Top Search Engine Optimization Tips - Part TwoWritten by Niall Roche
Welcome to second part of our series of articles on search engine optimization. In previous article we discussed keywords, domain names, content and keyword density issues. This article moves past that to nitty gritty of improving your web pages and website for better search engine rankings.Page Title
It's truly amazing how many people don't realize how critical TITLE tag can be to success or failure of your website. Your TITLE tag needs to have your most important keyword for that page included in it. This is for benefit of search engines. From a visitors point of view it also needs to entice them to click on your title tag when they see it in search engine results. If your page is about PDA Accessories don't just use that phrase in TITLE tag. Dress it up a bit. For example "PDA Accessories For The Busy Geek" or "Need Accessories for Your PDA? Come right in!" Those examples took me 10 seconds to come up with. You can do far better with a little more time and effort. META Keyword Tag
Anybody still using Meta Keyword tag as their sole search engine optimization method please leave room. Go on get out and don't come back. The Meta Keyword tag is all but dead to search engines. When building your pages it's still worth including but simply put in top 3 or 4 keywords that are relevant to your business and leave it at that. Do not spend hours coming up with hundreds of keywords to stuff into Meta Keyword tag. It's a total waste of time and anybody who tells you different has no idea what they're talking about. META Description Tag
This still has some limited value for your SEO work. When Google or other search engines display search results they display contents of TITLE tag and your Meta Description tag (if present) or a random selection of text from page. Your Meta Description tag will take priority if present. The Meta Description tag is still worth using. Your most important keyword should be in there and again you need to work this keyword into an eye catching phrase or sentence. Don't just copy and paste main keyword in there.
| | The Factors that Play a Role in Your Web Site’s RankingWritten by Courtney Heard
Have you ever had a proposal, estimate or quote for search engine optimization work and wondered what goes into pricing? What makes one site need more work than another? Why do some sites increase rankings faster than others? Why do some sites get more traffic from their top page ranking than yours?There are so many aspects of a web site that can decrease or boost your search engine rankings. Each web site is as unique as DNA and as such, will react differently to different marketing treatments. What are these different factors that go into your web site’s ranking? Here is a list of most important aspects: 1. The State of Your Site Prior to Optimization - Your web site can have many different attributes that contribute to it’s ability to rank well or not so well. Your site’s PageRank for example, if your PR is a 0/10 or 1/10, it’s going to take a lot longer and a lot more work to get your site ranking well. If your site is poorly designed, contains frames or is written entirely in Flash, a lot of work will be required to redesign your site so that it is search engine friendly. If your site has very few incoming links, a fair amount of link development will have to be done in order for you to see rankings and traffic you’re after. A web site that has been around for a while and developed it’s PageRank, has a search engine friendly design and obtains links on a frequent basis, will be able to reach top positions much faster than other sites, once an optimization campaign is under way. 2. The Keywords You Are Targeting - Some keywords are less competitive than others. If you search Google for a keyword or keyword phrase, you’ll see at top of results how many web pages are listed in those results. That is amount of web sites that are competing with yours to reach top page placement for that keyword or keyword phrase. For example, keyword phrase “web design” has approximately 303 million web pages listed in results, whereas if you search for my name in quotations, “courtney heard”, you will see that there are only 508 web pages listed in results. It is therefore, much easier to rank well for keywords “courtney heard” than is is for web design. This is why you must choose keywords wisely. With tools such as wordtracker.com, you can find out approximately how many searches are performed for a given keyword or keyword phrase. The more competitive those keywords are, higher cost will be to optimize your web site and longer optimization will take.
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