What is SEO
SEO stands for search engine optimization, in simple terms it means to build and develop your web site in a fashion that is search engine friendly. What is the use of making a web site that is not listed on the front page of major search engines. As far as SEO is concerned there is nothing technical about any one having a bit of knowledge about internet and the use of PCs can do it the catch is it is time consuming and involves painstaking patience it is not that you can achieve in a night time.
I have discussed briefly about SEO in the succeeding paras for you to go through there are a number of things that you have to consider while promoting your site likewise there are many techniques involved as well so it is better that you chalk a side wise strategy before optimizing your site, there can be techniques which involve payment to the search engines like google adwords and yahoo marketing and there can be ways by which you can also optimize your site free of cost.
However if you have a time constraint you can always turn to professionals for that please visit www.londonwebdesigning.co.uk
When looking for information on the internet people head straight for the search engines to find it. Your website will be competing with millions of others to try and get people to visit. It is therefore crucial to optimise your site so that you will be found and your competitors will be pushed further down the ladder.
Improving Page Ranking of your Website
The process of improving web pages so they page rank higher in search engines for your targeted keywords. How do organic search listings work?
· A spider or crawler which is a component of a Search Engine(SE) gathers listings by automatically "crawling" the web
· The spider follows links to web pages, makes copies of the pages and stores them in the SE's index
· Based on this data, the SE then indexes the pages and ranks the websites
· Major SEs that index pages using spiders: Google, Altavista, Msn, Aol, lycos "Spiders read only text, nothing else"
Why the internet Marketing or SEM is Important?
It gives companies the ability to:
· Drive quality customers to their website
· Increase sales leads from customers looking for their products and services
· Build their brand online by communicating marketing messages to their target audience
· Increase their profile against their competitors
· Target a global audience via international search engines
· Be accountable with ROI tracking (SEM)
Now there can be many strategies for it either you pay the SEs on PPC basis where by they put your adds on relevant sites as you see adds by google and likewise sponsored links. Moreover you can build your clients data base and use the help of news letters being send to there emails. Likewise you can create many mirrored sites and blogs and post your views and start threads at various discussion forums once the SE spiders crawl through the internet they shall automatically detect your content.
Domain name strategies
The URL of a webpage (its address), if made correctly can greatly improve your search engine listings. The search engines look for any keywords or phrases in a URL and use this as further information to process your website.
Bad Example: http://www.domain.com/014.html
Good Example: http://www.domain.com/nokia-phones
Easy to read (and remember) URLs will not only help with the search engines, but also visitors who want to return to your website.
The domain name should, where possible, contain the main keyword(s) that your site is about. For example: www.phoneshop.com contains two keywords relating to the content, whereas www.wizzawong.com will not mean anything to a search engine (unless of course wizzawong is a keyword you want to target!).
More technical readers should look into mod rewrite or ways to provide easy to read URLs for both static and dynamic websites.
Choose a domain name that will increase your search engine ranking.
· How?
· simple, short, no hyphens, no numbers
· use keywords, common words, advertising terms, product names
· choose a keyword that is important for your business
Linking strategies
Link building is the process of getting other websites to link to your website and is an extremely important part of search engine optimisation.
Each link to your website is seen as a vote by the search engines. This means that if a lot of people are linking to (or voting for) your website, it must be important and will be pushed up the search engine rankings as a result.
A mistake a lot of people make when link building is to think quantity is better than quality. Two hundred links from websites which contain content that doesn’t relate to yours will do little to improve your search engine rankings. A handful of links from relevant websites that have a high search engine ranking will do a huge amount to improve your listings.
It is important to mention Googles Page Rank system as this is a quick and easy way to gauge the popularity of a website and the value of a link from their website.
“PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important.”
In other words, if you wanted people to judge you as a person, a positive testimonial from a high court judge would look better than a testimonial from your mate John down the road and it is the same with link building. Getting a link from a high ranking website to yours will give your site a lot more credibility. Try to target websites with a higher page rank than you currently have. The google toolbar includes a Page Rank displayer.
There are two types of links; reciprocal and one way. Reciprocal is as simple as “if you link to my website, I will link to yours”. One way is when people link to your website without you having to link back to theirs. One way links are better for search engine optimisation than reciprocal links as it shows that your website is a valuable resource.
The best way to start link building is to phone or e-mail websites asking for a one way or reciprocal link. This will start the process of enabling internet users to find out about your website. If you have followed the other rules in the guide and your website is well designed, you will find that people will start linking to your website of their own accord (creating those much sought after one way links). This can often start a snow ball effect – the more people who find out about your site, the more who will start linking to it.
Link building should be an ongoing process throughout the life of your website – there will always be competitors trying to take your place so you have to try and stay one step ahead.
· the more inbound links the higher the SE ranking
· if the site linking to you is already indexed, spiders will also receive your site
· quality of inbound links is critical
· how to increase links:
· good content
· good outbound links
target a list of-sites from which you can request inbound links
· links for the sake of links can damage your search rankings
1. "Link relevancy is critical in getting your site indexed by search engines"
2. "A small no of inbound links from high-duality, relevant sites is more valuable than many links from low-traffic, irrelevant sites."
Keywords
There is a lot of debate over the value of using the keywords tag. Some search engines completely disregard the keywords tag and instead rely on the title, description and content in the page to create a list of the most used keywords for the search engine listings.
It is always better to be on the safe side and include the keywords meta tag. The keywords tag contains words or phrases separated by commas. It is a difficult task to get to the top of the search engines for popular keywords such as “phones” so it is often better to target specific searches such as “phones in
For example: mobile, phone, shop, London, cheap, handsets, Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, UK mobile phones, London phone shop, cheap new phones, buy mobile phone, cheap phone tariffs UK, discounted Motorola handsets.
It is important to only focus on keywords that relate to the content of the page – never include keywords because you think they may be popular (people sometimes add keywords such as “sex, celebrities, games”) as this will not help bring targeted traffic to your website.
· important in optimising rankings
· keywords are words that appear the most in a page
· the spider chooses the appropriate keywords for each page, then sends them back to its SE
· your web site will then be indexed based on your keywords
· can be key phrases or a single keyword
· do not use common words eg 'the' 'and 'of, as the spider ignores them.
·
Importance of Content
A website is similar to a magazine or newspaper. Imagine you were given a newspaper that had all the text removed and you were only left with the images. You wouldn’t be able to make heads or tales of what you were seeing and the same is true when the search engines browse your site (spider your site). Search engines have selective vision, and only choose to see text when gathering information about your website. It is therefore important to provide content which is descriptive and informative. This will not only benefit the SEO for your site but also your visitors. The content should be unique and keyword rich – include phrases and words that people may search for to find your site.
Websites which rely on "flashy" animations or are heavily dependent on graphical elements and little else will suffer in the search engines as a result. There are exceptions to this rule when other methods of SEO are made the primary focus, such as
It is important to remember that text saved as a graphic file can not be read by the search engines.
Optimise Your Coding
To improve your search engine rankings CSS Based Layouts should be used rather than table based layouts. CSS based sites will help you gain the highest possible listings as they provide a simple and logical structure for the content which allows the search engines to make a more educated analysis of your websites content.
The code should be checked for mistakes and should follow the guidelines set out by the W3C to ensure that the search engines will read the content properly.
Images should be given descriptions using ALT tags in the same way that Title tags are used.
Text Formatting
Text formatting is an often overlooked aspect of SEO. Through a range of testing it has been found that text formatting is a hugely important part of improving a site’s listings in the search engines.
When writing a document in a program such as Microsoft Word you will no doubt make use of the Heading attributes and this should be no different from when you are preparing text for the web.
,,
Meta Tags
Remember, if you only use meta tags on the frameset pages, you may be missing a large number of potential visitors.
·
· the next important
· displayed below the title in search results
· use dynamic, promotional language
· use keywords
·
1. no longer carry weight with major SEs
2. a myth that meta keywords alone affect rankings
Title tags
· important in optimising rankings
· the first thing that a search engine displays on a search return
must keywords in title to be ranked no. 1
· should have the exact keyword you use for the page
· every single web page must have its own title tag
· you can use up to 65 characters eg Ebay http://www.ebay.com/ (title is littered with keywords)
~
Alt tags
· include keywords in your alt tags
Submit your website to SEs for indexing
· submit your site to search engine directories, directory sites and portal sites
· indexing takes 1 wk to 3 months
·
Major SEs to submit to
· AltaVista http://addurl.altavista.com/sites/addurl/newurl
(Search engines that also use this database - Looksmart)
· The Open Directory Project (DMOZ) http.//dmoz.org/add.html
· (Search engines that also use this database - Ask Jeeves, Lycos, Netscape )
· Fast http://www.ailtheweb.com/add url.php
· Google http://www.google.com/addurl.html
· (Search engines that also use this database - Yahoo)
· Inktomi http://submitit.bcentral.com/msnsubmit.htm
· (Search engines that also use this database - AOL, Excite, MSN, Overture)
· MSN http://submitit.bcehtral.com/msnsubmit.htm
· Yahoo http://docs.vahoo.com/info/suggest
Flash and Shockwave Files
Spiders do not pick up these files
Image only Sites
spiders do not pick up images
Image Maps
Spiders cannot read image maps. Do not use them on your home page or critical pages.
Frames
· only one page can be titled (titling is critical in search rankings)
· If the spider cannot read the complete page (because of the frames), it will not be indexed properly.
· Some spiders may not even read a frames web site
Password protected pages
spiders cannot enter password protected pages
Paid listings
· Paid inclusions
1. Advertising programs where pages are guaranteed to be included in a search engine's
index in exchange for payment
2. no guaranteed ranking
3. payment made on a Cost Per Click (CPC) basis
4. eg Looksmart: a directory that lists pages and sites, not based on position but based on
relevance. Advertisers pay to be included in the directory on a CPC basis or per-url fee basis with no guarantee of specific placement.
· Paid placements
1. Advertising programs where listings are guaranteed to appear in organic listings
2. the higher the fee, the higher the ranking eg sponsored links and Google's Adwords
3. can be purchased from a portal or a search network
4. search networks are often set up in an auction environment where keywords and phrases
are associated with a cost-per-click (CPC) fee.
5. Overture and Google are the largest networks
6. Usability driven information architecture
7. Effective cop writing (presented previously)
8. Affiliate programs
9. Email marketing and online newsletters
Interactive customer relationships
10. Web traffic analysis and web analytics
PDF files
can be problematic for spiders. Although some search engines can index them, the pages must be interpreted into HTML and can lose much of their content. - place PDFs lower down in your site
Dynamic pages
· spiders cannot index some content on pages using ASP, CGI or other
· dynamic languages.
· Make sure important pages are HTML, no dynamically generated content.
Drop Dlown menus
spiders cannot read them
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