Search Engine Optimization

Internet Marketing and SEO (or Search Engine Optimization) is a broad topic. There are many factors to consider when heading out with the goal of improving your website’s visibility and ranking within various search engines, which is a vital step in professional web design.

Choosing the right keywords for a website is an important and informative research task. In the process of improving your website you’ll learn a lot about your industry and your competitors.

Keywords are one the main factors that come into play in the algorithms used by major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Windows Live Search. If a web surfer is looking for home decorating tips and types ‘home decorating’ into a search engine, it will search its database for websites that contain that phrase and those individual words.

If you are an expert in your field, you know what your customers are looking for. Specifically, you know many of the words and phrases your customers would use to describe your products and services. Start with what you know.

Write out a list of phrases and words that describe your business. If you have a home decorating business you may think of words like ‘interior design’ and ‘furnishings’. Sort your list so that the most common phrases are on the top of your list.

You will now want to cross-reference the list of keywords that you have compiled with other lists generated for your industry. This will bring to mind other keywords that you may not have thought of. I recommend using a popular web-based keyword research tool named Wordtracker (http://www.wordtracker.com). Wordtracker helps identify additional keywords and phrases and offers a free trial of their service. It provides only a limited number of related words, but is still a great starting point. Searching for related keywords for ‘home decorating’ with Wordtracker produces a list of keywords like ‘home’, ‘decor’, ‘decorating’, ‘home decor’, ‘furniture’, ‘design’, ‘interior’, ‘interior decorating’, ‘art’, ‘wall’, and ‘fabric’.

Other keyword tools, which produce similar results, are also available. These include, among others, the web-based tools provided by Yahoo (Overture) (http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/), and Google (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal).

After compiling and merging the various lists of keywords, you’ll be ready to move on to the next step. Now that you have a clear picture of which keywords web surfers may type into their search engine to find your business, you need to be sure your website contains these important keywords.

A strategy is required when updating your website to include the keywords in your list. Starting at the top of your list, quickly review the keywords. Think about which keywords would naturally be present on your website and which keywords you probably wouldn’t use. Using the first list of keywords, you may now start reviewing the different sections of your website.

Your selected keywords should be placed in various areas of your site with the proper frequency. Your website content should focus on making sense to your visitors, not fed with keywords that will hopefully improve your search positioning. Search engine algorithms can detect the over use of keywords, which can negatively affect your positioning. Let’s now look at different areas of your website.

Every website has a title. This is not a website logo or a bold heading found on the top section of a website. The website title is displayed in the web browser’s title bar. This is the top most area of the window located to the far left of the window’s minimize, maximize, and close buttons. The website title is also the text that is displayed in search engine search results, which is often in a larger font and underlined. The website title is the first thing that a web surfer sees when performing a search. Web surfers quickly scan through search result website titles to evaluate which website will meet their needs. This is your first opportunity to grab their attention.

A website title should contain as many of your keywords as possible, while maintaining easy readability. This will do two things for you. First, the search engine will find your website in its database and display your website in their results. Second, the website title will catch the surfer’s interest as they see their search criteria matching your website title. Over-stuffing the title with keywords makes the title difficult to read and may be seen as abuse by search engines. The website title is updated by changing the text located between the opening and closing title tags, in the header of the HTML code. The title length should be kept to handful of words. The website description allows more space for describing your products and services.

As with the website title, the website description should also contain a variety of keywords. Unlike the website title, the website description is not visible on any part of the website itself. The description is the summary information you see in search engines results, displayed below the website title. The website description gives you a little more space to describe your website and your products and services. Again, be sure that your description is easily readable for your visitors, in order to attract them to click your site title. The website description can be updated by changing the text in the description meta tag, in the header of the HTML code.

Along with the title and description entries in the HTML code, there is also an area to define a set of keywords that you’d like to associate to the page. This is called the keyword meta tag. Keywords are entered as a comma separated list. The industry consensus is that the keyword meta tag is currently of little or no use with today’s major search engines. However, search engines continue to recommend their usage.

This brings us to the meat of our website, so to speak. Our chosen keywords should be used throughout the website content where it makes sense. Again, over-stuffing page content with keywords so that the message is unnatural can be detected by search engines. A good practice is to use the keywords to make the page content more descriptive. For example, a pet store may sell a variety of pet foods. This can be written in a descriptive manner, such as, ‘dog food and cat food’, instead of using ‘dog and cat food’. In this example the keyword ‘food’ is used twice.

Special attention should be given to the usage of heading tags and anchor tags. Keyword usage in page heading is more valuable than keywords used in a paragraph of text. The same can be said with anchor tags (a.k.a. hyperlinks). Using keywords as the clickable text of a hyperlink is very valuable.

Keyword density refers to the percentage of occurrences of your keywords compared to the other text on the web page. Keyword density tools such as Webconfs.com’s Keyword Density Checker (http://webconfs.com/keyword-density-checker.php) provides a visualization of the main theme or message on a chosen page. This tool counts the number of times each word is repeated on the page, which is a good test of how you’ve done at inserting keywords to optimize the content. It is also a good representation of how search engines will see your page. ‘More is better’ is not the most effective keyword density goal. Although the optimum keyword density is much debated, having some balance is definitely in order. A density below 1% makes it difficult for a search engine to understand your main message, where a density over 5% will start to make the content appear unnatural. At this stage in website optimization, the page content can be continually edited while the keyword density is being re-checked. Continue this process until your keywords are among the words with the highest density.

Choosing the correct keywords for your website is a must. Website keyword optimization is not rocket science, but it must be implemented carefully. By using the correct keywords, not only will your site be positioned well in search results, but it will draw visitors to your website.

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When the Internet was young, search engine traffic came at a premium price. Websites could buy their way into search engine listings, but there was no guarantee that the purchase would result in a significant amount of traffic.

Today, the rules are much different. In some ways it is much easier to get great traffic from search engines, but in other ways it is even harder. A website has to have a lot of clout before Google or Yahoo will list it in their top returns, but there are many ways to make your site more attractive to the search engines.

If you’re trying to build traffic for a blog, the best thing you can do for increased traffic is to blog and ping. This slightly humorous-sounding term simply means that you let blog directories know each time you make a new blog post.

By cluing in the blog directories whenever you add a new blog post, you’re building traffic in two ways. You might get an initial rush of traffic from the blog directory as readers click through to see your new entry. The real magic happens when the search engines follow the link from the blog directory back to your blog.

The search engine then finds other material to index. As you keep getting more links to your blog, the search engine has more pages to index. Eventually you will find your blog turning up in searches. You will not be in the top couple of pages right away, but you will see your search engine traffic rise.

Blog and ping might sound a little complicated, but it is actually very easy. Most major blog platforms ping the major blog directories automatically. If you want to ping a blog directory that is not listed in their default list, you can usually add it manually.

What if you don’t actually have a blog yet? Well, it is time to hop on the bandwagon. Blogs are useful for conveying your personal thoughts to anyone and everyone, about whatever subjects you choose. You can keep in touch with far-away relatives or just give yourself a creative outlet.

Lately, though… blogs are used quite often as marketing tools for businesses. The business blog can take many forms, from an informal journal kept by a CEO to a formal, frequently-updated record of new products.

Setting up a new blog is not difficult at all, and you have several options to do it. Most often, new bloggers set up a blog with one of the popular blogging platforms. These platforms offer standard templates, or you can create your own to match your company’s color scheme or your personal preferences.

Once your blog is set up and ready to go, don’t forget to make sure that it pings every blog directory possible. Blogging without pinging the blog directories is like spinning your wheels: you are doing something, but you are not making any progress.

If your blogging platform does not support pinging or does not submit to the directories you want, you can use software to accomplish the same thing. It is available under many different titles, but the basic function is to take your most recent blog post and send it to several blog directories. Your links start building up, your search engine traffic increases, and you are one happy blogger.

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When it comes to increasing web traffic and optimizing your website for search engines, external links to your site are the key. In general, the more websites that link to your site the better. But first, it’s important to know the basics about links.

A link is simply a means of navigating from one webpage to another. An internal link takes you to another page within the same website, while an external link takes you to a completely new website. The term back-link refers to another website providing a link to yours. Back-linking is great for getting your website exposure.

Links can also take on different forms. Being able to recognize and identify the various types is important. The 4 main types of links are: -URL Link: A website’s URL listed out as a link. -Text Link: (also known as Static Link). This is when a word or a phrase is clickable and takes you to another place. -Image Links: When clicking on an image navigates you to another page. -Dynamic Links: Inbound links from websites where the page is dynamically generated via a database query. Besides allowing visitors to navigate around the web, links are also important to computer programs used by popular search engines called spiders. Spiders crawl around the internet gathering information about various sites and then index those sites. This is why the more links to your website that exist on the web, the higher your ranking will be on search engines like Google and Yahoo.

Different Links, Different Values
Not all links are created equally in the search engines’ eyes. One-way-links which occurs when another website links to you but you don’t link back to them-are more valuable to the search engines than reciprocal links. Search engines also assign value to links based on various factors, such as the link’s relevance to your site, the text around the link, and the authority the website that links to you has.

There are also links that mean nothing at all to search engines. Dynamic links and links that have no follow codes built into them are of no value to spider programs. However, that doesn’t mean they should not be used on your website. While a link that cannot be followed by a search engine spider may not be useful from a search engine optimization perspective, it can still provide increased traffic and visitors to your website.

Ideally, your website should contain links of all types, but should contain more high quality links than anything.

What are High Quality Links?
High quality links are those that produce Page Reputation and PageRank, both of which are ranking methods used by Google. Linking to target keywords is one way to get higher rankings for your website.

Anchor text are links that appear as words that can be clicked, and they are very valuable in the eyes of search engines. The clickable text should always include some of the primary and secondary keywords that you have identified in your keyword research. Because anchor text links are higher quality than URL links, remember when building one-way links to use them as much as possible.

Don’t let your focus on keywords and links compromise the quality of your site’s content. It’s important to make sure you have valuable, relevant content on your website for actual people, and not just filler pages loaded with your target keywords. Google’s spiders have figured out how to spot those who try to cheat the system that way with technology called Latent Semantic Indexing. Basically, this means that their programs are able to analyze all of the words on your page and how they relate to each other, easily spotting and disregarding nonsense pages loaded up with keywords.

Be Selective with Targeting your One-Way Links
When targeting your one-way links, be aware that Google also ranks your site based on the relationship between your site’s content and the content of the sites that link to you. One way links from sites with content similar to yours (i.e. yours is a pet related site and other pet related sites link to you) rank higher than one way links from sites with very different content.

One final word of advice: Think twice about paying another person to link to your site; if caught, your site can be banned from the ranking system all together. Instead, focus on building your links legitimately by taking advantage of as many social media networks you have time for, and also by blogging.

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1. Join Adland Pro, add friends, and join communities. (Highly recommended!)
2. Make sure you sign up with Technorati and ping it every time you update your blog content.
3. Ping RSS aggregators after each post. Use a ping service such as Pingomatic to ping RSS aggregators.
4. Submit your blog to lots of directories, using Directory submitter
5. Use trackbacks whenever possible.
6. Leave comments on blogs that are in the same niche as yours.
7. Make sure you tell all of your friends about your blog.
8. Always use your blog url when posting in forums.
9. Use bait to entice people to click your link.
10. Inform all of your subscribers about your blog asap.
11. Always write a Press Release for your blog.
12. Link to other blogs in your blog postings
13. Try to tag your posts using Technorati tags
14. Submit all of your posts to all social bookmarking sites using Onlywire
15. Stumble all of your posts with Stumble Upon.
16. In your postings, answer questions from Yahoo Answers
17. Answer questions on forums related to your niche with a link to one of your blog posts that answers the question.
18. Set up a feed with Feed Burner and keep better track of your blog.
19. Put lists on your blog, such as “My Favorite Affiliate Programs” Many of the most popular blog posts are lists like this one.
20. Always try to use pictures/images. All of the top bloggers do!.
21. Try to put video on your blog whenever possible.
22. Try to find out what people want to read about in your specific niche. Then write about it!
23. If you hear a news story, try to be the first to post about it..
24. Use keyword research to find good keywords to use in your posts.
25. Try to stir things up, by posting controversial posts
26. Strongly Agree or strongly disagree with other bloggers postings.  Then write about it and include a link to the blog.
27. Your readers should find it easy to sign up for your RSS feed.
28. Also, make sure that readers can digg your post..
29. Always give your readers the opportunity to bookmark your sites
30. If it’s possible, try to interview well known people in your specified niche.
31. Ensure that you give credit to any blog that inspires your post.
32. Under NO circumstances, should you be boring. Nobody likes boring people.
33. Don’t get too technical. Always try to write for beginners.
34. Group writing projects are well worth taking part in.
35. Participate in blog memes.
36. Create a blog meme and then tag all of your friends.
37. Always try and participate in blog carnivals.
38. Always post to your blog at different times of the day.
39. Submit all of your best posts using an Article Submitter
40. Try to write “Killer Content”.
41. Learn how to start a group blog. Group blogs get more traffic, because more people are creating the content and more people are promoting it.
42. Allow guest partners on your blog.
43. Create a blog meme and tag an A-list blogger who you like.
44. Submit your blog to the regular directories, such as Dmoz.
45. Promote your blog by joining “Spicy Page”
46. Try to join a blog web ring.
47. Sign up for Twitter and promote your blog on it.
48. Join Link And Blog
49. Join as many free traffic programs as you can. (click the banners on this page).
50. Exchange your ads with complimentary blogs.
51. Trade blog role links with other related blogs in your niche.
52. Join up at Rojo. Subscribe to your feed and then click “add mojo” on your better articles.
53. Add a Plug-In, so your readers know when there are new comments.
54. Enable visitors to submit your post to all Social Bookmarking Sites. Don’t specify just one, eg Digg.
55. Put a tell-a-friend script on your blog.
56. Make sure your visitors can bookmark your page in their browser.
57. Make it exceptionally easy for readers to add links to your blog.
58. Always use easy to read fonts on your blog.
59. Make sure your blog has a professional looking design.
60. Make sure your blog is easy to navigate.
61. Highlight all of your most popular posts.
62. Some of your posts should ask provocative questions.
63. For the titles of your blog posts, use questions!
64. Use your best keywords in your blog title
65. Always reply to questions you receive via email.
66. Also, reply to every question that you get asked on your blog.
67. Tell other bloggers about your best posts. eg. breaking news!
68. Always give away free stuff, such as ebooks and web tools.
69. If you get the opportunity – Run a competition.
70. Publish videos on you tube and enter your URL at the beginning and end.
71. Install a translation plug-in service
72.Ensure that anything that leaves your home, has your URL on it. Business Cards, mailing labels, stationary etc.
73. Search for a list of web 2.0 websites, and promote your blog on as many of them as you can.
74. Search for Wikis related to your niche to submit your blog to. For example, “make money online wiki” or “internet marketing wiki”.
75. Try to give regular polls – Use a plug-in like “Democracy”
76. If possible, try to add a trivia quiz page. People will always love a quiz!
77. Place e-card pages on your blog.
78. Add a forum on your blog. This will enable visitors to comment on your niche.
79. Place a Wiki onto your blog.
80. Join Hubpages and in your articles, be sure to add links to your blog.
81. Join Blink List and make a list of blogs with your blog in it. blink it
82. When you get a moment, join up at 43 Things. Then write a list, of 43 things that you would like to achieve. Place your blog URL in the list.
83. Sign up free at Blogger Party. Once you have joined, write posts and link them back to your own URL.
84. Create a Squidoo Lens with a link to your blog.
85. Provide Wikipedia articles with links to your blog where it makes sense.
86. Let other blog authors review your blog, by telling them that you will link back to them.
87. Join Blog catalog, this is very similar to MyBlogLog.
88. Create a Facebook or MySpace page. Once they are created, put your blog onto your personal page, and invite some friends over.
89. Get a good knowledge of SEO – Search Engine Optimization
90. When you are writing, it is vitally important that you use proper punctuation, correct spelling and excellent grammar. Readers appreciate this!
91. Make sure that you submit your blog, to all of the directories in your niche.
92. Every time you publish a new post, make sure that you email your friends and instant messenger friends.
93. If you own any more websites, add a link to your blog from them.
94. If you write a post about any of the top bloggers in your county/state or country. Let them know about it. They will more than likely place a link back to you.
95. Make sure you promote all of your posts on any related newsgroups.
96. Always post frequently and consistently.
97. Submit your site to free website review sites.
98. Look for sites that end in .edu that have link pages. These are great!
99. Arrange to give out Blogger Awards. Then tell your fellow bloggers about it.
100. Put both of your hands together and Pray

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Adobe is teaming up with search industry leaders to dramatically improve search results of dynamic web content and rich Internet applications (RIAs). Adobe is providing optimized Adobe Flash Player technology to Google and Yahoo! to enhance search engine indexing of the Flash file format (SWF) and uncover information that is currently undiscoverable by search engines. This will provide more relevant automatic search rankings of the millions of RIAs and other dynamic content that run in Adobe Flash Player. Moving forward, RIA developers and rich web content producers won’t need to amend existing and future content to make it searchable—they can now be confident that it can be found by users around the globe.

Why is this news important?
Adobe is working with Google and Yahoo! to enable one of the largest fundamental improvements in web search results by making the Flash file format (SWF) a first-class citizen in searchable web content. This will increase the accuracy of web search results by enabling top search engines to understand what’s inside of RIAs and other rich web content created with Adobe Flash technology and add that relevance back to the HTML page.

Improved search of SWF content will provide immediate benefits to companies leveraging Adobe Flash software. Without additional changes to content, developers can continue to provide experiences that are possible only with Adobe Flash technology without the trade-off of a loss in search indexing. It will also positively affect the Search Engine Optimization community, which will develop best practices for building content and RIAs utilizing Adobe Flash technologies, and enhance the ability to find and monetize SWF content.

Why is Adobe doing this?
The openly published SWF specification describes the file format used to deliver rich applications and interactive content via Adobe Flash Player, which is installed on more than 98 percent of Internet-connected computers. Although search engines already index static text and links within SWF files, RIAs and dynamic web content have been generally difficult to fully expose to search engines because of their changing states—a problem also inherent in other RIA technologies.

Until now it has been extremely challenging to search the millions of RIAs and dynamic content on the web, so we are leading the charge in improving search of content that runs in Adobe Flash Player. We are initially working with Google and Yahoo! to significantly improve search of this rich content on the web, and we intend to broaden the availability of this capability to benefit all content publishers, developers, and end users.

Which versions of the SWF file format will benefit from this improved indexing and searching? This solution works with all existing SWF content, across all versions of the SWF file format.

What do content owners and developers need to do to their SWF content to benefit from improved search results? Content owners and developers do not have to do anything to the millions of deployed SWF files to make them more searchable. Existing SWF content is now searchable using Google search, and in the future Yahoo! Search, dramatically improving the relevance of RIAs and rich media experiences that run in Adobe Flash Player. As with HTML content, best practices will emerge over time for creating SWF content that is more optimized for search engine rankings.

What technology has Adobe contributed to this effort?
Adobe has provided Flash Player technology to Google and Yahoo! that allows their search spiders to navigate through a live SWF application as if they were virtual users. The Flash Player technology, optimized for search spiders, runs a SWF file similarly to how the file would run in Adobe Flash Player in the browser, yet it returns all of the text and links that occur at any state of the application back to the search spider, which then appears in search results to the end user.

How are Google and Yahoo! using the Adobe Flash technology?
Google is using the Adobe Flash Player technology now and Yahoo! also expects to deliver improved web search capabilities for SWF applications in a future update to Yahoo! Search. Google uses the Adobe Flash Player technology to run SWF content for their search engines to crawl and provide the logic that chooses how to walk through a SWF. All of the extracted information is indexed for relevance according to Google and Yahoo!’s algorithms. The end result is SWF content adding to the searchable information of the web page that hosts the SWF content, thus giving users more information from the web to search through.

When will the improved SWF searching solutions go live?
Google has already begun to roll out Adobe Flash Player technology incorporated into its search engine. With Adobe’s help, Google can now better read the SWF content on sites, which will help users find more relevant information when conducting searches. As a result, millions of pre-existing RIAs and dynamic web experiences that utilize Adobe Flash technology, including content that loads at runtime, are immediately searchable without the need for companies and developers to alter it. Yahoo! is committed to supporting webmaster needs with plans to support searchable SWF and is working with Adobe to determine the best possible implementation.

How will this announcement benefit the average user/consumers?
Consumers will use industry leading search engines, Google now and Yahoo! Search in the future, exactly as they do today. Indexed SWF files will add more data to what the search engine knows about the page in which it’s embedded, which will open up more relevant content to users, and could cause pages to appear at a higher ranking level in applicable search results. As a result, millions of pre-existing rich media experiences created with Adobe Flash technology will be immediately searchable without the need for companies and developers to alter content.

When will the new results register on Google?
Google is using the optimized Adobe Flash Player technology now, so users will immediately see improved search results. As Google spiders index more SWF content, search results will continue to get better.

How will this announcement benefit SWF content producers?
Organizations can now dramatically improve the rich web experiences they deliver to customers and partners by increasing the use of Adobe Flash technology, which is no longer impeding the ability for users to find those experiences in highly relevant search results. RIA creators and other web content producers can now be confident that their rich media and RIA experiences leveraging Adobe Flash technology are fully searchable by users around the globe who use the dominant search engines. Furthermore, the ability to index information extracted throughout the various states of dynamic SWF applications reduces the need to produce an HTML or XHTML backup for the RIA site as a workaround for prior search limitations.

Does this affect the searchability of video that runs in Adobe Flash Player?
This initial rollout is to improve the search of dynamic text and links in rich content created with Adobe Flash technology. A SWF that has both video and text may be more easily found by improved SWF search.

Will Adobe Flex applications now be more easily found by Google search, including those that access remote data? Yes, any type of SWF content including Adobe Flex applications and SWF created by Adobe Flash authoring will benefit from improved indexing and search results. The improved SWF search also includes the capability to load and access remote data like XML calls and loaded SWFs.

Does Adobe recommend a specific process for deep-linking into a SWF RIA?
Deep-linking, in the case of SWF content and RIAs, is when there is a direct link to a specific state of the application or rich content. A variety of solutions exist today that can be used for deep-linking SWF content and RIAs. It’s important that sites make use of deep links so that links coming into a site will drive relevance to the specific parts of an application.

To generate URLs at runtime that reflect the specific state of SWF content or RIA, developers can use Adobe Flex components that will update the location bar of a browser window with the information that is needed to reconstruct the state of the application.

For complex sites that have a finite number of entry points, you can highlight the specific URLs to a search spider using techniques such as site map XML files. Even for sites that use a single SWF, you can create multiple HTML files that provide different variables to the SWF and start your application at the correct subsection. By creating multiple entry points, you can get the benefits of a site that is indexed as a suite of pages but still only need to manage one copy of your application. For more information on deep-linking best practices, visit www.sitemaps.org/faq.php.

Is Adobe planning on providing this capability to other search vendors too?
Adobe wants to help make all SWF content more easily searchable. As we roll out the solution with Google and Yahoo!, we are also exploring ways to make the technology more broadly available.7

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