Where Website Design Ends and SEO Begins

Monday, January 4th, 2010 at 8:34 pm

Many people looking to have a website developed think the only investment they need to make to have a successful website is in the design of the website itself. I won’t argue that design is important, but any professional knows that without a long term search engine optimization and website marketing plan that website is never going to gain visibility. When clients pay a lot of money for a website that has no visibility they usually get upset. This is why any business owner should research exactly what they need their website to do and who can help them achieve this.

Business owners should look at professional SEO services as part of their website development budget as well as part of their yearly advertising budget. Professional SEO is an investment in your websites’ success where ultimately the traffic generated and business driven to your site will pay for this investment. Website design and SEO services work hand in hand to make a successful website, however you may need to go to two separate agencies to get both of these services. Getting a few different quotes for both design and SEO is always wise. Just like getting estimates from any other service provider, the lowest estimate isn’t always the best choice especially with Search engine optimization.

There are several factors that affect the pricing of SEO services with the main factor being the time involved in getting a specific site to rank well. Professional SEO companies that offer quality services don’t come cheap, but they usually offer a free website analysis and come up with a custom plan on how to achieve the best results for your website. This is important because every website is unique and so is it’s niche in the world wide web. A professional SEO company will check to make sure that your website is designed with not only the visitor in mind but the search engine crawlers as well. They will analyze the strengths and weaknesses of your website compared to your direct competitors’ websites and also determine how populated your specific niche is. They will then evaluate your site for useful content and determine what must be done to better your content and maximize target keyword search rankings.

Successful SEO is not a one shot deal it is a continuous effort that utilizes a combination of website marketing tactics. Many people are tempted by low one time fees offering to submit your website to over 12,000 directories with guarantees of high quality back links that will sky rocket your website to the top of search engine rankings. I’ve said this many times, “if it seems too good to be true – it is!” A professional SEO company will use a combination of marketing and link building services to naturally build links, credibility, and popularity to gradually increase your organic search engine rankings.

I don’t want to undervalue the importance of directory submissions, but directory submissions alone aren’t enough. Business owners should look at SEO companies offering a diverse range of SEO services to build your sites rankings. Things you should be looking for an SEO company to handle as part of their bundle of services are; directory submissions, content writing, article writing and article marketing, press release writing and distribution, blog creation, blog posting, and reciprocal link building with high quality related websites. Things you should steer clear of are one time only submission services and websites that guarantee first page rankings for comparatively inexpensive prices.

Ultimately, there are no tricks or gimmicks that will get your site top positioning. If your website is brand new It is realistic to expect to see positive results within four to six months. You will probably see very noticeable improvements in your website search engine rankings within one years time and in many cases even top ten rankings. Like most other forms of advertising – search engine marketing is a long term strategy that will eventually produce an excellent return on investment.

I am the art director for a highly rated website design company, graphic design and SEO Company. One of the greatest assets a company can have today is a well designed website combining good looks, intuitive navigation and the right amount of search engine optimization and marketing.

Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/seo-articles/where-website-design-ends-and-seo-begins-1665891.html

Strategies To Increase Search Engine Rank Revealed

Sunday, January 3rd, 2010 at 5:25 am

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The methods used to increase your search engine rank may seem like rocket science to you, which has lead you to probably avoid dealing with this issue. But, the time has come to face your website or blog! A high search engine ranking for your website or your blog is so essential that if you have the slightest desire to actually succeed in your business, there is no way you can continue to avoid using the search engines.

At least 85% of people looking for goods and services on the Internet find websites through search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. The idea of optimizing your pages for high search engine rankings is to attract targeted customers to your site who will more than likely make a purchase. The higher your page comes up in search engine results, the greater the amount of traffic that is directed to your website. That’s what search engine optimization is about.

You can immerse yourself in all the technical information available on the internet to figure out how to optimize your web pages so that they achieve higher rankings. Or you can look at a few simple items on your pages, make some small adjustments, and most likely see an improvement in your ranking quite rapidly. The first item you should examine is the title bar on your homepage.

The title bar is the colored bar located at the top of the page. Look at the words that appear there when you access your home page. To increase search engine rankings, the words on your the titlebar of your homepage should include the most important keywords or phrases, one of which would include your company name.

Then click on all your links and examine the title bars on the pages you access. Each title bar on every single page of your site should contain the most important keywords and phrases taken from the page itself. However, avoid long keyword lengths, keeping them to five words or less. Avoid repeating keywords more than once in the title bars, and make sure that the same keywords are not next to each other.

The next item to put under your microscope is your website content. Search engines generally list sites that contain quality content rather than flashy graphics. The text on your site must contain your most important keywords; the words that potential customers will be typing into the search engines to find your site. Aim to have around 250 words on each page, but if this is not what you want due to your website design, aim for at least 100 carefully selected words. If you want to achieve a high ranking on search engines, this text is essential. However, the search engines must be able to read the text, meaning that the text must be in HTML and not graphic format.

To find out if your text is in HTML format, take your cursor and try to highlight a word or two. If you are able to do this, the text is HTML. If the text will not highlight, it is probably in graphic format. In this case, ask your webmaster or whomever to change the text into HTML format in order to increase your search engine rankings.

Next we come to what is called meta tags. This probably sounds like something out of science fiction, but it is really just simple code. Many people believe that meta tags are the key to high search engine rankings, but in reality, they only have a limited effect. Still, it’s worth adding them in the event that a search engine will use meta tags in their ranking formula.

To determine if your page is set up with meta tags, you must have access the code. To do this, click the “view” button on the browser menu bar, and select “source.” This will pull up a window revealing the underlying code that created the page. If there are meta tags, they usually appear near the top of the window. For example, a meta tag would read: meta name=”keywords” content=. If you do not find code that reads like this, ask your webmaster or whomever to put them in. This may not do much for your search engine rankings, but any little boost helps.

Lastly, we come to the issue of link popularity. Backlinks, one-way links, any kind of link from an authority site is a factor that is extremely important in terms of search engine rankings. Almost all search engines use link popularity to rank your website. Link popularity is based on the quality of the sites you have linked to you from your links page.

If you type in “free link popularity check” in a popular search engine, the search engine will then show you what sites are linked to your site. In the case that there aren’t many sites linked up to yours, or that the sites that are linked up have low search engine rankings, consider launching a link popularity campaign. Essentially, this entails contacting quality sites and requesting that they exchange links with your site. Of course, this requires checking out the rankings of the websites you want to link up with. Linking to popular, quality sites not only boosts your search engine ranking, but it also directs more quality traffic to your website.

Search engine rankings are extremely important for a successful Internet marketing campaign. Before you go out and hire a search engine optimization company or you try it yourself, try taking some of the simple steps listed above, and see if you can’t boost your rankings yourself. Don’t ever ignore this all-important factor in Internet marketing. Remember, the higher your search engine ranking, the more quality customers will be directed your way.

Lawren Smith is founder and creator of Quest4Success Marketing, LLC, where online entrepreneurs can learn proven marketing strategies and cutting edge techniques to grow their business. For more information on search engine optimization, visit LawrenSmith.com blog or visit: Increase Searach Engine Rank Revealed

Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/seo-articles/strategies-to-increase-search-engine-rank-revealed-1657633.html

search engine optimization SEO Tips and Tutorial

Thursday, December 31st, 2009 at 1:59 pm

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What is search engine optimization?
Search engine optimization, generally called SEO, is the process by which you tweak your website to get high rankings in results of search engines like yahoo, google etc.

Why SEO?
The internet is a blind alley. The people surfing the internet do not know where the document they are looking for exists. So they turn to search engine for help.
Most of these people, will visit a site which comes up on the first page. If you are on the first page, its like the search engine saying, yeah this site is good.
So whether you are trying to sell something or just want your blog to be read by many more people, if you need more visitors to your site, you need to do SEO.

How SEO?
How to get a good ranking in search engines? Hmm. There is no clear answer to it. The SE(search engines) have very complex and intelligent algorithms to rank websites. And no one knows what these algorithms are. But some data about the algorithms is known. And we have to base our SEO on that.

Your first steps: Meta tags.
HTML pages have a meta tag describing the page. The content within the meta tag is not visible to the visitors of your pages. But the SE use them to find out about your pages. However these days most of the SE give very little weight to meta tags. This is due the fact that in past web masters used meta tags to fill the page with keywords. So even if the page was about buying used cars, the webmasters used “get rich quick” in meta tag, if they came to know that many people were searching for this. But still some SE use meta tags, you must use your meta tag to tell the SE about your site.

Designing your website.
The SE are bad at indexing pages containing frames, excessive javascript and based on flash. So it might be a good idea to use them sparingly. If you use them, be aware that you are taking a SE hit.

Getting linked.
The technique most of the SE use these days to find out how good your site is to find the number of pages which link to your pages. Think about it, if someone is putting a link to your site, it is as if they are saying, hey man visit this site, its cool. Also SE see, how popular a site which links to you is. If a page which is very popular links to you, you will get more benefit.
So if you want to rank higher, you will have to get links to your site. The easiest and also the hardest is to write good and unique content for your website. If your website is good other people will automatically link to it. So in essence they are helping you for free. Your various pages too should be linked together; this too increases your link popularity.
You must submit your website to the web directories like DMOZ and Yahoo Directories, for them to be indexed. SE give a lot of value for being linked in these directories.
Another method is reciprocal link exchange. In this you look for a website similar to yours, and about as popular. Then you ask the webmaster of that site if they would put up a link to yours site, if you linked to them. Many would agree as it helps them too.

Choosing the right keywords.
You must have an idea of what your potential visitors will search for when they visit your site. No matter how highly your page is ranked, if it does not have the correct keywords, no search engine is going to show it. So, if your web site is about buying used cars, make sure that this key phrase is used many times in your page. Some places which are given special importance by SE are the URL of the page, the heading of the page, bold text. But do not fill your pages with keywords excessively as some SE consider this as spam.

Submitting to SE, link farms etc.
SE have page where you can submit your site to them. However this is seldom necessary. If you have links coming to your site, it will soon be picked up by the SE. So your time is better spent creating content for your website.
Link farms are pages which let you add links to your pages free of cost. It is best to avoid them as the SE know the link farms and don’t even visit them. Even if SE visit them, they are so full with links that your site does not get any value out of being linked there. So at best you do not get any advantage, at worst you are penalized.

Breaking the rules.
There are many underhand techniques used to gain SE popularity. One method used in the past was to make key word text and background as same color. Then the visitors saw something else from the SE. However today’s SE can detect such underhand techniques and penalize it. So it is best to stay away from such techniques.

SEO dos and do nots.
Dos

Create content rich, unique websites.

Get links from similar websites.

Submit to directories like DMOZ.

Do nots

Avoid frames, flash etc if at all possible.

Avoid underhand tactics, like text and background as same color.

Avoid link farms, FFA etc

Don’t waste your time submitting to search engines. Let them find you.

The next steps.
SE use complex algorithm to rate webpages which is constantly changing. The ideas above are just indicators. Visit various websites to find out what the current techniques are.

Some parting tips.
1. Use link:yoururl in google/msn/yahoo search to find number of pages linking to you. Dont worry if you find only some pages linking to you, as SE these days only show a fraction of links they know.
2. Use site:yourdomain in google search to find the number of your pages indexed by Google.

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Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/seo-articles/search-engine-optimization-seo-tips-and-tutorial-1649496.html