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Basic tips on optimizing for Google
So without further ado, let’s get into the tips:
First and foremost, build links. This was what put Google in the position they’re in today – they realised that the most reliable way to judge a site isn’t by what’s on it – that’s open to manipulation, the best way to judge a site is by how many independent websites link to it, what’s on those websites and what keywords they chose to link with – This system is called PageRank. There are many tactics for building links and how you do it will depend on your site, but a good start is to set up some links to complementary (not competing) websites and see if you can get them to link back to you. Building links is great for Google, but it’s also great for gaining traffic from the links themselves. Produce some content – if you offer a service, write some articles related to the service you’re providing (you can see this technique in action on this very page). This gives you the opportunity to create lots of pages for Google to index and fill them with keywords relevant to your site. Write things that are useful or interesting that might encourage others to link to you. Put links to other websites in your content where appropriate, see if you can build link networks with other content providers. Use CSS to order your HTML files so that the content comes at the beginning of the file, before any menus, navbars or adverts – even if this is not the way it should appear on the page. The first thing in your HTML file should be a heading, followed by the actual content, and then after that should come any menus or navigational elements, and after that any adverts. Google does not render your pages, so if your menu comes before your content, Google will assume that your menu is more important than your content. It’s relatively easy to use CSS to override the order of the HTML file and position each element exactly where you want it irrespective of where it is in the HTML file. Determine the keywords that your customers are likely to put into a search engine and use them a few times throughout each of the relevant pages on your site. The higher up your page the better, this includes the page title and the address bar. The most important places you can put keywords are the page title, the URL and the first heading (hint, use h1 tags). If you have articles with different titles, use the title of the article in the title tag – don’t just use the same title for every page. You can get keyword ideas using one of the online keyword suggestion tools, Google’s is here, Yahoo (Overture’s) is here. You could also try these keyword tools from third party providers (although they mostly rely on the data from Google and Overture, they often display it in a more helpful way). SeoBook, WordTracker or KeywordDiscovery. If there is one specific keyword or phrase that’s particularly relevant you may try registering it as a domain name. For example at Digital Crocus we would love to get our hands on webhosting.com, web-hosting.com, virtual-private-servers.com or something similar; unfortunately for us none of these domains are available, but they may be for you. Google will usually rank you higher in keyword searches if the keyword actually appears in your domain name. Consider registering your domain for more than the minimum number of years – this shows that your site is here to stay. Some spammers and scammers will register many different domain names for the minimum period possible and once their domain is blocked or banned they allow it to expire and move onto a new one. Registering your domain for longer is an easy way to indicate to Google that you’re serious about your website and it could well gain you a few easy points in the search engine rankings. Make your URLs search engine friendly; if you use a database driven website your pages may have URLs like this: http://yourdomain.com/directory/phpscript.php?section=962452&page=662342. This may be the easiest way to reference the ID numbers of rows in your database, but it doesn’t exactly contain many keywords. Not only that, but there’s a risk Google may think that your PHP script is part of an interactive web application rather than a page displaying content and only index a limited number of the pages, or worse, not index it at all. The Digital Crocus knowledgebase is a database driven system, but notice how the URLs all contain the title of the article – the ID numbers are there too at the beginning of the file name but it’s a lot friendlier than the example above. We achieve this effect using mod_rewrite although this can be a bit scary for the novice user. If you run an out-of-the-box software solution on your website, you may find that there is a plugin for friendly URLs – this is particularly true of blogging software. Consult your specific system’s documentation and plugin list for further details. If you run a blog, try to build a network of links with other bloggers – many blogs have links to their friends’ blogs on their navigation bars. Add a similar list to your blog and see if you can get your friends to link to your blog from theirs. If you don’t run a blog, consider starting one – blogs don’t have to be personal diaries, you could use your blog to chart your company’s successes or new research projects, or you could use your blog to post links to any interesting things you find on the web related to your business. If you can create something that’s an interesting or useful read for your prospective customers, you should have no trouble building links – and that’s what it’s all about. Each time you add an article on your website, mention it in your blog and link to it using good keywords (hint, use the keyword tools mentioned previously). Try to build deep links to the content pages on your site, both from your own blog, front page and from external websites. The links should ideally be good keywords (use the keyword tools) relating to the article, rather than the name of your business as this ties the keywords and your individual articles together in Google’s map of the web. Determine a few of the most important keywords to your business (hint: pick the ones that have a high search volume according to the keyword tools mentioned above), and check regularly to see if your site appears on the search results. Even if it’s not on the first page of results, is it on the second or third pages? Look at the results that come above yours and ask yourself what they might be doing differently. Keep a record of the changes you make and the impact they have on your search position so you tell whether you’re heading in the right direction. Check that all of your pages are being indexed by Google. A quick way to do this is to pick a small section of text from each page and search for it with quotes (“”) around it. Do this for each page on your site that you would like to be indexed by Google so that you can determine if there are any pages that are not being indexed. Be aware that it can take Google a few days to get around to indexing new content. There may be a number of reasons why Google doesn’t index your pages; check whether you have to submit a form in order to access some of your content (Google never submits forms), check your URLs to see if they look like like static pages or dynamic applications – if all your pages are produced from a single dynamic script; Google may only index a limited number of the pages – see the point on optimising URLs for Google above. Ensure that each page has at least one link to it from somewhere else on your site – Google indexes your site by following links. Consider using Google’s webmaster tools to gain further information about how Google indexes your site. You may also consider creating a Google sitemap – this is a special file that tells Google exactly which pages you would like it to index – see the webmaster tools for further details. Depending on how your site is laid out it may be worth creating a single page with a list of every other page on your site and a link to it – this is a sitemap in the non-Google sense of the term. You may choose to lay this out like a tree (mimicking the way the links are actually built on your site), or you may choose to lay it out as a simple A-Z index. This can help your customers navigate around quickly but it’s also good for search engines as it will ensure that there is a quick way to link through to every single page.
So that’s it for now – this should give you a good idea where to start but you will need to keep monitoring your success and making changes and additions to your website in order to stay ahead of the game – the popular search engines are constantly changing and updating their algorithms to improve the quality of their search results and this means that if you’re in the top position one day, you may not be the there the next day. Depending on the competition in your business sector it can be hard work keeping your site in the top spot, but the rewards can be huge as it costs time, not money to get your site to the top, and once it’s there, the potential to generate traffic is huge.
Good luck!
The author Kieran Simkin is an experienced web developer and director of a successful web hosting business.
The Ten Important Steps for Optimizing your Website for Search Engines
“The Ten important Steps for optimizing your website for search engines:
In these ten steps we will know ten basics and important steps to optimizing a website to perform better on major search engines. If you will follow these steps correctly your website search engine position website will be surly improve depending on you industry competition.
Step 1 – Keyword Selection
Step 2 – Creating optimized Content
Step 3 – Site Structure
Step 4 – Internal Linking
Step 5 Submissions
Step 6 Link Popularity Building
Step 7 – Title and Meta tags
Step 8 Monitoring
Step 9 social bookmarking
Step 10 Testing
Step 1 – Keyword Selection
Selecting Keyword is the single most important factor in the entire search engine optimization (optimisation) process. Choosing the right and relevant keywords will not only help you in getting good search engine position and targeted traffic but it will also increase you return on investment (ROI).
Example: If you are a company based in UK providing search engine optimization (optimisation) (SEO) services. The first keyword in your mind would be definitely
Keyword Competition
SEO : 73,000,000
Search engine optimization : 63,600,000
Seo Company : 26,800,000
It is possible to get good ranking on these keywords but it will take lot of time and money instead you can target “”Seo Company Uk” and “Search engine optimization company Uk’ this way you are targeting two keyword at a time with less competition that means more chance of targeted traffic and good Search engine positions.
Keyword selection and research tools
The Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool
Site: http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
Word Tracker
Site: http://www.wordtracker.com/
Step 2 – Creating optimized Content
There has been lot of changes in the search engine algorithms but there is no change in the importance given to quality content. In this step we will focus on how to create optimized and unique content for high search engine positioning using the keywords we have selected in the first step.
Unique and well written content will both grab your visitor’s attention and at the same time, make them want what you have to offer. So write in keeping mind what your audience are looking for and targeted keywords.
First ask yourself some questions:
What services you offer
Do you provide the services your visitors are looking for
Do some research
Provide as much as possible information on the subject. Provide useful and unique information about your industry / subject area it can entice your visitors to visit your website in future. It has found that most of the online visitors search for information about their interests.
Content Optimization
Four important factors for optimizing content
1. Heading Tags – (H1 to H6)
2. Special Text – (bold etc.)
3. Inline Text Links – (Anchor text and alt tags for images )
4. Keyword Density – (number of occurrences of your targeted keywords in a page)
Heading Tags
By default text in these tags appear too large than standard text in a browser. We can customize it by using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).
Tip: Do not use the same tag more then once on a page.
Special Text
It can be used in bold, colored, “”In quotes”" or (in brackets). Using special text will help draw the attention to important information and also add weight to your keywords.
Inline Text Links
Example: We provide seo services and web hosting.
You add a link to related page on your site to these bold words. it gives the reader a way to find the information you are referring to.
Keyword Density
Keyword density is the no. of occurrences of targeted keyword in the content of the page. You should not spam the targeted keyword in your content; recommended keyword density is between 4% to 10%.
Step 3 – Site Structure
You must structure your website to attract the visitor as well as the search engine spiders. The site structure will help spiders read your site. Keep the code as clean as possible so search engine spider can get to your content, where you want them to be.
Use CSS to cut down code extra code like for font style, tables, images etc…
Things to remember while planning site structure
Keep URL Short and close to Root of the site
While creating folder and files use keyword
Eg: for a page in web hosting packs www.domainname.com/web-hosting/website-hosting.html
Use Hyphens (-) while splitting name in to 2 instead of underscore (_) as shown in above example.
Step 4 – Internal Linking
Internal linking means linking to your pages within the website by way of sitemap, navigation bar, footer, header etc. The sitemap should be linked on all pages of your website to get spidered by search engines from anywhere. You should also include Google sitemap on your site to get indexed easily by Google. It adds relevancy to the linked page which directly helps in getting high rank for the linked page
Using text based links with anchor text, footer navigation and use inline text link will improve Your Internal Linking Structure. So spider can crawl it easily add relevancy to the linked page. The closer a page is in clicks from your homepage. The higher the value the page rank is assigned.
Step 5 Submissions
Where to submit:
o Search engines
o Web directories
Major search engines to submit
Google.com | yahoo.com | Msn.com
Major web directories to submit
1. Yahoo (paid)
2. Dmoz.org (most important)
http://www.about.com/
http://www.incrawler.com/
http://www.jayde.com/
3. http://www.wowdirectory.com/
Step 6 Link Popularity Building
There are 2 ways of building Link popularity
o Reciprocal link building (2 way link building)
o Non-reciprocal link building (1 way link building)
Reciprocal link building
There are some basic rules to follow when exchanging links:
Relevancy is more important
Check and make sure the reciprocal link aren’t being blocked and pages are indexed
Link pages with more than 50 links aren’t worth exchanging with
Non-reciprocal link building
It can be in form of paid link, directory listings, social bookmarking, article publishing ,blogs and press releases
Step 7 – Title and Meta tags
Once you have planned and completed the site structure and content integration. Its turn for Title Meta and Description. Unique and optimized title and Meta tags are really helpful in achieving higher search engine positions
Title:
this tag represents information of page this can be in browsers header bar
Meta keywords:
This include the targeted keywords for that particular page
Meta description:
The Meta description shows on the SERPS (search engine results page). It is used in describing the products / services you offer to your customers, you can describe specific pages within your website that shows in the search results page.
You can describe your pages the way you want them to be seen by your visitors in the SERPS (search engine results pages)
Next is alt tags, Alt tags is a white hat SEO practice used very commonly by search engine optimizers
Step 8 Monitoring
There are three basic things in the monitoring process. They are:
Monitoring your search engine positions:
You can go through the searches manually, you can use software like IBP to check your rankings or you can use online. There can find many related Seo tools listed here http://www.seocompany.ca/tool/seo-tools.html
Monitoring Back Links
Schedule weekly checks of how many backlinks you have and are your link partners still linking to you
Monitoring Changes in the Search Environment
The last thing you will have to monitor is for changes with the search engines themselves.
Visiting forums and subscribing to newsletters to keep yourself updated about search engines algorithm changes
Step 9 social bookmarking
The social bookmarking is used by many people to bookmark their pages and websites. Using the social bookmarking visitors can bookmark the sites listed in the social networking websites. The popularity of the websites in the social bookmarking world gauged by most favorites websites among the visitors. The most bookmarked website obviously will get more traffic than others and it can also help improving your search engine ranking in major search engines.
How does it work?
In a social bookmarking system, users store lists of Webpage Urls, which they find useful. Often, these lists are publicly accessible, and other people with similar interests can view the links by category, tags, or even randomly. Some social bookmarking systems allow for privacy on a per-bookmark basis.
Most bookmarking websites allows to enter multiple tags for your web pages in order to be searched by the visitors that helps social bookmarking visitors to get relevant and accurate search results for their keywords.
Advantages
1. Social bookmarking helps in promoting your website users market your site.
2. It indirectly helps by building a brand.
3. Generates targeted traffic.
Some important social bookmarking sites
Dig.com | Blink |Del.icio.us |Digg |Furl |Google |Simpy |Spurl |Y! MyWeb
Step 10 – Testing
You have created a great design and added SEO elements to your site. Now its time to see if all that hard work done has achieved the main goal of reaching the visitor and to convert them to a customer.
o Check for broken links :
o Other script errors
o Ease in navigating site
o visual appeal of the site
o placement of content
o are you able to find what u are looking for
You have created a great design and added SEO elements to your site. Now you should test your website for errors (i.e. 404 not found error, script errors etc.).
Check for broken links :
Other script errors
Ease in navigating site
Visual appeal of the site
Placement of content
Are your visitors able to find what they are looking for?
“
Inventa technologies is a London based Search engine optimization (SEO) company specializing in Web promotion, E-mail marketing, affiliate management, PPC account management, paid inclusion and trusted feeds, directory submission and article distribution services. For more information please visit Seo company UK
Optimizing your Video and Audio for Organic Search Results
Video and Audio now gives you organic Search Results! Optimizing your video and audio for Organic search Results
There is no doubt that Organic traffic is going to be huge in the near future, look at PPC costs and see why. The changes that will take place in search engines are going to effect many people, maybe including myself 
This I can tell you because Google is constantly trying to get you to rank pages. Now let me introduce you to something new, marketers like to call it “universal traffic”. In the past marketers with SEO’s have tried to optimize each website for getting “page results” and are therefore ranked on the Search Engines. However, now they are changing the search results to be “All-in-one”. What this means is that your site need to conain bigger portions of content, not only text. Search Results appearing now can be anything from text to names of pdf files, or even videos. They have it all, blogs images, everything. This means trouble, for most people, since now the competition will increase A LOT. It’s easier to rank good for 10,000 pages than it is to rank for 100,000 objects on the same 10,000 pages. Why? It’s hard to compete with Audio, Blogs, Articles, How to’s, Wikipedia posts and News from the big site, even images. A combination of these are hard to fight off. I’ll tell you how to get a fair step ahead.
Tell me the keys to doing this, right now. Well alright, I will tell you!
There are many things to use to your advantage here. We have Podcasts, RSS feeds, Blogs, Articles, Wikipedia enries, Softwares, and even social bookmarking sites. This article only covers the optimization for audio and video meta tags and titles to rank higher on google for the new generation of Search Engines.
Optimizing your audio and video for 2007
To make something clear, podcasts are a part of audio and video. Video and Audio Podcasts are all over the internet. technology is so far ahead that this might actually scare you! Voice recognition can actually take note on what you are actually saying and transscribe this into text. This is so high tech that I can’t even stress this enough. Some search engines take that transscribed audio/video and then reads that text to return results. To optimize for this then you will have to follow some basic steps. If you are recording something for a podcast in the form of audio then while editing your audio podcast use “old SEO techniques”, but for your voice. Follow these guidelines and you will be well of in the new “Universal Organic Search Engine Results”
1. Your Audio/Video should have a good descriptive title!
2. The Meta Tags are still important for your Audio/Video, so don’t change this from old SEO.
3. Meta Tags are in turn the same as SERP or ID3 tags in media such as windows media player or winamp. When playing a song you will usually see artist, album, song title etc. Now take into account that this is exatcly how you should put your Audio/Video Podcasts tags, DO put in the extra time it takes to do this.
4. Use programs such as Audacity to edit the ID3 tags for ultimate easy for both search engines and visitors to your site.
5. If you are writing a post to your podcast (which you should anyway) be sure to include targeted keywords.
6. Use the same old bold and the same old italic for keywords, no different, like I said before.
7. Your links should have a nice little anchor tag too, with the keywords attached.
8. Important note are the tags, the small keywords you are allowed to use. Tag it with targeted keywords and be sure to have only relevant keywords. This is good for SE and visitors.
9. Another great feature that has been around for some time is RSS. Get a free RSS feed to your podcasts, this gives your visitors the next podcast directly in their reader and acts as a signal for them to come back.
10. Geo Target your Feeds
11. Categorize your video correctly, this is for the easy of any spiders that want to find “relevancy” and also for visitors
12. If you are not already a member of Social Bookmarking sites, be sure to become one and promote your videos there.
13. Send Invites to friends, Invite friends to join you in your network
14. Use Technorati to ping your Video/Audio podcasts
15. If you don’t have a blog, get one and embed your audio/video inside.
16. Use this as leverage, get frinds to give honest reviewsto your content, feedback
17. This should be obvious, but I feel the need to say it submit your Audio/Video to all the directories and search engines you can afford or know about.
18. If you are familiar with Viral Marketing then use this, have a Tell-A-Friends button and be sure to have great interesting content for this to really work well
19. Use other people to get them to post your content. Maybe you have a frind with a blog, ask them to embed the video to their site and so on.
20. Tell as many people as you know about your videos and talk about it on the street, passionately is always better.
I hope these 20 steps can bring you to better Search Engine Results and more organic traffic, this can sound like a lot of work, and it can be. Therefore I suggest the tools on my website posted below.
The tools I was talking about above can be found at http://online-marketing-expert.com/main/products/software this will really help you in your pursuit to internet profits.
Making a Heavyweight: Optimizing Database-powered Sites
The Problem
When you are charged with creating a large website powered by a database, the way it is set up heavily affects its ranking in search engines. Even more than static sites, database sites can be optimized to effectively rank for many keywords. For these type of sites the goal is often to rank highly for many long or obscure queries – this is called “the long tail” of search. But what is the best way to optimize a database site? Database sites have their own methodology for optimization, which will be explained below.
Titles
Each page that is served up from your database should have a unique title. Titles are one of the most important factors for Google, Yahoo and MSN when they determine the topic of a webpage. Very often, a site’s developer will simply put the overall site name as the title of all pages on the site. This stems from either laziness or a lack of SEO knowledge on the part of the site’s developer. As pages are extracted from a database and displayed, it is important to dynamically insert their titles into the website template as a tag.
Interlinking
It is best to interlink the pages of your database-powered site. Sometimes this is very easy to do: if your site is a dictionary site, where each page shows a single word’s definitions and synonyms, this is as easy as programmatically making each synonym into a link that points to the synonym’s own definition page. In some cases this is difficult, for example when your site is a blog. In those cases, it is possible to either manually insert “related articles” links into each post, or to take advantage of plugins that display “most popular articles”, or “similarly tagged articles” at the bottom of each post. This interlinking helps your site gain a higher rank because it allows search engines to see the relationship between pages accurately, rather than see them as totally standalone (and possibly relegate them to the supplemental index).
Static Appearance
It is a benefit to have your pages appear as static HTML pages rather than as parameters to a PHP file which retrieves them. This makes your site appear to search engines as though a person took the time to uniquely write out each page. Such changes to the URL are possible using “mod_rewrite”, which is module for the Apache web server (it is a very popular web server, and you always have the option of hosting your website on it). Although it takes time to learn, it is fairly simple to translate a request for a file with a .html extension to the “real” URL of your PHP file with the page name as a parameter.
Descriptive Filenames
Another important factor in the way you structure your URLs is that each page’s URL should have the title in it. This is something that your developer should be able to set up. Doing this will guarantee that any keywords that are present in page titles are also present in the URL – another factor that boosts your search engine rank. You can see this in action when you look at blogs – their titles are almost always present in the URL in some form. Sites like Hubpages also allow for inserting relevant keywords into the URL – which is something that you should also do if your site hosts user-generated content.
Because database-powered sites are often much larger than traditional static sites, there is a lot more scope for success when they are optimized. The above techniques should have you and your developers well on your way towards making your site a heavyweight.
Jacob F. is a search engine optimization specialist with 7 years of experience as a developer. You can see an example of techniques discussed in this article at this Dictionary Site developed by Jacob. You can contact Jacob F. at his Canadian SEO company.
Optimizing Blog Post Headlines in WordPress
If you were to develop a site seven or eight years ago, you would likely need at least a basic understanding of programming codes like HTML or Javascript. Such coding was a significant barrier to entry for many non-digitally savvy users. The game changed when WordPress was developed in 2003. Since its release, WordPress has grown to an incredible 62.8 million websites in the US and 202 million websites worldwide.
WordPress is an open-source blog publishing application that eliminates web programming for the end user. As it is open-source, there are many different features that have been created by developers to enhance your blogging experience and website design. Many of these features allow bloggers to increase their SEO performance. We will discuss many of these features and how to use them in WordPress.
Use Static Key Words
The more key words you have on your webpage, the more attractive you are to web crawlers. (In simple terms, keyword density is one of many variables web crawlers look at. For example, Google Search looks for the quantity and quality of other sites linking to you).
WordPress has many tools to create sections to feature your own blog posts. In WordPress, click on the “Appearance” button in the left sidebar. A drop down menu will appear. Click on “widgets.” Then drag and drop widgets, such as “recent posts,” “tag clouds” and “links” in the sidebar 1 column on the right. These widgets will increase the number of key words that appear on every page.
Use WordPress Plugins
You might also consider a plugin that features relevant post. This will increase your SEO and pageviews by creating an additional source of keywords and generate relevant content for your reader. Simply click…
To read more about optimizing blog post headlines, go to Sparxoo, a digital marketing, branding and business development blog.