Posts Tagged ‘webmaster’

Exchanging links - the pitfalls - plus link management software review

Sunday, October 5th, 2008

Link exchange strategies and linking management software have become increasingly popular over the last couple of years as webmasters have come to realize the importance of gaining increased coverage on other sites.

Having a solid link exchange campaign is a crucial part of your overall marketing, not just as a traffic boost from having a listing on another site, but also from a search engine perspective. It’s no secret that many major search engines will boost your rankings not just based on what’s on your site, but also what’s off it; i.e links from other sites pointing back to you.

Every day I receive several requests for reciprocal links trades and out of 100 such requests, perhaps one or two I will actually respond to.
Web masters searching for cross-promotional partners have a tendency to make many mistakes when approaching other web masters for a link trade. The popularity of Windows based link management software packages and the consequent misuse of them has also provided many traps for web masters:

1) Tone - the request is more like a demand.

2) Impersonal link request - I can tell that the person hasn’t really looked at my site, just at my rankings.

3) Unbalanced link trades - many people create a huge “list o’ links” - hundreds of entries on a single page and then expect a premium placement. These kinds of link farms are of no benefit.

4) Failure to exchange - on a couple of occasions where I’ve agreed to a swap, after a few of days I’ve noticed the link to me has disappeared from the reciprocating webmaster’s site

Link Exchange Tips

Sunday, October 5th, 2008

1. Exchange links with websites that will bring you targeted traffic. Targeted traffic means visitors and/or customers that will be interested in your products or services.

2. Keep your link title brief and free of long sentences.

3. Try to keep your link description brief (aim for 200 characters or less).

4. Do not capitalize all letters in your link title or description.

5. Do not give the webmaster a deadline on when they should reciprocate. Webmasters are very busy people and it may take from 1 to 60 days or more. Be patient and in the long run you will receive more quality link partners!

6. Never remove a link partner from your site once they have agreed to exchange links with you and placed your link on their site.

10 Common SEO Mistakes

Thursday, June 26th, 2008

1. Using the same keyword more than twice in a Title tag - Having the same keyword listed in your heading 3 times or more will in fact reduce the relevance and strength of those keywords. Most important factor is that it’s readable to the user and is an accurate description of your page.

2. High keyword densities - Including your targeted keyword is obviously important but don’t think for one minute putting the keyword in every link on the page and in every paragraph will make your page more relevant - it won’t.

3. Not having a Valid XML Sitemap - Create one and submit it to the webmaster consoles on the major search engines.

4. URL’s not containing any keywords - Yes, I’m still seeing utterly useless URL structures. Just remember to include an accurate description of the page content in the URL.

5. Using <H1> tags more than once on a single page - There should only be one <h1> tag per page.

6. Not giving each page unique Meta data - should be relevant to each page’s content and unique - you will see benefits in doing this - trust me!

7. Using the same anchor text in all links - Unless you have been around for years, just don’t bother using the same anchor texts in your links. Make them as varied as possible, you will see see an increase in your targeted keywords if your site is optimized properly.

8. Putting analytics code at the beginning of your body content - Doing this will slow down the page content load which will effect usability. The amount of time is not large but noticeable to search engines, always put it at the end of the </body> tag.

9. Not using accurate image descriptions - Stuffing keywords in image descriptions will do nothing for you and may even harm your rankings if used excessively.

10. Not having a 301 redirect setup - It’s not hard to do and it will help with your indexing like you wouldn’t believe!

10 Spring Cleaning Tips for your Web Site

Thursday, June 26th, 2008

1. Update Any Scripts and Plugins - Look at WordPress, Joomla and any other scripts or services you have installed and see if it is time to give them an upgrade. You should be doing this more often than every spring but now is a good time to check and make sure.

2. Do Your E-mail Addresses Work? - I recently got an e-mail from a friend who told me, “Sorry I didn’t get back to you I just figured out I had major problems with my e-mail account”. Send yourself a dummy message to make sure you don’t fall into the same boat.

3. Clean up Your Sidebars - This ‘bit of advice would be mainly for blogs. I have seen some people become really addicted to having sidebar widgets and gadgets. If you have more than five per sidebar, might be time to ditch some or at least make them look pretty again.

4. Review your Terms of Service - Make sure your terms of service and acceptable use policy are up to date and include everything you wish to include there. You may have made some changes to your web site and business since the last time you reviewed it so check it out now to make sure all your bases are still covered.

5. Check and Update your Sitemaps - If you have a Google Webmaster Tools account, it might be a good time to login and check to make sure Google didn’t find any errors, which would keep them from indexing certain parts of your web site.

6. Is Your Contact Information Correct? - Check out your contact page and make sure that the numbers, e-mail addresses and postal addresses listed there are up to date and show the correct information.

7. Renew Your Domains - When does your domain name run out of date? Might need to check and also be sure that you have all your hosting bills paid up too. This also makes for a good time to upgrade your hosting account to one with a few more perks.

8. Test Your Web Site Links - Are all your web site links working? Check your error logs in your various stats packages to see where people are finding 404s and try to fix all the broken links or non-existent pages you can find.

9. How Out of Date is Your “About Us” Section? - Checking out my own about us page on one of my other web sites I see I pretty much haven’t updated it since the launch of the site. Always good to keep this up to date because well, this is how people lean more about you and what you do.

10. Spellcheck Your Web Site Content - How many grammar errors can you find on your web site? If you don’t want to read through everything you have posted - you might try just going through a few of the most popular ones and making sure they are correct. Bad spelling really peeves some people, so best not to get on anybody’s bad side.

General use for each SEO tool section

Thursday, June 26th, 2008

Web site promotion tools - This Section contains promotional tools for a web site. A webmaster would use this section to search keyword and keyphrase rankings and compare them to the number of pages that use the searched keywords and phrases. Calculate keyword density for each keyword given, get a percentage of keywords to other words in your site, optimize density for your prefered search engines standards. Create meta tags from keywords, That are ready to cut and paste in to your sites code. generate Submit a website to all the major search engines at once with a few clicks. Check a web sites ranking on a certain keyword or phrase on google***, yahoo, MSN, or other major search engines, see where you place. robots text telling a search bot to follow all your site pages or not to search certain pages. Optimize keywords / phrases that you have picked out for a site.

Web site analysis tools - Webmasters can use these tools to analyze various sites for meta tags of any given site, check out your friends sites or competitors sites. Check out the internal and external links in a site with a page link analysis. Use the website analysis to keep track of how many hits your site gets with a custom code generated for your site. Get a sites source code by using the page snooper tool. Want to know how your site will look in a search engine query? The search engine simulator will give you a good idea. Do a Whois search to find out who owns a domain. Is your site’s html valid? test it with the html validator tool.

Link popularity tools - This is a useful set of tools to see how a sites links compare relative to one another. It is also possible to see how friends and compeitors websites compare with link popularity. these searches are done specific to each selected search engine*** .

Miscellaneous tools - This set of tools is a webmasters mixbag of goodies. Get your domain name typos, and keyword / Phrase typos generated automatically. check how a search engine spider sees text on your front page. You can also access google dance. google dance can help webmasters figure out when google may be recalculating your sites PR ranking. google does this “dance” monthly where the servers www, www2, and www3 for google.com go through the calculation. you can determine when google is “dancing” with your site when the results within the three servers are not the same. Want to do a page rank search? use the page rank search to compare the page rank of web page results for a specifed keyword on google, or use a page rank lookup for a single domain on google. Use the site link analyzer to get how many links are external and internal on a site. then use the future tool to estimate where your site may end up for its PR rank in google next month.