Blogging for SEO

Having fancy looking images and such is good and all to the eye of the viewers, but as you may know, search engines don’t care at all what you have in the actual image because they may as well be pure white or black or just yeah…not a lick of style in it at all. For every image up there without a Alt Tag or Title, it’s basically a blank spot and will actually reflect badly on how well the site is SEO’d.

Adding the appropriate Alt Tag and Title is incredibly important in helping your rankings if your site has even one. Putting the tags is actually fairly simple.

img src="http://whatever.something/cow.gif" alt="Cow Eating Grass in Colorado" title="Cow Eating Grass in Colorado"

Even something like that is better than nothing and just placing images all willy nilly. Don’t forget your opening and closing to the code, but I’m going to assume you know that much. Do something more appropriate for each and every image of course and you’ll be on a lot better footing when it comes to SEO’ing the site you’re working on.

There is so much talk out there about what the ‘perfect’ web page looks like. In this article we give you tips on what we consider perfectly optimized as well as tips on helping turn the page into a great conversion tool.

Step one – Know who you are targeting
As with any marketing campaign the first step in optimizing ANY web page is to know your target audience. Is your site B2B (business to business) or B2C (business to consumer). This is important because this not only affects the tone of your site, but also the keywords you chose.

It is imperative that you nail who your target is before you do anything else because if you don’t it doesn’t matter how big your site is, or how many pages you have. If you don’t write to the right crowd you aren’t going to get too much business.

The best thing is to write down who you think the target is. Be as detailed as possible. For example, your target may be a 30-45 year old female, in middle management, who drives a mini-van and takes her 3 kids to school before she goes to work. She makes $45,000 per year and has a bachelors degree in finance. This is the type of detail you need. You should be able to picture this person in your mind. Not just the abstract idea of her, but a physical look as well. the better you can picture them in your mind the more successful you will be.

Once you know who you target is the next step is choosing keywords.

Step two – Choosing the right keywords

This may be the most difficult part of your journey, especially if you don’t fit the target profile. That is, picking the keywords they will use to find your site.

You can start by using free tools like Yahoo!s keyword suggestion tool. It gives you a good place to start picking keywords.

Start with a phrase you know your site is about (i.e. if you sell widgets, then simply put “widgets” in the search box). The tool will then not only spit out other related words, but also the search volumes associated with each for the previous month.

A word of caution however: Sometimes, depending on when you use the tool, the search volumes are from a couple months ago. So if your product is seasonal based, the numbers may actually be lower or higher than represented.

Don’t be afraid to get a few hundred words to start. Remember, right now you are just gathering ideas – phrases that could drive traffic to your site. They aren’t all necessarily being used by your target customer.

You can also go to Google’s Adwords site and perform the above steps. Start with a phrase or two which describe your site or product and use Google’s suggestion tool to help expand your list.

At this point you want as many phrases on your list as possible. Don’t worry, you will cull the list pretty quickly.

Once you have a huge list of words, the next place to go is a site like Wordtracker, which has a keyword analysis tool. This tool can be used for a one time fee, or if it’s something you might want to return to you can purchase a subscription. It is a fairly simple tool to use and will give you a good idea of just how likely your site will be able to compete for a phrase.

A warning about Wordtracker: The software uses search volumes from some fairly minor sites such as Dogpile, so the estimates could be a little skewed. But again, unless you deal with an SEO firm that has their own proprietary software, this is about your best alternative.

Also remember as you are culling your words, don’t just focus on the competitive factors. These won’t account for your target audience. Therefore you need to have that picture in your mind of the target as you are selecting phrases that they might use. If you are unsure, you could always as for help from friends and family that fit the target profile.

A good rule of thumb would be to chose about one phrase per page. That doesn’t mean that you will only have one page per phrase, but it gives you a good target. So if your site is 300 pages, consider having a list of 300 phrases.

Step 3 – Write your pages

Now that you have your keywords its time to write, or re-write, your content to make them more appealing to the target audience, inserting the key phrases you’ve selected whenever possible.

Keep in mind that you don’t want to over do it. Also now is a good time to ensure you have proper keyword density’s and page length.

I recommend pages that are 400-500 words long. If they are a little longer or shorter that is fine, however if they are approaching 1000 words or more you should split them up, trying to hit that 400-500 word limit.

On this 400-500 word page you should have 2 or 3 occurrences of a key phrase, and you want to limit the key phrases used to 2 or 3. In other words you could have between 4 and 9 occurrences of all your key phrases per page. This should provide you with optimal keyword density.

Above all, make sure the pages are readable. Don’t optimize for optimization’s sake. If only one key phrase applies to the page, then only use one.

Step 4 – Optimize your Pages

This can be done in conjunction with the writing. In fact it should be done at then to save time. I purposely made this a separate step so that I could outline the finer points of optimization.

Provided that you are following the guidelines found in step 3, your pages should already have good keyword density, now is the time to improve that optimization by adding optimized meta tags and if appropriate, some image alt tags.

First is to write the meta description tag. While many engines will index thousands of characters in your description, I recommend no more than a couple hundred characters. That is about how long this paragraph is.

The meta description should be a readable sentence or two with the same keywords that you wrote the page for. In other words, the same phrases should appear in the meta description as the body. They should also appear as near to the front of the tag as possible however don’t sacrifice readability for this. If the tag doesn’t make sense with them at the front, then reorganize until they do make sense. Be sure to use proper punctuation as well.

Also preferred but not mandatory is a meta keywords tag. While none of the major engines use this tag, other smaller ones, and some specialty engines do use the meta keywords tag. If your target uses one of these engines then it makes sense to have that tag in place.

Also, with the keywords tag there is a lot of debate over using commas or not. Personally I do not use commas. I just combine the phrases and remove duplicate words. For example, if the page is about blue widgets, yellow widgets and red widgets then the keywords tag could be: “blue yellow red widgets.”

Common sense should be used when deciding if you will use image alt tags as well. If your keywords match the image and you can make a compelling image description, then do it. Otherwise don’t.

Step 5 – Write a compelling title tag

I purposely left this as a separate step from meta tags because this is the most important part of your optimization program. Again, it can be done at the same time as the previous two steps, but it’s importance can not be over-emphasized.

This is because the title tag is the tag which is displayed in the SERP (Search Engine Results Page). It is the link that people click on, and also the tag which is generally read by the visitor before they decide to visit.

Therefore, if your title tag isn’t compelling, it doesn’t matter how well optimized your page is, it may not get that click.

For this step, you need to look at your competition to determine what they are doing. Perform a search to see what is compelling about their listing? Is there one that stands out? If so what are they doing? For example, if on every other site the keyword is the first phrase on the title, then consider moving your keyword in to the second or third phrase.

This is because, as you will notice, engines like Google bold the search term in the title and snippets or description. One way to make your title stand out is to have the term in a different position than the competition. That way the bolding stands out like this:

key phrase in title tag
key phrase in title tag
title tag with key phrase
key phrase in title tag

Notice how the third one stands out from the rest?

I can not emphasize enough how important that title tag is. As I said, it is the “hook” to get visitors to your site. If the title is ineffective, then it won’t get clicked which means you don’t get the opportunity to woo that client.

As any good SEO person knows, it’s always good to have copies of the work you’ve done. What if something goes wrong and the site you spent a good 4 hours on goes up in smoke? That’s where backups come into play of course. Copies of your images, content, CSS, and the PHP/HTML files if it’s applicable. Of course, it’s always good to have a copy of those as well, but it depends just how much you’re allowed to edit those files.

I suggest writing everything down in a MS Word document or my personal favorite, a plain old .txt file. I keep files on everything like this site that I had done recently. Keeping copies of files also helps in the development of future sites. I can’t tell you how much time my former sites done had saved me in completing future sites. If you can’t find anything that matches the file you’re working on (like if you only have content on cabinets when you need water slides) then Wikipedia is an excellent place to grab content. Also learn about things you hadn’t known before. Just remember. Backups, backups, backups. I guarantee at some point you’re going to need ‘em.

Things like over saturation of your keywords can actually lower your page ranking, similar to the way that having too many credit cards can hurt your credit score. In SEO terms more is not always better.

Companies began experimenting with ways to get better page ranking around 1994. Getting good page ranking was not super complicated in the early days of the internet, however the search engines quickly become much more sophisticated in order to offer the most relevant results to their users. And that is how the cat and mouse game started. SEO companies continue to search for ways to achieve higher placement on the major engines and the engines continue to become better at preventing this. Search engines also have learned to detect some common practices which are considered unethical and may even demote your ranking status as a result, or maybe even drop you from its index altogether.

SEO companies continue to learn and change the way they optimize websites for best placement and in response search engines are continually revised in the way they pull results to try to prevent companies from playing to search engine.

Today’s most popular search engines employ different techniques try to get the most natural and relevant results for a search. For instance Alexa with a list of known URLs from around the whole entire Internet, then it fetches local links that it finds as it goes. Each search engine uses a different method to collect and rank listings. Google uses an entirely other method of which includes distribution over many smaller computers for added speed.

Developing a site with PHP offers a number of SEO advantages over pure HTML. One of the most major advantages of using a dynamically scripting website is in updating without having to manually write in new content. This can be achieved through something as simple as an RSS feed or as complex as a news site scraper. Search engines notice new content to a page and an RSS feed is a hands-off way to enhance your content and keep it constantly fresh.

RSS stands for Really Simply Syndication, and it is nothing more than a specially formatted XML(eXtensible Markup Language) document. An RSS feed contains updated information from an external site(for instance, the latest news articles from a news website), and an RSS reader parses this XML document into an attractive list of news links that updates as the news site updates. This electronic syndication makes it ultra easy for one website to broadcast information for another website to post snippets of onto it’s own page.

Here are some tips on getting the most out of RSS feeds on your website:

• Be careful of where you are getting your feeds and what keywords are being used in your feeds. Acronyms are generally a bad idea, because you never know what else the acronym might stand for. For instance, while MLM may mean multi-level marketing to some, others may have less appealing connotations. The RSS feed may pull in some pretty unappetizing links off of an acronym.
• The more varied of feeds you have, the better, but only so long as they are all inter-related and tie into the page that displays them. Having a single news feed from a single site is too limiting, since all of their articles(or at least, the vast majority) will link you to the same domain - theirs. If you mix and match feeds (and with a solid PHP developer on hand, taking several feeds and blending them into one stream of data is a walk in the park), the greater variety of links will give you a nice boost. Alternatively, you can find a news source that is an aggregate source, that is, someone who merely links all over the place. Google News is one such news source, and when properly formatted into HTML, it’s virtually impossible for a search engine to recognize they all came from the same place.
• Don’t go overboard with RSS feeds. They are not the be-all-end-all of search engine work. Search engines strive to put the most relevant page on top, not the page that jumps through all of their arbitrary hoops in the goal of being #1. SEO is a balance between tricking the engine into thinking you’re extremely relevant…and actually being as relevant as you can. Static content is a good balance to a dynamic feed. The content is recognized as the central pillar of your page, and the dynamic feed is recognized as shifting data on current stories. If you run a feed on real estate in Alabama, it’s probably a good idea to actually write content on real estate in Alabama to supplement it.
• Put the RSS output into organized HTML tags. The <h1>-<h6>, <p>, <ul>/<ol>/<li>, and <dl>/<dt>/<dd> tags are there for more than just formatting. Those all mean something. Header 1(most important tag on a page, equivalent to the title of a book) through Header 6(deep subheading, six levels deep of categorization) mean just that. Using these tags for no reason other than their look is not only bad SEO practice, but also misuse of HTML and CSS(use the almighty CSS to do your page styling, not the data-defining HTML). Likewise, a paragraph tag means the search engine expects a paragraph of data, not just something you wanted on it’s own line with a gap above and below. The same goes with unordered lists, ordered lists, list items, definition lists, definition terms and definition definitions. Used properly with your RSS, these tags help the search engine make sense of your content, it knows what’s more important, it knows what the headers are, it knows how to categorize your site.
• Keep an eye on your feeds to make sure they are still pulling the data you want. This is especially important for a news feed. Let’s say you run a company called Thomas’ Jammies and you sell pajamas. This seems simple enough. You set up your RSS feeds and decide to run your company name through one in case an article ever gets pulled up mentioning you. Well, a small problem arises right around now (mid Oct 07) as Jammie Thomas gets plastered on the news for being convicted of copyright infringement and fined $222,000 in a major case for online file sharing. Now, your feeds are flooded with news articles about the RIAA, Kazaa, Jammie Thomas, and U.S. copyright laws…yet there is not a word on the site about pajamas. If you check up on the feeds about once every other day, you would’ve seen this trickle of news and cut out that link before it became a torrent of completely unrelated content. Most search engine spiders hit about once a week, and you’d really hate if that once a week came during that time period.

With these tips on how to handle an RSS feed onto your site, you should be able to springboard into using RSS effectively. Balance out RSS vs. static content, watch your feeds, output the RSS into appropriate HTML tags, be careful of where you get your feeds, and be careful of what keywords you use in your feeds. Take these pieces of advice to  heart, and you’re halfway to solid, search engine friendly Really Simple Syndication.

Once you’ve got this down, the next step is learning to do more than display another site’s RSS feed in an effective way, and learn to broadcast your own RSS. Any dynamic website can do it, and any PHP developer worth their salt can pull it off fairly easily.

SEO or search engine optimization is a specialized way of creating sites to appear better to search engines and to get the highest placement on the search engine as possible. The way this is done is through the use of key words and content to make a clients site rank as high as possible as it can on any search engine such as google.com and yahoo.com.

To create the perfect SEO site it needs to have a lot of key words and very key word rich content. Basically the search engine is told what to look for with the key words and the more that key word is used in the content the higher the importance of that key word is and the higher the web site will be placed on the search engine.

 1. Targeting the wrong keywords

This is a mistake many people make and what is worse – even experienced SEO experts make it. People choose keywords that in their mind are descriptive of their website but the average users just may not search them. For instance, if you have a relationship site, you might discover that “relationship guide” does not work for you, even though it has the “relationship” keyword, while “dating advice” works like a charm. Choosing the right keywords can make or break your SEO campaign. Even if you are very resourceful, you can’t think on your own of all the great keywords but a good keyword suggestion tool, for instance, the Website Keyword Suggestion tool will help you find keywords that are good for your site.

2. Ignoring the Title tag

Leaving the <title> tag empty is also very common. This is one of the most important places to have a keyword, because not only does it help you in optimization but the text in your <title> tag shows in the search results as your page title.

3. A Flash website without a html alternative

Flash might be attractive but not to search engines and users. If you really insist that your site is Flash-based and you want search engines to love it, provide an html version. Here are some more tips for optimizing Flash sites. Search engines don’t like Flash sites for a reason – a spider can’t read Flash content and therefore can’t index it.

4. JavaScript Menus

Using JavaScript for navigation is not bad as long as you understand that search engines do not read JavaScript and build your web pages accordingly. So if you have JavaScript menus you can’t do without, you should consider build a sitemap (or putting the links in a no-script tag) so that all your links will be crawl-able.

5. Lack of consistency and maintenance

Our friend Rob from Blackwood Productions often encounters clients, who believe that once you optimize a site, it is done forever. If you want to be successful, you need to permanently optimize your site, keep an eye on the competition and – changes in the ranking algorithms of search engines.

6. Concentrating too much on meta tags

A lot of people seem to think SEO is about getting your meta keywords and description correct! In fact, meta tags are becoming (if not already) a thing of the past. You can create your meta keywords and descriptions but don’t except to rank well only because of this.

7. Using only Images for Headings

Many people think that an image looks better than text for headings and menus. Yes, an image can make your site look more distinctive but in terms of SEO images for headings and menus are a big mistake because h2, h2, etc. tags and menu links are important SEO items. If you are afraid that your h1 h2, etc. tags look horrible, try modifying them in a style sheet or consider this approach: http://www.stopdesign.com/articles/replace_text.

8. Ignoring URLs

Many people underestimate how important a good URL is. Dynamic page names are still very frequent and no keywords in the URL are more a rule than an exception. Yes, it is possible to rank high even without keywords in the URL but all being equal, if you have keywords in the URL (the domain itself, or file names, which are part of the URL), this gives you additional advantage over your competitors. Keywords in URLs are more important for MSN and Yahoo! but even with Google their relative weight is high, so there is no excuse for having key-wordless URLs.

9. Backlink spamming

It is a common delusion that it more backlinks are ALWAYS better and because of this web masters resort to link farms, forum/new group spam etc., which ultimately could lead to getting their site banned. In fact, what you need are quality backlinks. Here are some more information on The Importance of Backlinks

10. Lack of keywords in the content

Once you focus on your keywords, modify your content and put the keywords wherever it makes sense. It is even better to make them bold or highlight them.

This article is taken from www.webconfs.com

Interesting information is always being dissected about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and its hard to tell fact from fiction sometimes. People are unsure where to turn, and what to believe. Too often a novice to SEO will believe that they can get to the top of Google over night, which any seasoned veteran of the internet will tell you is just not the case. It takes time and hard work. The only sure-fire way to the top of a search engine over night is to buy placement from the search engines. Google, Yahoo! and Live/MSN all offer advertising options. However, in the world of organic search engine optimization, this just doesn’t work, or help in your long term marketing plans, unless you are willing to pay per visitor, which can cost you greatly over the long haul.

If you are interested in getting your website, or homepage, to the top of search engines, you may consider using a search engine specialist. Someone who can help you navigate the waters to search engine positioning. Just as a ‘brick and mortar’ business needs to advertise in their local yellow pages, a web related business needs to advertise online, however, many experts agree that banner ads do not work, people search for what they are looking for on search engines, exactly as they search their local phone books. And being closer to the top means more traffic.

USA SEO Pros is a company that helps customers do just that. Talking to an SEO Expert can help alleviate the stress of search engine marketing with a friendly staff and knowledgeable experts. Putting yourself in front of your customers can yield your business immeasurable returns both in increased market penetration and increased sales.

Just a reminder to everyone interested in working with a Search Engine Optimization company, there are no overnight solutions, as much as everyone wants. SEO takes weeks, and sometimes months, to achieve the desired results. And sometimes it doesn’t happen the first try, and your marketing team should work to change your campaign to put together everything successfully. USA SEO Pros works for our clients, making sure to never stop until you are ranked with the desired terms, in the desired numbers.