Posts Tagged ‘description’

Ten Tips to the Top of Google

Saturday, June 28th, 2008

Having a Web site that gets found in Google isn’t hard to do, but it can be difficult to know where to begin. Here are ten tips to get you started.

1. Start out slowly. If possible, begin with a new site that has never been submitted to the search engines or directories. Choose an appropriate domain name, and start out by optimizing just the home page.

2. Learn basic HTML. Many search engine optimization techniques involve editing the behind the scenes HTML code. Your high rankings can depend on knowing which codes are necessary, and which aren’t.

3. Choose keywords wisely. The keywords you think might be perfect for your site may not be what people are actually searching for. To find the optimal keywords for your site, use tools such as WordTracker. Choose two or three highly targeted phrases for each page of your site. Never shoot for general keywords such as “travel” or “vacation.”

4. Write at least 200 - 250 words of visible text copy based on your chosen keywords. This is a crucial component to high rankings and a successful Web site. The search engines need to “read” keyword rich copy on your pages so they can successfully classify your site. Use each keyword phrase numerous times within your copy for best results.

5. Create a killer Title tag. HTML title tags are critical because they’re given a lot of weight with all of the search engines. You must put your keywords into this tag and not waste space with extra words. Do not use the Title tag to display your company name or to say “Home Page.” Think of it more as a “Title Keyword Tag” and create it accordingly. Add your company name to the end of this tag, if you must use it.

6. Create Meaty Meta tags. Meta tags can be valuable, but they are not a magic bullet. Create a Meta Description tag that uses your keywords and also describes your site. The information in this tag often appears under your Title in the search engine results pages.

The Meta Keyword tag isn’t quite as important as the Meta Description tag. Contrary to popular belief, what you place in the keyword tag will have very little bearing on what keywords your site is actually found under, and it’s not given any consideration whatsoever by Google. Use this tag, but do not obsess over.

7. Use extra “goodies” to boost rankings. Things like headlines, image alt tags, header tags <H1><H2>, etc.), links from other pages, keywords in file names, and keywords in hyperlinks can cumulatively boost search engine rankings. Use any or all of these where they make sense for your site.

8. Be careful when submitting to directories such as Yahoo and the Open Directory Project (DMOZ). Having directory listings are a key component to getting your site spidered and listed by Google. Making mistakes in the submission process could cost you dearly as directory listings are difficult to change later in the game. Therefore, it’s important to read Yahoo’s How to Suggest Your Site and How to add a site to the Open Directory before submitting.

9. Don’t expect quick results. Getting high rankings takes time; there’s no getting around that fact. Once your site is added to a search engine or directory, its ranking may start out low and then slowly work its way up the ladder. Some search engines measure “click-through popularity,” i.e., the more people that click on a particular site, the higher its ranking will go. Be patient and give your site time to mature.

10. Don’t constantly “tweak” your site for better results. It’s best not to make changes to your optimization for at least three-to-six months after submission. It often takes the engines at least that long to add your optimized pages to their databases. Submit it, and then forget about it for a while!

If you’ve followed these tips and still can’t find your site in the engines, the first place to “tweak” would be your page copy. If you added less than 250 words of visible text on your pages, this is probably your culprit. Also, double check your keyword density, and make sure that you only targeted two or three phrases per page. Eventually, you’ll see the fruits of your labor with many top ten rankings in Google and the rest of the search engines!

Use ALL in ONE SEO PLugins :

Thursday, June 26th, 2008

ALL in ONE SEO Plugins is the best plugin to be used in the wordpress if you know something about SEO. It can let you define various attribute related to seo like page title, meta keyword, meta description.

What is Organic SEO?

Thursday, June 26th, 2008

An organic search is a process by which Internet users find web sites that they are looking for in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages), instead of using pay-per-click advertisements, such as Google AdWords, to locate the sites that they visit. Here are some organic SEO techniques that will increase your web site’s visibility:

1. Make sure that you add relevant meta tags to each page of your web site. These are used by the Search Engines to index your web site.  Whenever you are choosing the keywords for in your meta tags, make sure that you list the most important words that you think that your target audience will be searching for. These words should also be used in your meta tag description, which is the short explanation of your business.

2. You need to setup a site map for your business and then submit it to both Google and Yahoo. This is your chance to inform the Search Engines about the URLs that are on your web site.

3. Another thing that you should submit is any important information from your web site to Google Base. This will dramatically help with your organic SEO while also helping to distribute and share information with other people who you would not otherwise know how to reach.

4. It is also a good idea to set up a blog in order to be able to add more content to your web site. This is the key to your success online.

SEO : Optimize Your META Tags

Thursday, June 26th, 2008

META tags are hidden code read only by search engine webcrawlers (also called spiders). They live within the HEAD section of a web page. There are actually 4 very important META tags you need to worry about. Meta tags specifying who the author is and what the site is about really isn’t important to the search engines that matter the most (i.e.: Google). The META tags you need to be the most concerned about are:

1. robots
2. content-type
3. description
4. keywords

Sequencing of these tags may be extremely important. I say “may” because SEO is mostly hypothesis due to the changing algorithms of the search engines. Even though the W3C states that tag attributes do not have to be in any particular sequence, I’ve noticed a significant difference when I have the tags and attributes in the order described here. The only deviation from the list above is that the Title tag should come after content-type and before description.

The robots META tag tells the various search engine spiders whether or not you’d like them to crawl through your web page as well as where to start in their crawling activity. Top 10 SEO Tips wouldn’t be worthless without META robots, so long as you use a Robots.txt file. It’s not too hard to see why this tag can still be important. Here is the syntax:

<meta name=”robots” content=”index, follow” />

You can change the “index” to “noindex” and the “follow” to “nofollow” if you do not want your website to be indexed. Though, I have no idea why you wouldn’t want to be indexed.

Content-type is important to complex search engines like Google. This tag tells the spider what type of page you are posting, which helps the search engine categorize the listing. It also shows that you are following the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) guidelines, which could be an indication of a site being “optimized”. Here is the syntax used on this page:

<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=UTF-8″ />

The description META tag is the text that will be displayed under your title on the results page. See the OC Internet Advertising example above. There’s also a lot of controversy about the number of characters you should have in this tag. I’ve seen sites with a paragraph in their description listed in the top results, so I don’t think this tag has very much weight.

Feed Optimisation Tips

Thursday, June 19th, 2008

There are plenty of things you can do and should do to optimise your feeds aside from just clicking on a couple of Feedburner “activate” buttons. Some of the things you can do are actually the same things you do to optimise any normal web page including:

* Using keywords - Use keywords in your channel and feed item titles, anchor text for both internal and external links (be considerate of other people’s SEO efforts!), channel description, and blog posts.
* Make sure links are working properly - Use full path when linking to ensure that the links are rendered properly.
* Use H1 and H2 tags - The use of heading tags for channel and feed titles are important in order to emphasise the importance of the titles. However, if you do not insert key terms in the title then you’ll simply be emphasising words you are not optimising for.

Other things you can do to SEO for your feeds that are “feed specific” include:

* submitting your feeds to appropriate directories
* offering feeds for different categories - This is especially important if you cover a wide variety of topics. If your site/blog is very specialised you might not need to do this. Note that this is useful not only to subscribers who do not wish to be deluged by blog entries they are not interested in but also to syndicators who are only interested in specific topics.
* subscribe to your feed - This isn’t a tip to boost the number of subscribers but is important in order for you to always see exactly what your subscribers see when they view your feeds.
* use MyYahoo and MyMSN - To get your feeds indexed faster and crawled more frequently by the two search engines add your RSS feed on your MyYahoo and MyMSN pages. According to Yahoo if you do this your feed will be indexed approximately within 48 hours! You might as well try this on iGoogle although I don’t know how fast this tactic will get your feed indexed by Google. To add your feed to iGoogle click on Add Stuff, click on Add feed or gadget (at the bottom left sidebar), then paste your feed URL on the box.