Marcio Rocon asked:




Here is a list of things NOT to do for optimizing search engine results. Many people have used these methods and have found negative results:

Do not use text hidden in the background by disguising them with different colors. Do not use keywords in the title such as web hosting stated multiple times. Do not stuff the keyword in the different pages so find different ways to use the keywords. Do not use misleading word on the webpages; only use relevant words and phrases. Do not create webpages the automatically direct the site. Do not repeat the keywords in the Meta tags – only use the keywords once. Do not submit the same page more than once a day to the same search engine. Do not use small or invisible text on the website. Do not layer the page contents or position text off screen. Do not optimize a page for top ranking then exchange it for a different site to use that ranking. Do not create web page where the user cannot use the back button to return to search results. Do not use more than one keyword in the title tag in HTML codes. Do not purchase multiple domains and use multiple webpages of the content on the site for each domain. Do not submit different versions of a website to obtain higher rankings or listings. Do not send queries to a search engine multiple times a day to achieve higher rankings or listings. Do not submit more than allowed number of pages to the search engine during their time of submission. Do not create a webpage using too many keywords “stuffing” where many site visitors will not see the keywords. Do not cloak the website. Do not support affiliate sties with the same content but different site designs. Do not participate in Link Farm programs they lead to disaster. Do not use CSS to set the text size of a particular tag then refill your page with invisible text. Do not create a plain page designed to obtain high ranking then change the design of the webpage after it has been ranked. Do not use many 1×1 transparent .gifs on the page and assign them the same ALT text. All of these tricks have been used numerous times in the past of thousands of websites. The sites will be banned or taken off the internet for fraudulent content. Many people try to trick the search engines to gain higher rankings yet in the end the dishonest methods do not work and the website owners pay a high price for their tactics which also earn themselves a negative reputation on the internet, which means they will find it hard to open another website by using the terrible tactics.

search engine optimizing

Donovan Baldwin asked:




Search engine optimization is relatively simple when you own your own website. However, if you have signed up with some affiliate program and have been handed a URL for your affiliate link and it has seventy-two characters, a question mark, looks exactly like the website everybody else got, and you have no control over META tags, content, or appearance, how do you optimize that?

YOU CAN’T!

However, there are some steps you can take to perform many of the search engine optimization tactics and techniques so that you can enhance your website traffic.

CREATE YOUR OWN, RELATED, WEBSITE(S).

One simple way to kick off the process is to simply register your own domain name, create a website that provides valuable content related to your affiliate program and send information seekers from your website to the affiliate link you were given. Since you own the website, you DO have control over content, META tags, linking, and all the other normal tools of search engine optimization.

FRAMING, POINTING, AND REDIRECTS.

The actual techniques of creating frames and redirects is a little more complicated than I can get into here. However, a frame shows your URL, title, description, and so on, but the page that is actually seen is the affiliate page. When you register a domain name, with GoDaddy.com, for example, you are allowed to “point” that URL at a website. Like a frame, when someone clicks on your URL, they will be shown whatever page you have pointed it to. A redirect will simply, as the name says, re-direct the visitor to whatever site you have selected when they click on your URL.

While many more search engines and directories at least like these better than the affiliate link itself, they have no real substance and are still not quite as effective as a “real” website. The good news is that you at least can have some control over the title and META tags and this, combined with the selection of a good domain name, can give you an edge over the affiliate link itself.

CREATE DOORWAYS.

I make this a separate topic for two reasons:

1. Most people make doorways the wrong way and make the search engine gods angry, and…

2. A website such as the one I talked about in the previous section on creating your own website should be content rich, nice looking, and have all the SEO bells and whistles. A decent doorway can be a simple information site, doesn’t need much in the way of graphics or website design prowess, and can even simply be one page.

When most people create doorways, they are trying to get something for nothing. Most doorway software will create either a simple page stuffed to bursting with keywords and phrases with the description META tag sprinkled throughout the page. You will normally be asked to provide a phrase or paragraph relevant to the topic, and then the software creates umpteen thousand pages that look exactly alike. Most search engines are on to this and you can do some serious damage to your search engine optimization efforts by trying this tactic.

You can calm the search engines down by one simple tactic…make sure each doorway page has its own unique, valuable, relevant content. Search engines don’t really care how many pages you have, they just want them to be of value to their customers and not all look exactly alike. I personally like to use the doorway script at ismy.net, but where they ask for a paragraph about your site, I usually simply put in a statement such as “PUT INFO HERE” or “WE ARE SORRY, THIS SITE IS UNDER CONSTRUCTION”.

Once I have uploaded my pages to my website, I then go to each individual page and place specific information there which is relevant to the subject of the site and the keywords used on that page. I will often change banner links throughout the site and crosslink pages using anchor text on each page. Once the the site is complete, I create a sitemap and submit that to Yahoo and Google. I then put down a reminder to myself to come back regularly and make small but constructive changes to the site.

LINK TO YOUR AFFILIATE SITE.

When you own your own website, you can promise someone a link in return for one on your site. You can even possibly get someone to link to your site without a reciprocal link if your site is valuable enough. However, most people will not want to provide a one-way link from their site using an affiliate link. It can be done if you look around hard enough. You can also use an affiliate link in signatures on some forums, and in the signature on your emails. There are still many directories around which do not use a spider to gather data from your website, but rather ask you to type in the title, description, and keywords for your webpage. I am lazy and use a software package that allows me to type in these items one time and them submits them to several hundred directories if I do not have control over the website. It will also extract these items automatically if they exist and then allow me to submit to search engines using spiders and directories which don’t.

WRITE ARTICLES.

If you write articles relevant to the subject of your affiliate site, you can sometimes include your link in either your author’s resource box or, occasionally, in the body of the article itself. However, many article directories will not allow an affiliate link itself in the body or resource box, nor will some even allow a redirect or frame. These will require you to get your own site and then hope that your site is persuasive enough to drive traffic through to your affiliate site.

search engine optimizing

Glenn Murray asked:




Within the HTML code behind your page, there are things called ‘meta tags’. These are short notes within the header of the code which describe some aspects of your page to the search engines. Although there is some debate over how important meta tags are when it comes to SEO, it’s generally agreed that they shouldn’t be ignored.

Whether you’re building your website yourself, or you’re getting a web designer to do it, it’s a good idea to understand the basics. There are four main meta tags you need to consider:
Title Keywords Description Alt

Following is a bit of discussion of how these meta tags should look and a few tips for writing them.

Title – e.g. Cheap second hand computers – Widget Computers

The title is the most important of the meta tags. Try to use your keyword at least once in the title, preferably towards the beginning. Also, it’s not just important for your ranking; it also has the biggest impact on your Click Thru Rate (CTR). The text you put in the title will appear as the link text in your Google listing – the bit that people will read first and click on. Think of it as an ad headline – the better it is, the more people will click on it.

TIP: Google only displays 66 characters in the clickable part of your listing. So try to keep your Title text to a max of 66 characters.
Keywords – e.g.

Search engines used to look only at this tag to identify a site’s subject material. This isn’t really the case any more, but some search engines still give it quite a bit of weight (such as Yahoo). There are various ‘rules’ about how many characters you should include in this tag. The most recent I’ve been working to is 300 characters (including spaces). I’ve never been too strict about enforcing it though.

IMPORTANT: The most important detail about the Keywords tags is that Yahoo pays quite a bit of attention to it. If you do it wrong, you’ll be penalized. I learned this the hard way. You need to ensure that your Keywords tag is aligned with your web copy. By that, I mean that you shouldn’t include keywords that don’t appear in your copywriting. And I’m not talking about arbitrary stuffing or spamming here. I’m talking about legit keywords. For instance, I used to use my suburb, Bateau Bay, as a keyword for every page of my site. However, “Bateau Bay” hardly appeared at all in my web copy. There were quite a few other examples like this, too, like my state (NSW), and some of my neighboring suburbs. After ranking really highly in Google for about a year, I couldn’t understand why I was ranking so poorly in Yahoo. Turns out, this was the reason. I made the change, and my ranking shot up about 60 positions!!! And I don’t mean from position 1000 to position 940 (that wouldn’t be noteworthy at all). I mean I shot up from about 80 to about 20 (then gradually moved onto the first page).
Description – e.g.

The search engines pay some attention to this text when identifying your site’s subject material, so make sure you include your keyword at least once in the Description. Also, most search engines use this text as their description of your site (i.e. it’s the site snapshot that follows your link in the search results). Make sure it’s informative and compelling. Think of it as the copy for an ad.

TIP: Google only displays about 160 characters including spaces. So keep your Description text to a max of 160 characters.
Alt – e.g.

The Alt tag is designed to help visually impaired people use the World Wide Web (WWW). They use software to read out loud the content of your website. When the software encounters a picture, it looks for the Alt text to learn what the picture is, then reads that text out loud. The Alt tag is relatively important to search engines because they assume that your pictures have something to do with the subject material of your site. But like the visual aid software, they can’t actually see the picture, so they look at the Alt text as well. Try to include your keyword at least once in your Alt text.

Summary

You can use the same meta tags on each page, or you can make them unique. It all depends on how many keywords you’re targeting. If you’re targeting a different keyword in the copy of each page, your meta tags for each page will be unique (i.e. you’ll target that page’s keyword within these meta tags).

TIP: If you have any high ranking competitors, take a look at the way they’ve done their meta tags, and follow their lead. You already know they rank highly, so chances are they’ve done a good job.

search engine optimizing

Adam Ada asked:




Adobe’s Flash is a very powerful and widely-used tool. Designers use it to create motion, animate objects, create scalable graphics, embed videos, make slideshows etc. Some designers find it so useful that they design entire sites using Flash.

Flash is a great resource to designers but it poses problems for Web Marketing strategies. Search engines don’t like Flash. Or to put it in a better way, they don’t understand it. Flash includes logic and can take input from the user, but search engines spiders/crawlers are designed to crawl or handle static content. Flash is actually a running program, so it’s much difficult to analyze it as compared to plain HTML code. Though Adobe has made great changes in terms of making Flash files more accessible and searchable, but there is still more progress to be made.

However, Flash does provide a great user experience (without a doubt) and can definitely increase sales. After all, people are very visually stimulated and it is often ‘flashy’ sites that attract the user. People like interactivity, and Flash provides them a method to get potential/existing customers ‘involved’ in a site.

When you create an animation, you get a file with the ‘.fla’ extension; for example fastfast.fla. The.fla represents the Flash format extension. To display this file in a web page, you need to export it in Shockwave Format (.swf) and then you can use it for your website. Spiders cannot read the insides of this Flash file, at least not without assistance. And even with assistance, spiders don’t crawl and index all your flash content. There can be a slight difference in how various search engines weigh page relevancy, but in an overall approach to Flash (at least for the time being), search engines are united – they don’t really like it but they index portions of it.

So, what to do about this?

You don’t need to worry much, search engines have made great strides with their ability to read and understand Flash. Google says it is confident in its ability to read text and extract links, but they’re still unable to put these elements into context. Getting all pages of a website indexed is an important aspect of SEO, and it’s a fact that doing SEO for Flash requires a bit of effort.

Here are a few tips for optimizing Flash;

1. Input Meta – This approach is often underestimated and misunderstood by many. Although metadata is not as important to search engines as it used to be, Flash development tools have an option to easily add metadata to your animation, so there shouldn’t be any excuse as to why you won’t enter it.

2. SDK Tool – Also known as the swf2html tool. It will extract text from the Flash file and convert it into a simple HTML document (saves the time and effort of doing it manually). You will be able to directly see what the search engine spiders will see when they crawl your flash file.

3. SWFObject 2 – Another SEO tip is in the use of CSS element..div (it has search engine accessible content); associated with a JavaScript function is what SWFObject plugin is about. This plugin is a must use to optimize Flash. It may not cause your site to spectacularly rank in search engines but it will definitely eliminate most ranking disadvantages of Flash.

Provide alternative pages – It definitely requires more work to create separate HTML pages but the reward is worth (a good ranking on search engines). If the visitor wants to view it in Flash, they will see it. Otherwise, there is alternative HTML version, which is also ‘crawlable’ by search engines for indexing.

4. Check that your Flash links point to HTML pages and not to other Flash pages

5. Create descriptive Page Titles and Meta Descriptions

6. The NOSCRIPT tag – It is similar to the approach of using the NOFRAME tag to optimize sites using frames. SCRIPT element displays the Flash site for users with scripting enabled and the NOSCRIPT element displays the HTML site for users, screen readers and search engines with scripting disabled. This tag is often forgotten but is of immense importance to optimize Flash.

search engine optimizing

Chris A. Harmen asked:




Press releases provide specific information about changes in existing companies or the introduction of a new company. The information can include such things as changes in personnel of a company as well as increases or decreases in overall personnel numbers. They can also announce the opening of a new business or a new branch of an existing business. Traditionally news releases were intended to provide media alerts to newspapers, trade magazines, and other publications on a particular date.

How Online PR’s Work

In this tech age, it’s becoming more effective to distribute releases online in order to get information out faster. In fact, they are often the source from which hard copy publications get their news. But even more importantly, the news release can be distributed through numerous news service sites.

As more and more information is released through the utilization of online releases, it is important that they be optimized. Optimized press releases are accessed online by the entering of a keyword or keywords into a search engine. When a computer user enters a keyword, that person is usually looking for something specific.

How To Optimize Keywords

Optimized PR’s need to be keyword rich. Keywords that are too common will result in a multitude of results, while too specific keywords may not produce enough results. Therefore, a good balance of keywords should be maintained through optimized press releases.

Keywords phrases should complement the company’s website keywords. It’s imperative to make sure that an online release has a relevant keyword phrase in the title tag, first paragraph and dispersed throughout the body of the document. Take a look at free press release distribution sites to see the format and requirements of each. Some will allow one photo to be released with the PR, and others provide templates to create a release.

Benefiting From Online PR’s

A keyword optimized online release has many benefits beyond just announcing news like a traditional PR. If done correctly, the benefits of distributing PR’s online include:

a. Gaining top listings in news search engines
b. Improved organic searches for keywords in Google, Yahoo and other top search engines
c. Increased overall web visibility a low cost
d. Brand awareness
e. Exposure to industry-specific trade publications and news editors
f. Links to the company website, known as ‘backlinks’

Online press releases definitely have gone beyond just releasing information. They’ve become an invaluable tool to drive traffic to a company website.

search engine optimizing

Mike G Bennett asked:




Trick #1: Get Good Keywords

Use Google’s Keyword Tool to find the keywords that you’re looking for. You can search through these keywords based on the amount of traffic they get, how competitive they are, and Google provides you with alternative keywords that will work for your campaign too. This is by far the most useful way of finding out which keywords you want to use when Search Engine Optimizing. In addition to this, Google allows you to choose the option of entering your website URL, and they recommend keywords to you based on the content of your site. This too is VERY useful.

On his blog, one of the top Google guys wrote that meta tags aren’t looked at by Google anymore (due to blackhat keyword stuffing). So if you were planning on using meta tags to SEO your site, don’t worry about it so much anymore (although you should still put your keywords in the meta tag field for good measure). However, the hottest thing to do right now to SEO your site is your title tags- believe it or not. So, when doing the html for your site, make sure your title tag has your keywords in it! They are among the most important things in your site as far as SEO goes, so make sure they have your keywords!! For example, if I were to make a dog training website, my title tag might say “Train your dog. This is the best place to train your dog online. Get tons of dog training information!”

Make sure when writing the content for your site, you have your keywords written in plenty of times. That way the search engines are more likely to index you higher for those particular keywords. But make sure you evenly space them throughout the content or Google might view it as “keyword stuffing” and block your site from the search engines. That would be horrible. My rule of thumb is to space out the keywords every 5-10 sentences or so. That way you’re getting plenty of keywords in there but your not saturating your content.

Trick #2: Get Back Links!

This is by far the most important part of Search Engine Optimization. A back link is a link that from another site, linking to your site. The more of them you have, the more important your site looks to Google. The more important your site looks to Google, the higher they are going to rank your site.

When finding back links, it’s VERY important that the sites linking to yours are:

- Relevant to your website
- Have a high Page Rank (The higher the better)
- And Have get a good amount of traffic (check the Alexa ranking. Anything below 800,000 is considered good in my book).

When obtaining backlinks, contact the site you want a back link from and offer to link to them if they link to you. This is called reciprocal linking. This is not nearly as important in your Google rankings as it used to be. So here’s a trick you can use:

Put up another site/blog with the same content as your main site. Tell the prospective link partner you will link to them (via your 3rd party site) if they link to you via their main site. That way you get a one way link to your site, without having your main website link out to them. That allows you to create one way links into your website, and one way links are valued very highly by Google. I use this trick, also know as 3-way linking, to gain higher rankings for my sites.

When contacting prospective link partners, it is very important to be polite. Start your email off by complementing them on their website, and tell them you have recommended their site to a few friends who would find the content useful. Also, tell them because their site is so good you would like to become link partners with them. This is by far the best way to gain link partners.

Trick #3: Get More Traffic!

The more traffic you can get to your site, the more important Google and other search engines view you. Getting traffic can be expensive, so here are some very cost effective, free ways to generate solid traffic:

- Post on classified ad sites like backpage, and kijiji. Craigslist is currently super hard to post on, and pricy, so I would stick to the free ones like backpage and kijiji.
- Create a Facebook Page. Creating a Facebook page is not only easy, it’s free. It allows you to keep in touch with your customers, and increase the awareness of your site.
- Start a Google AdWords Campaign.
- Set up a mailing list.
- Be creative!

search engine optimizing

Patrick Sia asked:




Search engine optimization is such a common topic these days that it has almost become a must within any organization. In some commercial firms there is also a use of SEO unit within the organization. This goes on to show how much importance does this search engine optimizing bears.

However the investment you make should be worthwhile. Lots of organizations today prefer to outsource their search engine optimizing needs. While doing so, many of these companies will not consider comparing SEO pricing. SEO pricing has become a major influence on deciding the advantage and profitability in investing for search engine optimization. SEO pricing are available in several methods and ways. Each of these are unique to each and every company. Some company’s may require pricing regarding the number of words processed and some other company might also consider not only the quantity, but also the quality of the work done. Either way you can easily calculate the most likely amount you will have to pay at the end of the day.

You can compare several SEO solutions online to make sure that you buy the best and the most affordable one for you. A proper preparation prior to any marketing setup is essential in order to make it a success. Hence it is the same for the case of SEO pricing as well.

There are several supportive websites for you to make things easier. These websites will promote many search engine optimizers with their pricing. Once you visit such websites the job is made to be so much easier and you will be able to compare several products at the same time giving you a bird’s eye view of the benefits and drawbacks of each and every service available.

Make sure that your company has fully observed and compared all the SEO pricing available. You may also want to seek expert help regarding the matter and might want to consider several options which you can bargain on. Do not just jump in to a solution before making a proper analysis.

After all it is your investment which you are willing to make a benefit of. If it does not meet the requirements the investment would be in vain. Therefore make a proper SEO pricing and find out the most financially beneficial one. After that only you may decide on obtaining other advantages with the service and quality of the service. Search engine optimizing is important but also SEO pricing is most important as well.

search engine optimizing

Daniel Bolton asked:




Search Engine Optimization is a process by which a web site is improved so that it can be more easily found by search engines, rank higher and be found by its target audience. The main components to SEO are: keyword analysis, content analysis, title and meta tags, relevant link building, search engine submission, and maintenance.

Below are steps in the process. By clicking on the links below you can start understanding whether your keywords are likely to drive traffic to your site.

- Keywords – You can use Google AdWords Keyword Tools and Google AdWords Traffic Estimator to evaluate the popularity of the keywords your site is optimized for.

- Content Analysis: You’ll want to make sure that your search terms are utilized on each page of your site. You don’t want to have to few, you also don’t want too many.

- Title and Meta Tags: This is a brief description of your business usually found with your listing in internet search results.

- Back Links: It can help your ranking if you have other related web sites linking directly to your site. This increases your internet profile.

- Search Engine Submission: Once you’ve done all of the on-page optimizing, you can manually submit your improved web site to Google, Yahoo, MSN and other search engines.

- Monitoring and Maintenance: One easy way to do this is to sign up for Google Analytics to monitor the activity and status of your site. This is a free service offered by Google.

Search Engine Optimization can be done by anyone, but it can be a very time consuming process, especially if you’re combining it with a pay-per-click campaign. Every business owner has to decide just what services they can do in-house and what things they want to outsource. If you have extra time SEO can be done by yourself at minimal cost, however if your time is limited and you may not be that internet savvy, there are several reputable SEO firms that provide a quality service. To learn more about SEO or to find an SEO firm, go to http://www.weblocalmarketing.com.

search engine optimizing

Martin Lukac asked:




SEO or search engine optimizing is a set of promotion strategies that webmasters have took advantage of for ages to tout websites. SEO marketing gives webmasters options, such as link exchange. Keyword density content, spiders, URL and other tactics are used also. Web titleholders will utilize a selection of options in hopes to get their web pages listed at the top ranks at the major search engines.

SEO sometimes is challenging for callow webmasters. Often these strategist falls short of transporting SEO in a way, that cooperation is they to reach top search engines online.

Consequently, the seconds are written, saturated in keywords which hefty search engines turn away. While density is necessary, Google’s will not allow room for cramming, since quality rich dense content attracts the leading search engines.

Webmasters will probe the net searching for relevant links or writers to produce keyword density articles for their web pages. The masters be driven* discriminately amidst from outbound, inbound, PR2, or other relevant links of quality that works in union with their station-bound services or products. Many web SEO seekers sometimes do not receive the quality they set out to achieve. They want that rank, but many users fail to see that honest strategies will increase your chance to reach higher ranks at the major search engines. Still, they cheat.

Ranking is determining. If your website reaches the major engines’ top ranks it affects draw a higher volume of traffic to your Internet pages. In consequence knowing the first strategies in SEO is importunate, specifically to those marketing their websites SEO style.

Technology is warlike, thus offering web owners innovative tools that will permit them to promote their website(s) with fewer achievements. You have keyword finders, generators, Link popularity checkers, link-superstructure tools and more, yet you have to know your stuff to pass algorithms set up by Google. If your website slips short of meeting major search engine expectations, seek forthwith-noted marketing tools so that you get the quality and relevancy you try.

Some of the popular tools offered online are the latest Engine Promoter. The tools are at your junking, which you have access to the beforehand SEO solutions, guaranteed to take your web pages to the ranking at the top of major search engines online.

search engine optimizing

Ruadhri McGarry asked:




As an ex recruiter my clients often ask me what steps they can take to make sure that their CVs are found on Recruiter and Company CV Databases. It’s relatively simple once you understand the nature of these Databases. Essentially they act like little search engines, mini Googles if you will. A query run by a recruiter is based on keywords which in turn should be based on the main skills required for their client. You as the jobseeker have a number of ways to manipulate the odds in your favour by using two simple tricks.

Keyword Density

To determine what the best keywords are for your desired role, have a think about what a recruiter would use to find you! If you are a Java programmer, make sure that the word Java is included more times than you currently have, of course without being too obvious. If you have a degree, mention it in your Career Summary as well as your Education section.

The same applies to job titles, industries and so on.

Updating the Recruiter

The second part to keeping your CV high on the list is to make sure that you contact your recruiters via email regularly. Their databases work on a combination of keyword density and recent updating of your file. For example, if the recruiter has two identical CVs in terms of keywords on their database, the one that was updated most recently will rank higher.

Assuming the recruiter or their administrator is diligent in updating contact on their database, (also bearing in mind the larger recruiters have smart software that automatically import emails to a given candidate’s file) sending an email that does not require a response, i.e. “just letting you know that I am still on the lookout for specific roles, feel free to contact me should a suitable role come your way”, on a regular basis will keep you at the top of searches, remind the recruiter that you’re still on the market and will ultimately ensure that you get called before the competition for the right role.

So remember, Search Engine Optimize your CV and keep in regular contact with your Recruiters.

search engine optimizing