Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Define Search Engine Optimization - What Does Search Engine Optimization Mean? By Keith Garrow

Sunday, May 17th, 2009

Search engine optimization is an enormous subject, which involves the various actions you need to take to get your website to rank well in search engine results. These actions will include visible changes you make to your website, and things you need to do that cannot be seen on your web pages. The reason search engine optimization is so important is that if you do not get it right, your website is likely to have no visitors at all unless you pay for advertising.

The only way to get regular free traffic to your website is to have pages which are returned on the first pages of search engine results. Websites featuring in the top three places receive many times more visitors than any outside the top three, and if your site is not in the top thirty results, you may as well not be in the top thousand. This is why search engine optimization matters so much.

To be in the top results, your web pages need to be optimized for words and phrases that people are searching for, and you need to ensure that the search engines see your site as an authority in these areas. When someone types a phrase into a search engine such as Google, what the search engine then tries to do is find all the sites that have information relevant to the term searched for, and then present the results in a ranked order, with the most important or authoritative sites at the top. That is a very crude approximation of what is actually an extremely complex process, but it is generally accepted that this is more or less the main thrust of what Google does.

Judging the relevance of your site is fairly straightforward matter of analysing the information on your website. But how does Google decide which sites are most important? A very good, and crucial question. What the guys at Google want to see is a web full of interesting sites, packed with useful information. They make the reasonable assumption that if a site is a good one, webmasters from other sites will link to it to help their own visitors. Therefore one of Google’s main measures for the importance of a site is the quantity and quality of links from other sites that are pointing to it.

Quantity is self explanatory, but quality is an important point to understand. A hundred links from unrelated sites that Google does not consider important are likely to be of less worth than one link from a site that Google ranks very highly and which covers a subject closely related to your site.

There are many other aspects and details involved in search engine optimization, but most of the detail is concerned with the main points I have outlined - having the right search terms on your page and getting enough of the right sort of links pointing to your site.

Find detailed information and guidance on search engine optimization on Keith Garrow’s website. Originally created to showcase his abstract art, the site is also full of useful advice based on his experience of going from knowing nothing about websites to creating one that now ranks in the top five out of eight million.

Do You Research Keywords For Your Website? See Why Proper Keyword Research is So Important By Patrick A Martin

Saturday, May 16th, 2009

Ever found yourself wondering why your website does not make it to the top 10 results in a search engine? If you’re among the millions of website / webpage owners / web designers, i’m pretty sure you have at some point of time thought about this.

Have you thought about why others may want to see your site? Have you considered what your visitors want, and what you’re really offering your visitors? Would you really want to visit your site if it wasn’t yours?

Building a website is all about researching what others want. Everything on your site needs to be about what others would like. Once you’ve understood and acknowledged these facts, you are now in a position to really really build a site that people want to visit.

Unfortunately, most pages designed rarely have what it takes to make the cut for Search Engines to rank the page high. While a lot of thought is put into the layout and graphics on a website, little to no thought goes into the hidden sections of the site, such as the META TAGS, and very often even the visible content such as the TITLE.

Try doing a Google search for the term “New Document”, and you’ll see exactly what I mean. Of the over 300 million results, only a handful will have content that actually refers to creating / modifying a new document.

Just about every webmaster knows how important the TITLE and META tags really are. In case you still don’t know, have no fear. It’s never too late to learn. Head over to your favorite search engine, and look for ‘meta tags’.

Now here’s where your research comes in. You need to research the keywords for your site based on what people want. What better way to know that than to look for what people are searching for? Lookup ’search trends’ for your favorite search engine (and some of the other popular ones too). You’ll get samples of what people want (are looking for).

Use this information to build your title and meta tags. If possible and relevant, use some of these terms within your page content as well. Don’t overdo it though. You don;t want search engines thinking you’re just bombarding everyone with a bunch of keywords and search terms.

Congratulations! You now know a secret that can help you reap the rewards of having your website high on search engines. See the difference this one strategy makes to your Search Engine Ranking Positions (SERP).

More tips on Keyword Research, Content Optimization and Search Engine Optimization by the Search Engine Optimization Magicians can be found at http://blog.seomagicians.com.

The Nofollow Attribute and SEO By Roger T Matthews

Friday, May 1st, 2009

The “nofollow” HTML attribute was originally designed to stop comment spam on blogs. Blog readers and bloggers were well aware of the immense problem. Just like any other type of spam affects it’s community, comment spam affected the entire blogging community, so in early 2005 Google’s Matt Cutts and Blogger’s Jason Shellen designed an attribute to address the problem and the nofollow attribute was born.

Since then, the nofollow attribute’s usage has gone far beyond just blog comments. Web directories commonly use the nofollow to control outbound links. Free directory listings that are either not paid or are not reciprocally linked usually use the nofollow attribute. Since both outbound and inbound links are considered when some of the important search engines rank a page, the nofollow attribute is used to control the outbound links so as not to give away ranking.

Many of the newer SEO back-link checking scripts now include information on whether or not a website or blog is using nofollow on its pages or in its robots.txt file. This information is useful for site administrators that want to know which sites are giving them ranking and which ones are not. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said “Knowledge comes by eyes always open and working hands; and there is no knowledge that is not power.” In this case the power lies in both using and knowing what other sites use nofollow.

Google suggests that paid listings should include the nofollow attribute so that ranking cannot be purchased and so page rankings stay true. Because most search engines use links to help determine the reputation of a site, they must consider paid links to be a way for site owners with deep pockets to circumvent the process. It makes sense but I doubt we’ll see many sites that sell advertising include an attribute that will affect the links to their advertisers and therefore advertising dollars. Until Google finds a way to determine which links are paid, a very difficult task, the practice of buying links for ranking will continue.

Some SEOs have suggested that pages such as “About Us”, “Terms of Service”, “Contact Us”, and “Privacy Policy” are not important enough to earn PageRank and should have nofollow on internal links pointing to them. Others disagree and feel that there are surfers that actively search for these pages and that it should not be used. I tend to agree with the latter and don’t think it hurts anything if the attributes aren’t assigned to those pages. A cursory search for all three page types resulted in quite a few well-ranked pages for each.

The nofollow attribute in no way, affects the traffic that utilizes a link that carries the attribute, that’s just common sense, but for many webmasters and bloggers a quality link is a two-headed and friendly monster. It benefits your site in both page rank and in traffic. Cut off one head and the monster looses half of its strength. That also depends on what is important to you and what your goals are. Both are important and in many ways they can work hand-in-hand. As we see more search engines adopt the ranking system its importance will continue to grow as well.

The nofollow attribute’s importance is evident simply because of the weight some SEO companies place on it when developing their back-link scripts. Just knowing if a site you are linking to includes the attribute when there is an exchange of links can only be valuable information. If you aren’t using the nofollow attribute when linking to a particular site, but they are, it may be an unfair trade. I say “may” because it depends on the page rank of both sites. What’s fair to one may not be fair to the other.

The best way to be sure that the use of the nofollow attribute is fair depends on a number of factors. Being aware of where and why it is being used can benefit you in many ways and may help you determine what you should do when linking reciprocally. Nothing can take the place of active moderation whether you run a forum, a blog or manage a reciprocal link list. Knowing how sites are linking to yours can help you make wise decisions.

Roger Matthews is a freelance, article writer and the webmaster at http://www.published-articles.com and http://webdirectory.published-articles.com

Roger T Matthews - EzineArticles Expert Author