Archive for the ‘SEO Basics’ Category
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: 97% [?]
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: 98% [?]
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: 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: 87% [?]
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: 33% [?]
published by Dan in SEO Basics
- Make sure your site and all the pages in it gets indexed ASAP by…
- informing search engines about your new website(s) - While you can wait for search engines to find your new website you can make it quicker by submitting your URL to search engines. You can submit your URL for free to Google, Yahoo, and MSN Live. If you want extra fast inclusion you pay to be included in Yahoo’s index within 48 hours by submitting via Search Submit.
- creating and submitting a sitemap - I’ve done several posts on this already. Reminder the sitemap I am referring to is the XML sitemap that is to be submitted to search engines. You can also indicate pages you DO NOT want to be crawled/indexed by explicitly stating it in the sitemap.
- making sure that all the content in the pages you want to be seen are accessible - Please refer to #1 of the previous post.
- Pay attention to formatting - By this I mean emphasising the important keywords/phrases. I’ve mentioned keyword placement in SEO Tips Part 1 but note that should provide a way for search engines to know that the keywords are extra important not only by the placement by also by using heading tags when appropriate (for heading of course!) and bold <b> </b> tags for those you want emphasised but are not main headings
to be continued…
Popularity: 18% [?]
published by Dan in SEO Basics
- Make content accessible to search engine spiders - Make sure all content that you want to be searchable can be found by search engines. Remember that certain formats like Flash pages and Java script drop down menus can not be crawled by search engines. Do not forget to provide a way for search engines to know the content of those pages/elements.
- Make sure your site’s server is clean - This is very important for those using shared servers. If you happen to be sharing a proxy server with a banned/flagged site this could affect your ranking.
- Provide fresh content - Sites that rarely update their content can do this by publishing RSS/News feeds or by adding a blog. The blog need not be updated daily but posting a couple of times or a bit more per week is recommended.
- Settle canonicalisation issues - Figure out which URL you want to be the primary URL (with www. or without the www) and 301 redirect the other URL to the primary URL.
- Look at your SERPs standing and not on page rank - While a higher page rank should make you happy the true test of whether your SEO efforts is paying off or not is your placement in SERPs for the keywords you are targeting. A high page rank does help but there are lots of instances wherein pages with a lower page rank out do ones with higher page ranks in SERPs.
to be continued…
Popularity: 31% [?]
published by Dan in SEO Basics
- Incorporate your SEO campaign into your overall website strategy - See previous post on reasons for SEO.
- Do exhaustive keyword research before selecting keywords to optimise for - A cursory keyword research will still get you results but you can almost be sure that you’ll either miss some very important keywords that will result in higher conversion rates or that you’ll end up optimising for some keywords that will not yield that much results. Either way it will result in wasted resources.
- Make sure you provide quality content - Content is and always will be king. There’s no point optimising for a site that doesn’t have something of real value to offer. When it comes to keywords in the site’s text make sure that they can be found there and that variations of the keywords/phrases pepper the pages. However, make sure that the content still sounds natural and that the content doesn’t look spammy. Keyword stuffing is a big no since it makes for substandard content.
- Keyword placement - I’ve posted on this several times. Make sure keywords are placed where it counts (title tags, anchor texts, ALT tags, etc.).
- Focus on link building - Get as much relevant links as possible. Non-relevant links are okay as long as they’re not from link spammers and as long as you get more relevant links than non-relevant ones.
to be continued…
Popularity: 33% [?]
published by Dan in SEO | SEO Basics
- SEO does not guarantee results overnight - Patience is one of the virtues SEOs must develop!
- SEO will get you the traffic but won’t guarantee conversions - You still need good content and a good website design to convince the traffic sent by search engines to take the action you want them to.
- SEO is hinged on keyword selection - If you want a successful SEO campaign you need to make sure that you select the most important/relevant keywords/ke phrases to target.
- SEO is a continuous effort - Search engines are very dynamic. To keep up with the changes in search engine algorithms you should make sure that you keep an eye on your site’s optimisation efforts. SEO is definitely NOT a one-time thing. You also need to regularly look at your keywords to see if you should be targeting new ones.
- SEO starts with website debugging - Time and again I have emphasised the importance of checking bugs, both critical and trivial, before doing SEO. You can not optimise a broken site!
- SEO service providers are not equal - Make sure you hire the services of a good/experienced SEO service provider if you want to get real results. Stay away from SEOs that promise results overnight. Chances are they will employ black hat tactics to show you “results”, which in the end will endanger more than benefit your website.
Popularity: 34% [?]
published by Dan in SEO | SEO Basics
I firmly believe that every now and then it is important that we review SEO basics to make sure that we do not neglect anything. The good thing about reviewing SEO basics is that you get to check whether you are losing sight of the reason why you are doing SEO.
- To get traffic from search engines - The primary purpose of SEO is NOT to be number in SERPs but to get as much traffic as from search engines as possible! This distinction is important because though you might rank better than before your SEO efforts still can’t be considered a success if you don’t reach the number of traffic you need/want from search engines.
- To get interested visitors from search engines - This pertains to relevance. You want the traffic you get to be interested in the content of your website. If you get a very high bounce rate then you need to take a close look at your keywords and start targeting search terms that are more relevant to your site’s actual content.
These are the two most basic reasons for SEO, however, if you look at the bigger picture you will see that even the above reasons exist to support the primary goal of your site (market your products online, educate people about your field, etc.). Hence, always remember that SEO is just a tool to help you reach your website’s aim. If you want to do effective SEO then do not lose sight of your goals.
Popularity: 33% [?]
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