marți, 7 iunie 2011

5 Basic SEO Tips That Create SE Friendly Web Sites

The simple solution to this problem is to implement the following basic SEO tips and spend the rest of your time building links and content. These tips may be fairly common to the more experienced Webmaster but if you are not using them, you are losing traffic.
1. Implement unique META titles and descriptions for all of your pages. Many Webmasters begin their first web site without META description and title tags at all. Once they learn that, SEO wise, it is very important to do so, they add them but they are not unique. Each title and description should be unique to each individual page.
2. Add an HTML sitemap to your site. This is a single page that includes links to the main pages of your websites. If your site is small you may want to include every page while larger sites should just have links to the most important pages. Sitemaps are an import part of SEO optimization because they give the search engines a 'hub' where their spiders can find all of your pages through one single page.
3. Target 'long tail' keywords in your sub pages. Long tail keywords are those that are not as highly competitive as your main keyword. Target a fairly competitive keyword for your index page and less competitive keywords for all sub pages. Many Webmasters have a bad habit of targeting the same few keywords throughout their entire site; because of this they are losing valuable traffic to inner pages.
4. Use underline, bold, strong and italics tags on each pages keywords. This SEO tip is one that has proven to be very valuable. Search Engines give more weight to words that are using these tags. Do not over do it, implementing these tags at least two or three times would cut it.
5. Use H1 and H2 tags with your main and secondary keywords. Most SE's give a lot of weight to words that are wrapped in these tags. Each page on your web site should have one or two targeted keywords at the beginning of the page. Just add keyword to the main keyword and the same for your secondary keyword replacing h1 with h2 and deleting the spaces.
If you have not been using the above tips in your SEO strategy then you have been missing out on quality targeted traffic. Implement these tips as soon as possible and you will start to notice an increase in visitors.

SEO Tips - Quality Links

We have written about the benefits of quality over quantity links in SEO ad nauseom, but I do still think it is a subject worthy of discussion.
As Kaspar Szymanski, Search Quality Strategist at Google says in his recent blog post: Quality links to your site, published on Monday - a quality link is always going to be worth much more than a hundred 'spammy' links. So, how does a person determine which links are 'quality' and which are not?
Well, I think a lot of this comes down to experience, when I first started dabbling in SEO a few years ago, (and, my, how the discipline has changed since then!) I know I fell into some pretty easy traps and pitfalls when it came to link building. One thing that I do know about link building is that it isn't easy. Whichever way you come to look at it, 'easy' is not a word I would use to describe it, not that it's technically very difficult, of course, just that it's time consuming and requires patience, dedication, and to some extent a certain amount of luck.
So, what pitfalls and traps could a green SEO newbie easily find themselves slipping down?
Lets start with Rubbish Directories - when I started my first SEO Campaign (many moons ago now) I seem to remember spending hours (literally hours) submitting my site to a gazillion directories. Some were ok, and I would even go so far as to say I would use them again today, some, however were absolutely diabolical.
What do you look for in a good directory then? I hear you ask - and because I am feeling generous I'll let you in to a few little secrets I've picked up the hard way...
1. Is the directory relevant? At the very least it should have a relevant category
2. Does the directory provide SEO friendly links (by this I mean, make sure the links aren't PHP forwarders or other such uselessness)
3. Is the directory active?
4. Look at the page you want to link from, does it have a lot of other links? - The fewer the links the better
5. What is the PageRank of the directory?
6. Are the Links Follow or Nofollow (not that Nofollow links should always be discounted, just if the site asks for an administration fee then bear this in mind)
This seems a good place to add in a comment on Kaspar Szymanski's blog that caught my eye:
Zack Pike said...
Kaspar - Very relevant artice. I lead the SEO strategy for a Fortune 200 company and I get cold calls on quick turn linkbuilding all of the time, it gets especially frustrating when someone above my pay level catches wind of "linkbuilding" and how this "great" new strategy can get you to the top of Google. It takes a lot of time educating my internal stakeholders that the key to generating quality links, that are going to have any effect, is great content and interaction with our consumers and KOLs online. I'm glad you wrote this post so I can reference it in my presentations... Straight from the source. Thanks!
Kaspar Szymanski goes on to say in his blog post that your site's content is extremely important to gain quality backlinks through natural processes. Well, I tend to agree with him, and this is why I say that link building isn't easy.
To continually come up with unique and interesting content for your site is an ongoing and arduous task. It's important to weigh up the value a page one listing will have over the time you spend on this task. If you know that the time spent on such things is worthwhile then invest your efforts there. If it's not going to make commercial sense then look to other online marketing activities such as email marketing or PPC Advertising and invest your time and money there instead. But, this isn't the place for such discussions, we're and SEO blog, and SEO is what we're all about, so... If you have decided that it's worth your while developing you content, then look outside the box. There are many forms of content besides plain old text, though text is still extremely important (and will remain so for as long as Google uses text as fodder).
Think about including a web video to your pages. This will add value to you users, can increase the time spent onsite (I think this is a Ranking Factor), and generally gets you noticed. If you employ Video Optimisation techniques then your videos will even start to appear in the SERPs and it doesn't take a genius to work out that videos are much more likely to get clicked than text. You'll also find that your videos will get distributed and linked to by others within your community.
I would say, if it's lasting effect you are after then humour will have it's down side - the benefits are often short-lived. You will get a spike in traffic, but it will always remain just this - a spike. For lasting effects add something your users will want to return to regularly and will find useful in the future.
Kaspar also talks about Social Media. I have to confess, this is an area that I feel a little out of my depth in, however, with a strategy behind it I think it can be very powerful. It's just about leveraging what you want from it (like pretty much everything else in life, eh?). His tip of making sure you provide a link to Twitter or Facebook is a great and simple one to implement. It's just about making it easy for non-techy folk to share online content.

Discover The Effective Website SEO Tips Today

The success of any website lies on how well it is promoted both over the internet, and also in the real world. But since it is online and that is where your visitors will most be coming from, it is there that you need to focus on. And to do this you will need some of the best website SEO tips.
Search engine optimization is not about gaming the search engines. At least let us get that notion straightened out early on. It is about getting your website noticed by the search engines through their search spiders (software that crawl the web looking for bits of information), in the process following the guidelines that they had set. This should avoid your website getting into trouble with them and resulting to either low ranking in the search results or not showing up at all.
And to rank in the search results for your targeted keyword should be the target of every SEO technique that you do. Because the higher you are in the rankings, the more quality traffic you will get for your website. And by quality it simply means that people should be genuinely interested in the copy or content of your website. Without a doubt these are the people you would want to attract.
So to help you with that goal I have listed here some of the most important website SEO tips that you should follow.
Know what keywords you should focus on. And to do this you will have to use a keyword research tool. Do not think for a second that you can do it on your own without utilizing a tool or a software. Because even if you know what your target traffic wants to look for it does not mean you know the exact words they would be using in their online searches. And that is where a keyword tool will come in very handy. It will show you the frequently searched terms including how many people are searching for these words every month.
When you already have your keywords then you should focus on the on-page optimization of your website. To simplify this idea, what you need to do is to put your keywords in all the right places in your web pages. The most important location is the title tag. Your most important keyword should go there. And do not forget the body or the text of your page. Put your keywords there once, twice or maybe more depending on the length of the article.
Then you need to focus on the off-page optimization which is simply building quality backlinks to your site. And I emphasize the word quality because there are many SEO specialists out there who are wasting their time getting low quality links when a single link from an authority website will have more than 10 times the value. Of course make sure you are following the guidelines set by the search engines when you are building links.
So there you go. These are just some of the most basic website SEO tips that you should now if you want your website to start ranking in the search results. Just remember that search engine optimization takes time especially if you are working within a competitive niche.

3 Tips on Improving Your Site's SEO

There are a number of ways that you can improve your websites traffic using SEO (search engine optimisation). The best position for your website to be in is obviously number one on the search engine results. So how can you improve your site's SEO? The following tips should give you some help:
1. Improve use of keywords
Researching the keywords that you want to target is one of the best things you can do to improve how your site performs in the search engines. It will be harder to target some keywords so look for easier ones. For example, if you are selling handbags on your site, then trying to get to number one on the search engine results pages for the keyword 'handbags' will be extremely difficult. However it might be easier for you to target a keyword phrase instead such as 'buying leather handbags'. There are a number of applications which can help you to determine how easy a certain keyword or keyword phrase will be to target.
2. Use social media sites
There are a number of social media websites such as Twitter and Facebook which you can use to increase the number of backlinks to your site. The more backlinks your site has the higher it will fare in the search engines. And by having some of your posts on these sites, you will have more chance of getting visitors to your site too which is of course the main goal. You can also comment on other people's blogs in order to create more links. But remember that any comments you make should be meaningful.
3. Submit articles to article directories
Article marketing is another way to get more links to your site. You can write some quality articles or pay someone else to do this for you and then submit them to some of the article directories. At the bottom of each article you can add a resource box where you can place links back to your site. This will also help to improve traffic to your site.

Seo Tips - Keywords

Seo (search engine optimization) tips for keywords is one of the starting points for good search engine optimization.
Seo keywords is one of the very first things that you will do when you begin to optimize your web site for high natural search engine rankings. Although it is foundational, meaning that you practically have to do it, it keywords for seo is a very small portion of the work that needs to be done for good seo. It is one of the least impactful components of seo.
So how do you create a strong seo keywords foundation? Here are some tips for seo keyword optimization:
1) Use a keyword tool (the free versions are all you need to get all the information you need) and find keywords that get at least 1000 searches per month, and that have less than 5000 competing web sites (results) in the search engine results.
2) Create individual web pages for each keyword you wish to optimize for. Put the keyword in the title, keyword tag, description tag, a header tag, and several times in the content of the web page.
Once you have your seo keyword foundation, here are some tips to gain further search engine rankings:
1) Write articles around your keyword themes, put text anchor links into your articles, linking to the web page that is optimized for the respective keyword around which your article is written, and submit these articles to each of the top 100 article directories online.
2) Submit your web page url to each of the top 100 web directories online.
Within a short period of time, your optimized web page should be appearing in the top ten results in most of the major search engine rankings for the respective seo tips keywords
you have been using.

7 YouTube SEO Tips You Haven't Heard Of!

If you are a small/medium/large business owner who is actively using social media marketing WITHOUT any YouTube presence, then please allow me to ask: How was your trip to Mars?!
If social media is booming, video marketing is blooming and the cost is next to nothing. That's why; it boggles my mind why many businesses are not devouring their share of the YouTube Pie!
Even those who do end up with mediocre results only because they are unaware of few tips that can blast their YouTube visibility and their SEO. Not anymore!
Top 7 Insiders YouTube SEO Tips You Haven't Heard Of!
  1. Did you know that there are only four categories (News&Politics, Science&Tech, Howto&Style, and Gaming) that are listed in the advanced search functions? So, if your video is posted under any other category, it wouldn't be found if category searching is involved! The good news is that these four categories are very generic and you can probably tailor any of them to your video
  2. YouTube allows roughly 22 words for the description displayed on the query page. So, it's your best bet to ensure that your keywords are in the beginning of your description. A general description rule of thumb: too short and too lengthy descriptions are not recommended. Use keywords wisely within a moderately sized description that actually describes your video. (Some people include the most irrelevant video descriptions imaginable. Don't be one of them!).
  3. Make a video transcript which is a closed caption file. This will greatly help with search engine indexing. And, as an added bonus, it will enable deaf users to read through your video.
  4. Use your own material or any of YouTube's audio tracks collection. The last thing you need is being penalized for using a copyright material!
  5. Row file names make a difference. Make sure to optimize your video raw file name the same way you would optimize your video title.
  6. If you're putting a link in your video description, start it with http:// before the URL. It won't work otherwise!
  7. Become YouTube savvy by exploring YouTube API and YouTube RSS Feeds. You will be glad you did!
That's it for now! Try these tips and see your YouTube SEO explode in no time. To your success!

5 Essential Joomla SEO Tips For Beginners

Joomla is not search engine friendly by default. You need to put some work into improving this. The main thing that you notice when you start your SEO work on Joomla website is the URL or each page. The page URLs produced by Joomla are not search engine friendly. They have always query parameters, which doesn't give much information for search engines to properly index and rank those pages. When you do on-page search engine optimization, one of things you should pay a lot more attention is the URL of the page you want to optimize. It has to be informative and meaningful, well populated with keywords and preferably with ".html" extension.
1. Use Search engine friendly URL
To make your Joomla website's URL search engine friendly, you have a lot of options. The first one is to use the default Joomla's SEF plugin. By default this plugin is not activated, so you have to go to your global configuration page and activate that.
You can also use third party free or paid components that do the same thing with additional features. One of my favorite is sh404SEF.
2. Craft catch Page titles for all pages in your website
Most of the time, I see on Joomla websites with default title that say "Home". This is the title of the home page. Mostly beginners don't see that and the way you change that title also a little bit obscure at first. As you know, page title is one of the main on-site criteria considered by search engines when ranking web pages. So you should give your pages meaningful title with your main keyword included in it. To change this title, do the following:
a. Go to Menu Manager and click your main menu. 
b. From the list of menu items, open the one that says "home" 
c. Now on the right hand side of the screen there are a number of parameters you can change. Open "Parameters (System)" and change the field that say Page title to your desired homepage title and save.

3. Setup Meta data for every page in your website
Meta data may not have as much value in the eyes of search engines as used to have few years back but still you should do proper optimization work on them. When optimizing Meta data of a webpage. You should focus more on the description rather than keywords. You write good descriptions about your page, preferably 160 characters long. This description is the one you see on search engine result page under your title. So it has a lot of value to help your link in the search engine result page stand out. Of course if search engines cannot find relevant description in your Meta tag, they will try to extract some text from your article body on the page and use that as description on the search engine result page. However, you have the chance to decide what to put instead, so use this advantage to attract more visitor from search engines.
The major problem I see on lots of Joomla powered website is that they use one set of Meta description and keyword for all pages on the website. This is wrong! You should set up individual sets of description and keywords for every page on your website. You can still use the global configuration to set Meta data for the whole website, but you should add Meta data for every article you add from you're your article manager page.
To add Meta data for an article you just wrote, look at the right section of Article [edit] page to find fields for entering Meta data.
4. Take advantage of 404 error page pages
Most often you see a Joomla website with the default 404 error page with small information about the error and a link to home page. You should setup a 404 page, either using some sort of plugin or setup one manually. Include valuable resource on this page to direct the user somewhere back to your website. Or include search form that can be used by the user to get back on track. Or use some of the phrases from users query on the previous page and produce a search result page yourself. The point here is to avoid users from being frustrated by the mean error page.
5. Insert H1 Tags In Joomla
It's a good idea to make use of H1 tag as your article title decorator. It has some significance to wards convincing search engines that the page is actually about the keyword you have been mentioning starting from the page title. I know pages that do well without H1 tag, but who cares if you can get a little help on your SEO for little or no work. Go ahead and us H1 tags for your your articles' Title.