SEO Considerations for New or Improved Websites

Search is still the No. 1 way users find a website, and astronomically so. As such, it’s an important consideration when embarking on a new business venture to think about re-launching an existing site, purchased from a marketplace like Flippa, or to create a new business from scratch.

If you’re simply worried about SEO, the truth is, each scenario has its challenges and benefits. There is no unequivocal rule of thumb that one is better than the other. To determine what’s best for you, examine the list of requirements for each undertaking, and make an informed decision about how to proceed. Below are the most critical considerations for launching a new web business, or revamping an existing site with an overhaul.

SEO Requirements for Brand New Sites
Launching a squeaky clean new website has a serious draw. Imagine the joy of a clean slate, the chance to do everything right out of the gate.
Yet the pressure is immense to get it all done successfully on Day 1. There is so much to consider, it’s easy to drop the ball on any one given focus. To make sure your SEO efforts are aces right from the start, follow these tips:

1)   URL Structure — Be 100 percent sure you’re compliant with your URL structure; this is one part of your site that is a nightmare to change in the future. Obviously, your website name is crucial; be descriptive, avoid special characters, and the more keywords you use the better. Furthermore, avoid creating site sections like blog.website.com — instead, keep your core content within a normal domain structure; blogs should always be at website.com/blog. The same goes for key navigation segments.

2)   Set-Up Your Webmaster Tools — Don’t wait until long after launch to create a webmaster account with Bing and Google. Have this in place straight away, and alert them when you site is live.

 3)   Keywords, Keywords, Keywords — The very moment you’ve decided on a company name, URL, and brand strategy, kick your keyword research into high gear. Then apply these phrases throughout your site in organic and natural places within the text. Yes, images are always important to a website’s aesthetics and appeal; words, however, are still king in SEO, so make sure your copy tells the story of your company with highly targeted keyword phrases.

4)   Double Check Title Tags and Descriptions — These should also be laden with your core keywords, and be fully optimized at launch.

5)   Get Marketing Materials Ready Pre-Launch — Have all your social media profiles good to go, as well as the first couple of marketing campaigns locked and loaded. Start sounding the alarm about your business the moment you feel it’s stable and ready to receive the attention it deserves. Do not wait to handle marketing efforts once you’ve launched the site; you may miss some golden opportunities to start strong.

6)   Test Site Performance Metrics — Be extremely meticulous in the first few weeks about monitoring performance. This includes ensuring your robots.txt sitemap is complete and functional, redirects are performing correctly, all URLs are legitimate (no 404s), you have zero indexing errors, and that all your core pages have appropriate load times.

7)   Benchmark Your Rankings — Once you launch, create an immediate benchmark for your key rankings, and don’t forget to include your company name as well. This will give you a baseline to study SERPs going forward. Set goals early on as well, and methods to create these successes, as a means to be proactive about forward movement.

SEO Considerations for a Website Re-Launch
If you choose to rebrand a site instead, many of the steps above remain the same. There are additional items to include as well — use the list below as your foundation.

1)   Create a Pre Re-Launch Baseline — Just like Step 7 above for new sites, before you make any changes to the existing site, measure all appropriate metrics so your starting foundation is crystal clear. As you determine your new keywords, see how the site ranks for those before you make your changes; this will make it much easier to see how you’re improving things during the re-launch.

2)   Map all Old Pages to the New Ones — Assuming you’re changing the site structure, make sure to move all desired content correctly, or you can do some serious damage. Create a flowchart that maps old URLs to new ones, and follow it religiously. Even if you decide to delete some pages, these should redirect to a page on the new site.

3)   Make 301 Redirects Throughout Your Site — The 301 “permanently moved” redirect is your friend when it comes to moved pages. This is the only reference that will not hurt your SEO rankings.

4)   Update all Marketing Campaigns — You’ll want to update all social media profiles and marketing materials with your new branding images and language, if appropriate. If you’ve developed a new logo, make a list of all places you’ll need to update this, and do so as soon as you re-launch. Don’t confuse consumers with dual branding, or let old marketing campaigns linger.

5)   QA Thoroughly — Once you re-launch your site, it’s crucial that you test all components completely, in all major browsers, devices, and operating systems. Don’t assume your site works as it did before — test things like redirects and core functionality to make sure visitors aren’t encountering any errors.
Whether you choose to start from scratch or to improve upon an existing brand, there are many tasks to cover to ensure great SEO rankings from the start. Remember that if you re-launch a site, it’s completely normal to experience a significant dip in SERPs for the first few weeks; this should improve greatly in a month or so if you’ve covered all your bases.

Website Design - Top Ten Ways To Identify A Quality Design And Development Firm

An effective website attracts customers to your business, generates sales leads and closes sales - multiplying your profits in the process. Professional web design firms must combine uniqueness and innovation in design with state-of the-art technology and maintenance support to create a powerful website that produces results. Before hiring a web designer, consider the following ten factors: 1. Effective Web Designers communicate well Experienced web-designers support multiple modes of communication for interacting with their clients. These include phone, email and live chat. Depending on your requirements, you can use the communication method that suits you best. 2. Website Design Budgets Should Focus on Results Effective web-design teams often combine the method of flat fees with hourly billing for software design and installation. It is never advisable to enter into open-ended billing relationships with Web designers until the maintenance phase of the project. 3. Smart Web Designers and Developers Make Billing Easy An experienced web-design company usually charges twenty to fifty percent of the project fee in advance, and accepts payment through checks and major credit cards. 4. A Web Design Company Shares Its Work Professional design companies encourage their designers to maintain portfolios representing their best work, client information and testimonials. You can request portfolios to assess the effectiveness of the company’s web design solutions. 5. Flexible Website Designers Use Time Saving Technology Quality web design teams support the use of inexpensive and time saving technology. This includes open source publishing and e-commerce tools like WordPress for handling Weblogs and corporate information pages, osCommerce for online shopping features and Zope for building customized content management and customer interaction tools. These tools enable businesses to achieve professional standards while saving time and money. 6. Efficient Web Design Professionals Blend Stock and Scratch sources Efficient website designers always maintain a set of stock templates and images to speed up work. When designing a website for a client, they select an appropriate stock template and customize it from scratch to meet client-specific requirements and ensure uniqueness and freshness in design. 7. Intelligent Web Professionals Distinguish Design and Hosting Many website design firms offer complementary and low cost Web-hosting solutions, usually as part of their maintenance packages. Quality firms provide excellent uptime, reliability and service. Compare the cost and benefits of an in-house hosting solution and an independent web-host before making your decision. 8. Creative Website Designers Let Clients Handle Minor Updates Experienced Web designers develop architectures for Websites including publishing platforms that simplify the process of making changes. These plans are so effective that they allow you to make minor updates in-house or with the help of a less expensive Web professional. These web designers often save their skills for launching or re-launching websites and major revisions requiring considerable work on design, templates and graphics. 9. The Best Web Developers Understand Standards and Accessibility The designed website should comply with both web standards like standards for interface design and browser accessibility, and state and federal guidelines such as providing accessibility features for the visually impaired and people suffering with other medical insufficiencies. Experienced Web designers should also ensure SEO optimization of your website and prevent it from become inaccessible and unusable. 10. A Good Web Design Company Gets Honest about Rates and Turnaround Time Even the most efficient Web designers can combine only two of the three features (High quality, speed and low cost) when designing your web-site. Professional web design teams will provide you accurate estimates about their rates, speed and turnaround time. Firms that are more expensive often have smaller waiting lists. If sufficient time is available, you can get a high quality website at a lower cost. Select a Web design firm that meets your requirements. Focusing on Results sets Premier Website Design Professionals Apart Effective Web designers comply with all of the above-mentioned practices. More importantly, they make clients feel comfortable about wading into unfamiliar waters. The right Web design firm can enable your business to save thousands of dollars and valuable time. About the Author: Daljeet Sidhu is Co-founder at TradeSeam. See guide to hiring web site development firms. Compare web design services quotes. Sellers JOIN for sales leads. Source: http://www.isnare.com/ Permanent Link: http://www.isnare.com/?aid=422286&ca=Internet

How to Rank High in Search Engines Result Pages (SERP’s)

Studies have revealed that 90% of Internet users find websites through search engines and out of those users, 90% do not go past the first 30 results displayed. With this in mind it is easy to see why it’s important for your website to rank high in these results.

Search Engine Results Pages (SERP's) are the pages you see after you type in a search on Google or other search engines and click on the Search button. Because 90% of people use search engines to find what they are looking for these SERP’s are the most important pages on the internet.

The Search Engines Result Pages (SERP’s) can be broadly divided into two categories: “Organic” or ”Natural” listings and Paid Advertisements usually bought on a "Pay Per Click" (PPC) basis.

Roughly 80% of clicks at Google occur within the organic listings not the PPC listings. This is why is it important to get your site to rank naturally in the search engine result pages. Getting your site to rank high is not tricky; it’s just a matter of optimising your website to be search engine friendly. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of engineering your website so it can be properly read by the search engine spiders. SEO is pretty much common sense, search engines are text analysis systems so if your webpage is full of images with little text your site will not rank high. You need to target each keyword/phrase on different pages. So if you want to target the search terms “business plans” you need to have one page with the title “business plans” and lots of text about “business plans”.


To me this is just common sense but then I have been working in the SEO field for a number of years. However it never ceases to amaze me why people still call their home pages “home” or have their business name on the title of every single page of website. The owners probably search for their business and are pleased when it comes up first in Google. This is only good for the customers that know your company which is fine for large brands like Argos or Amazon but if you’re trying to get customers from for internet users you need to optimise your text for the search engines.

The other aspect of getting high SERPs is trust and authority. It is kind of no different than any other business trying to gain trust and a good reputation. Forgetting the cyber world for a moment, in the real world established businesses have much more clout that new start up businesses. Like your favourite restaurant. If a new restaurant opened up just down the street you might not want to chance eating there and stick with your favourite restaurant. Now if you hear that its gaining a good reputation for good food you might then decide to try it out yourself. The same can be said about websites except the trust you get is via an algorithm. The more links you get from already established trusted (authoritive) sites the more Google will trust you. It makes sense really, because a good website will not link to a rubbish or not relevant website.

Another aspect of trust is by doing things with the search engines terms and conditions. This means building links naturally and using keywords excessively. Adding 500 pages in one day is not a naturally progression, search engines like websites to expand naturally, anything else and their warning lights flash which means they might look into your site and possibly penalise it.
So the only way to obtain high SERPs is to do everything the search engines like. This means building websites that are easy to navigate (so users and the crawlers can find every page easily), have lots of good relevant interesting content and plenty of trusted links. Make your website the best site on the internet in your chosen niche and you shouldn’t go far wrong.

About the Author: Carolyn is the webmaster of Search Solutions Ltd, experts in obtaining High Search Engines Results.

Source: http://www.isnare.com/
Permanent Link: http://www.isnare.com/?aid=280696&ca=Internet

Link building for effective search engine optimization

When you begin the task of acquiring quality and relevant backlinks to your website there are many factors that can increase or decrease your search engine rankings. This article outlines the difference between good and bad backlinks.

A quality backlink pointing to your site should be in the same category and relevant in content to your website. The page where your link is located should be indexed by Google and the page should also have a Google page rank. The webpage where your link is located should also contain no more than 30 other out-going links to other websites. Link pages with more than 30 out-going links are less relevant to the search engines. Having your link posted on this type of webpage can affect your search engine rankings in a negative way. Other excellent techniques of acquiring backlinks are directory submissions, posting articles, blogs and forums.

For directory submissions select the proper directory category and take a look at how many other websites are contained in the category where your link would be posted, if you can manage to get on the first or second page of the listings, this is a quality backlink. Also look at the Google page rank of the landing page for your link. If the page has a Google page rank this is also a quality backlink.


Stay within your category, relevant content is very important to the search engines. Write an article preferably relevant in content to your website and submit the article to high quality article directories. Blogs are an excellent way to get quality one-way backlinks, Blog sites also receive tons of traffic, which in turn give your site more exposure. Posting your link on forum pages is also an efficient method of aquiring backlinks instantly.

Backlinks to avoid would be a zero page ranked webpage, especially if the home page has a zero page rank. Links posted within framed webpages which will also steal your traffic. Especially avoid link farms, webpages which contain more than 100 unrelated outgoing links, This type of link page is frowned upon by many major search engines. Avoid Webpages with mirror sites containing the exact same content with a different URL, also pages that utilize redirects and URL cloaking. Never post your link on a webpage that contains a "no follow" or "no index" robots meta tag within the source code. Dynamic websites with question marks in the URL should be avoided because they are not always indexed by the search engines.

Avoid posting your link on a page that opens very slow or contains mostly ads and flash banners. Try not to aquire or purchase great numbers of backlinks in a short period of time, backlinks should be accumulated gradually. Also avoid webpages and directories that list their results in alphabetical order, as their database increases your link could be moved to a less relevant page with less pagerank. Quality backlinks are one of the most important factors involved in the process of acheiving high search engine ranking.

Author Bio Article written by the CEO of http://www.submit-site.org/ Article Source: http://www.articlegeek.com/

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

How to Gather Facebook Fans

For many businesses and institutions, having a Facebook page is an effective way to promote their products and services, and can significantly expand their network. Getting tons of fans on Facebook is easy, if you just follow some of these simple ideas.

First off, start with what you already have. Click on the "Suggest to Friends" button and invite friends from your original profile. The number of fans you will get from this method depends mainly on the number of friends that you actually have and your relationship with them. Aside from this, you should also invite your e-zine and e-mail subscribers. Send out an e-mail to your subscribers informing them of your fan page, and place a logo of Facebook in your newsletters.

Get the people who regularly visit your site to go to your Facebook fan page by embedding eye-catching things on your website. Choose from a number of widgets that you can embed on your site, such as the Fan Box widget, where you can display your page stream and some fans, or the Live Stream widget, which fans can use to send comments in real time. You can also load nice videos on your Facebook page and embed them on your website or your blog. The video serves as a link to your Facebook fan page.


People are attracted to unique and interesting material. A great way to get more people to check out your Facebook page and like it is to add interesting stuff on your fan page. Make your fan page unique by uploading an attractive welcome video on your main canvas page. Here, you can share what your page is about and why people should "Like" it. There are also a number of Facebook applications that you can try adding to your page to make it more appealing, such as Vpype, a live video-streaming application where you can air Internet shows directly from your page. There are also several companies that create custom Facebook applications, depending on what you want.

After doing this you post interesting updates, articles and news relevant to your business on your Facebook, so that people who are added in your list get the post and are forced to comment on your profile. By doing this the user who will comment on your profile will in return automatically post your comment to all users in his profile. This will notify more users about your existence and you will end up getting more people in your network.

Don't forget to link, link, link. Make sure you add a link on your personal profile page that will direct your visitors to your Facebook fan page. Place your fan page’s URL right below your profile picture, on the "Write something about yourself" area, so that it will be easily visible to friends who visit your page. You can also link your fan page to other sites, such as Twitter. Your Facebook updates will automatically get posted to your Twitter account, and you can also promote your fan page on your background and Twitter bio field.

Above are the ways of doing it but the most important thing is that you keep on posting on your Facebook profile. You have to be very active on Facebook. An active profile is the key to attracting more and more users.
These are only a few of the things you can do to increase your Facebook fans. Try them out!

About the Author: Seomul Evans is a senior Custom Facebook Fan page designer and a Social Media Blogger.

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

How to Raise Your Rankings in Search Engines

I don't know how many times I've been asked. "How do I get traffic to my website?"
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.

Author Bio
For more information please goto: http://www.newworldproducts.com/

Article Source: http://www.articlegeek.com/