Search engine optimization tips – the beginning

More and more people are planning to go big on the Internet, that’s why Search engine optimization tips is a very hot subject these days. But they must know at least the basics in SEO first. That’s why I’m going to write a nice guide on search engine optimization, with many episodes, covering all (or at least most of) the important things in this domain, with planning, On Page SEO, Off Page SEO, statistics, improving and of course tips.

SEO – The beginning

One of the important causes why some sites are successful and most aren’t is because their webmasters did their homeworks before starting building the project. They studied and researched. What? Well, there are many aspects.

1. Think about your site, about the idea behind it, about its topic, about its niche. Niched sites are the most likely to become big in time, as long as you don’t pick an overcrowded niche and you have something to say regarding that subject. So, going as deep in a niche as possible and being an expert there is important.

2. Study your competition. See how are their sites built (that’s why a SEO wannabe must have basic programming knowledge, like HTML, PHP, CSS), see on what keywords do they rank well, see where you can beat them.

3. Think about the keywords you’ll be focusing your main page. This article on keyword researching tools will help you.

4. Then, choose your site’s name. I suggest you go for branding instead of choosing a name that would help you from the SEO point of view. Why? Because a branded site name can pe optimized for search engines but a SEO name normally can’t (all the good domains are taken, at least on .com). Remember, the name should be simple, easy to remember but also should be related to your site’s topic.

5. Find a good and reliant hosting. I’m using Dreamhost and I’m satisfied with it. For 10$ a month i get 500 GB storage space, 5TB traffic, i can park as many domains as i want and so much more. If you’re interested you can get even better offers from here. You can use this code: MIKE84 , and get 2 extra FREE lifetime domain registrations that are well worth some bucks.

6. After you’ve done all of these, you’ll have to take a while and think about your site’s structure and layout. It is important to use also usability criteria here, to make your content easier to spot by your future readers. Use SEO friendly programing languages (more about this on a following article). For now, here are the basics:

• No frames
• As little Javascript, AJAX and Flash as you can
• Use plain XHTML+CSS code. Use external CSS
• Try to use a table less layout: reduces the page’s size so your site will load faster
• Validate your code. It might be hard to eliminate all the errors, so focus on the important ones: don’t open a tag without closing it, don’t use improper attributes, etc

If you can’t build your site by yourself the way it should be, hire a specialist. It will well worth the money.

7. Plan your link structure carefully, as this is a crucial aspect.

Edited: February 14th, 2008

Which web page elements lead to high Google rankings?

The German company Sistrix analyzed the web page elements of top ranked pages in Google to find out which elements lead to high Google rankings. They analyzed 10,000 random keywords, and for every keyword, they analyzed the top 100 Google search results.

Which web page elements lead to high Google rankings?

Sistrix analyzed the influence of the following web page elements: web page title, web page body, headline tags, bold and strong tags, image file names, images alt text, domain name, path, parameters, file size, inbound links and PageRank.

• Keywords in the title tag seem to be important for high rankings on Google. It is also important that the targeted keywords are mentioned in the body tag, although the title tag seems to be more important.

• Keywords in H2-H6 headline tags seem to have an influence on the rankings while keywords in H1 headline tags don’t seem to have an effect.
• Using keywords in bold or strong tags seems to have a slight effect on the top rankings. Web pages that used the keywords in image file names often had higher rankings. The same seems to be true for keywords in image alt attributes.
• Websites that use the targeted keyword in the domain name often had high rankings. It might be that these sites get many inbound links with the domain name as the link text.
• Keywords in the file path don’t seem to have a positive effect on the Google rankings of the analyzed web sites. Web pages that use very few parameters in the URL (?id=123, etc.) or no parameters at all tend to get higher rankings than URLs that contain many parameters.
• The file size doesn’t seem to influence the ranking of a web page on Google although smaller sites tend to have slightly higher rankings.
• It’s no surprise that the number of inbound links and the PageRank had a large influence on the page rankings on Google. The top result on Google has usually about four times as many links as result number 11.

What Google likes in a website

Google, the Internet’s most important search engine now has a lot of competition with Yahoo’s new search engine and with the upcoming MSN search. Still, Google is very important search engine to understand as it has the power to bring a tremendous amount of traffic to your website.

This article provides you practical tips & know how’s to improve your Google rankings.

• Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
• Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.
• Create a useful, information-rich site and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
• Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
• Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn’t recognize text contained in images.
• Make sure that your TITLE and ALT tags are descriptive and accurate.
• Check for broken links and correct HTML.
• If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a ‘?’ character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them small.
• Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).
• Content: Google searches the content on your site to return relevant search results. Be sure to include relevant keywords in the text of all your pages. Also, try to keep them near the top of your pages – Google may not crawl all the way down your page.
• Domain Name: Having your keywords in your domain name may boost your ranking. Google seems to favor sites with keywords in their domain.

Those are few basics to Google rankings. Integrate some of these suggestions into your web page, wait for Google to update in next few weeks to see the difference in your rankings.. Verify what works and what doesn’t and constantly improve your site based on what you ascertain.

Edited: August 29th, 2007

Suicide in Cyberspace -Your Outward Links Can Kill Your Rankings

Link building strategies have, for most people for a long time, revolved around reciprocal link exchanges. Whilst most people understand that links are important, they generally don’t understand why this is so. In a nutshell, a link to your site has traditionally been accepted by Search Engines as a vote for your site. A link from a topic or theme-related site to yours is better than a link from a site having a completely different topic. An important site’s link to yours carries more weight – for example from The Open Directory, or Yahoo Directory. All pretty straightforward…

BUT… the rules have changed… significantly! All the thinking webmasters worked diligently to build links – willy-nilly – in order to subvert the search engine rankings and gain an advantage to themselves at the expense of everyone else. For a long time, there have been mutterings about this, and comments from Google staffers about possible penalties from linking to “bad neighbourhoods” and – heaven forbids it – buying links! Google et al simply don’t approve of willy-nilly link-building schemes, and have recently tightened the screws a bit more, in two notable ways…

Bad Links
Some links are bad… for example, if you are a car sales company and you’ve got dozens of completely irrelevant links to international hotel sites… yeah, YOU know the ones! in Prague, Munich, Shanghai etc! That’s a BAD neighbourhood over there! That IS going to put a world of hurt on you! And as for the Free For All link sites, web rings, and 3 way link schemes… that’s just suicide in cyberspace! Why? Coz its a blatant and completely indefensible attempt at cheating the system!

Reciprocal Links – Almost a Waste of Effort
Reciprocal links are still of some value, providing the link titles are explicit, and if the page they link to you from has a higher Page Rank than the page from which you link to them. The concept of a link to you being a vote for you, and being added to your site’s Total Vote Count has a flip side. A link from you to someone else essentially deducts one vote from your total vote count… meaning its value is minimal when compared to a 1-way incoming back-link!

1-way Outward Links Are Toxic
Ok, lets assume you are a service provider, maybe a health clinic, and you deal with hospitals, other doctors, specialists, nurses, laboratories. So, as a benefit to your visitors, you place direct links to their web resources on your links page. Is that clever?

Most certainly it is NOT! Transfusion time, because you’ll be haemorrhaging Page Rank with nothing in return! Do it, but be smart about it, because there is NOTHING to be gained (by you) from linking to any site that does not link back. So make sure your links include the “nofollow” attribute that tells SE’s that the link is NOT a vote by your site for that site!

Link Content Is Mission Critical
This is mission critical because Google and other have decided that they can’t trust you to be honest about your site! Basically, it seems like there are two web tribes – those who know not so much about how things work, and those who know more than they should. There should also be a flourishing third tribe, who just build great sites with lots of terrific content that automatically ranks highly – but nobody’s seen nuthin’ from those guys for ages!

The tribe who know more than they should ruthlessly manipulate every available loophole to dominate search engine rankings, at the expense of those who have yet to read SEO For Dummies. Therefore, Google decided that its essential that there is some external correlation between what YOU say your site is about, and what OTHER people say your site is about… This is done by analysing the words in the Link Title on all links pointing to your site. Bottom line here is – if a keyword phrases does NOT appear on links to your site, you ain’t gonna rank for that phrase!

For many established sites, this is the main reason they might have experienced a noticeable decline in rankings in the last few months. Most older sites will have a majority of incoming links based on their business name, and NOT on their activities / products / services / location etc. To use the common “widgets” analogy – if you are selling “widgets” and all your incoming link titles have your only business name e.g. Smiths Manufacturing Co Ltd, its now very difficult for you to rank for “widgets”!

Backlink analysis reveals this shortcoming rather quickly and, lucky for you, it is possible to remedy this by building 1-way incoming back-links using multiple Title / Description combinations that contain a good spread of relevant keywords. It does require some keyword research, and it is tedious – but if you don’t do it, you are certainly not going forwards! But your competitors might be…

Edited: August 27th, 2007

Good Web Design Feng Shui

Feng Shui simply stated is the harmonious flow of energy. Pronounced “foong shway”, The basic principle of Feng Shui is simplicity. Removing everything that stops the natural flow of chi (life force, energy, particles) into our lives to produce more harmony and balance.

The principles of Feng Shui can be applied to all areas of life including relationships, business, web sites, personal finances, and even your closet since there’s nothing hidden from the natural flow of energy. You can slow it down, attract or repel it, but you can’t stop it. It’s not magic and in spite of what you may have read about Feng Shui, you probably won’t win the lottery just by placing a three legged frog with a coin in it’s mouth near your front door. In fact, by diving right in to Feng Shui without a good understanding of how chi works, you could actually increase the amount of negative energy that you want to dispel. What do I mean by that?

The universal law of attraction states that ‘like attracts like’, so if you have piles of clutter around you (or on your web site) or you are surrounded by things that no longer serve you or that you don’t like, you will attract more of the same until you do something to change it. By removing things in your life (or on your web site) that serve no purpose, and only keeping those things that serve you well and that you absolutely love, you are going to attract more of the same. The flow of energy is both receptive and aggressive (Yin and Yang) and when this flow is out of balance, there is disharmony.

How does this apply to web design, you ask… good question. If you’ve ever been to a web site where the colors hurt your eyes, the music offends your ears or you have a frustrating experience trying to find what you’re looking for, it’s probably because the site does not have a good flow of information that is pleasing to your senses. Web designers call it ‘user-centered design’ and it’s the way content is organized so the user can intuitively find it without having to fight their way through or to stop and think about it.

You can tell when a site is out of balance, probably in more than one area, and not just in the layout or the graphics, but in the simple, logical order that you come to expect from the internet by visiting sites with good standards in web design and information architecture.

Sites with good Feng Shui typically have:

1) the logo in the top left corner and it’s usually linked to the home page or a home link is provided on all pages,

2) the primary navigation is across the top or down the left side of the pages. If buttons are used for primary navigation, text links are duplicated at the bottom of each page, not only for better search engine results but so the user doesn’t have to scroll back up to the top of the page to continue,

3) there is a visual balance on most pages of curves and corners with a pleasing color scheme,

4) headings are larger than content text and information is concise for skimming the page while providing the user with an option for more information if desired,

5) animation and ads are not forced on the visitor but are offered as a choice,

6) font is resizable in the browser, alt text is provided on images and the site is usable for people with disabilities and/or older browsers,

7) fresh content is added on a regular basis… weeding out or archiving out of date information to add new or more up to date information. This not only prevents ‘web clutter’, but tells your users that you want their visit to be useful,

graphics have been compressed in byte size making them load quickly. Time is the main factor in web design. The whole purpose of database-driven web sites is to load the information quickly off the server instead of depending on slower browser version dependent rendering,

You can probably think of many more ways to improve the flow of energy on your web site. There is room for improvement on every site and the best way to find out is to ask your visitor’s opinions of what they like. After all, if you didn’t build your site for your user’s experience, then why did you build it?

Edited: June 12th, 2007