6 Major Tips Not to Ignore

Google, Yahoo, MSN, consumers, and shareholders all appreciate user-friendly and well designed sites. This strong feature keeps them coming back and optimizes your search engine results. A well-designed site perfectly executes these 6 tips.

Design For Your User

As stated above, your site must be user-friendly to those who are using it, your users. The colors must blend and be easy on the eyes. The font needs to be large enough, but not to large to draw attention away or distract the eye. It must be easy to navigate and all the pages must have another page to link to. Try to stay away from pull-down menus, clashing colors, excessive advertisements and small font.

Here are some of the best sites found on the web, use them as reference: Amazon.com, Gorp.com, Kids.gov, Guggenheim.com, and google.com

A Fast Working Site

Neither user nor spider wants to sit around and wait for your site to load. Avoid an overload of graphics. If you are using Flash, create a Flash-free alternative. This way if people don’t want to wait they can ‘skip intro’ or Flash.

Easily Comprehendible

The content on your site needs to be perfect; avoid big words, non-familiar terms and long run-on sentences. Very few people have time to read paragraph after paragraph; bullets are fast and lead the reader to information they want. Check and recheck your spelling. Show your intelligence through content and grammar.

Validate Your HTML

Spider will ignore HTMLs with long titles, numbers or symbols. Keep it simple and validate your HTMLs at http://validator.w3.org/

Use ALT tags for images

Alt attributes or alt tags are what describe your images to spiders and users using hand held devices, or text only browser. An alt attribute arranges your site back to the basics, almost to the format when the Internet was first being developed.

Perfectly Functional

Everything from graphics, links, registration forms, key locks, and cookies needs to be perfectly functional. If not viewers will be quick to click out of your site.

These 6 guidelines are simple, but must not be ignored. They will guide you to high search engine rank and keep your viewers happily returning.
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The rapid proliferation of business operations and marketing via the Internet has resulted in fierce competition between websites for the users’ attention. It is thus of utmost importance that your website has maximum exposure, and search engine optimization (SEO) can greatly enhance this. What search engine optimization basically entails is the modification of a website in such ways that it achieves a high ranking in search engine listings for relevant terms to your product or service offering. A high placement for relevant terms should lead to more qualified traffic to your site.

The SEO process, however, is not a simple one, and should be left to the experts. Equally important is that these experts must be reputable. Aggressive and unethical search engine optimization tactics have resulted in many websites being penalized and even removed from search engine indexes. At the other extreme, inefficient and incompetent work will result in you paying for an insignificant change in your site ranking. Thus for the average businessperson who is not highly versed in search engine technology, the job of selecting a reputable search engine company can be a daunting and dangerous one. However, do not be put off – the Return on Investment of this marketing tool can be huge, in comparison with traditional marketing methods. The following suggestions will help to make the selection process simple and secure.

Although no company can guarantee you a number one position on all search engines, it is essential that you define goals in search engine ranking that you would like to reach. This will allow you to easily assess the success of the campaign at a later stage, while giving the consultant a clear idea of what you need. Decide if you require short term or long term optimization, as this will affect your budget and also point you to specific services suited to your goals.

For example, you may want to implement and maintain search engine optimization for your site on a long term basis, and you may want to have added to this a more assertive short term exposure for your business or product over a specific period. For this short term objective, services such as Pay-per-click (PPC) or Pay-for-inclusion (PFI) may be suitable. These services entail giving your site prime placement in either the actual search results listing or on the same page as listed high ranking sites, for which you pay a fee. It is not necessary to understand the intricacies of these systems and services, just be certain of your marketing goals and strategy, and what you intend to gain from search engine optimization.

The vast number of available firms may be intimidating. In order to narrow the scope, consider these suggestions:

Use search engines to search for companies. Search engine optimization companies that rank highly in engine listings should have the skills to do the same for your business.
Scan web directories. A company that belongs to a directory or listing may possibly be approved according to certain standards of practice and expertise. Similarly, any associations or societies of SEO agencies may be a good place to start.
Ask other companies for recommendations. Word of mouth is usually the safest and most reliable method of selecting a service.
Companies to avoid are those that send you unexpected email inviting you to join “free-for-all” link systems.



You will need to carefully evaluate the companies during your initial search as well as during subsequent meetings or correspondence, in order to find a trustworthy and proficient firm. It is recommended that you meet the consultants in person if possible, so as to establish a better impression of their business practice. The following are crucial deciding factors which you should use in your selection process from the very beginning of your search:


Track record

It is recommended that you pick a firm that is experienced in the industry and has valid references and reports to prove it.

Check references to ensure that specific job claims were actually done by the firm that you are considering. Also ask these companies whether the search engine optimization agency delivered in terms of service and results. You will quickly discover if there is anything suspicious or unsatisfactory about the agencies by talking to their other clients.

The company should be able to show you reports clearly detailing success in search engine ranking for their current or previous clients.

Success is indicated by a good website placement across a range of the most popular search engines, for a variety of popular keywords or phrases. A high position for one unpopular keyword on one obscure search engine does not equal success. The reason for this is that SEO companies add key words and phrases to your site content and HTML coding for a search engine spider to detect. If these terms are hardly or never typed into search engines, their addition to your site is completely useless. In the same way, high ranking on an obscure search engine is meaningless. For current ratings of the popularity of search engines, investigate the Nielsen Netratings page at Search Engine Watch (www.searchenginewatch.com). Wordtracker (www.wordtracker.com) is a program that is helpful in determining the popularity of keywords or phrases as searched by Internet users.

The reports should also show that good results are maintained over a period of time (at least six months). SEO is a very competitive field, with search engines regularly changing their rules and structures, requiring that a site’s ranking be constantly monitored and any problems or decline in position addressed. When viewing these reports, enquire as to the frequency of reporting (it should be monthly), as well as the methods of presenting the information. Reports should contain unprocessed data in addition to comprehensible summaries of the data (e.g. in chart form which allows for easy comparison between variables) and suggestions for any improvements or adjustments.

SEO Methodology

Enquire as to the techniques employed to optimize sites. Steer clear from firms that use methods of redirection such as “cloaking”, “doorway” or “bridge” pages. These methods basically involve pages hidden to the Internet user that are heavily loaded with popular keywords. Many search engines, in particular Google, claim that these tactics are deceptive and unethical and they will heavily penalize (and even remove) sites that use them.

Your site should not need to link to the SEO agency’s site. This often implies a redirection method which is not only risky but will also potentially reduce the amount of exposure and traffic to your site.

Beware of companies that avoid your questions or are not open about their techniques – this usually implies dishonest business operations.

Make sure that the company manually submits websites to indexes, and does not use software to do so. They should also provide you with a receipt of submission. Also be careful of companies that plan to submit your site to thousands of search engines – this method prefers quantity over quality and is quite futile.

Do not buy into a service that involves searching directly from the browser window – this requires specialized software that most Internet users will not have.

The company should help you with selections of keywords and phrases which are relevant to your business and popular with search engine users. Check their optimization plans for your site, and the extent to which they may want to change your site content and design. Ideally you do not want to compromise on your site design or visitors’ ease of navigation. It is generally beneficial to employ SEO services at the beginning of your site development process, so that money does not get wasted on site redesigning.

Link popularity is another optimization strategy used, which involves linking popular sites to your site. However this is not a simple process and double check that it does not involve “free-for-all” “link farms” (mentioned earlier) which will only detract from your site’s exposure.

Price

Quality and ethical business practice are two aspects that you definitely do not want to compromise on when it comes to selecting a search engine optimization company. Generally, a more experienced company will charge higher fees and should guarantee you a successful, low-risk campaign. Obviously younger companies exist that can do the same thing for a cheaper rate, but be sure that you are convinced of their competence and reliability before you sign them on. If in doubt, wait until you find a company that you are comfortable with.

Agencies differ in payment methods. Some charge a monthly fee and guarantee a certain amount of top 10 or top 20 results. Others make use of a Cost-per-click system which involves paying a fixed fee per every click made on your website link. This means that you only pay if traffic is directed to your site, although there is a danger of going beyond your budget.

Be clear on the quotation breakdown, ensuring that you understand which fees apply to long-term inclusion in search results and which apply to short-term advertising (such as Pay-per-click or Pay-for-inclusion campaigns).

Make the final selection and begin the search engine optimisation campaign proposal

After scrutinizing candidates according to the abovementioned factors, you should have a shortlist of potentials to choose from. If you are faced with a number of suitable prospects, pick the company that you are likely to get along with best, i.e. follow your gut reaction. If you do not feel particularly secure with any firm, rather hold on and keep looking. You will most probably be starting a long-term partnership with the SEO company, in which case you will want to be certain of your choice.

Before signing a contract, be sure that the agency will not simultaneously work with any of your competitors, as this could severely jeopardize your campaign’s effectiveness. You should also have full ownership of the optimized pages, in case you discontinue the service or replace the firm. These conditions should be stated in the contract. The contract should also state the company’s commitment in adhering to ethical standards of practice. Expect to wait at least 2-3 months before you see any results.
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I have no doubt that the majority of people who have taken the time to read this article are aware of the difficulties and complexities of trying to go about effective search engine optimization for their websites. Due to the ever increasing competition of websites in the popular niches it has now become more important than ever to make sure you are 5 steps ahead of your competitors to reap the rankings you believe your websites deserve. Lets take a look below at some helpful link building tips to help you with your website optimization

Link Building and Advertising Techniques:

1. Directory submissions: This is probably the most effective and known method of achieving a high quantity of backlinks to your website. By submitting your website to search engine friendly directories and related categories can increase the ranking of their website over time. It is very important to alternate up to 3 different titles and descriptions when submitting of your website to directories for SEO reasons. It may take a long time for submissions to be accepted but this method of gaining backlinks is essential.

2. Forum and Blog Posting: These two ways of building up backlinks can also be effective but most people just end up spamming other blogs and forums for the main aim of trying to obtain immediate traffic and sales. Having said this, don’t bother submitting poor affiliate based websites in your posts as the chances are high that you will get banned. However if you have a blog that advertises a link to a product or service then it will most likely be okay, and in that case can largely help the ranking of your website after time provided the post is on a forum related to your niche.

3. Submission To Article Directories: Going about writing quality articles with niche related content and submitting them to top ranked article directories can help you receive good amounts of web traffic and also help build quality backlinks. Be sure to include a backlink to your website in the resource box using anchor text for a good keyword in your niche.You may even discover that if related websites in your niche find your article, they will probably put a link to it on their website which will give you more exposure and traffic.

4. Link Exchanges: Exchanging links with websites in your niche is also an essential technique which will once again get you very high quality backlinks, which can sometimes be more effective than doing a couple of hundred submissions to directories. Take a look around at the many SEO forums which have link exchange rooms and post a message about the type of website you wish to exchange links with. There is always someone willing to exchange links.

5. Pay Per Click:For those of you who have commercial websites or any websites for that matter, using pay per click programs like adwords can provide immediate targeted traffic to your website. You just need to work out a good budget and make sure you don’t waste too much money as one can get addicted to this easy traffic method.
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1. Optimise every page on your website

The major search engines are not looking at individual websites and ranking them, they are ranking pages from every website in the world. This means that if your website contains more than one page you should optimise for the specific content that is found on each page.

Optimising each webpage is overlooked by so many websites and this can be the difference between competing for a highly competitive keyword phrase such as “Irish Hotels” and competing for a much less competitive keyword phrase such as “Hotels in County Offaly ”. After that they can check out the rest of your website that is all about “Irish Hotels”.

2. Pick appropriate keyword phrases

This is the single most important thing to do when it comes to optimising your website for search engines. The keywords that your potential customers type into Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask Jeeves are the keywords that your site should be using within the specific areas of your webpage (see below; Optimising your Page Titles and Optimising your Content). There are a number of useful keyword research tools available on the web. The most recommended and user-friendly are Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery. Both offer trial versions.

3. Optimising your Page Titles

All of the major search engines have 100’s of different algorithms that compute where your webpage should be listed for different keyword searches. Putting your keywords within the Title description (the blue bar you will see at the top of your screen) of your pages is one of the most important SEO techniques and will help your website climb through the rankings and allow your visitors to remember exactly what your page is all about when they save it to their “favourites”.

4. Optimising your Page Content

It is sometimes very difficult to write content for your website. Not only do you need put the information that you want the visitor to see in front of them in an easy-to-read style, you also have to keep in mind the keywords or keyphrases that your page is targeting so that you can rank better within search engines.

One of the best pieces of advice that I have come across is to write for your visitors and include the keywords and keyphrases as much as makes sense. Read what you written out loud to yourself and a few others. If it sounds stupid… lather, rinse, and repeat.

5. Create an inbound linking strategy

Submitting your site to online directories is a very beneficial way to drive targeted traffic to your website. People will find your listing in a directory and click on the link to go directly to your site.

This not only brings visitors to your website, but it also creates links for search engine “spiders” or “robots” to find your website and index your pages within their results. If your site doesn’t have a link pointing to it on the World Wide Web the search engines will never find it and you will never see any traffic from Google or the other big ones.

6. Descriptively labeling your links and images (aka the anchor text)

This technique is both common sense and good practice. Telling your visitors what the link that they are going to click on allows them to know exactly what they are going to be directed to. Saying “click here” is not enough to help them understand what they’re going to find once they click through. Be as descriptive as possible with every text and graphical link on your site. The cool thing about writing your anchor text and alt attributes to be descriptive is that you can almost always describe the page you’re pointing to by using its main keyword phrase which is another one of those many factors search engines that into account when it comes to ranking your web pages.

7. Make sure your site is spider-friendly

Your website may look fantastic. You and your web designer may be talented graphic designers that can make Flash and Javascript dazzle your visitors with a show that would put RiverDance to shame. However, if your website contains Flash and Javascript it’s important to know that search engine spiders can’t read this code (or appreciate the effort you put into the design). The way around this is to provide navigation alternatives to allow the spiders crawl deep within your website and index the web pages within their results.

8. Create Fresh Content

When you are optimizing your website properly you will see a trend. If you are doing something that benefits your websites visitors then the search engines will reward you for it.

Search engines do tend to like websites that create fresh content regardless of the format. If they know any given site is adding new articles on a frequent basis, they will come around often to index it.

Blogs and forums are effective and easy ways of adding new information to your site on a regular basis.

However, if your only purpose of setting up a blog or a forum is for better search engine rankings then there really is no point in doing it. Only add a forum if it contributes something beneficial to your website and if you have the traffic to make it interactive enough for visitors to return to it. And, only add a blog if you have something of interest to say on a regular basis.

9. Do not think that you can trick Search Engines

As noted before, “ If you are doing something that benefits your websites visitors then the search engines will reward you for it”.

If you try to trick the search engines by hiding keyword phrases in your pages by making the text colour the same as the background colour, hiding keyword phrases in tiny font, joining link farms, or any other sneaky practice your sites will be removed from the search engines and it will take you a long time to get back in (and you will also have to spend more time cleaning up your website before they will accept you).

10. Offer something unique

If your website offers something that is unique and interesting to your target market and it is properly optimized (by applying all of the techniques that are listed above) you will not only rank well within the major search engines, you will also get the added benefit of people linking to your website in forums, blogs, and through other websites which will send your site more visitors and create more inbound links which will help it rank higher.
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If you know how to use SEO to get a high listing in search engines, or are an expert in search engine optimization for high Google listings, then you need read no more of this article. Your website obviously has at least one page in the top 10 of Google, MSN and Yahoo, and you have as much traffic as you need for your success.

However, if not, then you need some advice. You need to understand the basics of search engine optimization. Incidentally, what the basics are to you may not be basics to others. Basics to some are the correct use of LSI (latent semantic indexing), of internal linking strategies and of other techniques designed to lead search engine spiders by the hand and convince them that their site is the tops. Can you do that?

If not, then here are one or two tips. Good SEO is a lot more than just having your page title in title tags and your heading in H1 tags. It is more that just having the correct keyword density – do you know what that is? The vast majority of people don’t have the slightest clue about keyword density or what it means. Formulae said to relate to keyword density and the number of words in the key phrase as a function of the number of times the phrase should appear in a web page are mediaeval in internet time.

Do you know what? Google doesn’t give a toss about your calculations. Google cares about the service you are providing to Google customers and how relevant the content of your web page is to their needs. To find that out, Google applies a statistical mathematical equation based on statistical analysis of semantics as related to the specific keyword being used by the searcher, and the semantic content of your web page.

Google doesn’t care if you have exactly 15 incidences of your keyword every 500 words – in fact if you do, you have no chance because that is now excessive. Keyword stuffing or keyword spamming they call it! Yet people still write articles packed full of keywords in the mistaken belief that it will be good for them. Who is still telling them that?

So let’s forget keyword density. It’s old SEO and no longer relates to Google’s needs. Internal linking: now there’s a new thing to most people, even though it has been relevant for the past few years. By intelligent use of internal linking you can lead your friendly neighbourhood spider down any web you can weave for it. And you will benefit greatly by doing so, if you know where you should be leading it.

Internal linking strategy is a different concept entirely to an external lining strategy involving one way or two way reciprocal links back to your web page from that of another website. Most people are involved in that, but also most don’t know how to do it properly, and therefore lose out. Let me give you a simple example.

You have a website with a page rank of 4 for your home page. Note that it is not your whole site that gets a Google PageRank, as it is properly written, but each individual page in your site is individually ranked. When you come across a website with a PR of 4 or even 8, it is the page you are looking at that has that PageRank. That will generally be the home page, and when you agree to a reciprocal link, guess what! Your link will be placed on a ‘links page’ in that site with a PR of zero. That’s right, a Google PageRank of zilch: and that’s the benefit you will get. Zilch!

If you place their link on your home page, or any other page with a PR of greater than zero, you lose out. Even if your page has a Google PageRank of only 1, THEN YOU LOSE OUT!! They get a share of your PR of 1, and you get a share of their PR of zero!

Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, and then tell me I don’t know what I am talking about as many have. Some of these many are so-called internet gurus and SEO experts that fleece you by promising you a Google Page 1 position for your site, when they can’t even get one for themselves.

If a site offers you a top 10 position, check out their position by using their URL. If they were so good, wouldn’t they be in the top 10 for their URL? I would have though so! But NO.

So, do what you can to understand what Search Engine Optimization is. What it really is – not what some would want you to believe what it is. Check out the source code of successful sites and compare it to the unsuccessful sites and try to spot differences. If you cannot, then it is the linking strategies that make the difference. Whatever strategy you use, however, make sure that you fully understand it and that you are using it as it should be used. There are links and links – some better than others. Some can give you positive results, and some of your links can be very bad for you.

Do you know how to tell the difference? Most can’t, and so are led by what they read online. The problem is that since ‘most can’t’, most of what is written online is garbage. It is difficult to spot the truth from the opinion. It is truth that gets you a good Google or Yahoo listing, not opinion. The problem is that more people believe opinion than truth since they don’t know what truth is, and most of what they read is false opinion.

The best advice you can have is to check out the websites that have succeeded and copy what they do. However, that is not as easy as you think since the off-site linking strategy that you cannot see is as important as the on-site SEO that you can see.
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