SEO on a Budget - Cleaning Up Your Site

The process of getting customers to your site normally involves your winning a place on the first page of a web search that your would-be client sees when he searches for your product.

This involves you, whether you like it or not, in the process of buttering up the search engines.
Now it is a fact of life that today's market is dominated by the big players - grocers have Walmart and Tesco to play against, booksellers have Amazon, accountants have Price Waterhouse Coopers - and there is no way you can out-spend them when it comes to advertising or its online equivalents.
You have to be more targeted, cleverer, and more fleet-footed.

The process of getting onto the front page of a Google or Yahoo search is called Search Engine Optimisation or SEO for short. It is a black art where a host of real and pretend experts vie to out-think the bots, the robot spiders that the search engines have wandering the web twenty four hours a day and three sixty-five days a year. These bots are examples of artificial intelligence deciding the fate of your site against an ever-expanding and ever more sophisticated set of rules.

The first stage of your 'budget' or even 'zero cost' battle with the bots is to avoid upsetting them. After all they are all looking for an excuse to downgrade or even discard your site and settle for the big boys who pay them the big bucks.

So let's look at some precautions that will help you to avoid down-grading.

1. Avoid spelling mistakes

Spelling mistakes upset the bots. Create your text in a good quality word processing package and use the spell-checker

2. Make sure that all your links work

There are several open-source link-checkers down-loadable on the web: pick one and use it every time you modify your site.

3. Check your HTML

HTML is the language of the internet. Even the best suites of website builder programs fail to give bullet-proof renderings of your design. Like open-source link-checkers, open-source HTML-checkers can save you a lot of grief.

4. Use the "alt" facility in the Image tag.

A tag is an HTML instruction telling your browser how to present your site. They are enclosed in triangular brackets.

The tag that displays your artwork is contained in these brackets, which makes them easy to spot and is in the form:

a href = "address of the artwork" alt = "text to be shown if for any reason the artwork itself isn't"
The "alt" is important because visually impaired surfers will use software that reads out-loud the text on your site and cannot read a picture so the "alt" provides a textual alternative.

So what do you do if your site fails any of these tests. Well you are the author of your site, the website builder took your instructions and built your site, so get back into your source data and clean up your act.

Roger Webb is a retired CEO from Small and Medium Sized (SME) companies in the UK and Continental Europe. In thirty years experience at life at the top he has been instrumental in turning around and setting up a number of specialist subsidiaries in Europe, Africa and beyond, in every case producing stable profits in some of the most testing corporate environments imaginable.

In retirement he has devoted most of his energies in developing a group of wiki sites devoted to helping others to set up eBusinesses. His current sites http://computer-virgin.net/ for new-starters and http://mywebtrade.net/ for those further along the trail are just part of those efforts.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Roger_J_Webb

Top 5 Search Engine Optimization Tips To Boost Your Website Visitation

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the promotional tool of choice for many website owners because they know that most Internet users do not search for a particular website when finding products to buy; instead, they enter what words come to mind when they want to see or buy at the search tabs in the homepage and then skim through each website until they run upon something that merits their full attention.
SEO focuses on targeting the right keywords and placing them in strategically selected places in articles as well as spreading backlinks systematically through the Web.

So how can you tailor your SEO campaign to make people visit your site more often? Here are some tips:

Tip #1 Plan Your Keywords

Anticipate the keywords that others often enter, then incorporate them in your articles. Using your accumulated observations, together with your intuition, try to find out what users are most likely to enter if they want to visit a website whose topic is the same as your website.
Don't use keywords that are too outlandish such that others won't think about them. But don't use keywords that other websites often use when searching for the topic of your website - for there will be competition.

Tip #2 Think Like Search Engines Act Like Humans

Don't dare attempt to fool by stuffing your articles with too many keywords. Search engine algorithms are clever, and they can detect and lower the SEO rating or even ban websites that try to beat the competition unfairly through keyword stuffing. If you want to write articles, write it for human consumption, not for search engine consumption.

Tip #3 Determine Your Keyword Density

Ensure proper keyword density and modify as needed. A rule of thumb is that 3 to 5 percent of your article should be made up of keywords. And it's not only about your homepage; each page of your website needs keywords so that there will be a theme which search engines can examine, and the more pages you get a search engine to rank, the better your SEO rating will be.

Tip #4 Choose Backlinks that Make Sense

Post backlinks to related websites. Not only do backlinks increase visitors to your site; they help beautify your website's SEO rating. However, make sure that the sites where you post backlinks are popular and related to your web content. Indiscriminate backlinking can reduce SEO rating.

Post other websites' backlinks. It's not only your own backlinks that can increase SEO score; other sites can post their backlinks into your website too. That is a sign of rising popularity, which search engines can pick up.

Tip #5 Seek Expert Help

Get an expert to do all the SEO tasks for you. It may be a little pricey to hire, but SEO experts, with years of experience, know how to approximate what the SEO algorithms want from websites that deserve ranking up. While SEO experts mind the marketing, you have more time to mind administrative concerns of your business.

SEO will remain a premiere website promotion tool for as long as search engines exist. These five tips - mostly basic advice - can help a fledgling search engine optimization program become a juggernaut in no time.

Are you looking for more information regarding search engine optimization? Visit http://digistreammedia.com/our-blog/ today!

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Jichel_Stewart

How to Get the Search Engines to Crawl Your Site More Often

If you're interested in making your site more attractive to search engine crawlers so you can generate more free traffic for your site then you've come to the right place. The Google crawl rate is nothing but the total frequency with which their bots visit your site and index new content. Some websites go a long time in between crawls and this prevents new material from gaining valuable page rank. But you can change that by making your site more crawlable.

It's important to invest a little time and attention to optimize the photos on your site. Images that aren't optimized usually aren't good for the overall performance of your site in the search engines. It can also lead to a less than favorable crawl rate for your website. But the real question is how to get that improved crawl rate. You can do many things to optimize images like placing keywords in the name of the file, resizing images properly, and using captions that are designed to appeal to search engine crawlers. While these may seem like simple steps they can have a huge impact on how often your website gets crawled by the search engines.

You need to make regular updates to your site's content.

The problem with this is that this might mean one thing to you and something else entirely to someone else. This doesn't mean that you have to update your site ten times a day; just make it happen more often and you're good to go. Google has a deep appreciation for sites that add new information often and rewards that by indexing their information and updates faster. This is the way that Google uses to let website owners know they've noticed them and like what they see on these sites.

The most basic thing to do when trying to enhance your site's crawl rate is to submit your website's URL to Google. This is something that is quick and easy but effective. In fact, the more search engines you submit to the better your exposure will be. Additionally you'll want to check that you're getting the right header response.

Give Google what it wants and you'll have no trouble at all attracting those famous Google bots to your site every other day. These are all steps that are easy to duplicate and apply to every one of your sites for fast results. Most website owners have no idea how important proper optimization is for their websites. It only takes a little effort on your part to make your site more attractive to them but the rewards are well worth that effort.

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Four Top SEO Tips: How To Get The Results You Need From Your SEO Campaign

On every side alley on every street, there's an SEO expert just waiting to jump out on you. What's more, they all share one thing in common: they all make SEO sound complicated. It's almost mystical, a black art, a process; it's not. There are things, as a small business owner, you can do to increase your visibility in search, you just need to know where to look.

Diversify Your Anchor Text: Anchor Text is the text you find in a link e.g. "click here". Search engines utilise anchor text to determine the subject-matter or topical relevance of a linked to page. The problem with anchor text however is that most webmasters abuse it; vary up your anchor text and instead of creating one hundred "payday loans" anchor text links, try creating "quick payday loans - apply online" to make your anchor text appear more natural.

Grab Attention With Your Page Titles: "Place a keyword in your page title". While the advice may still be true, it's also a bit outdated. Your page title is an SEO factor, true - however, perhaps more importantly, it's an opportunity to communicate the true value of your page. Your page title will be shown in the Search Engine Results Pages, don't use it purely as an SEO ranking factor, but rather to communicate the value in your page and entice a click from the user.

Content, Content, Content: What is the purpose of content? Is it there purely to fuel search engine rankings? The truth is, there's not much you can do to a page of content to make it more amenable to ranking in the Search Engine Results Pages.
However, one strategy which you should be looking to, is expanding the range of your target terms. Search Engine Optimisation is not, and never will be, exclusively about targeting big volume search terms - it's about so much more than that. Create a unique page of content for all of your main target destinations, products, services and so on, and start targeting the long-tail of search, all the query variations which fall below the main generic terms.

Attribution and Google Analytics: How do you know what's working and what's not? To put it simply, without Google Analytics, or some other form of tracking your web pages, you don't. Setting up a Google Analytics account is one of the first things you should do on any SEO Campaign - the second thing should be to set up conversion points, or create a means through which you can monitor the progress of your campaign.
Create goals, and enable e-commerce tracking, in your Analytics dashboard, and get a true feel for what works and what doesn't.

Gareth J Power is an SEO professional. Looking for more information on how to devise a link building campaign? Read more now only at Clickwork Media, the number on link building company in the UK.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Gareth_J_Power

USA TODAY's Jefferson Graham interviews Google engineer Matt Cutts on how to get your site to the top of Google with 5 basic, common sense SEO tips. Matt Cutts guests on the USA TODAY Talking Tech web video show. New episodes air weekly at http://tech.usatoday.com

SEO and Its Importance on the Web

There are waves of changes that happen to the web constantly. We are passed the old static websites that were not as friendly as they are today (considering this was only a few years ago). If we neglect proper research, your web design/development campaign will not go anywhere. I will explain many important factors that I go through in order to get indexed correctly by major search engines.

In the beginning

Something that almost everyone misses is proper web marketing research that is neglected and should be the first step of any project. Lets not forget the 4 P's:

1. Product - Physical product, service and ideas
2. Price - What customers or users pay
3. Place - Place or distribution channels
4. Promotion - Advertising, selling process and sales

Once you have thoroughly researched your 4 P's it is time to consider domain names and branding. This doesn't simply mean one domain name serves all. Try registering multiple domains with different hosting companies. The reason is Google may consider multiple similar sites on the same server as duplicate sites. Consider the class C block of an IP, which is the number shown in the third position of an IP address. It doesn't hurt to be on other servers. This is more work but well worth the effort.

Your next step is creating Microsites. Try hiring a professional for this or if you don't have the budget, try buying a template. A microsite should be short-lived with 6-7 pages. Make sure you add Google analytics and track your efforts. The content on a microsite should be short and sweet. Don't forget your call to action and a link back to your main site for popularity and credibility with Google, Bing or Yahoo. It also doesn't hurt to have an AdWords campaign to drive relevant traffic to the site.

Onsite SEO

As most of you know onsite SEO is a huge factor to consider when creating any website. Yet again, proper research will be needed in order to reel in your target market through keyword research. You want to create two documents (excel or word) that have 25-50 primary and secondary keywords. Number them all by importance so that when you create a website, placement will not be an issue. Here are three factors to consider with keywords after your research is complete:

1. Keyword Placement - Where on the page keywords are located
2. Keyword Prominence - How early or high up keywords are placed
3. Keyword Density - The number of times keywords divided by a total number of words on the page

Where to use Keywords

• Title - Title tag
• Headings - H1 and H2 tags
• Link (anchor) text - Text that is inside and anchor tag
• First paragraph - especially the first 2 sentences
• Last paragraph - especially the first 2 sentences
• Drop down boxes - Use forms that are keyword research
• URL's - The actual link should have keywords in it as well
• Folder and file names - keywords/keywords.html
• Image ALT tags - alt="keywords"
• Navigation - Very important to use keywords here (ie. T-shirts instead of Products)

What Google looks for

• Keywords used in link text
• Keywords used in the URL/subdomains/folders of your site
• Keywords used in your and
• External links linking in * explained more further down
• At least 200 words of relevant text
• How often the content is updated
• How fast your obtaining new links
• How old the site is

Link exchange or Reciprocal linking

Getting other sites to link to you is always good but there are some points to consider before getting these links and they are:

1. Exchange links with only relevant sites
2. Try to get links with high PageRank or trusted sites (BBB, dMoz etc....)
3. Your best links will be from sites that have large number of links coming in and have a small number of links going out
4. Try to get links close to their home page

End-to-End SEO Checklist

• Determine the best primary and secondary keywords phrases for your site
• Create content-rich pages
• Optimize each page for its best keywords phrases
• Link each page from your sitemap page, and from each page back to your home page
• Submit to directories
• Setup and maintain link-building and exchange
• Regularly monitor your progress and modify your efforts

And DO NOT list for SEO

• Don't use redirects on your site
• No doorway pages
• Don't repeat keywords over and over
• Don't use hidden text on your site
• Don't use tiny text on your site
• Don't use frames
• No hidden image links
• Don't use elaborate image maps
• Absolutely no proprietary third party domain names
• No link farms
• And don't get links from sites that are not credible or irrelevant

This might sound like a lot of work but I assure you that it will pay off in the long run. And remember that the web is literally taking over marketing and an SEO campaign should be a top priority for all organizations.

A great place to start.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Puya_Turkiyan

7 Simple Search Engine Optimisation Techniques You Probably Haven't Tried Yet

While there are many SEO methods to try, there are certain techniques that work like magic. Here are the top 7 Search Engine Optimisation strategies you should try.

Using 3 and 4 word keywords

While targeting one or two word keywords might seem like the best options especially if you are looking for a massive influx of traffic, the number of competition you have can be overwhelming. You could be competing not only with other information sites but also with product sites.
Using 3 or 4 word keywords is actually better. These are specific keywords. They may not have demands as high as the one-word or 2-word keywords but you have a fewer competition here. You have higher chances of getting the traffic you want.

Use an optimised website layout or theme

You may have tasked an expert web designer to make you website look snazzy but if it does not contain simple search engine optimisation website techniques, it will not be marking high in search engines. It is not impossible for a simple 2-column website to dominate search engines. That is because the algorithms are not looking for the layout but the content of the site and how each page has been optimised to SEO. There are certain layout designs that have been specifically incorporated with SEO strategies.

Guest posting

One of the key steps in improving site ranking is guest posting. Guest posting is a simple way of building links. You submit an article that will link back to your site to another website that has a higher ranking than yours. Their readers will read your articles. If they are interested in what you are telling them, they will click the link to your site.

Using multimedia

Multimedia is a quick and fun way of garnering more organic traffic. Making a video blog and upload it to hosting sites. Create interesting graphics and submit it to arts portals. Every art project or video project must have a link back to your site.

Giveaways

What is great about giveaways is that they promote a certain kind of positive vibe. Everyone likes free gifts so everyone will most likely take advantage of the opportunity of getting your freebies or winning you giveaways.

Twitter broadcasting

Got updates to your site? Why not put a link to it in your Twitter account. Add people who will most likely be interested to what your site is all about.

Offer valuable information only

Search engine optimisation is not only about incorporating keywords to the contents of your website. You also have to think about the quality of your site's contents.

When it comes to Search Engine Optimisation, it is important to garner a loyal clientele or audience. SEO UK does not have to be difficult if you know how to use link building services well.

Kathryn Dawson writes for Strategy Internet Marketing, a high professional SEO UK company. Strategy create marketing online strategies for small and large companies. If search engine optimisation is your priority, Strategy offer an innovative approach to SEO including link building services.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Kath_Dawson