"How to submit my site to web directories?" - is the question I would like to answer in this article.
As you know link popularity is an important factor for high search engine rankings. For a new site, submission to general or specialized web directories, is a good way to build links and therefore, increase your site search engine rankings. Of course do not expect miracles, directory submission is only the starting point in link building.
Prepare your website listing from the beginning. Most of the directories ask for title, description, keywords, contact name, phone and email, business address. Write few different description and titles, which contain the keywords you would like to rank for. Keep in mind that every directory is different, even if they look the same! Most of them have strict guidelines for submission, read it very careful and follow it. In some high quality directories you will not have the second chance. Make sure that site's title and description are unique and respect the conditions imposed by directory's guidelines. Some directories require an email address on the same domain as URL's site so keep this in mind when you decide which email address you will use. I suggest you to create a special email address for the directory submission because you will receive a lot of confirmation emails (maybe some spam too). Choose the most appropiate category for your site. Do not resubmit the site if the directory's guidelines interdict it, your listing could be deleted.
Selasa, 15 Januari 2008
Increase Return Traffic to Strengthen SEO Services
When businesses get into search engine marketing, their main objective is driving new visitors to their website. Almost all optimisation strategies devised by webmasters are centered around the same objective, and this is possibly the greatest mistake they can make. It is true that new visitors pep up the traffic influx of a website; but is it wise to neglect the importance of old visitors?
Apart from catering to new users, webmasters have to formulate strategies to bring back old users in the form of return traffic. All web users have certain favourite websites, that they access frequently for daily doses of information and entertainment related to their fields of interest. If webmasters can get their sites to this level, it'll definitely spell success for their SEO campaigns.
Web analytics is one service that can be extremely useful in driving return users to your site. It'll help you analyse prevalent online trends and customer behaviour. The log files of your website will also provide a good insight into visitor reactions, thus helping you identify pages that are retaining or repelling users.
People who bookmark your pages are quite likely to come back once in a while. Buyers - prospective or otherwise â€" will, in all likelihood, visit your site more than once. Return traffic also fosters viral marketing - when users buy something from you, they talk about it to their family, friends and peers, thus publicising your business by word of mouth.
Retaining users is not as easy a task as it sounds to be. Your website should have appealing content matter; something that users have not read elsewhere, something that interests them enough to make a return visit, and above all, something that benefits them. You also need to upgrade your site constantly, catering to latest SEO service guidelines and design techniques. By doing so, you can ensure that users will not find your site boring or static.
It is also imperative that you do away with elements that irk visitors. Things like drop-down menus, scrollers, dragable objects, colours, fonts, etc. have to be dealt with smartly. Review the content of your site periodically. This will help effective Search engine optimizationredirects as much as possible.
When people come back to your website, they would definitely not like to see the same mistakes on your pages. Let your users feel refreshed after every visit to your site. This return traffic will ultimately go on to benefit your campaign in a major way. Use it to your advantage!
Apart from catering to new users, webmasters have to formulate strategies to bring back old users in the form of return traffic. All web users have certain favourite websites, that they access frequently for daily doses of information and entertainment related to their fields of interest. If webmasters can get their sites to this level, it'll definitely spell success for their SEO campaigns.
Web analytics is one service that can be extremely useful in driving return users to your site. It'll help you analyse prevalent online trends and customer behaviour. The log files of your website will also provide a good insight into visitor reactions, thus helping you identify pages that are retaining or repelling users.
People who bookmark your pages are quite likely to come back once in a while. Buyers - prospective or otherwise â€" will, in all likelihood, visit your site more than once. Return traffic also fosters viral marketing - when users buy something from you, they talk about it to their family, friends and peers, thus publicising your business by word of mouth.
Retaining users is not as easy a task as it sounds to be. Your website should have appealing content matter; something that users have not read elsewhere, something that interests them enough to make a return visit, and above all, something that benefits them. You also need to upgrade your site constantly, catering to latest SEO service guidelines and design techniques. By doing so, you can ensure that users will not find your site boring or static.
It is also imperative that you do away with elements that irk visitors. Things like drop-down menus, scrollers, dragable objects, colours, fonts, etc. have to be dealt with smartly. Review the content of your site periodically. This will help effective Search engine optimizationredirects as much as possible.
When people come back to your website, they would definitely not like to see the same mistakes on your pages. Let your users feel refreshed after every visit to your site. This return traffic will ultimately go on to benefit your campaign in a major way. Use it to your advantage!
Jumat, 11 Januari 2008
How to Create Search Engine Friendly Web Site Copy
Search engines read text and not much else. Because they can’t generally index graphics, search engines rely on the text in web sites to provide information about the site content, which they can compare with search queries.
Webmasters therefore need to use body text on any pages on the site that they want indexed by the search engines and ranked highly for matching search queries. Not graphical text that was created in design software, but actual, visible body text. Not sure if your site uses graphical or body text? A good rule of thumb that I learnt from search engine guru Danny Sullivan is to try and highlight the text with your mouse. If you can drag your mouse over individual words in the text when viewing it in a browser, chances are this is body text and the search engines can read it.
Figure 1
Figure 2
The most important page on which to use body text is the home page. Above is an example of a home page that uses graphical text instead of body text. Figure 1 shows what content the site visitors see, while Figure 2 shows the content a search engine sees and indexes.
How much information about a site’s content does a page like the one above provide a search engine? That’s right, very little. With next to no text to be found, the search engine would have to rely on the page’s Title and META Tags to tell it what the page is about. With such little information to go on, it is unlikely that a search engine would consider this page a relevant match for search queries relating to its content. To remedy this, it is widely recommended that each web page you want listed in search engines should contain at least 250 words of visible body text.
Keyword-Rich Text
While it’s a good idea to use plenty of body text on web pages, if that text doesn’t contain relevant keywords and phrases that people type in to the search engines, there’s not much point, because a site isn’t going to be found for logical search queries anyway. Many web sites make the mistake of including text on their site that is either unrelated to their products and services, or full of marketing-speak like “Internet solutions†or “superior servicesâ€. The Internet is plagued with web sites selling particular items without once making reference to those items in their site text. Weird huh?
For a search engine to find a site relevant for a particular search query, it MUST find that search query somewhere in that site. The easiest way to ensure this is to include logical keywords and phrases within the visible text on web pages, as well as in the Title and
Once it is determined what search terms perspective visitors are commonly typing in to search engines, they can then be compared to the goods and services offered on the site and the body text can be adjusted accordingly. Sites lacking any keyword research tend to use very generic, unfocused body copy, or sales-oriented “hypeâ€. Neither style contributes to high search engine rankings.
Target keywords and search phrases placed strategically throughout your body copy give your pages a much higher ranking potential on search engines for related searches. But it’s not as easy as throwing the keywords into your site text willy-nilly. You must ensure that the keywords are integrated seamlessly so their repetition is unobvious and so that the text flows smoothly for the reader.
Don't compromise the readability of your copy to achieve this - hire an expert copywriter to strike the right balance if need be.
SEO Copywriting
Before writing your web site copy, you should research potential keywords and phrases that your target audience may use in search engines and then narrow the list down to your priority terms for each page, sorted in order of importance. You should then use those target search terms as a basis for the creation of optimized Title and
Speak to Your Audience
Don’t lose site of the reader when writing your body copy. Integrating your keywords is important, but not if you are sacrificing the readability of your site and losing the attention of your audience. Put yourself in their shoes like you did when researching your keywords. What are they looking for? What do they need? How will your product/service help them? Does it represent value for money?
Be emotive when describing your products and services. Describe how your product/service will make them feel or look, how it will improve their lives, give them more time etc. Use trigger words that people respond to such as “freeâ€, “successâ€, “youâ€, “cash†etc. Not sure what these are? Check out Words That Sell reports. These reports are perfect if you are targeting a specific industry or profession because they define what keywords people in over 38 industries respond to and what they expect when making a buying decision.
Not sure who your audience is or what they’re looking for? Why not ask them? Use a free survey service such as Survey Monkey to learn more about them so you can write “to†them and not “at†them. You could even draft various styles of body copy and obtain feedback from your site visitors to determine what copywriting style works better for them.
Use Easy to Understand Language
The Internet is no place for verbosity. People are in a hurry - they want to find what they seek quickly and easily with the least hassle possible. You can help them in this quest by ensuring your site pages use simple language and easy to grasp concepts throughout. For example instead of "brand-building web information architects", use "website designers specializing in brand promotion". Keep the large chunks of text on each page to a minimum, using bullet points, white space, graphics, lists and sub-headings to break it up and make it easier to read. This rule of thumb is especially important when creating landing pages for pay per click and other advertising campaigns.
Use examples to get your main points across or to demonstrate your product benefits. Use the old WIIFM (What's In It For Me?) adage when composing your body copy to keep the user's interests at top of mind. Remember your international visitors by incorporating regional word usage (such as organize versus organize or jewelry versus jewellery) and avoid technical jargon that could alienate. Want your visitor to take a particular action? Spell it out for them in plain English, for example Click here to Buy Now, Subscribe to our free newsletter, Bookmark this page now etc. These references are called “Calls to Actionâ€.
Build Your Copy Around Your Keywords
You should always build your page copy around your keywords and not the other way around. If your existing page copy doesn’t contain any of your target search keywords, you’re going to have to rewrite it! Start from scratch if you have to. The secret is to focus. Search engines aren’t going to rank your web site about socks highly if your body copy talks about foot sizes. You need to get specific. It sounds really obvious, but if you sell socks, make sure your site copy has plenty of references to the word socks! If you sell green wool socks, target the phrase "green wool socks" and not "foot apparel in lovely shades of emerald"! Who's going to search for socks using that phrase?
At the risk of sounding like Dr Seuss, if you want to be found for, big socks, small socks, cotton socks and wool socks, then mention them all. Better still, sort your copy into categories based on your various products and services. If you sell wool socks AND cotton socks, then have a page dedicated to each kind. This allows you to target niche keywords within your copy and meet the search engine's relevancy guidelines for related search queries.
Keyword Integration
So imagine you've added plenty of text to your pages and the copy flows well for the reader. You've researched your keywords and phrases and now you're faced with the dilemma of integrating the keywords into your copy. So how do you satisfy the search engine's craving for keywords without interrupting the copy flow for the reader? The answer is: very carefully.
Let's take a look at a practical example. We have a client that specializes in luxury adventure travel. Before I optimized their site, part of the home page copy read like this:
"We specialize in providing vacations for people who want a personal service. We bring to our efforts a fanatical obsession with quality and exclusivity. We also bring a freshness, an outward-going passion for discovery which justifies our growing reputation as one of the world's top travel providers. We can put together packages that include all adventure activities, accommodation, transport and food".
Extensive Keyword Discovery keyword research for the client had determined that the site should target the following key phrases:
• adventure travel
• best adventure vacations
• tailored travel
• overseas adventure travel
• luxury travel packages
So taking our original home page text, the challenge was to integrate these keywords carefully and naturally so as not to disturb the logical flow of the copy and lose the interest of the visitor. Here's how I did it:
"We specialize in providing the best adventure vacations for people who want a personal and tailored travel service. We bring to our efforts a fanatical obsession with quality and exclusivity. We also bring a freshness, an outward-going passion for discovery which justifies our growing reputation as one of the world's top overseas adventure travel providers. We can put together luxury travel packages that include all adventure activities, accommodation, transport and food".
Note that the key phrase "overseas adventure travel" accommodates the phrase "adventure travel" too. Voila! The search engines are happy because the site contains text content relevant to related search queries, the client is happy because we were able to integrate the keywords without distracting the visitor and I'm happy because I know the site is going to rank highly for the client's target search terms.
Now it’s your turn – go tackle your web site copy!
How to Create Search Engine Friendly Title and META Tags (Part 2)
In Part 1 of this article, I defined Title Elements and META Tags and took you step-by-step through how to create an optimized Title Element. Now it's time to create your optimized META Description and META Keywords Tags.
Create Your META Description Tag
Now it's time to create your optimized META Description Tag.
Take your list of target keywords and phrases and open another text file. Again, you can use an existing sample META Description Tag as your template. Let's say our existing description is:
[META name="description" content="Miami Florists create beautiful floral bouquets, arrangements, tributes and displays for all occasions, including weddings, Valentines Day, parties and corporate events. Deliveries throughout Florida."]
You can make your META Description Tag as long as you like, but only a certain portion of it will get indexed and displayed by search engines. According to Danny Sullivan in his article How to Use HTML Meta Tags, 200 to 250 characters of the META Description gets indexed but less than that gets displayed, depending on the search engine. So you want to make sure all your important keywords are listed towards the start of the tag.
Now take your list of keywords for the home page in order of importance. For our fictional florist these were:
- florists Miami
- florists Florida
- wedding bouquets
Now you need to create a readable sentence or two describing your web site and incorporating these keywords so they make the best use of the keyword real estate available.
Because search engines often display the contents of the META Description Tag in the search results, it is very important that your sentences make grammatical sense and are enticing enough to encourage readers to click on your link. Let's start with:
If you're seeking a florist in Miami Florida, Funky Florists create unforgettable wedding bouquets, floral arrangements, tributes and displays for all occasions.
Ok, so that's around 150 characters long and gets our three important keyword phrases included. But it’s a bit bland. We need to add something to entice the searcher to click on it. How about:
Order online for a 10 percent discount!
So now we have the following completed META Description Tag:
[META name="description" content="If you're seeking a florist in Miami Florida, Funky Florists create unforgettable wedding bouquets, floral arrangements, tributes and displays for all occasions. Order online for a 10 percent discount!"]
Our new tag is optimized for our keyword phrases, it's around 200 characters in length, it describes our site accurately, it speaks to the reader and it (hopefully) entices them to click on the link and view the site.
Create Your META Keywords Tag
We're almost there. Now it's time to create your optimized META Keywords Tag. Let me stress here that this Tag is quite unimportant in the grand scheme of things. Not many of the search crawlers even support it any more. You can see which ones do on this page. If you have the time and you really want to create META Keywords tags for your pages, then go ahead, but if not, then leave them out of your code altogether. This tag will have very little impact on your overall SEO campaign.
Assuming you do want to create a Keywords tag, take your list of target keywords and phrases and open another text file. Again, you can use an existing sample META Keywords Tag as your template. Let's say our existing Keywords Tag is:
[META name="keywords" content="flowers, roses, weddings bouquets, florists, floral arrangements, flower deliveries, Valentines Day gifts, Christmas decorations, Mother's Day, tributes, wreaths, clutches, sprays, in sympathy, funerals, corporate functions, parties, floral displays, Miami, Florida"]
You are just including a list of related keywords to include in this tag. Now take your list of keywords for the home page in order of importance. For our fictional florist these were:
- florists Miami
- florists Florida
- wedding bouquets
Because you have a lot more room in this tag, a good rule of thumb for creating a META Keywords Tag is to include the keywords and phrases your are targeting with your site content, as well as some terms that you don't necessarily want to use in your site copy but are still relevant to the site content. For example, the site copy, TITLE and META description tags would include the most important search keywords, but the META Keywords Tag could be used for keyword variations and combinations that don't appear in the visible site text, but that people may also search for. Examples include plurals, contractions, slang, variations, misspellings, cultural nuances and industry jargon.
For our fictional florist, these may include things like:
- wedding flowers
- roses
- wedding roses
- Valentine's Day roses
- sympathy gifts
- Mother's Day gifts
- funeral wreaths
- flower deliveries
- floral arrangements
- birthday gifts
- flowers
- flowers for wedding
- wedding decorations
So now we have the following draft META Keywords Tag:
[META name="keywords" content="florists Miami, florists Florida, wedding bouquets, wedding flowers, roses, wedding roses, Valentine's Day roses, sympathy gifts, Mother's Day gifts, funeral wreaths, flower deliveries, floral arrangements, birthday gifts, flowers, flowers for wedding, wedding decorations"]
However, when creating your Keywords Tag, you should not repeat any particular keywords within your META Keywords Tag more than five times and exclude commas so that all your keywords can be indexed in combination with each other.
So we need to fix the draft tag to remove the excess repetition of the words "flowers" and "weddings". This is easy to do because some of the keyword phrases already incorporate these single generic keywords.
For starters, we can lose the single "flowers" as it is already covered by some of the other phrases like "wedding flowers". Next, we can drop "roses" for the same reason. Then we can combine some keyword phrases together to save space, e.g. "flowers for wedding" and "wedding decorations" can be integrated to become "flowers for wedding decorations" so we can lose the extra instance of "wedding".
So now we have the following completed META Keywords Tag:
[META name="keywords" content="florists Miami florists Florida wedding bouquets wedding flowers wedding roses Valentine's Day roses sympathy gifts Mother's Day gifts funeral wreaths flower deliveries floral arrangements birthday gifts flowers for wedding decorations"]
Tailored TITLE and META Tags
While some webmasters remember to include a META Description and a META Keywords Tag in their home page HTML code, many forget to include them on every page of the site that they want indexed. Or worse, they duplicate the homepage TITLE and META Tags on all other pages. To give a web site the best ranking ability possible, it is highly recommended that each page of the site include a unique TITLE tag and unique META tags, individually tailored to the content of that specific page.
For example, our fictional Miami florist may have a page devoted to wedding bouquets and another devoted to funeral wreaths. The TITLE and META tags for the first page should include keywords relating to weddings and the page about wreaths should utilize keywords relating to funerals and sympathy.
The use of tailored TITLE and META Tags on each page creates multiple entry points to a web site and enables relevant content to be found in search engines no matter where it resides on a site. For example, instead of relying on visitors to arrive via the Home Page, the optimization of individual site pages makes each page more visible in the search engines, providing additional gateways to the site's content. The more pages optimized, the wider the range of keywords and phrases that can be targeted and the more entry points are created to a site.
Create Your META Description Tag
Now it's time to create your optimized META Description Tag.
Take your list of target keywords and phrases and open another text file. Again, you can use an existing sample META Description Tag as your template. Let's say our existing description is:
[META name="description" content="Miami Florists create beautiful floral bouquets, arrangements, tributes and displays for all occasions, including weddings, Valentines Day, parties and corporate events. Deliveries throughout Florida."]
You can make your META Description Tag as long as you like, but only a certain portion of it will get indexed and displayed by search engines. According to Danny Sullivan in his article How to Use HTML Meta Tags, 200 to 250 characters of the META Description gets indexed but less than that gets displayed, depending on the search engine. So you want to make sure all your important keywords are listed towards the start of the tag.
Now take your list of keywords for the home page in order of importance. For our fictional florist these were:
- florists Miami
- florists Florida
- wedding bouquets
Now you need to create a readable sentence or two describing your web site and incorporating these keywords so they make the best use of the keyword real estate available.
Because search engines often display the contents of the META Description Tag in the search results, it is very important that your sentences make grammatical sense and are enticing enough to encourage readers to click on your link. Let's start with:
If you're seeking a florist in Miami Florida, Funky Florists create unforgettable wedding bouquets, floral arrangements, tributes and displays for all occasions.
Ok, so that's around 150 characters long and gets our three important keyword phrases included. But it’s a bit bland. We need to add something to entice the searcher to click on it. How about:
Order online for a 10 percent discount!
So now we have the following completed META Description Tag:
[META name="description" content="If you're seeking a florist in Miami Florida, Funky Florists create unforgettable wedding bouquets, floral arrangements, tributes and displays for all occasions. Order online for a 10 percent discount!"]
Our new tag is optimized for our keyword phrases, it's around 200 characters in length, it describes our site accurately, it speaks to the reader and it (hopefully) entices them to click on the link and view the site.
Create Your META Keywords Tag
We're almost there. Now it's time to create your optimized META Keywords Tag. Let me stress here that this Tag is quite unimportant in the grand scheme of things. Not many of the search crawlers even support it any more. You can see which ones do on this page. If you have the time and you really want to create META Keywords tags for your pages, then go ahead, but if not, then leave them out of your code altogether. This tag will have very little impact on your overall SEO campaign.
Assuming you do want to create a Keywords tag, take your list of target keywords and phrases and open another text file. Again, you can use an existing sample META Keywords Tag as your template. Let's say our existing Keywords Tag is:
[META name="keywords" content="flowers, roses, weddings bouquets, florists, floral arrangements, flower deliveries, Valentines Day gifts, Christmas decorations, Mother's Day, tributes, wreaths, clutches, sprays, in sympathy, funerals, corporate functions, parties, floral displays, Miami, Florida"]
You are just including a list of related keywords to include in this tag. Now take your list of keywords for the home page in order of importance. For our fictional florist these were:
- florists Miami
- florists Florida
- wedding bouquets
Because you have a lot more room in this tag, a good rule of thumb for creating a META Keywords Tag is to include the keywords and phrases your are targeting with your site content, as well as some terms that you don't necessarily want to use in your site copy but are still relevant to the site content. For example, the site copy, TITLE and META description tags would include the most important search keywords, but the META Keywords Tag could be used for keyword variations and combinations that don't appear in the visible site text, but that people may also search for. Examples include plurals, contractions, slang, variations, misspellings, cultural nuances and industry jargon.
For our fictional florist, these may include things like:
- wedding flowers
- roses
- wedding roses
- Valentine's Day roses
- sympathy gifts
- Mother's Day gifts
- funeral wreaths
- flower deliveries
- floral arrangements
- birthday gifts
- flowers
- flowers for wedding
- wedding decorations
So now we have the following draft META Keywords Tag:
[META name="keywords" content="florists Miami, florists Florida, wedding bouquets, wedding flowers, roses, wedding roses, Valentine's Day roses, sympathy gifts, Mother's Day gifts, funeral wreaths, flower deliveries, floral arrangements, birthday gifts, flowers, flowers for wedding, wedding decorations"]
However, when creating your Keywords Tag, you should not repeat any particular keywords within your META Keywords Tag more than five times and exclude commas so that all your keywords can be indexed in combination with each other.
So we need to fix the draft tag to remove the excess repetition of the words "flowers" and "weddings". This is easy to do because some of the keyword phrases already incorporate these single generic keywords.
For starters, we can lose the single "flowers" as it is already covered by some of the other phrases like "wedding flowers". Next, we can drop "roses" for the same reason. Then we can combine some keyword phrases together to save space, e.g. "flowers for wedding" and "wedding decorations" can be integrated to become "flowers for wedding decorations" so we can lose the extra instance of "wedding".
So now we have the following completed META Keywords Tag:
[META name="keywords" content="florists Miami florists Florida wedding bouquets wedding flowers wedding roses Valentine's Day roses sympathy gifts Mother's Day gifts funeral wreaths flower deliveries floral arrangements birthday gifts flowers for wedding decorations"]
Tailored TITLE and META Tags
While some webmasters remember to include a META Description and a META Keywords Tag in their home page HTML code, many forget to include them on every page of the site that they want indexed. Or worse, they duplicate the homepage TITLE and META Tags on all other pages. To give a web site the best ranking ability possible, it is highly recommended that each page of the site include a unique TITLE tag and unique META tags, individually tailored to the content of that specific page.
For example, our fictional Miami florist may have a page devoted to wedding bouquets and another devoted to funeral wreaths. The TITLE and META tags for the first page should include keywords relating to weddings and the page about wreaths should utilize keywords relating to funerals and sympathy.
The use of tailored TITLE and META Tags on each page creates multiple entry points to a web site and enables relevant content to be found in search engines no matter where it resides on a site. For example, instead of relying on visitors to arrive via the Home Page, the optimization of individual site pages makes each page more visible in the search engines, providing additional gateways to the site's content. The more pages optimized, the wider the range of keywords and phrases that can be targeted and the more entry points are created to a site.
How to Create Search Engine Friendly Title and META Tags (Part 1)
The TITLE Element
TITLE elements, (commonly called TITLE Tags), are one of the most important factors that search engines "look" at when it comes to determining the relevancy of a web page against a search query. In their ranking algorithms, nearly all the major search engines attribute a high relevancy weight to the content of the TITLE tag.
In the HTML code of a web site, TITLE tags look like this one for a fictional florist:
[TITLE]Miami Florists - beautiful floral creations made to order.[/TITLE]
(Please note that square brackets [ ] have been used in place of open and closing tags < > to prevent this page code from breaking. You'll need to replace all square brackets with open and closing tags.)
To view the HTML code of any site, choose "View, Source" from your browser toolbar or right click anywhere on the page and choose "view source code".
The META Description Tag
META Description Tags are designed to describe the content of web pages. Search engine robots will gather up this information when indexing web sites and often use it when referencing web pages in the search listings.
While not all search engines continue to utilize the META Description Tag, a majority of search engines rely on the content of this tag (together with a site's visible content) to provide information about a site that they can match with search queries. It is therefore important for webmasters to include keywords and phrases in the META description that they would expect searchers to use to find their site content.
In the HTML code of a web site, a sample META Description Tag looks like this:
[META name="description" content="Miami Florists create beautiful floral bouquets, arrangements, tributes and displays for all occasions, including weddings, Valentines Day, parties and corporate events. Deliveries throughout Florida."]
You can view the META Description Tag of a site by viewing the source code.
The META Keywords Tag
While only indexed by a small handful of search engines these days, the META Keywords Tag is still worth including within a site's HTML code, if only to provide those search engines with as much information as possible about site content.
In the HTML code of a web site, a sample META Keywords Tag looks like this:
[META name="keywords" content="flowers, roses, weddings bouquets, florists, floral arrangements, flower deliveries, Valentines Day gifts, Christmas decorations, Mother's Day, tributes, wreaths, clutches, sprays, in sympathy, funerals, corporate functions, parties, floral displays, Miami, Florida"]
The current lack of support for the META Keywords Tag by so many search engines can be attributed to increasing spam abuse by ignorant webmasters. These webmasters thought the keyword tag was a good place to stuff hundreds of keywords in the hope of achieving a higher search ranking, thereby "spamming" the search engines with useless, non-relevant data. This prompted many search engines to filter out the META Keywords Tag or lower its importance within the ranking algorithm.
You can view the META Keywords Tag of a site by viewing the source code.
Create Your Own Optimized Tags
Now, it's time to create optimized TITLE and META Tags for your own site. Let's start with the TITLE Tag for your Home Page.
Create Your TITLE Tag
Take the list of target keywords and phrases that you want your web site to be found for in search engines. You should have already allocated them to the appropriate pages of your site to be optimized. I use a spreadsheet for this purpose but you should use whatever works for you.
Now, open a text file in Notepad or something similar. If you like, you can use an existing sample TITLE Tag as your template. Let's say our existing Title is:
[TITLE]Miami Florists - beautiful floral creations made to order.[/TITLE]
Now take your list of keywords for the home page and put them in order of importance, with the ones you want to rank highest for at the top. For our fictional florist these are:
- florists Miami
- florists Florida
- wedding bouquets
Now you are simply going to combine these keywords into a sentence or short blurb so they make the best use of the keyword real estate available. Always try to use as few words as possible in your Title Tags, because each additional keyword dilutes the ranking relevancy of all the others.
In this case, I would initially combine the keywords as follows:
Florists in Miami Florida specializing in wedding bouquets.
Notice how I've got the keywords in the correct order for the search queries? I've tried to include the most important keywords towards the start of the tag. There was no need for me to repeat the keyword "Florists" more than once because the sentence I've used covers both "Florists Miami" and "Florists Florida". Most search engines will ignore "in" as a stop word, so it shouldn't matter that we've included it.
Although it's tempting to put a comma between Miami and Florida, on some search engines commas act as a keyword separator, so we don’t want to use one here because we don't want "Florists" and "Florida" to be separated.
Now, there is just one problem with this draft Title. Our 3rd keyword phrase "wedding bouquets" is right at the end of the sentence, meaning it may lose some relevancy weight (search engines consider keywords closer to the start of the tag as the most important). How do we fix this? Let's try this:
Florists in Miami Florida - wedding bouquets a specialty.
We don't want to use a period after "Florida" for the same reason that we don't use a comma. But a hyphen should not make a difference to search engines yet still allow the sentence to read logically to a searcher. So now we have our three target keyword phrases covered in a very short space.
In fact, the above sentence now covers the following keyword combinations:
- florists Miami
- florists Florida
- florists in Miami
- florists in Florida
- florists in Miami Florida
- wedding bouquets
- Miami wedding bouquets
- Florida wedding bouquets
When integrating your keywords, remember that their order is important. If you want your site to have the best possible chance of being found for the search query "Miami florists", you need to put the keywords in that exact order and not "florists Miami", because the spider searches the keywords in exact order. Unless they are stop words, also try to avoid using extra words between your keywords.
If you wanted to, you could integrate your company name into the Title tag, but (unless your company name is super short or includes a keyword), don’t sacrifice a keyword to do so. Instead, try placing the company name at the end of the tag so you can be sure that all your important keywords will be indexed first.
In the case of our florist, let’s imagine their name was Funky Florists. We could easily accommodate the name into the beginning of our optimized Title as follows:
[TITLE]Funky Florists in Miami Florida - wedding bouquets a specialty.[/TITLE]
It may reduce the keyword relevancy impact very slightly, but including your company name enables you to brand your page, which may be more important to you.
The content of the Title Tag is also what gets saved in a person's Favorite’s list when they bookmark your site, so having your company name included is worth considering from a branding perspective.
TITLE elements, (commonly called TITLE Tags), are one of the most important factors that search engines "look" at when it comes to determining the relevancy of a web page against a search query. In their ranking algorithms, nearly all the major search engines attribute a high relevancy weight to the content of the TITLE tag.
In the HTML code of a web site, TITLE tags look like this one for a fictional florist:
[TITLE]Miami Florists - beautiful floral creations made to order.[/TITLE]
(Please note that square brackets [ ] have been used in place of open and closing tags < > to prevent this page code from breaking. You'll need to replace all square brackets with open and closing tags.)
To view the HTML code of any site, choose "View, Source" from your browser toolbar or right click anywhere on the page and choose "view source code".
The META Description Tag
META Description Tags are designed to describe the content of web pages. Search engine robots will gather up this information when indexing web sites and often use it when referencing web pages in the search listings.
While not all search engines continue to utilize the META Description Tag, a majority of search engines rely on the content of this tag (together with a site's visible content) to provide information about a site that they can match with search queries. It is therefore important for webmasters to include keywords and phrases in the META description that they would expect searchers to use to find their site content.
In the HTML code of a web site, a sample META Description Tag looks like this:
[META name="description" content="Miami Florists create beautiful floral bouquets, arrangements, tributes and displays for all occasions, including weddings, Valentines Day, parties and corporate events. Deliveries throughout Florida."]
You can view the META Description Tag of a site by viewing the source code.
The META Keywords Tag
While only indexed by a small handful of search engines these days, the META Keywords Tag is still worth including within a site's HTML code, if only to provide those search engines with as much information as possible about site content.
In the HTML code of a web site, a sample META Keywords Tag looks like this:
[META name="keywords" content="flowers, roses, weddings bouquets, florists, floral arrangements, flower deliveries, Valentines Day gifts, Christmas decorations, Mother's Day, tributes, wreaths, clutches, sprays, in sympathy, funerals, corporate functions, parties, floral displays, Miami, Florida"]
The current lack of support for the META Keywords Tag by so many search engines can be attributed to increasing spam abuse by ignorant webmasters. These webmasters thought the keyword tag was a good place to stuff hundreds of keywords in the hope of achieving a higher search ranking, thereby "spamming" the search engines with useless, non-relevant data. This prompted many search engines to filter out the META Keywords Tag or lower its importance within the ranking algorithm.
You can view the META Keywords Tag of a site by viewing the source code.
Create Your Own Optimized Tags
Now, it's time to create optimized TITLE and META Tags for your own site. Let's start with the TITLE Tag for your Home Page.
Create Your TITLE Tag
Take the list of target keywords and phrases that you want your web site to be found for in search engines. You should have already allocated them to the appropriate pages of your site to be optimized. I use a spreadsheet for this purpose but you should use whatever works for you.
Now, open a text file in Notepad or something similar. If you like, you can use an existing sample TITLE Tag as your template. Let's say our existing Title is:
[TITLE]Miami Florists - beautiful floral creations made to order.[/TITLE]
Now take your list of keywords for the home page and put them in order of importance, with the ones you want to rank highest for at the top. For our fictional florist these are:
- florists Miami
- florists Florida
- wedding bouquets
Now you are simply going to combine these keywords into a sentence or short blurb so they make the best use of the keyword real estate available. Always try to use as few words as possible in your Title Tags, because each additional keyword dilutes the ranking relevancy of all the others.
In this case, I would initially combine the keywords as follows:
Florists in Miami Florida specializing in wedding bouquets.
Notice how I've got the keywords in the correct order for the search queries? I've tried to include the most important keywords towards the start of the tag. There was no need for me to repeat the keyword "Florists" more than once because the sentence I've used covers both "Florists Miami" and "Florists Florida". Most search engines will ignore "in" as a stop word, so it shouldn't matter that we've included it.
Although it's tempting to put a comma between Miami and Florida, on some search engines commas act as a keyword separator, so we don’t want to use one here because we don't want "Florists" and "Florida" to be separated.
Now, there is just one problem with this draft Title. Our 3rd keyword phrase "wedding bouquets" is right at the end of the sentence, meaning it may lose some relevancy weight (search engines consider keywords closer to the start of the tag as the most important). How do we fix this? Let's try this:
Florists in Miami Florida - wedding bouquets a specialty.
We don't want to use a period after "Florida" for the same reason that we don't use a comma. But a hyphen should not make a difference to search engines yet still allow the sentence to read logically to a searcher. So now we have our three target keyword phrases covered in a very short space.
In fact, the above sentence now covers the following keyword combinations:
- florists Miami
- florists Florida
- florists in Miami
- florists in Florida
- florists in Miami Florida
- wedding bouquets
- Miami wedding bouquets
- Florida wedding bouquets
When integrating your keywords, remember that their order is important. If you want your site to have the best possible chance of being found for the search query "Miami florists", you need to put the keywords in that exact order and not "florists Miami", because the spider searches the keywords in exact order. Unless they are stop words, also try to avoid using extra words between your keywords.
If you wanted to, you could integrate your company name into the Title tag, but (unless your company name is super short or includes a keyword), don’t sacrifice a keyword to do so. Instead, try placing the company name at the end of the tag so you can be sure that all your important keywords will be indexed first.
In the case of our florist, let’s imagine their name was Funky Florists. We could easily accommodate the name into the beginning of our optimized Title as follows:
[TITLE]Funky Florists in Miami Florida - wedding bouquets a specialty.[/TITLE]
It may reduce the keyword relevancy impact very slightly, but including your company name enables you to brand your page, which may be more important to you.
The content of the Title Tag is also what gets saved in a person's Favorite’s list when they bookmark your site, so having your company name included is worth considering from a branding perspective.
Kamis, 10 Januari 2008
3 Steps to a Search Engine Compatible Site
Is your web site search engine compatible? Despite all the misinformation out there, it's very easy to design a web site that search engines will love. All you need to do is follow 3 simple steps:
1) Obey the Search Engine Guidelines
Nearly all search engines publish their own guidelines regarding the submission of sites, the type of sites they will accept and recommendations for optimized content. Google recently updated their Webmaster Guidelines which cover the most common forms of deceptive or manipulative search engine behavior that they consider to be 'spam'. They also published SEO Guidelines – advice for webmasters to heed when choosing an SEO. Google was the first search engine to publicly acknowledge search engine optimizers in this fashion.
It's not just Google publishing anti-spam guidelines. You'll find them at the following search engine sites as well:
* Yahoo terms of service
* Yahoo guidelines on search engine spam (covering AltaVista and AllTheWeb as well)
* Yahoo definitions of search engine spam (covering AltaVista and AllTheWeb as well)
* Yahoo content guidelines
* MSN Search webmaster guidelines
* AltaVista terms of use (AltaVista is a Yahoo-owned company)
* Ask.com terms of service and spam policy
* Ask.com editorial guidelines
2) Don’t Use Spammy Search Engine Tactics
Often, webmasters will use search engine spam techniques without even being aware that they are doing so. Or worse, web designers can - advertently or inadvertently - integrate techniques that could cause a site to be penalized in the site's rankings in one or more engines, without the site owner's knowledge of such penalties. The key to avoiding spamming the engines is research.
Keep track of the various search engine guidelines via the links above. Watch for any changes they make to these guidelines and tweak your site accordingly. Trawl the various webmaster and search engine forums regularly to ensure your site doesn't use any of the latest optimization methods that appear to be penalized. If you suspect your site has been penalized, remove the offending content, contact the engine concerned and ask to be reinstated.
Google actually encourage you to file a re-inclusion request via their Help Center and this post by Google staffer Matt Cutts outlines what should be included.
Alternatively, here is a sample email template you can use instead:
--------------------------------------------
Sample Re-inclusion Request Email
Dear [search engine name],
I am the owner of [your site URL].
I did not realize that participation in [spammy method] and
[spammy SEO name] programs could cause problems for my website. I was
assured that these techniques were search-engine-friendly by [your source for using spammy method].
I now understand that the practices used are not acceptable. I apologize for having allowed them to be placed on my website. I've removed the questionable pages and links from the site. I promise not to repeat such mistakes.
I am asking you to please consider reinstating my website,
[your site URL] into the [search engine name] Index.
Sincerely,
[Your Name]
------------------------------------------
To assist them to provide a high quality service, search engines encourage people to report search results they are dissatisfied with. If you spot some content spam or techniques that are clearly in breach of the search engine's public guidelines, you can report it using these links:
* Google spam report or via search-quality@google.com
* AllTheWeb relevancy problem report (AllTheWeb is a Yahoo-owned company)
* AltaVista search results manipulation report (or via Yahoo's spam report)
* Yahoo spam report
* Ask.com spam report or via information@ask.com
3) Build Sites for Visitors Rather than Search Engines
The methodologies may have changed over the years, but the same principles have always applied to "good" or "white hat" SEO. Build sites for humans, not search engines. Make the site as user friendly as possible, avoid the bells and whistles and include high quality, relevant content.
Wherever possible, include text-based content and navigation menus with simple, descriptive, well-written copy designed to convert your visitors into customers. Include keywords and phrases your audience would logically type in to search engines to find sites like yours. Only link to sites that are relevant to your target audience and spend some time on usability, making sure all your forms and shopping carts work.
Remember that what pleases a visitor is almost always what pleases a search engine too.
1) Obey the Search Engine Guidelines
Nearly all search engines publish their own guidelines regarding the submission of sites, the type of sites they will accept and recommendations for optimized content. Google recently updated their Webmaster Guidelines which cover the most common forms of deceptive or manipulative search engine behavior that they consider to be 'spam'. They also published SEO Guidelines – advice for webmasters to heed when choosing an SEO. Google was the first search engine to publicly acknowledge search engine optimizers in this fashion.
It's not just Google publishing anti-spam guidelines. You'll find them at the following search engine sites as well:
* Yahoo terms of service
* Yahoo guidelines on search engine spam (covering AltaVista and AllTheWeb as well)
* Yahoo definitions of search engine spam (covering AltaVista and AllTheWeb as well)
* Yahoo content guidelines
* MSN Search webmaster guidelines
* AltaVista terms of use (AltaVista is a Yahoo-owned company)
* Ask.com terms of service and spam policy
* Ask.com editorial guidelines
2) Don’t Use Spammy Search Engine Tactics
Often, webmasters will use search engine spam techniques without even being aware that they are doing so. Or worse, web designers can - advertently or inadvertently - integrate techniques that could cause a site to be penalized in the site's rankings in one or more engines, without the site owner's knowledge of such penalties. The key to avoiding spamming the engines is research.
Keep track of the various search engine guidelines via the links above. Watch for any changes they make to these guidelines and tweak your site accordingly. Trawl the various webmaster and search engine forums regularly to ensure your site doesn't use any of the latest optimization methods that appear to be penalized. If you suspect your site has been penalized, remove the offending content, contact the engine concerned and ask to be reinstated.
Google actually encourage you to file a re-inclusion request via their Help Center and this post by Google staffer Matt Cutts outlines what should be included.
Alternatively, here is a sample email template you can use instead:
--------------------------------------------
Sample Re-inclusion Request Email
Dear [search engine name],
I am the owner of [your site URL].
I did not realize that participation in [spammy method] and
[spammy SEO name] programs could cause problems for my website. I was
assured that these techniques were search-engine-friendly by [your source for using spammy method].
I now understand that the practices used are not acceptable. I apologize for having allowed them to be placed on my website. I've removed the questionable pages and links from the site. I promise not to repeat such mistakes.
I am asking you to please consider reinstating my website,
[your site URL] into the [search engine name] Index.
Sincerely,
[Your Name]
------------------------------------------
To assist them to provide a high quality service, search engines encourage people to report search results they are dissatisfied with. If you spot some content spam or techniques that are clearly in breach of the search engine's public guidelines, you can report it using these links:
* Google spam report or via search-quality@google.com
* AllTheWeb relevancy problem report (AllTheWeb is a Yahoo-owned company)
* AltaVista search results manipulation report (or via Yahoo's spam report)
* Yahoo spam report
* Ask.com spam report or via information@ask.com
3) Build Sites for Visitors Rather than Search Engines
The methodologies may have changed over the years, but the same principles have always applied to "good" or "white hat" SEO. Build sites for humans, not search engines. Make the site as user friendly as possible, avoid the bells and whistles and include high quality, relevant content.
Wherever possible, include text-based content and navigation menus with simple, descriptive, well-written copy designed to convert your visitors into customers. Include keywords and phrases your audience would logically type in to search engines to find sites like yours. Only link to sites that are relevant to your target audience and spend some time on usability, making sure all your forms and shopping carts work.
Remember that what pleases a visitor is almost always what pleases a search engine too.
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