Archive for July, 2008
published by Dan in Keyword Research | SEO | SEO Basics | SEO Strategy
When it comes to coming up with a good website design, you have to ask yourself if you are following a certain design to satisfy your liking or for the people you are aiming to target. Most of the time, there is a problem in this area as the common belief of most people is to satisfy what they want to project and not what others would want to see. In a sense, this approach to web site designing may not be the effective way to approach it.
Remember, when you put up a site, you are luring people towards your site. On that note, just like a good host, you must identify how they can be able to be comfortable when they get to your site. Colors, themes, scripts and interfaces that you are planning to put on your site have to be considered properly. Just don’t overload your site with scripts to impress visitors. On these occasions, it seems that visitors will not always be impressed with such a setup.
Further, remember that page loading is the important thing that most people look for. If a page takes a long time to load, chances are they will navigate away from the page. This normally happens when website owners become enthusiastic about how to enhance their site. Normally, you will be surprised at the impact of a plain website would have over a sophisticated one.
So before you start anything else, ask yourself firsthand. Are you designing for yourself or are you making your site comfortable for your visitors?
Popularity: 86% [?]
published by Dan in Blogs | Keyword Research | SEO
We are often told to make use of good keywords that are being sought over the web. There are various keyword checkers that can help us in finding out what keywords to use. Overall, they may seem easy to use but remember that word count also varies. The number of keywords used should be in line the whole post. Going over it may put your composition in the category of spam and hence kill your effort as trying to adhere towards known keyword utilization principles in line with your SEO efforts.
Keyword density is something that can help identify the amount of keywords you are using. At times, it seems that you are repeating so much. But again, it depends on how you use it in line with how understandable your post may be. In blogging or article writing, you have to follow a certain level of percentage in keyword density. For example, it is recommended that in 300 word compositions, a 2% keyword density is deemed as the most appropriate level to categorize your post as something that is acceptable. Going over that may place you under the category of spam and most probably a senseless write-up.
So what does SEO have to do with it? Well for people looking for information, Google for one has placed a certain medium to determine which are spammers who are abusing the whole effort of authentic bloggers and writers who want to do their contribution over the web. If you want your whole effort not to go to waste, then a keyword density analyzer is something you may want to utilize.
Popularity: 88% [?]
published by Dan in Blogs | SEO | SEO Strategy | SEO Tools
The funny thing about the web these days is that once a new trend in social marketing is identified as an effective way to address the search engine optimization efforts, they will immediately be turned on to. Social bookmarking has been found to be a good way to do just that, a great alternative to the usual link building and directory submissions that are obviously targeted to get links that point back towards the mother site.
The number of links to a site is known to be a varying factor towards measuring the degree of relevance and importance that a site has. The thing with bookmarks, it is something that you can do by a simple sign up and then submit a site or certain posts of your site for others to read. Depending on how you look at it, it has two things that are trying to cover, namely:
1. To share information
2. To entice fellow bookmarkers to check out the site
As you can see, this is a good way to optimize a site and build on popularity. While it seems that bookmarking is easy, do not be misled by the ease of using it. For one thing, they still do not entertain spam and once you fail to read their TOS or Terms of Service, one violation can get your account banned along with the links to go with it.
No one loves spam. We all know what it is. While there are some people desperate for popularity, it should be done in the professional way to optimize promising sites that we have today.
Popularity: 89% [?]
published by Dan in Keyword Research | SEO | SEO Basics | SEO Strategy
Website design is all about combining design with advanced programming. We see them being applied to most websites. In fact, when you are thinking of putting up a website you are normally given a choice; have a simple starting page or use the flash enabled option which sometimes becomes an eyesore as far as waiting for the page to load. The result? Well not all people are fascinated with advanced scripting. Remember, they land on your site to see what you have to offer.
For most visitors these days, getting information is important over design. You can impress some by using these scripts, audio and video but they are practically secondary compared to the first time that visitors land on your page. Similar to the old belief that “First Impression Last”, the same holds true for people who surf the web.
The Internet has grown so much since its early years. It is no longer purely about graphics and scripting. Essence and the purpose of your site is important these days and if you are wise you will place all important and relevant information which you think people will be looking for.
Settle that aspect and then try to focus on unique but simple designs. Designs and scripts are not usually indicated in search queries since for one thing, nobody cares on how you represent your website. You can use the usual meta tags or descriptions but do remember, you have to conceptualize it as a whole. Do not take it by part as it will only make your work doubly hard.
Popularity: 91% [?]
published by Dan in SEO | SEO Basics | SEO Strategy | SEO Tools
If you want to be successful on the web, you have to determine the proper way to be noticed by people online. Search Engine Optimization is a familiar word but there is more to it than doing the traditional practices of online marketing. You have to be wise to what is going on and be up to date with the latest web marketing trend.
The common practices seem routine. We often hear about them. Much of them include:
1. Blogging
2. Link Building
3. Commenting
4. Directory Submissions
5. Article Marketing
6. Email Marketing
Add to the growing list new innovations such as RSS and Video Marketing. It seems that they grow by the year. Something new will always crop up but that does not mean that old practices will go passé and unnoticed. The attention will be diverted but as they say “Old Hands Still Work Best”.
So whenever we hear of new online advertising practices, do not just jump the gun and shift towards it. Master the current online marketing strategy first, check out the results and then consider the alternatives. If you do all of these SEO strategies at the same time, make sure you attend to them equally. Missing out on one of them may be the outcome you are waiting for.
Time is another element not mentioned. It takes time for these strategies to sink in. SEO is not achieved overnight. Depending on what you focused on, the results will show after perhaps weeks or even months. Just be patient and be dedicated to it.
Popularity: 98% [?]
published by Dan in SEO
Going back to the benefit of CSS that web designers and webmasters seem to love the most, which is the very ease of maintenance, if you think about it you’ll realise that this is actually also beneficial for your SEO campaign because…
- easy to maintain sites mean less hassle for the webmaster, which in turn means that he/she can devote more time to other productive activities such as SEO!
- the ease of changing style/presentation (without affecting content) is great for optimising each page to see which look/feel leads to the highest conversion rates.
- the ease of adding/updating content makes it possible for SEOs to easily point out the need for and request new copy in cases wherein keywords and phrases are not used as much or in cases wherein new keywords are targeted.
Popularity: 99% [?]
published by Dan in SEO
Use of standard HTML tags - By using CSS web designers are forced to used standard HTML tags that have SEO benefits like the heading <h1> tags instead of relying on font <font> tags for styling content. Font tags work just as well for achieving the look you need to emphasise the word(s) within the tags but does nothing for greater visibility of your keywords in terms of spiders being able to classify the words under those tags as being more important.
Another example of standard HTML tags used are the unordered lists <ul> and anchor <a> tags, which are needed for making menus in CSS, this results in automatic links to the pages found on the menu list making it easier for spiders to find the other pages on the site simply via the navigation menu. Of course these standard HTML tags are also used even by those not using CSS but there are lots of times when they are not (such as when links are embedded in javascript and other instances). With CSS you won’t have to worry if the web designer used javascript for the menus or not because you can be sure that search-engine friendly tags are used.
to be continued…
Popularity: 99% [?]
published by Dan in SEO
Lots of web design clients nowadays prefer web designers to use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) mostly because a website designed using CSS is really easy to maintain. CSS allows content and design elements to be kept separate so that anytime the client wants new content to be added or old one to be replaced it can be done without affecting the site design, making updating the site virtually hassle-free. Even when it comes to changing some factors like the font color or type size of a certain paragraph or heading thanks to CSS it can be done super fast so that in a few seconds or minutes you’ll be done with the changes.
What many clients do not realise though is that CSS can also be advantageous in terms of SEO. Some of the reasons why CSS can benefit your SEO efforts include:
- Less code - Less code means greater readability of the content, at least for the spiders, since it makes for a more efficient crawling of the files. For users this is also good news because less code means smaller file sizes, which in turn means faster loading time of pages.
- Ability to move important content - Move where? To the top of the HTML file. Since it is on top of the HTML file it will be deemed as more important (remember placement makes a difference) by spiders. It will also ensure that soon as the HTML file is crawled then that important content will be indexed. Some files a cropped so it is imperative to get the important ones on the top.
to be continued…
Popularity: 100% [?]
published by Dan in SEO Basics | Social Media
- Use the power of blogs - This means both starting your own blog (remember to your blog under the domain you want to optimise!) and also reading and participating in blogs that has similar theme as your site. The benefits from this tactic is numerous (not just restricted to SEO) including…
- having a venue to provide fresh content more frequently without having to tweak the content of the other pages in your site,
- being able to insert more keywords/phrases via the blog posts,
- helping establishing your online reputation (note this only works if your blog is sensible and you make smart and relevant comments on other people’s blogs),
- generating more traffic for your site (if your blog becomes popular or at the least by baiting other commenters of blogs you participate in to check you out), and
- getting more links (from those who like or even sometimes dislike a particular post).
- Use social media marketing - Once you have finished with the technical aspects of optimising your site (adding tags, using keywords, cleaning up the code, etc.) concentrate on building up your online network. A well managed social media marketing campaign will result not only widen your online network but also help in reputation building as well as in your link building campaign. Just make sure that you use this strategy wisely or it might backfire on you (READ: Do not spam people in social media sites!).
Popularity: 100% [?]
published by Dan in SEO Basics
- Don’t forget the importance of relevance - Search engines rank pages not only based on the the amount of links pointing towards the site but also on the relevance of the page’s content relative to the user’s search term. Because of this it is important that you…
- make sure that the site has pages with a containing cohesive content - Unless your site is an encyclopedia, new site, classifieds, or something similar wherein you really will have a very large scope of topics you should only have pages that tackle different aspects of the same theme. This is important because it will be easier to optimise your site for that certain theme.
- get relevant inbound links - Instead of aiming to get hundreds of links from non-related sites 10 to 20 links from similarly themed sites will provide more value. Of course if you can get hundreds of links from relevant sites then so much the better!
- Understand how layout affects SEO - This will affect keyword placement as well as the concentration of keywords in different parts of the web page. To understand more do read Hannah’s post on “How Your Layout Affects Your SEO”
- Use web analytics - From the very start you should have this in place. If you still do not it isn’t too late. Web analytics are great not only for keeping track of statistics but more importantly for helping set goals and see how well you are doing and which aspects/pages in the site needs improvement.
to be continued…
Popularity: 56% [?]
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