Posts Tagged ‘on page optimization’
Why you need more than just a Website
Although a website is the first step to succeed online, succeeding online don’t only rely on having a good site. It’s simply the first plan of action you need to implement before launching your site in the World Wide Web. Needless to say, it will be your store front to establish your online presence.
Before you start with the design, consider the fact that you need your site to work for Search Engines and end-users. You have to balance between the two, both are equally important for a website. You need more than just a website to launch an effective online campaign. Consider researching for keywords to use as your meta-tags, titles, description etc., learn the art of creating a navigation system that both users and spiders understand, create an XML site map etc. Visit this page on how to create an SEO Website Design Friendly.
Another thing, when I say more than just a website, it means worthy to be bookmarked as reference. Other site owners create a blog to share relevant information about the products and services they offer, while others provide a section for resources. You really don’t have to create a blog just to say you have one. You need to ask yourself this:
• Do I have passion for writing?
• Can I really maintain it?
These are just two of the questions you have to think over before launching your own blog (this will be discussed further on my next blog).
If what you have is more than just a website, then you don’t have to worry about on-site optimization. The next action you need to do is market your website doing off-site optimization. If you worked from the ground up, optimizing your site for Search Engine will not be as hard as it seems – less effort, more savings. Work from the ground up, learn the basics and avoid unnecessary processes to optimize a site. When the site is ready, you only need a good plan for your link building activities.
Scamming SEO Companies
There are scammers everywhere when it comes to the field of business and scammers won’t let the SEO services get away. Yes, there are also SEO companies who are nothing but scammers. Unfortunately, they still get to be successful in luring innocent people into their bait. Here are a few tips that you should know to avoid being one of the victims of SEO scammers.
Impossible Promises
Come on, we should get real here. There’s no way that a certain SEO company could give you a number one rank on Google in a matter of days. SEO is a continuous step-by-step process which helps your site to get up higher one at a time. Don’t fall for promises saying that they could get your site to page one of a search engine even if you’re beyond page ten. Keep in mind that SEO is not something that could be rushed. To be successful, patience is needed. It’s better to pay for a service that requires you to wait for a while but is sure to give you results than to pay for a service that promises fast results then leaving you with nothing.
Using Email for Marketing
If it’s a reliable SEO company that you want, you won’t find them in your e-mail’s Inbox or Spam folder. The best thing that you could do is to search for them in search engines. Companies with high page ranks are most probably trustworthy companies. Because if they offer SEO services then they should also be able to get their own sites have a higher page rank. Never fall for those who would email you saying “Your site is not listed in search engines” then would start offering services to get your site listed and even give you a high page rank.
Get Famous in Thousands of Search Engines
Sure this will really be pleasing to the ears of someone who wants their site to be as popular as they want. But thousands of search engines are just useless if you would think of it. The ones you should be concerned of are the big players such as Yahoo, Google, Bing, etc. Fraud SEO companies will just spread your site everywhere and that would do no good to you. It will just send minimal or worse, no traffic at all to your site and worse than that, your site could get penalized for spamming the web.
Research
Always look at the company’s background. Search for satisfied clients. Review their history and note any suspicious acts and information. Be vigilant. It’s better to be extra careful than be a victim of scammers. You will surely lose money if you rush into things without doing your research.
Being a victim of a scammer can always be avoided. Make sure you take all of these things into consideration when choosing the company for SEO services. Because when it’s too late, it’s impossible to get your money back and your site will be left to rot. These scammers are fast and smart. The key is to outsmart them by being careful.
How to Create SEO Website Design Friendly
A website should be eye catching to attract visitors. It should also be very search engine friendly. What matters aside from being user friendly is that it’s searchable on the web, otherwise, your website is useless.
How do we create an SEO friendly web design?
If you use flash on the entire website, you will have to put double the work to make it search engine firendly. Search Engine (SE’s) ignores Flash, therefore, you will also need a non-flash version of your website. If you really need to use flash, make sure that you have an alternative textual description that can be understood by SE spiders. Otherwise, you can also use web 2.0 technology to put your content first before your flash designs.
When using images, be sure to fill-in “name” and “alt” tags. The graphical image itself cannot be seen by SE spider, it is through this tags that SE spider interpret your website. Use relevant description only and do not try to deceive SE spider.
Avoid using frames, SE spiders have no way to interpret content on a frame.
Use CSS navigation and style sheets, doing so makes your navigational menu crawl-able and indexable by SE spider. Using Javascript and Flash do not have the same result – it is unseen by SE spiders. So if you have javascript or flash on your site, you also need to have simple texts of the same message you put in Javascript or flash.
Though it’s not a requirement to use CSS stylesheets, it will help your site to load faster.
Conduct a Keyword Research to use on your meta tags and contents but also avoid keyword stuffing, suggested keyword density is 3-5%. For the title tag, characters should be at lest 70 and 150 for the description. Have at least 5-8 important keywords listed in your keyword tag.
Also, use keyword researched on your anchor text, H1, H2 and H3 as much as possible. This will help you rank in Search Engine Result Page (SeRP).
Create SEO friendly URL, incorporate your keyword related to your web page. Use dashes to separate words.
Structure your site up to 3 levels deep; Google only sees three-levels deep.
Provide useful content and make sure to have at least 250 words each web page since some SE spiders requires at least 250 to analyze your site. Make it a point as well that content on your site coincide with keywords used, else, SE spider will find it of little value.
Lastly, provide a site map.
Having an optimized site works well with your SEO campaign, the second step now depends on you.
If you like this article you may want to read 10 Tips on Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization Simplified
For those who have heard SEO but do not know what it means, it’s an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. It means optimizing your site for greater chances on appearing on Search Engine Result Page (SeRP). This is the primary goal of every website owners. It may sound simple but definitely requires attention and dedication to make it work in your advantage. It can either improve or damage reputation of a websites’ performance. It’s an Internet Marketing strategy that analyzes how Search Engine work and how people behave.
There are two types of SEO, on-page and off-page optimization. The on-page optimization is improving the elements within your site. This includes:
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Title that you would like to appear on SeRP</TITLE>
<META CONTENT=”description of the content”>
<META CONTENT=”keywords separated by comma “>
</HEAD>
- Content – content should written based on relevant keywords.
- Title Tags –appears on the top portion of the code of your page.
- Meta Tags –not required though it allows detailed description of your site. The most commonly abused tag is the keyword meta-tag. Google in fact recently mentioned that they do not use keyword to rank in web search result, other Search Engine still does. People have used it to spam search engines. However, meta-description is still used as snippet in SeRP for Google.
- Title and Alt Attributes – describes text links and images.
- Internal Linking – linking within the site
- URL Structure
Off-page optimization is on the other hand is any method done off-page to maximize performance, such as:
- Link Development – backlinking, link exchange etc.
- Article Marketing – article distribution
- Social Media Marketing (SMM) – Facebook, Twitter etc.
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM) – paid listing
- Pay Per Click (PPC Campaign) – AdWords etc.
There are numerous techniques to optimize site off-page, the above mentioned are just list of commonly used strategies. Both methods complement each other.
Although different SEO expert has their own opinion which is better used to optimize websites. In my opinion, no matter how optimize the pages of your site is, without proper and continuous off-page optimization effort your SEO campaign may not be as successful as you thought it would be.
Additionally, you may implement both but still you will wonder why your site does not appear on the first page of SeRP, don’t be frustrated, there are more factors to consider including the number of years you have been in the web. There is no road map to follow in SEO - not because everybody is doing it, you should as well. One example is your Twitter and Facebook account, it’s one that is mostly talked about, everybody is doing but there are many things to consider before jumping in to Social Media Marketing.
Before doing anything always remember that every move you make could either break or make the best out of your business. SEO may be simplified in layman’s term but it’s not for everybody to chew. Experimenting on techniques and keeping up to date with the current trend is one of the factor behind SEO success.