SEO Tips And Techniques

Here are a few more tips and tricks to help you do well in the search engines...

Be a "White-hat"

Above all, be one of the good guys. Keep your optimisation efforts honest. This may (arguably) take more effort but it will definitely pay off in the long run.

Use Statistics

Any decent web hosting packages includes the option to see how many visitors your website is getting, where the referrals are coming from and which search keywords were used to find the site. Monitor these statistics so you can keep improving.

Experiment

It's good idea to try different tactics and see what works best. This takes patience - you may have to wait months for your pages to be indexed and build up statistics. After watching your search referrals for a while, change your web pages and see what the effect is. Remember to keep good records of the exact changes and dates so you can compare these to your statistics.

Keep Abreast of Developments

Stay in touch with the latest news and developments in the search engine world. As technologies and companies change you need to change with them.

Getting Listed in Search Engines

Once you have your website up and running, one of the first things you'll probably want to know is how to get your site listed in the search engines. Although it can be hard work, search engine optimisation (SEO) can also be a lot of fun and reap huge rewards.

This tutorial will cover each of the following areas:

• How Important is SEO?
  Exactly how important are search engines to your marketing strategy? How much time and resources should you devote to SEO?
• Search Engine Terminology
  It makes things easier if you understand a few common terms.
• Targeting Keywords
  You need to understand what people are searching for before you begin optimising, otherwise you may be optimising for the wrong things and attract no one.
• SEO Basics
  A few simple things to make sure your website is search engine friendly.
• Inbound Links (Backlinks)
  Search engines take notice of links to your website — you need them.
• Choose an Advanced Strategy
  Once you have the basics covered there are various options for pursuing better results.
• ON Page SEO
  Search engines love high-quality content.
• OFF-Page SEO
  As well as the content within your pages, there are other important ways to improve your position in the search engines.
• Tips & Tricks
  A few more general notes.

Note: This tutorial assumes that you have a commercial website with business goals, however this is just to illustrate the process of optimisation. The same principles apply to any type of website, commercial or otherwise.

Off Page SEO

This school of thought maintains that the actual content on the website is less important than the way it is optimised. Whilst the content should still be good quality, content alone is insufficient to compete in the top SERPs. Instead, webmasters must use other methods to increase their rankings. For simplicity's sake we will call all such methods Non-Content SEO.

With non-content SEO the focus is on understanding the methods and algorithms used to rank web pages. The webmaster must therefore have a very good technical knowledge of how search engines work. For example, knowing exactly how Google's PR is calculated means you can structure your site to give the best possible PR value, which in turn will lead to improved SERP rankings.

This is a much more mathematical approach than content-based SEO. It's like solving an equation - you figure out the way the calculation is made and then provide the correct mix of components in your website to give you the highest score.

The specifics of non-content SEO are beyond the scope of this tutorial. Becoming proficient in this art requires many hours of study and effort. In addition, search engine technology changes constantly and you will need to keep up with the latest developments. This is hard work but it can also be a lot of fun - in fact many people treat it like a game.

To get you started, here are a few non-content SEO techniques:

• Acquiring inbound links from web pages with high PR value.
• Arranging navigation structure and linking methods to maximise PR value in your site.
• Tailoring the anchor text of hyperlinks (the text which you click) to emphasise keywords.
• Paying to list or advertise your site with search engines, portals, etc.

Ethical Considerations

It is often said that non-content SEO is unethical, since the webmaster is forcing pages to the top of the SERPs which would not be there on their own merit. The truth is more complex than this though, and it is not fair to cast all such SEO in the unethical basket. Even the search engines themselves advise some non-content SEO.

Having said that, there is a limit to how far you can ethically use non-content SEO. The following tactics cross this line and are considered to be search engine spamming:

• Misleading optimisation, such as purposely optimising pages for keywords which are not relevant.
• "Keyword stuffing" - filling the page with a ridiculously high percentage of keywords.
• Attempting to gain multiple SERP positions by duplicating content on different pages.
• Creating misleading "doorway" or "cloaked" pages which distort the true content of the website.

There is a fine line between legitimate SEO and SE spamming. Err on the side of caution.

Google Bombing and Other Games

Every now and then you will see an example of pure non-content SEO appear in the news. A common game is known as "Google Bombing", which usually involves a group of people working in unison to create links to a website in order to produce an unusual result. Some well-known examples include "French military victories", "weapons of mass destruction" and "miserable failure".

These examples testify to the power of non-content SEO. It is quite possible to gain top SERP positions with basically no relevant content if you can play the game well enough.

On Page SEO

This school of thought adopts the principle that the content of your website is what really matters. This could be described as the "purist" view which assumes that if people develop high-quality websites, they will be rewarded with high-quality search rankings.

The theory is that good content will attract attention, inbound links and other referrals. Over time the accumulation of good press will give you many of the same benefits as other methods of SEO. In addition, this type of "natural" referral tends to be more genuine, diverse, robust and long-lasting.

This approach is better suited to websites which can provide large quantities of content, especially unique content. If, for example, your website is about the life cycle of the native New Zealand tuatara lizard, you will probably have plenty of content in a field without much competition. In this case a modest amount of content and a few links from other sites will give you a good chance of being well-placed in the SERPS.

If your website covers a more popular topic you will need to try harder. For example, MediaCollege.com provides content in the area of film and electronic media production. This is a much more competitive field, with many thousands of websites competing for the same keywords. At this level it is much harder to get good SERP placement through content alone, although it is still possible.

It gets worse for those competing for the very top keywords. If your site provides content in the area of "debt reduction" or "online gambling" you will find the competition is so fierce that content alone won't be enough.

Content-based SEO alone may or may not be enough to give you good SERP placement, but in any case it will ceratinly benefit your website to some degree.

Content for Non-Content Sites

Many webmasters complain that they do not have a "content-based" website and they are therefore at a disadvantage. This often applies to business sites. For example, the owner of a furniture store website might bemoan the fact that their content is not unique and they have no hope of attracting customers unless they rely heavily on non-content SEO.

In most cases this simply means the webmaster is not being creative enough. Almost any topic you can name can be written about. If you sell furniture on your website, write pages of advice about how to choose furniture, care for it, remove stains, make simple repairs, etc. You could employ an interior decorator to write articles about how furniture integrates with design. Do some research of your own and write about the history of chairs. This may sound an unlikely recipe for attracting customers but you would be surprised at how much it can help.

Except in very rare cases you can add unique content to your site if you are sufficiently motivated.

Quality vs Quantity

It's not only the quality of content which matters - quantity is also very important. People search for a huge variety of words in all sorts of combinations. The more text you have, the more chance that some particular phrase will match the exact phrase someone is searching for.

Some search engines also place importance on quantity - they assume that a large website has had more effort put into development and is more likely to be high quality.

In short, it is not a case of quality vs quantity. The more of each you can get, the better.

Summary

Content-based SEO is usually hard work in the initial stages and slow to reap rewards. It can also be difficult for some websites to create enough content to be effective. However it is likely to give you the best, most stable long-term results. Once established, content-based SEO becomes easier to maintain than other methods.

Content-Based SEO

This school of thought adopts the principle that the content of your website is what really matters. This could be described as the "purist" view which assumes that if people develop high-quality websites, they will be rewarded with high-quality search rankings.

The theory is that good content will attract attention, inbound links and other referrals. Over time the accumulation of good press will give you many of the same benefits as other methods of SEO. In addition, this type of "natural" referral tends to be more genuine, diverse, robust and long-lasting.

This approach is better suited to websites which can provide large quantities of content, especially unique content. If, for example, your website is about the life cycle of the native New Zealand tuatara lizard, you will probably have plenty of content in a field without much competition. In this case a modest amount of content and a few links from other sites will give you a good chance of being well-placed in the SERPS.

If your website covers a more popular topic you will need to try harder. For example, MediaCollege.com provides content in the area of film and electronic media production. This is a much more competitive field, with many thousands of websites competing for the same keywords. At this level it is much harder to get good SERP placement through content alone, although it is still possible.

It gets worse for those competing for the very top keywords. If your site provides content in the area of "debt reduction" or "online gambling" you will find the competition is so fierce that content alone won't be enough.

Content-based SEO alone may or may not be enough to give you good SERP placement, but in any case it will ceratinly benefit your website to some degree.

Content for Non-Content Sites

Many webmasters complain that they do not have a "content-based" website and they are therefore at a disadvantage. This often applies to business sites. For example, the owner of a furniture store website might bemoan the fact that their content is not unique and they have no hope of attracting customers unless they rely heavily on non-content SEO.

In most cases this simply means the webmaster is not being creative enough. Almost any topic you can name can be written about. If you sell furniture on your website, write pages of advice about how to choose furniture, care for it, remove stains, make simple repairs, etc. You could employ an interior decorator to write articles about how furniture integrates with design. Do some research of your own and write about the history of chairs. This may sound an unlikely recipe for attracting customers but you would be surprised at how much it can help.

Except in very rare cases you can add unique content to your site if you are sufficiently motivated.

Quality vs Quantity

It's not only the quality of content which matters - quantity is also very important. People search for a huge variety of words in all sorts of combinations. The more text you have, the more chance that some particular phrase will match the exact phrase someone is searching for.

Some search engines also place importance on quantity - they assume that a large website has had more effort put into development and is more likely to be high quality.

In short, it is not a case of quality vs quantity. The more of each you can get, the better.

Summary

Content-based SEO is usually hard work in the initial stages and slow to reap rewards. It can also be difficult for some websites to create enough content to be effective. However it is likely to give you the best, most stable long-term results. Once established, content-based SEO becomes easier to maintain than other methods.

Advanced Search Engine Strategies

The steps covered up to this point are all fairly standard and universally agreed upon. However more advanced techniques are less straightforward. There are many different ideas about what works and what the most effective strategies are. In addition, each search engine works slightly differently and advanced strategies require you to consider these differences.

It pays to learn as much as you can about different ideas and trends, and spend time deciding which is most appropriate for you. Most likely, you will find a certain combination of techniques is the best plan.

To simplify the situation we can say there are two main areas of SEO:

1. Content-based SEO: Building and optimising the content of your website.
2. Non-Content SEO: Any optimisation technique which is unrelated to the actual content of the site.

The relative benefits of these techniques are debated regularly in SEO circles. Many people lean heavily toward one philosophy or the other; that is, "Content Is King" versus "Content is Secondary". The arguments can get very heated but our advice is not to take either side too strongly. Both philosophies are perfectly valid and should co-exist peacefully. The smart webmaster will carefully consider all techniques and work towards the best mix.

Inbound Links (Backlinks)

Having links from other websites to yours is a critical part of search engine optimisation. As well as the obvious bonus of having people follow these links to your site, inbound links provide the following benefits:

• Search engine robots follow links between websites. The more inbound links you have, the more often robots will visit your site.
• Many search engines count links to your site as "votes" for you. They assume that if lots of websites link to your site it must be high quality. Page Rank is Google's system of counting links.

The general rule is that the more inbound links you can get, the better. Getting more links should almost certainly be near the top of your priority list when optimising your site.

Important: Before you start trying to acquire inbound links, read this page and take heed of the warnings!

Check for Inbound Links

You can use search engines to find out how many inbound links you have. For example, with Google, enter the word link: followed by your URL to see a list of all websites which contain a link to your site. Try it here with www.cnn.com or enter your own URL:

Note: Google only returns a selection of inbound links — it doesn't show all links to your site. Other search engines have the same feature and may provide more comprehensive results. Each one works a bit differently — visit any search engine and look for "Advanced Search Options" for more information.

Natural Links

The best way to get inbound links is simply to create web pages which other webmasters will want to link to. These are known as natural links — the type of link which is created purely to increase the usefulness of the internet (in an ideal world all links would be natural). Natural links have many advantages:

• You don't have to work to acquire them (except creating the content in the first place).
• They are free and you don't have to reciprocate the link.
• The links will be diverse, with different anchor text.
• The referring pages tend to be similarly themed (this is likely to become more important in the future).

If you are lucky you will attract enough natural links to give your site a boost. However most websites need to make an effort to acquire inbound links. You must be very careful about this! There are many ways to create links to your website — some of them are acceptable and some aren't. If you use the wrong methods, search engines may detect this and penalise you severely.

Acceptable Methods of Acquiring Inbound Links

These methods, used sensibly, are all good ways to acquire inbound links:

• List your website in directories.
• Contact other websites with similar themes to your and ask for a reciprocal link.
• Use your URL as part of your signature in discussion forums and newsgroups. Don't overdo this — keep your signature brief and never spam forums. Make sure you are genuinely contributing to any discussions and not just posting for the sake of displaying your signature.

Unacceptable Methods of Acquiring Inbound Links

There are no official laws or rules about what is unacceptable linking, but the following methods are widely accepted as being a very bad idea and likely to damage your rankings:

• Free-for-all link pages and link farms. These are websites which allow you to post your URL freely without being part of any structured or useful directory. Link farms exist to benefit the linked websites rather than any person trying to use the links. Search engines hate link farms, and participating in some of them may cause your site to be banned from certain search engines.
• Buying links. Some websites sell links from pages with a high PR value. These can be very effective but they are frowned upon and search engines such as Google have been known to identify and blacklist the websites involved.

Summary

To have any real chance of being noticed by the search engines you need at least a handful of inbound links. Without any links at all you will be at a serious disadvantage. The more genuine inbound links you can acquire, the better your search results will be.

Search Engine Terminology

Inbound Links	Hyperlinks from other websites to yours. Also known as return links or backlinks.
Page Rank (PR)	Page Rank. A number between 0 and 10 given by Google to every page on the internet as a rating of how popular the page is.
Reciprocal Links	Links between two websites - each webmaster agrees to provide a link to the other website so both will benefit.
Robot / Spider	An automated piece of software which travels around the internet looking for web pages and storing them in the search index. Robots are good - you want them to visit as often as possible.
Search Algorithm	The "equation" used by a search engine to decide which web pages are the best match for a search term.
Search Index	The database of web pages used by a search engine. When you perform a search, the search engine looks in this database to find the best matches.
SEO	(1) Search Engine Optimisation - The process of optimising. (2) Search Engine Optimiser - A person who offers optimisation as a commercial service.
SERP	Search Engine Result Page, i.e. the list of web pages shown when you perform a search.

The Importance of Search Engine Optimization

Before you begin planning your search engine strategy it's worth considering exactly how important the results are to you. This is because you need to decide how much energy and resources to put into SEO, so you need to know what sort of results to expect for your efforts. If the benefits are likely to be minimal then you might be better off spending your energy on other areas of the website. On the other hand, if your entire business plan relies on good search engine results, you should be prepared to spend a lot of time and money getting them.

It's easy to assume that by having good search rankings, lots of people will find for your website and become customers. You need to test this thinking and make sure you're not just being optimistic. Who exactly is the type of person you expect to attract? Imagine them as a single real person, sitting at a computer. Why will this person use the internet to find your product? What will they expect to find? If they do find your website, will they buy from you or will they just use you for information and buy somewhere else?

In most cases good search engine results will benefit you, but it pays to be realistic about how significant the benefit will be.
What Are Your Chances of Getting Listed?

Getting a basic listing isn't hard and you should be able to get at least a small presence in the main search engines. The question is how many actual visitors will result from your listing.

If you have something reasonably unique to offer, or if you are targeting a particular geographical region, your chances of getting visitors are fairly high. Most businesses could expect to attract at least a few visitors each day through search engines.

To get more than a few visitors per day (up to around a hundred) will take more effort but is still quite achievable.

If you are aiming to attract hundreds or thousands of visitors per day, you will need to have something a bit more special — either some very unique content or a very good optimization strategy.

Define Your Target Keywords

Define Your Target Keywords

A common mistake is to target the wrong keywords, or worse, no particular keywords at all. When you optimise your website, you are optimising for target keywords. This means creating a list of specific words and/or phrases which you know people are searching for, and making sure that when these keywords are searched for your site will be in the result pages.

Ask yourself these questions:

* First of all, will people actually search for the things you have at your website? If not, you're wasting your time.
* If so, exactly which words will they be searching for? You need a specific list of words and phrases - these will become your target keywords.
* How competitive are your target keywords, i.e. how many other websites are targeting the same keywords? Be realistic about targeting highly competitive keywords - you may be better off targeting less popular ones.

Finding Keywords

The easiest way to find keywords is to use one of the online tools available. These provide a list of popular keywords associated with a particular topic. An example is shown below - try it!

If you are really serious about finding the best keywords to target, you will need to pay for a serious tool such as Wordtracker. This is a powerful and comprehensive tool which will definitely give you an edge. Payment is by subscription (a free trial is available).
Your Business Name

A very common mistake is to assume that the keyword you need to target is your own business name. For example, a business called "Nigel McGrath Furniture Limited" might spend all their effort making sure their website is the #1 result when their name is searched for. Once this is achieved they think the job is done.

The problem is that, whilst this will be helpful for those customers who already know about you, it will not attract any new customers. If a searcher has never heard of your store (or can't remember your name), they will not search for "Nigel McGrath Furniture Limited". They are going to search for more general terms such as "furniture", perhaps with the name of their city or the particular type of furniture they are looking for.

Think like a potential customer who doesn't know you. Instead of targeting the keywords you would use to find your own website, find the keywords your potential customer will search for.

SEO Basics

Before you begin serious SEO you must ensure that your website is "search engine friendly". This means making sure that each individual page is compliant with search engine standards and ready to be indexed correctly. Follow each of the steps below for each page on your site.

Have your list of target keywords ready - you'll need to insert them into your pages.

The title of the HTML page should be relatively short and describe the page content accurately. Wherever possible, try to include keywords (without distorting the true purpose of the title).

Metatags

Use the description and keywords metatags in the head of each web page. Make these tags different on each web page.

Heading Tags

Use heading tags. Many search engines place more emphasis on text within heading tags, so make sure they use keywords. Use one

tag per page with the most important keywords. Use other head tags (

,

, etc) to provide variations and support the main heading.

Page Text

Make sure the text of your web pages contain keywords and common phrases which people might search for. Be careful with the frequency of your keywords - you want to have them occur at least a few times if possible, but don't repeat yourself so much that the copy becomes unnatural. The idea is to discretely spread keywords around without making it obvious.

Remember that text contained within images won't be picked up by search engines. Only actual text on the page will be indexed.

Use all these methods in moderation. If you include a hundred keywords in the metatag or saturate your page with heading tags they will lose their effectiveness (and you may be penalised in other ways). Keep it simple and under control for maximum impact.

Optimizing Your Web Site for the Search Engines

One of the best and most obvious ways to gain new web design clients is by ranking better in the search engines. If you can't afford to hire a professional search engine optimization (SEO) company then read this article all the way through because I'm about to teach you a few strategies that we've personally used to get Interspire.com ranked on the front page of Google for a lot of competitive search terms.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search engine optimization (or SEO as it's affectionately called) is the ongoing process of tweaking and modifying your website in an effort to rank competitively in the search engines for one of more keyowords that people will use to search for your business.

As a web designer I'm sure you'd agree that if more people were able to find your site in the search engines then you could dramatically increase the number of clients you have, right? Well it's the same for most businesses, and a good SEO plan is where you should start.

The "One Hour a Day, 30 Day" SEO Plan

Search engine optimization is part science, part art and part luck. The good news is that we can use a proven scientific approach to help your website rank better in the search engines, but you first have to decide which keyword(s) you want your site to rank for.

If you're a web designer in Los Angeles, then here are a few examples of keywords you absolutely would want to be on the front page of the search engines for:

* Los Angeles Web Designer
* Web Designer California
* Web Design Company Los Angeles
* etc...

To determine which keywords you want to rank for just ask yourself: "If I were one of my potential customers, which words would I use to find my company?". You should be able to come up with at least a handful of keywords.

If you can dedicate just one hour a day (for 30 days) to the search engine optimization plan I'm about to show you then there's a great chance that you'll be able to significantly improve how your web site ranks in the search engines for the keywords people are using to find you.

#1: Getting Links Back to Your Website

This is hands down the most important search engine optimization strategy you can spend your time on. When another website links back to yours, Google sees this as a positive vote for your website, and as such will take this into account when determining which sites should be at the top of the pile.

The more sites you have that link back to you, the higher your site will appear in the search results, however there is one main factor to consider with this strategy, and that's the credibility of the sites linking back to yours.

Google's PageRank algorithm is a measure of the popularity of a website. If you download the Google toolbar you can see the PageRank of any site you visit. It's just a measure between 0 and 10 - 0 means the site is new and has no popularity and a PageRank of 10 means the site is one of the most trusted and popular sites on the Internet.

Interspire.com for example has a PageRank of 7. Yahoo.com has a PageRank of 10.CNN.com has a PageRank of 9, Business.com has a PageRank of 7, etc.

When looking for sites to link back to yours, the higher the PageRank the more "points" Google will award you for having that site linking to you, thus pushing you higher up in the search results for your keywords.

The quickest and cheapest way to get sites linking back to your site is to send them an email and just ask for it, but what type of sites should you request links from? In general they should be similar in topic to your site, so as a web designer you might request links back from sites that talk about web design, marketing, attracting new leads and customers, etc.

A link acquisition strategy over the medium/long term is to get serious about publishing high quality articles on your web site that others will link back to. We've been using this strategy for years and we've written dozens of articles that are linked to from all over the Internet. Because we don't have to actively solicit these links, it makes it much easier to get links using quality articles.

So what should you write about and how often should you write? One article a week is a great start. Aim for 500-1,000 words and write about what you know: how to choose a web designer, why it's important to have a usable website, how to create a web page in Dreamweaver, etc. These are topics your potential customers will expect you to know about and after reading your articles they will come to respect you as an authority on web design.

#2: On-Page Search Engine Optimization

On-page keyword optimization involves making changes to existing pages on your website so they include the keywords you want to rank in the search engines for. On-page optimization includes a number of different "sub strategies", which are:

* Keyword density: How often do the keywords you want to rank for appear on your page? This is measured as a percentage, such as 5.8%. So let's say you want to rank on Google for "red sports cars". On most pages of your site you'll want to include the text "red sports cars" and also variations of this phrase, such as "red cars that are sporty", "sports cars that are red", "sports cars", etc.

There's no hard and fast rule, but you generally want a keyword density of about 7-12% for the keywords you want to rank for. That means that if you have 100 words on your page, 7-12 of them should be "red", "sports" or "car". You can check your keyword density at www.ranks.nl.

* Header tags: You absolutely MUST include the keywords you want to rank for in a

…

tag on your site. H1 tags tell the search engines that the text between them is important, and you should aim for just one

tag on each page as close to the top as you can. In our example you might use

Red Sports Cars

on one page and

Luxury Red Sports Cars

on another page.

* Page title: This is the most important on-page thing you can optimize. Your page title is the text that's used to form the link back to your site from the search engines, so it needs to include the keywords you want to rank for, and usually in variations, such as

* Internal linking structure: You want to use the keywords you want to rank for to link between pages on your site. For example, on your home page you might link to a category page using the text "sports cars" and on that category page you would link back to your home page with the text "red sports car". This is an internal two-way link, and although internal links don't hold nearly as much weight as external ones, you should link to different pages on your site using a few different combinations of your keywords.

* Keywords at the very top of the page: You should always include your main keywords as close to the top of the page as you can, because Google will look at the text on your site from top-to-bottom and will treat the text closer to the top of the page with a higher importance.

Google SEO Basics for Beginners

As many of us web developers already know, Google is rated by many as the number one search engine in the world. We personally know that our websites get about 90% of their search engine traffic direct from Google searches.

Getting indexed by Google can be a pain, but getting highly placed rankings for specific keywords seems to be the nut that not many web developers without SEO (search engine optimization) experience or seo training can crack.

Today we’re going to give you an informative primer on the basics of search engine optimization techniques -- many of which we use everyday to optimize our websites and stay ahead of our competitors.

4 Steps to Better Rankings
We personally believe in the "practice what you preach" approach to all things business related -- especially SEO. So, before we continue, here's a sample of keywords and Google rankings for some of our websites:
Website Keywords Google Ranking
Activekb.com Knowledgebase software #2 of 4,980,000
DevEdit.com Online HTML editor #3 of 9,080,000
MyFreeTemplates.com Free Dreamweaver Templates #4 of 93,600

Step 1. Choosing The Right Keywords

Choosing the right keywords to base your site optimization around is an important first step. General or generic keywords are usually not the best approach, and sometimes it's better to be a little more specific and focus on niche keywords relating to your product or service.

For example, let's talk about www.devedit.com -- DevEdit is our WYSIWYG HTML editing component that drops into browser-based applications.

The problem is, there are a LOT of WYSIWYG HTML editors, but how can we get DevEdit to appear in Google's top 10 rankings? Well, let's see. Trying to optimize for the keyword "HTML" alone would be a tough task, as it's too general. There are HTML editors, HTML tutorials, HTML articles, etc.

We need to be more specific, which means:

1. Targeting a more suitable market that is looking for a content editing solution
2. Competing with fewer websites targeting the same keywords
3. Optimizing for keywords that people actually use when performing searches

Targeting a suitable market will depend on your website, as well as the products and services you offer. Try to be specific with your keywords, and remember that people no longer use single keyword search phrases - the average search phrase contains 3-5 related words.

For example, if you're optimizing for a web development site and you're located in Sydney, Australia, use keywords such as "web development Sydney" or "web development services Australia".

To find out how many websites are competing with your keywords -- either intentionally or not -- simply do a search on Google and note down how many results are returned. In our case, for "online html editor", we're competing with 9,080,000 sites. The more sites that are competing for your keywords, the harder it will be to get on the front page.

Alternatively, to get a rough indication of how many people are actually searching for the keywords you want to optimize your site for, use the Overture search suggestion tool. It's not exact, and doesn't measure Google searches, but it does give a very good estimate.

The Overture search suggestion tool will also provide you with a list of similar keywords, based on the keywords you enter. This can be a great way to find other keywords to optimize your site for.

As a rough guideline, try to optimize every page on your site for a different search phrase. Each search phrase should contain 2 to 3 highly targeted keywords.

Step 2. Your URL and Title Tag

Two of the most determining factors in Google's ranking are your domain name and title tag. For example, a domain name such as:
http://www.web-development-sydney.com will generally get ranked higher than http://www.companyname.com, assuming that they had identical keywords and page content.

For some of us, keywords in the domain name look too unprofessional, and we've already registered our domain, so it’s too late to change. An alternative -- and also a useful tactic -- is to add your keywords into the names of your pages, such as
http://www.companyname.com/web-development-services.html

Your title tag is equally as important as your domain name. Using keywords in your title tag can improve your Google ranking significantly. Trying to achieve a balance of professionalism with keyword density in the title tag however is sometimes a little more difficult.

Going back to our example of a web development company earlier, a good title tag would be:

"Company name provides professional affordable web development services in Sydney Australia."

Usually, the closer to the front of your title tag the keywords are placed, the better.

Step 3. H1 Tags and Keyword Density

tags seem to have been depreciated by stylesheets these days, and are not used as often as they used to be.

The Google ranking algorithm dictates that if you're using a

tag, then the text in between this tag must be more important than the content on the rest of the page. Here's a quick example:

Google sees this text as more important

... than this text

By default, H1 tags aren't the prettiest in terms of formatting, so using a CSS style to override the default look is usually a good idea:

H1 { color: blue; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px }

Sprinkling keywords throughout your page content can also improve your sites keyword density. Keyword density simply means the ratio of optimized keywords to the rest of the content on your page. It is usually expressed as a percentage, and should be between 7% and 10% for each page on your site.

Don't overdo the keyword density, however, but don't overlook it either. A good example would be:

Before:

* Company name provides web design and site management services to our clients.

After:

* Company name provides web development services to the Sydney region in Australia

Notice how we use the keywords more efficiently the second time around?

Step 4. Links, Links and More Links

And this leads us to the toughest part of the Google SEO process -- back-links. Back links are websites that link directly to your website. The general principal is the more back links you have, the higher your pages will be ranked, as your website must be good if so many other sites are linking back to it.

If you run a web development company, then adding a simple link to the bottom of each of your client's websites, such as:

Web development by Company Name

... (With your clients permission of course) can help boost your back links, which will help boost your ranking position in searches.

Submitting your site to dmoz.org, Yahoo! and other directories is also an important step to increase the number of sites linking back to yours. Do remember however, that setting up back links takes time. I would recommend emailing 5-10 websites each and every day to request back-links or partnership links (keeping in mind that the sites contacted should be relevant but not competitive) e.g. - If you sell chocolate, partnering with a company that sells Roses may just be a good idea. Within a couple of weeks, you should have a good 100 or so sites happily linking back to yours!

Conclusion
Google can be one tough search engine to crack. Hopefully, however, in this article we’ve provided you with enough basic tips to get started optimizing both yours and your clients website.

Using Facebook to Promote Your Business

o how and where do you go to promote your business on Facebook so that your personal profile isn’t associated with your professional site?

Here’s a step by step guide:

1. Login to your Facebook account. If you don’t have one, it takes 5 minutes to set an account up.

2. Scroll down to the very bottom of your home page, and click on the ‘Advertising’ link in the footer.

3. Click on the ‘Pages’ link at the top of this page

4. Then click on the link that says ‘Create a Page’ (it’s kind of hard to see)

5. Now Select Your Category (let’s say you’re in the printing industry)

6. Now go through the process of uploading your image, writing in some info about yourself, and publish the page. Now comes the meat and potatoes. Go t

o your admin area by clicking on Edit Page:

7. Then click on this link here : More Useful Apps

8. Now you’ll see a list of the most useful apps for pages, I’ve circled the best ones for SEO and User Friendliness:

9. The FBML app allows you to add static html to a widget in your page’s sidebar. Which means links, links to images, and there are a number of fbml markup tags that you can use in it as well. All dofollow!

10. The Blog RSS Feed Reader sometimes doesn’t work correctly, and you have to know the RSS feed of your blog (but I’m assuming that if you have a blog, you’ll know what your RSS feed is). But when this app works correctly, it will add an RSS feed of your 5-10 most recent posts, pulling in the title of the post, with do follow links to each blog post. Very handy!

To sum up, if you are using Facebook, the 2 best apps for links that are helpful to your fans are the Blog RSS Reader, and the Static FBML App.

Facebook

8 Step Guide to Using Facebook to Generate Links & Business

Let’s first talk about what Facebook is, and what it isn’t. Facebook is an easy way to stay connected with friends, family, business associates, and even famous people or companies that you consider important. There is literally something for everyone on Facebook.

Facebook is not a way to advertise to a certain demographic of users and convince them to buy what you’ve got. Sorry, all you Facebook advertisers, but not many people are going to buy a car or sign up for a credit card offer through any type of advertising on Facebook. People aren’t there to buy. They are there to get away from life’s little stresses and connect with friends.

So after having said all that, how can it be possible to make money from Facebook? (unless you’re a widget developer and have a wide user base, this next part is for you)

Remember how I talked about the fact that people on Facebook want to connect with other people (what we will call networking) and relax a little bit? Well we are going to use that to our advantage. There is no secret widget or App that you’re going to install. All this will take is your time. And if you can’t spend the time, pay someone else to do what I’m about to tell you. Ready? Here we go.

Step 1. Add all the people you know and have ever met as your friend on Facebook.

Step 2. Update your profile with real photos of yourself (nothing from your last drinking party or late night criminal activity).

Step 3. Search for at least 10 groups to join that are relevant to your business (I don’t care how niche your business is, there is at least 1 group for it) If you have to choose between groups, go after the ones that are active, and have at least 50 members.

Step 4. Contribute useful information to these groups. Answer and ask questions. Get into conversations with people.

Step 5. Add as many of the people in the group as your friend as you’ve had at least a tiny conversation with through the group.

Step 6. Find out which of your friends that you’ve just gotten from these groups have a website or blog about your industry. They usually put a link to their blog or site in their ‘Info’ tab on their profile.

Step 7. Ask your new friends if they would allow you to contribute some content to their site or blog, in return for a link back to your site.

Step 8. Write this content, and send one unique article to each person that accepts your offer.

Those are the eight steps to get you started down the path to success with Facebook. Like all the best things in life, it will take time to really develop Facebook into a useful and profitable channel for building links, but the more you put into it, the more you will get out of it.

Web Two Point What?

If you’re reading this, which neither of us can dispute the fact that you are, I’ll bet my salary on the fact that you’ve heard of at least one of these behemoths of social media.

* Facebook - Ain’t just for young kids. The largest growth on Facebook is from 30+ year old patrons and 50 million people in 35 languages use it almost every day. Wow. Facebook is killing MySpace, and not softly. (Oops. I wasn’t going to mention MySpace because I wanted you to connect the dots. MySpace was the pioneer in social media so naturally MySpace belongs in this list of social media giants. Even though it deserves a mention, I’ll leave them MySpace “unbulleted” in this bulleted list.
* YouTube - Nielsen Online estimates that Youtube serves over 32% of the videos watched online. I guarantee you’ve laughed at a video from YouTube. Inescapable.
* Twitter - The incredibly popular micro-blogging platform grew at 752% growth last year. You must get on Twitter. This is one of the best ways to listen to and follow the pulse of your industry.
* StumbleUpon It’s just what you do when you stumble across something cool. (My personal favorite for social bookmarking. If I find some content I enjoy, I can bookmark it using StumbleUpon so that everyone can enjoy it).
* iTunes Podcasts - Even Apple has joined “social media.”
* LinkedIn - Business networking powerhouse.
* Squidoo - Community of content sharing “lenses” created by the Social Media, Permission Marketing Master Mogul himself, Mr. Seth Godin.
* Blogger - Google’s baby. The most popular and user-friendly hosted blogging platform.

If you haven’t heard of any of these mega-sites it’s safe to assume that you have no business reading this blog post either. I’d also guess that if you’ve never heard of them you don’t use a computer (which is impossible), haven’t turned on your computer (impossible), don’t watch television (almost impossible), or you don’t have teenage kids (very possible). So what is this fad? It’s called Web 2.0.

What is Web 2.0?

With technical geek speak aside, Web 2.0 is synonymous with social media. For our purposes, it’s that simple.

The sites I mentioned above are just a few sites that make up a major part of the new generation in internet user experience. Social media is made up of online social communities built around an interactive, conversational delivery and sharing of all things media. Social media is about content.

Just how popular is Web 2.0? Here’s a stat offered by Dave Rosenberg over at CNet: social networks and blogs are MORE popular than email.

“He’s kidding, right?”

No, he’s not.

Why You MUST Be Using Social Media

If you aren’t utilizing social media in your marketing (called social marketing or social networking) you’re leaving mounds of cash on the table. Why? Social media is FREE to use and the absolutely best way to create raving fans of your brand or product.

Is your business struggling? Hit social media and you won’t strain your budget. Is your business already successful? Use social media to bury your competition so deep they won’t be able to get out. There are just no excuses not to use social media. If you’re not using it, your competitors will. Just do it.

People spend more time in social media than ever and the amount of time they spend sharing stuff, and chatting, and posting, and commenting increases by the hour.

The social media landscape just gets better and better and better and better. New social sites are popping up all over the place. What’s more is that supplementary sister sites with software and programs to help you use the behemoth social media sites are showing up more and more. For example, Twitter users have new tools that are published to help them generate more Tweeps (Twitter followers) and analyze their Twitter traffic and statistics and even allow for incredible search capabilities (how you keep up on your industry). There are almost two dozen of these programs that I’m aware of. These useful tools help to eliminate any excuse you have for not getting involved in social media. All these tools allow you to automate and analyze some social networking tasks. Even more evidence that you just can’t ignore social media.

Social media allows for you to brand your business, share media, generate traffic, presell new customers (without actually selling anything), create relationships, monitor the pulse of your industry— and do it all for FREE. You can’t beat that. Social media is the kind of thing that your bottom line loves.

Start with Facebook and Twitter. As of today, these are the two pillars. Set up a LinkedIn profile next. Steadily build your profile and your exposure will increase. Honestly, you won’t find a subject that isn’t been worked over in social media. Just jump in and get involved in the conversation that’s already taking place in your industry. We’ll talk next about social media rules that will help you do social media right.

Basic Rules of Social Media:

* Be real. Be genuine. Be yourself. Social Media is not about selling stuff. It’s about communicating with others. If you “promote” yourself you’ll get hammered and it will ruin your brand. Social media is a lot like high school where everyone will start talking about you, whether for good or bad.
* Most important Rule of Thumb: Add indisputable value to the conversation. Nobody likes people who are always selling stuff. By adding value to a conversation people will seek you out in large numbers and look to you for answers. The biggest way to add value is to give away free stuff and to TEACH. People will begin to see you as an expert.
* Transparency is the social media protocol. Transparency has never been easier to recognize than it is now. It can absolutely catapult your business or rip it apart. If you are real and genuine, people can see you for who you really are in social media. If you’re fake, you can’t hide. So don’t be fake. If you’re real, let people in to your life (Don’t worry, you’re in control of what they do and don’t see about your life). You’re literally bringing thousands of people in to your world through social media so let them pull up a chair, sit in your parlor and chill with you for a minute.
* Use real names and profiles. Unless you’re branding your business, use real usernames and real profiles that don’t sound promotional. People are wary of salesmen. Don’t be salesy.

That should get you pointed in the right direction. Now go set up a Facebook account for yourself and a Facebook Fan page for your business and put a link to that on your site. Sign up for Twitter, study Twitter, and go kill it. Put a link to your Twitter profile on your site as well.

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How Does Link Popularity Work?

Here's an example of how link popularity works:

Let's say that Ram's Pizza Palace Web site has a link to Mohan's Men's Clothing store. This probably won't help Mohan's link popularity for the keywords "men's clothing." However, if both Ram's Pizza Palace and Mohan's Men's Clothing Store are both located in the city of Chandigarh, and people are searching for "men's clothing in Chandigarh," the quality of that link, may have just gone up a little. There's now a common thread (Chandigarh) between the sites. It probably won't help for those people simply searching for men's clothing, but may help if they're searching specifically for stores in the City of Chandigarh. A higher quality link for Mohan, however, would be one from "Raghav's Clothing Store Directory," which lists a whole bunch of clothing stores that can be found on the Internet. That is exactly the kind of link that the search engines would credit toward link popularity. The key is in having that common thread between the sites

In brief we can say that: The search engine powers-that-be, have decided that if other sites are linking to your site, it must be the best, therefore, it deserves a boost in rankings. If given a thought, it makes a lot of sense. Simply getting links from other sites, isn't the way to go about getting it either. You need reciprocal links to other sites with similar or relevant content to your own site or you can actually harm your site's overall ranking!

What is Link Popularity

Link popularity can be defined as the number of links that point to a webpage. Link Popularity is an essential factor, used by almost all of the search engines to rank websites. Link popularity indirectly defines the popularity of the website in terms of search engine ranking. If many good web sites link to your site, you'll have a good position in the search engines results relating to your concerned topics.

Keywords alone are not used to rank a website because a great number of websites do have almost the same keywords. Search engines don't just look at the title, description and keywords of a webpage to determine whether it is a good match for a search but at the links pointing to that site also. Link popularity today is more important than ever, but it must be done right. Thousands and thousands of webpages contain the same keywords (in different combinations) so matching a search term with a page's content is not enough to build an ordered list of results to a search query and thus link popularity comes into consideration by search engines.

One of the first search engines that used link popularity as a key factor in ranking websites was Google. One can check the number of links pointing to a website (link popularity) by querying Google with the search keywords link:http://xyz.com most search engines have similar functions for link popularity check. Getting good links to a web site is not so difficult as you might think. There are tools that can help you to get high quality links to your web site quickly and easily. The text contained in the link that point to a webpage is considered as well. If the text in the link that points to a webpage contains the queried keywords, the search engine considers that webpage a better match to the search query on those keywords.

Link exchange partners can be found among websites that offer a good match with the content and the theme of your own website. The major point of consideration should be the website's theme or topic, because search engines give more "weight" to a link from a website that has a similar topic to yours. Websites which have topics that are related to, or complement, to your website's theme should be considered as your main links swap partners. Establishing a link partnership with another website may appear to visitors as an "association" between the links swap partners. It is therefore important that only those websites should be "associated" that are high-quality and credible.

A website may be benefited in many ways from a good linking strategy:

• It’ll get more visitors
• It'll get higher search engine rankings
• It'll get more customers
• It'll get more sales

Search Engine Optimization – Factors to be considered while hiring an SEO

Search Engine Optimization has been the talk of the street these days as more and more companies are entering this SEO service sector and all claim to make a website appear among the top 10 results in major search engines i.e. Google, Yahoo, Lycos, AltaVista etc. How can a novice individual make a decision of choosing an SEO company to optimize his/her website among this roar of bids and claims. Which factors to consider while deciding to hire an SEO company?

There are a number of factors that are to be clarified with an SEO company before making a final decision of hiring one. Here are some key factors to be discussed with an SEO service provider before entering into a deal:

Mode of submission

A majority of SEO providers use various softwares to automate the task of submission to search engines but a manual submission is more reliable and preferable as compared to an automatic one because some search engines ignore automatic submissions by softwares. You must always ask the exact method of submission from the SEO provider.

Healthy link building

Many firms will boast about that they have a very strong link building database and very high number of links pointing to your website will increase your website ranking, however this is partially true because search engines are not foolish but very intelligent and they can very easily recognize that whether the links pointing to a website are quality links or just spammed by a group of websites. A clarification about link building should be sought from the SEO provider.

Use of Unfair Statements

Many SEO companies make false claims like “We will make your website rank among top 10 in 3 days or a single day” Beware of those making such hype statements, never go with such providers. SEO is a continuous process that demands time, it requires proper research and analysis and you would wonder to know that it takes about four to five months for Yahoo to just decide the relevance of a website for it’s directory inclusion even in paid listing although it is not final that you would be added to their directory after you have paid for it. The reason for such delay is the huge number of websites received by them to be included in their directory.

Price consideration
Many SEO providers will offer you $99 for submission to 1000 search engines and directories this is again a misleading offer. Many people are attracted by such offers and go in for such a service but after submitting the amount they are completely unsatisfied with the results. Quality SEO service demands more resources, research, time, analysis and finally more price.

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Google Dance

The process of updation of index can be seen by visiting these domains. The results at each center vary from one another which is a proof of the process going on. Also each domain mentioned above i.e www-xx.google.com has an additional domain www-xx2.google.com and the IP address of such a domain ends on .101 instead of .100. These pairs of domains belong to the same data center and hence search at these two pairs shows same results. Index updates at an individual data center seem be done at one point of time. Servers seem to update by one half first and during this first-half update time the remaining half of server becomes active and serves search results for queries. Once the half under progress completes it becomes active and serves the results and the other half undergoes the same process. Users are very unaware about the changes occurring behind Google and feel normal search experience.

Google has employed test domains www2.google.com and www3.google.com that resolve to a fixed IP address. This fixed IP address is of the data center that updates the index at the earliest. As soon as the dance starts least of these domains is assigned the IP of the data center that receives the very first updated index. So you can check for future Google listings (listings after update) on these test domains. Webmasters are eager to view the changes in position of their listings at these test domains. If everything goes fine then its time to change the DNS records at Google, if no problems are found then Google’s DNS is resolved to the data center that is updated at the earliest. However if certain problems arise then the update at other data centers is cancelled, now the domain google.com will not resolve the IP of the malfunctioning data center but it will resolve the previous index and hence general users are unable to get what is happening behind the scene.

However nobody can bet about the exact internal workings of Google but a technical overview like this one is all the way very necessary and helpful to plan an SEO campaign. Other than that it can also help webmasters and SEO experts in planning new developments & updates to be launched online by a certain date and time so as to be properly included in the search engine database. Now you know when and how to determine Google updates and do a lot to improve your rankings.
Best of Luck!

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Google Dance

Google, the greatest search engine, maintains an index of all the pages that it crawls in the database. This index is updated or reformed after a rough time interval of about one month however the exact dates fluctuate and are not disclosed. The update process of this mega search engine is popularity known as the “Google Dance”. Google also happens to be one of the very few search engines offering free submission, and that is why it is having over 3.4 billion pages in its database. SEO industry seems to revolve around this giant engine as nearly 77% search results on internet are powered by Google. So it becomes extremely important for a webmaster to understand the process of Google dance in order to plan optimization for a website.

Every dance starts with a deep crawl that entrails spidering the whole web from the start which ends up to many days. Google uses around 15000 servers spread all over the world at its data centers. Obviously an index update cannot be proceeded on all those servers at the same time. One server after the other has to be updated with the new index. Servers used by Google are placed at data centers mainly located in US. It is possible for Google to record all queries centrally and then distribute them to the data centers but this would obviously be inefficient. During the Google Dance, the data centers do not receive the new index at the same time. One after the other the data centers receive the updated index. So if a user queries Google during the Google Dance, it is possible that he may get the results from a data center which still has the old index at one point of time and after a few minutes from a data center which has the new index because DNS is resolved to that latest data center.

Google Dance can be identified by querying the IP addresses of its data centers which are unique for every center. Generally all queries on the IP addresses of data centers are redirected to www.google.com but there are special domains by Google that resolve to these data centers individually. Those domain and IP addresses are

Domain IP Address
www-ex.google.com 216.239.33.100
www-fi.google.com 216.239.41.100
www-ab.google.com 216.239.51.100
www-in.google.com 216.239.53.100
www-zu.google.com 216.239.55.100
www-va.google.com 216.239.37.100
www-dc.google.com 216.239.39.100
www-cw.google.com 216.239.57.100

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