Search engine optimisation (seo) is the process of optimising and promoting a website over the Internet for top rankings in search engines.
A number of factors are important when optimising a website, including the content and structure of the website’s copy and page layout, the HTML meta-tags and the submission process as well as off page factors, such as the number of links you have to your website.
This work needs to be done on an ongoing basis to improve your search engine rankings, Google especially is always looking for fresh content as well as links to your site from established third parties and well respected websites.
How to get a high ranking?
As well as having a well optimised and well designed website here are some of the current known facts that will assist your website in obtaining better rankings:-
The number of links to your website
The age of your website
Quality content & regular updates
The addition of new web pages
A well designed website
Links on web pages of Google PR4, or above
On page factors such as your Title & Meta tags
Ethical Methods
If you are unfamiliar with optimisation, we should mention that ethical methods for website seo are essential, to ensure that any seo work will have a positive effect on your site, not a negative one.
Over the past few years the search engines have clamped down on various ‘non-ethical’ methods of optimisation, a few such examples include ‘keyword stuffing’, ‘doorway pages’ and ‘hidden text’. It is important that your optimisation company is aware and up to date with all the latest requirements regarding the design and optimisation of your site, otherwise rather than having a top ten listing for your site, you may find your site banned instead…..
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Tag Archives: Google
SEO for Images on Web Sites
Excellent images are essential for web sites and can lift an ordinary web site to a professional level. The average surfer responds better to websites that use good quality images, tending to linger longer and browse more pages than when faced with dense, text-heavy pages. There are many reasonable priced picture libraries online where one can source everything from flower pictures to computer equipment images.
Here are a few rules that need to be followed to ensure that the images become an asset to your site rather than an unwieldy burden and that your careful SEO use of keywords in the text is enhanced by the images:
1. Make sure all your images are correctly optimized: i.e. a relatively large image of 600×475 pixels should be between 20KB and 50KB in size(maximum). If you use a lot of thumbnail images on one page (125×125 pixel) then they should be between 5KB and 10KB in size.
By sticking to these simple size guides you will ensure that your page loads quickly. Do check every single image that you put up. I have seen images on websites that are 2MB in size, leaving the web site owner scratching his head and wondering why the page takes so long to load. Casual surfers will have long since departed to faster loading sites.
2. Naming your images appropriately will substantially help by making it easier for Google to find the images on your web site (Google has recently changed its algorithm to take into account images and other media more than ever before) improving your overall search engine optimization.
Try to name each image using keywords that link to the subject of the page that the image is on. If the subject of your page is red flowers, then find an image of a red flower and name it red-flower.jpg. Hyphenate the image names or use underscore between the words. The search engine spiders will see this image name as separate words if you do this.
Don’t be tempted to abbreviate your image names, thus rendering them unrecognizable for SEO purposes e.g. rdflwr.jpg. You may end up with rather long image names by using the full keyword names but you will maximise the SEO benefits of your chosen key phrases for each page.
Lastly vary the image names that you use, when you have multiple images on one page, even by one letter to make it a plural e.g. red-flowers.jpg or flowers-red.jpg so that the search engines don’t penalise you for keyword loading.
3. Make sure you add alt tags to every image, which are also taken into account by the search engine spiders, once again using appropriately varied keyword phrases that link to the subject of the page.
4. Search on the Net for royalty free stock picture libraries. There are many of them, some specialising in one subject others covering a huge range of subjects. They are normally free to register with and generally use one of two payment systems: a credit system whereby you purchase x number of credits and each image costs a number of credits according to size; or a monthly subscription which allows you to download a certain number of images each month. Most libraries provide web ready images at 72 dpi or print ready images at 300 dpi. Web ready images are generally from 450-800 pixels wide or high, but this is perfectly adequate for use on a website. With prices often ranging from $1 per web ready image to $50 for a A4 sized print ready image this is a very affordable way of enhancing your web site and attracting both spiders and surfers.
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How to Get a #5 Ranking in Google in 14 Days Starting From Scratch
Yes, it’s true. I landed a brand new blog in the #5 spot in Google for a two-keyword phrase in 14 days. How’d I do it? It’s simple: I chose the right domain name.
Did you know that Google gives special ranking bonuses to certain kinds of domain names? It does, and a significant bonus at that. Choosing a domain name that exactly matches the keywords you want to rank for will give your site a great head-start in the rankings.
In the case of the blog that I ranked #5, I purchased the domain name DietersBlog.net. I then posted 10 unique articles to the blog that I hired a ghostwriter to create for me. I didn’t get any links, or do any promotion of the site at all (I’ll be honest–I got distracted with some other work I was doing).
Two weeks later I checked the stats for the blog. I was happy to see that I was already getting traffic from Google, specifically for the phrase “dieter’s blog.” I ran the query through Google and, sure enough, my blog was ranked #5. This was in spite of the fact that there are 2.4 million competing web pages in Google’s index for the phrase, and despite the fact that the other pages ranking in the top 10 had a few links into them (You do know that Google favors links above all else, right?).
So the next time you sit down to create a new site, be careful to do your keyword research before you purchase your domain name. Also, keep in mind that the “Exact Match Bonus” applies more to .com, .net and .org domain names. Avoid .info and the other less known top-level domains.
An exact-match domain name is only the first step, though. Once you have that domain name in place, you have to back it up with links to your site. “Dieter’s Blog”, while certainly a phrase worth ranking for, is not highly competitive, so I was able to get the ranking just on the strength of the domain name and the site’s content. However, for keywords that bring a lot of traffic, you need a lot of links.
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Improving Your Search Engine Ranking
In today’s world of internet, it doesn’t matter much whether you are a small business or a large enterprise, you need to have a strong online presence. If not, you would be loosing heavily to your competitors. However, having a website only is not going to do a lot of good to your business. You should be able to generate quality traffic to your website, you have to convert that traffic as consumers for your business and you have to make them loyal for a long time. Then only, the online presence is going to add to your business.
Research tells that more than seventy five percent of web traffic comes from search engines like Google, MSN and so on. So, it is very important for your website to have higher rankings on these search engines for the keywords with which your potential customers search on the internet for information. Hence, improving search engine ranking is very important for your business. And also, maintaining that search engine raking for at least the chosen keywords is also very important.
There are lots of things that have to be done by any web master if he wants to have a very good search engine ranking. First the content should be quality content and you should be updating it quite regularly. You should have keyword rich content. You should first do a lot of research in finding out keywords which your prospective customers will be using while searching on the internet. Then you have to get content accordingly. This can immensely help in improving search engine ranking. But, never use content which is only focusing on keywords and have no substance. You have to strike a good balance between the both.
Google uses Page rank concept to rank the websites. Hence, you should have quality links that are referring to your website. This can be done by getting loads and loads of reciprocal links. You should do a lot of research to find the companies which will be interested in participating in the reciprocal link programs of yours. Even though, this consumes a lot of time, as a web master you should do it to improve search engine ranking.
It’s not a better idea to concentrate only on tier-1 search engines. Try and get into top ten rankings of other search engines also. For example, if your site is a career site then it is advisable to get good ranking on search engines which are mainly dedicated for job portals like bixee.com in INDIA. This helps quite a lot in improving your search engine ranking.
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Search Engine Optimization Marketing
Search Engine Optimization can be your best friend depending on how you use it. It can also be your worst enemy if you neglect this highly important aspect of internet marketing. It is important to know what SEO is, and what marketing is. You will also need to know how to build traffic to your web-pages using SEO, and why keywords are important in this process.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for search engine optimization, and it is a way of manipulating search engines so that your website or web-page can attract targeted visitors. The better your website is designed for SEO the more visitors you’ll attract which will eventually translate into a huge number of sales.
What is Marketing?
The official definition of marketing is exposing and/or communicating your website to a certain amount of people so that you can make your presence and product known to the general community. Therefore, Search Engine Optimization Marketing is making your presence known to those who search Google.
How to build traffic to your website using SEO
There are many things you must do before you start attracting search engine visitors. One of the most important ways to build traffic to your website by using SEO is by keyword optimizing your webpage. This means that you will have to find keywords that are highly searched but have low competing sites. If you put these keywords throughout your whole website, you will gain a great amount of organic, targeted, search engine visitors.
Why keywords are so important?
Keywords are highly important because keywords is how Google identifies the niche or subject of your website. For example, if your website is selling “dog shampoo”, then you would want Google to recognize your website as an authority on this subject. You wouldn’t want to rank for “computer accessories”, if your website is about “dog shampoo”. Also by utilizing keywords, it will catch the eyes of search engine visitors, and you will get more visits to your page as well.
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Search Engine Optimization for Photographers
So you’ve got a photography web site and want to get it to the top of the listings in Google, Yahoo and MSN. The first thing you need to know is to forget Yahoo and MSN. They are losing the Search Engine War and their share of SEARCHES is on the decline. GOOGLE is king and looks set to dominate the market for some time to come. MSN’s attempt to build their search feature into Windows has not done anything to increase their market share, rather MSN’s share of Search fell to 10.9%, Yahoo had 21.4% against Google’s 49%
So lesson number one concentrate you SEO efforts on Google.
Next thing, forget FLASH. FLASH packages a web site in lots of code that Search Engine Spiders/robots cannot read. When a Spider crawls a site it is looking for content text written in plain old HTML. FLASH – forget it.
2nd build your site with Keywords. First thing to do is decide what your keywords are going to be. In the case of SDBPHOTO.COM our keywords are: “hong kong photographer/photography”. Now the most important place to use these Keywords is first in the TITLE HEADING of the page. So many photographers title their pages “Jo’s Photography Gallery”. Now how many people do you think would search for this. Use keyword terms that people will search for. If you are a wedding photographer in Santa Maria. Title your page “Santa Maria Wedding Photographer”.
You will then want to repeat these keywords again in the metatags: Keywords & Description. While not given very much weight in the SERP’s these days, they are still important. Take two sites with the same PageRank, one with MetaTags, the other without. The page with the MetaTags is going to rank higher…
Then use your keywords again in the actual body text of the pages. Beware not to use them too many times. This is called Spamming and will get your site booted out of the SERP’s, you don’t want that. Use a Keyword Density Analyser to check the density of any given keyword in relation to the rest of the content on your site.
When building your internal links, the text you use in the anchor is also important. Try using the page title as the anchor text when you create your links.
And a few more tricks I have up my sleeve that I am not going to give away as my competition is sure to be reading this.
Internally the structure of a site is very important to the way a SPIDER crawls your site. Built properly a site with a lower PR will outrank a page with a higher PR, purely due to the structure of the site.
The most important determination of PageRank is how the site is linked to the rest of the web. INBOUND LINKS are king. The more the better. Trading links with other sites is a common way to build links and many SEO specialists spend lots of time and effort cultivating links with other sites. But not all links are created equal. Link Farms are sites that have been created purely for the purpose of achieving higher PR, Google does not like LinkFarms and sites have been know to be penalised for participating in LinkFarms. Be sure to screen your link partners carefully. A well optimised site with a number of good quality inbound links is what we are aiming for here. Linking from sites with higher PR will result in a higher PR for your site. It is all based on the theory of “votes” to your page. Google, how de mo crat ic (dont want to get censored) of them… now if they only could get the Chi knees to vote…
Of particular interest will be how you tag (file name) the photos on your site. The logo on my site which appears on everypage called from the server is named with my keywords. If you have a gallery site with many pages, you should have each page linked back to the index page of your site with your keywords as the anchor text.
Good sources of SEO info, forget any books, by the time they get to the presses the info they contain is dated at best, obsolete at worst. The web has a wealth of SEO sites and user forums. Good ones to check are:
http://www.searchengineworld.com/
http://www.seochat.com/
http://www.webmasterworld.com/
Of particular interest to photographers http://www.webmasterworld.com/ has a section on PPC (pay per click) advertising. PPC for photographers will be covered in the next chapter.
With your site ranking high in the SERP’s people will be able to find you and your business will grow.
Since achieving #1 position for my keywords about a year ago, this site has gone from 80-100 visitors a day to currently receiving 250-400 visitors a day. Most importantly our non-web business has increased by at least 50%. You could not buy the publicity that #1 in Google brings to a site in a highly competitive market such as Hong Kong.
To close. My site has been live for a little over four years. It was only late in 2004 that I took an interest in SEO and started the climb up the SERP’s, it took a little over six months to hit #1 in Google, we stayed there for about 6 months and then were bumped to #3, a reworking and revision of the site as well as the cultivation of some more links and we were soon back in #1 where we have been for the last 9 months. This site is PR 4 and has over 500 inbound links, and has indexed more than 3000 pages and building…
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Importance of Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization (Search engine Positioning) is something that no company that keeps an online presence can afford to ignore. The internet is difficult, if not entirely impossible to navigate without the use of a search engine like Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. and when you think about all the traffic that filters through Google on a daily basis, its obvious that search engine optimization can serve as an enormous benefit to business that draw some or all of their customers through their web pages.
Through SEO, you will take advantage of the people who are coming through search engines like Google. The goal is to ensure that the link to your site is as close to the top of the list of natural search results as possible when words relating to their business are searched. Because more than fifty percent of all purchases online are preceded by the use of a search engine and because people seldom tend to look below the first two or three pages of results of their search, it can be seen that optimization is an important part of getting the web traffic that you need.
It is true that algorithm changes of search engines sometimes results of a website loses it’s position in the search engine ranking, but it can be corrected usually with tweaking of the web site. Just as you service your cars or other equipments, from time to time your web pages have to be serviced and tweaked. If your site is building on sound principles and offers useful content, then it should be able to weather the changes in search engine algorithms.
If your website is an important part of your business plan, then you should take a look at your visitors statistics of your website, take a look at your competitor and do whatever you can to improve your website so that it achieves higher rankings in search engine queries for your most important keywords and keyword phrases. If this is going to cost you some money to do, then do not worry about it, you will get that money back from the new customers who will find you when your site become more visible in the search engines Through your important keywords and key phrases.
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How I Got a Top 10 Website Ranking in 48 Hours – Part 2
In part 2, we continue with how to get a top 10 website ranking, by using Web 2.0 tools.
Blog Blog Blog
We want to create a blog that is search engine optimized for one of the keyword phrases that we chose. If you recall in part 1, we had to do a little bit of keyword research to determine what would be a decently traffic keyword phrase that doesn’t have too much competition.
You can either create a blog on an existing website, create a new website/blog, or use a service like WordPress or Blogger that will host your blog for you, and all you have to do is use their web interface to add or modify your blog.
Make sure to name and title your blog the same as the longtail keyword that you have chosen. It also is very helpful if you have a domain name that contains your chosen phrase (ex. mysilverkeychains.com), or if your blog will be on your already existing website, that you name the webpage that will be the home of your blog using your keyword phrase (ex. mensaccessories.com/silverkeychains.htm). Google places a very high importance on websites that contain the particular chosen keyword phrase within the URL.
Next you’ll want to add content to your blog. Write at least one article using your particular keyword phrase and be sure to sprinkle that phrase in the beginning of your article text and a couple more times throughout the body of your article. I’d also recommend putting those keyword phrases in bold so that you can better emphasize the importance of those keyword phrases to Google.
Let Google’s buddies know that your new blog exists
You know that saying that it’s not what you know but who you know. That’s one of the biggest hurdles to overcome if you want to have your site ranking in the top 10. Google uses a system called page rank to evaluate the importance of certain websites. Google loves Web 2.0 websites and in particular social bookmarking sites. If your website link appears in these sites (Google’s buddies, he visits them very often), then your site will be listed very quickly within Google’s directory.
The best thing to do is to copy the URL of your blog home page and socially bookmark it. Set up user accounts at social bookmarking websites such as Digg, reddit, Stumbleupon and others to get the maximum benefit. Be sure to include your keyword phrase when you create your bookmark, by using it in the title, text, and tags section when setting up your bookmark.
When done properly, your blog will be indexed more than likely within 24 hours and Google will associate your chosen keyword phrase with those high page ranking Web 2.0 websites. Many times it’s just that easy, and other times you need to write a bit more content on your blog and bookmark that content in order to achieve your goal.
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Real Estate Website – Ranking High in Google
In order that a real estate website will rank high in the search engine result pages for specific search term it has to have quality links pointing to it from other websites. What are quality links? Well, it means that these links should come from relevant authority websites and that the links will have the required phrase as anchor text (hyper text).
How to get links for real estate website?
Article marketing is one of the best free methods to build links from relevant web pages. This method is excellent for the long run but in order that all your work will be beneficial it has to be done correctly or you might be flagged as spammer by Google.
What do you get with article marketing?
You get exposure You are strengthening your acknowledgment You get valuable links to your website that will improve your search engines ranking (quality backlinks are the key ingredient to strong search engine rankings) Other blogs and websites can reprint your articles including the links so your links popularity increases all the time in a viral manner.
It used to be that you write an article and submit it to as many article directories trying to gain as many links as possible from as many places on the web as possible. Times are changing and search engines tend to prefer quality over quantity and as times passes they know better and better how to differentiate quality from quantity. Search engines especially Google declared war on duplicated content (what is considered duplicate content is a subject for another article). As per my understanding for duplicated content is that there are some levels of duplicated content. The worst level is the same content on different pages of the same website. Less severe level is the same content on different websites, Google still shows the same article but usually it will be from the strongest sites and it seems that they disregard all the other weak article directories.
Because of the mentioned above it seems that submitting to as many as possible article directories is NOT the way anymore. When I submit articles I have two lists of article directories. One for the GENERAL strong article directories and another one is for article directories that SPECIALIZE in real estate. Relevancy is very important factor and if I had to choose between general and relevant I choose the latter.
Remember, link building is just a technique to reach your targeted audience. You want to fish where the fish are, right?
For better results it is good to make some rewriting to each article in the Title, first and last paragraph and the Resource box (change the anchor text)
The content of the article should be quality and informative that will add value to the reader. It can be tips on how to avoid common mistakes… or how to save money on a procedure… you get the idea
Very important: Until now you just set the domino infrastructure, now you have to make it work with a small effort but essential. You have to use web2.0 tools for that. It means that you have to bookmark (i.e. del.icio.us) the articles and use the social news network (i.e. digg) or any other web2.0 tools that the specific directory provides.
The best results of article marketing is when you submit articles on a constant pace. Put article submission in your weekly task list it is definitely worth it.
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Google Search Engine Optimization Tips
Tip #1 – Pay Attention to Page Titles
First of all, you need to pay attention to page titles. Google does look at the page titles on your website.
In some cases website editors merely give pages random titles such as “New Page” or “Page 1.” Whether you or your web designer builds your web pages make sure that meaningful page titles are created. I strongly suggest that the all important keyword for any given page is included in the title also.
Tip #2 – Build Inbound Links
Inbound links are very important to Google ranking. The more inbound links you have to your site, the better you are going to perform on Google rankings. If you don’t have many inbound links to your site, you need to build them. Yahoo! and DMOZ (The Open Directory Project) and just two of many website directories that can help you build inbound link credibility once you list with them. I must tell you the theirs cost money but, there are free ones on the web — ‘just Google it’.
Warning!
Be wary of using submitter software that submits your website to hundreds or in some case thousands of free directories — re: many of those directories are of poor quality. They usually have a backlog of thousands of sites to review before they ever get to yours.
Tip #3 – Add Plenty of Content with Relevant Keywords
Google also looks at the overall content on your site. This means for search engine optimization you need to have plenty of quality content that includes relevant keywords. In real estate it’s location, location, location — on the web it’s content, content, content!
Don’t try keyword stuffing to get better rankings – it won’t work. In the good old days, (…back in the 1990s that is), many webmaster wannabes tried those tricks — don’t do it! In fact, trying to fool the SEs, especially Google, could backfire because your site may get blacklisted.
Tip #4 – Develop Text Links with Your Web Page Keywords
Developing links with keywords that are imbedded in your text links can also help you to optimize your site. In other words, come up with creative ways to work your keywords into you text links. Google looks closely at the links that you have on your site. So, instead of just using plain language in a link, use keywords in your text links.
Conclusion
Ranking well with Google is an excellent way to bring in more traffic to your web site. Of course in order to do this, Google search engine optimization is necessary. Optimizing your site for Google is not difficult and it may take some time — but, it’s well worth it.
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