Showing posts with label Search Engine Optimization. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Search Engine Optimization. Show all posts

Monday, January 19, 2009

A Searcher's Best Friend are Keywords

People often look at things not in a direct manner, I mean, not in a straight line. I myself seldom look at things permanently. I take many things into consideration before diving into decisions and actions that I will take.

The same goes to searchers in the web. They do not just go and search by the use of a certain keyword and then click the first organic result of a search engine. They first think and consider their needs why they are trying to make a search. They also take into consideration how enticing and how unique the certain title of a page. And is they find nothing interesting, they go ahead and make another search in another search engine with the use of the same keywords. Current events also trigger changes on the searcher's needs. Yet, when your site is being displayed on the top portion of the search engine results pages, you have better chances of enviting users to view and visit your site.

In order for one to to rank high on the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page), one must take into consideration the most keywords that are being used on a certain period of time. In other words, use the most popular ones. Befriend keywords because they, too, are the searcher's best friend. The internet offers great tools that would be able to predict and analyze the projection of a certain keyword popularity. Use these to take advantage of the situation. Use the most recent and the most used keywords to be put into your site. By doing so, one would have more chances of showing up in the high ranking positions in the SERPs.

It is also a great advantage to put human touch in your pages. Most people are not just searching for information, most people wants to connect with the information. Thus, be careful of the words and the content that you use.

Always remember, consider the searcher's needs as your consider your needs.

Thursday, January 8, 2009

PageRank, What is it?

If you are not into online marketing, you probably haven't heard or if you did, you must not be that familiar with what PageRank is. But what is PageRank? Is it that important?

PageRank, according to Wikipedia, is a link analysis algorithm used by the Google Internet search engine that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of "measuring" its relative importance within the set.
In other words, it is a tool used by search engines to analyze the importance of a webpage by checking on the links that connect to it. The greater the number of links, the better. The higher the PageRank of the page of that link , the more importance is given to your page. The more important your page is, the higher your PageRank will be. When the PageRank is high, it gets better ranking on the search engine results pages.

But the numbers aren't that important. Quality links means more than it.

The history of the PageRank is as old as Google itself. According to the same Wikipedia page:
PageRank was developed at Stanford University by Larry Page (hence the name Page-Rank) and later Sergey Brin as part of a research project about a new kind of search engine. The project started in 1995 and led to a functional prototype, named Google, in 1998. Shortly after, Page and Brin founded Google Inc., the company behind the Google search engine. While just one of many factors which determine the ranking of Google search results, PageRank continues to provide the basis for all of Google's web search tools.

PageRank is based on citation analysis that was developed in the 1950s by Eugene Garfield at the University of Pennsylvania, and Google's founders cite Garfield's work in their original paper. By following links from one page to another, virtual communities of webpages are found. Web link analysis was first developed by Jon Kleinberg and his team while working on the CLEVER project at IBM's Almaden Research Center.
PageRank changes once in a while. As updates on the content are made, the importance of the specific page also changes. For example, this blog, at the time of this post has a PageRank of 2, but may go up or down as new posts are added.

There are many tools that calculates shows the PageRank of a page. One most commonly used and trusted tool is the google toolbar.

This summarizes what PageRank is. In future posts, we will discuss the main concept and algorithm of PageRank in detail, but I'll post updates on this page too.

Worrying about how to get higher PageRank for your website, yet you have no time? No problem. There are great outsourcing companies and virtual assistants nowadays that can help you give solutions to your needs.

Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Web Maintenace and Update Tips

Web maintenance plays a very important role in getting more visitors and more traffic in a website. That is why you need to be very very careful with the steps you make when maintaining a website. I decided to post some tips to follow in order for the website maintenance to be most effective.
  • Fresh Quality Content Always. The main objective of website maintenance is to keep visitors coming to your site. And the search engines drive great traffic when you update your website from time to time by adding new post. This is the reason why it is very important to add fresh and quality content regularly.
  • Tracking Visitors. It is also of utmost importance that you keep track of the activities by the individuals who visit your site. Which pages most of the people go to, which pages do they stay the longest and what attracts them most. This would assist you analyze your target audience interests and would help in making decisions for your next update and for the future improvements.
  • User Feedback. This is also a must for an effective website. Not only it would let people interact with each other, they will be able to give constructive comments and feedbacks that would give more maintenance tips. This can be done by setting up a forum on your website, providing a contact form and letting others to comment on your posts.
  • Newsletter subscription. Making newsletter subscription feature available would give your visitors an option to know updates made on your site. This would keep previous visitors to visit your website again.
  • Web Design. The design of your website play a vital role in the optimization of your site. Read more about it on my other post.
Do not have any ideas about these? No worries, nowadays, webmaster services is very much available to good outsourcing companies and virtual assistants are very much knowledgeable of these information.

Friday, December 12, 2008

Design Tips for Web to be SEO Friendly

How you developed your website contributes greatly on its optimization with the search engines and the success of your website with its marketing.

I formulated a list or tips that would help the design of your website to be search engine optimization friendly.
  • SEO Friendly URLs. Make sure that the urls that you are using are Search Engine Optimization friendly. By this, I mean that it is better if your targeted keywords would actually be part of it. Avoid characters like "=" or "?", rather use "-" or "_" to separate words. Separating the words are not that important for search engines, yet is suggested so that human visitors of your site would easily understand the content through the clear representation of the url.
  • Using Semantic Tags. Using semantic tags would help on website development would help the search engines to understand which terms are being emphasized and is put into importance. Use this list to of sematic tags to help you on your web development and website optimization.
  • Use Text for Navigation. Avoid using flash for the main navigation. Search engine crawlers cannot read flash. If this is used, they will not be able to proceed to the next pages. Yes, the only negative thing about this is that you are sacrificing the attractive designs you are aiming at. This can be, however, fixed by putting a little portion of your webpage at the bottom a sitemap, in which all your main pages will be listed in pure HTML.Website Optimization
  • Optimizing Images. There are instances that you will be using images to replace the content of your website. The problem is that spiders and crawlers are blind, they are only able to read but they cannot see. Thus, the text placed on the images will be useless. To optimize the images, first, you must be sure that the file name of the image will contain your targeted keywords for displaying the image. Secondly, be sure to put description of what message the image is trying to convey. Place alt tags on your images. Optimize the keywords in it. Lastly, optimize the image size. I would be honest, I hate pages that takes so much time to load, so I think any of you. Make image sizes smaller. It researches has stated that people leave the website if it takes up to 12 seconds to load. Imagine how short it is for web development optimization and how long it is for the browsers.
  • Optimized Links. Build only quality links. Be sure to use important keywords for your anchor texts. Be sure only to link on important and theme related site. Optimize the link flow of your site by linking to your own site content. Spiders love these.
  • Keyword Research. Optimize your keywords. Not only use your targeted keywords, explore to related words. If you theme is ice cream, don't focus on ice cream all the time, use other words like chocolate, vanilla, sweet, tasty, etc. Also base your design concept of your theme. Do not make a site full of the color yellow if your theme is blue, the same as to not to use pink if your topic is soccer.
Always be sure to think about how you would react when developing and designing a website. Take constructive comments from other people especially those who know nothing about you.

Don't have any idea to build a website that is SEO friendly? Do not worry, there are many good virtual assistant outsourcing companies that offer webmaster services and well trained virtual assistants on a low price.

Thursday, December 11, 2008

The Good Way of Marketing your Website

Making a webpage in the world wide web is only a step. After that, the next one would be to market you website. But is there really a need for Internet Marketing?

What is Internet Marketing? Internet marketing is the concept that refers to the ways and the strategies that are applied to promote products or services on the web, marketing procedures. These strategies would include SEO or Search Engine Optimization, online marketing and promotions, building quality links, website development strategies or creating a valuable, informative and useful site, and many more.

Do I really need this for my website? My answer would be yes. The importance of Internet Marketing has increased throughout the growth and expansion of the Internet Itself. Plus, this is also one of the main reasons why one is building a website, to promote their products, services or organization. So what would be the use to create a site that would not be seen by its intended and targeted audience? This is why promotion of your webpages is one of the most crucial stages of web development and maintenance.

In other words, the main objective of Internet Marketing is let people see your site, adding traffic to it.

There are many ways to market your site. There are ofcourse procedures that can give immediate results yet are against the rules set by the search engines that proves to be destroying the quality of the web and user satisfaction. These should be avoided. The good thing is, there are effective ways to promote your website while staying under the rules. Including are building only quality links, joining on social media only on related themed websites, and maintaining quality content. These procedures may take some time, yet it proves to be the most efficient.

Do not have any ideas? Worry not because there are great outsourcing companies nowadays that offer these services. Hiring a virtual assistant not only lessens your work burden, they do only the trusted and "good" ways to market your website and their services are always cheap.