by Francois Muscat | Apr 22, 2010 | SEO
There’s three parts to implementing a good organic SEO (Search Engine Optimization) campaign. Successful organic SEO results requires the following: keyword rich text, website architecture and link development. If you are missing even one of these, you are limiting your results.
Find below more information regarding these three organic SEO elements.
Keyword rich content:
Search engines and visitors of your website reads the text found on your content. Your website should cater for both those audiences. Search engine judges your website by how your content is formatted. Your visitors will look at your marketing message. Content should be original, compelling and make your visitors to take action.
Your content pages must contain valid keywords that are relevant to what your targeted visitors are searching for. Most search engine queries are made with a question being asked. Provide your visitors with valid answers to their questions. Your keyword phrases must be used in prominent ways. This includes page titles, headings, usage of bold text, keywords in links, etc.
Your pages need to contain the keywords that are relevant to what your targeted visitors are searching for. These keyword phrases must be used in prominent ways. This includes page headlines, bold text, links, numbered lists, etc.
Website Architecture:
Your website architecture and structure controls the search engines access to keyword rich content. Your website navigation should be simple and easy to follow. The structure of your website should be easy for search engine spiders to follow and have a natural sales flow for visitors.
If your website navigation is a bit complex, create a XML Sitemap for search engine spiders and submit it to Google webmaster tools, Yahoo site explorer and MSN.
Your website pages should be named with the most important keyword phrases. The pages should be constructed in validated error free code. Navigation should be strengthened with interlinking of pages within the body text.
Link Development:
Relevant incoming links to your website tells search engines that your website is important. Search engines place great importance on link text and how relevant these incoming links are.
Linking should be from a variety of other sites including websites, blogs and social media. Linking should not just be to the home page, but to relevant pages deep within your site.
by Marianna Muscat | Apr 16, 2010 | SEO
Many people have written long informative ebooks, paperbacks, blog posts, etc regarding Search Engine Optimization. Even though they are good to read and follow, I believe the best methods to improve your SEO skills is by self exploration and testing. I would say that again…TESTING.
The search engine algorithms changes constantly without any notice so it is good practice to stay actively involved in the Search Engine Optimization battlefield.
Here is a list of 30 Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tools you should not live and work without. These tools includes: Keyword research tools, Site Check Tools, Link Tools, Ranking Tools, Analytics Tools and various other tools.
Keyword Research:
Site Check:
Link Tools:
Ranking:
Analytics:
Various:
by Francois Muscat | Apr 16, 2010 | SEO
Here is a presentation released by Google themselves titled “Optimize your Crawling and Indexing“. In the presentation they explain context, how to reduce the inefficient crawling of your website, get your preferred url’s indexed and some resources.
This presentation is good reference for any Search Engine Optimization (SEO) specialist.
Taken directly from http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com on the topics found in the presentation.
Remove user-specific details from URLs.
URL parameters that don’t change the content of the page—like session IDs or sort order—can be removed from the URL and put into a cookie. By putting this information in a cookie and 301 redirecting to a “clean” URL, you retain the information and reduce the number of URLs pointing to that same content.
Rein in infinite spaces.
Do you have a calendar that links to an infinite number of past or future dates (each with their own unique URL)? Do you have paginated data that returns a status code of 200 when you add &page=3563 to the URL, even if there aren’t that many pages of data? If so, you have an infinite crawl space on your website, and crawlers could be wasting their (and your!) bandwidth trying to crawl it all. Consider these tips for reining in infinite spaces.
Disallow actions Googlebot can’t perform.
Using your robots.txt file, you can disallow crawling of login pages, contact forms, shopping carts, and other pages whose sole functionality is something that a crawler can’t perform. (Crawlers are notoriously cheap and shy, so they don’t usually “Add to cart” or “Contact us.”) This lets crawlers spend more of their time crawling content that they can actually do something with.
One man, one vote. One URL, one set of content.
In an ideal world, there’s a one-to-one pairing between URL and content: each URL leads to a unique piece of content, and each piece of content can only be accessed via one URL. The closer you can get to this ideal, the more streamlined your site will be for crawling and indexing. If your CMS or current site setup makes this difficult, you can use the rel=canonical element to indicate the preferred URL for a particular piece of content.
View the presentation below
by Marianna Muscat | Apr 12, 2010 | SEO
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) has been discussed many times. There’s lots of misinformation found on the web on ways to increase the visitor traffic to your website or blog. Many people are searching for the “secret” to achieve their traffic goals but unfortunately there’s no “secret”.
SEO, same with other online marketing related methods like Social Media Marketing (SMM), Pay Per Click (PPC) and content marketing is a never-ending practice with many methods.
Even though Pay Per Click (PPC) – with correct optimization and testing is a fast way to get noticed and to build leads, with correct SEO done for your online presence could result in a steady increase of traffic to your website through organic search results. Free traffic!
The SEO methods has changed over the last couple of years and more people knows what it entails than 10 years ago. If I say “know” – I mean more people and companies realises that SEO is way to attract more visitors to their website and online profiles.
They know there’s a way by improving their website to get more visitors. But how do you improve your website to get the best results? Do they really only need to insert keywords and descriptions in your META content? Really? This is old news buddy – META keywords and descriptions is a thing of the past, well not entirely, but to an extent.
Find below a couple of tips to help you better understand SEO.
SEO is all about tricks to fool the search engines
SEO, if done correctly can bring targeted traffic to your website. The object is not to fool the search engines, it is to communicate exactly what your website and pages is about. There are ways to trick the search engines and these methods are known as Black Hat SEO.
I’ve written a couple of topics in the past about this. The problem with “Black Hat SEO” is that if you practice these methods, your website could be “Sandboxed” meaning that your website could be taken off on all the search results.
I just need to insert META tags to optimize my website
Almost every website owner and developer has heard of the usage of META tags. They used to be an important part of SEO, but no longer. Of all the META tags, the Title tag is given the highest importance by Google. Correct SEO is by selecting the correct keyword phrases and using these in visible text on your website and in the outbound links from other websites.
I only have to optimize my website once
In the old days – 2000, you were able to optimize your website and leave it alone. The basics still remains the same by using keywords in visible text, search engines are constantly changing and evolving to what it takes to be in the top search positions.
Every page requires about 600-800 words to get the best results
Search engines uses the text found on the page to determine what a page is about, there’s no magic number of how much text is required to be optimized. A web page needs enough text to communicate your marketing message, whether it is 250 words or 800 words.
Flash on your website can hurt your rankings
The reason for this is because of the absence of text. Even though there could be text on the Flash website, text embedded with Flash can not be seen by search engines. It is the same as text on images. Even though you get stunning Flash websites, why settle for that when your website can not be found?
Can I create multiple copies of my website?
Search engine rewards higher rankings to original unique content. Making multiple copies of your website will not help as it will be seen as duplicate content.
Blogs get preferential rankings
Including a blog on your website could increase visitors to your website – if done correctly. Blogs are a powerful SEO tool because they regularly add keyword rich content to your website. It is easy to broadcast your message via the RSS feed linked to your blog.
Search engines updates their algorithms constantly. It is good practice to research what they are looking for on a website, and to stay update.
Leave a comment below if you require additional information regarding Search Engine Optimization.
by Marelise da Silva | Mar 24, 2010 | SEO
Nofollow is a way for website owners to instruct search engine bots and spiders not to follow and pass page rank (PR) on certain links. This method can be applied to individual links or to an entire page. By using the attribute rel=”nofollow” in your html links, you can control the PR flow within your website and the value that it passes to external websites and website pages.
PR Flow
PR (Page Rank) flows into a website via inbound links and it flows out via outbound links. The nofollow attribute is a method to help redirect the flow of page rank. By using this method and if you only have a couple of links on a page, the more page rank share each link gets. By applying the nofollow method to 15-25 links on a page, you will effectively reduce the ranking flow to 5 links.
The nofollow method allows webmasters to concentrate page rank to the most important web pages within their site. To give you an example: the contact us page is important for business communication, but not for the search engine rankings.
By adding the nofollow attribute to the links pointing to this page, you can focus the page rank on pages that are rich in keywords and content. This is way on how you can sculpt the flow of page rank to the most important pages on your website. You can control the link architecture of your website.
The nofollow method allows the shaping of the overall importance and relevance of your site. This can also help you to focus the relevance to a single topic. You can effectively “guide” the search engines to which of your web pages are the most important.
Google
View the Google Webmasters Guidelines on using the nofollow attribute.
Does using the nofollow attribute to a link guarantee that the link will not be indexed by the search engines? No, Google is clear that it won’t eliminate the indexing but it will control the page rank.
Leave a comment below if you require more information regarding nofollow, search engine optimization or other internet marketing strategies.
by Marelise da Silva | Mar 16, 2010 | SEO
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) relies on keywords – any way you look at it. Keywords are the foundation of any search online. How do you research and choose your keywords? Find below a couple of free and subscription keyword tools that you can use.
- Google Alerts: This is a free alert service where you can enter the search term that you are looking for, and every time those keywords or key phrases are used, you will be sent an email. Google will deliver snippets of news stories and web pages directly to your inbox.
- Wordtracker: Wordtracker features a free and a paid version of their keyword research tools. I have written a blog post a while ago titled “SEO Blogger Firefox plugin” where you can research keywords directly in your browser.
- Google Trends: With Google trends you can view popular topics over a period of time based on Search Engine OptimizationGoogle graphs of search volue and search data. You can enter up to 5 topics and see how often those topics are searched for on Google over a period of time.
- KeywordSpy: This is a great tool where you can view which keywords and keyword phrases your competition is using.
- Twitter Search: Twitter search is a real-time search engine where you can search for real-time results on the Twitterverse. This is a great tool to see which topics and keywords are trendy.
- Delicious.com: This is a social bookmarking site that is owned by Yahoo. You can use this social bookmarking tool and other bookmarking tools such as Digg, Mixx and Propellar to name but a few, to search for quality topics.
- WordStream: This is another keyword research tool with paid and free versions. With WordStream you can sift though large keyword list and segment the information.
- Google Keyword Tool: Powered by the Google adwords data, this is the best tool for topics with low search volume. This tool reports higher levels of daily searches than the other keyword research tools.
