Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Navigation Structure: Helping in Better Ranking

As a ship captain traversing the open sea without a good navigation system will surely get lost. Same way, a site with poor navigation structure will cause problems in good search engine rankings. Good site design means a good navigation structure for your web site. This means the visitor can find the information with ease. Thus the navigation structure of a website should be easy.


Some points should be considered to make the structure of a website “Search Engine Friendly” which are as follows:


1. Dynamic Site Navigation – If you are designing a dynamic website (php, asp etc), try make your URLs with less or NO query string. Some URL rewriting techniques should be used to make URLs search engine friendly.


2. Don’t Use Image Links - Try to avoid images for navigational links as we all know search engine spiders don't read text in images. Always use text links for navigation and use CSS.


3. Logo - Most of websites have Logo is on top left. It is good practice to link your logo to home page from every page.


4. Site Map - A few sites are now creating "Site Maps" which is a page which links to all other pages in the site. This is better option if you want to provide visitors with an 'index', and is also appreciated by the major search engines.


5. JavaScript Menus or Links - Do not use JavaScript for your internal linking because search engine spiders do not read text written in JavaScript and will not follow link defined in JavaScript

6. Avoid Links in Flash - Search engine crawlers are not able to index/follow links defined in flash. Graphics add a lot to a Web site, but text leaves a lot more room for links. When you write about a specific topic, product or service on a page, include a link within the text.


7. Frames - Don't use frames. Very few people use them. They not only create a variety of user problems but search engines also have trouble in indexing framed pages.


8. Avoid Image Maps - Do not use image maps for navigation.


User and Search Engine Friendly Content

The content of a website is most powerful tool for selling products or services. Though things like graphics, animations etc are important to increase your website visibility but good content is way to attract your visitors to stay on website and search about products and services you are selling. While writing content for a website, one should follow some tips:

Active Content - Always use active words in content to making visitor feel like a participant rather than a passive reader. Always inspire them to take an action.

Consistency - Your objective should be consistency through out website. Make content consistent from page to page.


Call of Action - Your call of action text should be clearly visible to visitor when your visitor is on your website.


No Error Content
- Content on a website should be free from any grammatical or spelling mistakes.

Selling Idea
- Most of websites have content describing features of their product or services, do not write about what your product/service have but write about how can it is beneficial for customers.

Content for Search Engines
- A search engine friendly content does not mean content stuffed with lot of keywords. Try to use proper density of keywords in content. Never try to spam by hiding your content. Try to link you keywords to relevant internal page of website that will really help to boost performance of linked page.

Sunday, March 23, 2008

Simplest Way to increase Traffic

There are many ways to increase traffic to your website. But the simplest and effective ways is posting blogs. Blog is basically an online journal related to a particular topic. Blogs consist of text, images and links to another blogs and websites too related to our website. The results in a blog appear sequentially. BLOG itself is a website which facilitates users to post their thoughts and suggestions through comments.

Benefits of blogging

  • Crawler mainly admires rich content sites and blogs are mainly rich in content as various readers can post their thoughts and also can update those posts. Blogs contains categorized content
  • Traffic rate on blogs is more than that of normal websites. As blog is related to particular topic, so it is beneficial for web surfers because they will get the required information.
  • Blogs contains the fresh content because blogs content is regularly updated. Both, the readers and search spiders reward fresh content.
  • Blogs supports text, images and video, more detailed information and opinions about a particular topic. Blogs can easily link to each other than the websites. So it attracts more incoming links and traffic.

So it is clear that blogs are very important for both the business point of view and seo point of view. Blogs are the cost effective and simple way to increase traffic and incoming links to our website.

Friday, March 21, 2008

Top Ways to Generate Website Traffic

What is link Popularity? Link popularity is a general representation of the total number of web pages which link to a website. Most of the major search engines support the "link:" operator. Link popularity plays an important role in SEO Parts. It helps to get the online visibility of a web site among the top of the search results. There are many ways to generate Quality links to your website.


Submit to Major Search engines and Directories: DMOZ.org, Google.com, and Yahoo.com are the example with good popularity among other Search engines/directories. Because DMOZ employs volunteers who manually judge and approves the links on Dmoz


Keep updating your site regularly: Unfortunately, may Internet marketers fail to do this and the website ends up static. Just like housekeeping, you have to keep you website as fresh as possible. Not only will your visitors come often to check out new content, the search engines will crawl through your site more often.


Article submissions: Write articles and submit them to websites who will publish them. Make sure you provide your name and URL, which will be published, with your article. This is a great way to get links to your website.


Make A Newsletter:
Another way to generate a great amount of traffic is to make a newsletter on your website each week or each month simply send out a newsletter to all of the people in your often list.


Exchange Links:
The best type of traffic is a free organic traffic that comes from search engines like Google.com or Yahoo.com. The way to get your website listed for great keywords that will bring traffic back to your website in the search engines is by building high-quality one-way links back to your site.

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

SEO Techniques

Search engine optimization methods can be mainly divided into two categories:

1. Techniques that search engines recommend as part of good design
2. Techniques that search engines do not approve of and attempt to minimize the effect of, referred to as spamdexing.


White Hat SEO: White hat SEO is technique in which webmaster follow all the rules of search engines means doesn't try to make fool search engines. White hat SEO means follow all the ethics rules and algorithms. Web pages that are created with white-hat SEO methods are advantageous to web surfers, search engines and webmasters and beneficial by search engines. An SEO technique is considered white hat if it conforms to the search engines' guidelines and involves no deception. As the search engine guidelines are not written as a series of rules or commandments, this is an important distinction to note.

Black hat SEO: Black hat SEO is technique that the webmaster used to improve rankings of their web pages in ways that are disapproved by the search engines. These methods include cloaking, paid links, doorway pages, hidden text, etc.Google and all other search engines have made it very clear to webmaster and site owner’s that they penalize websites that use black hat SEO methods once they detect them

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Meta Tags in SEO

Though Meta keywords tag and Meta description tags are not the main factors considered by search engines when ranking sites but they should not be overlooked. A Meta description tag is said to be a brief summary of page's content. A. They were proposed in order to make using the web easier. Meta tags mainly consist of:

Title Tag: The title tag has been one of the most important factors in getting high search engine rankings. Search engines use title tags to collect information about the website. Keywords in title tags are displayed in the hyperlink on the search engine result page.

Meta Description Tag: The Meta description tag describes site's content summary filled. In search engine result pages, after reading title of website a visitor reads the description of that web site and decide whether he will visit website or not.

Meta Keyword Tag: The Meta Keywords Tag is where you list keywords and keyword phrases that you've targeted for that specific page.

Meta Robots Tag: The Robots Meta Tag is meant to provide users who cannot upload or control the robot.txt file at their websites, with a last chance to keep their content out of search engine indexes and services

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Keywords - Major Actor in SEO

One of the major aspects of search engine optimization (SEO) is the use of keywords both in the Meta tags of a site and throughout the website content. In particular, the density, the placement and the actual keywords are the major concern. Keywords play the major role in making your site rank well in many search engines. Although the value of a keyword can be estimated in advance using various resources. One of the major aspects of search engine optimization (SEO) is the use of keywords both in the Meta tags of a site and throughout the website content.

Keyword analysis is a process of selecting the most favorable and relevant keywords or Keyword phrases that can help visitors find your site. For any online marketing product or services to accomplish it is vital to know your audience there likings and the most viable means to reach them. Various Online tools are available for analyzing keywords.So, What Is The 'Correct' Keyword Density Then?

This leads to the question of how to determine spam and what is considered an acceptable level of keywords within your text. The general belief was that including a keyword within your text with a range of 5% to 10% was best practice. It certainly wouldn't get you penalized and it made it blatantly obvious that your site was relevant to that topic. However, some believed the figure could legitimately be taken as high as 20% without any negative search engine effects.

Below is the list of few good tools available online which can be used for keyword analysis:

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/
http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/