Search Engine Optimization Blog

Search engine optimization – or SEO – has been around for pretty much as long as search engines have. Over the years, it has gained both proponents and opponents – many for good reason. The prevalence of sneaky, underhanded tactics, increasing spam in the search engine indexes, and publicized cases of websites being banned from the listings have given SEO a bad rap.

“SEO is just about tricking the search engines,” some claim.

In an effort to de-bunk this and other wayward SEO beliefs, we have developed a list of ‘top 5 myths about SEO’.

#1 – SEO is all about tricking the search engines

In actuality, good, honest SEO is not about tricking, but analyzing search engine algorithms in an effort to develop websites in a way that consciously supports search engines in doing their job – that is providing the most relevant content to their users. “White hat” SEOers understand that what’s good for users is also typically good for search engines, and they strive to not ‘trick’ search engines, but be forthright in giving them exactly what they want.

#2 – SEO is all about the meta-tags

In a previous life, webmasters would stuff the meta-keyword tag with their desired terms, and voila!, a top spot in the rankings. SEO was about the meta-tags and not much else. Whether this approach worked then or not, it most certainly does not today. In addition to the multitude of other ‘on page’ ranking factors that now seem to matter (such as keyword-rich copy, anchor text, and file names), sites now more than ever have to look ‘off site’ – most importantly, at the volume and quality of their inbound links.
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Often times we get so caught up in marketing our site and making it aesthetically pleasing, we forget one of, if not THE most important part of SEO. Content. The search engines can not see pictures, so the only way to tell them what your site is all about is to provide that information to them via text. But why is it so difficult to put text on our sites?

During the creation of a site, we often care more about how it looks than how it functions. Flash, in my opinion, can be used to create some of the most beautiful sites out there. We get so drawn into making nice layouts with neat animations, we completely neglect the fact that we are building a site for the world, not just us.

The content on your site should actually be the first thing you think of when optimizing it. You need to convey to the search engines that your site is worthy of ranking, and that you are here to offer something to the masses. I often give this advice to customers, and get a great deal of fearful feedback. I hear a lot of “I don’t even know what to write.” Well, your site is an extension of your business/service/whatever, and as such you are likely to be well versed in that area. But I think people get caught up in the idea that the text is going to be placed on the site, promoting the attention to variables such as what font to use, what color, how it will look, etc.

The best advice that I can give in reference to thinking of text, is to close your site, use notepad (not Word. This creates problems when deciding to copy and paste), or a pen and paper (these do exist you know), and just put your thoughts to reality. Just write. Write about your business, yourself, your products, the history of your company, whatever. Just write. Before you know it, you will have well over 800 words of cryptic information all about your industry. As I write this, I am not thinking about my blog or my site, but only what I am trying to convey to you, the reader. Once you have all that information, organize it. Make it mean something, and make sense. Given enough thought, it will not be too difficult to come up with at least 500 words, which is a good amount of text to be placed on a website. Read the rest of this entry »

Whether you have an established large-scale business or whether you are a one-person start-up, it is important for your website to rank high in search engine queries for your important keywords and search phrases. If you are not ranked properly you will not get much traffic, and if you depend on Internet traffic, then this can mean failure for your business. One of the best ways to improve your ranking in the search engines is by applying the methods of search engine optimization to your website. Here is a guide to search engine optimization that can help you to get started in this important task:

1. Start with a clear and simple website design

A good website design should be easy for your human visitors to enjoy and understand, and it should also be intelligible for the search engine robots that also visit your site. What looks good to the human eye may not look good to search engines. If your site is 100% flash then it may impress your visitors, but the search engines will not find text and will not be able to properly classify your site. Similarly a site designed with frames is also search engine unfriendly. Check with your web designer and make sure that the design you are getting is user-friendly and search engine friendly as well.

2. Focus each of your web pages around one or two distinct concepts

A well-organized site will help you to get better search engine rankings. Suppose you have ten different products. It may be difficult to get number one rankings for all of these products from one single page of your site. However if you make sub-pages for each different product and optimize those pages to highlight the particular product or service on that page, then those sub-pages stand a good chance of coming up in search engine queries. Remember, people do not enter your website only via the main page; rather they often enter via the “back” and “side-doors.” Prepare all the pages of your website properly and you will get more traffic.

3. Put your main keywords in the meta-tags of your web pages

Once you have decided what will go on your web pages, then you have to optimize each page separately. Never use the same meta-tags for all the pages of your site. If your page is about “Riding Lawn Mowers,” then put these words in the Title, Description and Keywords meta-tags of your website. The title tag is the most important of the three tags, and your keywords should be right at the front. Resist the temptation to put your company name first! If you are new, then no one knows about you and they are searching for Riding Lawn Mowers and not you. Do your branding elsewhere, not in the meta-tags

4. Put your keywords in the headlines and sub-headlines of your web page

A search engine is trying to find out what your page is all about. If you want to know what a magazine article is all about, without even reading it, the first thing that you would do is scan the headlines. Search engines do the same thing. Put your most important keywords in a headline right at the top of the page. Mark the headline with an H1 tag (ask your web designer to help if you do not know what this is). Make sub-headlines using an H2 or H3 tag. Putting your keywords in headlines is a vital part of search engine optimization. Read the rest of this entry »

By: Rama Krishna

Professional SEO Services

The world of the internet is becoming more and more complex and sophisticated as newer technologies are invented frequently. The growing competition amongst websites and the arrival of Google have changed the scenario completely.

Unlike web 1.0 where a creative domain name was enough to plummet you to the top, now you need to be an expert in Search Engine Optimization or SEO.

What is SEO?

In simple words, SEO is a set of tools and techniques which are used to optimize your websites for search engines.

A search engine will be able to find an SEO enabled website faster than others and hence that website will have a higher rank in search engine page results. The result will be higher and much better traffic and hence improved turn over for the business. So can anyone optimize his website for the web?

SEO services

Unfortunately, SEO is not as easy as it sounds. The rules keep changing constantly as the web evolves and you need to keep updating the techniques with them. Read the rest of this entry »

By: Jeff Casmer 

It is a common belief among many web business owners that once they submit their website to a search engines theyre on their way to financial success. Yes submitting your site is important. But simply informing the search engines that you exist (which is all you are doing) is not enough because they reaction you may get is so youre out there, so what. Today web pages need to be optimized in order for search engines to take them seriously.

Search engine optimization is the art and science of making your web pages attractive to the search engines.

But mention search engine optimization to some folks and you get winces. Some completely bury their heads in the sand. This in part is because search engine optimization is work. It requires research of keywords, content creation, producing well written Meta tags, enhancing your web pages with a few pictures, audio and video to improve the user experience and keeping up to date on the latest trends in SEO. For many webmaster this is more than they want to handle, especially since the internet businesses have be synonyms with get rich quick schemes.

An internet marketer recently said, I dont understand why I have to do it, the search engine will find me eventually. The fact that she was willing to wait around rather than put in a little effort to make things happen for her business puzzled me. Then I thought maybe shes just afraid to get her feet wet. SEO is like anything its scary if you dont know how to go about it.

First, you have to ask yourself what are you are willing to lose. If you do not participate in SEO you will lose your business, this is a fact. Search engines are still the number one traffic generator and most users who use search engines do not go past the second page of results. If you dont get serious and undertake search engine optimization you will be lucky to see a handful of customers because only a slight few will ever see you. Needless to say you wont become a millionaire with only 5 visitors per day (if youre lucky).

Next, join a forum that discusses it. There are a lot of masters out there that who are willing to share SEO tips for free. Start asking questions about what you dont know. If youve tried SEO but failed, find out where you went wrong.

Another excuse many use is that they want to do SEO but they dont have the time. This may be valid. However, a great number of people can spend hours looking for gossip but when it come to their pages they suddenly realize they have something better to do. Ill optimize my page after my favorite show; I cant miss my favorite show! The shed needs cleaning. I dont have the energy for it after I come home from my other job.

It only takes an hour a day to build a successful business. If time spent optimizing your website leads to an increase in sales isnt it time well spent? Take it one page at a time; optimize one page today and move on to the next when youre done. Trying to take on the whole website would make anyone have an anxiety attack, especially for a large site.

The beauty of SEO is that it does not take too long to become proficient and once you have the hang of it youll find that run through it quicker.

Its all about increasing the potential for sales. And if search engine optimization is going to increase your profit margin dont you think you should take head out the sand.

Dreamsubmitting Quality SEO Services Provider.

By: AjeetKhurana

Ask any webmaster and they will have tried their hand at submissions to optimize their websites placement in search engines. But what is the fuss all about? Do submissions actually yield better search engine placement. Let us try to dissect this issue.

I do not like automated submissions as they lead to spam, so let us talk about manual submission. There are primarily 2 types of manual submissions:

Manual Directory Submissions
In this type of submission, you go ahead and fill up forms set up by web directories. A web directory is to websites what a phone directory is to phone numbers. Web directories can be free or paid. I have found that there are many free web directories and a few exceptionally good paid ones. Also, though most web directories are generic, some are niche web directories — for instance I have seen legal web directories, real estate web directories, health web directories and what have you. My experience is that manual directory submissions do not help in raising the search engine ranks of the websites significantly. But, they can certainly help search engines in understanding the theme of the website. This is primarily because your site will be listed in the directory on a page that is about tightly related sites.

Manual Article Submissions
Quite naturally, I am a fan of manual article submissions. I say that as I am creating this article for exclusive distribution by article submission sites. That you are reading this article is testament to the fact that word does go out and you can gain popularity by submitting articles to article submission sites. But, there are a couple of ifs and buts. First of all, the world of article sites is quite lopsided. For every good article directory there are a hundred junk sites. Make sure to do your research to ensure that you are not stuck with the junk kind. Second, if at all possible, try to submit unique articles to different article sites. At least make them a little different. The reason for this is that search engines such as Google have become very smart. They are able to read the same article on different sites and despite some of the surrounding text being different; they are able to tell that the article is a duplicate. What these search engines do is to relegate these duplicate pages to a supplemental or lower priority index. Hence the links on these pages will also get much less benefit.

Let us to do this Important SEO Part for you> Dreamsubmitting Directory Submission Services

Undergoing MyBlogLog Verification

Regards,

Dilpreet

by: Strive Mazunga

If you are already running an Internet marketing campaign or are about to embark on an Internet marketing campaign, one concept you cannot afford to skimp on is search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is one of the most popular buzz words in Internet marketing but unfortunately most Internet marketers simply do not know enough about SEO to make this strategy work for them. Even those who are knowledgeable about SEO may have difficulty executing their SEO strategies to produce the desired affect.

Advertising is a very important part of running any type of business. You need to advertise to reach new customers and market your products or services. Whether you run your business online or not you probably already realize how important it is to advertise but if you are running your business online you should understand there is a great deal of free advertising available in the form of optimal search engine rankings.

Well known search engines such as Google rank websites according to complex algorithms which are designed to determine which websites are most relevant for particular search terms. Therefore taking the time and effort to optimize your website for relevant search terms may result in you being rewarded with high search engine rankings for these terms. This is important because most Internet users rely heavily on these rankings. It is not uncommon for Internet users to only review the first few results when they search for a particular term. This means if your website ranks high enough to appear on the first page of the search results you will likely enjoy increased website traffic. However, if your website doesn’t make it to the first page or even the second page, it is unlikely you will receive a great deal of website traffic from visitors who use search engines.

Now that you understand why search engine rankings are so important you might wonder how to achieve these rankings. The easiest way to optimize your website is to hire a SEO specialist to do the work for you. The world of SEO is complex and continually evolving making it difficult for most business owners who do not specialize in SEO to keep up with the changes in the industry. Therefore, business owners who attempt to optimize their website by themselves may have difficulty keeping up with competitors who hire a SEO consultant to optimize their website.
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By : Alan Lim

If you don’t have a fully functional website and yet want to make headway into the progress of your business, you can do so with directory submission. These are virtually free of cost and provide an effective platform to propagate your business far and wide.

How it works

The way it works is that these directories will have a wide range of categories which are listed out in the site. You need to select the particular category which suits your business the best. Then you can go about the directory submission process smoothly. You will also need to ensure strict adherence to directory guidelines and rules as violation of these may even result in your site being scrapped from the directory.

Less input and more results

With directory submission tactics it is very possible to realize large scale publicity and traffic without much effort put in. With as little as 2 or 4 hours in a day you can expect to attract tones of traffic to your site. You will also find quick and easy placement on search engine rankings. Many websites have successfully been able to enjoy a top 10 search engine ranking due to such submissions to directories.
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By: Jeni Dalton

Directory submissions the name itself conveys the message that it is related to submissions to a directory or directories. Directories now a days a very popular way to get traffic as well as a link back to your website which is counted a vote to your website in search engines point of view and which tells them the popularity of your website.

What is a directory?

A directory is a list or a collection of website addresses which is organized in a categorized format to provide a unique information system of Webpage’s in terms of websites.

What is Submission?

The process of submitting websites for inclusion into directories, Search engines for indexing in terms of websites.

Directories are a good way to improve search engine placements and search engine positioning. When you submit a website to a web directory you will get a one way link back which is a vote towards your website in search engines point of view. If you get few hundreds of good link backs i.e. one way link back, then your search engine position will grow very fast. Read the rest of this entry »