Archive for 2009
Choosing The Title and Description Tags
The title tag in the HTML head of your site pages is a critical location to insert your target terms. The search engines evaluate this factor heavily. So, it is very important to place keywords in title tags.When it comes to title tags, spiders (a computer program that searches the Internet for newly accessible information to be added to the index examined by a standard search tool of a search engine) will probably only check the first 60 to 70 characters including spaces. Therefore, it is best to keep title tags short and specific.
Make sure that the page is actually about the keyword if a keyword is in a web page’s title tag. Search engines will check the content of the page and expect it to match the title tags.
It is also advisable to avoid symbols such as “&” and other code-like characters when separating terms within a tag. The presence of these characters may confuse the search engine into thinking that it is not looking at code instead of a keyword.
In addition to a title tag, web pages can also contain a meta description tag. This is not as heavily weighted as the title tag but search engines sometimes use the content of this tag to provide a summary of that webpage on results pages. Other times they’ll just pull some text from the webpage that seems relevant to the search term and provide that to users as a description on the result page. It is important to use the
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Posted by Unknown
Identifying Effective Keywords - Part 1
Here are some ways to identify effective keywords to boost your website’s SERP ranking:Thinking like your customers
In choosing keywords, you should based on how your customers or potential website visitor think about your products or services. You can do some research to find out what consumers really do call your products. You can also have a little keyword analysis to check what people are actually searching for on the Web. With this, you’ll discover later on that the words that you were positive people would use are rarely searched, and you’ll find that you’ve missed a lot of common terms.
Starting your keyword analysis
You have to do a keyword analysis. This is a check of what keywords people use to search on the Web and this will save a lot of your time and effort. There are numerous tools available on the net for this.
Identifying the apparent keywords
You can begin by typing the obvious keywords into a text editor or word processor. After that, study the list for a few minutes. When you do your analysis, you’ll find that some of the initial terms you think of aren’t searched for very often.
Looking at your Web site’s access logs
Take a quick look at your Web site’s access logs or often called hit logs. You may not notice it, but most logs show you the keywords that people used when they clicked a link to your site at a search engine. If your logs don’t contain this information, you probably need another program. Write down also the terms that are bringing people to your site.
Examining competitors’ keyword tags
You should also know who your competitors are. Take a visit to their sites and open the source code of a few pages at each site. To do this, just choose View➪Source from the browser’s menu bar to get a peek. Look for the NAME=”keywords”> tag and see if you find any useful keywords there. If you look at enough sites of your competitors, you’re likely to come up with some useful terms you hadn’t thought of.
The Keyword and Its Significance
Basically, search engine rankings are rooted on keywords. Search engines employ all kinds of technology that is beyond the average person's comprehension, but it all comes down to words. Determining what keyword or keywords to use when optimizing a website is at the heart of every successful SEO. When you find something on a search engine, you type in a word, or several words, and click the Search button. The search engine then looks in its index for those words that you typed and return the Web sites as part of the search results. The occurrence of a specific word or phrase on a webpage is critical to influencing SERP ranking.Meanwhile, choosing the right keywords is the first step to better search engine positioning. You should, analyze your business carefully and think of all the words that relate to your company or product. As you do any sort of business online, you will know the importance of keywords.
Keywords can be defined as those words or phrases that your target audience will be inputting into the search engines. For them to find your business and not your competitor's, you should know how to use those keywords to maximum advantage. Thus, you need to research what keywords are being inputted into the search engines. You also need to research what the competition is for those keywords. In some cases, it is easier and cheaper to go after keywords that don't generate quite as many searches but ultimately have less competition.
In most cases, websites must be optimized for multiple keywords, and a simple way to do this is to optimize different sections or pages with different keywords and picking the right keywords is critical. And if you don’t choose the right keywords, a search engine can’t relate to your Web site the words that someone searches for and it has no reason to return your Web site as part of the search results.
Monday, June 22, 2009
Posted by Unknown
Defining SEO
SEO or “search engine optimization” is mainly tweaking a website to do well to appear among the top listings on search engine results pages (SERPs). SERPs are the web pages returned by search engines like Google or Yahoo! after a certain user performs a search. These pages contain links to web sites and documents that the search engine deems significant to the word or phrase. We call these words or phrases as “keywords.”SEO focuses on keywords. That’s why it’s important to figure out what words or phrases a website’s target audience is likely to use when searching for a site’s content. The goal here is to have the website appear within the first page of search results.
Meanwhile, search engines vary their results by geographic region and language. For example, Google’s German page will place more emphasis on German websites. Other various pieces of information that the search engine use are the language and the physical location of a website’s server. For example, the results from Google.de may differ from the results of Google.com.
"Rank" as the main concern of SEO refers the website's position in the search engine’s results pages. There are a number of factors that can influence the rank of a website on SERPs that website administrators can control; others they cannot. Controllable factors include page title tags, page content, the website’s architecture, and the ease at which a web “spider” can examine a site. A web spider is a website discovery program installed by search engines that scans the Internet looking for new pages and content changes on pages it has already discovered. There is little control over what competing websites can do to increase their search engine ranking; these actions may result in the down-ranking of other sites. Furthermore, website administrators sometimes can influence which other websites will link to their own site and how they will do so.
Posted by Unknown