Top Seven Insider SEO Tricks to Boost Your Website Rankings

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Many people in the internet marketing world got a rude awakening one day when the Google Slap came around, myself included!. They introduced a new parameter into their Adwords algorithum which measures the “quality” of the site that you want to buy clicks for. If the quality is considered too low they increase the cost of the clicks. In the same way Google had earlier cleaned out the doorway type pages from the organic search results, removing that source of cheap traffic as well.For those still in the dark, Google introduced a new quality metric in their PPC system which also takes into account the “quality” of your website that you want to advertise. If they consider it not good enough the costs of clicks is increased, in some cases to ridiculous figures like $5 or $10 a click!

The 3 big search engines, Google, Yahoo and MSN account for about 80-95% of the search traffic, so if you want more free organic search engine traffic focus on these. After the Google slap many marketers began to refocus their SEO efforts as they could not afford to pay the high PPC costs.

Most website can be improved in terms of SEO with a little work, if you have been neglecting your site over the last few years now would be a good time to do a make over. Here are some quick fixes that you can make:

1. There is a big issue with duplicate content on websites, never copy and paste content from other websites, it may look good but it will kill your website and more than likely get your site banned or pages de-indexed from the listings. If you have copied material from other sites replace it with some re-written text.

2. As already mentioned the SE’s (search engines) hate duplicated content but love original content. One of the best ways to get more traffic for your site is to add original content, however you can. Try writing it yourself or ask family members, friends or relatives. You can try to hire students or sub contract a freelancer to do it, but just do it!. Try and add at least 650 words to each page using your keywords and some good descriptive test.

3. Many websites still keep affiliate links for years even though they have never made any money from them, if this is you get ride of them. If they are none productive not only do they make your site look un-professional they can also bleed valuable page rank from your site. If you want to keep them fortunatley there is an easy fix, see below for details.

4. A big mistake many webmasters make is to link all their non-money pages from every page on their site. Pages like contact us, privacy policy, site map and disclosures are often linked from every page, this will degrade the effectiveness of your money keyword pages and they will not rank as high. In addition these pages will drain off page rank, which is very valuable, from your important pages and be wasted!.

5. It is important that every page in your site has a unique title and description, don’t bother with the keyword meta tag. manually check, or do some sort of search with your web design tool to check that you don’t have pages called “New Page 1″ (created by Frontpage!), or index.htm etc. Also check that you don’t have pages with duplicate titles and descriptions, this is easy done when you copy one page and use it as a template for others. Don’t expect these sorts of pages to do well in the rankings.

6. When linking to pages that are not important to you, like the privacy page, the contact us page and in affiliate links etc, use the nofollow parameter to stop your valuable page rank from being wasted in pages that will never rank in the search engines. For example if your link is this:

 

How to Improve Search Engine Rankings

Category: Tips and Tricks    |    158 views    |    Add a Comment  |   

1. Check your listings

If you are going to see an increase in traffic to your web site, you need to be listed in the top 20-30 sites. If you are not listed in them, you should at least submit your site to the major search engines. If you are already in the top 10, then keep monitoring your site’s search engine rankings to maintain your search engine position. If you are not in the top 30 position, continue with the next step.

2. Select the right keywords and phrases

Go to Word Tracker or the overture suggestion tool to find the most popular words and phrases that suit the theme of your web site.

Weave these words and phrases into your meta tags (title, description and keyword tags), web copy (particularly the first 200 words of your web page) and links (i.e. if your site is called camping.com and you have a page for camping tools, name the link www.camping.com/campingtools.htm, instead of www.camping.com/generic.htm).

Optimize each web page with different keywords. Visitors can then enter your site from different pages, depending on what keyword they entered in the search engines.

3. Exchange reciprocal links

Search for other sites that compliment your own site and ask for a reciprocal link back to your site. Ideally the site should have the same keyword phrases as yours and already have a high search engine ranking. These are quality links.

Having many sites linked to yours, will increase the popularity of your site in the search engines, resulting in a higher ranking.

If you are very busy or want to build a useful link directory, you can use reciprocal link exchange management script which can generate search engine friendly webpages.

4. Write articles

Choose your best keywords and weave them into the theme of your articles. Include a link to your web site in the resource box at the end of your articles. Submit your articles to ezine publishers and article announcement lists. This gives your article the potential to be read by thousands of ezine subscribers. Your article will become linked to many web sites, resulting in higher rankings.

5. Participate in forums

Find a forum that is related to the theme of your web site. People visit these forums to look for content that answers their questions. Once you have provided helpful information, you can leave a link to your site in your signature file. If this is a highly trafficked forum, leaving your link there, will increase your site’s popularity.

In addition, a link in those forums can increase your website visitors.

6. Monitor your search engine rankings

The best way to check how your site is doing in the search engines is to check your web site statistics. A high quality web hosting service will show you which pages receive the most traffic (hits and visits) and where it is coming from (which search engines).

Software like WebPosition Gold 3 allows you to check search engine rankings and offer advice to improve search engine placements. Why not download a free trial copy?

7. Exercise patience Search engines

Typically search engines take one day to three months to spider your web site, so your changes will not be seen immediately. Think of the steps outlined above, as a long-term marketing strategy for your web site.

Tip Generating a massive amount of traffic to your web site, doesn’t guarantee sales. Here is a short list of factors that will also help convert your visitors into sales:

Professional site design Well-written web copy
Fast loading times
Simple navigation
No broken links
Optimizing for different screen resolutions
Optimizing for the main browsers

 

How to Easily Create a Search-Engine Friendly Navigation Menu For Your Website

Category: Tips and Tricks    |    154 views    |    Add a Comment  |   

To create a search engine friendly web page is a very important element for search engine optimization. With such a web page, you can get a higher chance to get high search engine ranking and entice website visitors. A search engine friendly navigation menu not only allows website visitors to browse your easily but also allows search engines to index and analyze your website easily. This article tells you how to make use of server side include (SSI) to achieve the purpose.

A navigation menu is an important element of a website.

A good navigation menu helps your visitors navigate through your website efficiently - in as few mouse-clicks as possible.

You can think of a website navigation menu like the “Table of Contents” of a book.

And the greater the number of web pages on your website, the more important the role of a website navigation menu.

Another important benefit of a navigation menu is it optimizes the internal linking structure of your website and allows the navigation menu links to rank better in search engines, since all web pages will be pointing to it.

(For example, if your website has 1000 web pages, each navigation menu link will have 1000 web pages pointing to it. This will result in the navigation menu links ranking higher than the other web pages)

Here’s how you can use this knowledge to improve the search-engine rankings of selected web pages - Simply include the selected web pages as links in the navigation menu and you’ll automatically have the rest of the web pages pointing to them.

And finally, here’s one method you can use to easily create a website navigation menu - Using Server Side Includes (SSI).

What are Server Side Includes?

Server Side Includes (SSI) are simply instructions (also known as “directives”) that are included in a HTML document to execute a specific command e.g. inserting the content of an HTML file.

The SSI directives are “processed” at the Server side, before it reaches the requesting browser (hence the name Server Side Includes).

As a result, the “processed” SSI directives merge seamlessly with the HTML file.

Here’s an example of SSI in action at a website (i.e. the left navigation menu): http://www.BizSuccessOnline.com.

Notice the left navigation menu is made up of static HTML links.

This is to allow search-engine spiders to crawl through the website to discover other web pages (via the navigation menu links).

An alternative solution to get your web pages spidered by search-engines is to use a sitemap.

A sitemap is simply a webpage that contains links to every webpage on your website and should be linked from your home page.

This will provide the search-engine spiders a path to follow and will ultimately result in your web pages getting fully indexed.

You can learn more about sitemaps here: http://SiteMapSoftware.com

Note that most, but not all servers have SSI’s enabled. Please check with your web host to find out whether SSI is enabled in your server.

How to Easily Create a Navigation Menu Using SSI?

Step 1# - Create a HTML navigation menu file

This is the navigation menu file that will be inserted into your HTML pages and is also your HTML navigation menu template.

A simple horizontal text HTML navigation menu can look like this:

Home | Products | Pricing | About Us | Contact Us

(You’ll need to hyperlink each of the above text to make these navigation links clickable by using your favorite HTML editor e.g. FrontPage or Dreamweaver)

You need to save this file with a .shtml extension once this file has been created e.g. topnavi.shtml

Step 2# - Insert navigation menu file into HTML file

Open up the HTML file (e.g. products.html) and place the cursor on the location where you wish to insert the navigation menu.

Click here to view the SSI directive: http://BizSuccessOnline.com/SSI_CodeSnippet

And copy and paste the above SSI directive at the cursor.

(Be sure to replace “your_navigation_filename.shtml” with the name of your navigation menu file)

Note: You CANNOT use absolute path with an SSI directive: e.g. do not use http://yourdomain.com/topnavi.shtml

And finally, save the HTML file with a .shtml extension e.g. products.shtml

Step 3# - Upload files onto your server

The last step is to upload the newly created .shtml files onto your web server and check to make sure the pages display properly.

And if you view the HTML source code of your HTML file on a live internet connection, you’ll notice that the SSI directive would have been replaced by the actual HTML navigation menu code.

Maintaining your navigation menu is now a simple matter of changing the contents on the navigation file.

 

Search Engine Optimization Advice

Category: Tips and Tricks    |    228 views    |    Add a Comment  |   

Search Engine Optimization Techniques:

{title}…{/title}

This tag is to be a winner. This is a primary spot to include our keywords for SE spiders, bots or crawlers (”spider” hereafter). {title} tags are the best “dainty dish” for SE spiders. They “eat them as cakes”, so make title tags to be “tasty” for them, about 65 characters long.

{meta name=description content=”…”}

Important Meta tag. Very often the description you put will be shown at the SE searching results. To my personal opinion they have more important marketing role of attracting visitors than actual optimization. The SEs’ trust in “description” tag as well as our next “keywords” tag has been greatly discriminated due to fraud and unfair competition. Make it no more than 250 characters long, including, of course, your targeted keywords as well.

{meta name=keywords content=”…”}

Another advisable to use Meta tag should be included with all your targeted and untargeted, but related to the topic, key phases separated by commas. Note that highly popular and stand alone keywords like “web-site”, “internet”, “business” etc. will give you nothing more than increase the size of your web-page. I won’t be mistaken if I say that about tens of billion of web-pages have them. Don’t overuse your keywords as well, spiders don’t like to be forced to eat what they don’t want to.

{meta name=author content=”…”}{meta name=copyright content=”…”}{meta name=language content=”…”} etc.

Subsidiary Meta tags used are more likely to satisfy webmasters’ ego, rather than any real help in rankings.

{h1}…{/h1} {h2}…{/h2} {h3}…{/h3}

In contrary to the previous tags the importance of, let’s call them, {body} tags have substantially risen for simple reason, they are readable by visitors and it is hardly to cheat SE with them than Meta description or keywords tags where any webmaster may put anything s/he wants. Given that these tags determine the headers of your web-page from the SE spiders’ viewpoint, try to include your targeted keywords in them.

{img src=: alt=”…”}

“Alt” is just a comment for every image you insert into the page. Use this knowledge at your advantage. Include your key phrases where possible and safe. By “safe” I mean common sense, don’t input comment like “ebook package” into the image of the button that leads to your partner, say, “Pizza ordering” web-site. On the contrary, if your web-site has graphical menu and buttons, it is very wise to include “alt” comments according to directions they lead to, i.e. “Home”, “Services”, “About Us”, “Contacts” etc. If for any reason visitors have their browser with images turned off, they won’t see any menu if you haven’t inserted “alt” comments.

Content

Your informational coverage should be keyword/phrase rich, the same way as headers. In general the more relevant key phrases your textual information will contain, the better your chances of being “remarked” by SE spider are.

HTML text format tags like bolding {b}, italic type {i} and underlining {u} may also have some weight in SEs placement.

Key word density and frequency are another indexes vastly used by SE to rank web-pages. Don’t overuse them though.

Link popularity (page rank)

Another extremely important parameter for your listing position nowadays. In general the more links on third party web-sites point to your site the better. Although try to avoid “link farms” or other “clubs’ the only aim of which is to artificially increase your link popularity. These tactics may simply result in penalization or banning of your web-site.

Link popularity without any doubt helps to increase the relevance of searched terms more often than it doesn’t, but makes SEO even more far-reaching target, because establishing “incoming” links pointing to your site is beyond your direct power.

To be short, your task is to find web-sites that have highest SE listing positions and/or page rank (determined via Google Toolbar) and negotiate a link to your site in return for some service, product or solicit simple exchange of links. As you see these “manual” work is the most time-consuming, but it repays if you are focused to get as much relevant links as possible.

You may apply viral strategies by offering some free/paid service that implies putting a link back to your site.

Google has developed its own link popularity evaluation tool called Page Rank. It is calculated basing on consistently changing number rules: current rank of the site the link to your page is pointing from, its relevance to your web-site topic etc.

Fake tactics

They are what I call them and used by webmasters similar to ways some “marketers” use spam to promote their businesses. Unfortunately, usual internet users don’t have ability to “ban” spammers the same way SEs penalize those “smart” webmasters. I don’t recommend you to use any of these tactics, even on someone’s “advice”. They include excessive use or related and totally unrelated keywords, comment tags, hidden layers, text on the background of the same color, artificial link farms, numerous entry pages etc. This game simply won’t be worth candles if your web-site is banned for good.

robots.txt file

Very important file every web-site should have but very little actually has. It allows you to literally rule or direct SE spider to the “proper” places, explaining what and where should be scanned, not just blind waiting of your lucky day. With its help you can also protect your confidential web-pages and or directories from scanning and showing at the SE searching results, very important feature many web-masters solve with “tons” of Java or even Perl coding instead of one line string in the robots.txt file that will forbid to scan “download”, so-called “thank you” pages or anything you want! General rules of creating robots.txt file you can find here http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/robots.html

Design & Layout issues

Next point is to have a textual info. The simple declaration of content rich web-site is not enough, SEs need text to scan.

Clear to follow links. If you have Flash or Java applet navigation menu, make sure to duplicate somewhere and include HTML links as well. Most SE spiders cannot distinguish dynamically created web-pages with the help of ASP, Perl, PHP or other languages. It is also clear that all web-pages, access to which was forbidden (no matter how) by administrator, would also be left unnoticed. The same relates to HTML frame sites. What frames actually do is complicate the way web-site is being scanned, no more, no less. When I see web-site made of frames, it is like webmaster telling me: “I want lower SE position.”

Because of the excessive work spiders have to do in order to scan as many pages as possible, their scanning “accuracy”, if we can say so, have dropped, so they will hardly scan each and every of your pages from the very top to the bottom, it is more likely to be selective scanning, so, to ease this process you should try to arrange the most valuable info, including header tags and text at the very top of web-pages. Having “site map” page with all link connections of your site not only does it help your potential visitors, but SEs as well.

All link names, inside your informational content, are to contain your related keywords or phrases, not just “click here” or “download here”.

Avoid a lot of javascripts, cascade style sheet tags or a lot of image tags at the top of the page that could occupy more than a page of HTML source code with almost no textual info. If you have java or .css coding save them as separate files and upload on request, leaving one string of code in your HTML document only. This tactic is also very smart considering general web-page optimization and space saving purposes.

 

SEO: Google’s Next Big Move

Category: Tips and Tricks    |    144 views    |    Add a Comment  |   

Google touts highly its secret PageRank algorithm. Although PageRank is just one factor in choosing what sites appear on a specific search, it is the main way that Google determines the “importance” of a website.

In recent months, SEO specialists have become expert at manipulating PageRank, particularly through link exchanges.

There is nothing wrong with links. They make the Web a web rather than a series of isolated islands. However, PageRank relies on the naturally “democratic” nature of the web, whereby webmasters link to sites they feel are important for their visitors. Google rightly sees link exchanges designed to boost PageRank as stuffing the ballot box.

I was not surprised to see Google try to counter all the SEO efforts. In fact, I have been arguing the case with many non-believing SEO specialists over the past couple months. But I was surprised to see the clumsy way in which Google chose to do it.

Google targeted specific search terms, including many of the most competitive and commercial terms. Many websites lost top positions in five or six terms, but maintain their positions in several others. This had never happened before. Give credit to Barry Lloyd of SearchEngineGuide.com for cleverly uncovering the process.

For Google, this shakeup is just a temporary fix. It will have to make much bigger changes if it is serious about harnessing the “democratic” nature of the Web and neutralizing the artificial results of so many link exchanges.

Here are a few techniques Google might use (remember to think like a search engine):

  1. Google might start valuing inbound links within paragraphs much higher than links that stand on their own. (For all we know, Google is already doing this.) Such links are much less likely to be the product of a link exchange, and therefore more likely to be genuine “democratic” votes.
  2. Google might look at the concentration of inbound links across a website. If most inbound links point to the home page, that is another possible indicator of a link exchange, or at least that the site’s content is not important enough to draw inbound links (and it is content that Google wants to deliver to its searchers).
  3. Google might take a sample of inbound links to a domain, and check to see how many are reciprocated back to the linking domains. If a high percentage are reciprocated, Google might reduce the site’s PageRank accordingly. Or it might set a cut-point, dropping from its index any website with too many of its inbound links reciprocated.
  4. Google might start valuing outbound links more highly. Two pages with 100 inbound links are, in theory, valued equally, even if one has 20 outbound links and the other has none. But why should Google send its searchers down a dead-end street, when the information highway is paved just as smoothly on a major thoroughfare?
  5. Google might weigh a website’s outbound link concentration. A website with most outbound links concentrated on just a few pages is more likely to be a “link-exchanger” than a site with links spread out across its pages.

Google might use a combination of these techniques and ones not mentioned here. We cannot predict the exact algorithm, nor can we assume that it will remain constant. What we can do is to prepare our websites to look and act like a website would on a “democratic” Web as Google would see it.

For Google to hold its own against upstart search engines, it must deliver on its PageRank promise. Its results reflect the “democratic” nature of the Web. Its algorithm must prod webmasters to give links on their own merit. That won’t be easy or even completely possible. And people will always find ways to turn Google’s algorithm to their advantage. But the techniques above can send the Internet a long way back to where Google promises it will be.

 

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