Siam Communications Web Services & Tools » search engine optimization

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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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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Improving your On-page SEO

Eric — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 09:25:49 +0000

On-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 section of each web page in the following tags:

Your Web Page Title

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 pageâ€™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 (

,

, 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

tag is usually the headline of the Web Page. The lower ranked headings ( 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
tag while the sub-titles, like the one at the top of this section on headings, is a
.

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 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.

Related posts:
10 Search Engine Optimization Myths

Improve your Google Page Rank

Search Engine Ranking and Domain Names

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SEO lessons – "Died in a Blogging Accident"

Eric — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 17:09:09 +0000

Well, 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.

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