duminică, 24 aprilie 2011

Article Marketing

If you have a well optimized web page and that page is not ranking well in the search engines, then building lots of good quality backlinks will really help to push your website to the top of the search engine results.

In my opinion, the best way to build quality backlinks is through article marketing.

Article marketing simply means writing short articles of around 400-500 words, related to the theme of your website, and then submitting your articles to the top online article directories.

All the article directories allow you to include an author resource box at the end of your article and in this resource box you can promote yourself and include 2-3 links to your website.

The benefits of article marketing include:
(1) Good backlinks, which will help your SEO
(2) Helps to brand your name, your company or your website
(3) Visitors may read your article and click through to your
website

To find article directories, just search in Google.com for "article directories" and you will find lots of them. The
best article directory on the net is:

http://www.ezinearticles.com

This directory gets a ton of visitors daily and it also has a very good page rank, meaning a valuable backlink for you.

vineri, 22 aprilie 2011

Navigation

Although it may seem like it should go without saying, you need good links to get through your site.

Of course you need to use good anchor text in your links. Anchor text is the words that go into the part of the link that is clickable. It should define the page it is linking to. I will make this statement throughout this course. Nothing is worse than having a link that uses the anchor text Click Here. You want to define the page you are linking to with this anchor text. Describe the page with a couple of keywords. Use the keyword that the page is mostly about.

Navigation is basically to allow your users to get from one page to another. Beyond that, everything about it is used for SEO purposes. I will often repeat links at the bottom of the page. I often simply duplicate the navigation at the bottom of the page, in a horizontal layout rather than vertical, and make it like a lot of text links, instead of buttons like navigation at the top of a page would be. It is generally better to repeat those links with different anchor text, mixing it up with other keywords that pertain to that page.

You probably have a lot of keywords within the text of your pages. It is advisable to use these keywords as links to the other pages of your site. Don't go overboard with this, but throughout your content you can link to other pages of your site.

Intersite linking counts, and it's an important thing to do.

joi, 21 aprilie 2011

Off Page Optimization

There are three stages in SEO:

(1) Keyword Research
(2) On Page Optimization
(3) Off Page Optimization

You can have the best keywords and the most perfectly optimized web pages, but if you ignore step (3) you have very little chance of achiving a top ranking for your website.

When you search for something on Google and you receive millions of results, have you ever wondered what differentiates the websites on the first page from all the other websites?

The answer is backlinks.

A backlink is simply a link from another website to your own website and search engines see this as important because a link to a website is like a vote of confidence.

The more backlinks your website has, the better chance you have of ranking high in the search engines.

A good way of determining how difficult it will be to get a top ranking is to simply:

1) Type your keywords into Google.com (without quotes).
2) Write down the URLs of the websites that are in the top
two positions on page one and the top position of page two.
3) Visit any backlink checker tool.
4) Enter the URL of your website and the URL of the three websites that you wrote down.
5) Click the button and you will see how many links your website has compared to your competitors

This exercise will let you see how far away you are from achieving a top position on page one or a top position on page two of Google.

One thing that is worth remember though, is not all links are equal. Links from higher quality websites are worth more than links from lower quality websites.

Google measures quality by something called "Page Rank" or "PR".

Fully Qualified URLs

The term fully qualified URLs means the use of the complete domain name and path to the particular file.

So, you will use http://www.domain.com/filename.php instead of filename.php.

This is just a brownie points tactic. What we get each time there is a link found to the domain itself is another link pointing at domain.com. It is much better to have the link pointing at domain.com rather than filename.php because it counts as a link to the domain. It may not be much, as it is within the domain itself, but every single link counts. Why waste the points?

Alt Attribute

Tag attributes should be used through your HTML pages. Tag or code attributes are bits of text that can be added to a tag or piece of code to define or describe it. These are good places to add your keywords in where a description is called for. The alt attribute is part of the img tag. You'll often see it like this:

Here you also see the use of the title attribute. This isn't new, although it really isn't used by most webmasters. If you want to check on things, it is part of the W3C specification, and therefore should be used. As well, for those surfing with IE, they will see the alt attribute information when they hover over the image. Those surfing with Mozilla (Firefox) will see the title attribute information, not the alt attribute.
Backlink Builder SEO Course Logo. I consider this good use of the attribute as it utilizes a keyword, and at the same time describes the image. Two birds with one stone so to speak. Poor birds.

The W3C calls the alt attribute mandatory, so always include it. If your image is simply a spacer, or background, you may be best off not specifying it, but include the empty tag anyway as alt="". This may sound ridiculous to you, but it is in the W3C Recommendation, so it's official!

Always use a keyword or phrase in the alt tag, if at all possible but don't stuff the tag. The tag is meant for people who have images turned off in their browsers, or for browsers that don't display images. You want to portray to these people what this image is. A list of keywords doesn't do that. A nice description can however include a keyword or phrase.

I've never seen any facts about how long an alt tag should be, but common sense tells me that since it is meant to be a short description of what the image is, it should be just that. Short. Keep it to a short sentence. As a matter of fact, if you think about it, the attribute is intended for people not only surfing with images turned off, or textual browsers with no images, but for those visually and hearing impaired. The alt attribute is rendered in braile (so I've been told ... I have no clue how it is done), or speech. Anything beyond a simple explanation is going to slow down the entire process of viewing a webpage to these people.

luni, 18 aprilie 2011

Headline Tags

The <h1> and the <h2> are useful. The engines, Google in particular, will place emphasis on these two tags. Utilize the headline tags to get keywords into the engines. The H1 tag is thought of as a title. I will often use the same words that I used in the site title, actually just repeating the title in an H1 tag. I have had some good results from that. The H2 is like a subhead. Utilize your keywords here too. Don't however repeat the H1 tag as an H2 tag as that would be pushing the envelope.

I don't suggest you do this on every occasion. I have seen some results from this strategy, but I would never do it on every page of a site. I should also explain that I don't repeat the tags word for word usually. In the title tag I will not use stop words, (and, the, but etc.), but in the H1 tag I will. Again, always keep things as different as you can.

Just like in a book, magazine or newspaper where you would have the title in larger type, a subhead in smaller type and the content in yet smaller type.

If the H1 tag is too big for your design with the default values you can change it with CSS.

DO NOT utilize the H1 tags to make paragraphs of text thinking you'll get more keywords into the Headlines tag and gain ranking. Keep the number of words in these tags down. The H1 is supposed to be a title headline. The h2 can have a few more words, but it too is supposed to simply be a sub heading. Don't try and exploit these tags.

You need to understand how these tags are supposed to be used. Think of an outline. One big head, then smaller heads, with yet smaller heads under them. Think that way with your web pages and utilize the Headline tags as such.

The heading tags run H1 through H6 with H6 being the smallest. It is meant for sizing on a page. You could code each section of your page with H tags where your title would be H1, subheads H2, second subheads as H3, text as H4 ... well ... I really think that was the original idea. However, only the H1 and H2 tags are used with regularity. It has been that Google paid closer attention to these tags than the H3 through H6. Expect this to be something that changes. It's worth utilizing H3 tags and the others on some pages to see what happens in the future.

Utilize CSS to change this into any typeface or size that you wish. Simply change the <h1> tag to something like this <h1 class="mymainheading"> where your CSS file defines mymainheading as the type size, font, color etc., that you wish your main heading to be. See, CSS is a huge step forward in HTML. It not only simplifies things, it has opened up all kinds of new ways of formatting your pages, and is a huge step forward for SEO.

META Tags , META Keywords

META Tags

Same rules hold true here about varying the basics.

My basic here is about 24 words. I like to make it very readable and also have the keywords in it. This is where the description of your site is going to come from on all the META Search Engines out there. So make it descriptive and make it so the reader wants to visit your site.

META Keywords

Again, use different character and word counts in this tag. For starters keep it to around 25 words or thereabouts. Sometimes use commas, sometimes don't. Google has a way of stemming keywords so insure can become insurance. Always include both insure and insurance in your keyword tag though. Don't take Google for granted.

Don't repeat keywords in the keywords tag. Use ONLY very relevant keywords. Don't use keywords in the tag that don't show up in the content of the page. Let me say this again, do not use keywords in the title and meta tags that don't show up on that page.

It's worth mentioning at this point that Google doesn't even pay attention to these META tags (description, keywords). Or at least that is what most optimizers think. But let's cover all bases anyway, and besides we do want the traffic from those META engines out there!

Maybe however Google will pay attention to them tomorrow!

As a matter of fact lately Google has been using the description meta tag for the description within the SERPs. Proof that we really need to keep our meta tags intact.

Always include these two tags to tell the robots to follow the links and index your site. I also use the special googlebot tag too. I like to let Googlebot know that I'm watching it.

I have taken this two steps further since I first wrote this. Here are the follow tags that I always use today:

META Robots, NOODP -
No Open Directory Project Descriptions

Here is a good one to use as well. The Open Directory Project, http://www.dmoz.org, is sometimes used for the description of your site, in the SERPs. Google does this.

Why use this tag? Well DMOZ is a highly respected directory, and being listed there, by-the-way, will help your listings in any other search engine. It's great to be listed there. But, they are not refreshed, they don't spider, they are quite frankly ... old. If you are listed there, the description that was used back then is still there.

I will assume that your are keeping your site updated and fresh and timely. Why have an old stale description in the SERPs. Add this meta tag into the mix and the robots will not use the ODP description, at for Google, for sure

or specifically for Google:

or specifically for Yahoo! Slurp:

There are a lot more meta tags, but you are better off not using them. I'll tell you to definitely not use the revist meta tag. This tag is telling the robot to come and visit every X number of days. Well, when initially thought about, this sounds good. You can tell the robot to come back and visit you every 14 days because you put up new content on a bi-weekly basis, or whatever. But in fact, it is a bad code to use. I see the Gooblebot visiting my sites on a regular schedule. Generally every two to three days. If I am going to tell it not too do that ... sheesh ... I would have to have poop for brains. If you find that Googlebot is not coming around to visit often enough work on reciprocal linking to make sure it is finding your URL in enough places to make it to it's task list.

There are copyright, generator, author meta tags and more. All kinds of information can be put into these meta tags. A good portion of it, basically all of it, is never seen by anyone nor used as information by any robot or spider. For this reason, they really do nothing but bloat your pages. Remember, the smaller the overall code of your page is, the easier it is to get the spiders to find and digest your content.

Here is the way I want you to use your meta tags. Always put them in this order, title, description, keywords.

<title>Title Goes Here</title>
<meta name="description" content="Description Goes Here">
<meta name="keywords" content="Keywords Go Here">

You can include the four robots tags shown above after these if you wish. It's entirely up to you.