Tryangled Solutions web designing tips tricks

The optimal keyword density doesn’t appear to have changed but rather appears to have declined in value altogether. Sites with low keyword densities are starting to appear more often for phrases based more on their links than their content and also overall site relevancy.

While the importance of a specific keyword density on a page has declined, this has been countered by an increasing importance of relevancy throughout the site. Google is opting to assign relevancy based more on the overall content of the site rather than a single page. General directories will be showing up less and less in exchange for topic-specific directories. Additionally, sites with a central theme carried throughout the majority of pages will tend to rank over sites with a specific page or even section on a topic.

Internal links are carrying a solid weight in attaching relevancy to specific internal pages. Properly worded internal links, preferably built into the content of your site (see note on natural links above) will add weight to those internal pages and increase the likelihood of those pages ranking for specific secondary phrases.

META tags are hidden code of information in the head area of your web pages and is used to communicate with search engine spiders/crawlers. The most important META tags you need to utilize in your webpages are:

1. Description
2. Keywords
3. Robots

I personally don’t believe that sequencing of these tags in certain order is that important. Even though I see many websites put title tag after description and keywords tags lately but there is no proof that it is better for SEO.

Optimization of Description Meta tags

The effective META description tag consists of 25 to 30 words or less but using no more than 160 to 180 characters total (including spaces) or some Search Engines would not consider it Search Engine Friendly.
Read more and see meta tags examples in this Meta tags article.

Optimization of Keywords Meta tags

The meta keyword tag is also sometimes useful as a way to help your page come up for synonyms or unusual words that don’t appear on the page itself but don’t fret too much over your Keywords Meta tag, instead utilize keywords and keyword phrases from your Title Tag element, Description Meta Tag, heading tag and first one or two paragraphs of visible content. Optimal Keyword Meta Tag has 15 to 20 words max. SEO Tip: Don’t repeat your keywords more than 3 times or search engine will consider it as spam of their search results and don’t include keywords that are not in the main content section of your page.
(Read more and see keywords tag examples in this Meta tags article.)

Robots Meta tag will let search engine know if you want a particular page to be or NOT be indexed or to follow or not to follow links on given page. (Read more and see robots tag examples in this Robots txt article.)

Excite used to be the best-known general-purpose search engine site on the Web that relies on concept-based searching.  It is now effectively extinct.

Unlike keyword search systems, concept-based search systems try to determine what you mean, not just what you say.  In the best circumstances, a concept-based search returns hits on documents that are “about” the subject/theme you’re exploring, even if the words in the document don’t precisely match the words you enter into the query.

How did this method work?  There are various methods of building clustering systems, some of which are highly complex, relying on sophisticated linguistic and artificial intelligence theory that we won’t even attempt to go into here.  Excite used to a numerical approach.  Excite’s software determines meaning by calculating the frequency with which certain important words appear.  When several words or phrases that are tagged to signal a particular concept appear close to each other in a text, the search engine concludes, by statistical analysis, that the piece is “about” a certain subject.

For example, the word heart, when used in the medical/health context, would be likely to appear with such words as coronary, artery, lung, stroke, cholesterol, pump, blood, attack, and arteriosclerosis.  If the word heart appears in a document with others words such as flowers, candy, love, passion, and valentine, a very different context is established, and a concept-oriented search engine returns hits on the subject of romance.

Most sites offer two different types of searches–”basic” and “refined” or “advanced.”  In a “basic” search, you just enter a keyword without sifting through any pulldown menus of additional options.  Depending on the engine, though, “basic” searches can be quite complex.

Advanced search refining options differ from one search engine to another, but some of the possibilities include the ability to search on more than one word, to give more weight to one search term than you give to another, and to exclude words that might be likely to muddy the results.  You might also be able to search on proper names, on phrases, and on words that are found within a certain proximity to other search terms.

Some search engines also allow you to specify what form you’d like your results to appear in, and whether you wish to restrict your search to certain fields on the internet (i.e., usenet or the Web) or to specific parts of Web documents (i.e., the title or URL).

Many, but not all search engines allow you to use so-called Boolean operators to refine your search. These are the logical terms AND, OR, NOT, and the so-called proximal locators, NEAR and FOLLOWED BY.

Boolean AND means that all the terms you specify must appear in the documents, i.e., “heart” AND “attack.”  You might use this if you wanted to exclude common hits that would be irrelevant to your query.

Boolean OR means that at least one of the terms you specify must appear in the documents, i.e., bronchitis, acute OR chronic.  You might use this if you didn’t want to rule out too much.

Boolean NOT means that at least one of the terms you specify must not appear in the documents. You might use this if you anticipated results that would be totally off-base, i.e., nirvana AND Buddhism, NOT Cobain.

Not quite Boolean + and - Some search engines use the characters + and - instead of Boolean operators to include and exclude terms.

NEAR means that the terms you enter should be within a certain number of words of each other.  FOLLOWED BY means that one term must directly follow the other. ADJ, for adjacent, serves the same function. A search engine that will allow you to search on phrases uses, essentially, the same method (i.e., determining adjacency of keywords).

Phrases: The ability to query on phrases is very important in a search engine. Those that allow it usually require that you enclose the phrase in quotation marks, i.e., “space the final frontier.”

Capitalization: This is essential for searching on proper names of people, companies or products. Unfortunately, many words in English are used both as proper and common nouns–Bill, bill, Gates, gates, Oracle, oracle, Lotus, lotus, Digital, digital–the list is endless.

All the search engines have different methods of refining queries.  The best way to learn them is to read the help files on the search engine sites and practice!

This is the most common form of text search on the Web.  Most search engines do their text query and retrieval using keywords.

What is a keyword, exactly?  It can simply be any word on a webpage.  For example, I used the word “simply” in the previous sentence, making it one of the keywords for this particular webpage in some search engine’s index.   However, since the word “simply” has nothing to do with the subject of this webpage (i.e., how search engines work), it is not a very useful keyword.   Useful keywords and key phrases for this page would be “search,” “search engines,” “search engine methods,” “how search engines work,” “ranking” “relevancy,” “search engine tutorials,” etc.  Those keywords would actually tell a user something about the subject and content of this page.

Unless the author of the Web document specifies the keywords for her document (this is possible by using meta tags), it’s up to the search engine to determine them.  Essentially, this means that search engines pull out and index words that appear to be significant.  Since since engines are software programs, not rational human beings, they work according to rules established by their creators for what words are usually important in a broad range of documents.  The title of a page, for example, usually gives useful information about the subject of the page (if it doesn’t, it should!).  Words that are mentioned towards the beginning of a document (think of the “topic sentence” in a high school essay, where you lay out the subject you intend to discuss) are given more weight by most search engines.   The same goes for words that are repeated several times throughout the document.

Some search engines index every word on every page. Others index only part of the document.

Full-text indexing systems generally pick up every word in the text except commonly occurring stop words such as “a,” “an,” “the,” “is,” “and,” “or,” and “www.”  Some of the search engines discriminate upper case from lower case; others store all words without reference to capitalization.

1. You need to decide which key phrases to target by researching which words or phrases your target audience will search for. These keywords must then be incorporated into your title, description and content between 5 and 8 times within the editorial content that consists of between 200 and 400 words.
2. Your site’s structure needs to be set up so that it can be properly indexed. You also should not build your site completely out of graphics, flash, javascript or other such dynamic content.
3. Web sites that are difficult to navigate, slow to load or leave you wondering what it is about will not perform very well. So, make sure that the flow of information is both logical and intuitive.
4. Inbound links are a very important part of organic optimization but herein quality also matters more than quantity. Relevant links are more important than “junk” links are and if you get a lot of “junk” links you will look like you are abusing or spamming them. Some examples of “junk” links are links that come from link farms and free-for-all link pages.

While paid search advertising is growing in popularity, the need for unpaid optimization is growing because paid campaigns can only offer short-term exposure and you will want long-term results. Plus web sites that have unpaid optimization tend to offer users a more quality experience.

You have a choice. You can target a general high traffic keyword you have little chance of ranking well for and get barely any traffic. Or you can shoot for a keyword that gets a moderate level of targeted traffic resulting in more subscribers and sales. I like to call this a “lucrative keyword”. Whatever you call them, here’s the most important thing: They may not get you the most traffic, but they often bring the most profit.
More Web Site Traffic and More Sales? Not Always

You may be surprised to learn that there isn’t always a correlation between high traffic and high sales. Many of the most profitable sites in the world get moderate traffic because their lucrative keywords result in a much higher ratio of visitors to buyers.
Length of Search Query is a Factor

A recent article in Information Week stated that the highest conversion rates from search engine traffic comes from people who do four word queries. The great thing about your blog is that it can get so well-indexed that you have the potential to show up for any number of four word phrases that are relevant to your industry.
Target Your Blog for More Traffic and Sales

It isn’t just the four word phrases that get converting traffic - there are two and three word phrases that can bring you traffic and sales. Targeting your blog discussion to a two or three word phrase that has a high yield of traffic, and yet has little competition, is not a dream of past Internet days. Another recent study revealed that surprisingly high percentages of search engine queries debuted as late as 2004.As long as there are new developments, new products, services and trends, you’ll never have a shortage of these terms if you learn how to discover them. a

If you are looking to hire an SEO firm, here is some of what you want to look for in that firm.

Keyword Research and Copywriting Skills

Both SEO and search engine advertising require keyword research and copywriting skills.

With ad copy, writers deal with only a limited set of words, including:

1) Query Words

2) Unique Selling Propositions

3) Calls to Action

In Web Site pages (including landing pages), writers have much more to deal with like page titles, meta tags, headings, a higher word count, site navigation schemes, calls to action (above and below the fold), and cross-linking. Though some of these features should be available on ad landing pages, many of these landing pages aren’t an integral part of a site’s information architecture.

Many copywriters come from the print world or, advertising, or journalism background. These copywriters might not specialize in the Web and search engine copywriting. Search engine copywriters know how to write with keyword phrases and incorporate these phrases into sales copy without diluting either their brand or copy. Search engine friendly copy has a certain level of redundancy that most likely will not be acceptable in a print medium or for that English paper you wrote in college. So it is important to find search engine copywriters for web site work, otherwise inevidibly you will most likely have problems if you try to hire a print copywriter.

Web Site Design, and Interface Usability

Placing keyword-rich text on Web pages won’t increase search engine visibility unless crawler-based search engines can easily access that text. A site’s design, page layout, navigation scheme, and information architecture are just as important as search engine friendly copy. That’s why you will notice a site that is primarily designed in graphics will not rank well in the search engines.

Finding an SEO firm that specializes in search engine friendly design is difficult. Not only must this firm’s staff have design skills, their staff should have programming, marketing, Web analytics, and interface usability skills. Very few SEO firms have staff with technical and marketing skills.

Even if an SEO firm doesn’t have individual staffers with multiple talents, make sure it has staffers with these five skill sets: web design, programming, search, Web analytics, and interface usability.

Inbound and Outbound Link Development

Link development is often an ongoing process that goes far beyond site development completion. For a new site, link development often begins with directory paid inclusion. Since it’s very difficult to modify a directory listing, a search engine friendly copywriter should know how to research categories and write appropriate descriptions that will enhance a site’s overall search engine visibility and be an accurate directory description. Many Web content writers don’t understand directory submission. It’s a special skill.

Unfortunately, link development isn’t a skill PR firms currently provide. Link development requires search, publicity, and e-mail skills. For example, an article opportunity might arise in an online publication. A qualified link developer knows how to:

1.) E-mail a publication to pitch the article
2.)Write the article so keywords naturally appear in the copy
3.)Ensure the article links back to the Web site in a search-friendly way.

In Closing

Sometimes, SEO can be a simple process. Maybe the title tags need a little tweaking. Adding text links and a site map might solve the problem, or creating a URL structure the crawler-based search engines can follow. However, if you need to outsource or hire an SEO firm, make sure the firm has staff that specialize in search, copywriting, design, programming, marketing, and inbound link development.

What is Anchor Text?

Anchor text is the hyper-linked text that allows the user to move around web sites.

Anchor Text Relevancy

From a search engine stand point it is important that the anchor text be relevant to the information that it points to. If it is it can improve your ranking in the search engines. So for example if your web site is dedicated to selling exercise videos and the page that you are going to point to has numerous articles on exercise videos then you have a high relevancy.

To achieve even higher relevancy make sure that the integrity of the document that your pointing to has been marked up with those same anchor text phrases. I.E. The page title of the page you are going to is called “exercise videos” and your anchor text is the same.

What Not To Do:

It is a common mistake to see people use “click here” in anchor text. In doing this you are loosing many possible users. Instead use descriptive anchor text phrases that are relevant to the subject matter.

The way you structure the links on your website can affect your Google rankings. As we had discussed previously consider a link to your site as a vote for your site. So, based on this if you have the most links coming into your homepage then that page has a higher vote count. The higher the vote count then the higher you will come up in the search engines for that phrase. Based on this the things that you can do to increase that vote count are as follows: Make links within your site absolute, not relative, so use the full url, use the key phrases in your links that point to relative information, use a nofollow tag for links that are not important, less links on a page give the links that you do have more power, reduce 404 not found errors on your website.