Search Engine Optimization Tips (part 1)Written by Jimmy Whisenhunt
Search engine optimization (seo) can be a freighting and daunting experience. We have put together some tips to make this task much more pleasant. We are going to go over some tips to help your search engine rankings. Here is what we are going to cover in this article.1)Design and Setup Problems 2)Selecting correct keywords 3)The Title Tag 4)Your Page Copy 5)Meta Tags 6)Images “alt” tags 7)What you should not do 1)Design and Setup Problems Unfortunately, some webmasters have lost ballgame before they even get started with search engine optimization with design problems. We are going to go over five of most common design problems and there work around or solutions. a)Sites that use Frames: Search engines do not index frames well. In fact search engine do such a poor job we recommend no to use frames at all. Here is problem a frame page is like name conveys it is a page in side of another page in a frame. The HTML code is like this: Framed Site As you can see, there is no real content on in page so search engines do not have anything to index. The work around is to use tag to add content to page manually. You would place tag before then add your optimized content between . An easy way to do this is to create a new regular (not framed) home page for your site that describes your site, products & services. Then copy everything from between tags and insert it in tag. Example Framed Site Keep it simple search engines like it that way and no one will every see it. Do not for get about Title and Meta tags more on that later in article. b)Dynamic URLs Most search engine cannot or will not index dynamic URLs. A dynamic URL is a URL that contains any of following characters: ?, &, %, +, =, $, cgi-bin, .cgi Dynamic URLs are most common on database driven sites. If your URL contains any of above characters it is very unlikely that you will get listed with major search engines. Solution is to make a static page that has a static URL on that does not contain any of above characters. c)Sites That Use Flash Sites that use flash as a splash screen spiders cannot index them. A general rule is not to use flash as a home page splash screen. If you just have to use as much of your page copy as you can and remember to use your title and meta tags. Another note about flash is menu items. Spider’s follows HTML links with flash menu spiders cannot follow them. Work around use a site map to link all of your pages together so spiders will have HTML links to follow. d)Image Maps Image maps are similar to Flash most spiders cannot follow links in image maps. To be on safe side build a site map of your entire site so spiders have HTML links to crawl.
| | The Changing Face of Search Engine Optimization
Written by Bobby Heard
With ever evolving internet market for just about anything you can imagine and Google’s index growing to almost 9 billion pages, and counting, there is little dispute amongst search engine optimizers that our job is getting much harder. From linking to articles, and density to ontology, our industry changes as fast as any other. The search engines, especially Google, seem to be on a daily diet of change and their algorithm seems to be growing at rate of their index.The word ‘related’ plays a much bigger part in SEO today than it ever has in past. Instead of targeting an exact keyword phrase, it now makes a lot more sense to keep your site within context and to have related words to your keywords, compared to having density of one keyword phrase. Linking has also turned into a frenzy for relevancy. Unrelated links seem to no longer carry much weight at all. The theme through all of Google’s recent changes seems to come down to one cliché: quality over quantity. Just like with any other update at Google, optimizers must search and research their profession, however it seems to be happening more often than ever. You can’t walk through our office without hearing Google’s name a thousand times. We have unofficial RND (research and development) meetings almost every hour as there seems to constantly be new ideas and theories popping into all of our heads. In past there were always changes to way we’ve done our work, but pace of this change is accelerating rapidly as well as competition for online searchers.
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