A guide to good Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tips:

Getting your website listed in Search Engines (SE) can sometime be a monumental task in itself, here are my top ten tips to get you started.

1. Page Title
Forget using 'Welcome to my website' as your page title, if you really want to attract target media specify your keywords and list your product keywords separated by an | (hold Shift + backslash key) symbol (eg: Digital Cameras | Video Cameras) will boost the strength of your chosen keywords, in this case Digital and Video Cameras.

2. Page File names
Still naming your page filenames as products.htm or aboutus.php, why not add some weight to your website and help the SE distinguish from the multitude of pages with generic names and again utilize your keywords into your filenames (e.g.: paper_back_novels.htm) for a Book selling site with this link to the list of Paper Back Novels.

3. ALT Tags
Again keywords play a huge part in the design of your site and another area to include these words is in your image 'ALT" tags.


4. Header Tags
Getting back to your Page Title, there is no point in making the heading text "Welcome to my Website" especially if you are selling Garden Tools. Using , and tags to emphasize your Products and Services in order of importance, lets the SE's.

5. Bold Text
Got something to say?, say it in Bold Text, this tells the SE that this text is important and relates strongly to your content and keywords and should be taken notice of.

6. Keywords
Some say they aren't that important anymore to getting results in the SERPS (Search Engine Result Pages) but using them correctly can add to your sites overall effectiveness. Concentrate on 3 - 4 keyword phrases (eg: "custom website design" or "web site design" for web site designers) and make sure they are used in the first and last paragraphs of your home page content.

7. Google Toolbar
Not only a search tool the Google Toolbar displays each sites Page Rank according to Google on it popularity and web presence.

8. Alexa Toolbar
Download the Alexa Toolbar from Amazon and sign up to their affiliate program, the tool bar is an essential tool in gauging the popularity and hit results of how your website ranks in the www..

9. RSS Feeds
Want to increase traffic? well consider starting a RSS Feed on your website with important news items relating to your business and your chosen profession then link these to your articles.

10. Article Writing
Article writing is another way to cross promote your site with helpful information for others and with links back to your site.

In conclusion
There are many facets to Search Engine Optimization of websites and these 10 tips are merely just a few and a good starting point to get your website promoted in the www.

Popular 2011 SEO Tools

There are a number of popular SEO tools available online that will make your work much easier. The SEO experts will advise you about these effective tools that will solve your problem areas. The first and most important tool is Google Analytics.

This is a free tool that gives you an easy solution to analyze the traffic of your website. You can track your site and find out the number of page views you have received in a particular time frame. You can also find out the length and depth of visit and the geographical location of your visit. The three SEO elements covered by Google Analytics are search traffic, search keywords and content performance.

Alexa toolbar is very useful for internet users. This is widely used by many webmasters for many years due to its ability to measure the performance and popularity of a website. Alexa is able to give you accurate results up to the top 100,000 sites existing online.

Another great tool that helps you to find out the right keywords for your site is KeyCompete. You can determine the keywords of your competitors easily. This could be obtained through their PPC programs. This is an online tool with lots of useful features. No one can overlook the usage of this tool to find out the appropriate keywords for their sites.

You can get information about your competitors and receive reports about their performance in major search engines like Google and Yahoo through the SEO tool SEOmoz. This helps you to find out what your competitors are doing and help you to keep track of their progress. Knowing these things will help you plan your future moves accordingly.

This also helps you in site error detection, traffic tracking and keyword research. IWEBTOOL has many tools in one that covers most areas of SEO. The great feature of this is the Google PageRank Prediction. This predicts the ranking in Google. This gives account of the links a domain has and measures the speed of the website. With Website Speed Test you can find out the time taken for site loading.

Widexl helps you to locate pages that are linked to your site. This feature has a meta tag analyzer that helps you to analyze the meta tags, page loading time and keyword density. You can check the links of your site on six search engines and make comparisons among competitors with another great tool of Widexl, Search Engine Saturation.

The SEO tool, Link Diagnosis helps the website owners to examine the link competition. This provides main details about eh links of the competitors. You can get details about anchor text, page ranks, etc. The Link Diagnosis runs only in Firefox browser.

SEO Logs is a combination of many free tools for SEO like Web Page SEO Optimizer, Keyword Difficulty Check, Backlinks Analyzer Tool, HTTP Headers, Domain Age Check, Alexa Rank Comparison, Adsense Profit Calculator, etc.

This helps you to measure the difficulty of keywords to get ranked in search engines. It also can detect the faked Pagerank and give PR value results. With these popular SEO tools you can optimize your site easily.

About the Author: If you want to learn more about various SEO tools you have to contact a up to date, professional SEO company.

Source: http://www.isnare.com/

Permanent Link: http://www.isnare.com/?aid=932616&ca=Internet

While Designing a Website wear the Shoes of a Crawl Spider

The  is similar to tests of strength knights of yesteryears went through. To taste success a website needs to be more than functional or great looking. It is a complicated business and webmasters are now kept on their toes trying to get higher rankings on search engines.

The secret lies in appealing to search engine spiders and so you need to know in detail how a spider works before you build a site.

• Spiders read text and cannot comprehend images, colours or graphics. So, any page that is design friendly with little or no content it will receive a low rank. Unless, you include in text format information contained in graphic images; submit only URLs of main content pages and not splash pages; include ALT descriptions of all pictures and include keywords that pertain to them.

• Know that the components that attract spiders are: TITLE tags, META tags, Header tags, keywords, and links. Many spiders score entire sites based on the overall scheme.

• Spiders read algorithms and do not take in whole pages. So, be news savvy and like newspapers place the most important information first. Titles, headers, and the introductory paragraphs must present the essentials.

• Keep updated on technical advancements in the way search engines examine materials. Read through guidelines of major search engines, as well as blogs and forum devoted to SEO and spiders.

Once your page is designed think about using a search engine stimulator to evaluate your pages. See: www.webconfs.com/search-engine-spider-simulator.php you can add the tool to your website. The report will clarify where you need to make any changes.

A search engine stimulator will also help you determine whether hyperlinks in your pages are "real." Experts recommend using tags instead of java script based menus. Try and limit hyperlinks to less than 100 and check that they do not lead to 403 Forbidden or 404 Page Not Found pages. Spiders do not deal with such errors and your pages will not get indexed.

What any search engine spider does is that is crawls the web and indexes pages in any given database. The spider makes use of algorithms to determine page ranking and relevancy of indexed pages.

Be SEO savvy and select keywords that search engines will find. Tools like Keyword Playground and Website Key Word Suggestions will help greatly. Avoid dynamic pages and if you have them then run them through the spider stimulator to check if dynamic pages are accepted. Get your Meta Keywords and Meta Descriptions Right these are the delicacies a spider relishes. They are the cornerstones of page ranking and relevance in the "eyes" of any spider.

When planning a web site and its pages keep in mind at all times " the spider." This will help you develop pages that are search engine friendly.

How to Raise Your Rankings in Search Engines - Basic SEO

To best discuss this topic I should break this down into categories

1. Title Tags
The title Should contain keywords and keyword phrases that is important to your site. Our recommended maximum number of characters for this tag is 60.
Also when counting your characters remember that spaces are considered as well.
Titles should appeal to the reader otherwise even a top position will lose a lot of clicks.
For example, "shoes, nike shoes, best shoes, review shoes," is unlikely to induce a click. What may induce a click would be like: Shoes - Find out the latest styles on name brand shoes.

2. Description
The maximum number of characters I recommend for this Tag is 150. Any longer than this and it will only be cut off and may count against your site being listed high in the search engines. Try to repeat your keywords that you used in your title in a proper sentence and in 3rd party. Avoid I, Me, Myself etc

3. Keywords
keywords My recommended maximum number of characters for this tag is 250. Any more than that may be considered spamming. Keep your keywords focused upon what your site is about.
Don't think that if I use an assortment of different keywords that your site will be a seller. Targeted marketing is associated with your keywords.

4. Keyword Nesting
Description: A term used in searching to indicate the sequence in which operations are to be performed
Enclosing words in parentheses identifies a group or "nest." Groups can be within other groups.
The operations will be performed from the innermost nest to the outmost, and then from left to right.
keyword nesting is nesting your top 5 most important keywords in the html page that the public will see. I would recommend using the keywords that you've used in your title, description.

5. Head Tags not to be confused with (head) tags def.
HEAD or HEADER (of HTML document)
The top portion of the HTML source code behind Web pages, beginning with and ending with . It contains the Title, Description, Keywords fields and others that web page authors may use to describe the page. The title appears in the title bar of most browsers, but the other fields cannot be seen as part of the body of the page. To view the portion of web pages in your browser, click VIEW, Page Source. In Internet Explorer, click VIEW, Source. Some search engines will retrieve based on text in these fields.
Head Tags should be a repeat of your title tag. Most webmasters put their head tag right after the body tag. A head tag will look like this (h1) (/h1) with the ( and ) being replaced with < >

6. Anchor Links
Anchor Links is one of the most important html tags that your site needs to gain search engine page rank especially in google and msn.

Google AdSense and AdWords - Like Yin and Yang

Many websites include a section or two with the "Ads by Google" above it or below it. These are ads displayed via Google's AdSense. When you do a search on Google and see ads in the search results pages, they are generally AdSense ads.

AdSense - The Yin:
Google's AdSense is programming that "senses" the content of a page or search. It finds keywords on a web page or in a search phrase to determine the subject of the content. It does this by either "reading" the page, or taking a look at the search term that was typed into Google Search. It can "Sense" which ads in the system are relevant to the content or search and display them - thus: "AdSense."

Before ads on a page are displayed, AdSense searches its database of advertisers and finds ads that are associated with keywords on the page or in the search. Now AdSense needs to decide which of the thousands of ads vying for position are actually displayed. To make this decision, AsSense looks at the advertiser's bids for the relevant keywords. The advertisers that have a combination of the highest bid, keyword relevance and best click through get displayed first.

Google tracks clicks on ads and advertisers pay Google the bid price for each click. When the AdSense ad is on someone's web page, Google pays the website owner a portion of the payment for each click. The term "monetizing" your site refers to taking your existing site and placing ads like AdSense on it to make money (or finding other way to make money with websites). If you get 10,000 visitors and 10% of them click an ad that pays you, theoretically, $0.75 per click, you just made $750! Not bad for just copying some AdSense code (which Google provides) into your popular website's HTML (if your site is not popular, learn about SEO - Search Engine Optimization - from sites like AcmeWebResources).

AdWords - The Yang:
The other side to AdSense is AdWords. AdSense ads have lists of relevant keywords associated with them. Each keyword is bid on by the advertisers for placement in the results pages and on web sites around the world. The words that will prompt a display of an advertiser's ad are bid on by the advertiser. When an ad matches the words on a page, the ads are displayed; thus: AdWords. AdWords is the system in Google that is used to place ads that display in AdSense.

You can enroll in AdWords to pay for AdSense ads to drive traffic to your site. The first step is to sign up with Google. The next step is to associate keywords to associate with your site.

The idea is to drive traffic to your site through the use of relevant ads. The more relevant the ad to your content, the more targeted your traffic will be. Compose your articles around your list of keywords. Next, write an ad based on the keywords and assign keywords to the ad. You will bid on the keywords at the time you associate keywords with the ad. If one of your keywords is searched for or relevant to a site, and you have a good bid and relevant ad, your AdWord ad will be displayed. Only when someone clicks your ad are you charged by Google.

The more popular keywords are wanted by many competitors, so the prices per click can get pretty high. It is not uncommon for a click to cost $5 or even $10. If you have 10,000 ad clicks, after you account for your conversion rate (the rate that you convert visitors into buyers) you better be sure you are making more than the ad click costs! But it should never break your bank because you can set the bid limits and the monthly budget.

What if you can't afford $5.00 per click? Since the more popular keywords are so expensive, it is best to bid on less popular keywords because the cost per click is lower. Google presently has a minimum bid of $0.05 per click. If you can get those, you can reduce your advertising budget.

A popular site can make a lot of money, however, a lot of money and time can be wasted. To avoid waste, you have to learn as much as possible and get the right tools to do the research.

SEO - 9 Ridiculously Easy Steps to the Top 10

Search Engine Optimization companies are making a fortune by doing the menial work

 that is overlooked by many designers. It is ridiculously easy to do most of the work done by most SEO companies, all you have to do is create good habits.

There are 9 main points you should focus on:

• Keywords
• URL Text
• Description, Meta tags
• Title tags
• Image Names
• ALT tags
• Heading tags
• Content
• Hyperlinks

The focus of these 8 steps is to load your pages with as many "keywords" as possible.

Keywords
Keywords are the most important aspect of good SEO, this is where you tell the Search Engines what your site is about. Search Engines use an algorithm to determine the "Keyword Density" of your site, this formula is:

Total Words ÷ Keywords= Keyword Density

Use this formula on your competitors web site and see how they score, then aim to beat that score.

Choose keywords that best relate to the information, products or services that you are offering. For instance, if I am designing a site about "Web Design", I want my site to include the words "Web Design" as many times as possible.

However, most people don't just search for just one word, they type phrases, so you should consider the phrases that best suit your sites target market. For example, if I am creating a site about "Web Design" in New Orleans, I would include "New Orleans web design" in my keywords. Another way around this is to not separate my keywords with commas, just use spaces, and the Search Engines will make the phrases for you. The most important thing to remember is that the content of each page is different, so only use keywords pertaining to that page.

URL Text
When you name a new page you have the option to call it anything you could possibly think of, why not se a keyword? After all, the URL address is the first things a search engine comes across when indexing your pages. You have to remember content doesn't come easy to everyone, so you gotta slip in your keywords when the process gives you an easy one.

Description Meta tags
These tags are dwindling in importance since Search Engines are now looking at content, but every little bit counts.

Optimize your meta tags to match your content, products, and services, and the Search Engines that still look at meta data will reward your efforts.

Title Tags
Title tags are the tags that tell the Search Engine the title, or formal description of the document or page. This is the word or phrase that is seen at the top of the browser window. The most important rule about title tags is, don't put anything in the title tags but keywords. Once again this is an easy time to slip in your keywords, so don't miss out.

Image Names
As I said before, content doesn't come easy to everyone, so slip in your keywords whenever possible, this applies to image names. If you are saving a picture of a guy working on a computer for your web design web site, don't call it "some_dude.jpg", call it "web_site_design.jpg". The Search engine will look at the code for the site and see the image pertains to the content of the site and this will be another relevant element on that particular page. You have to take the easy ones when you are given a chance.

ALT tags
Alt tags are keywords that you can attach to images, giving more weight to the image since Search Engines can't analyze the content of the image itself. Here is a chance to slip in more keywords without writing great content, use it.

Heading tags
Heading tags are associated with the bold font that leads into a section of text. Like this:

Web Design
Web Design Inc. offers custom web site designs...

Your heading tags should only be keywords, and should be presented in the order that your Meta tags follow.

H1= first meta tag, H2= second meta tag...

Try to utilize all 6 heading tags on each page to ensure maximum page optimization.

Content
As every expert will tell you, "Content is King." Each web page should have at least 350 words on it, and the more the better, but keep in mind the formula for keyword density. You don't want to fill a page with 1500 words of jibba-jabba and only 5 keywords in it. Some people get hung-up on how browsers display text, and use images with text in them because they want a cool font, but browsers can't read the text embedded in images, so this content ads no weight to the page in a Search Engines eyes.

Linkbaiting is the new trend among high ranking sites. Linkbaiting means writing quality content, or articles that other web sites can display on their pages as long as they give credit, and a link to your site.

You don't have to be a vi or emac expert to write good web content, just be thoughtful of how you word things and incorporate your keywords.

Hyperlinks
Hyperlinks are text links to other pages on your site. The rules of SEO and hyperlinks are easy:

• Use hyperlinks so the Search Engine will have a text link to follow to the next page
• Don't use one word links, use long link phrases, preferably keyword phrases
• Use bullets, or some sort of small image that you can attach an ALT tag to, this will ad more importance to the link, and throw in a couple of free keywords for you.

Keep these 9 aspects in mid when designing a site, and you are sure to have a leg up on the competition