A lot of people have been asking me personally about general SEO
techniques so I have compiled some of my previous posts (cause I didn't
want to write them again) and I offer them to you now.
Sorry if it's a long read but it is all good advise and can really help
you new guys get started.
GENERAL SEO STARTING POINTS
1. Make sure and use a markup language such as HTML that is visible to
major search engines.
2. Another thing is the amount of text on your index page (Home Page)
Always remember that search engines such as Google take into
consideration how much "relevant content" is on your page that directly
relates the keywords you are trying to optimize for. In other words,
Get alot more text near the top of the page and at the bottom of the
page. Make this text relevant to your business and make sure it
contains several of your keywords.
3.Next consider your title tag or the title of your pages.
Having your main keywords in your title is imperitive and you do have
this, but all the commas that you have may make some search engines
think that you are trying to trick them into giving you more ranking so
they penalize for this.
4.Obviously you need your meta-keyword tags to contain your relevant
key terms you are going for, but don't over do it. A Good rule of thumb
and
as a suggestion would be no not have any more than 25 keyword phrases,
and keep from repeating them only 1 time will do per phrase.
5.Your Description Meta Tag also needs to contain the main keywords and
make sure you DO NOT list them, instead make a nice relevant sentance
or two that really describes exactly what you do using a couple of your
top keywords.
6.Google is not the only search engine out there, dont forget about the
other major search engines out there.
7. Instant good one-way links can be found by joining certain
directories. I have listed a few below that are free.
http://search.ezilon.com
http://www.best-web-directories.com
http://www.3gnext.com
http://dir.sonicquest.com
http://www.searchsight.com
Obviously the larger directories like
www.bcentral.com and www.business.com and Yahoo directory are paid
inclusion but they rock at generating traffic. I use them all
8. Having clean HTML is a very important step. If the crawler gets
lost,
it has nowhere to go but somewhere else. Validate Markup Here
http://validator.w3.org
PS: HTML is still key to search engines, remember that.
9.Checking Keyword Saturation for Free is another tough task if you
dont
like checking potentially thousands of search pages if your not #1, do
that here
www.marketleap.com
10. use http://www.copyscape.com to check your text for copywrite
issues. This is a quick way to be busted with Google.
11. An obvious way to get google to "see" more of your pages is by
making a
sitemap and submitting it to google. This is a free service that google
can help you with by going to the following web address.
https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login
if you would like to see a couple of active sitemaps, I will include a
couple links to my sitemaps that I am using. By seeing these you will
be able to use a similar format for each page of your site.
http://www.azinsurancefinder.com/sitemap.xml
http://www.sucatoinsuranceagency.com/sitemap.xml
http://www.azmortgagesearch.com/sitemap.xml
If you don't want to create your own sitemap, their are free websites
that will do it for you. I suggest this one
http://sitemap.xmlecho.org/sitemap/?source=google&kw=sitemap
Follow the instructions and you will have a working sitemap in about 15
minutes.
12. Make sure and use keyword hyperlinking within the body of your text
on your pages to link the the keyword relevant page within your site.
13. OJ didn't do it
FLASH AND MY MYTHS
Flash is a interesting little aspect of a viewers web experience and is
not all bad. Search engines perceve flash animations as one big picture
so anything hosted inside the flash animation is absolutely invisible
to search engines. Just keep that in mind when you are doing your
flash.
COPYWRITE AND CONTENT
I just heard a horror story from another developer I know. Apparently
every site owner needs to make absolutely sure that your content is
unique and that you did not take any text from another site. This used
to be fine, just change the text and now you own it. But Google has
cracked down on this big time. Sites with a PR of 5 and up dropping to
0 Immediately because of a copywrite issue. Just as a precaution check
out www.copyscape.com and punch in your URL, find out exactly how many
people have similar content. Be specific to pages as well, it only
checks the page you tell it to. Great tool.
Here's some other great idea websites for SEO
Having clean HTML is a very important step. If the crawler gets lost,
it has nowhere to go but somewhere else. Validate Markup Here
http://validator.w3.org
PS: HTML is still key to search engines, remember that.
Checking Keyword Saturation for Free is another tough task if you dont
like checking potentially thousands of search pages if your not #1, do
that here
HTTP://www.marketleap.com
Oh yea and While Im at it, keep keyword linking on index page at a
maximum of 7% of total text. Got that one from a great search engine
book written by Mike Moran and Bill Hunt from the IBM press
titled:
Search Engine Marketing, Inc.
Driving search traffice to your company's web site.
Also if you are serious about learning the net and how to use it
propertly when developing sites, you might want to consider these
titles as well.
HTML & XHTML (the definitive guide) by Chuck Musciano and Bill Kennedy.
MySQL and JSP Web Applications - Data-Driven Programming by
James Turner
Have Fun
All the titles above are very very good books, the only problem is, if
you have any basic knowledge of SEO then you will be bored through the
first 4 chapters or so, but after that, you will learn things you never
knew before.
Many new SEO junkies such as myself tried many "methods" to get those
hits off of the keywords that fit your site the best. Alot of times SEO
people overload their site with keyword phrases and text links.
THIS IS NOT A GOOD IDEA
remember that if your keyword look like this
arizona insurance, arizona home insurance, arizona auto insurance,
arizona ...
the word Arizona is used WAY to much and you are almost certainly being
punished for it. The idea of using the phrases over and over began back
when search algorhythms were simple and search engines actaully used
those commas as a break in phrases. Newer and more advanced search
engines disregard those commas all together and just use the words
within them. A better version of the keyword phrase that I used above
would be something along the lines of
arizona insurance, homeowner insurance , auto , home, life , insurance,
phoenix arizona
By cutting down on the density of spammy keywords I will definitly gain
prominence whithin the search engines. Of course most of you would
never have these keywords , I just suggest that you use them as an idea
when dealing with your's. Keeping that idea going brings me on to the
next topic of keyword density within your text.
I have included a couple of interesting links. I want you to start with
the first one and go through them to see what I mean about keyword
density.
This first link shows what google sees on the "front end" for my main
keyword of "Arizona Insurance".
http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:uEzSuDProEEJ:www.azinsurancefinde...
This next link shows what the search engine really see's. This includes
alt tags and back end tags which may or may not increase your total
keyword density.
http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:uEzSuDProEEJ:www.azinsurancefinde...
Remember that your back end code such as Alt Tags are Absolutely
counted when it comes to keyword density.
So how much is enough?
This depends on exactly how much content is on your page, but most
people would agree that you are safe keeping your total keyword density
to around 5.5%-7%. Custom tayloring this can dramatically increase your
hits on search engines and visibility amount bots.
Oh yea, by the way, after playing with my keyword density, I moved from
#6 to #4 on Google. Don't believe me? check it out.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=arizona+insurance
If you guys are looking for a good tool to help measure keyword
density, I suggest any free one of course. I have included a link to
one that I have found and that works fairly well.
http://www.submitawebsite.com/keyword_density.html
As I come across new information I find myself asking the question; can
to many links hurt?
YES THEY CAN if they are all on one page.
Many engines handle incoming and outgoing links in many different
methods but their are some serious common characteristics.
As a member of the Microsoft Small business community on Search Engines
and Development I have found these few simple rules can help any link
campaign to greatness.
LINK EXCHANGING
1. When developing link pages try to keep the amount of links per page
to a maximum of 20. Any more than this can unofficially "confuse" other
robots and increase the chance that two robots from diffrent engines
may actually collide,
in a matter of speaking.
2. There are many good link programs out there which make your linking
life easy, but one major problem with those is that they allow you to
"Grow to fast". Every SEO firm I have ever talked to , warns of growing
to fast. Because I listen and understand that their are people out
there that know more than I do, I have no experience of what can
happen, but I do give this warning anyways. I was told 20 per month at
max. My http://www.azinsurancefinder.com website has a strong PR4 and
only has 55 links total.
3. Keep the links relevant. In the beginning I know it's hard to turn
down a link, but after 20 or so start getting picky. Relevant topics or
content is best. Try to keep it in a logical box of topics and if it
doesn't fit, then it doesn't fit. Also
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