Posts Tagged ‘search engine optimization’

10 Search Engine Optimization Myths

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.
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Does Your SEO Work?

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.
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Improving your On-page SEO

Improving on-page SEO GraphicOn-Page SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of placing your selected keywords in the right places on your web pages. It also involves optimizing your website’s page titles, headings, content, and URLs to improve search engine rankings.

In this post, we’ll take a look at each of these areas and how you can optimize these areas to help position your web site higher in search engine rankings.

Page Title Attributes

The attributes that we will examine in this section are the main title of your web page (the text displayed at the very top of the browser window), the description and the meta keywords. These attributes are set in the <HEAD> section of each web page in the following tags:

<title>Your Web Page Title</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”Your web site description”>
<meta name=keywords” content=”Your selected keywords”>

Although these are not that important to the Google search bots, they do help other web search engines and directories determine the value of your content. If these other search engines and directories value your content, this will also help boost your Google page rankings.

The Title is the most important attribute there is for two reasons. First, the title is the one piece of information that describes what the page is about. It is the default title your browser and book-marking sites will automatically use when people save your site for future use. Second, it is what search engines use to determine what your website is all about. Compared to everything else on your page, the title gets the most weight from the search engines.

The description is an abstract or a summary of your web page. It is crucial that the important words and terms about your site be crafted into the description. Another use of the description is that currently Yahoo! (and possibly other engines) use this description when your site is returned on a given search term, and it has to show a small summary of your site below the title.

The meta-keywords provide a set of key terms or words that describe your web page. Originally, the keywords element was a key element towards determining the context of a web page. It was a quick way for the search engine to understand what a web page was about. But, as people started abusing this feature by stuffing words into the meta-keywords element that had nothing to do with the web page’s content, the importance of the meta-keywords element has been greatly reduced. Although this information is still a contributing factor, search engines no longer look at this information as the definitive way to understand web page context.

Headings

Similar to how newspapers and magazines use headings and sub-headings to help readers, websites can use heading tags ( <h1>, <h2>, etc.) in their HTML. These tags not only help human readers segment the content, they also help search engine spiders better understand the content on a web page and determine what is most important. It is generally a good idea to use heading tags to help the search engines understand what the web page is about.The Item in the <h1> tag is usually the headline of the Web Page. The lower ranked headings ( <h2, <h3> and so on …) are used in the same manner as you might identify outline levels of a document. For instance, the title of this post is a <h3> tag while the sub-titles, like the one at the top of this section on headings, is a <h4>.

Identifying Images

Images are a great way to enhance a website from the visitor’s perspective. But search engine crawlers cannot see these images, even though they understand that an image exists because of the HTML tag in which it is contained. If you have lots of images on your website that contain textual content within the image itself, this text will not be seen by the crawlers.

HTML helps address this issue by allowing you to specify the textual content for an image using the “alt” attribute within the <img> tag. The alt attribute allows web pages to assign specific text as the “alternative” content for images for visitors or web crawlers that cannot view the images. This alt attribute also adds weight to determining the content on your web pages.

SEO lessons – "Died in a Blogging Accident"

Died in a Blogging AccidentWell, here is a lesson in Search Engine Optimization and keyword selection at its absolute best.

Before today, a Google search for the term “died in a blogging accident” would have returned a grand total of 2 results. However, thanks to the website xkcd, the term now fetches more than 3,000 results (as of this writing).

It is now known if the writer intended for this to happen, but this is an excellent lesson in how the proper content matched with a particular term can rocket your web site to the number one position for a given search term.

Now, I have never personally had a need to search for this term on Google, and hopefully I never will. But what intrigues me about this particular search term is that, at one point during the last 12 hours, this term returned more than 7,000 results.

Perhaps Google’s algorithm can determine the difference between spam posts on a popular term and the quality posts.

This event can certainly help you to gain an understanding of search terms and how they effect the overall scheme of things. You may want to continue to watch this term for a few days.