Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Blog

Are you in the process of having a new Web site designed for your company? If so, you should check with your Web designer to make certain that the HyperText Markup Language (HTML) code he is using is valid. A valid HTML code is an important part of successfully promoting your SEO and Web site.

Most Web pages are written in HTML, and as with any language, HTML has its own version of grammar and syntax. Every document written in HTML is supposed to follow these rules. The reason that a valid HTML is crucial for search engine optimization is because search engines have to scan your Web site’s HTML code to find the relevant content. If there are errors in the HTML code, search engines will be unable to find the content on the page, ending your optimization efforts and quest for high rankings.

Although most major search engines can handle small errors in HTML code, a single missing bracket in your HTML code may account for the fact that your web page cannot be found in search engines (http://www.villainsupply.com/). If you don’t close some tags properly, or if some important tags are missing, search engines might ignore the complete content of that page.

You can check the validity of your HTML code via one of several free services available on the Web. The search engine optimization community’s HTML validator is the W3C HTML Validator.

When a browser is interpreting your Web page, if you have valid HTML code, you have the advantage of the browser understanding the exact structure of your pages, and all your visitors, whatever browser, should see exactly what they should see and not a complete mess (http://www.websiteoptimise.com/valid_html.htm). Remember, your badly coded pages may look fine to you, with your browser, but not everyone will see the same.

How much weight do title tags carry among the search engine result pages (SERP) that you’re trying to capture? Plenty according to most Web site development experts. This reason is why you need to pay close attention to the words that appear in the title tag – and the order in which they appear. It is extremely important that you develop a crisply worded title tag that includes your most relevant keyword phrases and performs the function of announcing the summary of your Web page content.

Title tags carry hefty algorithmic hefty weight when it comes to search engines. Title tags are equally important as your visible text copy and the links pointing to your pages. You should definitely incorporate the name of your company in the title tag. If your company’s name is well known, it is essential that you include it in the title tag. The title tag gives you a great opportunity to further market your company and its brands.

The title tag has been and will continue to be one of the most important elements in search engine rankings. Title tags are the over-arching descriptors for the page; they communicate with the search engines telling them what each page is about. Don’t overlook your title tags. Their importance simply can’t be denied.

Looking to steer more traffic to your Web site? The key to motoring your success up the search engine ladder is in your keywords. Keywords are the function that drive search engines, and the most important keywords are what lead customers to your site. Once you’ve developed your site and understand which keywords are most important to you, it’s time to write the content for your site. You probably know that by repeating the keywords you can improve your search engine optimization (SEO) status. The frequency of which the keywords are repeated is commonly referred to as the keyword density.

Keyword density essentially is the ratio of the word that is being searched for against the total number of words appearing on a given Web page. If your keyword occurs only two or three times on a page of 500 or more words, it stands to reason that it has a lower keyword density than a keyword that would occur 10 times on a page of similar length.

Keyword placement on the page, and their density on the page, are two important areas where keywords are felt on your Web page. The choice of which keywords to target on a page is often of vital importance, especially for highly competitive keywords.

Your choice of keywords – and their density — is the primary reason people will discover your Web site. Customers are led to your Web site through their searches for information. With this thought in mind, it becomes vitally important that your site offers as many opportunities to be included in those search results as possible.

There is no magic formula or guarantee for success behind keyword density. Just remember that no keywords translates to no placement among the search engine results page.

The Google Toolbar is a free utility that attaches to your browser that adds features that optimize the web browsing experience. It is available for Firefox and for Internet Explorer. One of the features that it adds is PageRank. PageRank is one of many key aspects that makeup search engine placement. It acts as a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weight (0-10) to a webpage based on the quantity and importance of websites that point to it.

Ideally, in order to maximize your PageRank, you want a great deal of backlinks on sites that have high PageRanks. Adobe’s Website has the maximum PageRank of 10 because of the vast amount of reputable websites that link to it for downloads.

For ideas on how to obtain backlinks, check out our discussion titled Inbound Links - Link Trading and Exchanges

It is important to avoid putting too much emphasis on PageRank. It is only a piece of search engine optimization. Just because you have a PageRank of 8 doesn’t mean you will appear higher than a PageRank of 6 on search engine results. Spending too much time attempting to increase PageRank can detract from other important aspects of SEO.

Wikipedia defines an Inbound Link as the following:

An inbound link is a hyperlink transiting domains. Links are inbound from the perspective of the link target, and conversely, outbound from the perspective of the originator. Inbound links were originally important (prior to the emergence of search engines) as a primary means of web navigation; today their significance lies in search engine optimization (SEO).

Pretty technical definition if you ask me.

Basically, an inbound link is a link that appears on any outside website that points to your own. Why do you want them? Inbound links not only help increase the amount of traffic visiting your site, they help to increase your search engine rankings. It’s win win. However, in order to promote White Hat SEO we want to use only ethical methods of obtaining quality inbound links.

The easiest way to obtain inbound links is to submit your website to directories. This is usually a fairly simple process that consists of filling out an online form with fields for the URL, title, keywords, and description. There are literally thousands of directories available, some are free, some charge. The very first directory you want to submit your website to is DMOZ. DMOZ is the most popular directory available and it is free to submit your website to. Although directory submission may take time to process, it will give you quality inbound links.

There are other methods for obtaining reputable inbound links. Emailing reputable sites requesting for a link is one method. It is important to remember that it must be beneficial to that website to allow your link to be posted or they will not bother. Another effective way is being actively involved in posting on discussion boards. Many discussion boards allow users to attach a website to their signature in return for being actively involved in posting.

There are a variety of methods for obtaining inbound links. Just be cautious about how you’re obtaining them. Using unethical methods like link farms, is an easy way to get your website penalized or even banned from search engine results.

You’ve developed your laundry list of your Web hosting needs. Now how do you go about finding a company that provides fast, reliable service that benefits your Web site? Search engines like Google want some assurance that your Web site is always going to have a strong presence – and not be a site that is accessible 50 percent of the time. A good hosting service will give you that presence.

If your server is not guaranteed to be up 99.9 percent of the time, there is a good chance your site will be down when a spider or editor visits your pages. If your site is not viewable, it will be detrimental to your rankings. If you do not have 24/7 access to your files, this will eventually slow the optimization process of your site.

Many search engines give a lot of emphasis to the home page of a particular domain. The home page of a domain will often rank higher for a particular keyword than any other page . When you use some of the free hosting services, your index.html page is the home page of your site, but not of that domain. Therefore, in these search engines, your site will find it very difficult to make it to the top 20 or top 30, let alone the top 10 for some of the really competitive keywords. Just think of the amount of traffic that you will lose if this happens. See why you need reliable hosting?
(http://www.thejunglemarketer.com/)

Web hosting is one of the not-so-obvious items that can make or break a Web business (http://www.seofirm.biz/resourceswebhosting.htm). If your web hosting service has poor reliability and your Web site is down when the search engine robots visit your site, this will adversely affect visitors seeking your products and services and your search engine rankings. If a robot cannot spider your site, it will not be indexed.

If your in the market for a reliable host, contact ATX for Hosting Services.

When you prepare for your early morning jog, you probably grab the nearest baseball hat and head out the door. This process may be OK for your morning workout, but the type of hat – black hat or white hat – you’re Web site wears during the day can mean a world of difference when it comes to search engine optimization.

There tends to be a Great Divide between the effectiveness of white hats and black hats when it comes to SEO. Search engine optimizers typically label themselves as white hat or black hat to identify their basic philosophy, approach and methodology for SEO. The general theory is that SEO white hats try to follow the rules and grow sites through a period of years. SEO black hats tend to focus on winning the search engine game and making money today. (http://seoblackhat.com/category/white-hat-vs-black-hat)

As with most things in life, SEO probably isn’t as much “black” and “white” as a spectrum of gray. And more importantly to marketers, the question isn’t so much what’s black and what’s white but what impact can each approach have on your brand?

White Hat and black Hat SEOs seem to have their place in cyberspace. Plenty of people look for the types of products and services in which black hats specialize. There is a huge demand for their brand of black magic – and the thought of “doing things right” with the white hats (http://www.highrankings.com/issue119.htm).

Or maybe you prefer a New York Yankees hat like LeBron James.

OK, so you’re looking for more ways to use search engines to your advantage and attract people to your Web site. You can start with your meta tag description, which can be an essential component in your quest to gain greater SEO and search engine results page (SERP) visibility. A meta tag is an HTML tag that gives information about the content of a Web page, such as what HTML specifications a Web page follows or description of a Web page’s content. For more information on meta tags visit the W3C or check out the wikipedia.

To avoid truncation by the search engines in their SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), your meta description tag should be concise, within 140 to 200 characters. Truncation will vary depending on the search engine and the number of characters displayed in the search results
(http://www.seoconsultants.com/meta-tags/description.asp).

If the keywords in the meta tag description keyword line are not found within the text on the Web page, some search engines will penalize the page or simply not list it. The penalty is done to prevent meta tag spoofing. So, you might want to have several meta description tag on each of your pages, and be certain that keywords in the keyword tags are used on the page.

Keep in mind that there are specialized techniques involved in optimizing a site to place well in SERPs for specific keywords and meta tags. It is not just a matter of using dozens or hundreds of keywords in your meta tags. Doing so can ultimately have a negative impact on your site (http://www.bcseo.com/seo-search-engine-optimization/SEO-faq.htm).

Here is a useful article I found about the meta description from SEOConsultants.com..

To avoid truncation by the search engines in their SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), your meta description tag should be concise, within 140 to 200 characters. Truncation will vary depending on the search engine and the number of characters displayed in the search results.

(http://www.seoconsultants.com/meta-tags/description.asp).

If the keywords in the meta tag description keyword line are not found within the text on the Web page, some search engines will penalize the page or simply not list it. The penalty is done to prevent meta tag spoofing. So, you might want to have several meta description tag on each of your pages, and be certain that keywords in the keyword tags are used on the page.

Keep in mind that there are specialized techniques involved in optimizing a site to place well in SERPs for specific keywords and meta tags. It is not just a matter of using dozens or hundreds of keywords in your meta tags. Doing so can ultimately have a negative impact on your site. We will fully investigate this matter in an upcoming article.

You’re intentions are good – you want visitors to your Web site to feel welcome – but you don’t necessarily have to spell it out for them on your Web site. Avoiding a Welcome page, or splash page, can actually help you in your quest to attract and retain viewers of your Web site.

Splash pages are certainly eye-catching and appealing, but they are not helpful when trying to place your site with search engines (http://www.northstudio.com/searchengines/factors_that_can_hurt.htm). Because splash pages are heavy with graphics and light on content, they are difficult for search engines to “spider.” Search engine spiders crawl out on the Web looking for links and content to evaluate.

So, if your homepage is entangled in a splash page with no content, these spiders will give your site the spin. You are essentially telling search engines that there is nothing of value on your site.

Keep in mind that your Web site is a valuable, yet unique marketing tool for your company. People seek you out, rather than you seeking them (http://www.newfangled.com/splash_page_usage). You don’t have to work as hard as you may think to get people to stay on your site.

The intention of a Welcome page generally is to explain how your server works … information that usually isn’t helpful to your primary visitors. Welcome them once they walk through your doors after you’ve captured their attention with a Web site that is clean and easy to navigate (http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/Etiquette.html).

Your Web site is by far your most important marketing tool – the gateway to reaching new customers and keeping in touch with existing customers. If your Web site consists of just one page, then you may want to rethink your strategy and invest in a Web site development company that can provide you with multiple pages for your Web site
(http://www.startupnation.com/articles).

One page is not nearly enough to convey the many features and benefits of your business. Does your company have a catalog or handle order fulfillment? Then you should devote special pages to these two areas alone. Remember, the idea that drives your Web site is to let your customers – and potential customers – know all about your company and what you provide, and to be as user-friendly and informative as possible
(http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3627129).

When it comes to your Web site, don’t pinch pennies. Hire a professional Web site design and develop company that can give you a dynamic look – with the appropriate links — to portray your company in the proper manner to all who visit your site
(http://www.seobook.com/archives/001792.shtml).