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.

Free SEO keyword analyzer tool!

This article is about a free website which has a great text analysis tool, that is very useful for anyone in the internet marketing game or who optimizes their website for search engine rankings. The sites address is www.textalyser.net this tool really does the job when it comes to analyzing either all the text on a website or just a certain portion of your choice. Giving you all sorts of great information about the keywords used in the site.

When you first enter the site you can either paste in a certain portion of text into the designated area, or you just type in the URL of the whole website you would like to have analyzed. Then you can choose as to what analysis options you would like to perform. Such as the minimum characters per word, whether you would like it to ignore numbers, and a few more. After you chose your options then you simply click analyze the text, thus returning you a complete very detailed analysis.

At the very top of your analysis it shows some basic text information like the total word count, number of different words used, sentence count, a readability index ranging from easy to hard. That little function comes in handy, because you definitely want the text of your page to be easy for the viewer to read.

The next and perhaps most important feature, shows you the occurrences and frequency at which the top keywords for your page show up. It ranks them from the number one word to whichever number you would like it to stop at. That is set at the options you chose before you analyzed the text. This particular feature is very nice to SEO's, seeing as that it lists the top words on a site and the density/frequency of which they appear. So an example of how this might help would be if you were targeting to have a certain keyword density for a particular keyword on your site. Thus enabling you to figure out whether to add more or less of that word to meet the density at which is required for the search engines to list you for that keyword.

Not only does this tell you your top ranking keywords it tell you the top word phrases, ranging from 2 word to 5 word phrases. It gives the count of how many times that phrase was used and also shows the frequency compared to the rest of the text on the page.

Anyone who is in the internet marketing field especially marketers who optimize their websites for search engine traffic can make great use of this free tool. I personally find great use in this tool for the process of my keyword research, which is essential for any search engine optimization campaign.

16 Ecommerce SEO Tips

A typical Ecommerce website contains a few hundred pages. An Ecommerce giant like Amazon contains thousands of products and millions of web pages. Optimizing a website like Amazon is not tough; it just requires a strong SEO strategy.

Optimizing an Ecommerce site is slightly different from optimizing a static website. You need to plan and construct your optimization strategy well in advance. This will help save you a lot of time and effort in the future.

16 Ecommerce SEO Tips to Keep Your Website Ahead in Rankings and Traffic

1. Maintain a Uniform and Clean Website Structure: The home page of your website should reflect the product categories; while all the inner pages should follow a common webpage structure.

2. Use a Unique Title Tag: Every product page should have a unique title. An Ecommerce site can contain any number of web pages. You can ask the programmer to code the title from the page content and product name. This makes your SEO more dynamic.

3. Select an Appropriate Keyword: The keywords must be unique for every webpage. They must reflect the important phrases within the webpage content. For an Ecommerce site, you can ask the programmer to select keywords from the content and product name.

4. Create a Relevant Description Per Web Page: The description of a web page is the snippet which appears in the SERPS. Every visitor reads the snippet and then clicks on the search result. It is very important to include a description relevant to the webpage content.

5. Include Breadcrumbs for All Inner Pages: A breadcrumb is like a secondary navigation structure. It helps the visitor to navigate back to the main product category page. A breadcrumb also helps in the internal linking of the website. Overall, including a breadcrumb makes the website SEO friendly.

6. Use a Heading Tag: Searchbots assign a lot of importance to the heading tag. The heading tag is SEO friendly and can be used to format the title of the web page content.

7. Avoid Usage of Flash: Avoid using flash on every web page of your Ecommerce website. This will expand the site loading time. If the use of flash is inevitable, include textual content in the flash. Search engines are capable of reading the text in the flash file.

8. Optimize Images: Add the Alt tag to all the images of your website. Search engines cannot read images. The Alt tag is a means of ensuring that the search engines read the alternate text for images.

9. Optimize Anchor Text: Anchor text appears between the anchor opening and closing tag. It is good practice to use keywords as the anchor text.

10. Create an SEO Friendly URL Structure: The default URL structure of a dynamic website contains parameters. Search engines are not capable of understanding these parameters. A good URL structure must contain words separated by hyphens.

11. Generate a XML Sitemap: A XML sitemap contains all the URLs present in the website and makes it easy for searchbots to find and index all web pages. If the number of web pages on a site is large, you can create a number of XML sitemaps and then submit these sitemaps to Google via Webmaster Tools. E.g. sitemap1.xml, sitemap2.xml.

12. Limit the Number of Outbound Links: Always link to a safe and secure website. If you are not sure about the quality of the website you are linking out to, use the no follow attribute.

13. Submít to Search Directories: Forward your website URL to good quality search directories. Most of the search directories take a few weeks to link back to a site. Fill in the details of the submission form carefully, so that the administrator accepts the submission.

14. Submít to Article Directories and Social Bookmarking Sites: Article submission is the quickest way of obtaining high quality backlinks. You need to select the do follow bookmarking sites and submit the URL to them. Growth in traffic is a plus point of submitting to social bookmarking sites.

15. Integrate a Secure Payment Gateway: A secure payment gateway is the heart of an Ecommerce website. Get a trust seal from Verisign, TrustE, etc. Visitors will be more likely to trust your site and to make an online payment.

16. Track User Behavior with a Good Analytics Tool: You can track and analyze visitor behavior with a good analytics tool. You need to select an analytics tool based on your requirements. If your Ecommerce website operates on a large scale, you can opt for a paid analytics tool. Otherwise you can use a variety of free tools to obtain the best results.

It is very easy to rank well and get quality traffic with these tips. The trick is to maintain the balance of the site being SEO and user friendly.