SEO, Search Engine Optimization Blog: October 2012

Tuesday 23 October 2012

SEO –beyond the Meta Tags

SEO elements take up most of our concentration when we put efforts to make our websites search engine friendly. The On Page Elements extend beyond the Meta Title Tag, the Meta Descriptions Tag, the URL structure and the image optimization. We are, today, going to study an onsite SEO element that helps a great deal in search engine optimization.

Heading – (H1 to H6) Tags

We know that creative content has a big role to play. Neatly paragraphed text on the web page looks similar and uninteresting to the readers if the type style, fonts, sizes and color or the text are all the same. We also know that seldom few people read through the entire web page content. We need to mark the lines according to their importance; this will gives us two (2) benefits:

The website visitors can read through the important lines and decide whether to read further or not
The search engines crawl to index and read through the important areas of the text.

The H1 tag has its own importance. The characteristic of the written text, whether we are writing for the magazine or the newspaper, the people look for the headlines, these are generally the H1 tags in the terms of SEO.

H2, H3 to H6 are categorized with the level of importance these heading get from the search engines. Optimized H1 tags play a vital role. While building the script and while deciding upon the H1 tag, do consider the use of relevant keywords, so that the page being optimized gets its desired position on the search engines.

Google SEO best practice guide, guides us through the SEO science. About <H> tags it says, “Heading tags (not to be confused with the <head> HTML tag or HTTP headers) are used to present structure on the page to users. There are six sizes of heading tags, beginning with <h1>, the most important, and ending with <h6>, the least important.

Since heading tags typically make text contained in them larger than normal text on the page, this is a visual cue to users that this text is important and could help them understand something about the type of content underneath the heading text. Multiple heading sizes used in order create a hierarchical structure for your content, making it easier for users to navigate through your document.”

Monday 22 October 2012

SEO Tip for Today

Optimizing our websites is the issue central to our need of visibility on the web. We need not to walk barefooted and hurt the soles of our feet, here, learning helps and prevents and face ward fall. We have learnt steps to healthy SEO practices in our previous posts. Let’s look at one more important step to optimize our web pages. Today, we talk about optimizing images. Yes, images make our websites aesthetically appealing and create interest of the web visitor in out website. Why not make the best of the images and optimize them for the search engines.

Search engines, as we know, do not read images. We need to make them read these PNG or JPEG formats so that these images become search engine friendly.

Google tells us about optimizing images in its SEO best practice guide, it says, “Images may seem like a straightforward component of your site, but you can optimize your use of them. All images can have a distinct filename and "alt" attribute, both of which you should take advantage of. The "alt" attribute allows you to specify alternative text for the image if it cannot be displayed for some reason. Why use this attribute? If a user is viewing your site on a browser that doesn't support images, or is using alternative technologies, such as a screen reader, the contents of the alt attribute provide information about the picture.

Another reason is that if you're using an image as a link, the alt text for that image will be treated similarly to the anchor text of a text link. However, we don't recommend using too many images for links in your site's navigation when text links could serve the same purpose. Lastly, optimizing your image filenames and alt text makes it easier for image search projects like Google Image Search to better understand your images.”

Let’s not waste time pondering on the errors we have made in the past. Fastening our seat belts and getting our SEO right, will help in furthering our ranking on the search engines.

Wednesday 17 October 2012

Handy SEO Tips, Keyword Research

Organic ranking never comes without the relevant keywords and without original good quality content. Why do we believe that every thing that we do on the web, will carry us to our desired position on the search engines, so much so, that many of our friends do not hesitate in “copy + paste” of the content from other sites to make their sites look good.

User can make out the difference. They can make out the difference from the good quality web content from the bad ones and so do the search engines.

Coming back to the keywords, we need to understand the importance of the keywords and the importance of its prudent use, hence, we must:

Look for the relevant keywords in terms of daily, monthly and annual searches being conducted.
Look out for the competition for the relevant search terms

Anticipating user behaviour while conducting search will help in organizing our Keywords and phrase, Google SEO best practice guide educates us by saying, “Think about the words that a user might search for to find a piece of your content. Users who know a lot about the topic might use different keywords in their search queries than someone who is new to the topic. For example, a long-time baseball fan might search for, an acronym for the National League Championship Series, while a new fan might use a more general query like. Anticipating these differences in search behaviour and accounting for them while writing your content (using a good mix of keyword phrases) could produce positive results.”

On-line Keyword research tools come handy at this stage. Google Adwords tool, Word Tracker, Good Keywords etc are some very reliable keywords research tools. Even though if you have arrived at some very good keywords, do not forget that their prudent use in the web copy is the most important aspect of SEO. Do not over use, do not stuff, but keep the density of the keywords in check, so as not to displease the search engines.

Monday 15 October 2012

SEO Guide – Let look at Website Navigation

Today we will talk about the website navigation, as being the important SEO element. We have learnt in our previous posts how Meta Title Tags, the Description Tags, and the structured, user friendly URLs can help in SEO and help the visitors understand the search results. The website navigation, Google SEO guide tells us, “The navigation of a website is important in helping visitors quickly find the content they want. It can also help search engines understand what content the webmaster thinks is important. Although Google's search results are provided at a page level, Google also likes to have a sense of what role a page plays in the bigger picture of the site.”

We get the point. For Google this is the best practice. It is the same for other search engines too.

Making the search process for the website visitor easy should be the main goal of the designers. The most visited page, the home page is the place which leads the visitors to the other sections or the pages of the website which carries the information required by the website visitors. Our aim must be to make his visit to the site eventful and easy. Making him move around with easy and letting him arrive at the destination without having to search frantically on the website will help the visitors and the website owner meet the end goals. The difficulty of finding required information might chase the visitors away and make your loose your prospective customer.

Our focus must be to create a common, easy to understand hierarchy of pages. Common sense plays its part and the general content flow is often the choice of the website developers, yet, the internal pages with are rather difficult to access must be projected on the home pages, so much so that the visitors find the information or are guided through the website intuitively.

Text Links are the best for this purpose. The search engine crawls, understands and indexes the text links, but if we use java or flash, please understand that the search engines are not able to handle any of the fancy scripts and your efforts to make the website search engine friendly might fail.

Friday 12 October 2012

SEO Best Practices, creating search engine friendly URLs

This part is directly concerned with building a better website structure. URL – Uniform resource locators, the address to your website and to the subsequent web pages must be understandable and readable and must create relevance to the web pages. Such URLs are easy for the search engines to understand and easy for the web users to remember.

While describing the URL structure, Google SEO starter guide tells us, “Creating descriptive categories and filenames for the documents on your website can not only help you keep your site better organized, but it could also lead to better crawling of your documents by search engines. Also, it can create easier, "friendlier" URLs for those that want to link to your content. Visitors may be intimidated by extremely long and cryptic URLs that contain few recognizable words.”

Unrecognizable characters in the URLs make them more complex and unreadable by human eyes, though the search engines can easily crawl any URL structure, yet user friendly URLs make it easier for the humans as well as for robots to understand the website structure.

The benefits of search engine friendly URLs include:

User friendly URLs help the web visitors in understanding the relevance and the context of the web page.
URLs are displayed on the search engine results pages below the title, just above the description and the web visitors understand the web pages more easily. Odd parameters or symbols would not make users understand the URL and might reduce the web traffic.
If your webpage is being linked to other pages (as anchor text) by some users, odd parameters in the URL will make it difficult for the users to understand and also difficult for the search engine spiders.

While search engines can crawl all types of URL structures, but making them search engine friendly will help in SEO, as the search engines will easily crawl index these and the viewers will easily understand the URL through the relevance it creates to the web pages.

Thursday 11 October 2012

SEO – The Description Tag

Just yesterday we went through the SEO starting point, the Meta Title Tag. Now that we have learnt the first important element in the ON Page SEO where we shared the precise topic of discussion in the web page through the title, lets move on to the next important element i.e. the “Meta Description Tag”.

The name of the Tag tells us about its attributed. Yes, the Meta Description tag, describes the content of the web page. It is the summery that gives the search engines and the web visitors a fair idea about the content of the web page. Google SEO starter guide describes the Meta Description Tag as, “A page's description meta tag gives Google and other search engines a summary of what the page is about. Whereas a page's title may be a few words or a phrase, a page's description meta tag might be a sentence or two or a short paragraph.”

The Meta Description Tag can be further explained as the snippet of the text displayed by the search engine below the title tag when the user’s query is displayed on the search engine results pages. I will again refer to the Google – SEO starter guide that tells us about the Description tag.

“Description meta tags are important because Google might use them as snippets for your pages. Note that we say "might" because Google may choose to use a relevant section of your page's visible text if it does a good job of matching up with a user's query. Alternatively, Google might use your site's description in the Open Directory Project if your site is listed there (learn how to prevent search engines from displaying ODP data). Adding description Meta tags to each of your pages is always a good practice in case Google cannot find a good selection of text to use in the snippet.”

The reason we base our discussion on Google guidelines is obvious. Google’s importance as the leader of the search engine industry cannot be underestimated; hence, all of us strive for visibility on the Google, hoping for success of our web presence.

Wednesday 10 October 2012

Let’s get started with SEO

If you have a website, you must be than familiar with the term “SEO”. As soon as we hear the word SEO (search engine optimization) our first though is to make the site search engine friendly. Our focus than, is to make the search engine like our site and help us rank higher on the search engines. The top spot, the first place on the search engine’s results page is the most wanted spot for ever optimizer. Helpful tools help us to attract the search engine spiders and help us to gain visibility through the organic search results. We forget the users for whom we have built the website. We must, in unison, work to make the both ends meet.

If you are a new bee to the SEO, the post might be helpful to you to learn some basics of SEO. The fundamentals that we must understand before even thinking of making our websites search engine friendly

Take a look at the best practices

Making the Title Tag

Title tag tells the viewers and the search engine about the content of the web page and about the topic that has been discussed therein.

Looking at the best practice of making the title tag, we understand:

Not to create a title that has no relationship with the website content
Do not stuff keywords. Use of keywords must be logical and systematic, over use will cause harm
Do not use default or hazy titles for the web pages
Avoid using the same title tag in each page
Each web page must a unique title which relates to the subject of the web page content
Title must be of prudent length; too lengthy titles are not useful for the web visitors.

Title tags are the important element for SEO and for the viewers as well as there are the first things on the SERPs that the web visitor reads on the search results. Effective titles leads to more web visitors.

Monday 8 October 2012

Is Google Places gone?

Why is optimizing for local search results important? We need to understand the basics first. Optimizers got into the habit of optimizing websites for search engines. Good work, we need visibility, top ranking and free web traffic. Yes, we got the fruits of SEO. In this effort we missed out on few important things, we forgot the visitors, we forgot our target market, and we forgot the business prospects that would be searching for the products we are selling.

We understood the fact quiet late, that we have to target the local customers first, as these are people who would be interested to buy locally first, instead of ordering pizza from Japan. The global village is still spread on thousands of miles and not easily reachable for pizza delivery or even for a plumbing job.

Locals must find local businesses. IF we are not there to support their cause, and if we are not there to tell them that we have the answer to their quest for products and services, the local customers would look else where. Google Maps and Google places web search results were the best places to prove our local web presence.

Google now integrates the Google Places with the Google+, thus taking benefits of its strengths and send the world of customers reeling to the business places; they need to be in contact with.

Yell.com’s author Ahtisham Hussain cleverly puts this scenario in the following words, “Google are at it again and recently changed the name over to Google+ Local. Yes, they have linked up Places with Google+ their social networking platform.

Most business owners who are serious about local SEO will have claimed their Places listing and updated with content including images, video, categories and location targeting preference. The algorithm is not so straightforward to understand when it comes to placement of these ‘pin’ listings but now has a further twist.”

Google Plus is still there but with a new set up. We must take notes and get ready for the ride with Google+ local and give out our best presence performance for the viewers, to impress them and make them act on impulse.

Friday 5 October 2012

5 SEO mistakes that we must avoid

SEO today has gone fragile. We could have given little thought to the nitty-gritty’s earlier but as time passed the search engine pulled the plugs, thanks to our own action where we had forced the stringent changes and enhancements. Yet many of us make mistakes and land ourselves in hot waters. To err is human, but some of us purposely do things that lead to penalties later.

Let’s see, what not to do. 5 mistakes that people usually make in SEO are outlined below:

Creating websites with frames and flash – The search engines do not recognize the flash. It passes away. While we attempt to make our web visitors happy with animations and flash intros, we forget that we are harming our SEO efforts. We know that the search engine read text and index the same, than, let’s not spend time and money on efforts that can do harm to the website SEO.

Pushing too hard on keywords and keyword phrases – We must understand the thin lined difference between the keyword usage and keyword stuffing. The required or we can say that the appropriate density today stands around 1%. If you are doing more than that, you will be in trouble. Forget the 3% to 4% keyword density.

Use Hidden Text – Do not make such a mistake. Any black hat technique will get you no where. Your SEO efforts would bounce back as soon as it is detected. Some SEO’s might tell you to use hidden text to get top search engine ranking, but they might not tell you that search engines have got smarter and can detect hidden text. If you want to get your site banned on the search engine, you can follow through.

Buying Links – Great, if you have already done this, be ready for the out lash by the search engine. This is a big NO NO. The trend of links is foreseeable, the search engine can make out whether you have gathered links naturally or you have brought these links from link farm. Many incoming links and those too from not so relevant sites, creates the buzz on the search engine’s platform.

Using copied content – Surely coping content from your competitions website is the easiest way out. Many of our friends used to prefer copying the text. It used to save “hell lot of time”. Good haa, bad for the search engine. Your content would not be ranked no matter how hard you try.

Thursday 4 October 2012

Organic SEO v/s PPC

Is PPC good for your web presence? Why do SEO companies focus on PPC? The instant free web traffic flow to the website of the web business owners through the search engine ranking results and presence on the SERPs is the reason why the SEO companies preach taking on to the PPC campaign. The more you pay for the targeted keyword the higher the placement and hence, you will witness the increase in the flow of web traffic to your website. This is a short term strategy; is does not replace the organic SEO strategy.

The facts are:

We cannot do without organic SEO

PPC helps in getting instant visibility and can be used as a short term solution to long term goals. We cannot live with SEO but can live without PPC. Organic search engine results garner more trust from the web visitors

Does PPC help in Organic SEO?

Well to me, the answer is yes and no. PPC does not help in organic SEO directly, but its surely helps in getting more traffic instantly to your website, which means, the as many people would visit your website, the search engine spiders would be trigged to index your web pages fast and allot a position in the SERPs.

While we are looking at our organic SEO to take advantage of our PPC listings, we must not forget that PPC will also be helpful in learning the desires of our website visitors and will be helpful resource to monitor the relevant keywords response. The visitors search habits and their search trend will also be outlined through our PPC ad campaigns.

This will affect our organic SEO strategy directly and we can improve upon the basics by embedding the most relevant and result oriented keywords in our website SEO.

Benefits of PPC

Pay per click campaign can help you to get listed for the keywords that your website is not optimized for, hence, help in capturing the traffic that could have been lost otherwise.

Creating Brands Awareness – While organic SEO takes time to mature, PPC helps in creating brands awareness almost instantly by propping up on the SERP’s paid inclusion sections and leading the traffic, mostly the targeted traffic to your website.

Instant Placements – Depending how much you have bided for the keyword, you sponsored advertisement would be instant placed on the SERPs thus creating visibility.

Tuesday 2 October 2012

How to hurt your SEO efforts?

We have seen lots of changes in the world of the web, especially when we talk about SEO. Follow through from Big Daddy, to Panda and now to Penguin, we know what SEO strategies are the best for our website visibility, yet we knowingly and purposefully close our eyes are, try something different and hence hurt our ranking results or get penalized by Google.

Let’s study how we can hurt our SEO results.

Over use of keywords and phrases – Great – why do we need to do this? The keyword density is not the same as it was previously. Instead of using 3% to 5%, now 0.5% usage of keywords is good enough. The text or the web copy now makes more sense to the readers. With keywords and its variations stuffed, you could hurt your website ranking.

Copied Website Content – Sometime content on someone else’s website looks great. Copying and pasting it your website. Search Engines indexing and ranking is hurt, such websites are not given ranking after indexing, hence, your website (a) would not be ranked, even if it gains temporary ranking, it could be de listed any time by the search engine.

Broken Links / Bad internal Linking – Website structure with broken links is like a man with a broken back bone. Weak structured websites have never achieved high ranking, as the broken links do not give the search engine spiders a chance to properly index and understand the links.

Irrelevant Back Links – Walking into the trap of link sellers to get back links hurts and hurts the ranking real bad. Today, the search engines demand back links from the relevant sites. Image if your plumbing business website gets a back link from a gambling website or an adult website. Instead of gaining authority your website would tend to loss value.

Take care; don’t fall for illicit SEO practices. The days, when you could have got away by trying unethical means are gone, search engines have got smarter. Stay away from the SEO practices that SEO your online presence and visibility.