Archive for May, 2009

Optimizing Your Website for Search Engines and People

May 20, 2009 at 4:50 pm · Filed under Denver SEO Company, How to get your website noticed, How to get your website on first page, Search Engine Optimization ·Tagged , , , ,


seoYou want people to find, choose and use your website, not your competitors’ websites. This means that you need to appear high up the rankings on the search engine results pages – ideally in the top half of page one. But how do you do that?

Search engines aim to respond to their users’ queries by producing a list of websites that are relevant to the keywords that the user has entered into the search engine query box (e.g. Google toolbar) and high-quality.

Your website will be highly-ranked if search engines judge it to be a high-quality site that is relevant to queries for your type of product or service. If they cannot work out what your website is about or they judge it to be poor quality then it will appear low down in the rankings.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is simply doing the things that search engines, especially Google, look for so that they rank you higher on their results pages. Part One of this article explains how search engines and keywords work. This part describes some practical things that you can do to improve your search engine rankings.

Website Content

The content of your website should be very clear so that search engines – and people – can work out what it is about. The quality of the spelling, copywriting and structure will be judged by search engines too.

Keyword rich

The most effective places to use your keywords are:

  • page titles
  • headings and sub-headings
  • bold text
  • the anchor text of the links within your website
  • the first 25 words of your html document (which often includes navigation items as well as some of the text that appears on the page)
  • your home page.

Longer search terms with 3-5 words (known as long-tail searches) are increasingly used by people when they are looking for a website. So try to:

  • use all the keywords in common searches for your type of product – e.g. if someone is searching for “Gordon Brown” then a website with “Gordon” and “Brown” will beat a website with just “Brown”
  • closely associate the keywords in common searches – e.g. if someone is searching for a website selling “English goats cheese” then websites using all three keywords together will beat websites using those words in separate places.

Not keyword stuffed

Keyword stuffing is a meaningless list of words that are put on a webpage to trick search engines into ranking a website more highly than it really deserves. Nowadays, search engines are programmed to detect these lists and penalise sites that use them. People also hate keyword stuffing. It almost guarantees that visitors will leave your website quickly and never return.

Fresh and up-to-date content

Google loves fresh content. The more frequently your website changes, the more frequently Googlebot and other search engines spiders will visit it. When they find new, well-written content on your website, then it will move up the rankings as a high-quality and relevant site.

People also love new content. It gives them a reason to re-visit your website. Blogs, social media services, email forums and user-generated content are all great ways of keeping your website fresh.

Page Structure

You need to make your web-pages ‘search engines friendly’ so that they can easily work out what your pages are about. Try to use your keywords in all of the following places for maximum optimisation:

  • first 25 words of the page of the HTML documen
  • file name (e.g. optimising-websites.html)
  • html title
  • meta tags – description, keyword and content tags
  • unique page titles for dynamic pages.

The quality of the source code, navigation and links will also be judged by Google.

Tag your photos, videos and animations

Search Engines cannot read the ‘non-text’ content on your pages, such as photos, videos and animations. You need to tell them what these media files contain by using Alt description tags. The alternative descriptions also help people who are visually-impaired or using mobile devices such as Blackberrys or iPhones to access the internet.

Use description tags

A good description can help your website to get chosen from the listings on a search results page. Sometimes Google will use the description tag to create your listing. Other times, it will create its own description from some of the text on your webpages.

Send your sitemap to Google

Google looks at the link structure within your website to determine which pages are most relevant. If you submit a sitemap to Google, then it helps it to crawl all the pages in your site more often.

Links from other sites

Google uses the links on other websites to assess the subject and quality of your website. Each link to your website works like a vote for it. The most important things are:

  • The quality of the pages which the links are on (a link from the BBC website is worth more votes than a link from an obscure website)
  • The quantity of links pointing to your site
  • The anchor text of these links – i.e. the actual words used in the link
  • The location of the link is on the website – editorial beats footer.

Links also bring people directly to your website. People use links on one website to find other sites that are interesting and relevant to them.

Building links

Link-building is a low-cost way of dramatically improving your search engine rankings but it can be very time-consuming. Ways to build links include:

  • ask clients and suppliers to link to you
  • ask people in your business network to link to you
  • participate in communities
  • join networking groups – like LinkedIn and Ecademy
  • generate bylines by writing for other websites
  • list in free directories especially dmoz, the open directory project.

Ask for your main keyword phrase to be used as the anchor text for the link if you have any influence with the people who run the websites that link to your site.

Cheating can lead to blacklisting

Cheating is presenting your website in one way to search engines and in another way to the people who visit your site. Google will judge a site untrustworthy if it violates its webmaster guidelines by:

  • hiding text (e.g. text that is the same colour as the background or in tiny font)
  • hiding links (e.g. links on superscripts)
  • cloaking or using hidden doorways
  • key word stuffing
  • spamming
  • mis-using links (e.g. links to web spammers, excessive reciprocal links or paid-for links that are not part of legitimate advertisements).

Your website may be removed google index and not appear in any search engine results if it is judged by search engines to contain cheats.

Good practice

You cannot optimize your website once and then forget about it. You need to keep your website fresh with up-to-date content, optimize the new pages and build links with other website owners. If you do these things then, over time, you will have a website that is highly-ranked by search engines and well-used by people.

Women Unlimited are holding a workshop on search engine optimisation workshop for small business owners on Wednesday June 10, so if you want to find out more about this subject and how you can start making changes to your own results click here to book your place.

(Source: www.women-unlimited.co.uk)  More SEO Articles | Home

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Do You Have A Google Penalty?

May 20, 2009 at 4:34 pm · Filed under denver seo, google penalty, google webmaster tools, webmaster tools ·Tagged , ,

You wake up one morning, check out your site statistics and learn your traffic has plummeted. You then dig deeper to see the source of the traffic drop is from Google sending less traffic for your main keywords. Most SEO companies have gone through the experience of having at least one site penalized. The question is how does an SEO company first confirm a site penalty and then remove the site penalty.

We will discuss a thread at WebmasterWorld that has SEOs offering advice on this topic.

One of the sure fire ways to determine if a site was penalized by Google is if the site no longer ranks for it’s own domain name. So if your site’s domain name is rustybrick.com and you type inrustybrick into Google and you don’t come up in the first page, then you got pretty good evidence that you have been penalized.

Also, since you have statistics on which keywords you ranked well for. If most of those keywords are now ranking in the 5th plus page, then that is often a sign of a penalty.

Senior member, johnnie, suggested that you first see if it is a malware issue. To do so, either go toGoogle Webmaster Tools and login (make sure your site is verified) and it should tell you in the messages.  If not, then go to google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=mysite.com and replace “mysite.com” with your domain.

But I prefer Google Webmaster Tools cause they may show you other issues with your site. It doesn’t always show you if your site has been penalized, but it is a good start.

Here is a good checklist of items to review to make sure you fix your penalized site. We also wrote about how long sites are penalized in Google. In fact, we have lots of good articles about aGoogle penalty in our archives.

(Source: www.seroundtable.com)  For more articles like this, check out: Denver SEO | Home

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Google set to change its search algorithm

May 19, 2009 at 11:26 pm · Filed under Search Engine Optimization, UK SEO, google algorithym ·Tagged , , , ,

(Source: UK SEO)

Google is to change its algorithm to tackle the problem of spammers using black hat search engine optimization to get malicious pages at the top of results pages, it has emerged.   An unnamed source at the search engine told WebProNews that the algorithm for calculating search rankings will change in due course and should mean that web users do not see malicious results at the top of listings “nearly as often”.  The spammers in question get their pages to the top of Google’s search results by using Google Trends and Google News to research the most popular keywords of the moment, including these in their web pages and distributing links through comment boxes and forums on social media Google uses over 200 different signals to determine the ranking of a website by calculating its importance to the rest of the web and its relevance to users’ search queries. No one is sure about exactly what changes will be made, and the chances are that no one will ever find out but it will have an effect on the SEO techniques in the future.

For more articles like this check out:  UK SEO Company

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Video Seo Tips for Websites – SlideShare

May 18, 2009 at 10:13 pm · Filed under Uncategorized

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Tips to Ensure your Site Doesn’t Get Delisted

May 18, 2009 at 9:58 pm · Filed under Denver website design, How to get your website noticed, Nick Hantge, Search Engine Optimization, iniquitous

Written by: Nick Hantge

If you’re reading this article, you obviously understand there is quite a buzz around SEO and internet marketing.  Not only is it becoming a must to be on the first page of Google, you also need to have a presence on all major social networking sites, article and video repositories and directories listings.  Here are some helpful tips on how to avoid getting delisted by search engines so all of your hard work doesn’t go to waste!

Watch your Keyword Density

Your keywords on your web page are very important.  It lets the search engine know what your content is about and what you are trying to target with each page.  Each search engine has keyword density in their algorithm for ranking sites, however, their equation for density differs from one to another meaning their lenience of density allowed before a penalty varies.

If you know anything about SEO, you understand that at least 75% of searchers are using Google – I would think this is a pretty good place to start.  I have heard many SEO’s give the 3-5% rule for keyword density.  In my personal experience, I’ve gotten away with 7% and had great results.  The idea here is to watch you keyword density throughout your web page and never exceed 9%!  If you go over this mark, you are risking a negative reaction from the search engines.  I would say stick between 3-6% here and you should be fine.

Keep your Content Original

If you are running your own SEO campaign, you have and will be investing a ton of time.  Do not take the short cut and use someone else’s content on your web pages – it doesn’t make sense!  Search Engines love original content and in the SEO world, content is king!  It is what separates your page from the next before you even begin to create backlinks.  That being said, why would you want to be on a level playing field from the start with the same content?  Make sure you let the search engines know what separates your page from the competition.  Follow the keyword density rule above and write as much as possible!

Do not allow a search engine to disregard your content because it is a duplicate of someone else’s page. 

Don’t Hide your Content

As much as we don’t want to say it, the search engines (google bots) are actually pretty smart.  They know the difference between visible and invisible content.  Search engines will discredit a web page if they feel you are trying to trick them with text that cannot be read.  Make sure the text on your page is a completely different font and do not hide it behind images.  Make sure you tag your images with keywords but do not make the text invisible.  If you are smart you will have content on your Home page that leads to more content in the site.  

Tip: Publish articles to your home page with “Read More” buttons and your home page will get credit for all of the content on your home page including important keywords and links.

Be Cautious of Your Affiliate Links… too many = negative ranking

Be cautious of adding hundreds of affiliate links along with product descriptions.  If you have too many affiliate links on your website, Google will drop you down the listings.”

I hope this article has helped you understand exactly not what to do to a web page.  An SEO Campaign involves blood, sweat and tears which we don’t want to go to waste by getting delisted.  Search Engines do not like keyword stuffing, duplicate or invisible content and too many outside links.

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Optimising your web pages – 5 quick tips

May 18, 2009 at 5:42 pm · Filed under UK SEO, search engine optmization denver ·Tagged , , , , ,

(Source: UK SEO)

Are you looking to optimise your web pages to try and get a better ranking for your keywords?  Here are five quick tips to get your started:

  1. Check your keyword performance using a tool like Wordtracker or Googles keyword Tool.  It is vitally important that you optimise your site for keywords that people are actually searching on
  2. Dont forget to make good use of your keywords in your TITLE and DESCRIPTION tags on your web page.  These carry a decent weighting in terms of your pages relevance.
  3. Write your copy to accomodate your keywords, however make sure that you write it for humans and not the search engines.  Google uses technology known as LSI so you can use words that are relevant or associated to your keywords and Google will establish the relevance
  4. Make correct us of h tags.  By this I mean put your headings in h1 tags, your subheadings in h2 tags.  Dont think that you can get away with just using classes to format your page.  Its not good HTML and the search engines dont like it
  5. If you have to use Flash make sure that you provide a non-flash alternative, and where images are concerned make good use of the ALT tags to include your keywords

The above tips should give you a good solid ground in optimizing your website.  As any SEO will tall you the content of your page is the key and if you right clear, engaging and relevant content then you could well find that your natural links will start to grow on their own!

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The Evolution of Search Engine Optimization

May 4, 2009 at 3:41 pm · Filed under How to get your website noticed, Nick Hantge, Search Engine Optimization, iniquitous ·Tagged , , , ,

A search engine is basically an information finding system in a computer that helps one find out information they are trying to find. They dramatically cut down the time needed to find the information one is looking for.

The concept of optimizing a website for the search engines began in the mid 1990s when webmasters saw the benefit on high ranking of their sites.

In earlier years webmasters were able to manipulate their websites with the result of them being able to get high ranking in the search engines regardless of whether the content of their web page was actually relevant to the targeted keyword or not.

Over time the search engine computations of the relevance of a particular web page to a particular keyword or set of keywords became more sophisticated so that the search engine could tell what web pages were relevant to a keyword being searched for and what web pages had just been manipulated just to gain traffic. This was done by those computing by being able to determine the quality and strength of incoming or inbound links to a web page. This system however was still not foolproof as webmasters were still able to manipulate by exchanging, buying or selling for the higher quality links to their sites. From that point on other factors were entered in to the computations the search engines use in ranking pages. This information is not available to webmasters and the public at large.

There are companies that are search engine optimization companies. The service they sell to the public is to optimize their website to give it the best possibility of higher ranking with the search engines. If their techniques are too aggressive the effect may be detrimental to their clients to a point where their websites could be banned from search results. Not something you would want to pay someone for.

Some of the search engines have made efforts to communicate with the search engine optimization companies to get their efforts aligned for everyones benefit. There are those who use search engine optimization (SEO) to conform with the desires and wishes of the search engines and there are those who seek to get around the search engine rules and guidelines to get what traffic they can until they are caught.

It is a good practice to mix a campaign using search engine optimization with one of a good paying campaign. The reason for this is that the computations that the search engines use do change and one may see a drop in unpaid traffic due to this factor. It is also a good practice to avoid search engine optimization companies that make false promises they can not deliver, that guarantee a top rank with Google, that are secretive, that are nondescript about where your money goes, etc.

(Source: www.Articopia.com)

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