Wednesday, November 2, 2011

Submitedge - Search Engine Optimization Blog

Submitedge - Search Engine Optimization Blog


Creating a “Clean” Website

Posted: 01 Nov 2011 06:54 PM PDT

Many web design companies swill tell you that they create search engine friendly websites. When you talk to SEO companies and SEO professionals, they will be quick to remind you that you should have a search engine friendly websites. What exactly is a search engine friendly website?

The key to creating a search engine friendly website is keeping it clean and simple! The basic factors you should be taking into consideration when attempting to that make your website into a search engine friendly website include your URL structure, coding, tax, script and text. Each one of these factors may seem like a small thing, but when you add them up you can create a website that is highly search engine friendly. That means it is easily crawled indexed, and categorized as relevant to your niche by the search engine spiders.

URL structure is crucial for making your website into a search engine friendly website. It is essential that you be consistent and use correct URLs throughout your site. To not do this is to lose big points.

The coding of your website should follow all accepted standards. Poor coding standards can and will make your website unfriendly to search engines which puts you behind the 8 ball right away. Tags are important to search engines and visible results – what your visitors see. Make sure you take advantage of tagging at every opportunity. What your users see does make your website search engine friendly to a degree, but a lot of it has to do with the codes at the backend which matter to the search engines. You cannot neglect either.

Your website should above all be XHTML compliant. Iy cannot be said any plainer than you need to have XHTML validation done to check for errors.  All errors should be rectified at the earliest possible time possible. An XHTML validation service can help you stay on top of this. When you design a website, XHTML errors often pop up, so having it checked and fixed will help your website be much more search engine friendly. Include both XML sitemap for search engines and a regular HTML sitemap for the users. It is easy to do and makes all the difference in the world.

Your websites should avoid Flash, Frames andJava script as much as possible as search engines have problems with crawling websites with frames, don't like Java Script and can't read Flash – just the text around it. It looks nice, but it is wasted when it comes to getting your site crawled.

Include as much text as possible on your home page and minimize the use of images. When you need to use images, use them as sparingly as possible. Include appropriate names for the images as well as Alt text. Tagging your images with the same format will help you find them later as well. Again, keep it clean and simple!

Keep the web pages short so they load fast. Pages that lag are penalized and they don't make visitors too happy either. Make sure that all of the links are active; broken links and 404 errors will affect your website's ranking and can irritate online users who will leave your site due to page cannot be found error messages. Once you get visitors to your site, you need to keep them!

Avoid drop down menus if possible. Search engine spiders find it difficult to drill down the dropdown menus used for your website's navigation. Use regular static menus for website navigation instead! You should never have more than four clicks to reach any main page on your site. Also use 'breadcrumb links' to help navigation issues. These are simple installations that make the spiders and visitors happy.

Finally, choose a reliable hosting provider so that your website has the highest uptime possible, and add fresh content often so Google will continue to return and re-index your website. In order to remain relevant, you need to remain up and running and active.

How much money should you be spending on SEO?

Posted: 31 Oct 2011 06:51 PM PDT

The short answer is that it depends. In order to know what kind of budget you should assign for your website's SEO requires knowing what SEO is first and foremost. Determining what you want it to do for you is the second factor to determining an SEO budget. There are various other factors that will come into play when deciding your SEO budget as well. One of the major deciding factors is going to be what the competition level for the keywords relevant to your website are. For example, if you are in a broad market, trying to rank for 'shoes' can be hard. Likewise, if you are in a niche market, trying to rank for designer ankle boots can still be very difficult. If what you are selling belongs to a niche or broad market that is highly competitive then the efforts required to get good online visibility will be relatively higher – and the SEO budget for such websites will be higher. It is a symbiotic relationship that really drives what you will need to spend.

Because ranking can change fairly quickly at times for a number of reasons, a website's SEO budget should be more flexible than a rigid. At times, you may have to take some additional measures to increase traffic such as ads for paid traffic. At other times, making an investment in getting the right type of organic traffic will be the way you want to spend your money. If you don't do your SEO yourself, you must figure out what the priorities are when you hire an SEO Firm of professionals to help you out. If you are not on the same page, you don't have the right SEO.

It is imperative that you track your SEO results and as well every change for six to twelve weeks before changing course. There is nothing worse than jumping ship too quickly and having to backtrack. If you fall into the category of webmasters who are just launching a new website, then the initial expenses for SEO can be higher than what would be expected for a site that is up and running. Many webmasters who spend a lot of money on their website design fail to set aside enough to properly cover for their website's SEO. It's hard to put a figure for the SEO both in terms of $$ or in terms of % of the over all cost of your website development, but it is always safer to plan high and not be taken by surprise.

The size of your website is going to play a part in how much of your budget will be needed to meet real SEO needs. If your site is only a 5 page website then setting aside 20% of the cost of your site will in all likelihood not meet your SEO needs. If you are running a huge shopping cart site then 20% of the over all cost of your website will be a more than adequate budget in most cases. Don't fall for the trap that a flat percentage works the same for everyone

Always keep in mind the amount of competition that you are fighting off and the earning potential. Simply having a generous budget for your SEO can help, but only if you spend it wisely and on the right SEO professionals who know what they are doing and can provide real results.  If you identify the right service SEO Service provider that offers affordable SEO Services we will be able to save a considerable amount of money as well as see some positive results. In the end, it is as much about spending your money with the right SEO as it is how much you spend.

How Important are Keyworded Domains?

Posted: 30 Oct 2011 06:48 PM PDT

http://www.webspiderz.us/articles/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/domain-registration-tips.jpgMany webmasters will tell you that it is very lucky if they can manage to get keyworded domain names. As all the keyword domains in general have been grabbed already by others wo are using them or parking them hoping for a decent profit on resale. What that means is that unless you have an extremely niche oriented industry or a new concept that you are marketing, finding a keyword domain names is really difficult. Netflix will attest to that with their "Qwikster" debacle.

There are quite a few companies that pay a lot of money to get these prized domain names. Is it worth paying huge prices for such domain names, and do you really need to have keyword domain names?  There is no total agreement on this at all since not all SEO professionals agree. There are still many SEO expertswho believe that keyword domain names are weighted when it comes to search engine placements. Many SEO experts also feel that one of the search engine ranking factors has to do with the domain name. Whether this is absolutely true or not is unknown, but it seems as if that may be the truth to a certain degree.

What can we say with any certainty? We know that Google gives importance to the age of the domain – there is no doubt there. We know Google grades on keywords in the text, tags, and captions. Based on this, it makes sense that Google may also give importance to domain names. The question is how much impact it may have which is a point of a speculation. Quite a few webmasters have tried to make use of keyword domain names to the tune of spending thousands of dollars getting keyword domain names.

You most likely will not to lose anything by selecting keyword domain names, as there are other advantages associated with such domain names. Possibly the single greatest advantages of getting keyword domain names comes when people link to your website. They will most likely be using keywords to link to your main pages. If the keywords and domain name match, it can bring additional credit to your website and highly contextual links to your website are always a good thing.

Additionally, there is a number of people who link to websites using just the URL of the website rather than using anchor text. Keyword domains will stand to gain in this regard, because in the link itself your keyword will be present. Looking from it at that angle, you come out ahead in quite a few instances. This is a tremendous advantage to your website to increase the value of every such link.

All of this does not mean that non-keyword domains do not rank well but that it appears keyword domains have better rate of success on the whole if you follow this logic. Spending thousands on a highly keyworded domain name should only be done if you are confident it will aid you enough to recoup the cost. If you have any doubt, then you are better off ranking via contextual SEO and saving that money.

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