SEO Hosting Blog

Many years ago when the search engine marketing industry began there was no problem with adding a lot of keywords into a web page to help rank in the search engines. In fact it was pretty easy to rank back then in the major search engines. Switch to today and you see three major engines and many safeguards in place by them to catch over-optimization and on or off page techniques used by modern search engine marketers.

Afraid of Search Engine Spiders?
Search engine spiders (aka crawlers, robots) are software programs designed to find links, read through text, follow links from page to page and index the individual web pages of a web site. If you know anything about software you know human beings create them. If you are a software tester then you definitely know how fallible software is. Remember how often your browser or your laptop crashes? (more…)

Typically, a splash page is designed to catch the attention of a human visitor through use of a large graphic, a Flash movie, or some other technological item.  While this may indeed attract the attention of your human visitors, visiting search engine spiders won’t be impressed, and ultimately your human visitors will not get all the benefit they could from visiting your site.

Search Engine Spiders and Splash
Search engine spiders rely on text and links to get their work done. In the past when there has been virtually no text on an entry page, images or a Flash movie, the content of the web page has not been read and indexed by the search engine spiders. Graphic images and Flash were lost on the spiders beyond ALT attribute text for the images. Until recently Flash was unreadable to the search engine spiders. (more…)

The basis of good web design is also often what makes search engine optimization effective in the ability of the search engine spiders to index web pages.

Follow the Industry Leader
When you are dealing with Google it is important to remember their primary goal is to help the search engine user. Since Google’s search engine is the leader in the search engine industry the other major search engines will follow their lead. When designing your website you want to make the website easy to navigate. Use optimization code that makes sense to the website visitor when they see it used in text on the page and in the title tag.

Optimization Text That Makes Sense
A good way to be sure your website works for your visitors is to read the text aloud after adding in your search engine optimization code. If it sounds stilted start rewriting. Have someone else read over your copy to be sure the optimization words you have added make sense and reads well to the typical website user. You need to capture your audience when they first visit your website. Give them a reason to stay once they arrive.

Inform Your Vistors
If the optimized tags and keyword text benefit the content of the text on the page, being informative on the information or products of the website, it is also beneficial to the human visitor. In this sense search engine robots “read” legitimate text and legitimate tags which help explain the content of the page not only to the human visitor but to the search engine robots as well.

Ease of Website Navigation
You want to have a search engine friendly design focusing on the navigational system you have in place for the website. Having a sitemap in place is helpful especially for those deeper pages of the website that may not be easily accessed by the on page navigation. Search engine spiders need to find those deep page links and you certainly want them to find the links on a page! Human visitors are able to pull down drop down menus or understand the intent of a graphic to travel through the website. As important as this is you must also include methods to make your website search engine friendly. Search engine spiders cannot push a button or use pull down menus. Some robots have difficulty with JavaScript menus. Make sure a sitemap is in place, and easily followed text navigation or graphic navigation is available so your web pages may be able to be followed by the bots. Ideally text navigation should be available with the added advantage of keyword anchor text but there are times design prohibits this choice. By providing easy to use navigation for humans and spiders you increase your chance at visitor retention and maximum indexing of your web page content.

Good Web Design Really Can Get Along With Quality Optimization
Not everyone is an SEO Copywriter. It can be difficult to tie in your search engine optimization text and the intent of the web page for the human visitor. Get creative and always keep in mind your website visitor. Well selected keywords should reflect what the web page is about. Enhance what is already on the page whenever possible. Marketing lingo may be great but sometimes you need to think about a wider audience. Knowing your target audience well will help you find your voice in your design of the website and your search engine optimization copy.

Developing a highly visited website, a “traffic worthy site”, is essential for your web site’s success. While developing the site, however, you need to keep in mind that not only is your site going to be seen by the human eye, but also by the nonhuman eye. How is that? Well, search engines along with their spiders and crawlers, will also be viewing your website. Having a sound web design, therefore, is crucial for bringing traffic to your site. How is this done?

First, you need to know what your company’s keywords are. What words come to your mind when describing your business or interest? These may be your keywords. Do online research to find out how popular they are. There are a variety of keyword selector tools that you can use for no charge. Yahoo’s Overture is a good one, another is Word Tracker. Once you have access to these keyword selector tools, simply type in what words are important to you and results will be displayed regarding their popularity. The results can also help you decide which words are most important and will bring the most visitors to your site.

Secondly, you need to know how to optimize your keywords to your advantage. This is known as keyword optimization. Your website must have good keyword optimization if it is to perform to its best advantage and bring you success from it. Keyword optimization is part of search engine optimization (SEO). You want, and need, to know how the search engines will notice your website. Also, each time a person searches for something online (search utilization) they type in the words that are important to them. Hence, they type in their keywords. Sites will pop up containing those keywords and offer the viewer a chance to visit the site which matches their needs. It is important to note that about 85% of humans arrive at websites via search engines. That is a large amount. See the importance of both knowing what your keywords are and how to optimize them to get the most success from the search engines? Search engine optimization is highly important to the success of your website.

The best part of keyword and search engine optimization is the fact that the results will send you targeted potential, prequalified customers. This is due to the fact that the person performing the search is specifically looking for what you offer. They are using your keywords.

Also remember that when developing your website, do not use a word processor. Word processing software is well known for containing a variety of sloppy, hidden codes which are not search engine friendly.

These are just a few things to take into consideration while developing a website that receives a high traffic volume. Use them and you can only benefit.

There are many factors that go into good SEO, but probably one of the most important things you can do is create good titles. Not only are you doing this to help search engines find the topic of your page content, you’re also doing it to help brand your page and let visitors know where they’re going.

The two major benefits of using good keywords in title tags are:

1: Branding Your Page
If you’re like me, you’ve chosen a search result based on the title used for that particular site. If you searched for “Using Keywords in Title Tags” and one of the results popped up with the title “SEO Essentials: Keywords in Title Tags”, the odds are higher that you’ll find that result fitting to your information needs.

Your audience might not realize it, but most of us DO actually look at the titles and URLs in search results and use that information to formulate a decision on which result to click. This factor might be sub-conscious on many cases, but it certainly plays a role more times than not.

You can also use your titles to brand content. In the example listed here, and in the title of this post, you’ll see that I’ve added “SEO Essentials”. This tells readers that they will not only find information on keywords in title tags, but they will also know that the content is written from an SEO angle.

So, as you can see, I’m saying a lot through only six words. I’m explaining what the content is about, and for what purpose it is written.

2: Search Engine Optimization
Search Engines can and do use these tags. In almost every case the search engines have taken title tags, URL keywords, and headline keywords and they’ve used them in the results. And not just in the results, but also in the algorithm.

It has been proven time and time again that by using a consistent set of keywords in the title tag, the URL, and the page headline, the page has moved up in rank and enjoyed a higher click through rate in the search results pages.

What is the best way to use keywords in title tags?

-Understand searchers intent
-Use keyphrases when possible
-Use similar or same keywords and keyphrases in headline (h1) tags
-Use similar or same keywords and keyphrases in URL (permalink)
-Keep length to 65 characters or less (to ensure it all fits in the search engine results)

If you take these simple steps over time, you should eventually begin seeing cleaner results and a higher click through rate.