Siam Communications Web Services & Tools » SEO

Immediate Ranking on Page One of Google Search Results

admin — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 03:11:34 +0000

I just read a post from Hub Spot on “Using Twitter to Ranking #1 on Google in less than 5 minutes“. At first I thought it was a hoax.

But the news was even better.

Based on the information in the article, I did a search for a post made on Monday on our own blog. None of my Tweets made ranked number 1 in Google, but the actual blog post featured on page one of the Google results for latest results. The posts ahead of me were taken by Nation Multimedia, one of the largest publishing organizations in Thailand.

I was happy being listed among the largest in the nation.

I was also amazed to see that my post had been tagged as being published about “20 hours ago”. So within a very short period of time, almost immediately, one of my blog posts gained instant page one status with the Google search engines.

The lesson learned here is this:

Keep your content fresh
Maintain consistency and posts often, but not too often
Use your keywords and phrases properly

This is probably old news for so many people out there. But by keeping these few points in mind, you can continue to enjoy Internet fame with good search engine rankings.

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Search Engine Ranking and Domain Names

admin — Thu, 06 May 2010 15:00:48 +0000

I see many questions in forums and social networks about the effect a domain name has on the search engine ranking of a website. The most common questions I have seen relate to:

Using hyphens between words of a domain name
Including primary keywords in a domain name
The TLD of a domain name(i.e. – .com, .net, .us, etc.)

Based on feedback from the experts, and reference materials from Google, we will summarize the answers to these issues.

Hyphenation in a Domain Name

Most experts were pretty sure that hyphen between words of a domain name had no effect on the search engine ranking of a website. Search Engines like Google can recognize keyword patterns in a domain name without the need to break the domain name apart. Hyphens were helpful for people though. Some tend to hyphenate words when searching for a specific domain, but the numbers are very low.

Primary Keywords in a Domain Name

Most experts agree that having one or more primary keywords in a domain name was an important factor to good search engine ranking. But the benefit was only realized when primary keywords were also used well in the title, headings and content of a web page.

TLD of a Domain Name

The TLD, or Top Level Domain such as “.com” or “.net” seems to have little or no effect on search engine placement according to Google experts. However, if a business was local the TLD had some effect. For instance, using “.ca” or “.us” to indicate the country demographic for the website, might increase search engine placement for that site in local results.

Google tends to determine a web users location whenever their Search Engine is used. Google blogs indicated that results that were local to the users location were considered more relevant in some cases. But again, much of this depends on primary keyword usage in other key areas of a web page.

Of course we will never know for sure how the search engines make all of their calculations. But these guidelines will help in choosing a domain name that adds value to your websites search engine ranking.

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Website Planning – Site Structure and Navigation

admin — Mon, 03 May 2010 15:00:54 +0000

There have been many debates in past years about how links and the overall structure of a website affects the search engine ranking. Using Google as an example, we will explain how authority of a page is affected and provide some practical suggestions for the structure of a site.

A good website structure is important for several reasons:

It allows a web page to focus it’s message – keyword usage and terms
Control the flow of navigation when a Visitors come to the site
Dictates how a search engine will crawl and index the pages of the site

Focus Your Website’s Message

One of the primary steps to creating content for a website is with keyword research. This is very important when considering the structure of your site as well. Let’s examine how a website designer might do this:

Examine competitors sites for keywords and site structure
Evaluate keywords and select the one that best suit your message
Add the keywords to the page title, keywords, description and content
Setup navigation links to meet keyword criteria

To ensure that a search engine ranks your page well, it is important that the primary keywords are used, not only in the title, keyword, description and content areas. But also use keywords in the file name of the web page and the directory structure of the website add importance to a web page as well.

Website Directory Structure

The best way to demonstrate how the directory structure can be optimized is to examine how WordPress uses what they call “Permalinks”.

I remember setting up my first directory structure to include the year and month of a post for easy archiving. But I realized I was setting a structure that worked best for me and not my visitors. So I changed the directory structure to include a topic or category in addition to the post name. Here are the two methods:

Date method – http://www.siamcomm.com/2010/05/the-name-of-the-post/
Topic method – http://www.siamcomm.com/seo/the-name-of-the-post/

By using a primary keyword in my directory structure, I have increased the importance of that post in relationship to “SEO”.

Another advantage to using this method is that now my directory structure isn’t as deep as before (2 levels instead of 3). For search engines, the home page is considered the web page with the highest level of authority on the website. The further away a page is from the home page the lower the authority it has in search engine ranking.

I have increased the importance of that web page by moving it up a level in the directory structure.

This applies to navigation as well. If a search engine needs to visit two or three links before getting to a web page, the importance of that content is diluted because of the distance it is from the homepage. If your visitors need to go through the same process, chances are they won’t stick around to click through to the content you really want them to visit.

The guidelines to use are:

Design a directory structure that keeps the important content close to the home page
Design a navigation scheme that keeps the number of clicks to a minimum for important content

Link Spamming

Does this mean that you should put a link on the home page to every web page on your site?

Absolutely not!

This used to be a common practice with some web designers as they thought this was better for search engine rankings. However, the more links you have on a web page, the more a sub-pages importance is diluted by the search engines. It also makes it more difficult for visitors to determine what pages you intended them to visit.

Too many choices? Visitors will probably move on to a competitors site.

This reminds me of an example that was given in a management seminar years ago. The speaker was asking the audience why Joe Montana was a better (American football) Quarter Back than some one like John Elway. The San Francisco 49ers seemed as if they could go years on their winning streak compared to many other teams like the Denver Broncos.

The speaker explained that it was because his manager, Joe Walsh, ensured that Joe had only 3 choices to make at every play. If Option 1 couldn’t be done, try Option 2. If that wasn’t going to work, throw the ball into the ground and stop play. Whereas John Elway had many more choices at every play. This made it difficult to prioritize which action should take precedence over another.

This example can be used to describe the way the structure of a website should be planned.

Use a simple directory structure and page navigation
Offer the minimum number of choices
Use proper and specific direction to the content where you want your visitors

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Slow Websites and SEO

admin — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 11:48:11 +0000

We have discussed how writing bad code can damage a website’s ranking in the search engines. But can a website that loads slowly hurt rankings as well?

I spent a Sunday afternoon examining this question, which led me on an Internet voyage that discussed such geeky subjects as web page headers, HTTP 1.1 specifications, and the various types of caches that a typical user may encounter everyday in the travels online.

This article will examine ways to speed up your website and why it is beneficial to the traffic flowing to your website.

My Sunday journey started when Carl, from Web Courses Bangkok, left a comment relating to page load times in our last post about bad coding and search engine ranking. He provided the following link in his comment that revealed some very interesting information and taught me something.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-in-web-search-ranking.html

At the bottom of that post is a link for FireFox users to install a plug-in called “Page Speed“. So I did.

This plug-in showed me many of the problems in a specific web page that was causing my site to be slow. But I didn’t realize my site was slow until I went to Google’s Web Master Tools (WMT). At Siam Communications, we make it a habit to setup this tool for all of our customers to track the effectiveness of their website.

In the WMT Dashboard, Google has added a section called Labs. When you expand the Labs section, their is a Speed Test section. This Speed Test section shows how fast (or slow) a website loaded on average over time. I was shocked to learn that our page had received a designation of “Slow”.

I was horrified!

So I returned to my browser tab with our home page on it and began to examine again the list of problems identified by the newly installed “Page Speed” plug-in. As I looked at the suggestions offered, I began to consider how I would accomplish each of the tasks to improve the speed at which the web page was loading. Most of the critical suggestions were related to what was being cached and when the content being cached was going to expire or not expire at all.

I was familiar with a “browser cache”. This is the cache of files my web browser (FireFox or IE) saves to the hard drive of my computer when I visit a website. I learned that there are other types of caches that effect the visitors experience. The thing that bothered me about this was that, unlike the browser cache, I didn’t know if I could effect any control over the other types of caches out there.

How could I control which files, being loaded by my website, were being cached and when they expired?

With a few good search terms on Google I found my answer. Modify the HTACCESS file on my web server. I had used this file in the past to help search engines better understand the content of my site. I used the file to rename those long, dynamic website addresses (URLs) into human readable titles. This was better for the search engines and my visitors.

In our Online SEO Course, the configuration of a website is an important part of optimizing a web site. Using an HTACCESS file is a common way to assist with this. It pleases me when a website optimization task, such as using the HTACCESS file, improves the visitor experience. I was equally pleased to find the following post I suggest all Webmasters read if you are not already familiar with controlling the cache of a websites content using this file:

Speed Up Sites with htaccess Caching

This is written with the very technical web person in mind. If you’re new to this or not very technical, you may want to get help from a web site person.

Not only will these suggestions help you control how content is cached in a visitors web browser, it also allows you to specify how other type of Internet caches can be controlled as well. This is particularly important for visitors from countries like Thailand where a couple of the major ISPs use a Proxy cache system. The methods and configuration options mentioned in the article also support good website optimization practices, like keeping JavaScript and CSS files external to the HTML file.

As I was writing this, and thinking back on the whole experience, I wondered why a Speed Test was something that Google was testing in their Web Masters Tools Dashboard. Could this be a factor that will contribute to Search engine rankings in the future?

Perhaps.

Will making a website load quicker improve your rankings today? Probably not.

But one thing is certain. Optimizing a website shouldn’t be done with only a search engine in mind. The visitor experience is an important factor when optimizing a website. If a visitor has to wait for your website to load before they can begin viewing the content, chances are they will click away and go to a competitors site instead.

Search Engine Optimization is about ranking well in the search engines.

Website Optimization is providing quick, trouble free content that is valuable and beneficial to the visitor, and the Internet as a whole.

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Does bad code hurt search engine ranking?

admin — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 05:47:42 +0000

A website’s technical implementation, or coding, is an important part of search engine optimization. For example: if the foundation of a new house is of poor quality then it’s harder to build a good house on top of it.

The same goes for a website.

A website with a good, solid technical foundation has a better chance of ranking high in search results. This allows the on-page text or content of a technically good website to be properly indexed by search engines. This, in turn, increases the site’s quality in the eye of those search engines and visitors to the website.

Things to consider when examining the technical quality of a website include:

The overall structure of the website
Indexability – the ability to follow links included in the content and navigation
META tag information
Design practices used on each web page
Text and Content
Hosting consideration

Each of these points can be expanded upon considerably in relationship to the technical quality of a website. But we will leave that for future posts.

Pre-register for our Online SEO Course

Soon we will be offering a course to teach website owners how to do search engine optimization on their own websites. To pre-register for this course, enter your details in the form below.

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10 Search Engine Optimization Myths

admin — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 03:04:22 +0000

One reason that many individuals and organizations are reluctant to start an SEO project is lack of knowledge. Some are even reluctant to approach an SEO Service firm for fear of being “ripped off” or misdirected about the search engine requirements of their website.

It is always good to get as much knowledge about a topic before undertaking the project.

We understand that there are many myths about search engine optimization (SEO). This article will clarify the ten most common search engine optimization myths and misconceptions.

SEO is about secret strategies

There is a SEO myth that SEO Experts utilize secret strategies and methods that result in top placement in search engine results. In fact, there are some “SEO consultants” who might guarantee top placement for your website. While performing search engine optimization cam be a huge, time consuming task, the methods employed are widely known and available to everyone. If there are “Secrets” used, these are primarily employed by “Black Hat” SEO Service Providers. Utilizing these services will actually harm or lower your position in search engine results.

Load up on Keywords

Search engines are well aware of website pages that have been stuffed with keywords, regardless of their relevance to the content on the website. Keywords are key to the relevance and importance of the content on a web page. These keywords should be used (when possible) in the Title, meta keywords, meta description, and content of the web page for the best results. There is no magic number of keywords that will place your website before another in the search results. Best Practice: “Each web page should be written in a natural way and be designed with your website visitors in mind.”

Let’s Load up the page with Content

Have you ever seen one of those web pages that seems to scroll on forever about a certain topic? These irritate me. Too much content that runs on will send your visitors looking for another site that actually “gets to the point”. Too little content and your visitors will leave still looking for an answer. Unique, useful and up to date content is the best strategy for writing your content. Content is a major factor in regards to the relevance of your website. But there are many additional factors that are considered by the search engines.

Keep Submitting Your Websites to Search Engines

I remember the days when there were online services that sent a notification to hundreds of search engines monthly to ensure that your website was indexed. While some of these still exist, they are not necessary. Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft all offer a method for submitting information about your website so they can begin to crawl your content. But submitting more than once could get you banned or blacklisted. The best method for getting your website into search engine results is to get quality links from other, relevant websites linking to your website using relevant keywords in the linking text.

Guaranteed Top Search Engine Placement

“We can guarantee you #1 search engine placement!”. Have you ever seen this staement before?
This is a lie.
Your website can place well for keywords with little or no competition. But your keywords should reflect the message of your content and bring in the types of visitors you are targeting. It is impossible for anyone to guarantee that the placement of your website will be number one or even remain constant over time.

All Links to my Site are Good Links

We stated earlier that “The best method for getting your website into search engine results is to get quality links from other, relevant websites linking to your website using relevant keywords in the linking text”. Links from a website on fashion tips to your website on website design probably won’t help your rankings in the search results very much. Links should come from websites with similar content if they are going to be of great value to your search engine placement. Google does consider some sites as “bad neighborhood” sites and these can effect the placement of your website in a bad way if they link back to your content.
Also, services that offer hundreds or thousands of links instantly should also be avoided. If Google sees a sharp increase in the number of links pointing to your website they get suspicious. Perform a link building exercise in a natural progression by getting links from sites with a good reputation from the search engines. Check out every site that will link to yours. Usually, if a website has a high Google Page Rank, they are worth having them link to you.

All Your Web Pages require W3C Validation

This would be great if all web pages followed a single standard. But with so many variables on the Internet (different web browsers, operating systems, etcc.), the effort involved to maintain a website to a specific set of standards would be massive. The programming code of your website should be in a format that is readable by the search engine robots. As long as each page follows some very basic formatting guidelines, you should have no problem.

Search Engines do not like Dynamic Pages

This has been a very misunderstood area. Search engines prefer static content with static URLs. However, they can index dynamic URLs as well. They ask that you give them the opportunity to determine the content by not re-writing the URL to make the page look static. I have found that the methods used by blogging applications like WordPress offer a good method of maintaining the data needed for a search engine to index it properly while rewriting the URL to a more static value. A full discussion on this topic can be found on the Google Webmaster Tools Blog.

Meta Tags are the most important

This is not entirely true. While Google does not use the keywords contained in the “Keyword” meta tag, other search engines and directories do use these values. The best approach is to write your content for your targeted visitors, and put the most important keywords in the “Keyword” meta tag as well. Use of the meta tag will not damage your placement, but there are HTML tags that search engines consider more important for the placement of your keywords (i.e. – H1, H2, B, STRONG, etc.). But the best practice is, “Concentrate on your content”.

High Google Page Rank is required for top Placement

Although a High Google Page Rank may help your placement in the search results, it doesn’t guarantee top placement for every search term or keyword. Having a low Google Page Rank for a keyword does not move you down in the results either. Search engines are all about producing a list of sites that is relevant to what the user is looking for.

We hope this list has helped you understand a bit more about Search Engine Optimization. If you would like to see how your site scores in an SEO Analysis, have a try at our new SEO Analysis Tool.

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SEO Analysis Tool: Beta Launch

admin — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 01:56:34 +0000

One of the biggest hurdles we face as website owners is understanding how search engines see our websites.

This week, we’re looking to change that with the Beta Launch of our new Online SEO Analysis Tool.

We have developed an online Search Engine Optimization Analysis tool that any website owner can use. The result is a high level summary of how your website scores in three key areas; Technical Score, Popularity Score and SEO Score. The SEO Analysis Tool then calculates your websites incoming and outgoing links and provide you with an Overall SEO score. The higher the score, the better your website will rate in the search engines.

You have the option to Order and Download a full SEO Analysis report of your website’s SEO readiness. The report is quite detailed. You can download a sample report we ran on our site sometime ago before you decide to Order a report for your own site.

The SEO Analysis Reports are discounted for those of you we have invited to the Beta Launch of the product.

Please have a look at the new SEO Analysis Tool and let us know you thoughts. We will be adding more features in the weeks to come as we get closer to our official launch.

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55 Tips for Search Engine Optimization

Editor — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 09:02:22 +0000

I am always looking for lists to help with my online website design and search engine optimization business.

Recently, my friend Herb over at “What’s This Web Thing“, posted this list of 55 SEO tips. There is a lot of helpful information in here, without any of the hype that you often see in these sorts of lists. I am republishing this with Herb’s permission.

Enjoy!

1. If you absolutely MUST use Javascript drop down menus, image maps or image links, be sure to put text links somewhere on the page for the spiders to follow.

2. Content is king, so be sure to have good, well-written and unique content that will focus on your primary keyword or keyword phrase.

3. If content is king, then links are queen. Build a network of quality backlinks using your keyword phrase as the link. Remember, if there is no good, logical reason for that site to link to you, you don’t want the link.

4. Don’t be obsessed with PageRank. It is just one isty bitsy part of the ranking algorithm. A site with lower PR can actually outrank one with a higher PR.

5. Be sure you have a unique, keyword focused Title tag on every page of your site. And, if you MUST have the name of your company in it, put it at the end. Unless you are a major brand name that is a household name, your business name will probably get few searches.

6. Fresh content can help improve your rankings. Add new, useful content to your pages on a regular basis. Content freshness adds relevancy to your site in the eyes of the search engines.

7. Be sure links to your site and within your site use your keyword phrase. In other words, if your target is “blue widgets” then link to “blue widgets” instead of a “Click here” link.

8. Focus on search phrases, not single keywords, and put your location in your text (“our Palm Springs store” not “our store”) to help you get found in local searches.

9. Don’t design your web site without considering SEO. Make sure your web designer understands your expectations for organic SEO. Doing a retrofit on your shiny new Flash-based site after it is built won’t cut it. Spiders can crawl text, not Flash or images.

10. Use keywords and keyword phrases appropriately in text links, image ALT attributes and even your domain name.

11. Check for canonicalization issues – www and non-www domains. Decide which you want to use and 301 redirect the other to it. In other words, if http://www.domain.com is your preference, then http://domain.com should redirect to it. (There is a great list of how to do this with different languages and a redirect checker as well http://www.webconfs.com)

12. Check the link to your home page throughout your site. Is index.html appended to your domain name? If so, you’re splitting your links. Outside links go to http://www.domain.com and internal links go to http://www.domain.com/index.html.

Ditch the index.html or default.php or whatever the page is and always link back to your domain.

13. Frames, Flash and AJAX all share a common problem – you can’t link to a single page. It’s either all or nothing. Don’t use Frames at all and use Flash and AJAX sparingly for best SEO results.

14. Your URL file extension doesn’t matter. You can use .html, .htm, .asp, .php, etc. and it won’t make a difference as far as your SEO is concerned.

15. Got a new web site you want spidered? Submitting through Google’s regular submission form can take weeks. The quickest way to get your site spidered is by getting a link to it through another quality site.

16. If your site content doesn’t change often, your site needs a blog because search spiders like fresh text. Blog at least three times a week with good, fresh content to feed those little crawlers.

17. When link building, think quality, not quantity. One single, good, authoritative link can do a lot more for you than a dozen poor quality links, which can actually hurt you.

18. Search engines want natural language content. Don’t try to stuff your text with keywords. It won’t work. Search engines look at how many times a term is in your content and if it is abnormally high, will count this against you rather than for you.

19. Not only should your links use keyword anchor text, but the text around the links should also be related to your keywords. In other words, surround the link with descriptive text.

20. If you are on a shared server, do a blacklist check to be sure you’re not on a proxy with a spammer or banned site. Their negative notoriety could affect your own rankings.

21. Be aware that by using services that block domain ownership information when you register a domain, Google might see you as a potential spammer.

22. When optimizing your blog posts, optimize your post title tag independently from your blog title.

23. The bottom line in SEO is Text, Links, Popularity and Reputation.

24. Make sure your site is easy to use. This can influence your link building ability and popularity and, thus, your ranking.

25. Give link love, Get link love. Don’t be stingy with linking out. That will encourage others to link to you.

26. Search engines like unique content that is also quality content. There can be a difference between unique content and quality content. Make sure your content is both.

27. If you absolutely MUST have your main page as a splash page that is all Flash or one big image, place text and navigation links below the fold.

28. Some of your most valuable links might not appear in web sites at all but be in the form of e-mail communications such as newletters and zines.

29. You get NOTHING from paid links except a few clicks unless the links are embedded in body text and NOT obvious sponsored links.

30. Links from .edu domains are given nice weight by the search engines. Run a search for possible non-profit .edu sites that are looking for sponsors.

31. Give them something to talk about. Linkbaiting is simply good content.

32. Give each page a focus on a single keyword phrase. Don’t try to optimize the page for several keywords at once.

33. SEO is useless if you have a weak or non-existent call to action. Make sure your call to action is clear and present.

34. SEO is not a one-shot process. The search landscape changes daily, so expect to work on your optimization daily.

35. Cater to influential bloggers and authority sites who might link to you, your images, videos, podcasts, etc. or ask to reprint your content.

36. Get the owner or CEO blogging. It’s priceless! CEO influence on a blog is incredible as this is the VOICE of the company. Response from the owner to reader comments will cause your credibility to skyrocket!

37. Optimize the text in your RSS feed just like you should with your posts and web pages. Use descriptive, keyword rich text in your title and description.

38. Use captions with your images. As with newspaper photos, place keyword rich captions with your images.

39. Pay attention to the context surrounding your images. Images can rank based on text that surrounds them on the page. Pay attention to keyword text, headings, etc.

40. You’re better off letting your site pages be found naturally by the crawler. Good global navigation and linking will serve you much better than relying only on an XML Sitemap.

41. There are two ways to NOT see Google’s Personalized Search results:

(1) Log out of Google

(2) Append &pws=0 to the end of your search URL in the search bar

42. Links (especially deep links) from a high PageRank site are golden. High PR indicates high trust, so the back links will carry more weight.

43. Use absolute links. Not only will it make your on-site link navigation less prone to problems (like links to and from https pages), but if someone scrapes your content, you’ll get backlink juice out of it.

44. See if your hosting company offers “Sticky” forwarding when moving to a new domain. This allows temporary forwarding to the new domain from the old, retaining the new URL in the address bar so that users can gradually get used to the new URL.

45. Understand social marketing. It IS part of SEO. The more you understand about sites like Digg, Yelp, del.icio.us, Facebook, etc., the better you will be able to compete in search.

46. To get the best chance for your videos to be found by the crawlers, create a video sitemap and list it in your Google Webmaster Central account.

47. Videos that show up in Google blended search results don’t just come from YouTube. Be sure to submit your videos to other quality video sites like Metacafe, AOL, MSN and Yahoo to name a few.

48. Surround video content on your pages with keyword rich text. The search engines look at surrounding content to define the usefulness of the video for the query.

49. Use the words “image” or “picture” in your photo ALT descriptions and captions. A lot of searches are for a keyword plus one of those words.

50. Enable “Enhanced image search” in your Google Webmaster Central account. Images are a big part of the new blended search results, so allowing Google to find your photos will help your SEO efforts.

51. Add viral components to your web site or blog – reviews, sharing functions, ratings, visitor comments, etc.

52. Broaden your range of services to include video, podcasts, news, social content and so forth. SEO is not about 10 blue links anymore.

53. When considering a link purchase or exchange, check the cache date of the page where your link will be located in Google. Search for “cache:URL” where you substitute “URL” for the actual page. The newer the cache date the better. If the page isn’t there or the cache date is more than an month old, the page isn’t worth much.

54. If you have pages on your site that are very similar (you are concerned about duplicate content issues) and you want to be sure the correct one is included in the search engines, place the URL of your preferred page in your sitemaps.

55. Check your server headers. Search for “check server header” to find free online tools for this. You want to be sure your URLs report a “200 OK” status or “301 Moved Permanently ” for redirects. If the status shows anything else, check to be sure your URLs are set up properly and used consistently throughout your site.

The SEO Consultants website has a nice header checking tool.

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Does Your SEO Work?

The Coach — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 07:16:16 +0000

Many of us have come to appreciate the fact that link building, to create inbound links to our web sites, is an effective way to increase our web sites popularity on the Search Engines. Not only do inbound links bring new visitors to your sites, search engines like Google treat inbound links as a positive signal that your site has a good level of importance in your specified area.

What is the best way to increase your inbound links?

Develop more inbound links with other sites that contain content relevant to that of your web sites content. This is easier said than done. Developing links with other web sites is an ongoing effort that takes a lot of research and time.

First, you must first use search engines to determine which web sites contain relevant content for linking purposes. Just the huge number of search engines on the Internet today makes this a daunting task. This takes your efforts away from actually developing more valuable content … or relaxing by the pool. Then there is the request for reciprocal links, the waiting and then posting the links to each site.

Even after you have established inbound links, how do you know if the other sites are still linking to your site? You must occasionally go and visit each site to determine if your link is there. A more effective use of your time could be spent by using well established SEO tools for finding web sites with relevant content.

We have identified a few tools to assist you in developing those inbound links and make your SEO work for you.

The first tool that caught my attention was LinkAssistant. This software tool automated many of the time intensive tasks and cut my workload significantly. With LinkAssistant I could:

Find and select link partners out of hundreds of relevant, high-quality sites
Generate web directories of relevant sites for inclusion on my own site
Create personalized emails to web site owners (LinkAssistant can actually find the web site owners email address in a matter of seconds)
Quickly verify if my link partners are still linking back to my web site
Reveal black-hat SEO techniques your link partners might be turning against you
Group and manage my links into categories so I could use them on various landing pages which were specific to that category

These were just the features that provided me with instant benefit in making better use of my time. What I wasn’t expecting, were some of the other added features that makes this tool very useful for ensuring that your SEO is working for you. LinkAssistant is able to track my web sites rankings across 370 search engines. So if something isn’t working, I can instantly see what I need to fix to rank better.

It is easy to see how this tool can catapult your website to the top of search engine listings through Google-tested on-site optimization. You can learn more about it here.

The other web site SEO tool that impressed me was the suite of online tools at SEOmoz.org. They provide access to SEO guides and offer loads of SEO tools to help you to become an SEO expert.

SEOmoz.org is a site that caters to the SEO beginner as well as the SEO/SEM Professional by offering tools, guides and a custom question and answer marketplace to help you understand how SEO works.

We are still evaluating a couple of other products:

Want to know what others did to make their websites rank higher? Click here.

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Does Rewriting Dynamic URLs help SEO

The Coach — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 13:26:02 +0000

The battle in forums and on blogs on how Google handles dynamic versus static URLs has been going on for some time now. But recent comments from Google have both clarified and confused most webmasters. If you’ve spent any time rewriting URLs to accommodate user-friendly URL structures, Google is now saying “it’s not necessary”.

Google is suggesting that it is now not necessary for webmasters to rewrite URLs. The Google Webmaster’s Blog stated “… we at Google have made some progress in both areas. While static URLs might have a slight advantage in terms of click through rates because users can easily read the urls, the decision to use database-driven websites does not imply a significant disadvantage in terms of indexing and ranking. Providing search engines with dynamic URLs should be favored over hiding parameters to make them look static.”

The post also debunked a myth that “dynamic URLs cannot be crawled“. Google is now asking that webmasters give them the opportunity to analyze these URLs to determine the value of the content.

In fact, Google is recommending that webmasters do not rewrite URLs at all, stating that “If you transform your dynamic URL to make it look static you should be aware that we might not be able to interpret the information correctly in all cases. If you want to serve a static equivalent of your site, you might want to consider transforming the underlying content by serving a replacement which is truly static.”

You can read the entire post on the Webmasters Blog here.

While this removes much pain and aggravation for webmasters, there is this nagging voice in the back of my head telling me to beware.

What is your opinion?

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