SEO Daily

You could get carried away by the promises shown by your webmaster when it comes to search engine optimizing your website. Certain aspects related to SEO need to be avoided while designing your website. If neglected, you will not achieve the rankings you set out to achieve in the first place.

• Avoid using any black hat SEO technique, as it does not go down well with search engines. Some webmasters may use cloaking mechanisms, which are deceptive in nature. Cloaking involves presenting a unique optimized page to the search engines, but a different page to the visitors. Your website may be penalized or even banned by most search engines.

• Webmasters may offer you software that automatically submits your website on a periodic (weekly / monthly) basis. Search engines consider the use of such software equivalent to spamming, and might penalize you.

• Some SEO professionals or webmasters may guarantee a first rank for your website on the Search Engine Result Page (SERP). Search engine algorithms are such that no one is sure how they exactly work. Hence, you should not trust such statements. If you are given any such guarantee, ask the expert what mechanisms they intend using to support search engine optimization. They might be using techniques that may ultimately lead to the ban of your website.

• If you are being offered submission of your websites to hundreds of search engines, take care that there aren’t that many search engines. Your website might be submitted to link farms, which does not serve your purpose.

• To run up their bill, webmasters may resort to over-use of Flash animations. Remember that Flash animations and images are treated as blank spaces by search engines. They might lend beauty to a website, but avoid their over-use, if achieving search engine optimization is your major aim. Instead, focus on using HTML and search engine optimized text to promote your website up the Search Engine Result Pages.

Search engine optimization is not all about hiring top SEO experts to optimize your website and doing all that they suggest to grab the attention of search engine crawlers and spiders. Though the role of an SEO expert cannot be undermined, yet what does the trick is having a functional website with informative articles that describe your products or services truthfully. In addition, a shopping cart and quality products at competitive price will get customers coming to you in droves.

You may, if you want to, use every trick in the book on search engine optimization, but will lose out finally if your products or services are overpriced, of poor quality, and your website is not supported by a secured payments system that carries information and articles not related to the products. Top search engines look for ethically built websites, as their aim is to filter out websites that use excessive SEO tricks.

Google and Yahoo search engines have a process in place to filter out websites that take the SEO way to promote their websites up search engine rankings. Yahoo calls for manual submission to their programs. This costs money to website owners and they are penalized by a non-refund of the money if the site is rejected. Google search engine too works on similar lines where an XML type feed is created and submitted.   

To simplify matters, SEO should be used justifiably in conjunction with a website that is well constructed and not a blatant misuse of SEO techniques to have search engine spiders visiting. An easy way is to be linked to a website that is indexed by either of these top two search engines, or other prominent search engines. The indexed website will allow a link only if your website is good and functional because it would not like to lose its search engine ranking by linking to a dubious website.
 

A number of things need to be considered while designing your website. If text is important from the SEO point of view, then having graphics with some fancy fonts thrown in is just as imperative to enhance the visibility of the website. It is true that search engine spiders do not read graphics, images, fancy fonts, and animations as text, and consider these as blank spaces, but you just cannot have websites devoid of these important visual pleasures for plain SEO purposes.

If your webpage is plain text without any attractive graphics, you could lose the visitors’ interest in your website. Search engine optimizing your website will bring visitors to your website, but having them glued to it will require a fair sprinkling of graphics, fanciful fonts or animations.

The Solution 
What you would need here while designing your website is to use normal text such as Arial, Times New Roman or Verdana. If you are to use images, make sure that you have the caption in bold beneath each of them. These will help the search engine spiders read and rank your website higher.

Flash animations might make your website look attractive, but it was considered trendy in the nineties. Continuing to use animations to sell your products might send the wrong message across to the customers that you are not well-conversant with the present trends, and you may even present yourself as “old-fashioned”. Learn to change with the times. And, moreover, why not be SEO friendly by avoiding over-dependence on excessive graphics and animations.

The best solution is to have a balanced mix of images and text on the web pages. Text will not only give something for the search engine spiders to index, but also provide useful information to the buyer about your product. It makes perfect business sense not only to have sufficient text for the search engines to rank your website higher, but also to help your buyers make informed decisions before they buy. Your customers are bound to make revisits, if they find enough information about the product they buy.

Not only websites, but blogs too need search engine optimization. Using pings is an effective way to improve search engine ranking of your blog. By now you must be aware that you could improve your ranking on search engines by indexing more inbound links to your blog. It is important to have related links indexed.

You would certainly like to know what a ‘ping’ is. Whenever you make a fresh entry on your blog, your blogsite is automatically updated with links through an RSS feed. Search engine spiders, blogging trackers, and tagging programs are on the look out for updated blog material and link to it when they find one. When your fresh content is located, there is an addition of links over the net. And, when search engine crawlers scan your pages these pings help bring more readers and visitors to your blog pages.

Blogging templates available over the internet provide you with options to add pings. When you activate this option, many related links of different sites are indexed on your blog pages as material. It is pertinent to note that only related sites form links with your blog. Unrelated or illegal sites can have an opposite effect on your blog site.

No one would like to have their website banned on a search engine such as Google. A Google ban is said to have taken place when Google removes your website from its index. A flag is placed against your domain name refraining spiders from crawling your site. It is as good as sounding the death knell for your website. Mistakes committed by webmasters usually lead to the banning of a website. All your SEO efforts are brought to naught once your site is banned. Here are some commonly committed mistakes that may lead to a website ban.

• Some webmasters may try to act smart by using invisible text (keywords) on your web pages. This hidden text although is invisible to the human eye, but it is detected easily by the search engine crawlers. Search engines do not appreciate the usage of such tactics.

• Keyword stuffing done by webmasters does not run favor with search engines. It is a process whereby unrelated popular keywords are used in the meta tags.

• Webmasters may submit slightly altered versions of the same pages many times over to increase the number of pages on the website, and to enhance their chances of being listed. They usually change the title, subject, and make some superficial word changes in the text.

• Resorting to link farming is another common practice where free-for-all link pages are maintained to help sites attain higher search engine rankings. Such pages only carry a number of links and no meaningful text. You risk your site getting banned, if you link it to link farms.

• Overusing a keyword is known as keyword spamming. Containing more than the necessary keywords in the meta tags or your text can lead to your site being banned.

• Google does not appreciate the use of unauthorized automated software to check rankings and submit pages. Sending automated or programmed queries is against the Google terms. You may, however, hand submit your site, say, at an interval of thirty days.

• Some webmasters may use doorway pages that are specifically designed to attract search engine visitors to your website. SEO companies use doorway pages as standalone pages to act as doorways to your site.

• Linking to a banned website may also lead your website being banned.

You may have put in a lot of effort and expense in readying your website for the competition out there on the Internet. It may be a well designed website with meaningful inputs from SEO experts. But to your dismay, the website despite having everything does not have one important thing – visitors! You could certainly like to bang your head against the wall for not being able to break into the opening pages of prominent search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Your SEO expert may have promised you a lot, but the outcome is not as satisfactory.

Now, search engines use certain algorithms to determine the position of a website’s ranking in their index. This algorithm is a heavily guarded secret. Search engines too would like websites to rank naturally through the quality of their content, services and products. One simple technique that you can use on the web pages and off them to help improve your rankings on search engines is the usage of keywords.

SEO experts and webmasters are aware of the usage of keywords and they use plenty of keywords in the content and meta tags. Keywords are words that people use over the search engines while looking online for certain products or services. Webmasters use the most popular keywords that a product or service is used for. Logically, it might seem the right thing to do. But, taking a closer look you will find that the most popular keywords are the most ‘difficult’ keywords. The competition among websites using popular keywords is immense. Imagine having to compete with a million websites that use the same keyword. Where would you rate your chances of appearing on the first page of a search engine results?

What then is the key to the solution? A new website will do well to use “long-tail keywords”. These keywords are around four to five words in length. Since they are not used very commonly by webmasters, who focus on highly popular shorter keywords, there will be lesser competition, and a chance of emerging higher on the search engine ranks. You certainly can draw better traffic using this ploy.

Next time you go meet your SEO expert, make sure you ask them to add some lesser known keywords to your content to beat the competition.

The word SEO spells magic to most webmasters and website owners. SEO holds everyone in awe, as it is that magic word that can open a website smack in the midst of the world of business and money, provided you master the art of working around a search engine. Many people know about SEO, but the trick lies in knowing how to use search engines to your advantage.

The focus of every webmaster is to do SEO well so that the website climbs up search engine rankings and makes to the first page of the search engine results. That is the ultimate aim of an SEO provider. The very first requirement is to have the keyword in the URL. When registering a new website, it is imperative that the URL contains the keyword. When searching for the keyword, the search engine crawler checks the URL for the keyword. That places the website at a great advantage, if it contains the keyword in its URL.

The next best thing is to have information on the web pages written by an SEO copywriter. The SEO copywriter understands the requirements of the search engine and makes sure that the content or information provided on the web pages contains the relevant keywords at strategic places. Over-stuffing your web content with keywords not only mars the quality of content and makes it unreadable, but also proves to be counterproductive from the search engine viewpoint. Optimized use of keywords in your content will make the website rank quicker. Using keywords intelligently should be part of your search engine marketing strategy.

Even if you do not wish to change the content of your home page often, build links with your keywords on the anchor text. Make sure that you provide a large number of links using the keywords. It will help catapult your website up search engine rankings.

The more time your website has been in existence, the better it garners chances at moving up the search engine ladder. It is thus important to build your search engine optimized text with the appropriate keywords on the lines given above to grab a place on the first page of the search engine results in double quick time.

The secret to internet marketing success is search engine optimization and SEO services are probably the most sought after services on the internet. It has grown quite fast into a competitive industry. Keeping in view the growing number of online scams that are keeping pace with the growth of the internet, it will help to choose a company providing SEO services with care. Here are some practical suggestions about picking the right SEO services.

The first consideration of most people is the cost factor. Looking for affordable SEO services is not a sin, but then it should not be at the cost of services you seek. At the same time, an SEO company charging a higher price does not necessarily ensure quality services. So before taking the plunge, determine the quality of services and the credibility of the SEO company. Call up the company or send an email, and judge from their response how professional they are. As you are paying hard cash, it is important that you get professional SEO services in return. Go through the company website thoroughly. Read the ‘About Us’ page and see how good they are, what qualifications do each member of the company have, what experience they hold in the business, and more. Look for the address and location of the company, as well.

An SEO services providing company may promise you the moon. If you are being assured the number 1 position on any search engine, take guard. No SEO services provider can assure you that, since the entire process can be quite complex. A genuine company will ensure you of gradual progress and provide you with the related reports. They will be analyzing the reports to find how the keywords, links, and rankings are doing at a particular search engine.

Look at customer testimonials and also at the negative comments posted. Negative comments might be few in comparison, but they can convey a lot in terms of the company’s credibility and the quality of its expert SEO services. A company providing SEO services as its main business is better than one providing SEO as an ancillary service.

Inbound links have a definite edge over other search engine ranking strategies. The reasons are simple as incoming links help:

• Improve inward flow of potential clients to your website as they click on your link placed on some other website.
• Increases the traffic flow to your website
• Gives a boost to your search engine rankings

Search engine rankings improve when a website places your link on their webpage. If a high ranking relevant website does the same, your website will find favor with the search engines, and be ranked high. The issue however is why websites would want to have your link placed on their webpages. To want people to do that you will have to create useful and high quality content which provides useful information related to your business. It should have great value so that websites may like to send traffic over to you.

What are Inbound Links?
Technically, an inbound link is a hyperlink placed on the webpage of some other website. A simple example is that of your URL (www.kite-blog.com) that links to your homepage. Another better linking option that is subtler is a link provided within a relative portion of the content in the form of a keyword (e.g. …“SEO your blogs”…). The inbound link in this case assumes greater value when it is linked to a related article or piece of information.

The best that you can do, while providing a quality link, is to use descriptive text and some more text that carries additional information. The next best option is to provide hyperlink to the descriptive text only. The basic form of hyperlink is a link with your URL (www.kite-blog.com) that links to your home page.

Outbound Links
You may also provide some outbound links from your website too. This affords the search engine to evaluate your website better. The inbound links may however outnumber the outbound links. It is best to provide a hyperlink from your text to a related piece of information on another website. This will help your visitors access more information or detailed information, which is given on another website.

It will help your cause if the links are made to open in a new window. This way your website will not be lost when the visitor closes the window after reading the additional relevant information. The outbound example links given above all open in new windows, so that when you close those windows, you are still with this website and article.

Avoid having too many outbound links on a single web page. It will be too much of a distraction for the reader.

When you are talking about content to support your online marketing activities, the articles, whitepapers, advertising sites or micro-sites need to be SEO optimized. Thereafter, they can be distributed online to help bolster your brand and improve your search engine rankings. If you have to make online press releases, work on the same lines. Content is of grave importance in such cases. It has to be well focused on the subject and well supported by relevant keywords. However, keyword spamming or the overuse of keywords and link spam should be avoided for they can prove to be counterproductive.

The next step obviously is looking for a company to help distribute your content online to achieve your SEO goal. A word of caution may help you here. Some companies, not all of them, can be disappointing. You pay a company to host your press release, whitepaper, or optimized content. The company will help deliver leads through various means, which are under their control. The problem arises when you stop using their service. The content will be removed the moment you decide not to work with them. That will be a real setback to your long-term SEO goals. Make sure that you have some sort of agreement in place with the company to have all your content displayed even after the relationship is discontinued.

You will come across many company sites, directories, and online media firms which deal in distributing online content through their electronic outlets. Ensure that the content contains relevant information to enhance readability. Optimal use of keywords is essential, as their excessive use can mar the quality of the content. Content optimization helps your online marketing goals, as search engine crawlers will spot the content and bring it to the fore. This helps improve your search engine ranking. Content optimization via SEO is a sure way of improving your search engine ranking and help build a strong online marketing strategy.