Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Blog

Finding a suitable name for your Web site domain doesn’t have to be as difficult as finding a name for a child, but it is important nonetheless. With this thought in mind, don’t be in a hurry to rush out and purchase a domain name. Start off by doing a search to see if the domain names you like are available. You may be able to save yourself some time and trouble by purchasing your ideal domain name from its current owner http://www.igoldrush.com/buy2.htm.

Remember, keep your domain name simple. Shorter names tend to grab people’s attention and make it easier for them to remember it. Think of your domain name like a well-written newspaper headline that jars you into reading the story. Keywords that pertain to your business will help you to optimize your domain name on many search engines..
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Once you selected and registered your domain name, remember to check to be sure it doesn’t violate a registered trademark. Your domain name is important – and it’s advisable that you take the proper steps to ensure its safekeeping.

Check to see if your domain name is available.

When a web designer goes about developing a new website, he or she usually focuses on two aspects: functionality and appearance. Since text usually isn’t very appealing, images are often used to make a website more pleasing to the eyes. However, the saying “A picture is worth a thousand words.” does not apply to search engines. A search engine only understands text. Therefore, the question becomes, how can I create a fully optimized site, but still use images?

The first thing that you can do is make sure that everything that can be expressed in text is expressed in text. Often times, images actually contain text. One popular example of this is the use of navigation links on a website. Text could easily be used instead of images. This may raise the question: Why would I want to use more text if you just said that is was less appealing? Well, there are ways to make text seem like images. A perfect example is that of Ameritrade. The green links across the top of the page appear to be images, but are actually text contained within a background image, thus helping to optimize the homepage.

Another idea for optimizing you website is using alt and title elements whenever you use the img tag. Taking advantage of the alt element allows you to optimize your images for search engines. Essentially, what you are doing is telling the search engine what the image is, through the use of text. alt text is intended to be used instead of an image, not to provide additional information. To be used effectively, it should be limited to 3 keywords at most. The title element also allows you to assign text to an image. However, the text assigned should provide supplemental information, not explain what the image is. The title element allows users to bring their mouse over an image and get extended information about an image that may not be shown.

Image without alt and title elements

<img src=”dog.jpg” width=”200″ height=”150″>

Image with alt and title elements

<img src=”dog.jpg” width=”200″ height=”150″ alt=”Dog Jumping” title=”This friendly Labrador is great with kids.”>

Wait… What exactly are keywords you ask? Keywords are the search “terms or words” that users enter in search engines to find web sites in search engines such as Google, Live, or Yahoo. These words or phrases must align to the theme of your web site in order to have a successful SEO campaign.

Keywords are vital to the success of your web site. It is a waste of time money and energy to optimize your web pages for keywords that no one uses in the search engines.

The purpose of SEO is to get targeted visitors to your web site. In order to get targeted traffic, your keywords and phrases must not be to general or too broad.

Remember to choose keywords and phrases that are generic enough so the surfer can find your product or service but at the same time selective enough to discount millions of others pages and competitors. The more specific a keyword is, the more targeted and qualified visitors come to your site which in turn increases your sales.

Here are some general guideline to consider when choosing your keywords:

• Try to use only two to four keywords at a time.
• Remember to be specific enough to bring in only target traffic
• Try to avoid over competitive keywords and phrases.
• Don’t use keywords that have nothing to do with your site.
• Single keywords usually will not work and usually are not effective.

Use Google’s Keyword tool to help generate new keyword ideas.

Overview of Robots.txt

A robots file, named “robots.txt” is simply an “Access” file stored in your web server’s root directory. Creating a robots.txt file doesn’t improve your search engine ranking, but it does provide robots, or web crawlers, with specific information concerning which files you will not allow to be crawled and indexed in the search engines.

For example, if we had an area on our web site, such as a family blog that we didn’t the search engines to show the pages in the search engine results pages, or “serps,” we could specify in the robots.txt file, to exclude our blog directory.

We would do this by adding these two lines of code to the robots.txt file.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /blog/

If we want our entire web site crawled by the bots, we would simply either upload a blank robots.txt file into our web servers root directory our we would change the “Disallow:” to have nothing after it as in the example below:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

I have provide the following links for more information on the robots.txt file and it’s uses:
http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/robots.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots.txt

Here is a link to a robots.txt file generator:
http://www.mcanerin.com/EN/search-engine/robots-txt.asp

Today, I am going to talk about exactly what SEO is, and who needs it. For the sake of this post, we are going to say SEO is an acronym for “Search Engine Optimization.” However, it can also be defined as a job title, which would then mean “Search Engine Optimizer.”

The Wikipedia defines SEO as the following: “Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (”organic” or “algorithmic”) search results.”

SEO not only brings in more visitors to your web site or online store, but it IMPROVES the quality of visitors that you need to make the sales you want. This is explained in more detail in one of my previous posts called Choosing Your Target Audience.

Now that we’ve covered what SEO is, let’s talk about Who Needs It.

It’s been said that well over 60% of all web sites on the internet have NOT had any sort of optimization implemented to their web site. This is mainly due to the fact that most of your local web design companies are simply not large enough or trained in internet marketing. They may be able to make you a professional looking web site, but it won’t mean much if no one is finding it in the search engine result pages. Remember the saying “it’s like finding a needle in a hay stack?” Well with the web, it’s like finding a needle in a million hay stacks. The internet is huge. The competition is fierce. BUT, the customers are out there waiting to buy. They just don’t know it yet because they haven’t seen your web site, right? If you think your web site could use some SEO, contact me, Brian Petti, at ATX Webmasters and I will give you a free web site optimization analysis.

The very first question you need to ask yourself before you start any marketing campaign is, “Who’s going to buy my product or service?” or “Who is my target audience?” A target audience can be people of a certain age group, gender, marital status, etc. (for example: teenagers, females, single people, etc.) A certain combination, like men from twenty to thirty is often a target audience.

Okay. So I’ve picked my target audience. How does choosing the right target audience relate to Search Engine Optimization?

By choosing the right target audience, not only will you be able to choose a web design which appeals to that group, but you will also be able to pick the right keywords and write content which appeals to that demographic.

Let’s say I have a client with a new brand of beer called “Man Beer.” My target audience would be Men ages 21 and over. Would I have a pink web site with a flowered border? Would I write content that talks about how beer shortens the length of menstrual cycles? Would my keyword phrase be “fabulous fruity drink”? - Of course not. You may be able to get top rankings with the keywords and phrases you select, but bringing the wrong target audience to your web site won’t get you much business.

Well, I finally had time to set up my search engine optimization and general web help blog. It was time to jump aboard the train and contribute my personal array of knowledge and skills of web development, web design, and search engine optimization to the masses. I hope that you enjoy my contributions to the web community, and I encourage every reader to respond to my postings. If you think what I am saying is B.S., then by all means, reply and say, “Brian, that’s B.S. Here’s why…” There is nothing better than discussing multiple viewpoints on a topic.

First things first. Let me tell you a little bit about myself. My name is Brian Petti, and I am the Sr. Web Developer / SEO at ATXWEBMASTERS.com I have over 8 years of professional web design, database development, and search engine optimization experience. During the first 3 months of working at ATX, in Mentor, Ohio ( 20 minutes east of Cleveland ), I have personally increased their online sales by a ten fold, and have dramatically improved the traffic of the web site ( in the upwards of 1500% ) using all White Hat SEO techniques.

I know what your thinking… “What the heck is White Hat SEO, and how can I implement it to my site?” Well, you’re going to have to come back for that answer. It’s a very important topic that I will discuss in upcoming posts, and should be thought out before you go and call your neighbor’s-uncle’s-cousin’s-sister’s-friend, (follow me? LOL) who does search engine optimization while she is at college… It could cost you some serious money and down time due to improper, and unethical optimization.

I suggest that you bookmark this blog, and keep coming back each day to learn more about what you can do to your web site to improve it’s look and feel, overall functionality, and how to gain real targeted traffic, all leading into new business and higher profits for your web business.