5. use this tool in several ways: first… type in a category ‘keyword’ and
you’ll receive between 20 to 100 other relevant keywords
6. secondly… type in a website that ranks well and see what keywords they
use…
7. third… there is a facility on this page to download all keyword
suggestions as a text file… use it and file safely
8. be aware that when anyone types a request into a search engine it
includes keywords
9. these keywords need to be gathered and included upon your web page or
website
10. don’t use the keyword or keyword phrase more than 6 times on any one
webpage, otherwise this could be seen as keyword spamming
11. Find out what other websites use for their keywords… right click in an
empty space on the web page and click ‘view source’; and view their meta
tags listed between <head> and </head> at the very top of the page.
12. Don’t be eager to optimise your main keywords first. Concentrate on
minor keywords and see quick results and in doing this you’ll understand
the procedure better.
13. Attempting to work on your major keywords first could be costly. If
you misunderstand a procedure and you make an error some search engines
could penalise your efforts and it could damage how frequent the search
engine return.
14. Keywords are king. Now in most search engines - as you type in 'search
box' suggestions are prompted. These are search terms that are already
popular. Take a note of these and add them to your website. Or better
still make a web page with that as both the file extension and page title.
15. Be precise about your keywords! If you are a ‘marketing company’ and
are selling your skills on the internet… Don’t use the keywords ‘internet
marketing’; be more specific… instead of using one word such as internet
marketing which will be fiercely fought over, create sub headings… such
as: corporate marketing on the internet, professional marketing on a
budget…
16. If you take that process one step further… Imagine being a casual
browser on the internet and by chance you did want a corporate internet
marketer, and came across an advert for internet marketing. You may
wonder… and then press… and … find nothing that you really want… blah!...
not the right type of company for you. Precise wording guarantees a more
interested surfer and more targeted and likely to buy. promotion.
17. Include ‘long tail’ keyword phrases on your webpage or promotion. If
you are a travel company you should never use just ‘London’; but use for
example: ‘5 Star Luxury Hotel in the Heart of London’.
18. If your website site is new most search engines do not give it value,
especially for fiercely targeted keywords. Target sub categories first,
then when your site has more credibility, start chasing the more popular
words.
19. Type any keyword into Google and as you scroll down the listings
you’ll find sub category headings shouting out at you. Type in ‘weight
loss’ for example and within 20 listings you’ll find ‘weight loss plan’.
This is how you find your own 'long tail keywords'.
<<< o0o >>>
# Use anchor text on links that point to
your page with keywords you are targeting (both internal and external
sites).
# Along the same lines as the last tip, if you have images that click to
pages, use the ALT parameter within the <IMG> tag, and include whatever
keywords you are targeting.
# Generally, use common sense and stay away from trying to trick search
engines (cloaking tricks for example). It can get your site penalized or
even banned from the search engines.
# One of the most important factors is getting other sites to link to you
your website using your target keywords and phrases as the link text.
# Provide links on your pages to other websites with relevant content but
do not abuse reciprocal linking as you will be penalized heavily.
# Your page should be safe for older browsers, use html links and avoid
framesets to ensure a crawler can index it.
# Ensure your content is relevant and to the point and make correct use of
punctuation and grammar.
# Ensure your HTML code is well formatted making appropriate use of tags
such as h1, h2, alt, etc. Search engines like Google rank prefer
standards-compliant and semantically correct sites.
# Use meta tags including page title, keywords and description making sure
they accurately reflect the content of your page.
1. Create a MySpace account and use it to publicise your site.
2. Bookmark your site on Del.icio.us and if you’re really keen, add a
Del.icio.us button to your homepage.
3. Create a Technorati account and “claim” your blog.
4. Submit your site to free search engine friendly directories.
5. Conduct a survey. This is an excellent way to generate offline
publicity.
6. Place a free ad for your company on Gumtree.
7. Syndicate your site’s content by using an RSS feeds.
8. Submit your RSS feeds to aggregator sites like FeedBurner, Squidoo,
Feedboy, Jordomedia, FeedBomb, FeedCat, rssmad, feeddirectory and feedfury.
Stolen from DigitalPoint
9. Write an article related to your site and submit it to article sites.
10. Sign up to StumbleUpon and get your friends to Stumble your site.
11. Create a custom 404 page so that even if someone encounters an error
on your site, they are re-directed somewhere nice.
12. Set up a 301 redirect to take traffic from your non-www address to
your www address.
13. Add a link to your site in the signature of any forums you post on.
14. Tell your friends about your site. It’s free advertising init.
15. Speel cheek ur stie. Nothing appears more amateur than a site with
typos or spelling mistakes.
16. Test your site and make sure it appears correctly in all major
browsers.
17. Buy enough hosting. No one likes a slow site.
18. Don’t worry about PageRank - worrying about PageRank is as effective
as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubblegum.
19. Offer something for free. Free is good. People tell their friends
about free stuff.
20. Tell your neighbours, you never know what contacts they might have.
21. Offer your users as many ways as possible to contact you. MSN, Skype,
Yahoo etc all complement email, phone and a real address.
22. Advertise your site on Craigslist. It’s free, relevant and localised.
23. Do NOT use frames.
24. Submit your site to DMOZ.org. It may take time, but it’s worth it.
25. Create an XML sitemap of your site and submit it to Google.
26. Get a custom t-shirt made with your website url on it, and wear it
often.
27. Ask a large breasted lady to wear one too.
28. Sign up with an affiliate programme to sell your product, or if you’re
a publisher, make some cash!
29. On your Contact Page ask people if they mind receiving your
newsletter.
30. Send out a newsletter!
31. Go to a free seminar for Website owners. You might learn something.
32. Find quality and relevant blogs and leave a comment (with a link back
to your site of course).
33. Don’t pay people to submit your site to search engines. It’s a waste
of money.
34. YouTube and Google Video are excellent portals on which to launch a
viral campaign.
35. Giving away an eBook is an excellent way to generate word-of-mouth
about your site.
36. Sponsor a Wordpress theme or a phpListDirectory template.
37. If you sell products that are advertised on television by the
manufacturer, add “As Seen on TV” to your site!
38. Avoid proprietary technologies like Java and Active X.
39. Put downloadable content on your site, but make sure it’s not
manufacturer specific - so mp3 rather than wma.
40. Learn about CSS. It’s the new HTML.
41. Contribute to related subject areas on Wikipedia.
42. Ask bloggers and other Web site owners to review your site and/or
products.
43. Have user friendly page names - most tools comes with some way to
avoid
long page names.
44. If you must have a Flash homepage, make sure you have a “Skip Intro”
link.
45. Tell your local rag about your site. These newspapers are desperate
for stories and you may well even get a picture of your ugly mug
published.
46. Become a leading authority on your chosen subject.
47. Donate money to a charity and most will place a link on their site
back to you.
48. Abide to W3C standards - it will help your site in the long term.
49. Your local community sports teams offer cheap, but highly effective
sponsorship opportunities.
50. Publisise your site on related forums - but don’t spam!
51. Ask bloggers to write about your site or product - in return for a
link of course.
52. Offer a competition related to something in the news - so football
around the time of the World Cup etc.
53. Add a “Tell a Friend” function to your site, so people can easily
recommend you to their mates.
54. Have a Sitemap on your site to allow users to navigate around quickly
and to aid the search engines.
55. Have a nice keyword rich title at the top of each of your pages. Users
and search engines both like descriptive titles.
56. Include a Feedburner button on your site so people can easily
subscribe to your feed.
57. If you use PPC then create a landing page for each of your AdWords -
it’ll boost your conversations no end.
58. Appear on Dragon’s Den.
59. Create a Press section on your site where can you store all your press
releases, logos and banners.
60. Add a link to your site from within your eBay profile.
61. Ask your friends to give you honest feedback on your site.
62. The best way to find someone to do any kind of work on your site is
through personal recommendation.
63. Gain exposure by submitting photos and pictures to Flikr.
64. Share your banners on banner exchange sites.
65. Make sure it’s easy for your users to subscribe to your RSS feed.
66. Create a “lense” for your site on Squidoo
67. Ask friends, colleagues and associates to “Favourite” your blog on
Technorati.
68. You can add a Bulletin to your MySpace account promoting your site
that all your MySpace Friends will see.
69. Response to your customer’s emails promptly, even if it is with a
simply auto-responder. No one likes to wait 3 or 4 days for an
acknowledgement of their contact with you.
70. Get a professional Copywriter to give your site a once over. If you
are on a tight budget, limit to the just the homepage.
71. Make a list, “Top 10?s work well. Update it regularly to give your
visitors a reason to return.
72. What did you learn today? Tell other people and they might learn
something too.
73. Do you have really hot content on your site that geeks would love? If
so Slashdot will bring you a mass of traffic.
74. Deep link directories are an excellent way to promote inner pages of
your site.
75. Meta tags might carry less weight than previously, but you should
still have them on every page.
76. Ask your Gran for feedback on your site. Never ignore the silver
surfers.
77. Include a “Add to your Technorati favourites” button on your site.
78. Google Analytics is free and will tell you all you need to know about
who’s visiting your site.
79. Search engines will find you. Don’t pay money for your site to be
“submitted”.
80. Don’t be afraid to link to other sites, especially if they are
relevant and to highly respected sites.
81. Keep It Simple Stupid: use CSS to control layout, style and colours
and use HTML text rather than graphics to represent text.
82. Validate your HTML and CSS. It’ll help ensure your site displays well
in all browsers.
83. Small pages sizes and optimised graphics will give your site a snappy
feel and won’t require users to wait around for it to load.
84. If you plan to submit your site to lots of directory or article sites
- create an email especially for this. Delete it when you’re finished to
avoid spam.
85. “Link baiting” means writing some killer content that people will want
to link to. Like a “101 Tips to Improve Your Web Presence” list!
86. If your chosen field is technology related then write a “whitepaper”.
That’s a posh name for an article.
87. Google receives roughly 50% of all search requests, Yahoo 25% and MSN
just 10%. That’s a good rule of thumb as to how much emphasis to put on
each.
88. Make sure you have a robots.txt file in the root of your Web site. You
can use this to control search engines, but if nothing else it’ll reduce
the number of 404 errors in your Weblogs.
89. Free online games, a forum or chatrooms will give your users a reason
to come back to your site.
90. Ebooks with re-seller rights make an excellent “free gift” for your
site.
91. Upload your product feed to Froogle. It’s FREE!
92. This is an excellent list of Top 25 Social Bookmarking Sites
93. Search out unanswered questions on Yahoo! Answers and add your site as
the “Source”.
94. PageRank is vanity, ranking is sanity.
95. Yahoo are catching up with Google with an excellent set of webmaster
tools called Site Explorer.
96. Don’t buy traffic. It’s un-targeted and won’t convert.
97. Pay Per Click advertising gets you fast results - and if it’s handled
well can be very profitable.
98. Upload a favicon.gif file so that your users have a nice icon when
they bookmark your site.
99. And that’s it!
WARNING: Don't Even THINK About Trying To
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Dear Website Owner,
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A clear explanation of search engine optimization (SEO)
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the art and science of making websites
perform better in the search engines. There is no magic to it -- it's all
about understanding how search engines read web pages and what factors
they take into consideration when deciding how to rank a page for a given
search query. When done correctly, search engine optimization also
improves websites for use by humans, as will be explained below.
Write excellent content
The importance of quality writing in SEO
Quality content (meaning excellent articles) are the heart and soul of
search engine optimization, because the only thing that Google and other
search engines truly respect is text. Specifically, text to which other
websites have linked, as we will see below. So put your money and/or
energy into writing or obtaining excellent articles. Search engines have
remarkably sophisticated ways of determining just how good an article is -
you would be surprised at just how good they are at this.
Website Optimisation
Keyword density
The role of keyword density in search engine optimization
The articles should feature several instances of the keyword or keywords
that you are targeting. Don't overdo it, as this makes the article cheaper
and annoying, and is also considered spam by search engines. The real
secret is not so much about mentioning the keyword lots of times, as much
as making the article focused on that keyword. Therefore, stay on topic
and don't stray.
Latent semantic indexing
There is no need to worry about the deep technicalities of latent semantic
indexing. Let it suffice that search engines will be more impressed with
your articles if you use words that are synonyms of (or otherwise related
to) the keywords you are targeting. In other words, if your keyword is
"lenses", is your article about camera lenses, or is it about contact
lenses to correct vision? Search engines care a lot about the distinction,
because they want to direct uses to what they are looking for. You're
either looking for contact lenses or you are looking for photographic
lenses -- the two options are mutually exclusive. By analyzing the words
you use in addition to "lenses", search engines can correctly infer what
your page is really about.
So for example, if in addition to "lenses" you also keep mentioning "eyes"
and "tears," then it's a pretty good bet that your page is about contact
lenses. Conversely, if the keyword "lenses" is combined with words like
"camera" or "camcorder", the search engines will decide that your page is
about photographic lenses.
It's also a question of sheer quality: an article about lenses will be
pretty poor if it just harps on about lenses and never mentions anything
else and that is related to them.
Google Optimisation
Use the h1 tag
The h1 tag still plays a huge role in SEO
The h1 tag is very powerful ammunition in SEO. Put your keywords in the h1
tag and leave all the fluff out. Other things being equal, it is still
true that search engines massively prefer pages with an h1 tag to those
that don't.
Put your keywords in the meta-tags (but don't overdo it)
Meta-tags in SEO
Meta-tags still play a role in SEO. The ones that you should care about
are the "content" and "description" meta-tags. Here is the secret: if you
make them identical, it gives you an edge with the search engines. This is
field-tested knowledge.
Put your keywords in the URL
Keywords in the URL of webpages helps in SEO
The URL should include the keywords that you are targeting. This plays a
huge role in search engine optimization. For an adequate example, look at
the URL of this page :)
As with everything else, leave fluff words out and keep the URL highly
focused on the keywords you are interested in.
Use keywords in the names of directories
Directory structure in SEO
Your web site should have a hierarchical structure. Every article should
be placed in a directory (folder) that itself sits in the root directory.
These sub-directories should be named with keywords that are broadly
relevant to every article they contain.
For example, if you have an article about cherries, an article about
peaches and one about apricots, they should all be placed in a directory
called "fruit". This is what is meant by "hierarchical" structure. Naming
sub-directories with keywords plays a big role in SEO.
Search Engine Promotion
Keywords in domain name
Choose a domain name that uses keywords
This is actually a tricky decision to make, because if you are in it for
the long haul and want to make a classy, "branded" website, a cool and
memorable domain name is actually preferable to keywords. A branded domain
name will not help you with SEO, but it will take you further in terms of
brand quality. This is why Google called itself "Google" rather than "TheBestSearchEngine."
That said, if you want to go all-out on SEO, pick a domain name that
includes your keywords. This will save you a lot of time and effort in the
initial stages of launching your website and its SEO campaign.
When writing your articles, make sure that your keywords appear in bold
type, italics and underlined (but never more than one of these at the same
time). Make sure that you use a variety of synonyms, as well as the
singular and plural forms of your keywords.
Remember that writing quality articles is absolutely the main priority, so
do not write crappy copy for the sake of stuffing keywords in. This will
kill your website and stopped being effective 10 years ago.
Flash is bad for SEO!
Flash is bad for search engine optimization
Flash is bad for SEO for the simple reason that search engines are not
able to read it. In other words, any text that is displayed with Flash is
not real text, but just an image that search engines cannot read as text.
Well, that was true until recently, but there has been a recent
development that allows search engines to make *some* sense of Flash after
all.
However, I still think that Flash should be unceremoniously ditched for
good, partly because although search engines can make some sense of it
these days, it's still not a smart choice. After all, we are talking about
search engine OPTIMIZATION, right? That means that everything needs to be
absolutely top-notch and hunky-dory. So forget that Flash exists. Just bin
it.
Additionally, Flash is absolutely irritating and alienating for users,
especially when the homepage has a tedious, self-indulgent intro. If you
really think that people are interested in watching your intro -- no
matter how slick and well-made -- you need to do some serious learning as
a matter of urgency, because that is NOT how the Internet works,
especially these days.
To put it simply, people visit websites because they are after something
very specific. They need something and they need it yesterday. Does it
sound like they can be bothered to sit through your self-indulgent flash
intro? I cannot tell you how many websites I have completely aborted when
the intro was taking too long to load. And I'm a patient guy. You have
been warned!
This might seem like a slight digression from SEO to the topic of website
usability, but it is actually absolutely relevant to search engine
optimisation, because people will not link to your website if they do not
find it useful -- or if they do not visit it at all because they could not
bear to watch your Flash intro.
Small Business SEO
Instead, I would highly recommend that you go with the Google philosophy:
simple, uncluttered - an oasis of value and peace.
Frames are bad for SEO!
Avoid frames like the plague
Frames are disastrous - they are even worse than Flash. They are the
biggest enemy of search engine optimisation, because they completely
destroy the fundamental unit of web browsing: the static webpage. You will
notice that on a Web site that uses frames, the only URL that is displayed
is the root domain, regardless of which page you are on. The consequences
of this are very simple and absolutely disastrous: neither Google nor any
other search engine will be able to index any of your pages, vanifying the
whole point of having lots of articles and quality content.
Frames also make the user experience absolutely obnoxious, because they
make navigation difficult or impossible, and do not allow the user to use
the "back" button to go back to where they started in a logical fashion.
Frames are a mess and have absolutely no role in the creation of websites.
Avoid them at all costs.
Use a high content-to-code ratio
The readable text (content) should outweigh the code
Your content pages (articles) should have the highest possible
content-to-code ratio. What this means is very simple: when you view a
page's source code, the content-related text should occupy more characters
than those that compose the code. The words that make up your articles are
the "signal", whereas the characters that compose the code (e.g. HTML) are
the "noise". The higher this ratio, the more valuable search engines will
think the page is.
This is partly why Craigslist does so well in the search engines -- its
code is incredibly lean and simple, which means that if your Craigslist
post is at least 200 words long, the content-to-code ratio will be
excellent. This is why Craigslist posts do so well on Google despite the
fact that they are only a few days old and with no PageRank whatsoever,
and also why Craigslist is so useful in SEO.
If you want to see an example of a webpage with a high content-to-code
ratio, go to Craigslist and pick any post that is longer than 300 words.
Look at the page's source code, and make sure you scroll down so that you
can take a look at the entire page. You will notice that the words that
compose the readable text (that is, the ad itself) occupy much more space
than everything else. This is what is meant by a high content-to-code
ratio, and is one of the reasons for which craigslist has kicked every
other classifieds website into the ground (although admittedly first-mover
advantage played a massive role here).
Search Engine Optimiser
Put the menu on the right-hand side
Putting the menu on the right-hand side helps in SEO
This is related to the content-to-code ratio issue: you should put the
menu on the right-hand side, leaving the left-hand side of the page for
the content (the article). If you look at the source code of a page that
is set up like this, you will see that the content will be at the very top
of the page, while all the code that makes up the menu is directly below
the main content. In other words, if you put the menu on the left, the
"signal" (article) will be at the top of the page and will be read first
by the search engine spiders, while the "noise" (menu, AdSense code and
other junk) will be read last. This trick can help web pages a lot in
terms of search engine performance.
Use a reputable web host
A good web host helps with SEO
Using a reputable web host for your blog or website is crucial. You've got
to make sure that its service is reliable and that your blog or website is
virtually never off-line due to web server issues. By all accounts,
GoDaddy is a totally awesome web host, with the best quality and lowest
prices out there. They also have absolutely incredible customer service,
and I wholeheartedly recommend it.
Put outbound links to high-quality websites in your content
High-quality outbounds links help A LOT in SEO
High-quality outbound links on a web page help to boost that page's search
engine ranking -- this has been experimentally determined. It is not at
all surprising: Google and other search engines want to take users to web
pages that are USEFUL. A page of content is unlikely to be all that useful
if it does not have any links to other related high-quality external
websites. A page of content that has no links to external websites is very
likely to be spam - and Google knows it.
Not linking to external websites in an effort to keep visitors on your
website DOES NOT WORK. Internet users are extremely fickle and all they
have to do is hit the back button or shut down the browser altogether if
they want to leave your website. If you do not put high-quality outbound
links in your content, you are a value-taker and you will be justifiably
kicked into the ground by better websites that do link externally.
But here's the good news: people don't really click on links that much
anyway, so if you use high-quality outbound links, you will do a lot
better in the search engines, but will pay virtually no price in terms of
users leaving. Users WILL leave, but only because they were going to
anyway, not because of the links. This is therefore a win-win situation.
Use a unique IP address
Having a unique IP address is vital in SEO
Use a unique IP address. This means that there is an unequivocal
one-to-one match between a specific IP address and your website's domain.
This is important, because if you share an IP address with other websites,
if one of those websites gets penalised by Google for spam behaviour, your
website will also take a hit. Additionally, Google and other search
engines simply take you more seriously if you have a dedicated IP address.
Having a dedicated IP address will only cost you an extra few bucks a
month and it is well worth it. For example, on GoDaddy having a dedicated
IP address only costs an extra three dollars a month. The value you get in
return for those extra three dollars is absolutely huge.
