10 Tips for Raising Your Search Engine Rankings.

Filed Under (SEO Tips) by admin on 15-10-2009

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Search engine rankings are an important factor to consider when you have a website that needs more traffic. If your website doesnt have a good position in the rankings then no-one will find it, so you need to make sure that your website is ranked highly enough to be seen. The other important quality to getting high traffic to your site is having a nice arsenal of links. The more links that you have to your site the more traffic you will get, but also, the more links to your site the more search engines like your site. Keeping a nice supply of links pointing at your site requires similar precautions and practices as getting high search engine listings.

Although no SEO company can guarantee a high ranking for your site, here are some tips for raising your search engine ranking. Using these tips will not get you to the top unless your site is the best out there, but they will at least put you into the positioning that you truly deserve. After all, the internet is basically a free market. You will naturally flow into the place that you deserve and many search engines try to insure that you do not rise above or fall below this position. This is why they are so strict, and this is why you must keep yourself on good terms with them.

1) Content is an important factor in high search engine rankings. Make sure that you have plenty of content throughout your site with your target keywords in the articles. Its also worth doing a search for websites similar to yours and taking a look at their articles for ideas. The more content you have the better. It is generally a good idea to have between three hundred and five hundred words per page, but more important than a quantity of content is the quality of the content that you are providing. You cannot just put out three hundred words of jargon and expect your visitors to find it interesting and stick around for the long haul.

2) Your websites URL can help you rank higher with the search engines if it contains your keywords. However, dont think that naming your site after your keywords will always help your rankings you need to do more than just that.

3) Search terms should be written out in text, instead of graphics. If you do use pictures, be sure to give them alt tags. The alt tags in your pictures are almost as important as text. Its also a good idea to put some of your key words in links to other pages. In the eyes of a search engine it is almost as good to have a link to a page full of the content that the visitor is looking for as it is to have the content that the visitor is looking for on your page. If a visitor is looking for something that you are linking to and he or she finds your page, they may look around your site on the way through.

4) The title of your page is very important, and making sure that you choose it wisely will make a big difference. Terms such free article on safe children’s toys, or contact the children’s toy expert today are good to use as titles, for example they would get you a high ranking. The title area is the most important place to include your keyword phrases, so make sure that you put them all in.

5) The navigation menu that appears on each page of your website should include your pages title.

6) Dont just use the most popular keyword phrases the market is so competitive that you should be sure to include some niche keywords too.

7) Make sure that you dont have a lot of irrelevant links on your site. The more closely related to your site your links are, the better your chances of being ranked in a higher position.
8) You need to periodically update the content of your website, even if its only a slight change, as websites like sites that are kept updated.

9) You need to consider the fact most search engines dont like automatic submissions or multiple submissions submit once, manually.

10) Always be on the look out for SEO news staying up to date and using the latest techniques will help you stay one step ahead of your competition.

SEO Tips for Dynamic Websites.

Filed Under (SEO Tips) by admin on 05-10-2009

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Is your website is dynamic? You need to be careful, or you might not do well in the search engines. Some spider handle dynamic URLs quite well, but others have trouble and even those that do spider them might not look very deep within your site. The problem lies in the fact that you cannot really predict what will be delivered in these URLs at all times. If you have an inkling of what is going to happen to URLs most often plan ahead; try to insure that you do not run into problems regarding these URLs.

Dynamic web pages are usually database driven and displayed on-the-fly. You can recognize by looking for symbols like question marks and ampersands in the URL. These on-the-fly web pages are hard to deal with because they very every time that they are delivered. The best way to conquer this problem is to run everything that you can through the URL rather than through post method or through sessions/cookies.

If you want to sell one or two products, then you only need a static website with one or two pages. If you have a database with hundreds of products, however, then it would be very time-consuming to make each page manually thats when most people build a dynamic website.

These dynamic web sites should be organized in such a way that every page that has the potential to become dynamic can be delivered in a static form as well. I.E. your product listings pages may display certain categories dynamically, but they should have static links that will simply display every product. You should also have distinct links to each category as most search engines can handle a dynamic URL as long as it doesnt change each time that the site is viewed.

There are programs that will automatically produce static pages from a database, but its not usually the best move. Most designers to work with true dynamic technologies such as PHP, because of the amount of time it saves. Because search engine technology is increasing, the problems associated with dynamic URLs are decreasing day by day. It is still important to have constants, but you dont necessarily have to have a huge list of static links throughout your site.

It can be much easier to put www.domain.com/article.php?num=1 than www.domain.com/articles/article1.html. A search engine can easily locate the prior so there is no real need for the latter. The only time that you will see trouble is if you have things like www.domain.com/article?num=1&userid=2424 where userid changes for each user. If this sort of thing happens you may run into trouble and should arrange so that the userid isnt completely necessary (unless, of course, you want the page password protected).

Dynamic websites arent usually engine friendly, though, unless you deliberately make them that way. If youve spent money and time to build a dynamic website then you wont want to throw it out you need to learn how to optimize it for the search engines.

So how can you keep the functionality of your dynamic website, and make it search engine friendly at the same time? Well, suppose you have a website with products, and instead of having each product on one page youre using a dynamic, searchable database. Searching returns a list of products that meet the search criteria, and maybe a small picture clicking the picture shows the user more information about the product.

You have to realize that search engines cant use your search box, so the only way for them to access your dynamic information is if they follow a link to it some other way. The lesson to learn is that you need to give access to all your pages with plain, text links, somehow you cant just rely on searches to drive your whole site.

What this means is that somewhere on your website you need to have a list of your products that has been organized by category from here, you should be able to follow links to every page in your database. Once youve done this, the search engines can see your content.

Offering both search and category views improves your sites navigation, as well as making it crawlable your work will be useful to your visitors as well as the search engines, which is what SEO is all about.

How to Check Your Sites Ranking.

Filed Under (SEO Tips) by admin on 22-09-2009

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First, go to the search engine where you want to check your sites ranking, and enter the keywords you want to check. Your result pages will come up, and you will need to look through them until you find your website. SEO experts recommend that if you arent listed in at least the top 20 then you should continue to optimize, as most people wont look any further than that. This is simply common sense. When you are determining if your rank is high enough simply think to yourself, Would I look for this long for this page?

You will want to do this with each search engine and directory until you have some idea of where you are. Check your website’s rankings regularly, because changes to algorithms can affect them drastically and quickly. Keep in mind also that thousands of new web pages are added daily, and many of them are actively trying to get ranked ahead of you. Thats right. There are thousands of other in on the same game as you so you must keep sharp. Your competitors may be reading these same articles and using these same tricks!

If you cant find your website in a search engines results, you should enter site: your domain name in the keyword field to see whether you are listed at all. If your URL appears with the name or description of your site then you are somewhere in the search engines index. If all you get back is a blank page, then youre not in the search engines database at all you need to wait longer. This trick of typing site:www.yourdomain.com also helps you to determine how many pages you have indexed on each particular search engine. The more pages that are indexed, the more likely somebody is to encounter your site.

It you find that your website is miles away from the top 20, dont be discouraged you can change that! You may need to re-evaluate your keywords, and try to find new ones that are more relevant to your site. Many search engines have human-edited rankings for the most commonly searched-for phrases, and it is often difficult to get in that list. Good content is the best way to increase your chances of getting a high ranking for a certain topic. The more popular that your page is with the masses, the more popular it will be with search engines.

Search engines are a perfect example of the chicken or the egg. In this case, there is an answer! Search engines attempt to deliver sites that the populous has deemed important, not the other way around. This is why it is so important that you have good, relevant content and plenty of it.

If you want to check to see if a single web page on your site has been indexed, visit the search engine and enter the complete URL, like this: http://www.yourpage.com/yourpagename.html.

If the search engine has indexed that particular page then it will come back with a description of it. If it hasnt then youll see a message saying something like Sorry, no information is available for that URL.

On Google, if your URL has been indexed, this page will offer you to show the cached version of the page, or to find similar pages, as well as pages that link to your page or that contain your URL on the page.

You could go ahead and use these manual tracking methods, but we would recommend that you consider using online tools or downloadable software that will allow you to check these things more quickly. It can be a very tedious and time-consuming job to do by hand, especially if you have several sites to monitor.

Top25web.com is one such search engine-ranking tool. You can find out where your website ranks in Google, Inktomi and AltaVista for free. You can also analyze the results of a particular keyword search, to create a plan for improving your sites ranking.

URL Ranker offers instant, online reports of website rankings in 17 top search engines, including Google, Yahoo, AOL Search, MSN, AllTheWeb and AltaVista, again for free. It will tell you if your site is listed in each engine, and tell you the ranking if it is.

These tools alone offer an excellent way of checking your sites rankings. Once you know where you stand, you can continue with your SEO plan, and move on to other aspects of marketing too.