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Search Engine Optimization Tips & Tools For Higher Google Page Rank & Traffic
Before you can
even start writing your site content, it is essential for search engine
optimization and high google page rank, that you first develop the table of highly profitable
keywords applicable for your Web site, and the corresponding site
structure.
Now it's time to
fill that structure with content that accomplishes two critical goals...
1) Deliver valuable
information to your readers - your visitors must get what they are
looking for. Help them solve their problems and quests. Satisfy the whole
reason why they are doing the search. You must really know and like
the subject for this.
2) Convince each search engine
that you are the most relevant (at least in the Top 30, preferably in the
Top 10) for the keywords that you target. Keywords are one of the most
important things in search engine optimization.
1) Your potential visitors must find you on the first or second page of the search results for your
keyword. Otherwise you simply don't exist for that word.
2) Your potential visitors must read the Title and Description that are listed in the search results, and must find it attractive and sufficiently compelling to click to your site.
3) Your visitors find
valuable site content that helps them solve their problems, and so learn
to trust you, and follow your recommendations, whatever that's a click on
the link to an affiliate program, buying your product, subscribing to your
newsletter, etc.
If you have
developed the structure of your site properly, your search engine
optimization work will be much easier and you'll never have to worry about
the search engines, because their product is the quality of their results,
and your pages help them make their product better...
Your pages are optimized for relevant keywords and deliver quality content to searchers.
No
off-target keywords to suck in untargeted customers.
No
page cloaking or invisible links or anything else that is not natural
for a true content site.
No
wasting your time on creating multiple versions of the same site, one
for each major engine. Instead, focus on building one "best fit" site
that scores well with most of the engines for most of your words. Then
spend your time on creating another site.
No
multiple doorway pages which are specially created as part of a search
engine optimization campaign and higher google page rank. The fact is that every page which is
optimized to rank well, is acting as a "doorway" to your Web site.
Each page should
contain content that is about one of your most profitable keywords. This
is the keyword that you want the search engines to rank highly. We'll call
this word the specific keyword from now on. As you write the page,
you focus upon using this keyword slightly more than your high school
English teacher taught you was "good English."
There are also general keywords - the more generic words that are associated with
your specific keywords. For example, if your specific keyword is "search
engine optimization," your general keywords would be "placement,"
"ranking," "positioning," "promotion," etc.
You'll never be
successful in optimization campaign for general keywords by themselves -
there is just too much competition. Even if you win, the traffic is just
too non-targeted to be interested in your specific niche.
But if you blend some general keywords with your specific ones, you'll do well
when searchers use word combinations. You only need to include them
once or twice - you're not trying to get top ranking for general keywords.
You are interested in combinations of general keywords with the specific
one, which bring excellent, highly targeted visitors.
Now it's time to
write the actual body of the page that provides valuable information for
human readers and is optimized for high search engine ranking and google page rank.
Here are
strategic places in the page that should include your keywords...
Title tag,
Description Meta tag, Keywords Meta tag
H1 and other
header tags
The headlines are
more important than the regular body copy for both your human readers and
for the search engines. Always include your keywords in the heading tags,
preferably as the first words of the heading.
The regular text
of the page
Plan to put not
less than two hundred words on the page. Don't make the page too long.
Sprinkle the keywords throughout the copy more often than your high school
teacher would have liked. But your human visitors must not feel that you
have deliberately repeated a particular word or phrase throughout the
page. Make sure the copy is coherent and compelling. Don't simply repeat
your keywords over and over.
Use your keywords
at the start, middle, and end of your content. This will emphasize an
overall theme on your Web page and will give you a better search engine
and google page rank. Use your keywords more frequently in the opening two paragraphs,
and also in the closing paragraph. The first sentence must contain the
keyword.
And also sprinkle
one or two your most important general keywords, and a common synonyms and
variations that has nearly same meaning as your specific keyword. If
someone searches with one of these general keywords AND part or all
of the specific keyword or its synonym, you'll have a good chance of being
found.
In addition to
high search engine ranking, make sure that your site is presented
attractively in the search results. Some engines don't use the META
Description tag in their search results. They will usually use the first
few lines of text in the body of your page and display them as the
description, so make sure these lines are attractive to humans.
The Alt tags are
used as a convenience for those who surf the Web with graphics turned off.
The Alt tag text should contain the specific keyword or phrase. Use
complete sentences and a different sentence for each tag.
And include your
keyword in the image name. For example... high-search-engine-ranking.gif
Link tags
The page should
contain not less than two or three links to other places. A page with one
link will trigger the spam penalty in some search engines. Include your
keywords in the visible text under the link.
If possible,
include your keywords in the text of incoming links (links to your page
from other pages). This can lead to a higher search engine ranking for
your page. Try to link to other pages which have the keyword in the file
names. This can again lead to a higher google page rank for your page.
File name
Include your
specific keyword in the file name of your html page. Separate the
individual words of the keyword by hyphens. This will get you a higher
relevancy in some search engines. For example... high-search-engine-ranking.shtml
The only
exception to this, of course, would be your home page. It must be
named "index.html," and its specific keyword should be included in the
domain name.
While most major
search engines will ignore the text within the Comment Tags, some will
index the text present within them. This is an opportunity to use the
keyword or phrase thereby increasing the density and relevance. As with
the alt tags, use complete sentences and a different sentence in each
comment.
Here are some
general rules of writing the body of the page...
Include content on each page, not just graphics and links. Search
engines index by content and desperately need words. Pages that are less
graphical and more text oriented have better search engine rankings.
Avoid items that do not add content to be indexed. These items include
banners, counters, cgi, Java or JavaScript.
Keep your content focused to a single theme per page. Focus on one
specific keyword. Blend in common synonyms for your keyword and some
general keywords to cover multi-word searches. Not too much, though, or
you'll dilute your most important keyword.
Never place the same keywords directly beside each other. A search
engine will think you're trying to spam it and you'll get a lower
google page rank.
Try to position your keywords near the beginning of every piece of your
HTML... headline, body copy, Alt tags, etc.
Meta Tags and high search engine placement
Though META tags alone won't carry you to a high search engine placement, it's still
crucial to create effective title, description, keywords, and other tags.
Meta tags are
contained in the HEAD section near the top of the page. They're not
displayed to the end user unless you view the source code of the page.
They allow webmasters to provide information to a browser, search engine,
or automated program (i.e., robot).
They are ignored
by default unless the browser or search engine specifically recognizes
them. There are several meta tags, but we'll cover the most important...
This is the first
and most important tag in search engine placement algorithms. Ideally, the
Title tag should contain five to ten good, descriptive words and not
exceed 70-80 characters. The specific keyword should be used,
preferably as the first word of the title. Remember, the title appears as
the link in search engine listings, so you need to make it attractive to
humans as well.
For example...
<title> Meta
Tags and High Search Engine Placement </title>
Meta Description
tag
This is the
second important tag in search engine placement algorithms. The
Description tag is used by many search engines as a short description of
the page in search engine listings, so don't repeat the Title in this tag,
and make sure it's attractive, without being misleading. It should not
exceed 150-200 characters. The specific keyword should be used at
least once (try twice if it fits and see how it ranks). Include common
synonyms and one or two of your most important general keywords.
For example...
<meta
name="description" content="How to use Meta tags to get high search
engine placement.">
Meta Keywords
tag
The Keywords tag
is designed to tell the search engine what keywords are important to your
page, and thereby how people should be able to find you when they search.
But this meta tag has almost completely lost its relevance as far as
search engine positioning is concerned - it hardly affects the google page rank
these days.
However, just to
be on the safe side, you should include the specific keyword and
one or two of your most important general keywords in the Keywords
tag. You can also include some of the common upper/lower case variations
of the keyword. The rules for the Keywords tag are simple - don't repeat
any keyword more than three times and don't repeat the same word one after
another even if separated by a comma - it can get you penalized for
spamming.
Don't create a
long list of keywords. Consider including synonyms to your specific
keyword and related words that may not be in the document itself,
including misspellings. You may grab some extra rankings that way.
For example...
<meta
name="keywords" content="meta tags, high search engine placement, meta
expires tag, meta refresh tag">
This tag contains
instructions to web-indexing robots, as to whether or not to index this
page and to follow the links on it. By default, robots both index and
follow everything, unless you tell them not to. So, you generally don't
require this tag.
However, you may
need to prevent the search engines from spidering the pages containing
Meta Refresh tags or other risky techniques that are often used for
spamming, because the search engines may penalize your site for this.
For example...
<meta
name="robots" content="noindex,follow">
will tell the
robots that they shouldn't index this page, but they should follow the
links that are on it.
Meta Revisit tag
The Revisit tag
defines how often a search engine or robot should come to your Web site
for re-indexing. This meta tag is supported by many search engines and is
often used to control search engine placement of Web sites that change
their content on a regular basis.
For example...
<meta
name="revisit-after" content="30 days">
The following Meta tags control your visitors'
browsers...
Meta Expires tag
The Expires tag
allows you to force the browser to not cache a page, so that it loads a
new copy from the server each time the page is viewed. It is primarily
useful for pages with dynamic content. Just set the expiry date to 0, and
caching will be disabled...
<meta
http-equiv="expires" content="0">
To make a page
expire at a specific time in the future, spell it out in Greenwich Mean
Time...
<meta
http-equiv="expires" content="Mon Dec 31 23:59:59 GMT 2007">
Meta Refresh tag
The Refresh meta
tag will automatically send users to another URL, after a specified amount
of time has elapsed. The syntax for the content part is...
the number of seconds to delay, then a semicolon, then the new destination
URL.
Note that the
search engines don't like Meta Refresh tag and either ignore the current
page and index the second page or may not index the site at all.
There are many
more Meta tags that can be used for special occasions, but they're fairly
rare.
Web crawlers are
programs created by search engines that go around the Internet and create
an index of all collected information. The index allows search engines to
take queries from users and show all matching pages. Web crawlers are also
known as search engine spiders or robots.
You can specify
that some parts of your site should be private and non-searchable. You can
control how Web crawlers index your site at different levels - the entire
site, specific directories, and individual pages. The keys are...
robots.txt - a simple text file that specifies instructions for a large
number of pages on your site.
robots meta tag - a command that can be used on individual web pages.
Normally, if you
want the search engines to be able to spider all the pages of your site,
you don't require a robots.txt file or robots meta tags at all. However,
you may need to prevent the search engines from indexing the
printer-friendly versions of your pages which can be considered as
duplicated content. Or, you may want to block the engines from spidering
the pages containing meta refresh tags or other risky techniques that are
often used for spamming, because the search engines may penalize your site
for this.
robots.txt file
It's a simple
text file that resides on the server and prevents somes pages of your site
from being accessed by Web crawlers. When a search engine spider visits a
site, it first looks for a robots.txt file. If it can't find one, it will
spider all the pages. If it does find such a file, it will read it to find
out which pages you don't want it to spider. And then it will spider only
those pages which you haven't disallowed.
This file must be
uploaded to the the top-level directory of of your site, not a
subdirectory. Remember to use all lower case for the filename:
"robots.txt", not "Robots.txt". Some sites recommend you to use robots.txt
to block paid content you don't want people to see, but this isn't a good
idea. The robots.txt file is a publicly available file. Anyone can see
what sections of your site you want to hide by typing
"http://www.YourSite.com/robots.txt". Requiring a username and password to
access the premium content is much more effective.
You need a
separate "Disallow" line for every URL you want to exclude.
To exclude a
single crawler:
User-agent:
Googlebot
Disallow: /
You give
instructions only to Google.
To allow a single
robot:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow:
As you see, the
rules of specificity apply, not inheritance.
Note also that
globbing isn't supported. The '*' in the User-agent field is a special
value meaning "any robot". Specifically, you can't have lines like
"User-agent: *bot" or "Disallow: /print/*.html".
robots meta tag
It's an
alternative to robots.txt if you can't upload robots.txt to the root
directory, or you simply need to restrict Web crawlers from a few pages on
your site. The robots tag contains instructions to search engine spiders,
as to whether or not to index this page and also to follow the links that
are on it. By default, spiders both index and follow everything, unless
you tell them not to.
Typically, a Web
site owner would submit the main page and the robots would visit your site
and collect all subpages and related links from your main page. So, you
generally don't require the robots meta tag.
This tag looks
similar to any meta tag, and should be added to the HEAD section of your
page. Here are a few examples...
Unnecessary
commands:
<meta
name="robots" content="index,follow">
<meta
name="robots" content="index">
<meta
name="robots" content="follow">
<meta
name="robots" content="all">
All these
commands tell search engine spiders to index the page and follow links
found on it. However, all search engines do this by default anyway.
The following
commands disallow indexing of the page:
<meta
name="robots" content="noindex,follow">
<meta
name="robots" content="noindex">
The spiders will
still follow the links found on the page.
To instruct
crawlers to not crawl links contained within the page:
<meta
name="robots" content="index,nofollow">
<meta
name="robots" content="nofollow">
The spiders will
still index the page.
To make the page
and the subsequent pages to which it links invisible to search engines:
<meta
name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">
<meta
name="robots" content="none">
They disallow
both indexing and following the links.
To instruct
search engines to not place your page in their cache:
<meta
name="robots" content="noarchive">
Almost all search
engines offer little cache links in their results, which bring to the
latest copies of the pages. This tag is useful if your page is dynamic and
you don't want your visitors to have access to its old content.
Image Optimization
Image
optimization for search engines is a vital and growing trend in the
industry. With little bit of efforts, a huge amount of traffic can also be
gathered through image searching. The modern Image Search applications are
coming up with features that help in getting significant traffic of
popular search engines as Google, Yahoo and MSN.
Given proper
attention and focus kept, Image Optimization can bring vast changes to the
overall layout of the website as well as to popularity amongst various
search engines and higher google page rank.
Let us briefly
overview here few tips to optimize the images in your WebPages and to have
better SEO implementation:
Image Naming
While naming the
images, it's better to prefer the keywords allocated for the website.
Instead of naming an image as "Image-A"; Name it as "SEO-LOGO".
Secondly, hyphens
in image names are always a preferred choice as
"SEO-Image-Optimization.jpg".
Image File Size
Optimized file
sizes are always a recommended choice in SEO industry. Smaller the file
size, greater would be the performance boost. Large images affect the
website's performance adversely. It would add up to the page size and will
also make the page hideous for dial up users. Users don't like to stay on
a web page taking time to load up.
Using 'ALT' Tags
Always use ALT
tags in <IMG> for better optimization of the images. Let us show you an
example of how to rightly place ALT in the IMG tag:
<IMG SRC=”/images/SEO-Services.jpg” HEIGHT=”150” WIDTH=”225” ALT=”SEO
Services and Packages” />
Image
optimization plays a great role in pulling traffic from search engines as
Google Images; it also enhances the keyword saturation for a web page.
All the top SEO
consultants term Image Optimization equally important and necessary as
content optimization, hence do consider it and search engines would never
fail to have you enlisted highly on SERP (Search Engine Result Pages).
Keywords and Seo
Keyword analysis,
research and the proper implementation of this analysis and research is a
significant search engine optimization activity in any SEO process. Before
starting any search engine optimization or any search engine marketing
activity including sponsored listing or any type of paid campaign in
search engine, you have to be very precise about the keywords. Proper
keywords implementation result in better output from a search engine
related campaigns and increase google page rank of a website.
The keywords
research and analysis include to ascertain which keyword can generate more
revenue as all the search engine optimization activities for website are
having one aim, more and more sales. It may happen that a keyword may be
bringing more traffic but it may not be enhancing the image of your
services or product and thus, it is not increasing the sales from a
website. So the use of proper keywords (related to product and services)
are the basic ingredients of website success.
Keywords analysis
tools are popular as they suggest keywords along with the usage statistics
but are they helping in increasing the sales from website? For proper
keywords analysis, only expert web site optimizers are helpful as it
happens that at times the logic in keywords density analysis tools fails
to ascertain the most related keyword to web site product and services. So
it is useful to hire the services of professional search engine optimizer
to ascertain keywords.
The manner of
keywords research and analysis may differ but the keywords used by
competitor web sites and pages are given more emphasis. Likewise, help of
search engine itself if taken for ascertaining the best keywords. A great free tool for finding related and best suitable keywords for your website is Google Adwords Keyword Suggestion Tool. This tool would help you find good keywords for higher google page rank.
After the
ascertaining of keywords, the next step involved in optimization is the
proper usage of the keywords, they keywords should not be stuffed in all
the pages, keyword stuffing is disliked by search engine, it is better to
plan keyword distribution based on importance of keywords. More
competitive keywords are difficult to optimize as compare to less
competitive keywords hence if it is desired that immediate results of
optimization activities be seen, then less competitive keywords are to be
chosen as competitive keywords require more time and effort for
optimization.