cmoz.net

Search Engine Optimization Tips and Advice to Increase your Page Rank

SEO is a big topic that comes up all the time with my clients. Everyone wants to be the number one website on Google, but don’t know how to achieve this. This article is NOT saying you are going to be able to get to number one, but it will give you some guide lines on how to increase your chances greatly.

The most important item relating to SEO is to remember that CONTENT IS KING. Without endless amounts of fresh and interesting content you will never get to the top. But it isn’t just the quality of content that counts; it is how the content is written. For example if you are selling cell phones you want to make sure your keywords appear in your text over and over again. It may seem repetitive but this is the best way to get Google, MSN and Yahoo! to notice you.

The next tips are in no particular order because they all play a similar small role, but together make all the difference.

Use meta tags and descriptions – This is an older html technology that is considered dead by some but is still being used. Your meta description is often the description that a search engine will use when displaying your website.

Wrap text in paragraph and headline tags. Using the proper tags will tell a search engine that your text is indeed content. Headline tags are given a higher priority by search engines.

No Frames – stay away from frames, it makes it impossible for a search engine to appropriately link to your site. In-turn a user may find your site but it may not have all the page elements attached to it.

Links – Using your keywords in your links is a great way to emphasize those words to a search engine. Never use “Click here” it is a wasted link.

Backlinks – Backlinks are links from other sites that point to your site. Backlinks are one of the primary things that Google looks for in determining rank. The best way to build backlinks is with your content. You can syndicate your content over blogs, rss feeds and general article submissions. Each time you submit an article make sure it has your link on it. Joining forums and social networks are also great ways of building backlinks but many of them frown on blatant advertisements so you have to do this wisely.

Use Text – It may sound simple, but actually using text instead of images allows a google bot or yahoo crawler to read you site.

No Flash – Flash sites are bad for SEO plain and simple. Even newer Flash techniques that allow crawlers to read the site still won’t end up at the number one spot simply because of lack of perceived content since your website is only one page.

Web maps – Creating and submitting a web map notifies the search engines of which pages are the most important and how often they change.Time – SEO is slow, be patient.

There are many other things you can do to increase you rank naturally, just remember do not cheat and pay for a service to do this for you.

How To Get A Better Website Position In Search Engines ? Advice And Tips On SEO

It is an incredibly common situation to find yourself in; you have created your first website and you are very proud of how it looks and what it does, you have lots of great information on it, or products to sell, but there is just one thing missing…visitors!

You are not alone, and all is not lost.  What you require is a basic knowledge of search engine optimization, or SEO for short.  SEO is a huge subject, which cannot be covered in detail in any one article, but I will highlight some of the most fundamental points that you need to be aware of in order to drive traffic to your website.

Unless you are prepared to pay for traffic to your website by using adverts on other websites and on search results pages, you need your website to show up in the results pages when someone uses a search engine.  This is the only way to get a constant flow of visitors that you know are looking for what it is you can offer.

The best starting point is probably a rough overview of how search engines work, which will help you understand what it is you need to be doing to keep them happy.  While you must understand that this is a drastic simplification, what a search engine such as Google does when someone searches for something, is along the following lines.  It will sift through all the records it has of every web page it knows about, and see which ones are most relevant to the term being searched for. It then presents them in an order with the sites which it thinks are the most authoritative sources for that subject at the top.

What SEO involves, therefore, is doing the things that will let Google know what search terms your site is relevant to, and demonstrating that your site is an important and authoritative one on that subject.  The slightly more complicated part is how exactly you do that!  Google judges the importance or authority of a website to a large extent by looking at the number and type of other sites that have links to it.  Google sees a link to your site as a vote of confidence in your website by other webmasters.

You can roughly divide SEO activities into two main areas.  There are the things you do to your actual site, which you clearly have direct control over, and then the things you need to do which are off-site.  Building links is the main off-site activity that you will need to engage in.  As it is not possible to go into all aspects of SEO in one article, I will focus on link building as this is the main activity that will help your site rise up the search engine rankings.

Without lots of links from other sites to yours, your website will never appear at the top of the search engine results for any search phrase for which lots of other sites are competing.  It is fair to say that if your site does not appear in the top thirty results of a search, it may as well not exist.  In addition to that, I would say that the difference between being number ten and number one can make an enormous difference to the amount of traffic you get.  A huge number of people do not look further than the top three results

All links are not equal, and links from other sites that Google does not think are important will not count for much.  Neither will links from sites which are about a completely unrelated subject matter.  By far the most useful links you can have are those that come from sites which are about the same subject as your own, and which Google already considers to be an authority on that subject.  One good link is worth dozens of bad ones.

SEO is a vast subject, and the first thing you need to do is read up on it.  It involves a lot of work to get your site to the top of the search results, but it can be done, and there are various useful tools available which can help to speed up the whole process and guide you through the steps you need to take.

Search Engine Optimization; Tips and Advice

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a website from search engines via search results for targeted keywords. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results or the higher it “ranks”, the more searchers will visit that site.

As a marketing strategy for increasing a site’s relevance, SEO considers how search algorithms work and what people search for. SEO efforts may involve a site’s coding, presentation, and structure, as well as fixing problems that could prevent search engine indexing programs from fully spidering a site.

Most important online medium?

Search engines are the most important online medium to search for information. 92% of all internet users are frequently making use of search engines. Of all search engines, Google is by far the most used search engine. It provides search results not only on its own website, but powers other search engines’ results as well.

Placement at or near the top of the rankings increases the number of searchers who will visit a site. However, more search engine referrals does not guarantee more sales. SEO is not necessarily an appropriate strategy for every website, and other Internet marketing strategies can be much more effective, depending on the site operator’s goals. A successful Internet marketing campaign may drive organic traffic to web pages, but it also may involve the use of paid advertising on search engines and other pages, building high quality web pages to engage and persuade, addressing technical issues that may keep search engines from crawling and indexing those sites, setting up analytics programs to enable site owners to measure their successes, and improving a site’s conversion rate.

Investing into SEO

Since SEO strongly influences the volume of traffic to your website, it is important to invest into this. There are numerous agencies out there that can assist you to get into the top of the rankings. These agencies are usually quite expensive, so make sure a sitemap is present, issues such as broken links are fixed, etc. so the agency can focus itself on ‘the real work’. Since there are so many agencies out there, picking the right one can be quite hard. Here are a few pointers to keep in mind:

Be very skeptical against SEO agencies that unwillingly contact you. Treat them as unwanted emails about ‘making money while sleeping’ and ‘losing 100 lbs in 3 days’. In most cases these are trying to deceive you.

Nobody can guarantee a top position in the ranking list.

There should never be any sort of obligation of putting a link of the SEO agency onto your own website. This sounds very logical, yet once in a while some agencies will still ask you for this, which obviously is very inappropriate.

Talk to at least 3 different agencies and give out the same information. Ask each agency about the difference in their methods and let them explain why they work differently compared to their competitors.

Make sure you are legally covered. Don’t sign any 2 year agreements. Start with a half year or a single advice/training, so you can get used to the agency’s procedures. Make sure you are the owner of the work that gets done when cooperation between you and the agency ends.

Be careful with agencies that are mysterious about their methods and procedures.

Ask the agency in which way they are going to help you; often it’s a case of improving your own organization (such as writing better texts or having the web developer stick to certain guidelines).

Always ask for references. Ask the agency what they did for other clients, so you can get an image of what they can mean to you. If you can verify this with their clients, you’re probably on the right track. A good agency won’t be problematic about this.

SEO is per definition a long term project. Often it can take months before getting good results on all the investments and effort put in. The agency can’t guarantee you any results, but they can give you an estimate.

A solid keyword selection is the base of a good campaign, and crucial for success. The keywords at least have to be picked together. For example, by having the agency do a suggestion which you add up to afterwards.

Make agreements on how success will be criticized. Make sure all formalities are signed on paper. Best would be to measure the absolute number of visitors from search engines as indicator. Don’t forget to keep any seasonal influences and changes in the branch in mind.

Make sure your expectations are very clear and point out which responsibilities you think belong to the agency and which don’t. How often do you want to have contact with the agency, which data do you wanted to see reported, how often, etc.

 

 

SEO – How does it work?

SEO agencies offer services that vary from writing next texts to giving advice on the subject of the website, and finding the right directories which the website can be registered at. A few unethical SEO agencies have given the industry a bad name through aggressive marketing strategies and attempts on gaining ranks in unfair ways.

There are a lot of different theories on ‘the perfect method’ to gain a high rank in the search engine result pages (SERP). The algorithms used by the search engines are secret and nobody can give you a 100% guarantee on a good position. However, through extensive research some methods have been proven to be influencing the ranking in a positive way. Which elements are the most important is unknown, but the following methods will help you gaining a better position in the search engine rankings.

 

Using keywords within the tag

Placing one of the keywords you want to be found on in the title tag will have a big influence.

 

Using keywords in the body text

It’s very important to use the keywords you want to be found on in the content of your website, placed in naturally and logical spots.

 

The relation between your content and your keywords

It’s important to have a logical relation between the content of your website and the keywords you want to be found on.

 

Using tags

Make sure your headers are written in tags. etc, count as well but have less influence compared to the tag.

 

Using keywords in your URL

Even though it’s hard to actually change your domain name, it never hurts to use a relevant keyword in your domain name.

 

Link popularity within your website

When there are 15 internal links of your website lead to contact.php, while 25 links lead to team.php, your team page will be considered more important.

 

Relevance of external quality website

Putting links on your website that lead towards other websites which are high ranked will improve your own ranking as well.

 

The age of the website

The longer a page exists, the more relevant it gets to Google.

 

Visible quality text

Texts have to be visible as text and as little possible through pictures and Flash. The content needs to be as unique as possible as well. When certain texts can be found on the net too often Google will register this as spam.

 

Popularity of your website (links in quality and quantity)

The more links lead towards your website the more important your website will be considered.

 

Relevance of incoming links

When links which lead towards your website also have a relation to your content Google will consider your website more important.

 

Textual links

Links on your website should be made out of text as much as possible. Links in the shape of pictures and/or flash are considered less important. Of course this doesn’t mean you can’t make use of pictures and banners.

 

 

Next to the methods of influencing your position in a positive way, there also are certain attributes that can hurt your position. Be cautious of the following:

 

Server is not accessible to bots

Search engines make use of bots/spiders that crawl your website to index your pages. When your website is offline for more than 48 hours, your position will drop excessively. For small to medium websites with fewer visitors this is more flexible.

 

Used content

When the content on your website is considered a ‘duplicate’, your position will be negatively influenced.

 

Links to low quality/spam sites

Linking to the wrong websites (low quality and/or spam) will drop your position.

 

Using the same title on multiple pages

When identical titles are being used on too many pages your position will drop.

 

Over usage of keywords

Search engines will recognize when certain keywords are being used too often (in order to get a better position) and consider this spam.

 

Buying and selling links

When you try to buy or sell links at high ranked websites, and get caught by Google, your position will drop down drastically and you risk being removed out of the list totally.

 

(Very) slow servers

Slow servers with low response times can cause low ranks when bots can’t get to your pages.

 

See the big picture and how it all ties together for your business?

For a free consultation on Search Engine Marketing, please contact:

Lifecapture Interactive, 1-416-408-4669, info@lifecaptureinc.com, or visit us at www.lifecaptureinc.com.

Google Search Engine Optimization Advice That Works

Getting some basic Google search engine optimization advice is your first step before choosing the right linking strategies. A mastery of how Google works will likely result in a successful SEO campaign through obtaining a high rank on the search engine lists.

It’s an established fact among web developers that Google is the number one search engine in the world. Websites get an average of 90% of their search engine traffic directly from Google.

This makes it especially important to obtain search engine optimization advice from a well-known and reputable source. If you trust just anyone you are risking your reputation, and your website’s Google ranking!

Aiming at a high rank and web traffic and getting indexed by Google is a tedious process that only web developers with sufficient SEO experience can achieve. Getting the right search engine optimization advice helps you stay ahead of your competitors.

The most basic step in site optimization and getting indexed by Google is choosing the right keywords. Targeting specific keywords is a smarter SEO optimization practice rather than using general or generic ones.

Besides picking an appropriate URL and title tag, the toughest part of the Google SEO process involves back linking. This is where good search engine optimization advice comes in. Back links are websites that link directly to your website. The rule of the game is: the more back links you have, the higher your web pages will be ranked. Google would figure that you have a good website if others are linking back to your pages.

Setting up back links takes time. If you’re hoping to drive more web traffic to your site yet lack enough time to do it yourself, make sure you are getting search engine optimization advice before you attempt to do it yourself. Or better yet, try outsourcing your links to a reputable link builder!