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Friday, August 29, 2008

SEO Simplified

by Candace S. McMorrow

I'm sure you've heard the term, SEO. But what is it? SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization.

In order for your website to be listed in search engines like Google and Yahoo, the site needs to be built so that it is search engine-friendly.

However, just being listed is not enough. You wouldn't want to be number 401,000 when searched. No one would ever find you. Obviously, placement is extremely important. That's where SEO comes in. By following some basic rules, you can improve your website's position with the search engines.

KEYWORD SELECTION AND ANALYSIS
1. First, determine the keywords you want to optimize your website for. Start with your home page.
  - Keyword Selection. Find keywords that are searched most often. Here are 2 very useful tools:
    - Google AdWords
    - NicheBot Classic
    Sometimes it's a good idea to target terms lower down the list, rather than the ones on top, because the lower terms include the higher terms. For example, the keyword phrase 'women's vintage clothing' includes the keywords 'women's clothing'.
    
    In addition, you may need to be more specific in your keyword selection. For example, the keywords 'real estate' are extremely broad. You may want to target 'Lancaster real estate' — it's more specific to your market and, realistically, easier to optimize for because there is less competition.
2. Next, analyze your keywords.
  - Keyword Analysis. How keywords are highlighted and used are very important.
    1. How to highlight keywords:
      - Place keywords near the top of the page.
      - Place keywords within heading tags <H>keyword</H>.
      - Make keywords bold and italic.
      - Capitalize the first letter of a keyword.
      - Put keywords into bulleted lists.
      - Use a larger font size on keywords compared to other text on your page.
      Check how well you highlighted your keywords.
    2. How to effectively use keywords:
      - Make sure links to your pages and between your pages contain keywords.
      - Use Alt tags within your image tags. Example: <img src="web-hosting-plans.gif" alt="Web Hosting Plans">
      - When naming your pages, directories, and images, include your keywords.
WEBSITE FLOW

The search engines need to be able to follow links throughout your website and determine the prominent information.
1. The term prominence refers to where the keyword appears (the body text, the TITLE tag, and so on). A word near the top of the page is more prominent than one near the bottom; a word at the beginning of a TITLE tag is more prominent than one at the end; a word at the beginning of the DESCRIPTION meta tag is more prominent than one at the end; and so on.
2. NO flash or frames pages! Search engines cannot index these types of pages. This means NO domain forwarding with URL masking/cloaking. Domain Forwarding is fine if you do not intend on submitting the website to the search engines.
3. Create a custom 404 error page. (Most Web hosts include this feature.) If a server is unable to find a page on your website, a 404 error displays. If you have a custom 404 error page, that will display instead. Links from other websites into yours get broken, bookmarks broken, having a custom error page will help the visitor and search engines find their way around.
4. Create a sitemap for your website. A sitemap is like the Index in a reference book. Sitemaps contain links to the different areas of your website. An example can be seen at http://www.i-dentity.com/sitemap.html.
5. Do NOT have dangling pages — pages where visitors and search engines cannot find a link back to your main website. Suppose someone linked to one of your pages. If a visitor clicks on that link and there's no link to any of your other Web pages, then the visit (or in the case of a search engine, indexing) stops here.
6. Include navigation text links on all pages — links at the bottom of your pages so that visitors and search engines can easily find their way around.
PAGE CONTENT
1. The most important factor in search engine optimization is content — for search engines this means words and lots of them (at least 100). The search engines look at the text on your pages for indexing.
2. Use keywords multiple times on a page — not too much though. 8 to 10 percent of all the words on the page may be too much and the search engines could penalize you.
3. Webmaster Toolkit has a tool to check your keyword density.
META TAGS
1. It is critical that your site be designed with TITLE and META tags.
  - The TITLE tag should contain 40 to 60 characters.
  - META tags consist of a DESCRIPTION (up to 250 characters) and KEYWORDS (limit to 12 words separated by commas or spaces) tag.
    
    Webmaster Toolkit has an excellent tool for creating your KEYWORDS meta tag.
  Here are examples of TITLE, DESCRIPTION, and KEYWORDS tags:
  
  <TITLE>Poodle Grooming</TITLE>
  <meta name="description" content="We specialize in grooming pink poodles.">
  <meta name="keywords" content="pet grooming, Palo Alto, dog">
  
  When you do a search, both the page's TITLE and DESCRIPTION are what's displayed in the search engine's results.
2. Don't use the same TITLE and META tags in all your pages. The tags should be relevant to each page.
3. After creating your tags, analyze them. There's a tool from SUBMIT Express that will do that for you.
SEARCH ENGINE WEBMASTER TOOLS

Webmaster Tools provides you with detailed reports about your pages' visibility with the search engine.
1. Create a Google Webmaster Tools account.
2. Create a Live.com (MSN) Webmaster Tools account.
SITEMAPS AND SEARCH ENGINE SUBMISSION

Create search engine sitemaps. Upload the files (sitemap.xml and urllist.txt) to your root Web folder.
1. Google
  
  Submit your sitemap (sitemap.xml) and verify your website with Google.
  
  Submit your website URL to Google.
2. Yahoo
  
  Submit your sitemap (urllist.txt) and website URLs to Yahoo.
3. Live.com
  
  Submit your sitemap (sitemap.xml) and website URLs to Live.com.
You can quickly submit your website to 200+ search engines for only $49.95.
DIRECTORY SUBMISSION
1. Submit your website URL to The Open Directory Project.
2. To search for other directories to add your website to, Google 'keyword phrase add url'. For example, if your keyword phrase is women's vintage clothing, you would type 'women's vintage clothing add url' in Google's Search box.
RECIPROCAL LINKS

Links to your website provide traffic and can greatly improve search engine rankings.
1. It's a fact, reciprocal links can make any site more important in the eyes of the search engines, and are often valued more highly than one-way links.
  - The websites you exchange links with must relate in either content or theme. There is no value added by linking to/from just any random website.
2. When creating your links, make sure the links to your website include your keywords. Start the link with your primary keyword or keyword phrase.
3. Who to contact for reciprocal links:
  - Association sites
  - Manufacturer's websites
  - Companies you do business with
  - Ask to be a featured client
  - Apply for online awards
4. STAY CLEAR of Free For All (FFA) websites. They are automated directories to which you can add a link. They bring no traffic, but will generate lots of spam (when you register you have to provide your email address).
5. Check your website's link popularity.
PAID ONLINE ADVERTISING

Paid online advertising such as pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns and paid listings could help your placement; however, these options should be considered carefully as they can get expensive.
WEB ANALYTICS

Monitor your website's visitor statistics. Programs such as Wusage and Webalizer provide very good information such as referring sites (how visitors got to your website), top searched keywords, top entry pages, top exit pages, etc.

HitsLink is a leading online service to track hundreds of real-time website statistics. Easy to implement.
TO BLOG OR NOT TO BLOG

This takes commitment. If you cannot write (or have someone else write) at least 1 article per month, don't do it. If this is a commitment you can keep, by all means blog away!

Register your blog's RSS feeds with as many RSS directories as you can.