Entries from November 2006 ↓

These are what I believe to be the top 10 most important things (not necessarily in order) that you need, in order to get your website found in the search engines, and get your site search engine friendly.

There are many other factors as well, but if you follow these guidelines, you’ll stand a much better chance, and you’ll be off to a good start for a good SEO strategy.

1. Title Meta Tag

The title tag is what displays as the headline in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). It’s also what displays in the top blue band of Internet Explorer when your site is displayed.

Your title tag of your website should be easy to read and designed to bring in traffic. By that, I mean that your main keyword phrase should be used toward the beginning of the tag. True, there are websites being found now that do not use the phrase in the title, but the vast majority still do as of this writing.

Don’t make the mistake of putting your company name first, unless you are already a household name, like Nascar or HBO. People are likely searching for what you have to offer, not your name.

Your title tag should be written with a capital letter starting the tag, and followed by all lowercase letters, unless you’re using proper nouns. Some people prefer to capitalize every word, too.

If you use wordpress i recommend the use of the SEO Title Tag Plugin. The plugin allows you create search engine optimized titles for WordPress blogs.

2. Description Meta Tag

The description tag is the paragraph that people will see when your page comes up in the search results.

Your description tag should be captivating and designed to attract business. It should be easy to read, and compel the reader to act right now and follow your link. Without a description tag, search engines will frequently display the first text on your page. Is yours appropriate as a description of the page?

A proper description tag is what people will see below your title. You should make proper use of punctuation, and with readability, use your subject and geographical references.

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The term Web 2.0 is somewhat of a misnomer. Since The web and the Internet as a whole, is not released in such stages like in softwares. Rather, it evolves erratically as time pass on. The Internet is full of trends in technology. What is popular today may die out the next day. Or in some cases, it might evolve into something better.

So in reality Web 2.0 is not really an upgrade. Instead it refers to the current state of trends in the web. So if someone wants a Web 2.0 website, they may be referring to a website that has a popular style of design, a social component, or uses a specific technology or some combination of those three.

Take a look at how to design a site that uses Web 2.0 design conventions. First stop the page background. The background of a page is generally either very light (more common) or very dark (less common). This simply follows a good trend of making text on a page contrast highly with the background for easier reading.

A background may have stripes or something similar, but the most common aspect is a slope at the top, fading down to some other color that continues throughout the background of the rest of the page.

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Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo will all begin using Google Sitemaps in an attempt to standardize and improve the website indexing process. Sitemaps are XML files describing the layout of the site with associated metadata. Those files can let web spiders know the last time a page changed and how important a changed page is so that the indexing process is streamlined. With sitemaps, only pages with changes are visited, which saves bandwidth.

Sitemaps was originally created by Google in June 2005 and released under the Attribution/Share Alike Creative Commons license. Yahoo began using it within a couple of months its release. Combined, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo have an 85.3 percent search engine market share as of July 2006 according to comScore.

In a joint statement, Windows Live Search general manager Ken Moss said, “the quality of your index is predicated by the quality of your sources and Windows Live Search is happy to be working with Google and Yahoo! on Sitemaps to not only help webmasters, but also help consumers by delivering more relevant search results so they can find what they’re looking for faster.”

“This is a great development for the whole community and addresses a real need of webmasters in a very convenient fashion,” according to Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of Search Engine Watch. “At industry conferences, webmasters have asked for open standards just like this.”

If you want to learn more about Sitemaps, information—including the XML schema for the Sitemap protocol—is available from the Google Webmasters Tools page.

Source: arstechnica

Getting the right keywords for your page is one of the biggest factors that determine the success of your page in the internet. Good keywords are the building block of your webpage. You must do a major research on the keyword phrases where your site will focus. You should use a keyword software like goodkeywords that’s a free Windows software for finding the best keywords for your web site pages. You can also use Google Keyword Tool, Wordtracker.com or Nichebot.com, or superior keyword research software such as Brad Callen’s Keyword Elite.

Regardless of what process you choose, you must take your keywords very carefully. You should check the competition for that keyword or phrase and the number of searches made each month for that keyword. You can compare searches made for a set of keywords using Google Trends.

Other very important factor is keyword density. Keyword density refers to the ratio of keywords contained within the total number of words in a given web page. The preferred keyword density ratio varies from search engine to search engine. In general is recommended to use a keyword density ratio between 3-10%. Some websites provide real-time keyword analysis, helping you optimize the density ratio, like KeywordDensity.com.

Try to fit your keyword in the url of your site, and make sure you place it in the title tag of your page, as well in the h1 tag. This will help search engines like Google to rank your page in higher spots.

Now you don’t need to be a programmer to develop a search engine. With the new google service you can build a search engine that focused specifically on your own interests. The search engine you can create will be based on the topics and web sites you choose. Users of your custom search engine will benefit from results that are much more relevant to their needs than what they can find at Google itself.

First of all, you need to have some kind of Google account. Assuming you have one, you can go to the Google Co-op link for new search engines where you’ll see a number of things to do, before you have your SE.

Building a search engine with Google is free, and it can make you money with adsense! Perhaps this is the real reason Google is offering customization; it’s another way for Google to deliver a highly targeted audience to its advertisers.

Does it seem like no matter what you do your website just won’t climb up in the search engine rankings? If so, your web site may not be optimized well enough for the search engines to increase your rankings. There are some very important factors that determine where web sites are ranked. These factors are referred to as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques and they can make all the difference in your site’s rankings.

Here are some of the most important factors that the search engines use in determining your rankings:

1. Web Site Content

Content on your site is one of the most important factors for successful search engine optimization. Your web site should provide valuable information on specific subjects relevant to your web site. Furthermore, your content should be updated regularly. It’s not enough to just put up a few content pages full of information on your site and then nevër add to it. This is a continuous process that will help your search engine rankings if done correctly.

It’s also important that you don’t try to trick the search engines by flooding them with multiple versions of the same page, repeating the same content over and over. Doing that will not help your rankings and will eventually lead to your site getting banned from the search engines.

2. Link Popularity

Inbound links are very important for achieving high search engine rankings. Most of the search engines today regard link popularity as one of the most significant determinants of your website’s rankings.

Here are some of the best ways to get inbound links:

• Articles - Writing and submitting articles to websites and article directories is a very good way to get inbound links. 
• Content - Not only will adding quality content help in your rankings by itself, it will also help you with your link popularity. Other webmaster’s will want to link to your site because it is valuable to them and their own visitors.
• Directories - Submitting your site to online directories will help you gain inbound links. 
• Blogs - Start a blog that you update frequently with information related to your website’s niche. Then, link to your site from the blog. You can also submit your blog to various blog directories to get even more inbound links. 
• Link Exchanges - Simply find other quality sites related to yours and ask them to link to you in exchange for a link back to them. This is not as effective as it used to be but it is still a pretty good way to get inbound links.

When trying to increase your link popularity remember that the more inbound links you get the better, but quality is always better than quantity. Stay away from low quality sites, FFA’s, and sites unrelated to yours.

The next things that should be considered when doing SEO for your web site are the on-site and the off-site elements. Some of the on-site elements are the title tag, Meta tags, heading tags, ALT tags and highlighting of the text using the bold tag. The Link text is an important off-page element.

On-Site Elements:

3. Title Tag and Meta Tags

Meta tags help describe the page where they are placed. Though today the Meta tags are not nearly as important as they once were and are definitely not the only things the search engines look for when indexing your site, they are still somewhat important in deciding the relevancy of the page for a keyword search.

Search engines focus on three primary tags to help them determine the relevance of a website for a particular search phrase. The Title Tag, Meta Keywords and the Meta Description…

Note: Most experts agree that the Title tag is very important to a website’s ranking and that the Meta Description tag is still useful to most search engines in the SERPs (search engine result pages) as a concise outline of a site’s content. The Meta Keywords tag is, however, generally believed to be irrelevant to all the major engines in determining site ranking.

Ideally the title tags should contain less than 64 characters with your most important keywords in them and should definitely be relevant to the content on the page. Do not stuff keywords in to the title tag!

The Meta description tag is a summary of the page and its contents. This Meta tag should be 200 characters or less and should contain keywords and phrases you hope to be found for, but it should also read like an introductory lead-in for the page and be appealing to the reader. The description you provide for your page has to convince the visitor that they have found exactly what they were looking for.

Probably the least important Meta tag to search engines is the keyword tag. However, it shouldn’t be ignored. Keyword tags should be less than 1000 characters. This tag should include important keywords and phrases consistent with the body text, title, and content of the page. Be specific and accurate with the keywords and key phrases in this tag. Again, do not stuff keywords here… they should only be those that are actually on the page and do not repeat any word more than 3 times.

4. Heading Tags

The heading tags are given more weíght than the ordinary text. The higher the H tag the more weíght it carries. You should make use of the heading tags to highlight the important keywords and headings of your page as well as the paragraph headers.

5. Bold Text

Bold text is given a little more weíght than ordinary text but not as much as heading tags. Make sure to enclose some of your keywords in bold tags when they appear on the page.

6. Alt Text

The alt tag provides alternative text when images cannot be displayed… This might happen if the users have set the browsers only to download the text and not the graphics, or if the images are too heavy to download for the user�s internet connection. Only include important keywords relevant to your site and the image and do not stuff keywords in them.

Off-site elements:

7. Link Text

This is a very important factor in search engine optimization to gain higher rankings. The link text can be on pages within your site or what other web sites use to link to you. Either way, it is important. If possible the target page’s main search term should be included in the link text instead of just the URL. Do not use identical link text for every link, but do include the target page’s main keywords in the link text. Links carry more weíght when the text around them is relevant to the target page’s keywords and phrases.

Following the above SEO information will help tremendously in your search engine rankings. Remember that the search engines are advancing all the time. Don’t try to trick them because they will eventually catch on and that could mean the end of your web site. Stick to the basic techniques above and you will increase your search engine rankings without fear of being banned or dropped.

The Author
Trent Brownrigg is a successful Internet marketer and home busíness consultant. Visit his website http://www.work-at-home-jobs-iowa.com for all the information, tips and resources you need to succeed in your home based busíness.