Saturday, May 28, 2005

How to optimize your site without breaking search engine guideline by David Ausman



Having a nice design and an interesting content are not enough to make sale. Who is going to visit your site? Are you willing to spend thousands of dollars every month just to advertise ?

More than 600 million queries made to major search engine like Google, Yahoo, Exactseek, Hotbot and Msn every month. Imagine if you can get only 1% from that amount, there will be millions of targeted visitors to your site. Having this amount of visitors every months, you will earn more than $3000 with an ads CTR of 1.1% and CPC of $0.05. The CTR is an estimated rate, it may vary from 0.1% to 3% depending on advertising placement, banner design and relevancy.

By optimizing your site, you will have a several advantages :

Lower cost in advertising - You don't need to spend substantial amount of money to find high PR site to advertise. Your good placement on search engine result page solely will drive more traffic than your advertising does.
Targeted visitor - Since search engine shows only relevant site to match user queries, your visitors that referred from is whom you looking for.

How can i get a good placement on search engine ?
Maybe this is what you are asking right now. Doing a seo job is never been easy. It needs practice and researching. But I will show you a few good steps in doing it without breaking search engine guidelines.

HTML coding - Make sure you make no mistake in HTML. And also your coding should be neat. Include a descriptive words for "ALT" tag.
Domain name - When choosing a domain name, try to find those name that include your keyword. This will help to rank better in search engine result page. [keyword1+keyword2] = [key phrase]
Title - Make sure your page title is descriptive. Include your keywords as well. Use 1 or 2 "-" to separate keywords on your title.
Robots - Use robot text to allow and disallow search engine to crawl some private pages. Robot source
Keywords - Choose the right 2 - 3 keywords for your site. Always start with a low traffic and then add more if only you have success with the previous one. Use this resource to check your keywords: Overture keywords inventory
Keyword density - Keyword density is a measurement that indicates how many times your keyword shows up within that page. It should range from 5% to 20%, more than that will be regarded as spam.
Anchor text - When you buy a text ads, make sure your title contain your main targeted keywords that you choose. For example; If you are running a gaming site, you would certainly have to give anchor text like "Car racing gaming site" or "Online gaming", but you shouldn't give something like "Click here". When the search engine crawl the anchor text > "click here", they treat the content of that site contain in the anchor text is about "click here" instead of gaming site.

"Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or Page Rank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links." Source by Google guidelines.

We don't recommend you searching for link exchange to increase your positioning in search engine just like what other people is doing. Wasting their time on link building and searching for new partner. Even if the could find 1000 reciprocal links, the won't rank well in search engine. You don't need to do this to get highly rated. Don't believe it ? Let's do some research:

Type in the word in Google:

1. Reference - Look at the top 10 ranking. Do they have a page where a lot of reciprocal link is placed ? Do they search for link exchange ?
2. Webmaster - Same thing, look at the top 10 placement. Do you see any link farm on their site ?

The answer is "no". They do not have any link farm. The simple reason why they rank well is:

1. Domain name - Most of the top 10 ranking in Google have their keyword included in their domain name.
2. HTML - They do well in HTML coding
3. Great content - By having a good content, plenty of webmasters link to them without asking reciprocal link. This will increase the number of inbound link to their site.

Note: Yahoo and Google have different source and methods to rank web site. This research is done for Google.

Submission:
Warning to all of you. Don't use an automated submission program to submit your URL. Be aware that your site might get banned. Just a simple submission to Google, Yahoo, MSN, DMOZ and Excatseek will be enough. Even if it may take months to get indexed, but it is more secure to do it that way. Just be patient !

About the Author
David Ausman is the owner of http://www.freehostingcompany.com
who has the vision to help new web designer understand how to create a good web site

Help Search Engines get Smarter, ROR your Website! by Dom Vonarburg



[You may republish this article on your website, blog, newsletter, or magazine as long at you don't modify its content or author information.]

Help Search Engines get Smarter, ROR your Website!


What is ROR?
ROR (Resources of a Resource) is an exciting new
website content description tool and format created by AddMe.com.
It makes it very easy to describe the content, objects, and structure
of your website so search engines and other web applications can better
find and understand your information.

For example if you are selling products, ROR enables you to document
your product names, descriptions, prices, images, availability,
affiliate programs, etc. Or if your site or blog provides information
on a given topic, it allows you to describe how this information
is organized (sitemap, topics, categories, new information, archive,
blogroll, etc). ROR also provides terms for documenting objects
such as contacts, articles, newsletter, feeds, images, audio,
links, reviews, privacy policy, copyrights, and more.

ROR information can be easily added to your website by adding a ROR
File called ror.xml.
To create the file ROR provides templates and examples. It also provide
a ROR File Editor, which will
extract information from your website and allow you to describe it
further. Larger websites can also generate ROR files from their databases.



Why Describe?

But why is it important to describe your website? Well, consider this
phrase: "We offer a 10% discount on all our
products until Mother's Day". While these words mean a
lot to your visitors, they unfortunately won't mean much to a search
engine or shopping search engine. Language is extremely complex and
it will take time even for Google to elevate search to such levels
of sophistication. And that's just one language, English.
So for now, to communicate your product information to shopping search
engines you typically need to provide a feed (a machine-readable description
of your products), and re-submit that feed to each engine each time
the information changes. And to make matters worse, none of these
feeds have the same format, so you also have to learn each format.



Another Approach

ROR suggests a better approach. Since search engines already come
to your site to read text information about your products, it makes
sense to also read additional information like prices, image URLs,
discounts, etc. This way, you only change the information once, in
your ROR file, and that's it. Product information is just one example
but it illustrates this issue rather well.
ROR information can also be displayed on your website in a generic fashion
so visitors can quickly and easily find information, without the need
to re-learn or remember the structure and navigation of each website
they visit. For that purpose, ROR provides an Info
Button. The button reads the information directly from
your ROR file.


ROR simply makes a lot of sense! It's powerful, easy, and very flexible.
Not surprisingly, many of the search engines AddMe contacted so far
have already shown interest in reading ROR files.



ROR your Website, Spread the Word

Get your ROR file or button at http://www.rorweb.com,
it only takes a few minutes for a basic file. You can always add more
information later.


Help search engines get smarter, ROR
your website! Help spread the word by adding this
article on your site, or a link to it:




"Help search engines get smarter,
ROR your website!"





Happy RORing,




About the Author
Founder, Add Me, Inc
http://www.addme.com