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SEO Notes
0. Study successful sites.
1. Title tag is important. Google disregards the description META tag and the keyword tag, but thinks the Title tag is important. The text within the Title tag is a representation of what is inside the site. The Title tag is best when it includes 75 characters of keywords. Focus on one or two phrases and include them in the Title and Description tags.
2. Description tag is important. - Focus on one or two phrases and include them in the Title and Description tags. Only target one or two phrases per page. Gives a description of the web page that appears under the title of the 'serps' (search engine results page) for your website. This tag consists of a short, plain language description of the document, usually 20-25 words or less, anymore and the crawler making its way through your site will stop indexing the tag.
3. Content text is important: Organize it in a pyramid" style, even better. This is where the most important, compelling information is presented first, and deeper information follows (such as technical specifications). A simple and clean look and feel is the answer. b. Key phrases in H1
tags e. Key phrases in Alt tags
4. Use a central theme throughout the site. Answer this question: Why should your customers buy from you?
5. Key Words and Key Phrases a. Include keywords with headings and use bold type and large font sizes. b. Make sure that keywords are located within close proximity, as Google calculates the distance between keywords. c. Title tags should include the one or two keyphrases that you will be targeting with that page. The closer the keyphrase is to the beginning of the title, the more weight it carries. Thus keyphrase one, keyphrase two - business name will be more effective than business name - keyphrase one, keyphrase two. d. Google favors keywords located in, and close to hyperlinks. Google performs part of its ranking calculations upon the keywords that are contained in the URL. e. Choosing keyword or keyphrase rich folder/directory and file names gives you another avenue for introducing your keywords/keyphrases in your internal site links. Use hyphens (dashes) to separate words in keyphrases. Search engines parse hyphens as spaces. f. The focus of keyphrase extraction should be to identify popular keywords with very little competition from other web pages. If a keyword is searched a lot, it would not mean that it's the best one for you. Actually, the competition for such a term will be way high too. g. The longer the string of words in a keyword cluster, the more specific such a keyphrase is. Success is in selecting your best keyphrases, not keywords. Example: A recipe website for
a particular salad for Easter. "Salad"
could bring around 40 million results- a lot of competition. “Easter salad recipes". In your title, body text, meta data, alt tags h. limit the number of keyphrases you target with any given page to 2 (3 at the very most) per page. It is better to add more pages to your site and target additional terms with additional pages and copy. Search engines will index all of your pages, so do not limit yourself to trying to optimize just your home (index) page. i. Do NOT include keywords or other information irrelevant to the rest of your site "junk sites"
because there is a lot of things going on in one website
Google AdWords' Keyword Suggestion Tool Overture's Search Term Suggestion Tool Webmaster Toolkit's Keyword Research Tool Ask Jeeves Related Search Suggestions PPC advertising is a growing industry with Google AdWords and Yahoo/Overture leading the industry
6a. Reciprocal Links - the number of Web sites that are linked to your site a. Google places great importance on link popularity. Link Popularity is the number of Web sites that are linked to your site. If the hyperlink text is unrelated to the site at which it is directed, this is considered an irrelevant link that is poor in quality. If this page has no link popularity, your site will not receive a high position. b. If your site or product has a video on Youtube, when that product is searched for on the web that video will often come up in the top ten results. If this video has a link to your site in it, under it or as nearby as you can put it, it should be good news for you and your site. Make a video, even if it is just text, sound or a power point presentation, and then submit it to as many video and social networking sites as possible. c. Cross linking is a webmaster practice whereby a person owns many domains, uploads an identical site to each and then heavily links each domain to the others. If Google detect completely duplicate content on even just two sites that link to each other, then they will at least lower your page and result rankings, if not ban both sites. d. You can use the search engines to find websites that might link to you. Search on your keywords and your competitors' backlinks to find sites that link out to websites in your industry. Visit those sites and try to determine the owner's name (or a manager as appropriate). Send them a personalized e-mail introducing them to your site. Request consideration for a listing on their links page (and include the URL for that page) where your website would be of value to their audience. We do not recommend trading links with websites that have no topical connection to your site. 6b. Limit Dangling Links – Example: If you link to PDF files, add a hyperlink from the PDF file back to your main site.
7. Submitting site to Search Engines: Search engine submission is how a webmaster submits a web site directly to a search engine. While Search Engine Submission is often seen as a way to promote a web site, it generally is not necessary. Because the major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN use crawlers, bots, and spiders that eventually would find all by themselves most web sites on the Internet.There are two basic reasons to submit a web site or web page to a search engine. The first reason would be to add an entirely new web site because the site operators would rather not wait for a search engine to discover them. The second reason is to have a web page or web site updated in the respective search engine. You can download a program that will submit your site automatically to 10000 search engines or put a link to you web page on 50 other sites. The problems there being: only four major search engines exist and between them they take over 80% of all search engine traffic. BUT those search engines will find your site automatically and rank it according to, amongst other things, relevant and unique content making the 10000 search engine submission promise redundant Free directories - Crawling search engines use these human edited directories to find (and categorize) websites. Be sure you get listings for all directories that are applicable: DMOZ Open Directory Project http://www.dmoz.org/ (directory.mozilla.org) largest free directory. Used by Google to power the Google directory. It can take a long time (months in some cases) for an application to be processed, so patience is golden when applyingClick on [Suggest URL] on top of page.Yahoo Web Search submission: http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html MSN Web site submission: http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx WebSavvy – click [add URL] on bottom of page. JoeAnt - You must apply to become an editor if you do not want to pay for inclusion. Gimpsy - Only accepts sites that offer some interactive features. Be sure to check their guidelines before applying. Zeal - Only accepts non-commercial sites. When applying to these directories, comply with their instructions and make it as easy as possible for their editors to approve your submission(s). http://www.submitexpress.com/submit.html
8. Pay Per Click: PPC - The added bonus with pay for listings is that they usually review and include your site very quickly (24hours), which by itself may be worth paying for. And if you could buy 10 spots on decent directories your site will most likely become highly ranked on search engine results. But - the traffic is often not targeted and people often do not bother to look around the sites. Often it turns out to be a robot that is obviously not going to look or buy anything Google Adsense. Click fraud can occur when end users click on a competitor's ads in order to drive up their advertising costs. It can also occur when PPC providers syndicate their ads to affiliate search engines that receive commissions on click-throughs. These affiliates may then drive tons of traffic through your ad with no conversions (or ROI). But - so many free directories out there
9. Campaign: consider newsletter advertising, email advertising, PR campaigns, social networking. Consider Mail merge to relevant people.
10. Sitemap: Can either submit just one web page at a time, or they can submit their entire site at one time with a sitemap. However, all that a webmaster really needs to do is to submit just the home page of a web site. With just the home page, most search engines are able to crawl a site, provided that it is well designed. Ex: http://jayandjulietales.com/index.htm http://jayandjulietales.com/Contact.htm http://jayandjulietales.com/ComputerTip.htm http://jayandjulietales.com/OwnSite.htm http://jayandjulietales.com/Books.htm http://jayandjulietales.com/LivingWill.htm http://jayandjulietales.com/ReduceYourCarbonFootprint.htm http://jayandjulietales.com/Resume.htm
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"> <url> <loc>http://www.example.com/</loc> <lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod> <changefreq>monthly</changefreq> <priority>0.8</priority> </url> <url> <loc>http://www.example.com/catalog?item=12&desc=vacation_hawaii</loc> <changefreq>weekly</changefreq> </url> <url> <loc>http://www.example.com/catalog?item=73&desc=vacation_new_zealand</loc> <lastmod>2004-12-23</lastmod> <changefreq>weekly</changefreq> </url> <url> <loc>http://www.example.com/catalog?item=74&desc=vacation_newfoundland</loc> <lastmod>2004-12-23T18:00:15+00:00</lastmod> <priority>0.3</priority> </url> <url> <loc>http://www.example.com/catalog?item=83&desc=vacation_usa</loc> <lastmod>2004-11-23</lastmod> </url> </urlset>
Google Sitemaps was introduced in June 2005 so web developers could publish lists of links from across their sites[1]. The sitemap is used to make the search engine aware of the site and the pages on the site.
The whole process of creating an XHTML document starts with doc-type declaration, which characterizes the complete site. The most common is XHTML 1.0 Transitional, along with others. Moreover, there are free validation services, available to verify the coding of your website like validator.w3.org. A valid website presents great benefits in search engine rankings. With XHTML being a light weighted code, you can design a website that is about 60-80% smaller, which provide benefits to the Google or any other search engine crawlers. Also, your web site visitors and potential customers get benefited with a 60-80% decrease in the webpage load time.
A search engine results page, or SERP, is the listing of web pages returned by a search engine in response to a keyword query. The results normally include a list of web pages with titles, a link to the page, and a short description showing where the keywords have matched content within the page. Google advice: Do not feel obligated to purchase a search optimization service. Some companies "guarantee" your site a place near the top of a results page. While legitimate consulting firms can improve your site's flow and content, others employ deceptive tactics to try and fool search engines. Be careful - if your domain is affiliated with one of these services, it could be permanently banned from our index. Broken or improperly formatted links can prevent Google from indexing your page.
Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server. This file tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled. Make sure it is current for your site so that you don't accidentally block our crawler. Visit: http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/faq.html for an FAQ answering questions regarding robots and how to control them once they visit your site.
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