SEO Tips

SEO Tips: What To Do, by Orad Elkayam

Your key to success in online marketing and promotion is your website. From your title, keywords, meta tags, and content, to your over all site design, each plays a very important role when optimizing your site. as we all know If your site doesn't rank in the top 10 or 20 when doing a keyword search at the top search engines, your target audience won't be able to find you.

According to the Forster Research About 87% percent of all website traffic originates from the major search engines. Most of the time users find what they're looking for in the first 10 - 20 results. The percentage of click throughs are even smaller. Listing near the top and grabbing the attention of your target audience is top priority. There are many components of your web page that you should pay close attention to when starting the process of listing in a search engine.

The first step towards improving your listing is selecting the best keywords and keyword phrases that reflect your web page. Keywords are the foundation of your web presence in some of the search engines search engines.

Key Words

To help you choose effective keywords and keyword phrases, there are two important steps. First of all, get a Thesaurus and investigate synonyms for your original keywords. Write these words down on a sheet of paper. Next, perform your keyword and keyword phrases search at the major engines.

One of the most common ways to start from is to Pay close attention to the websites that rank 1 through 10. View the source code of these pages. Pay close attention to their placement of keywords in the and alt tags. Next, do a search for your competitor's websites and view their HTML source code. Noticing patterns is your key to ranking above them

Image Alt

An image alt attribute follows your graphic address or url in your html code. These words will be displayed in place of your graphics through an older browser or when your visitors have their graphics turned off. To fully optimize your graphics, insert several of your keywords in the alt tags of the graphics located at the top of your pages

Title Tag

Effective title tags include only relevant keyword or keyword phrases. Avoid non-indexing filler words, such as a, an, the, welcome and home page.

Meta Tags

Tags are HTML code that enable some of the major search engines to determine what keywords are relevant to this specific site. The META "description" tag will contain a description of your site. Make sure your description contains some of your relevant keywords. The META "keywords" tag will contain a listing of your keywords and keyword phrases that are relevant to your site and enable a search engine to find you.

Main Content (website text)

Not only are the html tags an important part of starting optimization for your site, but it is almost just as important to add plenty of quality content to your pages. Your text should contain each of your keywords used in different variations.

SEO Tips: What NOT To Do ... or How To Prevent Getting Banned From Search Engines, by Orad Elkayam

Google places a very strong emphasis on the quality and relevancy of their search results. As the undisputed leader in the world of search engines, they know that in order to stay on top they must make sure that their users are satisfied with the quality of the search results provided. To that end, they do not take kindly to several techniques used by many webmasters and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) experts. These techniques can and will get a site banned from Google or at the very least result in a Page Rank (PR) penalty. (PR will be discussed in more detail later.) A list of the most common (and dangerous) techniques is below:

Submitting multiple URL's for the same site - An example would be submitting mysite.com and mysite.com/index.html to their database, thereby essentially trying to get two search results for the same page.

Cloaking

Cloaking is having two separate pages, one optimized for the search engines and a different one optimized for the viewer. In other words the search engine sees one page but the user is redirected to a different page when the link is clicked. Cloaking is a big no-no with Google.

Doorway pages

In order to get a good listing in the search engines, some webmasters will load the home page with keywords. But a page filled with keywords comes across as nonsense to a human viewing the page. Therefore the webmaster will do a redirect to another page that is much easier to read (or have the user click a link to get to that page). This is basically cloaking. And as we now know, cloaking is a no-no.

Hidden text

Some webmasters will place hidden keywords on a page and make the font color the same as the background color (for example white text on a white background). This renders the text invisible to the human eye but the search engine spiders can still see it. This results in a higher Page Rank and search engine listing for those keywords. Hidden text is often used on a doorway page. Using hidden text is a sure way to get banned from Google fast!

Hidden links

The number of pages that link to one of your pages has a direct effect on how high your page appears in the search results (and that page's PR). As with hiding text, hiding links will also result in a ban or PR penalty.

Link farms

A link farm is loosely defined as a page that lists links solely or mainly for the purpose of achieving a high Google PR. Free-For-All links pages are often considered link farms by Google. Be careful who you link to! Realistically, you can't control who links to you, so incoming links will not hurt your site's ranking. But you control directly who you link to so Google will ban or penalize your site for linking to a "bad neighborhood".

Spamming

Don't send unsolicited commercial emails (SPAM). Enough said.

Selling PR

Blatantly advertising the fact that your high PR site will sell a link to another site in order to boost that site's PR is another big no-no. Selling advertising in the form of a link on your site is perfectly acceptable. Selling a link for the stated or implied purpose of increasing a site's PR is not.

Multiple identical sites

In order to increase PR, some webmasters will create and interlink multiple pages all with identical or very similar content. This is not allowed.

Multiple domains

Creating multiple domains that redirect to one page is not allowed. Also, creating multiple domains with the same or nearly the same content and then interlinking them is a no-no. If you have multiple sites place unique content on each site. Doing otherwise will result in a ban or penalty.

Excessive links

Google recommends having no more than 100 links on any given page. Having more than 100 links won't result in a ban but it can result in a lower PR.

If you refrain from using any of the above techniques you can avoid a Google penalty. The best way to attain a high PR and placement in the Google listings is to stay on Google's "good side".

Recommended source for more information: SEO Directory