Archive for July, 2007

Importance of Domain Names

Friday, July 6th, 2007

A domain name is important to a company’s online presence.  It will most likely be the first thing that your potential customers will encounter, and remember your company by if they find your business online. You need a domain name if you’re serious about being an online entity, it’s where you’ll direct all your potential customers to. For them to become customers you’ve to make a good first impression and having your own domain name will enable you to do this.

Does your domain name affect your search engine ranking? In my experience, the domain name has an enormous impact. One variable that modern search engines consider when determining which of the thousands - or millions - of results should be presented in the top slots is definitely the domain name of the site. The main advantages of having keywords in your domain name, are that you can legitimately include them in H1 tags i.e. welcome to <h1>SiteName.com</h1> You can also include the keywords in contact details, in links to other sections of your site and the title of your site.

Other benefits of your own domain name are:

1] It will make your business look more professional

2] Having an easy-to-remember domain name will result in more traffic to your site

3] You can create a professional looking email address with mail sent to your domain name

 So we highly recommend getting your own domain name if you are serious about doing business on the net.

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Meta Tags and SEO

Friday, July 6th, 2007

Meta Tags are the information inserted in the <head> area of the HTML code of your web pages, where apart from the Title Tag, other information inserted is not visible to the person surfing your web page but is intended for the search engine crawlers.

Meta Tags Optimization is an important aspect of the search engine optimization process. Properly optimizing meta tags can help you achieve good rankings in the search engines. The meta tags are supposed to tell search engines and users what a particular page is all about.

There are three meta-tags that concern most marketers:

1] Title - This is the text that appears in the title-bar of your web browser.

2] Description - This is a quick summary of the information on the page.

3] Keywords - These are words that are important in the page.

Every page title and meta description on your site is enormously important, from the point of view of both the search engines and your readers.  Always use your top keywords in each one of your web pages - it signals to the search engines as well as your readers what that page is about. The meta description tag tends to get overlooked far too much. It’s one of those SEO things that usually gets left to the last minute. Like the title tag a descriptive meta tag signals to the search engines and your readers what that page is about. When someone does a search on Google they’ll scan through the page titles and descriptions. Search engines, especially Google, will display the description you wrote for the meta description if the search term being used can be found exactly in the meta description you wrote. Avoid repeating the same word over and over in the Keywords Meta Tag. Repeating the same word over and over is a spamming technique known as ‘Keyword Stuffing’. Also, remember to keep the length of the tag below 200 characters. Never use keywords that are completely irrelevant to your site in the hope of ranking highly for a popular phrase. Most search engines will penalize you, if you do this.

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Role of Keyword Density in SEO

Friday, July 6th, 2007

So you’ve built your website, you know what keywords you want to target (i.e. what words your customers are searching for), and you’re ready to write your copy. You’ve been told that you should use your keywords frequently so that you appear in search results for those words. But what does "frequently" mean? In order to understand optimum keyword usage, we first need to have some way of measuring keyword frequency. In the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) world, frequency is actually referred to as keyword density. In simple words, keyword density is the ratio of the word that is being searched for against the total number of words appearing on a given web page. If your keyword occurs only 2-3 times in a page of 500 or more words, obviously it has a lower keyword density than a keyword that would occur 8-10 times in a page of similar length.

As far as search engines are concerned, if a particular keyword has a higher density on a particular web page, then the chances of that page obtaining a much better search engine ranking increases almost exponentially. Not all search engines compute or evaluate keyword density in the same way and most have their own proprietary algorithm for calculating the average density of a keyword. Each search engine, from industry dominant Google, to Yahoo, to MSN Search, to the various other search engines, has a different keyword calculation. Some search engines permit heavier keyword numbers and density on the page, while some like Google, have much stricter allowable density levels. The placement of keywords, in any number of locations on the page, has different results in the various search engines as well.

The placement of keywords, in any number of locations on the page, has different results in the various search engines as well. Hence, you should try to write sentences that use your important keywords and key phrases.  However,  you should try and keep keyword density around 1.5% - 2%. If you overstep this limit there is a real chance of your site being penalized by Google.

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Section headings and SEO

Friday, July 6th, 2007

There are 6 heading tags available in HTML coding. H1 is the largest and at the top of the heading structure hierarchy. H6 is the smallest and at the bottom of the heading structure hierarchy. Headings tags indicate to a search engine what a page is about. Heading tags label your headline so that search engines will recognize it as "important" on your web page. Hence, you should use the heading tags to identify the different sections of your articles. The heading tags will make your headline bolder so it will stand out.  Each search engine has a different way of prioritizing the importance of headings therefore it is important to use the heading tags correctly to create proper heading structure. When writing your headings, include your main keywords in the headings.  Be as specific as possible to increase your chances of being listed in a reasonable spot in the search engines. Don’t try to fool the engines by sprinkling heading tags throughout a web page. Instead, use heading tags where they make sense. Try an H1 tag for the main title of the page, and H2 and H3 tags for section headings.

Suggestions:

1]  Use keywords that relate to the page content in your heading tags.

2]  Have your keywords occur early in the tags.

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Filenames

Friday, July 6th, 2007

One of the simplest methods to improve your search engine optimization is to look at the way you name your files. Google give lots of importance to file names. You should think what are you going to put in your web page and then give it a relevant file name. How important is your filename? When you do a search in the search engines, most of them will highlight keyword(s) in your filename or your directory path. In other words Google is signalling the importance of filenames by highlighting it.

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Importance of anchor text

Friday, July 6th, 2007

Anchor text is the text (title) that appears within your hyperlink. In a well-built site the text that makes up the actual anchor link is indicative of the subject matter of the page it links to. Anchor text tells the search engines about the content of your web pages -  what the page is about and how others are perceiving it. In essence, the anchor text is about the relevancy of your webpage based on a keyword. Therefore your anchor text should always be completely relevant to the landing page (destination page) and should contain your keyword or keyword phrase.

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Link Building

Friday, July 6th, 2007

Inbound links are links from other web sites that point to your web site. The number and the quality of inbound links has become one of the most important ranking factors in Google, Yahoo and MSN Search. It’s a simple principle: if Site A links to Site B then it is seen by the search engines as a recommendation; that Site  A is ‘recommending’ Site B. The text that is used within the link that is linked to your website is also very important (especially to Google). Try to include your keywords or phrases into the text that is linking to your site.

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SEO and Graphics

Tuesday, July 31st, 2007

The biggest mistake made in web site design from search engine optimization perspective is creation of a fancy site with great graphics. Graphics is a major issue as it makes the site load very slow. It is a waste of time to spend money on search engine  optimization if the customers will not be able to download the site in the end. If your site loads too slowly, people will leave and you will lose customers. Moreover, search engines do not pick up text in graphics, no matter what image file you use JPEGS, GIFS, TIFF or BMP. Your first step in search engine optimization (SEO) is pretty simple - you have to remove all those bulky images from your web site. It is suggested that you use JPEG and GIF files for your images, if possible. Avoid use of BMP, TIFF and any other image files. They do not load as fast as JPEG files.

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SEO - Identifying your keywords

Tuesday, July 31st, 2007

One of the most important steps in SEO is identifying keywords that you want your site to be ranked in the top 10 for. It does not matter whether it’s a brand new site or an existing website. Brainstorm all of the terms that you think a prospective customer/visitor to your site would enter into the search engines. Take your own time. Look at the big picture - the theme of your website. A keyword can be a single word or consist of a combination of words. If it is more than a word, it is called a key-phrase.

Remember your keywords & phrases should be relevant to your site. For a site dealing with real estate some relevant keywords could be:    

Real estate

Real estate agency

Property

Buying property

Sell property

Dream house

Think about words that best describe your site and are likely to be used on your site. In a moment I will tell you how to decide which keywords to use and which ones not to.

I prefer to write all keywords for a site in a notebook. Not just keywords!!!  I use a blank notebook to take notes for every site I optimize. Write all the keywords and phrases that are relevant to your site in a notebook. This is important as you can refer to them at will, when required. You might not get all your keywords at once. No problem. You can use the following techniques to get more keywords.

1] Use tools like Wordtracker to find good keywords:  

2] Find keywords from your competitor’s site

A note of caution:

Just because a word occurs 50 times on a page and its word frequency is say 3% on that page do not think that you can achieve a higher ranking in the search engines by having that keyword 60 times on your page with a  word frequency of 3.5% or more. If you do so, you will be hurting your search engine rank. There are many reasons for a site ranking high in the search engine results. SEO isn’t that simple!!!

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