5 Simple Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Techniques

5 Simple Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Techniques
By Noah Ulrich

The lifeblood of any website/ecommerce business is traffic, and every webmaster knows the best type of traffic is natural, organic search engine traffic. There are two very important reasons for this: (1) it is extremely targeted, and (2) It is FREE! The hard part is getting top ranking for your sites keywords... or is it? The purpose of this article is to provide a few simple, effective, and most important, search engine friendly strategies to help boost your websites' ranking and ultimately your traffic.

1. We will start with the Meta Tags. I know you have already heard of, and are probably currently using meta tags on your site. This is great. I just want to make sure you are using them effectively. We will only go over 2 tags: the "title" tag, and the "description" tag. We will not go over the "keywords" tag, as the major search engines have placed less and less weight on this one, and some would argue this tag has no weight at all. I still use this tag however, as I feel there is some merit and no drawbacks to using this tag.

I have found it effective to use similar text in the "title" and "description" tags, and to place your keywords prominently in these tags (near the beginning and more than once). I have seen sites with "sitename.com", "New Page 1", or "Welcome to my site" in the "title" tag, which really does not help in their quest for higher rankings for their particular keyword. Also, try not to use words such as "and", "or", or "the" in these tags.

**Important note about your keywords. Search engines evaluate keyword prominence, keyword weight, and keyword density when determining a site's ranking. All three are calculated individually for the page, the title tag, the description tag, as well as other areas on a page. Keyword prominence means how close the keyword is to the beginning of your page. Keyword weight refers to how many times a particular keyword or phrase can be found on the page. Keyword density is the ratio of the keyword to the other words on the page. You do not want the keyword weight or density to be too high, as this can appear to the search engine as "keyword stuffing" and most search engines penalize sites that stuff their keywords.

2. Place your navigational links (and JavaScript) at the right or at the bottom, but not on the left, of the page. When the search engines "read" your site, they read from the top left to the bottom right. Search engines place an emphasis on the first 100 words or text on the site. You do not want these words to be navigational links or Javascript. Ideally, you want to have your "heading" tags with your keywords in the beginning of your page. This being said, placing your links/JavaScript on the right or bottom of your page ensures the search engine spiders get to the text first, giving more weight to what's important on your page.

3. Place alt tags on all of your images. Search engine spiders cannot "read" pictures or images. The only way a spider knows what an image is about is by reading the alt tag. This is also another chance to place more of your keywords in your HTML, improving your page's keyword weight/density. Alt tags are easy to make and they can make a big difference in your sites keyword ranking. A simple alt tag looks like this: alt="put your keyword phrase here." Search engines separately calculate keyword prominence, density, and weight in alt tags as well, so optimize your tags.

4. Place your keywords at the bottom of your page. Just as search engines place more weight on the first words of your page, they also do the same to the last words. The general thinking is this, if your site is about a certain subject, then the main points, or keywords, should, appear at the beginning, be spread throughout the page, and be prominent at the conclusion. But if you have all of your navigational links and JavaScript at the bottom, your relevant page text could end well before the HTML does. An easy way to have your keywords at the bottom of your page is to include them in the copyright information. For example, if you have a dog food website, you could have something like this at the very bottom of the page:

copyright 2005 yoursite.com

World's best dog food

Search engines are not (as of this writing), penalizing sites using this technique, and it wouldn't really make much sense for them to do so.

5. The Anchor Text of your links. Anchor text is the actual linking text on a site. It is what the user clicks on to navigate to that particular site or page. If a search engine finds many links to your site using the term "dog food", then the search engine concludes your site is about "dog food". This is overlooked quite often, but it seems to have a very large impact on your search engine rankings for a particular keyword. Your anchor text needs to be the keyword or phrase you are trying to target. Try to avoid anchor text such as "Click Here" or "www.yoursite.com"

Also, if you're running a reciprocal link campaign, be sure to use variations of your text. If an engine notices every link to your site is identical, it could place less weight on these links or potentially penalize your site. This is because search engines generally give more weight to "naturally occurring" links, and less to "reciprocal link exchange campaigns". Using different, but relevant anchor text can dramatically affect your targeted keyword rankings, by making your links appear more natural.

Effective SEO may seem difficult at first, but as you have read above, little tricks that require little or no programming knowledge, can make a huge impact on your website's keyword ranking.

Noah Ulrich is a successful internet marketer, and webmaster of
Informativeresources.com. His site maintains top rankings in all major search engines. He has owned and maintained an online presence since 2001. His site provides top quality resale rights, guaranteed signups, and web traffic to businesses all over the world.

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SEO – A Short Course

SEO – A Short Course
By Shawn Hickman

Anyone who does business on the internet today has heard of SEO (search engine optimization), and many have tried their hand at it themselves. Most find, however, that they don’t get much response from their efforts. This leads to a dilemma for a start-up business: Is there any way to capitalize on internet traffic without paying big bucks for a professional SEO?

The answer is, yes and no. As with anything in business, you can’t get something for nothing, and most people who own top listings for competitive search engine keywords have paid dearly for that privilege. However, there are some simple things that can help make your new website more friendly not only to search engines, but also to your customers:

1. Remember that your customers always come first! Make your site easy to use and easy to buy from, and you will win a loyal following. Simple, straightforward sites perform best all around. Clearly labeled navigation, informative page content, secure online purchasing and ease of ordering are some key elements to a successful website.

2. The KISS rule: Keep It Simple, Silly. Remember that not every potential customer has broadband internet, many surf the web behind firewalls which will not allow downloads, many have vision problems, and many do not have sound cards. Your pages should load quickly and cleanly in any browser (the most commonly used resolution is 800 x 600), your content and navigation should be in a larger type (font size 2 or greater, 10px or greater), and don’t rely on Flash movies, sound, or downloads.

3. Your index page is hands-down your most important page, for search engines and visitors alike. You have 10 seconds or less to convince someone to stay on your website. Give them a brief text summary of your company, your website, and your products/services. Two or three paragraphs is plenty; save the detail for the inner pages.

4. Do use meta tags, but use them properly! Meta tags consist of the title, description, and keywords, although there are other tags possible. For SEO, the 3 listed are the most important. Keep them simple and brief. The search engines that still use them have character limits, and also have strict spam rules, so don’t use a keyword more than once. Be specific: “insurance” is unlikely to get you any rankings, but “California life insurance” might, as it is a less competitive term.

5. Don’t use frames. Frames are a convenience for designers, but most search engines hate them, and so do most site visitors.

6. Don’t use a form for your landing page. Forms have little or no useful text content, so they won’t help your rankings (unless you want to rank well for “name and address”!). In general, they do not convert well to sales either. If you want a form on the first page, make sure you still have a couple of paragraphs of informative text.

7. Make sure your site has at least 5 pages of content. Search engines reward you for “site depth”. Many internet consumers will look for certain pages such as the About Us page and Testimonials; these help lend credibility which helps convert to sales, while giving you solid site content. And don’t forget your site map!

8. Every page should, ideally, link to every other page. This makes the site very easy for your visitors to use, and gives the search engine spiders a road map. When possible, increase the value of your text links: Instead of “Contact Us”, use “Contact the Women’s Network”.

9. If your site is dynamic, make sure you still have a few static pages. Many search engines still can’t “crawl” dynamic pages, so they can’t give you ranking for them. Your index page and your basic informative pages should be in static text.

10. Avoid anything “tricky” like hidden text, pages of irrelevant links, or spamming your site in any way. These tricks are well known, and if you’re caught, you will be sentenced to search engine Siberia!

Following these simple rules won’t guarantee you top search engine rankings (in fact, very few things can do that!) but they will help you to create a website that is informative, easy for your customers to use, and contains the key elements that search engines require.

SEO offers some of the best ROI in advertising for many industries, when done properly. If the time comes when you are ready to go after internet market more aggressively, don’t be afraid to hire a professional to help you out. Search engines change the rules at a dizzying pace, and only a professional can really invest the time needed to keep up. Just do your homework first; as with many other industries, internet marketing has its share of companies that make unrealistic promises. A little research can save you from a bad experience, and make sure you get the most value for your money!

Find more articles at http://www.4cornersflorida.com

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SEO Hints and Tips and Free SEO Tools

SEO Hints and Tips and Free SEO Tools
By Alan Boyer

Do you realize that if you manage your website, SEO tools, and pay-per-click tools, you can literally have as many leads as you want from your website? I assume that a website should convert approximately 5% of the viewers to doers, taking some kind of action that you want them to take. So, all we have to do is make sure the website does convert viewers to doers, and then we make sure we’ve got the right amount of traffic arriving at the website. All quite manageable. Today, we’re mainly talking about how to get the traffic to your website through Search Engine Optimization, SEO.

Here is a list of the best tools I’ve found to do SEO and a quick review of some of the top issues for SEO. Most of these tools are either free, or can be tried for free before buying

Most search engines are looking at your site to find relevant search words. How relevant determines your eventual search engine position.

How do they determine relevancy? Although every search engine has slightly different rules, here are some of the key ideas. Keep in mind, they could change tomorrow. Search engines are continually changing because just as soon as they determine how to find the relevant search words on your site, someone finds a way around their rules. Then search engines change the rules again.

A key word usually has to show up in each of the following areas of your site, with a density that falls within a range that search engine would like to see. They also like to see the words at a certain position in that area, usually at or near the beginning of these areas:

Areas search engines look at:

1)Meta tags (title, description, and keywords) (NOTE: I’m told that most search engines don’t consider meta tags any longer, but I keep seeing my keywords pop up from the meta tags).

2)Body text of the site

3)Headlines

4)Alternate text behind the graphics

5)Links, and link text

How do you choose the right keywords?

Here’s a big warning: Consider what people are looking for, not who you are or what your product is. For me, I would rather be found for “small business help” than for my company name, The Leader’s Perspective. Obviously I want people to find me, if by chance they are looking for me by name, but just think about this:

Aren’t there more people in the world looking for “small business help” or “business help” than could possibly be looking for my name. Those looking for my company name are those that I have probably met personally and sent them to my site. That’s a small number, in comparison to the number of companies on the internet looking for help that don’t have any idea who I am….yet anyway.

Here are some tools to find the right keywords.

http://inventory.overture.com
Enter a keyword, and Overture will return the number of times that keyword was searched for in the last month. It will also show you other variances of that same keyword and the number of searches for each variance.
Use this to brainstorm keywords. (NOTE: I’ve also discovered this is a VERY useful tool to use before sending out any kind of marketing. Find what people are looking for and then make sure those words show up in your marketing, AND in your website.

http://www.wordtracker.com

Now, this is an even better tool. This one contains a thesaurus as well, so it will show lots of other ways people have been searching for the keywords you’ve typed in.

This tool also has a way of measuring the RIGHT keyword that is even better than Overture for Search engine optimization.

Overture reports the number of searches last month for that keyword, so you can find the words that have the greatest number of searches.
However, Wordtracker, reports the greatest number of searches for the words with the LEAST competition.

When you are doing SEO it won’t do you any good to go after the words that have been searched for the most if there are millions of competing sites. It’s just not likely that you COULD get a page 1 ranking among millions of sites.

So, Wordtracker helps you find words that have been searched for ENOUGH to give you traffic, but at the same time have the least competition. They provide their own proprietary ranking that finds the best search words that you are likely to get a search engine position for.

Just make sure that the words you end up with from that search actually are words that someone would be looking for to find you.

Hint: I use Overture to find the greatest number of searches and use that for pay-per-clicks, and use Wordtracker to find the right search words for Search engine optimization.

Here are some other useful tools.

Tools that help you Learn Search Engine optimization while guiding you through the process.

Internet Business Promoter will provide not only an analysis of many of the search engine sensitive stats, but will give you almost a step-by-step how to fix your site. Although this has ended up down the list, this is probably the number one greatest tool to learn search engine optimization.
www.axandra.com

Another similar tool is
http://www.wpgsales.com/

Link Popularity

Search engines tend to give websites that have more external links from other websites pointing at them a higher search engine ranking. Here are a couple of free tools to track your link popularity, and to check our competition as well. www.checkyourlinkpopularity.com
http://www.marketleap.com (this one shows a graph if your history)

Alan Boyer, President/CEO of The Leader’s Perspective, LLC is considered one of the world’s leading breakthrough specialists. He has worked with some of the worlds largest companies, on projects in the multi-billion dollar area, and with single proprietor companies. He has worked on many hundreds of projects with companies that have resulted in multi-$100 million savings or gains.

With over 35 years of business, quality, and process experience, he has catapulted businesses lightyears ahead in weeks. Some have doubled and some have jumped 10 times. He claims the key to that is:

Helping the business owners/employees develop the business skills

Helping them overcome the limitations and attitudes that they built between their ears (the self imposed limitations, I can’t, this won’t work for me, I’m different)

By helping them find the breakthroughs in their business and thinking

He helps companies worldwide reach further than they EVER thought possible….FASTER

http://www.leaders-perspective.com/Small-Business-Help.aspx

mailto:AlanBoyer@leaders-perspective.com

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