Organic SEO | Best Place for Organic SEO: May 2009

Sunday, May 31, 2009

Be Wary of How the Engines Use your Title and Meta Description Tags

Check out this stellar example of how the major search engines display results for Netflix’s home page.

netflix-title-serps

We see a high level of variation because while Ask & Google use the title and meta description directly from Netflix, Yahoo! and MSN are pulling data from the Yahoo! directory and DMOZ (respectively). I’d bet $50 that Netflix could get a 20%+ boost in their CTR at MSN simply by using the NOODP tag?

Currently, there’s no way to opt out of the Yahoo! directory listing. We’ve been trying to do it with one client for almost two years, but they won’t throw us out even when we don’t pay our dues! Someone at Yahoo! needs to fix that issue.

As search engines start to use metrics like CTR in the SERPs, you might lose more than just eyeballs - you’ll slide in rankings to boot. Here’s the strategy I’d recommend - look at your top 20-100 search referral phrases for the year, then search for each of them at the major engines. Note not just where you rank, but how well your “ad” (after all, what is a meta description tag if not ad copy) is written. Just as you constantly tweak and refine copy in your PPC listings, so too should you apply that same logic to the natural SERPs. You’ll probably find a far greater rate of return.

About The Author

Wahid Qazi is a Research Analyst, eBusiness and eMarketing Consultant, SEO Consultant, SEO Trainer, SEO Speaker and Author, specializes in eBusiness, eMarketing, SEO, branding and promotion and has trained dozens of qualified SEOs. He is a Professional SEO Consultant can be reached at http://www.wahidqazi.com/

Title Tag Showdown

In Rebecca’s Fresh Egg Internship experience, she mentioned a disagreement that Ammon Johns (Internet Marketing legend and someone I consider a mentor) and I have on the issue of brand names in title tags. The dispute centers around how a company’s brand name should be used in their title tags:

Ammon’s Strategy - Put the brand name first in the title tag of the home page, but at the end of the title tag on any interior pages. Thus, Amazon.com’s title tags might read: “Sony 46″ Bravia Televisions - Amazon.com”

Rand’s Strategy - If it’s a short brand name (not “Washington Mutual Bank” for example), always have the brand name preceed the content. So, in my view, Amazon’s title tag would read - “Amazon.com - Sony 46″ Bravia Televisions”

It seems like a small area to have a debate about, but both sides bring up good points.

Ammon’s Strengths:

You can fit more keywords into the visible portion of the title tag
Users only read the first few words of a title tag and are searching for information about a subject/product/etc, not a brand
Bookmark usability is far higher with descriptive title tags rather than brand-first tags

Rand’s Strengths:

The brand at the beginning serves to help remind the user of where they’re going and who’s providing the service - yeah, it’s beating them on the head a bit to have it on every page, but branding is an exposure-based system. Note the studies that say most TV ads have no recall until they’ve been viewed 7 or more times…
Having the brand first in the SERPs can make a user who knows/loves your brand choose you over results that may rank above you - think of the times you search for a product and see a C|Net review or an Epicurious recipe. Assuming those are brands you like, you’re far more inclined to click them than a dodgy brand/URL you’ve never seen before. Brands carry inherent trust.
Even if users don’t click you in the SERPs, seeing your brand front and center dozens of times over many searches will show them that you’re a strong brand, and brand recognition will follow. Sites like Expedia, Craigslist, Epinions and even, I’d argue, SEOmoz, have built brand recognition in this way.

For my caveat, I’d probably not put the brand name first in several of the clients Ammon was working on. I’d conceed the point that it’s not as valuable in many areas - just look at the title tags for our client, Avatar.

What’s your verdict? Is there a hard and fast rule? Should I be won over by Ammon’s years of experience and multiple strong points?

p.s. Somehow, I forgot to mention that Ammon is talking about this very same topic on the Fresh Egg Blog… Thanks to Kevgibbo for the reminder.

Best Practices for Title Tags

It’s been a while since I provided some straightforward, back to basics style advice and there can be little doubt that the title tag is worthy of attention for beginners and experts alike. And so I present…

How to Make the Best Title Tag Possible:

Brand your traffic

Use the title of your site or brand at the beginning or end of every title tag to help searchers know where they’re going and to increase return visits. If you’re struggling to find justification for this component, think of all the ad studies showing that consumers are willing to pay more for a “brand name” product than an off-brand or store brand item of the same type - apply this logic to the SERPs and you’ll find that users will go further down the rankings to click on a “trusted” brand.

Limit length to 65 characters (including spaces) or less

There’s no reason to cut off the last word and have it replaced with a “…” Note that the engines have fluctuated recently and Google, in particular, is now supporting up to 70 characters in some cases.

Incorporate keyword phrases

This one may seem obvious, but it’s critical that whatever your keyword research shows as being the most valuable for capturing searches gets prominently included in your title tag. It doesn’t have to be the first words, but it should be the semantic and logical center of attention.

Target longer phrases if they’re relevant

When choosing what keywords to include in a title tag, I often like to use as many as are completely relevant to the page at hand, while remaining accurate and descriptive. Thus, it can be much more valuable to have a title tag like “SkiDudes | Downhill Skiing Equipment & Accessories” rather than simply “SkiDudes | Skiing Equipment” - including those additional terms that are both relevant to the page and receive significant search traffic can bolster your page’s value. However, if you have a separate landing page for “Skiing accessories” than for “equipment,” then you shouldn’t include one term in the other’s title - you’ll be cannibalizing your rankings by forcing the engines to choose which page on your site is more relevant.

Use a divider

When splitting up the brand from the descriptive, I like to use the “|” symbol (aka the pipe bar). Others choose the arrow “>” or hyphen “-” and both work well. At times, however, I’ve found it useful to use the arrow or hyphen inside a title tag, as with a title like “SEO | SEM | Articles and Keyword Research - A Beginner’s Guide” hence my love of the pipe bar.

Focus on clickthrough & conversion rates

The title tag is exceptionally similar to the title you might write for paid search ads, only it’s harder to measure and improve because the stats aren’t provided for you as easily. However, if you’ve got a market that is relatively stable in search volume week-to-week, you can do some testing with your title tags and improve the clickthrough. Watch your analytics and, if it makes sense, buy search ads on the page as well - even if it’s just for a week or two, it can make a huge difference in the long run. A word of warning, though - be wary that you don’t focus entirely on CTR. Remember to continue measuring conversion rates. As MindValley Labs showed us, a lower CTR can sometimes be the better choice due to a higher conversion rate.

Target searcher intent

When you’re writing titles for web pages, keep in mind the search terms your audience employed to reach your site. If the intent is browsing or research-based, a more descriptive title tag is appropriate. If you’re reasonably sure the intent is a purchase, download or other action, make it clear in your title that this function can be performed at your site, i.e. “SkiDudes | View Snowboard Sizing Chart” or “SkiDudes | Buy Discount Snoqualmie Pass Lift Tickets”

Be consistent

Once you’ve determined a good formula for your pages in a given section or area of your site, stick to that regimen - you’ll find that as you become a trusted and successful “brand” in the SERPs, users will seek out your pages on a subject area and have expectations that you’ll want to fulfill.

Repeat in the headline

Re-using the title tag of each page as the H1 header tag can be valuable from both a keyword targeting standpoint and a user experience improvement. Users who go to a page from the SERPs will have the expectation of finding the title they clicked - deliver and you’ve fulfilled that obligation. Users will be more likely to stay on a page they’re reasonably certain fits their intended goal or query.

Any other suggestions that you’d like to include? Disagreements? Valuable links I should point to?

The Secret to Ranking at the Search Engines (that’s really no secret at all)

How I despise those awful, cheesy pages promoting the “secrets” of search engine optimization. How I loathe the slick salesman pictured in fuzzy, 1980’s-style photography promising you “the hidden tactics SEOs don’t wan’t you to know.” When most search folks think of the “ultimate secret” in SEO,” they probably think about one of these:

Keywords in the Title Tag
Spiderable Links & Content
Anchor Text in Links
Links from Quality Websites

Those are all good pieces of advice, and important to high rankings, but even the last one (links from quality websites) doesn’t convey the most important part of successful ranking campaigns. If there is one key to high search engine rankings, a single piece of advice that unlocks the door to the top of Google & Yahoo! it’s this: Your website must appeal to a link-savvy audience.

Simple? Sadly, no. The truth is that the very best website in the world that sells your product, offers your content or promotes your cause may not be good enough to make it to the top of the engines. Why? Because the world of search has an inherent bias to those sites with more links. It’s not enough to build links now through manual link requests or link buying, nor is it enough to bolster these link acquisitions with a flawlessly “optimized” website filled with keyword-targeted pages. These strategies, while effective in the short term, won’t guarantee you success in the long run. To have a shot at keeping the top positions for years to come, you need a strategy that naturally drives links to your site again and again. The “secret” is that the audience most sites appeal to is NOT the same audience that provides links, yet this group (the Linkerati) has the power to make or break a site’s rankings.

Let’s walk through a brief history of search engines to see how this happened:

Hotbot Monster

No, Hotbot Monster, back in the early days, you really weren’t. Measuring repetition of keywords and keyword placement and density led to some pretty bad results and a lot of cloaking and spamming.

Googlebot Links Rankings

With the arrival of Google’s PageRank and Apostolos Gerasoulis’ Teoma (now called ExpertRank), the search engines got smarter, mapping the link patterns of the web and giving higher ranks to those sites & pages with more inbound links.

Googlebot Natural Links

Over the last 8 years, the engines have been refining the way they measure links, taking into account context, relevance, trust and other metrics to help indicate which links are worth counting towards a particular ranking.

All of this algorithmic evolution means that sites wishing to rank at the top of the engines must have high quality, naturally given, topically relevant links. Since search rankings are so valuable, massive amounts of time and money pour into campaigns for the most competitive queries, making the struggle for placement increasingly difficult. This brings us to the fundamental issue that site creators struggle against - segmenting visitors accurately and appealing to the “Linkerati.”

Three Groups

Above are three groups of visitors, applicable to nearly every commercial or goal-oriented website in existence. While most sites do a reasonable job identifying and targeting the 2nd group (in blue) from the first (in green), this isn’t the case with the 3rd group (in red). Those red Llinkerati are essential to your site’s rankings - they are the great “secret” of long-term SEO success. In order to leverage their power, you must create compelling content that appeals to their desires. This really is no “secret” at all. In every interview and on every stage, you’ll hear representatives from Google, Yahoo!, MSN & Ask repeat this same mantra (albeit without the benefit of colorful diagrams). As an example:

“…the sort of people who have been doing “new” SEO, or whatever you want to call it, that’s social media optimization, link bait, things that are interesting to people and attract word of mouth and buzz, those sorts of sites naturally attract visitors, attract repeat visitors, attract back links, attract lots of discussion, those sorts of sites are going to benefit as the world goes forward.” - Matt Cutts in an interview with Gord Hotchkiss

Why are these Linkerati so powerful? What makes their opinions and influence so important to average website owners? Easy - the power to control the web’s link structure.

Links Per Month

The web’s content may still be overwhelmingly commercial and organizational in scope, controlled by exceutives at companies, museum curators, government taxonomists, etc. But, the link landscape of the web, particularly those links that point externally from sites, are dominated by the Linkerati. If your competitors or even organizations like Wikipedia, About.com, niche bloggers or industry news publications become more popular with the Linkerati than you, how can you ever expect to compete for search engine rankings?

This is the great “secret” of SEO - that (at least) some content on your website must be targeted to the Linkerati - fulfilling their unquenchable thirst for new material to link to and share and spread virally. Although they may be a vastly different population than your customers, you need their respect and approval in order to continue to draw in targeted leads from the engines.

Effective and optimized META Keywords Tags

Meta keywords tags are not very effective for major search engines, it is always suggested to have them instead of avoiding, a website should be optimized for all search engines not just for the BIG Three. This particular tag doesn’t require thinking process, one needs to put pre-selected keywords in it, keeping few given guidelines in mind.

What Is The Meta Keywords Tag?

It’s an HTML tag use to feed keywords to search engines, it helps search engines to identity the webpage relevance with respect to supplied keywords, it is declared after description tag of the webpage under head tag.

Is The Keywords Tag Still Important?

Not exactly, keywords tag has lost its value, search engines get smarter these days, they have set their own criteria to identify web pages with their relevancies, they take each word as “keyword OR phrase” present at webpage and they keep those words in priorities with their densities. There is no harm in utilizing this tag for better results.

How to Hide Keywords from Your Competitors?

If you use this tag, then obviously your competitors are going to know where you are focusing and what are your primary keywords? You should use KEYWORDS in BITS, distribute PHRASES into SINGLE KEYWORD, remove DUPLICATE keywords, keep all keywords UNIQUE.

Old Technique: “seo services, seo trainer, seo training, seo consultant, seo outsourcing, outsourcing services, seo consultancy”
BITS Technique: “seo, trainer, services, training, consultant, outsourcing, consultancy”

Tips To Write Effective Page Description Tag:

Optimize for relevant keywords
Use group of relevant keywords on a particular webpage
Put only those keywords which are focused on webpage
Don’t put all keywords in this tag
Don’t repeat keywords in this tag
Don’t use misspell keywords
Use keywords with small case letter
Use BITS technique to write keywords
Each individual page should be optimize for less than 10 keywords

How to Write Effective META Description Tag for Better Positioning in Yahoo and Msn

Description tag is another useful meta tag which takes prominent place at your web site’s header. There are SEOs who think that there is no worth using this meta tag, but majority of them still agree that this meta tag helps in optimizing websites for Yahoo and Msn, in this article you’ll learn how to effectively utilize it.

What Is The Meta Description Tag?

It’s an HTML tag use to feed description to search engines, it gives description of webpage to search engines, it is declared after title tag of the webpage under head tag.

Why Is The Description Tag Important?

Description tag is the very important tag, search engines take webpage description through this tag, though search engines don’t give any importance to this tag in their ranking algorithms but this tag can lead searchers to motivate and visit your website.

Tips To Write Effective Page Description Tag:

Describe your complete webpage in one single line or in a small paragraph
Forget about keywords, focus on “call to action” words with respect to page relevancy
Avoid covering complete website in one paragraph, try to focus on page
Use unique description tag for each page, since each page has unique content
Keep your description tag’s limit under 160 to 250 characters, longer sentences won’t give any value but they can be hurdle in deep crawl of your web page
Avoid using special characters such as ! @ # $ ^ & * ( }[ | ? /
Avoid all capital letter, try to use sentence case
Use motivational lines so that your listing will be clicked comparatively better than your competitors
Don’t misguide search engine visitors, write what is available there at the page

How to Write Effective Title Tags for Better Positioning

Title tag is the most important part of your web page, which is normally neglected by most webmasters and designers, in fact there are few SEOs who think optimizing “Title Tag” is worthless. Title tag plays very important role in page optimization and in this article you’ll learn how to optimize it.

What Is The Title Tag?

It’s an HTML tag use as a title or heading of the web page, it shows input text on the blue bar at the web page, it is declared at the beginning of the webpage under head tag. Your Home Page Title

Why Is The Title Tag Important?

Title tag is the most important tag, almost all search engines evaluate webpage with title tag and check the relevancy with other elements of the page as well, and search engines also present results of a search by displaying webpage titles as links in the first line of each query result.

Tips To Write Effective Page Title:

Try to place your most important keyword phrase at the beginning of the tag
Use your primary keyword phrase in the title tag at least once
Avoid using the same words multiple times
Use plural form of keyword phrase, specially which includes complete singular word in it (Example: manufacturers)
Use sentence case for keyword phrase but keep preposition in lower case
Keep your title tag’s limit under 70 to 90 characters, longer sentences won’t give any value but they can be hurdle in deep crawl of your web page
Avoid using special characters such as ! @ # $ ^ & * ( }[ | ? /
Avoid using stopping words such as or, and , with, for, by, etc
Use unique title tag for each page, since each page has unique content
Make your title interesting and “compelling” to the reader to convince them why they should click there

How to Optimize Dynamic Websites for Better Search Engine Rankings

There is a misconception related to dynamic websites that dynamic websites are not search engine friendly or they can’t have good positions in major search engines. This is absolutely wrong, dynamic websites can have better and more controlled positions in search engines comparatively than static websites.

What is a dynamic website?

A dynamic website is database driven website in which parts of the content are generated by Server Side Programs/ Middle Tier.
Dynamic webpage doesn’t physically exist as a file/document on (hosting) server, unless the request comes for a webpage. The request contains parameters, user identities, date & time, context etc.

Problems with Dynamic Websites according to Search Engines

This is true that search engines are not good at reading dynamic web pages, but there is always a solution for any problem, first you need to understand that why search engines are unable to read dynamically generated websites? What hurts them not to read dynamic web pages?

Dynamic webpage doesn’t physically exit on server
Dynamic website has complex URLs such as “ http://www.wahidqazi.com?name=value&blabla%blabla@session_id@2226897&blabla=77
Search engine bots/crawlers usually have difficulty in reading these characters “?”, “=”, “@”, “%”, “$”, “*”, “&”, “!” in URLs
Search engine usually considers dynamic website as group of never ending links
Search engine bots/crawlers might get stuck in an infinite loop, specially if the dynamic webpage has session id

Tips to Optimize Dynamic Websites

Now you know what hurts search engine bots/crawlers to index your website? What you need to know is that how you can keep your valuable website indexed by search engines, the more your web pages are indexed the better your website will impress search engines

Create an HTML sitemap with 100 text links or less. If you have more than 100 links, break the sitemap into more than one web pages
Google Sitemap will also be an advantage, specially if your website is big and dynamic
Get inbound links deep into your website from other relevant websites such as directories, classified directories, vertical industrial portals
Convert dynamic web pages into static web pages with the help of URL re-writing techniques
You can use some plug-in applications that will change your existing dynamic URLs into static ones, specially for shopping carts there are plenty of applications available
Avoid using session IDs in the URL, specially when user has not logged in
If you do need to include parameters, limit it to two and limit the number of characters per parameter to ten or less
If you do have small dynamic website and enough time you can apply this technique. Just right click on page by page of you website, copy the source code and create new static page with .htm or .html extensions

URL Rewriting Techniques and Tools

A rewrite engine is a piece of web server software application that is used to modify URLs before fetching the requested items for a variety of purposes.

Rewrite Engine for Apache HTTP server:

Apache HTTP server has a rewrite engine called mod_rewrite, which has been described as “the Swiss Army knife of URL manipulation”

Rewrite engines for Microsoft’s Internet Information Server (IIS):

IISRewrite from Qwerksoft
ISAPI_Rewrite from isapirewrite.com
URL Replacer from Motobit
Ionic’s ISAPI Rewrite Filter (IIRF) (open source) from Ionic Shade

Rewrite HttpModule for Microsoft ASP.NET:

URLRewriting.NET

Rewrite engine for Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) Servlet container servers:

Apache Tomcat, Resin, Orion etc)
HttpRedirectFilter (open source)
UrlRewriteFilter (open source) - allows you to rewrite URLs before they get to your Servlets, JSP’s, Struts etc
URL Rewriter (open source - LGPL) - URL Rewriter is a tool for rewriting URLs in Java Servlets. It is similar to mod_rewrite

Conclusion:

Dynamic websites are not impossible to optimize, it’s just a small fine tune that you need to keep in mind when developing a dynamic website, if you can understand the problems search engine bots/ crawlers have to face when crawling your website, you can better prepare your website, so that search engine bots/crawlers can easily index your valuable website.

Three Basic Elements of Search Engine Optimization SEO! Code, Content and Linking (CCL)!

Search engine optimization effort can be categorized into three basic elements “Code, Content and Linking (CCL)” these three diverse elements play very important role in search engine rankings, you will come to know about their effectiveness and usability with some of the very useful tips in this article.

Code	Content	Linking
Writing Code	Content Writing	Internal linking
Validating Code	Formatting	Incoming or Inbound linking
Cleaning & Optimization Code	Content Placement	Anchor linking
Cross Brower Independence	Content Distribution	Navigation
Robots.txt and sitemap	Content Updating	Site Structuring

Code

Code of the website is the very first element that is unfortunately ignored by most SEOs, website code allows search engines bots to go through the webpage, and if bots will not be able to understand code they will not be able to access content of the webpage because content is kept within code, this is enough to tell you about the importance of website code.

Code of the website has to be clean and optimized, here i means that code like JavaScripts or CSS should be called externally, try to keep your code as short as possible and ignore too much nesting.

You must validated complete website code either everything is working fine or not, check for browser compatibility, orphan pages and broken links, don’t forget to have robots.txt and sitemap.

Content

Content is still king, no one can deny the fact that since the revolution of search engine in mid 90s, content is undefeated king. Content needs special treatment, today search engines automatically take keywords within content, they become more conscious about content, they follow basic fundamentals of writing techniques, such as headings, sub-headings, bullets & numbered, inverted commas.

Now it’s up to you either you are successfully able to give an impression of your important keywords to search engines, try to use your important keywords in headings, sub-headings and try to start paragraphs with important keywords.

Note: - Here content means selectable content, content on images can’t be selected and read by search engine bots.

Linking

Linking is one of the most important criteria to get better rankings in search engines specially in google. Linking is divided into two categories onsite linking and offsite linking. Onsite linking belongs to links that are mentioned at your web-domain either they are internal or external it doesn’t matter, they have to be declare at your website (domain). Offsite linking belongs to links that point your web-domain from a different web-domain, they are inbound or incoming links to your website (domain).

In internal linking you should try to keep web pages as close as possible to root, if you have a big site of over 100 pages or 500 pages then you have to make relevant directories and keep relevant pages in them.

In link-building you have to keep few things in mind that link has to be one way, and link title and description should be very focus, try to have incoming links from relevant sites, since one relevant link is equal to 100 irrelevant links, when submitting to directories, go as deep as possible and try to find most relevant category where you can submit your site.

How Well Your Website Can Communicate with Search Engines?

Search engines don’t talk with websites directly, they use bots to communicate with websites, their bots come to websites and start reading the websites, whatever they read at websites they go back to search engines carrying the messages and store those messages in search engine’s database.

Search Engines are NOT Human Beings!

Search engines view websites with different prospects. They don’t have eyes to analyze beautiful colors and animations, don’t have ears to listen music and don’t have feelings to fall in love with your catchy slogans. Apart of all these disabilities they can evaluate your website better than a human being.

When you develop or going to get your website developed, what things you should keep in mind? Being website Owner you might think of website design and content, being Webmaster you might think of easy navigation and flexibility of website. You might be missing one very important aspects of search engine positioning, and that is how search engine is viewing your website?

What Things Search Engines Like at Your Website?

Good communication can increase the performance, it applies the same to search engines, if your website can communicate well enough to create good impression to search engines, your website will be facilitating with high rankings then, here is a list of elements search engines like.

Validated and Optimize Code
Rich Content
Unique URL of Each Webpage
Plain URLs
Proper Internal Linking
Healthy Incoming Links
Text Based Navigation
Neat Table Structure
Good Directory and File Structure
Proper Headings, Subheadings, Captions
Title, Meta Tags and Alt Tags
Robots.txt

What Things Search Engines Dislike at Your Website?

Take care of the elements which can hurt your view to search engines, thought each search engine has its own criteria of viewing websites but all major search engines dislike these mentioned elements.

Broken Links
Invalid Code
JavaScript
Orphan Links, Images and Files
Under-construction Page/es
Pop ups
Redirectors
IP Tracking
Dynamically Generated Pages
Frames
Same Background and Font Colors
Multi Nested Table Structure

Search engine bots crawl website with different time frame period, it depends upon how frequently your website updates? Each search engine has its own time frequency to crawl websites, now you know what things do matter to search engines, take care of them so that your website can delivery its message well enough to get top rankings.

Best of luck

Organic Vs PPC! Who wins?

Interesting comparisons between Organic and PPC listings, everybody wants to know which is of more worth and value, I would say that both have different preposition and benefits. Here is list of elements between both organic and PPC with their pros and corns.

Organic Listings

Long Lasting Effect
Slow Results
Low Cost
Less Control Over Ranking
More Clicks Than PPC
No Management
No Monitoring
Assumption
Gigantic Exposure
More Text Space
Uncontrolled Title And Description

PPC Listings

Effect Depends On Budget
Quick Results
Expensive
Complete Control Over Ranking
Less Clicks Than Organic
Complete Management
Complete Campaign Monitoring
Authentic
Limited Exposure
Less Text Limitation
Controlled Title And Description

I’m sure, this comparison will help you take better decision and best use of your hard earned money, both these marketing are very effective in different scenarios, if you have big budget you must go for PPC first and also keep organic as secondary marketing for long term. If you have small budget then organic would be an excellent choice with some paid listings in directories and industry related portals.

How Important is Validated, Compressed and Optimized Website Code for Google, Yahoo and Msn?

Code of the website is the very first element that is unfortunately ignored by most SEOs, website code allows search engine bots to go through the web pages, and if bots are unable to understand code they won’t be able to access content of the web pages because content is kept within the code, this is enough to tell you about the importance of website code.

Three major elements of Website Code Optimization:

Code Validation
Code Compression
Code Optimization

Code Validation

Today web designers and developers, who use WYSIWYG tools to design and development websites. These tools are really a great help especially when it come to time saving, these tools provide huge relaxation to designers and developers. All these tools can be very effectively used by trained and experienced designers and developers, but the real problem is that new designers and developers get trained using these tools that’s why they have very poor concept of coding. All WYSIWYG tools are very easy to use and if they are used improperly they can generate GARBAGE, which makes webpage HEAVIER and MEANINGLESS to search engine bots.

Search engines can’t see your webpage, they send their BOTS to crawl all web pages, and these bots work on ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. They ONLY UNDERSTAND CODE, if your web page code is not validated they will stop reading from there and will evaluate your web page on the basis of received information. If you want search engines to read everything you have at your web page, validate your code before putting it online.

Code Compression

There is another very important issue, which can make your webpage more complex and less valuable when it comes to search engine’s point of view. Webpage visitors see only upfront of the webpage, they don’t care either webpage code is compressed or not. But you have to take care of code compression, so that your valuable content can be read by search engine bots and will be able to get good ranking in search engines.

Search engine bots always try to extract content from web pages, they don’t like to read code, though they can understand the code. On-page CSS and JavaScript declaration push your valuable content down, since top 2000 initial characters including code are very crucial to create good meaningful impression to search engines. That’s why you should try to call external JavaScript and CSS and also should try to make short naming for CSS classes, this way your code will be compressed and there won’t be any visual difference to your website visitors.

Code Optimization

Code Validation and Compression comes in Code Optimization, but there is more to do with the Code. Code Optimization is basically using search engine friendly CODE (Tags & Attributes) with their PRIORITIES and LIKINGS to search engines. Search engines like “TITLTE, HEADINGS, BOLD, ITALIC, UNDERLINE, ANCHOR LINK, TEXTUAL HYPERLINK, IMAGE HYPERLINK, PARAGRAPH, NUMBERING and BULLETS TAGS”, they also like “ALT and LINK TITLE ATTRIBUTES”. All these mentioned Tags and Attributes will give your content value to search engines. You should try to utilize all mentioned search engine friendly CODE (Tags & Attributes) as much as possible to take good rankings.

You should take care of your website code periodically (weekly or at least monthly), check your website code for BROKEN LINKS, MISSING and ORPHAN PAGES. Try to update “robots.txt and sitemap” whenever there is a change at the website. Check your website for CROSS BROWSER COMPATIBILITY, especially for Internet Explorer and Firefox.

Effective and optimized META Keywords Tags

What Is The Meta Keywords Tag?

Is The Keywords Tag Still Important?

How to Hide Keywords from Your Competitors?

Tips To Write Effective Page Description Tag:

Optimize for relevant keywords
Use group of relevant keywords on a particular webpage
Put only those keywords which are focused on webpage
Don’t put all keywords in this tag
Don’t repeat keywords in this tag
Don’t use misspell keywords
Use keywords with small case letter
Use BITS technique to write keywords
Each individual page should be optimize for less than 10 keywords

How to Write Effective META Description Tag for Better Positioning in Yahoo and Msn

What Is The Meta Description Tag?

It’s an HTML tag use to feed description to search engines, it gives description of webpage to search engines, it is declared after title tag of the webpage under head tag.

Why Is The Description Tag Important?

Tips To Write Effective Page Description Tag:

Describe your complete webpage in one single line or in a small paragraph
Forget about keywords, focus on “call to action” words with respect to page relevancy
Avoid covering complete website in one paragraph, try to focus on page
Use unique description tag for each page, since each page has unique content
Keep your description tag’s limit under 160 to 250 characters, longer sentences won’t give any value but they can be hurdle in deep crawl of your web page
Avoid using special characters such as ! @ # $ ^ & * ( }[ | ? /
Avoid all capital letter, try to use sentence case
Use motivational lines so that your listing will be clicked comparatively better than your competitors
Don’t misguide search engine visitors, write what is available there at the page

Sunday, May 10, 2009

10 Tips to have Successful Blogging

Creating a blog is easy but managing a successful blog is something every Blogger wants, a Blogger’s success depends on the amount of audience that Blogger is known to and repeated traffic is the most valuable asset for a Blogger. In this article you’ll get to know ten (10) tips to effectively and successfully manage your blogs and brining your audience back to you.

What is Blog?

Blog is a short word representing “Weblog” and weblog is an online eDiary that is used to display chronological order of postings by one or multiple individuals. It’s an online journal that is regularly updated and accessible publicly to everyone, people can post their comments openly on blogs. It’s basically an interactive media to share thoughts, where author and readers can interact each other on single platform.

Blogger is a person who writes Weblogs, it has become a successful and dynamic profession internally, there are industries OR topic specific bloggers who are equally popular as start.

Tips for Effective and Successful Blogging

There are some very effective blogging tips through which you will be able to entertain your audience and they will keep coming back to your blog, it’s the LOYAL AUDIENCE who is the difference b/w a normal blog and a successful blog.

Purpose of the Blog
Who Your Target Audience Is
Think Big
Keep It Simple Principle
Short And Brief
Informal And Friendly Attitude
Truth And Honesty
Frequency Of Post
Quick Reply To Comments
Don’t Treat Blog Like An Advertisement Or Marketing Campaign

1. Purpose of the Blog

You should be clearly know the purpose of the blog, either you want to make it professional, topic or industry specific, want to project it as story or want to use it for PR of certain company or product. The best think is to write something you are crazy about.

2. Who Your Target Audience Is

Once you know your targeted audience, their interests and their likeness, you can easily facilitate your audience and can reach to comfort zone or your audience.

3. Think Big

You can create a blog easily, it’s free and quick but it requires your valuable time and continuous input. You just can’t have blog for anything. You have to have something new to your readers, so that they keep coming back to your blog and frequency of their visits depends on your input.

4. Keep It Simple Principle

There is no alternate to simplicity, keep your content simple and easy to understand, so that it will have wide range of audience. Find out simple alternate to difficult words, if somehow you have to use technical word, you should explain it.

5. Short And Brief

You should always write short and brief, people normally don’t like to read too much content. You should be very specific and to the point while posting your blog, if you try to irritate your audience they will never come back to your blog.

6. Informal And Friendly Attitude

Your blog should have informal and friendly attitude of writing, so that you can get quick interaction with your audience who will read your blog, you have to have immediate friendship with your audience through your expression of words and tone.

7. Truth And Honesty

You should always blog with honesty and truth, people like to read your original thoughts rather a point of view of someone else, this way you get closer to your audience and your audience tries to communicate with you.

8. Frequency Of Post

You have to have something new to your blog that will get your audience stick to it, if you are able to post thrice or twice a week that will be good frequency to get your audience back to your blog.

9. Quick Reply To Comments

Your audiences want quick reply to their comments, you should ideally reply back same day. You can set email alert on your blog, so that whenever someone post comments, you get an alert in your email and this way you can keep your blog up to day.

10. Don’t Treat Blog Like An Advertisement Or Marketing Campaign

Your blog is not one way communication, it’s a two way communication where your readers will have equal rights to share their comments openly, if you treat your blog like an advertisement, there are chances that you will have negative feedback or your blog will have less attraction to your readers. Today’s readers are smart enough to understand the purpose of the blog, if you want to use your blog for PR, then you have to keep the balance and be true to your audience.

I hope that above mentioned points will help you manage your blog more effectively, and if you still don’t have a blog, I would highly recommend you to create it today and feel free to ask if you have any question or query.

Sunday, May 31, 2009

Be Wary of How the Engines Use your Title and Meta Description Tags

Title Tag Showdown

Best Practices for Title Tags

The Secret to Ranking at the Search Engines (that’s really no secret at all)

Effective and optimized META Keywords Tags

How to Write Effective META Description Tag for Better Positioning in Yahoo and Msn

How to Write Effective Title Tags for Better Positioning

How to Optimize Dynamic Websites for Better Search Engine Rankings

Three Basic Elements of Search Engine Optimization SEO! Code, Content and Linking (CCL)!

How Well Your Website Can Communicate with Search Engines?

Organic Vs PPC! Who wins?

How Important is Validated, Compressed and Optimized Website Code for Google, Yahoo and Msn?

Effective and optimized META Keywords Tags

How to Write Effective META Description Tag for Better Positioning in Yahoo and Msn

Sunday, May 10, 2009

10 Tips to have Successful Blogging

Organic SEO | Best Place for Organic SEO

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