CyberJudges

Small Business SEO Checklist: The Do’s

1. Commit yourself to the process. SEO isn’t a one-time event. Search engine algorithms change regularly, so the tactics that worked last year may not work this year. SEO requires a long-term outlook and commitment.

2. Be patient. SEO isn’t about instant gratification. Results often take months to see, and this is especially true the smaller you are, and the newer you are to doing business online.

3. Ask a lot of questions when hiring an SEO company. It’s your job to know what kind of tactics the company uses. Ask for specifics. Ask if there are any risks involved. Then get online yourself and do your own research—about the company, about the tactics they discussed, and so forth.

4. Become a student of SEO. If you’re taking the do-it-yourself route, you’ll have to become a student of SEO and learn as much as you can. Luckily for you, there are plenty of great Web resources (like Search Engine Land) and several terrific books you can read. Aaron Wall’s SEO Book, Jennifer Laycock’s Small Business Guide to Search Engine Marketing, and Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day by Jennifer Grappone and Gradiva Couzin are three I’ve read and recommend.

5. Have web analytics in place at the start. You should have clearly defined goals for your SEO efforts, and you’ll need web analytics software in place so you can track what’s working and what’s not.

6. Build a great web site. I’m sure you want to show up on the first page of results. Ask yourself, “Is my site really one of the 10 best sites in the world on this topic?” Be honest. If it’s not, make it better.

7. Include a site map page. Spiders can’t index pages that can’t be crawled. A site map will help spiders find all the important pages on your site, and help the spider understand your site’s hierarchy. This is especially helpful if your site has a hard-to-crawl navigation menu. If your site is large, make several site map pages. Keep each one to less than 100 links. I tell clients 75 is the max to be safe.

8. Make SEO-friendly URLs. Use keywords in your URLs and file names, such asyourdomain.com/red-widgets.html. Don’t overdo it, though. A file with 3+ hyphens tends to look spammy and users may be hesitant to click on it. Related bonus tip: Use hyphens in URLs and file names, not underscores. Hyphens are treated as a “space,” while underscores are not.

9. Do keyword research at the start of the project. If you’re on a tight budget, use the free versions of Keyword Discovery or WordTracker, both of which also have more powerful paid versions. Ignore the numbers these tools show; what’s important is the relative volume of one keyword to another. Another good free tool is Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool, which doesn’t show exact numbers.

10. Open up a PPC account. Whether it’s Google’s AdWords or Yahoo’s Search Marketing or something else, this is a great way to get actual search volume for your keywords. Yes, it costs money, but if you have the budget it’s worth the investment. It’s also the solution if you didn’t like the “Be patient” suggestion above and are looking for instant visibility.

11. Use a unique and relevant title and meta description on every page. The page title is the single most important on-page SEO factor. It’s rare to rank highly for a primary term (2-3 words) without that term being part of the page title. The meta description tag won’t help you rank, but it will often appear as the text snippet below your listing, so it should include the relevant keyword(s) and be written so as to encourage searchers to click on your listing. Related bonus tip: You can ignore the Keywords meta altogether if you’d like; it’s close to inconsequential. If you use it, put misspellings in there, and any related keywords that don’t appear on the page.

12. Write for users first. Google, Yahoo, etc., have pretty powerful bots crawling the web, but to my knowledge these bots have never bought anything online, signed up for a newsletter, or picked up the phone to call about your services. Humans do those things, so write your page copy with humans in mind. Yes, you need keywords in the text, but don’t stuff each page like a Thanksgiving turkey. Keep it readable.

13. Create great, unique content. This is important for everyone, but it’s a particular challenge for online retailers. If you’re selling the same widget that 50 other retailers are selling, and everyone is using the boilerplate descriptions from the manufacturer, this is a great opportunity. Write your own product descriptions, using the keyword research you did earlier (see #9 above) to target actual words searchers use, and make product pages that blow the competition away. Plus, retailer or not, great content is a great way to get inbound links.

14. Use your keywords as anchor text when linking internally. Anchor text helps tells spiders what the linked-to page is about. Links that say “click here” do nothing for your search engine visibility.

15. Build links intelligently. Submit your site to quality, trusted directories such as Yahoo, DMOZ,Business.com, Aviva, and Best of the web. Seek links from authority sites in your industry. If local search matters to you (more on that coming up), seek links from trusted sites in your geographic area—the Chamber of Commerce, etc. Analyze the inbound links to your competitors to find links you can acquire, too.

16. Use press releases wisely. Developing a relationship with media covering your industry or your local region can be a great source of exposure, including getting links from trusted media web sites. Distributing releases online can be an effective link building tactic, and opens the door for exposure in news search sites. Related bonus tip: Only issue a release when you have something newsworthy to report. Don’t waste journalists’ time.

17. Start a blog and participate with other related blogs. Search engines, Google especially, love blogs for the fresh content and highly-structured data. Beyond that, there’s no better way to join the conversations that are already taking place about your industry and/or company. Reading and commenting on other blogs can also increase your exposure and help you acquire new links.Related bonus tip: Put your blog at yourdomain.com/blog so your main domain gets the benefit of any links to your blog posts. If that’s not possible, use blog.yourdomain.com.

18. Use social media marketing wisely. If your small business has a visual element, join the appropriate communities on Flickr and post high-quality photos there. If you’re a service-oriented business, use Yahoo Answers to position yourself as an expert in your industry. With any social media site you use, the first rule is don’t spam! Be an active, contributing member of the site. The idea is to interact with potential customers, not annoy them.

19. Take advantage of local search opportunities. Online research for offline buying is a growing trend. Optimize your site to catch local traffic by showing your address and local phone number prominently. Write a detailed Directions/Location page using neighborhoods and landmarks in the page text. Submit your site to the free local listings services that the major search engines offer. Make sure your site is listed in local/social directories such as CitySearch, Yelp, Local.com, etc., and encourage customers to leave reviews of your business on these sites, too.

20. Take advantage of the tools the search engines give you. Sign up for Google’s webmaster Central and Yahoo’s Site Explorer to learn more about how the search engines see your site, including how many inbound links they’re aware of.

21. Diversify your traffic sources. Google may bring you 70% of your traffic today, but what if the next big algorithm update hits you hard? What if your Google visibility goes away tomorrow? Newsletters and other subscriber-based content can help you hold on to traffic/customers no matter what the search engines do. In fact, many of the DOs on this list—creating great content, starting a blog, using social media and local search, etc.—will help you grow an audience of loyal prospects and customers that may help you survive the whims of search engines.

Just like last week, this list could continue well beyond these 21 “DOs.” Your additions are welcome in the comments.

With this checklist and last week’s list of “Don’ts,” you should be able to develop a good plan of attack for your SEO efforts for your small business.

Reference

McGee,M,(Jun,2008) 21 Essential SEO Tips & Techniques. Retrived from http://searchengineland.com/070628-074149.php

Check your web site score for SEO at HubSpot!

http://www.websitegrader.com/

Search engines are more different than people think

The conventional wisdom is that the major search engines serve up similar results. Our research suggests the opposite: the search engines are far more different than most people think.

For example, what do you suppose is the overlap between the top 10 results on Google and the top 10 results on Yahoo! for the average search term? Most people we asked thought about 70 percent. So did we, until we checked.

The actual overlap is roughly half of that. In tests we conducted using the 500 most popular search terms, on average, Google and Yahoo! shared only 3.8 of their top 10 results.

Even more striking is the distribution of results: fully 30% of the search terms had 2 or fewer overlapping terms, and only 17% had 6 or more overlapping results among the top 10.

The Overlap between Google and Yahoo!:

Source: Jux2 Analysis of 500 top search terms, April 2004

What are the main differences?

So far we’ve found that none of the major search engines is particularly similar to the others, with none of the pairings sharing more than 4 results in the top 10, on average. (We’re working on testing MSN’s new algorithmic search products, and will have more to report shortly.)

That said, results from Google and Yahoo! overlap more than results from Google and Ask Jeeves, which in turn have more overlap than Yahoo! and Ask Jeeves.

Source: Jux2 Analysis

The following chart shows another way to look at it. In every match up, over 80 percent of searches share fewer than 6 results of 10.

Source: Jux2 Analysis

We are focusing here only on the top 10 search results because we have found that most searchers either find what they are looking for in the first page of results, or they change their query and try again.

However, looking past the top 10 results confirms the thesis that the search engines are quite different from one another. In a separate test of 91 random searches, we found that Google and Yahoo! share only 23% of their top 100 results. Furthermore, only 4.8 of Google’s top 10 results even made Yahoo’s top 100 (conversely, only 5.4 of Yahoo’s top 10 made Google’s top 100).

Why does this matter?

If the search engines are providing top results that are very different from each other, then by using only one search engine, Internet searchers are potentially missing relevant results.

It stands to reason that searchers will get a better assortment of highly relevant results by searching two engines at once with jux2. So, give jux2 a try and let us know what you think.

Taken from Jux2

http://www.jux2.com/stats.php

Active Server Pages (ASP) is Microsoft’s first server-side script engine for dynamically-generated web pages. It was initially marketed as an add-on to Internet Information Services (IIS) via the Windows NT 4.0 Option Pack, but has been included as a free component of Windows Server since the initial release of Windows 2000 Server. Programming ASP websites is made easier by various built-in objects. Each object corresponds to a group of frequently-used functions useful for creating dynamic web pages. In ASP 2.0 there are six such built-in objects: Application, ASPError, Request, Response, Server, and Session. Session, for example, is a cookie-based session object that maintains variables from page to page. Web pages with the “.asp” or file extension use ASP, although some Web sites disguise their choice of scripting language for security purposes. The “.aspx” extension is not an ASP page, but an ASP.NET page, another server-side scripting language from Microsoft, based on a mixture of traditional ASP, and Microsoft’s .NET technology.

Most ASP pages are written in VBScript, but any other Active Scripting engine can be selected instead by using the @Language directive or the <script language="language" runat="server"> syntax. JScript (Microsoft’s implementation of ECMAScript) is the other language that is usually available. PerlScript (a derivative of Perl) and others are available as third-party installable Active Scripting engines.

History

ASP was one of the first web application development environments that integrated web application execution directly into the web server. This was done in order to achieve high performance compared to calling external executable programs or CGI scripts which was the most popular method for writing web applications at the time it was introduced. Today there are additional platforms for web application development that are more common on other operating systems. Both JavaServer Pages and PHP are more commonly found on webservers running non-Microsoft operating systems, with PHP currently being the more common of the two. Also of note is ColdFusion, a popular Java technology running on several platforms including Microsoft servers as well as other platforms.

Prior to Microsoft’s release of ASP for IIS 3, programmers relied on IDC and HTX files combined with ODBC drivers to display and manipulate dynamic data and pages running on IIS. The basics of these file formats and structures were used, at least in part, in the implementation of the early versions of ASP.

InstantASP and ChilisoftASP are technologies that run ASP on platforms other than the Microsoft Windows Operating System. ChilisoftASP was purchased by Sun Microsystems and later renamed “Sun ONE Active Server Pages”, then later renamed to “Sun Java System Active Server Pages”. It appears that InstantASP is no longer available. There are large open source communities on the internet, such as ASPNuke, which produce ASP scripts, components and applications to be used free under certain license terms.

[edit] Versions

ASP has gone through three major releases:

• ASP version 1.0 (distributed with IIS 3.0) in December 1996
• ASP version 2.0 (distributed with IIS 4.0) in September 1997
• ASP version 3.0 (distributed with IIS 5.0) in November 2000

ASP 3.0 is currently available in IIS 6.0 on Windows Server 2003 and IIS 7.0 on Windows Server 2008.

ASP.NET is often confused as the newest release of ASP, but the technologies are very different. ASP.Net relies on the .Net Framework and is a compiled language, whereas ASP is strictly an interpreted scripting language.

The move from ASP 2.0 to ASP 3.0 was a relatively modest one. One of the most important additions was the Server.Execute methods, as well as the ASPError object.^[1] Microsoft’s What’s New in IIS 5.0 lists some additional changes.

There are solutions to run “Classic ASP” sites as standalone applications, such as ASPexplore, a software package that runs Microsoft Active Server Pages offline.

[edit] Sample usage

Several scripting languages may be used in ASP. However, the default scripting language (in classic ASP) is VBScript:

Or in a simpler format

The examples above print “Hello World!” into the body of an HTML document.

Here’s how to connect to an Access Database

——————————————

Retrieved from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

What Is XHTML?

• XHTML stands for EXtensible HyperText Markup Language
• XHTML is aimed to replace HTML
• XHTML is almost identical to HTML 4.01
• XHTML is a stricter and cleaner version of HTML
• XHTML is HTML defined as an XML application
• XHTML is a W3C Recommendation

---

XHTML is a W3C Recommendation

XHTML 1.0 became a W3C Recommendation January 26, 2000.

W3C defines XHTML as the latest version of HTML. XHTML will gradually replace HTML.

Stay updated with the latest W3C recommendations in our W3C tutorial.

---

All New Browsers Support XHTML

XHTML is compatible with HTML 4.01.

All new browsers have support for XHTML.

Rounded Corners with CSS are a hot topic in web design: I think that there are hundreds of articles on them. This page is intended to present the solution I came up, that doesn’t requires images, extra markup nor CSS. Let’s start.

Stripe it to get it rounded

The basic idea of Nifty Corners is to get some colored lines to get the rounded effect. This is the markup to get a rounded div:

<div id=”container”>
<b class=”rtop”>
<b class=”r1″></b> <b class=”r2″></b> <b class=”r3″></b> <b class=”r4″></b>
</b>
<!–content goes here –>
<b class=”rbottom”>
<b class=”r4″></b> <b class=”r3″></b> <b class=”r2″></b> <b class=”r1″></b>
</b>
</div>

And here’s it the basic CSS:

.rtop, .rbottom{display:block}
.rtop *, .rbottom *{display: block; height: 1px; overflow: hidden}
.r1{margin: 0 5px}
.r2{margin: 0 3px}
.r3{margin: 0 2px}
.r4{margin: 0 1px; height: 2px}

You can see the final effect on this simple example. A few words on the use of the <b> element. I needed an inline element to obtain the rounded corners, since it could be nested in almost every kind of tag mainting the markup valid. So the choice fell on b because it doesn’t have semantical meaning and it’s shorter than span, like Eric Meyer said.

The technique works even on floated, absolute positioned or percentage-width elements. It fails on element with fixed height, or with padding. Both of the problem could be easily solved with an extra wrapper around the content.

Known bugs are: text-indent won’t work on the element that has been rounded in Opera, and IE (both Mac & version 6 PC) would mess up on floated elements without specific width.

The support should be extended to all modern browsers: the technique has been tested with success in Internet Explorer 6, Opera 7.6, FireFox 1.0, Safari 1.1 Mac IE. It fails on IE 5.x PC.

Easy, isn’t it? But we can do much better.

Looking forward with DOM

In the example we saw how to get rounded corners without images, sparing about 6-8Kb of page weight. But we love webstandards and semantic markup and we’d like to maintain the HTML clean and light.

Nifty Corners with CSS and Javascript

So, the next step was to provide the unnecessary <b> elements with javascript and DOM making some functions to get rounded corners on almost every element on the page without adding a single line of extra HTML or CSS apart from the basic rules we saw. Let’s have a look at the example with Nifty Corners. As you can see from the source code, no extra markup is in it. The solution is a combination of CSS and Javascript. The technique is made up of four essential parts:

1. CSS file for the screen
2. CSS file for the print
3. Javascript library to get Nifty Corners
4. the javascript calls to round the elements you want

The first three components just don’t need changes, whatever you want to accomplish. They need just to be declared in the head section of any HTML page like this:

<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”niftyCorners.css”>
<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”niftyPrint.css” media=”print”>
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”nifty.js”></script>

To understand how to implement the fourth part, you need first to understand how the javascript library for Nifty Corners is implemented. Don’t worry: you aren’t requested to know javascript to use Nifty Corners…

The javascript functions

If you see the code of the example, you’ll notice that I left embedded the CSS and part of the javascript to show how the page is build. Let’s see the embedded javascript code:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
window.onload=function(){
if(!NiftyCheck())
return;
Rounded(”div#nifty”,”#377CB1″,”#9BD1FA”);
}
</script>

The function NiftyCheck performs a check for DOM support and excludes IE5.x PC for running the script. If the test has passed, the Rounded function is called. It accepts four parameters:

1. A CSS selector that indicates on wich elements apply the function
2. Outer color of the rounded corners
3. Inner color of the rounded corners
4. an optional fourth parameter, that if is setted to “small” would render small Nifty Corners

The real strenght of the function is that is capable of accepting a CSS selector to target the elements to round. The accepted parameters are:

• Tag selector, i.e. "p" or "blockquote" or "h2"
• Id selector, with specified tag of the element: for example "div#content" or "p#news" or "li#home"
• Class selector, with specified tag of the element: for example "div.entry" or "h2.highlight"
• Descendant selector, with some limitation: this has to be composed by an id selector followed by a tag selector. Valid examples are: "div#news div" or "ul#menu li"

About the colors: they should be specified in hex code with # symbol in three or six digits. The outer color could be also set to transparent.

The fourth parameter is optional and must be setted to “small” to get small rounded corners. Let’s see an example:

window.onload=function(){
if(!!NiftyCheck())
return;
Rounded(”div#header”,”transparent”,”#C3D9FF”,”small”);
}

I’ ve provided also two additional functions that you could find very useful: RoundedTop and RoundedBottom that receive the same parameters of the Rounded function and allow to get rounded corners just on the top or on the bottom of page elements, or all four corners but with upper ones that differ in color from the lower.

Now.. let’s see some examples.

The examples

Now the fun part.. I did some examples to show the possibilities of Nifty Corners. For each example will be reported on this page just the javascript calls to Rounded, RoundedTop and RoundedBottom functions, but keep in mind that these calls should be included in the following code:

window.onload=function(){
if(!NiftyCheck())
return;
/* here the calls to add Nifty Corners */
}

Now, let’s begin!

Example one: a single div

This is the example we saw in the opening. The javascript call is:

Rounded(”div#nifty”,”#377CB1″,”#9BD1FA”);

Example two: 2 divs

In this example, two divs were rounded. The js calls are:

Rounded(”div#content”,”#fff”,”#9DD4FF”);
Rounded(”div#nav”,”#fff”,”#E5FFC4″);

Example three: small corners

In this example the heading has small rounded corners. The code:

Rounded(”div#header”,”transparent”,”#C3D9FF”,”small”);
Rounded(”div#box”,”#FFF”,”#E4E7F2″);

Example four: newsboxes

In this example we’ll see how to make 2-colour newsboxes. The code is:

RoundedTop(”div.news”,”#FFF”,”#91A7E3″);
RoundedBottom(”div.news”,”#FFF”,”#E0D6DF”);

Example five: transparent, tabbed menu

This example show the power of the discendant selector and transparency to get a tabbed menu with a single javascript call:

RoundedTop(”div#nav li”,”transparent”,”#E8F0FF”);

Example six: a liquid image gallery

I rounded-framed an unordered list used for an image gallery here. The javascript call is:

Rounded(”div#minipics li”,”#DDD”,”#FFF”);

Example seven: rounding a form

In this example, I rounded a form and its labels with two js calls:

Rounded(”form”,”#FFF”,”#BBD8FF”);
Rounded(”label”,”#BBD8FF”,”#FFF”,”small”);

Example eight: final example

This is the final example wich uses some of the techniques we saw in the previous ones. In this case, I did not use embedded css or javascript. The head section contains the following lines:

<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”roundedPage.css”>
<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”niftyCorners.css”>
<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”niftyPrint.css” media=”print”>
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”nifty.js”></script>
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”final.js”></script>

The final.js contains all the javascript calls, let’s see its content:

window.onload=function(){
if(!NiftyCheck())
return;
RoundedTop(”div#container”,”#FFF”,”#e7e7e7″);
RoundedBottom(”div#container”,”#FFF”,”#E9F398″);
RoundedTop(”ul#nav li”,”transparent”,”#E8F0FF”);
Rounded(”div#box”,”#C0CDF2″,”#E4E7F2″);
Rounded(”div#minipics li”,”#C0CDF2″,”#FFF”);
RoundedTop(”div.gradient”,”#C0CDF2″,”#B8B8B8″);
RoundedBottom(”div.gradient”,”#C0CDF2″,”#ECECF2″);
}

A good practice is in fact avoiding using embedded javascript or CSS in the head section.
Quite easy, isn’t it? If we’d use one of the css techiques based on background images, probably we’d used 18 images, maybe some extra and non-semantic wrapper and a lot of css declaration. Could you imagine the kilobytes that were spared? Probably, about 18-20Kb or so.

Download

You could download the zip file containting the script, the html and the css of the example that were presented here.

Credits

James Webb Young wrote about 40 years ago in his little gem “A technique for producing Ideas”:

An idea is nothing more nor less than a new combination of old elements.

So, I think the idea about Nifty Corners wouldn’t have been possible without these readings in past or recent times:

• Rounded Corners without images by Joshua Sowin: his solution showed me that it was possible to avoid the use of images and the missing second part of the article pushed me to start thinking about it
• Mountaintop Rounded Corners by Dan Cederholm

: the real fuel for the idea was the zoomed image of an aliased rounded corners on his article.

• Doug’s 4 Rounded Corners by Douglas Livingstone
• Rounded Corners with CSS and JavaScript by Simon Willison
• sIFR - Scalable Inman Flash Replacement by Mike Davidson

About Html.it

Html.it is the most known and visited webdesign portal in Italy, providing guides, tutorial, forums in every field of webdesign and programming throught its portal and targetted sub-sites. webdesign, the sub-section that host this article, is specialized in webdesign, CSS, javascript, Search Engines, Photoshop and many other topics with more than 500 article published.

About Alessandro Fulciniti

I was born in northern Italy in 1975. I studied webdesign since for two years, and I have been writing for HTML.it since December 2003. I wrote about 45 articles focused mainly on CSS and javascript, and I’m the author of the guide on CSS layout published on html.it. You can contact me writing me at a.fulciniti[AT].html.it

Some copyright stuff

Nifty Corners are free for personal and commercial use. However, when writing about them on blogs/webdesign portal, please mention the autor and this page in your text. They were published on the 16th of March 2005 both in Italian and in English on HTML.it. The technique is subject to future improvements: if you’ve done one, or you have an idea, please let me know by writing to me. The technique is provided as is, and no responsability should be given to the author to bad page renderings or browser crashes. Use Nifty Corners and save your bandwitdh, but be sure to test your pages in as many browsers as you can. Enjoy!

by Alessandro Fulciniti

Taken from http://www.html.it/articoli/nifty/index.html

If you’re not thinking about this, you need to get started, and if you have started, how is it working out?

Google seems to be at a defining moment in time with it’s penalizing sites with paid links, and almost constant shifts to the algorithm that make the SERPs a guessing game just about everyday.

So what are you doing now to make sure your site survives should it be hit by a Google penalty? You might be ranked very well today and making great money from the traffic that Google sends to your site naturally - so what if they flag your site for some deserved or un-merited form of spam?

With soo many people gaming the system, no wonder Google lashes out at the SEO community on occasion. We’re the ones pushing them to provide more relevant results while at the same time doing things that some would question on a moral level.

Point is, Google delivers a ton of traffic. But the web is VERY big, and Google is not the be all and end all. You should be constantly looking for other ways to deliver traffic to your site such as:

Be active in forums - answer questions without trying to sell our product or service - instead, demonstrate your expertise in your answers and people will realize that what you say is worthy, and in turn will use your product or service when they are ready.

Write articles! I know it’s old and tiresome and boring - but like the first point, it’s a great way to not only show off what you know, but in inject your writing style. Some people will read you not for your content, but because they like the way you put things into perspective. Don’t underestimate that.

Ask for help - I know a lot of people have trouble with this, but when my car breaks down, I have no trouble calling a mechanic. Use this same approach on the web. If you need help with a problem seek out the people who can help you. Many times in that process there is an exchange of information that leads to a deeper and “real” relationship - leverage that for links!

Tell ‘em what you think - this applies to blogs, forums, articles and email responses. Why pretend to be something you’re not? Like is too short to pussyfoot around and to be taken advantage of by other people.

Use your clients! I know I just said don’t let others abuse you, and now I am saying to use your clients? What I mean is, your clients have other relationships as well, and if you perform well for them, they will refer you to their other business relationships.

See a pattern here? While Google is great for delivering text-based computer crunched results, at the end of the day, human relations (social engineering) is what makes you money. Treat people with respect, end any relationship with grace, and you’ll see that over time, that crazy thing called karma makes it way back to you.

Enjoy the ride!

-To your online success!

Paul Bliss

Taken from,
www.SEOforGoogle.com

You have two choices to consider when trying get your site ranked higher in search engines. You can hire a Search Engine Optimization Company that is an expert in the field or if you have some time, you can do it yourself

Research your Keywords
———————–

Ask yourself what keywords you think someone might type in when searching for products you sell or services you provide. Though a keyword may be only one word it is usually a phrase made up of keywords. Phrases are more specific and will more than likely be what potential customers use when searching for products or services online.

After a quick brainstorming session write down all that you were able to come up with. Make sure to consider geographical phrases if they are important to your customers and don’t forget of alternative words that could be used (an example could be “new car Littleton”). Make sure to surf the websites of your competition to get more ideas until you can come up with a list in the neighborhood of 20 to 30.

Now you should take two keywords from your list that you feel potential customers will use most frequently. Take into consideration that popular keywords are also competitive keywords and harder to achieve higher ranking with. If your goal is to obtain a high ranking for the term “auto insurance”, the path to achieving it may be long. Try to make your keywords the ones that are most related to your business and not riddled with vagueness or extremely competitive. Make each phrase about two or three words in length like the previous example.

Now that we have your keywords we will move on to the next step.

Site Text
————–

Your site text is made up of the wording that is on your web page. There is a phrase for search engines and it is content is king. Search engines love unique content and your keywords should be placed in key locations within the content so Google understands the relevance your site has to them. Also make sure that your copy reads well around them as it needs to make sense for your visitors who are most important.

Keywords can be placed in headings, at the top of pages, in bold or italics, used as link text for other pages of your site and in your title tag.

Add additional content after you are finished tuning up your webpage. Give more detailed descriptions of the products and services you offer. Provide a frequently asked questions page and pages of articles that pertain to your products or services.

With your design you should keep in mind that search engines cannot read images nearly as well as text. Sites that are made up with excessive flash or pictures really impede how well they can read the content of your site.

Link Building
—————-

A common way of thinking about links is that every link from another site that leads to yours is a vote for the popularity of your site. Every quality link you receive can improve your search rankings.

The quality of your inbound links is more vital than the quantity. The preferred and more valuable link is from sites that are relevant to your niche and with authority (highly regarded in the niche). A quality directory with relevant categories is another example. Just a few quality links with authority can have more value for your site than hundreds of lesser quality. Think of it like you do your personal business network. Both can have a strong effect on the success or failure of your business.

Take time to consider all the other relevant websites in your niche such as organizations, industry affiliates and non-competing companies. Send them a email introducing yourself, your products and services and explain how your website could benefit their visitors. Then politely suggest that they create a link to your website from theirs.

Record the Results
———————

Over time you should watch and record your search engine rankings by doing a Google search for your chosen keywords to see where you rank. You can also monitor where your visitors are coming from by watching your hosting reports. Do this for each significant page of your website.

Continue to add to your websites content and increase the links to your website over time. This needs to be an ongoing effort for as long as you want visitors to your website.

As you continue to record the results of your efforts you should see the traffic increase and with that your sales. Know where your visitors are coming from so you can continually monitor your marketing efforts successes. Only by measuring it do you know where and how to improve it.

Search engine optimization techniques for Google and Yahoo are quite different. Many websites rank well in one search engine but not the other. This is the direct result of each search engine having its own unique ranking algorithm. For example, the Google algorithm predominantly values the anchor text of in-bound links. Yahoo places more emphasis on keyword density and meta tags.

The primary reason for the difference in ranking algorithms is that Google owns the patent on Page Rank (PR), named after Google’s founder Larry Page। As a result of owning this patent, other search engines need to place more emphasis on different optimization factors including website URL, keyword density and so on.

What are the greatest differences in search engine algorithms?

Google places a significant amount of emphasis on inbound links to your website. The value of these inbound links are measured based on their Google PR. The more links you receive from high Google PR web pages, the better your search result placements will be for a given keyword or search term.

Yahoo places emphasis on website URLs, meta tags, and keyword density. These factors can be analyzed on any website with a limited amount of effort, allowing Yahoo to quickly and easily rank websites properly.

How you can optimize your website for both Google and Yahoo!

The challenge all website owners face is making the most of their optimization efforts. When thinking about search engine optimization, you need to cover all the bases. To do so, pay particular attention to the following guidelines.

Keyword Targeted URL. If your website URL doesn’t contain your keywords, consider purchasing a new one or creating a new page off of your root directory (ex: marketingscoop.com/internetmarketing.htm). Having your keywords in the URL helps improve both your Yahoo and Google search results. Yahoo weighs the website address as an important ranking factor. Google values a keyword rich URL when third party websites place a link to your site using nothing but a web address.

Meta Tags. Although not as important as they once were, Yahoo still uses meta tags to help align search engine rankings and appropriate website pages. Make sure that your meta tags are complete and include your keyword phrases in the title, description, and keyword tags.

Keyword Density Between 6 - 8%. Although much has been written about the importance of keyword density remaining between 2 - 3%, Yahoo looks for sites with keyword densities as high as 8%। Don’t be afraid to include your keywords throughout your webpage content. Make sure however, that your keyword density is not more than 8%.

Link Building. This is the most important factor for increasing Google search result placements. Develop a link building campaign and give other sites a reason to link to your site. This may include free downloads, tools, or other valuable resources.

Site Map. Publish a sitemap. This makes it easy for search engines to spider your website and access all of your most important web pages. Site maps should be accessible from your home page and kept up-to-date.

Optimizing for both Google and Yahoo can be challenging. Following basic seo principles and working to develop incoming links can help you reach the top of the largest search engines. Apply these techniques regularly to see the greatest results.

There are two types of search engines: Search Engine Directories and Search Engine Spiders. Each search engine (regardless of whether it is a spider or a directory) uses unique criteria for “ranking” websites.

1. Search Engine Directories rely on humans to gauge web page relevancy and search engine placement. Human editors review each website and rank them according to a set of guidelines such as website content, website functionality, and design professionalism. Yahoo! and the Open Directory Project, DMOZ are the most popular Directory Driven Search Engines.

2. Spider driven search engines use “robots” to spider websites across the Internet. Robots “crawl” each website and “score” pages based on relevancy. Some engines score the index page while others score individual web pages. A website’s score or placement within a spider driven search engine is derived from hundreds of variables such as, link popularity, click popularity, keyword density, website themes and more. Google.com is the most popular spider driven search engine.

Earning Top 10 Search Engine Placement is complex and highly competitive for three reasons:

1. The variety and complexity of search engine’s “ranking” algorithms
2. Search Engines constantly modify “page ranking criterions”
3. Increasing competition on the web