Secrets To be More Social!

Your Website is not MERELY A SITE rather a

COMPLETE BUSINESS for you......

The shortcut to SUCCESS is indeed HARD WORK.....

To be more SOCIAL and to have more traffic on your SITE here are some SECRETS revealed for you my friends....

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process to increase the number of visitors to your site by designing the site content and it will make the site ranks high in the search results of a search engine. The higher a Web site ranks in the search results, the higher chance or higher possibility that a user will visit that site. Most of search engine user’s only read search results on page 1, page 2 or to page 3, seldom users will go further.

They’re not going to spend time reading all search results pages. Once they get what they want, they will normally stop surfing.

Therefore, a site with higher rank in a web search is absolutely important to direct more traffic toward the site. SEO is to make sure that your site is accessible to a search engine and improves the chances that the site will be found by a search engine.

To get a higher rank in the results, you do the following

1. Tag your website/blog
2. Set your permalink structure
3. Submit articles

After your website has been designed, you need to tag it so that search engines can easily recognize what it is all about. If the website is not tagged, it becomes very difficult for the search engine to index it and without been indexed, your website can not appear on search results.

There are two tags you must input on your website / blog after you have designed it, these are the meta name description and the meta name keyword tag. While the meta name description what your website is all about, the meta keyword tag shows a list of relevant keywords to your website/blog.

TO GENERATE TRAFFIC

1. Search Engine plays an important role to generate HUGE traffic to your website so first of all

A. Make your site SEARCH ENGINE FRIENDLY...

1. HOW TO MAKE A SITE SEARCH ENGINE FRIENDLY (S.E.F)

Emphasize on following important things step by step to make your site or blog search engine friendly.

i. DOMAIN NAMES
ii. PAGE SPEED
iii. LINK COUNT
iv. PR (PAGE RANK)
v. TITLES
vi. H TAGS, META TAGS

vii. AVOID FRAMES

viii. USE PLAIN HTML

* USE SIMPLE LANGUAGE

(This is more for ease your customers/clients/visitors)

Once you think your site become S.E.F go through STEP 2 Search Engine Submission...

2. Search Engine Submission

Submit your site or Blog to world renowned Search engines such as

A. GOOGLE

B. YAHOO

C. BING

A. TO SUBMIT TO GOOGLE:

Use this link to submit to the number 1 Search Engine in the world i.e. GOOGLE

Submit to GOOGLE!

B. TO SUBMIT TO YAHOO:

Use this link to submit to YAHOO

Submit to YAHOO!

C. TO SUBMIT TO BING:

Use this link to submit to BING

Submit your Site to BING

You may find that one or two advertising methods are enough to supply you with all the traffic your business needs - if not, you can continue mastering and applying the techniques of your choice one-by-one until you've reached your desired level of traffic and income.

Let's get started!...

1. Ezine Advertising

If you have your own list of opt-in online newsletter (ezine) or mailing-list subscribers, you can write an informative ad or personal endorsement letter for the product or service you're promoting (whether it be your own product, or an affiliate product), and blast it to your list.

Hot Tip: You can double, or even triple your results by sending out your letter several times - and using a different subject line for each mailing. For example, I might send out an ad on Tuesday for a particular product, and then follow up on Friday with the same ad and a subject line that simply reads - "[FIRSTNAME] did you get this?" Often times, my second and third mailings outperform the first!

If you don't have your own list of subscribers, you can pay a small fee to advertise in other people's publications...

Respected Internet marketer Brian Garvin has put together a very useful list of LOW COST ezine advertising resources. Click here to check it out. You'll find places that run full "solo" (full page) ezine ads for as little as $6.00 each (prices typically depends on the size of the subscriber list).

Some ezine publishers post limits to the number of lines your solo ad can contain, but nearly ALL of them will make exceptions for longer ads when you ask. Make sure to also request first name personalization in the subject line and minimally the beginning of the ad body (ie Dear [FIRSTNAME]...).

Hot Tip: For more information about effective ezine advertising, I highly recommend you visit http://directoryofezines.com/ - then scroll down the page, locate the free sign up form for the "Doe Insider" newsletter, and subscribe. The free information you receive as a result will help you immensely.

2. Web-Site Advertising

Obviously, if you have a web-site related to an affiliate product you're promoting, you can post an ad for that product in a prominent place on your site. You could write up a full page product ad or endorsement and link to it from a main page...You could post an attractive graphic accompanied by a catchy headline...Etc. (Of course, don't forget to customize the ad with your unique affiliate/referral link!)

You could even create a multi-part training course (follow up course), throughout which you insert tasteful plugs for the affiliate product(s) you're promoting. Rather than sending prospective customers directly to the affiliate site, you get them on *your* newsletter or mailing list, and THEN introduce them to the affiliate product. In doing so, you potentially produce critical repeat product exposure, which can mean a much higher conversion rate for you!

Hop Tip: I highly recommend the above "two step" advertising approach regardless of what type of advertising method(s) you use...Whenever possible, FIRST get people on your list, and *then* promote to them.

3. PPC Search Engine Advertising

Pay-per-click search engine advertising is without a doubt one of the FASTEST ways to begin bringing traffic through your web-site URL's and affiliate/referral links.

Click here to visit Google Adwords, the web's premier pay-per-click search engine program.

Before you list your ad, spend some time "getting to know" the Google Adwords program:

Click here to take the Google Adwords tour.

Click here to read program details and FAQ.

For further study (the more you learn - the more you earn ;-), you'll want to download this pay-per-click "mastery" seminar by Willie Crawford. (You will need Adobe Acrobat to view this seminar. Most computers already have it. If yours does not, you can download it for free from here.)

To get unlimited examples of pay-per-click ads that you can refer to as you write your own, do a Google.com search on the keywords and phrases of your choice, and off to the right (under the search results) you'll see a list of current AdWords ads. If you see the same ad running week after week, that's a great indication that the ad is making money! ...Now, keep in mind that you cannot COPY the ads you see, but you can certainly use them to help brainstorm and get ideas for your own ads.

4. Forums and Message Boards

And outstanding way to advertise your own web-site(s), and your top affiliate/referral links is by participating in online message boards and forums...By both responding to posts, as well as putting up posts of your own.

Most boards don't allow blatant advertising. However, MOST will allow you to include a few bylines to promote whatever you wish - which can generate a great deal of exposure and clickthroughs for you.

There are two main keys to message board promotion.

Key 1. Participate only in message boards that relate to whatever you wish to promote. For example, if you're promoting an Internet marketing or online business related product, here are several such boards that you can get started with right away:

http://www.ablake.net/forum
http://www.howtocorp.com/forum/
http://www.bizweb2000.com/wwwboard/

Tip: By posting to any of the boards above and asking people for recommendations on OTHER popular Internet marketing boards and forums, you're sure to come away with another half dozen or so boards that you'll want to add to your list. This question could be your first post!

Key 2. I eluded to it above, but the second key to message board promotion is participating only in POPULAR boards (in terms of visitors and traffic). The more popular the board, obviously the more exposure your posts will receive. For the most part, the popularity of a board is common sense. If posts are up to date and numerous, chances are you've found a popular board. But you can further determine board popularity (or the popularity of any site for that matter) by searching it through Alexa.com.

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The more time you spend participating in the forums, the more exposure you'll receive. Certain topics and posts will generate more exposure than others. After a while you'll get a feel for what topics attract the most attention.

Your signature file can consist of just about anything you wish, as long as you keep it fairly brief.

I encourage you to study the "sig files" of other message board posters - to get a feel for how you can promote YOUR web-site(s) and affiliate/referral links. Remember, your signature file is really a mini advertisement - so make it as powerful and irresistible as you can in order to generate those all-important click-throughs!

5. Email Signature File

In the same way that you can use a signature file to promote your favorite web-sites and affiliate products through message boards and forums, you can use similar (or the same) sig. files in your daily outgoing email messages.

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What you want to do is create a signature file in your email client. This should take you just a couple minutes to set up! We'll use Outlook Express (the most popular email client in use) as an example on how to set up your signature file:

Step 1) Open Outlook Express =)

Step 2) Click on Tools, then Options, then Signatures.

Step 3) Click on "New" (next to Signatures)

Step 4) Enter your new signature in the Edit Signatures box.

IMPORTANT: In the same window, make sure that you have the "Add signatures to all outgoing messages" option checked. And further, that you have the "Don't add signatures to Replies and Forwards" unchecked.

Step 5) Click Apply/OK

And that's it! The text you added in the Edit Signature box will now be included in all messages that you send out (unless you choose to delete it).
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6. Article Submission

Write and submit short (350-500 word), applicable articles to ezine publishers (with ezines related to the product(s) you're promoting), with a 6-10 line "resource box" (including your web-site URL or referral link) attached to the bottom of the article. This is a win-win situation as the ezine editor receives informative content to send to their subscribers, and you receive exposure in exchange. One article can go a *long way* using this technique.

Hot Tip: In addition to submitting your articles to ezine publishers, there are a variety of other resources and directories you can submit to. Do a quick Google.com search on the phrase "submit your article" (and similar phrases) for a list of options. Remember, if just a few web-site owners post your article (along with your resource box), it can lead to YEARS of free traffic and click-throughs.

Important Note: When offering "reprint rights" to your articles, make sure to specify that your article must be reprinted exactly "as is", including the resource box.

7. Co-registration (Pay-Per-Subscriber) Services

(You'll need your own online newsletter, ie "ezine", for this strategy, but that is something you desperately need anyway if you wish to succeed online. So if you don't have a newsletter, start one - it's MUCH easier than you think! Click here for free information on how to start your own ezine today!)

Utilizing co-registration services is truly one of the *ultimate weapons* in online advertising. I routinely stress that capturing the contact information of your prospective customers is your initial primary objective. Additionally, I've always stressed that "the money is the list" (ie, your opt-in list of ezine subscribers).

...Co-registration, also known as "pay-per-lead" or "pay-per-subscriber" services offer a *guaranteed* way to build your opt-in list for a very reasonable fee. Here are my current favorite co-registration services:

Lead Factory
Push-Button Leads (my service)
ListOpt.com

Now, the use of these services will not only enable you to build your opt-in list for *future* promotions - you can also send each new sign-up your autoresponder series (training/follow-up) course through which you tastefully promote affiliate offers, your own offer(s), your affiliate program, or any combination of the preceding.

With co-registration services, your advertising dollars are really working *exponentially* on your behalf. You're killing quite a few birds with one stone ;-) You're building your list while potentially advertising affiliate products, your own product(s), your affiliate program, etc.

You can start slow, by purchasing a smaller number of subscribers. As you *cultivate* your list by regularly sending your subscribers free articles and information to their benefit, your list will become profitable...

In addition to incorporating "plugs" (ads) within your follow up email series, you can place "top-sponsor" style ads in your regular ezine issues. And, once or twice a month you can send out special solo offers (where the ad alone is sent, no article).

Hot Tip: To learn more about how to run your own profitable online newsletter, I highly recommend you subscribe to a half-dozen or more online newsletters related to your chosen topic of business (get recommendations on the top newsletters from others in your line of business)...Then study the publications, paying close attention to how they present their material and run their ads, and apply what you learn to your own publication.

8. Joint Ventures

(This strategy applies best if you have your own product, OR if you're promoting multi-tier affiliate or MLM programs...)

Contact ezine publishers (about 20 a day - it's a numbers game!) and propose a joint venture. If the proposed joint venture is based on your own product or web-site, set up an affiliate program and (preferably) offer the publisher a "higher than normal" commission (over what you offer your regular affiliates). Provide a ready-made sales letter so that the editor can simply plug in their affiliate link, copy and paste the letter, and broadcast it to their list - make it as effortless as possible for your prospective JV partners.

There are no set rules when it comes to arranging joint ventures. You can get as creative as you want! The key is putting yourself in the shoes of your prospective joint venture partners - if YOU were them, how would YOU want to be approached, and what benefits or incentives would convince YOU to participate?

Next to free publicity, joint venturing is widely regarding as the ultimate form of free online advertising! ...Joint venturing takes persistence, and a willingness to accept being turned down numerous times (before hearing your first "yes"), but the potential payoff is well worth the effort!

Note: If you're selling digital products for a one time fee (vs. recurring billing), ClickBank.com is a 3rd party merchant services provider that will enable you to accept checks and credit cards from your customers, AND enable you to set up an affiliate program of your own - which in turn opens more doors when it comes to joint venturing possibilities. QuickPayPro.com and Groundbreak.com also provide affiliate tracking/management solutions.

Hot Tip: Of course, once you have your own affiliate program set up, at some point you may want to make it available to ALL your customers (and maybe even offer "free affiliate program participation" to anyone who visits your web-site) - in addition to your JV partners. Carefully study (and participate in) other successful affiliate programs and apply what you learn to your own program. My own affiliate programs have accounted for over 50% of my sales - and countless thousands in free advertising.

9. Free Ezine Ads

Do a Google.com search for "free ezine ads", "free ad when you subscribe"
(and similar keyword phrases), and compile a list of ezines that offer a free ad in exchange for subscribing. Submit your free ad to 5-10 ezines per day.

This simple technique, if used consistently, can add up to $100's worth of free advertising for you - each and every month!

10. Testimonial Submission

Submit testimonials (with your name and web-site or affiliate link at the bottom) for products or services that you've purchased in the past (preferably products that relate to, or compliment, your own business or offer).

If you haven't *purchased* many products and therefore can't offer many testimonials, subscribe to free ezines and offer testimonials for the ezines that you enjoy! With over 300,000 ezines online, you could be submitting testimonials
endlessly...Try to submit at least 5 testimonials a day.

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Hot Tip: As the profits from your online business begin to come in, REINVEST them in more advertising! Repeat this critical *cycle* (profit, reinvest 100% , profit, reinvest 100%...) until your income has reached the level you desire. At that point you can begin dividing up your profit into two categories: income & expenses (with your advertising budget accounting for the majority of your expenses).

Familiarize Your Site or Blog

* Include Your Site or Blog in Your EBAY PROFILE

* Use your Site as a Signature on your Emails

* Use TAF (Tell a Friend) option on your site/blog

* Offer some free stuff Widgets etc

* Use Back Links (Reciprocal Links)

* Use Contact Form

* Use Feed Back Forms

* Post Articles on EZINE/ISnare/Goarticales

* Post Ads on OLX

* Include in YahooBiz

*Develop a Video about your products/ site/ blog and offers.

* Post on Social Media Sites

Face book

Twitter

LinkedInn

MySpace

How do I get the best listing in search engines?

This is referred to as "SEO" -- Search Engine Optimisation. Many web sites, forums, and companies exist that aim/claim to help with that.
But it basically comes down to this:

In your site design, use text rather than images and Flash for important content
Make your site work with JavaScript, Java and CSS disabled
Organise your site such that you have pages that focus on a particular topic
Avoid HTML frames and iframes
Use normal URLs, avoiding links that look like form queries (http://www.example.com/engine?id)
Market your site by having other relevant sites link to yours
Don't try to cheat the system (by stuffing your pages of keywords, or attempting to target specific content at search engines, or using link farms)

Main SEO Steps we must have to follow:

1) On-page - using keywords smartly on your own website. You can take
top 10 Google leaders in your niche and figure out *how exactly they
arranged their content*, so that Google ranks them high. Then you make
your own on-page optimization plan, and it's working 100%, because to
put it together, you used only working real time examples.

This on-page optimization trick becomes simple with WebSite Auditor
tool that you've got in your SEO PowerSuite toolkit. Here is the
quick-start guide to this smart software:http://www.link-assistant.com/website-auditor/user-basics.html

2) Off-page - building a network of high-quality links. Find out what
links your competitors have, figure out their most profitable PageRank
and traffic sources, then get the same links plus a few more - and
very soon you'll occupy a search engine position much higher than
theirs. Wouldn't you like to look at your competitors FROM ABOVE? And
you will, with the tool from SEO PowerSuite pack called SEO SpyGlass.

The unique thing about SEO SpyGlass is, only this SEO software is
able to find up to 50 thousand links even when they are hidden in
search engines.

Check SEO SpyGlass FREE and learn how to put it to use quickly:http://www.link-assistant.com/seo-spyglass/user-basics.html

And here's our guarantee: if you apply SEO PowerSuite tools to track
your competition, your site will skyrocket in ANY search engine you
wish.

Seize your chance as early as you can, get your copy of SEO PowerSuite
right now: http://www.link-assistant.com/buy.html

SEO Tip #1: Find the Best Keywords

It would be a waste of your time to optimize your website for keywords that are not even being searched for. Even if you do get top placement for a broad keyword that isn't what most users are looking for, Google will calculate the number of times users did not select your listing, and the number of times they returned to the search results to choose a different website. Trying to beat this calculation is futile and more often then not, just a huge waste of time and energy.

Therefore you should invest some resources into finding the best keywords; those that turn searches into purchases or leads. Buying Sponsored Ads and paying for high end design and usuability is best place to start. However, there are several SEO tools and SEO software available on the Internet to help you find the best keywords; most of which are offered by the search engines themselves and are completely free.

Here is a core principle of the Top 10 SEO Tips: When using any SEO tool for doing keyword research, start by keeping your searches ambiguous, creating categories, and drilling down to create small clusters (or silos) of keywords. The results will always return new suggestions and ideas, sometimes surprising ones that you may not have thought of. In the Sponsored Ads, these clusters become your ad groups. With your SEO, they become the directories (or taxonomy) of the content you'll want to have on your website.

Behavioral-targeting and using Long Tail Keywords are an excellent way to get higher ranking quickly for keywords that generate sales, and will have longevity to them in the search results. Poor keyword examples would be: kindle, nike shoes, roommate new york. Here are some examples of keywords that are ideal for SEO:

Buy Used Amazon Kindle Online
Nike Shoes Kobe Mens Size 10
Find a Roommate in NYC

SEO Tip #2: Discover What Your Competitors are Doing

It's a fact and one of my Top 10 SEO Tips, that search engines analyze incoming links to your website as part of their ranking criteria. Knowing how many incoming links your competitors have, will give you a fantastic edge. Of course, you still have to discover your competitors before you can analyze them.

Your analysis of competitors should include these extremely important linking criteria (super SEO tips), such as:

Competitor rank in the search engines
Quantity AND quality of incoming links (prioritized)
What keywords are in the title of linking page?
% of links containing specific keywords in the link text
The Google PageRank^™ or MozRank of linking pages
The popularity of the linking domain and the linking page (measured by links & mentions)

Aside from using some of the awesome SEO software mentioned on this website, here are some things I personally do when researching a competitor:

Click the link to their Site Map page and see what keyword you find in the links
Get a savvy web person to find and parse their XML Site Map to find keywords in page names
View the HTML title and meta tags of your top competitors to compile a list of needed content

SEO Tip #3: Write Very Linkable & Sharable Content

An article is not a sexy thing to look at here in today's online marketing world. Generic content can't be slapped together and thrown online with the hope that it will get high ranking for the life of that page of content. Think about the book the Long Tail that I linked to above. I do because the content was meanful and useful to me in my career as an SEO Expert. The content could have these attributes if it has any hope of earning and sustaining higher ranking in the search engine results (many of these came directly from Google):

The content is useful
The content is original
You can't help but link to it
There are supportive facts and references
There's enough detail that nobody can memorize it
Something fun or interesting is included (like video)
It's not just blah, blah, blah, content
There's enough call to action to invoke engagement
There are visual examples, charts, and references
You had multiple contributors who all link to the content
You thank or compliment someone who shares it with others
You have an offer, discount, or promotion included
How To's and tutorials are a great way to get people to link
Create a controversy
Answer questions
Conduct research & discuss the results
Get involved with social media
Create lists (Top 50 Link Building Techniques, etc)
Get a blog and establish yourself as an authority
Run a service or create a product (ie: Firefox extension)

SEO Tip #4: Optimize Your Title and Meta Tags

HTML titles and meta tags should be different on every page of your website if you wish for most search engines to store and list them in the search results. Us SEO Expert's have experimented with these two pieces of code to help us reach an accepted conclusion about how best to use them and what happens when you optimize them.

The meta "keywords" tag won't be discussed in to much detail here, since Google has announced that they do not use the meta keywords tag in their ranking criteria. Because Google has 64 percent market share in search, that should be enough to convince you to not spend a lot of time on this attribute.

Optimizing Your Homepage Title

There are different theories about how long your homepage title should be. Since Google only displays the first 66 or so characters (with spaces), my Top 10 SEO tips for the title on anything other than the homepage would be to keep the title under 66 characters and relevant to the content on the page. However, some (including myself) argue that the value of the homepage title may warrant additional search term inclusion. Let's take a look at Amazon and Ebay homepage titles:

eBay - New & used electronics, cars, apparel, collectibles, sporting goods & more at low prices
Amazon.com: Online Shopping for Electronics, Apparel, Computers, Books, DVDs & more
Local SEO Services, Local Search Engine Optimization, Mobile Search, Online Advertising for Local Businesses | LocalSplash.com
Buy.com - Computers, Electronics, Digital Cameras, Books, DVDs, Music, Games, Software, Toys, Sports

Optimizing Your Homepage Meta Description

Same best practice applies here. Get those top terms into a description that isn't spammy and is a clear indicator of what your website is about. Below are the meta descriptions from eBay and Amazon.

Buy and sell electronics, cars, clothing, apparel, collectibles, sporting goods, digital cameras, and everything else on eBay, the world's online marketplace. Sign up and begin to buy and sell - auction or buy it now - almost anything on eBay.com.
Online shopping from the earth's biggest selection of books, magazines, music, DVDs, videos, electronics, computers, software, apparel & accessories, shoes, jewelry, tools & hardware, housewares, furniture, sporting goods, beauty & personal care, broadband & dsl, gourmet food & just about anything else.

The rule of thumb here is to get your most important keywords into your homepage title and meta description.

Optimizing Subpage Titles and Meta Tags

Let's take a break for a moment and discuss Click-Through Rate (CTR) and Bounce Rate. When you perform a search in a search engine, what shows up in your web browser is called an impression. When you make a selection, that selection is called a click. Google and other search engines record each impression and each click to help them understand which listings are being clicked on the most. They also record patterns (so stop thinking about getting all your friends to search for and click your listing). If the majority of normal search volume selects your listing, you'll have a higher CTR and higher ranking; same applies for Sponsored Ads by the way.

That being said, if a healthy percentage of searchers return to Google's search results (called a Bounce) and select a different listing, your CTR value will be reduced and ultimately so will your ranking.

To get and stay at the top of the search results, you need to be the most attractive listing in the search result, and you need to provide enough content to prevent the searcher from leaving your website to find a different listing.

This one SEO tip could make or break your SEO campaign. Click-Through Rate (CTR) plays an instrumental role in how relevant Google thinks your website is. By compelling users to click with clear call-to-actions (buy, order, download, beat, fix, etc) and by using value propositions (guaranteed, on sale now, etc), one can improve their CTR and search engine ranking. Oh, don't forget to squeeze your keywords in there as well.

If you ever forget this SEO tip, just perform a search in Google for "title tag principles", where you'll find my listing invoking these principles. Told ya I was good at this stuff, didn't I?

Here's some sample syntax:

<title>Call to Action, Keywords, & Value Proposition (under 66 characters)</title>

SEO Tip #5: Optimizing Your Headings and Subheadings

In college and some high schools, essays are written using a standard guideline created by the Modern Language Association (MLA). These guidelines included how to write you cover page, title, paragraphs, how to cite references, etc. On the Web, we follow the W3C's guidelines as well as commonly accepted "best practices" for organizing a web page (page structure).

Headings play an important role in organizing information, so be sure to include ONLY ONE H1 tag when assembling your page, and optionally using one or more subheading (H2-H6). Using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), I was able to make my h1 at the top of this page more appealing. Here's a piece of code you can pop into your heading:

Since a page full of headings would look just plain silly, my SEO tip would be to fill in the blank space with paragraphs, ordered and unordered lists, images, and other content. Try to get at least 400+ words on each page.

SEO Tip #6: Use Title and ALT Attributes

Using the title attribute is a direct method of telling the search engines and the user more information about where a link will take them if they click through it. It's also a W3C standard for making your page accessible to those who are visually impared. In other words, blind folks can navigate through your website using a special browser that reads title and ALT attributes. Sample syntax might be:

<a href="http://www.top10seotips.com/seo_software.htm" title="SEO Software to Help You Get Higher Search Engine Ranking">SEO Software</a>

The ALT Attribute is used for the same reasons as the title attribute, but is specifically for describing an image to the search engine and to the visually impared. Here's how you might use ALT attribute in an image tag:

SEO Tip #7: Optimizing File Nomenclatures

Whenever possible, you should save your images, media, and web pages with the keywords in the file names. For example, if your keyword phrase is "golf putters" you'll want to save the images used on that page as golf-putters-01.jpg or golf_putters_01.jpg (either will work). It's not confirmed, but many SEO's have experienced improvement in ranking by renaming images and media. You also may receive visits from Google Images and other media search queries.

More important is your web page's filename, since many search engines now allow users to query using "inurl:" searches. For fun, try this query in Google (copy/paste): "ebook site:.com filetype:pdf". You'll find all you can eat eBooks (you're welcome).

Your filename for the golf putters page could be golf-putters.html or golf_putters.html. Anytime there is an opportunity to display or present content, do your best to insure the content has the keywords in the filename (as well as a Title or ALT attribute).

You may need to contact your IT department or webmaster to rewrite your page URLs if your website platform is non-accommodating to custom URL nomenclature.

SEO Tip #8: Tell the Search Engines What to Index

I may take a lot of heat from the other SEO's out there for this one, especially because Google and other search engines have already helped reduce the amount of duplicate content indexed. However, I do enough search queries that begin with "site:" to know that duplicate content is still a major issue. Worse, I see a lot of files showing up in the indexes that should be hidden from the world (case in study: all the free PDF's you're probably still downloading from SEO Tip #7).

Optimizing Your robots.txt File

By far the easiest top 10 SEO tips you will ever do as it relates to search engine optimization is include a robots.txt file at the root of your website. Open up a text editor, such as Notepad and type "User-agent: *". Then save the file as robots.txt and upload it to your root directory on your domain. This one command will tell any spider that hits your website to "please feel free to crawl every page of my website".

Hopefully, you've already moved all the excessive JavaScripts and CSS styles into their own folders on your website to reduce the filesize and load time of the pages on your website. If you have, adding a simple "Disallow: /js/" to a file called the robots.txt will tell the crawlers not to bother with files in the JS folder and to only focus on your content, as opposed to non-important source code. Here's an example of the robots.txt file from this website:

Redirecting Duplicate Content

For consistency, it's better to have one version of each page to get all the inbound links and earn all of the points with the search engines. This means telling Google and Bing (in their respective Webmaster Tools) to only index the www.-version of your website (or the non-www version if you're "one of those types of people"). You can also use your Windows Server or a file called the .htaccess file on your Apache server to permanently redirect one version to the other.

Next, add a new tag to every page of your website to prevent other versions of the page from appearing in the search results. Just think about all the different ways we display content. There are often "Print View", "Flash Version", and pages with reviews, ratings and comments that append page URLs with strings such as &rating=5, &view=print, etc. To correct this issue, we add a Canonical Tag to every page of the website. Here's the syntax:

Finally, you should round up all those domains you bought and make sure they are pointing to your one main website with a 301 Permanent Redirect. Bruce Clay created a way to this efficiently which he called an IP Funnel. I've been the victim of this so many times being an SEO Expert. More than once, I've found myself scratching my head trying to figure out why a website would not get Google PageRank^™, only to find out later than an older domain held by the client had been displaying the same content and had been the one Google gave the credit to.

SEO Tip #9: Feed Search Engines Static and XML Site Maps

Optimizing Your Static Site Map

PageRank is relative and shared throughout a website by a unique voting system created by Google. I could spend two days trying to explain how PageRank^™ works, but what it comes down to is having efficient navigation throughout your site. That where a site map page comes in. Since every page on the website will be linked to the site map, it allows webcrawlers (and users) to quickly and easily find content. This SEO tip is one of my favorite of top 10 SEO tips.

It used to take 4 clicks to get to a product page at www.questinc.com. By creating a site map, users and search engines can now access any page on the site with only two clicks. The PageRank from these deep pages went from 0 to 2 in about 3 months and the ranking went from virtually not existent to #1 almost across the board for nearly 2,000 pages on their site.

Feel free to search Google for any of the terms on this catalog page, such as MITSUBISHI Monitor Repair. See how powerful a static site map can truly be.

Using XML Site Maps

Though you may feel like it is impossible to get listed high in Google's search engine result page, believe it or not that isn't Google's intention. They simply want to insure that their viewers get the most relevant results possible. In fact, they've even created a program just for webmasters to help insure that your pages get cached in their index as quickly as possible. They call the program Google Sitemaps. In this tool, you'll also find a great new linking tool to help discover who is linking to your website.

For Google, these two pieces in the top 10 SEO tips would be to read the tutorial entitled How Do I Create a Sitemap File and to create your own. To view the one on this page, website simply right-click this SEO Tips Sitemap.xml file and save it to your desktop. Open the file with a text editor such as Notepad.

Effective 11/06, Google, Yahoo!, and Bing will be using one standard for site maps. Below is a snippet of the standard code as listed at Sitemaps.org. Optional fields are lastmod, changefreq, and priority.

 

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">

   <url>

      <loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>

      <lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>

      <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>

      <priority>0.8</priority> 

   </url>

</urlset>

SEO Tip #10: Use Checklists and Validators

There are several ways to validate the accuracy of your website's source code. The four most important, in my opinion, are validating your search engine optimization, HTML, CSS and insuring that you have no broken links or images.

Start by analyzing broken links. One of the W3C's Top 10 SEO Tips would be for you to use their tool to validate links. If you have a lot of links on your website, this could take awhile, so I recommend trying Xenu's Link Sleuth, which you can find on our SEO Software page.

Next, revisit the W3C to analyze HTML and CSS. Here is a link to the W3C's HTML Validation Tool and to their CSS Validation Tool. A new, unbelievable tool just came out that does much better than some of these older ones, and that is the Qualidator Site Analyzer tool, which you can also find listed in our SEO Software page.

The final step in the last of my Top 10 SEO Tips is to validate your search engine optimization. Without having to purchase software, the best online tool I know of for this (now) is my own SEO Audit List, which contains website-level SEO validation, webpage-level SEO structure and keyword optimization, and off-page SEO strategies you should have in your arsenal. You can also use WebsiteGrader.com and other online tools. However, they aren't as inclusive (yet) as my Audit Checklist.

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