Posts Tagged ‘website development’

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SEO Basics

Wednesday, May 27th, 2009

Author: Prashant Shukla

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of methods aimed at improving the ranking of a website in search engine listings, and could be considered a subset of search engine marketing. The term SEO also refers to “search engine optimizers,” an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients’ sites. Some commentators, and even some SEOs, break down methods used by practitioners into categories such as “white hat SEO” (methods generally approved by search engines, such as building content and improving site quality), or “black hat SEO” (tricks such as cloaking and spamdexing). White hatters say that black hat methods are an attempt to manipulate search rankings unfairly. Black hatters counter that all SEO is an attempt to manipulate rankings, and that the particular methods one uses to rank well are irrelevant.

Search engines display different kinds of listings in the search engine results pages (SERPs), including: pay per click advertisements, paid inclusion listings, and organic search results. SEO is primarily concerned with advancing the goals of a website by improving the number and position of its organic search results for a wide variety of relevant keywords.

Early search engines

Webmasters and content providers began optimizing sites for search engines in the mid-1990s, as the first search engines were cataloging the early Web. Initially, all a webmaster needed to do was submit a site to the various engines which would run spiders, programs to “crawl” the site, and store the collected data. The default search-bracket was to scan an entire webpage for so-called related search words, so a page with many different words matched more searches, and a webpage containing a dictionary-type listing would match almost all searches, limited only by unique names. The search engines then sorted the information by topic, and served results based on pages they had crawled.

Organic search engines

Google was started by two PhD students at Stanford University, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and brought a new concept to evaluating web pages. This concept, called PageRank, has been important to the Google algorithm from the start. PageRank relies heavily on incoming links and uses the logic that each link to a page is a vote for that page’s value. The more incoming links a page had the more “worthy” it is. The value of each incoming link itself varies directly based on the PageRank of the page it comes from and inversely on the number of outgoing links on that page.

The relationship between SEO and the search engines

The first mentions of Search Engine Optimization don’t appear on Usenet until 1997, a few years after the launch of the first Internet search engines. The operators of search engines recognized quickly that some people from the webmaster community were making efforts to rank well in their search engines, and even manipulating the page rankings in search results. In some early search engines, such as Infoseek, ranking first was as easy as grabbing the source code of the top-ranked page, placing it on your website, and submitting a URL to instantly index and rank that page.
Due to the high value and targeting of search results, there is potential for an adversarial relationship between search engines and SEOs. In 2005, an annual conference named AirWeb was created to discuss bridging the gap and minimizing the sometimes damaging effects of aggressive web content providers.

About the Author:

Prashant K Shukla is a successful webmaster and author. Visit his website http://www.mysmartseo.com to read more articles on SEO. Know about lot of free tools to help link building, get back links, boost traffic and ranking of your website. Permission to reprint this article is granted if the article is reproduced in its entirety, without modification, including the bio information. Please include a hyper link to http://www.mysmartseo.com

Article Source: ArticlesBase.com – SEO Basics

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Posted in Google SEO & PageRank, SEO, Site Promotion, Website Development | No Comments »

One way Link Building: Securing Lasting Results for Your Website

Wednesday, May 27th, 2009

Author: Akhila Choudhary

If you are contemplating link popularity building , the best advice is think long term. Don’t rely on the traditional reciprocal links. They may give you link popularity for a short period of time but are not long lasting. On the contrary, the benefits you get from one way link building last for years and help improve your website’s ranking on search engines results.
Now, let’s see how one-way links are more beneficial than reciprocal links. It is true that both one way links and reciprocal links do a world of good to your website’s ranking on search engines. Link popularity is one of the criteria that Google and Yahoo use while evaluating web pages. Pages acquire link popularity depending on the pages that link to them. But if you use a number of reciprocal links, the popularity of your site may even be decreased. Though these links point back to your site, they may not be links which shares the same area of interest as yours. They may lead to sites which are quite different from yours in term of content.
One way links are difficult to acquire. But once you have them, you are guaranteed of lasting benefits. These are links that points back to site and they also lead to sites that share the same topical focus as yours. As such, they also add value to the users and search engines see this as an authentic and not an artificial way of building link popularity. Consult link building services providers to get one way linking sources.
Building links through this method also secures permanent results as website owners feels that their users can be benefited from your site’s content. Hence they don’t easily drop your link from their sites. So turn to one way links for link building.

About the Author:

I am the webmaster at www.synapseinteractive.com . Synapse Interactive is a one way link building company in India.

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Posted in Google SEO & PageRank, SEO, Website Development | No Comments »

12 Simple Steps to Effective Websites

Thursday, April 30th, 2009

By Nancy Fraser

The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea
In a beautiful pea green boat,
They took some honey, and plenty of money,
Wrapped up in a five pound note.

Edward Lear must have had some precognition about what was in store for us all with the development of the internet when he wrote this nonsensical poem.

Many people do feel at sea after they launch their website and attempt to navigate the sometimes confusing channels of the internet. They wonder why their website doesn’t get more traffic and why their inbox is not filling up with emails from people clamoring to buy their products or services.

It seems that the rules change as often as Oprah changes her clothes and who could ever hope to keep up with that!

Price quotes for search engine optimization are all over the map; the process seems never-ending and expensive.

How is it that some people seem to have great success on the web without spending a huge amount of money? Is it unrealistic to think that you can make a living working on the web?

When faced with a seemingly overwhelming challenge it helps to break things down into bite-sized pieces.

Effective websites should include the following:
1. Your website needs to focus on a specific niche.

2. You need to do keyword research and although Google no longer gives weight to Meta keywords some of the other major search engines still do.

3. Your website should have the main keyword used throughout and each page should be written around 5-10 keywords that are tightly focused on that particular page’s topic.

4. Content is still King. Well written, focused content is crucial.

5. Meta titles need to include your keywords.

6. Organization of content should include headings and subtitles to make it easy for readers to scan the pages. Be sure to include your keywords in these headings as well.

7. Most people on the web are looking for information. If you don’t give them anything of value or entertain them, they will be gone, probably for good.

8. Use keywords in links whereever possible.

9. Include a call to action and,if possible, offer a Free trial. You have to build trust before you can make a sale.

10. Check your website in various browsers (FireFox, Internet Explorer, etc.) to make sure it displays equally well in all.

11. Your personality is what attracts people to you so why would you create a generic website with all of the excitement of a flat glass of pop. Keep the content fresh so it has Fizz!

12. Most importantly, have realistic expectations of what you want to achieve with your website. With all the hype about overnight successes on the internet it’s difficult to put your results into perspective. If you expect instant success and it isn’t happening, it’s easy to become demoralized and quit before you reach your goal.

Some Other Important Web Marketing Tips

Google page rank counts! The higher your page rank number the higher you will rank in user searches. How do you find out your page rank? Download the Google toolbar here for Internet Explorer http://toolbar.google.com/T4/ or here for FireFox http://tools.google.com/firefox/toolbar/install.html.

Improve your page rank by encouraging other highly ranked websites in complementary businesses to link to yours and by developing content with a niche focus. Page rank is also affected by traffic numbers. A couple of ways you can boost traffic are pay-per-click advertising and posting articles on the web.

Your web image is at least as important as your personal image. You wouldn’t go out to meet a prospective client wearing a mishmash of styles and colours but many businesses have websites with tools that don’t work, tables and text that are out of alignment, old information, dated colours, and confusing navigation. Those things are bad enough but when an experienced web developer looks at the code on a website they often find a website that looks good but is not built to encourage search traffic.

Be prepared like the wise owl and make the job of marketing your business as easy as possible with a website that enhances your brand image and is technically sound and purrrr your way to success.

About The Author
Nancy Fraser of Nota Bene Consulting has been helping clients get better results with their marketing and advertising for over 20 years. Sign up for Notable News and get free marketing tips at www.notable-marketing.com.

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Posted in Google SEO & PageRank, SEO, Search Engine Marketing, Site Promotion, Website Design, Website Development, marketing | 1 Comment »

Website Templates Tips And Tricks

Thursday, April 9th, 2009

by John Dow

Web templates can save you time and money. If you want to get a jump start on your website design, there’s no fast way to get up and running quickly. Even experienced web designers use some kind of homemade web template to put the required web pages and layout in place.

If you are starting from scratch on your design, reviewing different colors, layouts, and navigation methods of several different web templates can give you some good ideas. You make like the colors from one, the layout from another, and some graphics from somewhere else.

When choosing any website templates, look and feel are important, but the technical aspects can impact both the user and search engine features. You often have to look behind most web templates designs to make sure that proper techniques for the user experience and ease of search engine review are also in place.

You only have 3-6 seconds to grab the visitor’s attention, so you better use every feature at your disposal. Lets start with the visitor’s possible reasons for sticking around and reading your message. Here are a few methods that will help you get the visitors attention and convince them to keep reading. These methods should be incorporated into any web template.

Give the visitor instant gratification on subject matter. The area above the fold (top 5 or 8 inches) is prime real estate and you need to have a powerful headline that reinforces the reason they came to your website. Applicable graphics (photos, illustrations, etc.) can help but the written word usually rules in grabbing attention.

Show them the information they want by using meaningful anchor text in menus. Demonstrate at first glance that you have additional information or easy to understand links that revolve around the subject matter with easy navigation. Fancy pull down menus don’t cut it for making any visual impact.

Don’t waste important real estate with a huge graphic that takes up half of the area above the fold. Many website templates waste valuable space with some large graphic. If you look at some of the most popular websites you see that none of them waste that first 6-8 inches of space with huge graphics. Look at Yahoo, Google, MSN, eBay, and others and you’ll see what I mean.

On the technical and search engine side, there are several methods that directly effect your ability to get high index rankings under your keywords or phrases. Although the search engines look at structure and content, they also need your help. You should always make sure that the search engine bots can easily navigate and interpret what your website content is all about.

OK, lets say you did your homework and have decided on the best keywords and phrases for your subject matter. Remember our headline form the above visitor attention example, make sure you include your keyword or phrase and code it with html H1 tag. That tells the search engines you think that is important.

On the graphics you use, especially the first visible one, use the alt text feature to name it using your keyword or phrase. It doesn’t really matter what the graphic is, although you should stick to ones that are related to subject matter anyway, but use the same keywords from the headline.

Create your title and description mega tag so that you use the same keywords that are in the headline, alt text, and best represent your subject matter. Many say that you should start the description and name with the keyword is the best way. Not sure it has to be the first word but it can’t hurt. Make sure that the description makes since to the possible audience too since that’s what they see when doing a search.

Many web templates come with one set of meta tags that are the same for each page. Something to always remember about any web page in your web templates or finished website, each web page should be unique to itself. Always make sure that the meta tags reflect the individual web page, don’t use one set for all web pages. Search engines rank web pages, not websites.

It’s always a good idea to customize any web templates to your particular subject matter, color preference, and layout. You don’t want to look like a twin to someone else’s website to users or search engines. Whenever you start your design, always remember that you are serving two masters. Both the visitors and the search engine bots need to be facilitated for good results.

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Posted in Website Design, Website Development | No Comments »

The truth about duplicate content and Google

Wednesday, April 8th, 2009

by Brad Callen

So a concern of many webmasters out there is the idea of duplicate content. With all you read out there today I am sure this has crossed your mind from time to time as it has mine.

The idea of Google being the 800-lb gorilla is a long standing one and thinking that maybe some how and some way they have the ability to screen the internet for duplicate content on the fly sounds CRAZY but we always perpetuate the idea as paranoia is much easier to believe than fact in many cases.

I mean think about this for a second just in terms of computing power:

1. Google shows a cached version of your website and not the actual site listing in its results. This means that Google ACTUALLY STORES information about your sites pages and updates them on the fly.

2. Google’s index likely contains BILLIONS of webpages.

So what this means is that for Google to determine if your site is an exact copy of another persons website than it has to store your pages content and screen that content against its ENTIRE active index…sounds nearly impossible as far as I am concerned. To boot you have to consider this is happening simultaneous to the active crawling and indexing and re-indexing of new pages in Google.

I hope this is putting a little bit of perspective to the situation for you. Let’s further the concept. I will take an article from Ezinearticles.com:

http://ezinearticles.com/?Cocoa-Beans-and-the-Fierce-Competition-in-the-Chocolate-Industry&id=1674880

Now let’s make the assumption that there is a duplicate content filter. If that is the case Google will eliminate all duplications of this article from its index and a phrase match for this article title will only return 1 result, the one it considers to be the best right?

http://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1GGLS_enUS291US304&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=”Cocoa+Beans+and+the+Fierce+Competition+in+the+Chocolate+Industry”

Yet somehow there are 162 results for that title. You can do this for every article title you test. Try it for yourself…it works and it is still the basis for article marketing and why article marketing still works.

Now this comes on the heels of an interesting article from Google which should further dispel any remaining myths you may have:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/demystifying-duplicate-content-penalty.html

As SEO experts have been telling us for years there is NO DUPLICATE CONTENT PENALTY!

Ok….that is a little bit of a lie.

There are 2 types of duplicate content: external and internal duplicate content. Let’s take the first of the two.

1. External duplicate content.

External duplicate content is very similar to the example I just posted above where you see multiple copies of the same content on DIFFERENT WEBSITES. That last part is very important there as it seperates what could be considered as a penalty but in reality it is just competition.

So how is it that 162 sites can list the exact same article in Google and they allow it?

The quick answer is that they really don’t care. Yeah it may be mudding up the index but if a site or page is still showing in the index it is because they have enough authority or link clout to be there. Pages will be removed from the index if they get stale or have no links pointing to them for example but not for duplicating content.

The real issue becomes how can you soar to the top with a site that has repurposed content? I am inclined to say its not easy and more importantly its just not a good idea. If you are using content to build your website AND to promote it be sure to do this:

1. Your sites content is unique to your website

2. Your promotional content (PR’s, articles, etc…) belong outside of your website

This makes your life a lot easier. IT IS NOT FOR DUPLICATE CONTENT THOUGH. It’s to avoid competition with those with the same content. If you must republish content from another website make sure you add some commentary or additional content around it. This can include images or other variations of media and your doing this for your visitors sake. You need to stand out, not repeat what others are doing.

Bottom line, with external content the site with the most links and authority in Google will always win. Same as with keyword competition.

2. Internal Duplicate Content.

Ok this is as real as it gets but for the same reason. Its a web filter to keep you from competing for yourself but its a lot simpler to handle than you think.

This is important for the following individuals:

a. If your running a CMS out of the box

b. If you are running an eCommerce platform

c. If you are pulling pages and having them autogenerated

These are just a few examples of people who have had issues with internal duplication.

When Google does index your pages it will look at your title tags and meta descriptions and one of the evaluating factors it uses to determine to actually list your pages are the uniqueness of those tags. If my shopping cart system has 10 products which are all “shoes” and that is what I use as my page title for all of them and the meta description for all of them is “tennis shoes” Google will look at all 10 and simply choose the best 1 to list.

This is a big and easy fix and something I would advise for both usability and for regular old good SEO.

Every page NEEDS a unique title tag

Every page SHOULD HAVE a unique description
(or at the vesy least enough unique content to differentiate it from the others pages on your site)

So rest easy. There is NOT a duplicate content penalty from Google. If you site is not ranking I can assure you its because of the lack of links targeting your core keywords so go out and start link building!

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Posted in Google SEO & PageRank, SEO, Site Promotion, Website Design, Website Development | No Comments »

How Keyword Rich Domain Names Will Increase Google Rankings

Tuesday, March 24th, 2009

Everyone who wants a website to be hosted on the internet will have a purpose. The common aim for every website owner is to get more visitors to the website. When you run a website for your online business, you have to concentrate more on getting many visitors to your website. Search engine traffic is the highly targeted traffic, but to get visitors from search engines, your website must have high Google rankings. Apart from on page SEO, it is possible to increase search engine rankings by taking advantage of domaining. While buying domain name is an important task for a webmaster, many people ignore the importance of domaining. A domain name which contains the keywords of your website is likely to increase search engine ranking.

Search engines will first look out for URLs containing keywords that the user searched. If the search keyword matches the keyword in the domain name of your website, your website will be displayed in the search engine results increasing the possibility of getting more number of visitors. Your website will get higher increased ranking if it contains keywords in its domain name. Using exact keywords in the domain name is a small change in your domaining plan, but it can give you positive results which you thought were tough to achieve.

Domaining has to be considered before hosting a website. If you have already established a website that has a few visitors, you should not change the domain name because users will remember the website only using the domain name. Though domaining is important for search engine rankings, you cannot expect to increase the ranking of your website only with the help of keyword rich domain names. Lot more steps are involved in search engine optimization and the importance of any of those steps cannot be ignored if you want higher search engine rankings.

While choosing domain names, many webmasters are unable to choose between branding and keyword rich domain names. If your website is aimed at selling products in a niche and if you have a small budget for marketing your website, then keyword rich domaining can greatly help you achieve your goal. Brandable domain names are easy to remember for your repeating visitors. You cannot expect your visitors to search for the same keyword every time to reach your website. Also, search engine ranking is not a constant number and the ranking of your website changes continuously.

With more and websites being hosted on the internet, finding the domain name that you like has become near impossible. Many people buy domain names at lower rates and wait for some time to sell it for a higher price. When you search for domain names, come up with as many names as possible that reflect your business. If you cannot buy domain name that contains exact keywords of your website, you can look for names that describe your website niche. For business websites, hyphens in domain names are to be avoided even though search engine optimization is not affected by the hyphens in the domain names.

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Posted in Domain Names, SEO, Website Development | 2 Comments »

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