hard to become experts just to give that information away.
Good luck and get to work!
Jack Humphrey is the CEO of http://WebFoxMedia.com, an online marketing consulting firm that focuses on publicity, traffic generation and website development for small to large companies.
Written by SEO Tipster on January 9th, 2007 with no comments.
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Anybody who has their own website or is involved in business online understands the importance of SEO or search engine optimization. Higher rankings equal more traffic. More traffic equals more potential sales. Simple, eh? Or is it?The problem here is that most people think search engine optimization is like magic and that only search engine “gurus” have all the answers.
Forunately, for you, this is far from true. In fact search engine optimization is relatively easy. What stops most people from ranking well in the search engines is misinformation and the promise of quick fixes. Every week there’s a new tool or ebook that promises to solve all your search engine woes. There are no quick fixes folks. Accept that as a truth and move forward.
What follows in the next three articles is a 10 step program for improving your online presence and search engine rankings. Enjoy!
Keywords
Keywords should be the first step in your search engine optimization campaign. People put keywords or phrases into search engines looking for information. The search engines then check their index for pages that contain these keywords. Unless your pages contain keywords relevant to your business or service then do not expect search engines to rank you well. It’s that simple.
For example if you have a website about dating then you’ll find it very difficult to rank well for the keyword “dating” because so many other sites are competing for it. However if you were to target a specific area like gay and lesbian dating then you’re dealing with a smaller, more targetted market. You could even regionalize it by targetting gay and lesbian dating in Toronto. See where we’re going with this?
So what keywords tools are available to you? Describing each of them goes beyond the scope of this article so please refer to our site for more information on this topic.
Content
Make this your motto - Provide Useful Content. DO NOT provide keyword stuffed, spammy, automatically generated pages. Write something useful for your visitors based on keywords which are relevant to your business or service.
Ask yourself one question - do you want your website to last? Yes? Great then provide content that’s actually useful to your visitors. Not only should you provide the initial content but keep adding content to your site. A page a week, a page a month it doesn’t matter. Give your visitors a reason to come back to your website.
You can’t write? Yes you can! Most people just think they can’t write. Most of us send emails every day to friends, colleagues and loved ones. If you can compose an email like that then you’re perfectly capable of writing 200 - 300 words of text for a page of content. The mere thought of writing a page of website content can fill people with terror but if you need help on this please refer to our website for a list of resources.
Keyword Density
This is how often your keyword is used on the the page. For example if you have 100 words of text on a single page and you mention your keyword 5 times then your keyword density is 5%.
So what’s the ideal keyword density? Do yourself a favour and don’t focus on keyword density at all. The forums are full of “experts” with theories on the perfect keyword density percentage. Here’s a wake up call - there is no perfect keyword density.
Mention your keyword towards the top of your page within the body text, in the page title and in the Meta Description tag. Apart from that only ever use the keyword or keywords within the page itself as is contextually appropriate. Forcing a keyword into a page over and over again is going to produce a webpage that’s difficult to read and sounds silly.
Domain Name
You have two choices when choosing a domain name. You can use a branded name that doesn’t relate to your business e.g. Amazon.com have built a hugely successful brand name as an online retailer using the name of a South American river for their company. It just works for some reason.
Your other choice is to use a keyword rich domain name. What this means is that if your website is about baby clothes you’d use a domain name like www.baby-clothes-guide.com. Should you really use hyphens to separate the keywords in the domain? The simple answer is yes because a search engine can read each individual keyword in the domain.
If you were to use www.babyclothesguide.com the major search engines can only read the first word from it which is “baby”. Therefore it has no idea that the domain is specifically about baby clothes (targetted) and not just about baby (untargetted).
(c) Niall Roche - All Rights Reserved
- continued in Part 2
This article was provided courtesy of Search Engine Fuel where you’ll find tons of information on getting effective search engine optimization
Written by SEO Tipster on January 9th, 2007 with 1 comment.
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In October 2002, the Yahoo! portal changed the way it delivers search results. In the past, the most prominent results were exclusively culled from websites listed in the Yahoo directory itself. Since October, sites listed in the Yahoo directory no longer enjoy this privileged status.The Google search engine now drives the primary search results on Yahoo. While this is certainly an improvement for users of Yahoo search, it’s a disaster for many businesses that counted on their Yahoo listing to deliver substantial traffic.
This change has also led many site owners to question the value of a listing in the Yahoo directory. In this article, I will outline the pros and cons of maintaining, or paying for, a Yahoo listing. In the process, I will delve into more details of the recent changes.
Argument #1: Yahoo Listings Mean Link Popularity
Pro: Even if the Yahoo listing itself delivers little or no traffic, other search engines will rank your website higher if it’s listed in Yahoo. Because Yahoo is so important, a link from Yahoo counts more than a regular link. Thanks to its higher “PageRank,” Yahoo means even more to Google.
Con: Yahoo listings do not deliver nearly as significant a contribution in this area as you might think. You can verify this by doing a “backward links” search on Google for any Yahoo-listed website. The most important links are listed first, and the Yahoo listing is rarely even on the first page of links for top ranked sites on Google.
Argument #2: Listed Sites Look Better In The Search Results
Pro: Websites with a Yahoo listing show up in the combined Yahoo/Google results with their title, description, and category from the Yahoo directory. This may boost the response when the site appears in the search results. This applies when the URL listed in the results is the same as the URL in the Yahoo listing.
Con: Results listed with Yahoo information include a link to the site’s category, which may prompt surfers to pass over your listing and go to the category. Sites without Yahoo listings have the more inviting “search within this site” link, which leads to more results exclusively from your site.
So, Is A Yahoo Listing Worth It?
If you have a non-commercial site and can get listed for free, of course! If you’re not one of the lucky few, though, you have to evaluate whether it’s worth $299 a year for what amounts to a better than average incoming link. Everyone must make their own decision. If $299 is small compared to your total marketing budget, it may be easier to just continue paying. My own listing expires in March, and I don’t intend to renew it.
How Can You Profit From The Changes At Yahoo?
The obvious answer is that you must take steps to improve your own position in Google’s search results. Google’s rankings are made up of many factors, but the dominant factor is “PageRank,” which is based on the number and quality of incoming links from other websites.
Therefore, the first step in improving your position on the Google search engine (and now Yahoo) is to improve your site’s link popularity. This takes time, and trying to take shortcuts can get you into real trouble - Google doesn’t like “link farms,” or any program designed to artificially boost your link popularity.
Finding Quality Link Partners Through Google
Since only links from quality sites will count for much with Google, let’s take a quick look at how you can find these sites. Start by targeting the sites that link to existing top-ranked sites. You can do a backward links search for any site by typing “link:http://www.domain.com” in the Google search engine.
An even faster method is to use the Google toolbar (http://toolbar.google.com/), which requires Internet Explorer 5 or greater, running on Windows. With the toolbar’s advanced features enabled, you can conduct a “backward links” search from the “Page Info” menu for any site you visit.
Since Google lists these results in descending order by “PageRank,” you can quickly determine the best places to get links by doing backward links searches on the top 10-20 sites for your desired search terms, and seeking links from the top 10-20 places that link to them.
Links Are Not Enough: Optimizing For Google
While “PageRank” is the dominant factor in Google’s algorithm, it’s not the only factor, and you still need to optimize your web pages. This can be a complicated topic, but the most important factors are:
- Keywords in the title of the page
- Keywords in headings on the page (H1 or H2 tags), especially the first heading.
- Keywords in the body text of the page, particularly the first paragraph.
Don’t Complain, Act!
By some estimates, Google now controls 2/3rds of the searches conducted on the Internet in a given day. Not only is Google.com extremely popular in its own right, but Google also controls the search results on popular portals like AOL and Iwon.com - not to mention Yahoo.
A lot of website owners are complaining bitterly about this change. All the more reason for you to take action now, while so many of your competitors are busy licking their wounds. With a little planning and effort, you could be in a dominant position on Google before they even get started.
I wish you success…
About The Author
Dan Thies is the author of “Search Engine Optimization Fast Start,” the ultimate beginner’s guide to higher search engine rankings - available today at http://www.cannedbooks.com
Written by SEO Tipster on January 9th, 2007 with no comments.
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