Web Design – An Insight

You will only get a quick introduction to the most common ways of optimizing your site. This article does not by any means contain all details that effects how your site is ranking in the search engines, but gives you a few simple tips that can get you of in the right d irection.

SIDE NOTE

If you own SBI or you are planning to use it, you do not need to worry about the technical details in this part. SBI takes care of all the ‘tech stuff’ and the analyzing and optimizing of pages is done automatically, and the pages comes out ranking very well in the search engines. You will still get big value from reading about the off page optimization factors.

As we touched briefly in some of the parts before, SEO efforts are necessary to give your site best possible possibilities for ranking high on the search engine results pages (SERP). Getting into the top of the ten first results is the major goal of all SEO efforts. That means you are on the first page of results that comes up when someone makes a query and it is more likely that they will find your site and click thru to it if it is in the top ten somewhere, instead of on result number 599. No one goes that far in the list of results to find what they are looking for.

But you need to be patient in the start, do not expect to see a lot of traffic from search engine referrals in the first months. In that time the other traffic building methods are more important.

Basic SEO:

There are two major parts of SEO; on page optimization and off page optimization.

The on page optimization is optimizing all the ranking factors that are on your website. The off page optimization is the optimization of all the ranking factors that are not located on your website that the search engines use to determine the ranking of a website.

Optimizing on page factors:

When you have chosen your main keyword that will be the search term that you want your page to be found by, you will need to include that keyword a few important places where the search engine robots will look for information.

The robots (spiders, bots) will place special importance on the words in the title, description and headline of your document. It is important that you include your main keyword on all of those places. Even so, it is important to remember that you are writing both to satisfy the robots and the human readers, so short and descriptive sentences are the best. If you place keyword, keyword, keyword , it will look strange to a human reader. You just need to learn to convey what you want in as few words as possible.

Title tag:

Preferably you should place your keyword as the first word in the title tag of your page, and use as few other ‘filler’ words as possible.

Description tag:

In the description of your page be short and precise, and be sure to include your keyword once, at the most twice. In the description you can also place other secondary keywords or keywords that are related to your main keyword.

Keyword tag:

The effect of using the keyword tag has been discussed, because some search engines are said to not honor the keyword tag because it has been misused for spamming. Other search engines seem to honor the keyword tag, so we will put it in to be sure. Do not overuse it though. Put in only a few keywords or key phrases and do not put in 50 different keywords. That would be spamming.

Heading tags (h1 tags):

In the heading of your page you need to include your main keyword. This along with t he title tag is what says the most about what the content on the page is to the search engines robots. If the text is longer use also sub-headings (h2/h3 tags) containing your main keyword, and/or a variation of your main keyword.

In the text:

Throughout your text you need to sprinkle in your keyword here and there, preferably in the start of the text and close to the end of the text. Some SEO’s will give you a percentage of how many times you should mention your keyword in a text depending on the length of the text. You will not get that here, but it is important to mention the main keyword in the first couple of sentences. Put the keyword towards the end of the document too.

Bold/Itallics/Underlined

Also put your keyword in bold, underlined or italics once or twice on your page. Do not over do it, because if you do it will also be seen as spam.

Off page factors

- The off page ranking factors are:

- The number of sites linking to you

- How relevant to your topic these sites are

- The title of the page where your link appears

- The anchor text used in the link to you

- The amount and types of sites that are linking to the site that is linking to you

- The number of links on the page where your link appears

- The Google PageRank of the site that is linking to you

First a simple explanation of PageRank from Google itself:

“PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”

The simplest way to keep track of Google PR is to download the Google Toolbar. That will show the PR of each site you visit and it will also give you another neat feature which is showing how many backlinks a site has. If you hold the cursor over a domain and right click you will get a menu that

The number of sites linking to you

You would want to have as many websites linking to you as possible. That means that your site is popular and that will increase your ranking. But there is also differences here, sites that are more relevant to your subject and has a high PageRank and few links out will be worth more then a link from an irrelevant site with a ton of links out and no PageRank. But as a general rule we can say, the more links the better.

Please be aware that this linking need to come in a natural way and not 1000 back links in the week after your site has been indexed by the search engines. If you build your links to fast, it will make your site seem manipulated, and the back links will not be credited. In the worst case it will get your site dropped from the index of the search engine. A rule of thumb can be that you can build more back links if the site has got a lot of new content and is updated often.

How relevant to your topic these sites are

The more relevant to the topic of your site the pages with your link on are, the better it is. Stay away from FFA’s and Webrings that are just constructed to artificially increase your PageRank.

The title of the page where your link appears

Other important factors are the page title of the page that is linking to you. If it is similar or a variety of the keyword you are using it is seen as more relevant.

The anchor text used in the link to you

The anchor text that is used in the links that are pointing to your site is also an important ranking factor. The anchor text describes the link you are clicking on. It is the actual text that is made clickable in the link.

As an example we can use ‘click here’ this is the most common anchor text on the web, but as you see it does not give you much information about where it is leading and what the information on the page it is leading is about. The anchor text give both search engines and humans a clue of what they will meet when they click on the link.

On the links where you have influence over how the link is displayed, you should make sure that the anchor text on your links contains your main keyword. The links where you have influence is:

Internal links on your site

Reciprocal links

In the resource box of your articles

In directories where you submit your site

It is good to make some variations of the anchor text, so the search engines do not consider it as manipulation. If all you inbound links only contains your main keyword it seems unnatural.

When you are doing reciprocal linking it is good to provide the html code for your reciprocal link. Then you are in full control of which words are the actual link. The internal linking strategy is important, and the ‘votes’ that you give yourself counts as much as external links. Remember to use keywords as anchor text and not ‘home’ or ‘page 2‘or something similar when you link to your internal pages.

The amount and types of sites that are linking to the site that is linking to you

This is not a factor you can do, much about, but what you can do when you seek out linking partners is to look for sites that have a lot of back links to them. An explanation of how to do this is given in the research section on page 9.

The number of links on the page where your link appears

This is a factor that is important when seeking out link partners. Look at their links pages and see if they have many links on them. Above 100 is no good, less then 50 is good and the best would of course be if there are as few as possible links to other sites..

The Google PageRank of the site that is linking to you

A third factor you can not do much about, other then to look for the sites that has the higher PageRank when you are looking for link partners.

Searching for link partners and or one -way links:

A great way to find sites that will include your link either for free or as a link excange is to do a search query in Google that searches for submission forms:

Try one of these searches including the ‘allintext:’ command, and just change ‘keyword’ with your main keyword:

allintext: “submit a site” “keyword”

allintext: “add-a-link” “keyword”

allintext: “submit url” “keyword”

allintext: “add url” “keyword”

allintext: “add your site” “keyword”

Another query you can try is this:

Keyword “Please also suggest my link to the LinkPartners.com Directory”

Write it in the search field exactly as it is written above, you only need to change ‘keyword’ with your own keyword. That will bring up all the sites that uses your keyword, and has a link submission form from LinkPartners.com

The best places to look for link partners:

SiteSell Value Exchange

Linkmetro.com

Buying backlinks.

If you are going to buy backlinks there are a few things to watch out for. Lately it has become publicly known that Google discounts links that are recognized as bought links. The links can be recognized as purchased when they are placed in a section of a website that says ‘Sponsored Links’ or ‘Our Sponsors’ and so on. The best way to get a link displayed is without it being marked as sponsored. An example would be an in context text link with your keywords as anchor text.

Point to check:

Whenever you buy or exchange links, submit your site to directories or submit articles, press releases, or testimonials where your link will be displayed you should check that the links is displayed correctly and is possible for the search engines to spider.

If you are about to exchange links with a website always check that the site is indexed by the major search engines and is not using cheating methods.

The methods for cheating can be:

Disallowing robots via the robots.txt file

Using ‘nofollow’ and/or ‘noindex’ meta tags on the page where the link is displayed.

Using ‘nofollow’ and/or noindex’ attributes on the outgoing link itself.

Hiding the link in a JavaScript

Disallowing robots via the robots.txt file

Disallowing search engine robots of spidering the links/resource/directory pages where your link will be displayed. This is done via the robots.txt file. An easy way to detect this is to write in the domain like this in the address bar of your browser: http://www.example-domain.com/robots.txt

If the text you read looks like the example below and your link will be displayed in the links section, it is not ok:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /links/

The user agent means for which robot the instruction is meant for (* means all robots). Disallow means which directory the robot is excluded from. In the example above, robots are excluded from the /links/ directory. If there is nothing written in the disallow section, robots are allowed to spider the whole site.

You need to check that the directory where your link is going to be displayed is not disallowed. If the website you are checking does not have a robots.txt file, you will get an error page or get redirected to the home page.

There is much more to know about robots.txt files and if you come into situations where you have questions, this is a site with great information: http://www.robotstxt.org/

Using ‘nofollow’ and/or ‘noindex’ meta tags on the page where the link is displayed. To check if the site you are exchanging links with is using ‘nofollow ,noindex’ in the meta tags you need to view the source code of the document. You just go to the toolbar of your browser and click on ‘view’ and then click on ‘source’. Then you will see the raw html of the page displayed. You will find the meta tags are at the beginning of the page between the <head> tags, and if they are using the exclusion tag it will look like this:

<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW”>

If you do not see it, or you see what it shown below, it is OK:

<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”INDEX, FOLLOW”>

Using ‘nofollow’ attributes on the outgoing link itself.

To check if the site you are about to exchange links with is using ‘nofollow’ attribute on their links, you need to check the html code (view source) of the page where the links are displayed. If the links on the page where your link will be displayed has a ‘nofollow’ attribute on them, the link will not be followed by robots, and will not be credited when linkpopularity is counted. If it is used, the links will look like this:

<a href=”http://www.example domain.com/” rel=”nofollow”>Anchor text</a>

If the links looks like the example below, it is OK:

<a href=”http://www.example-domain.com/”>Anchor text</a>

Hiding the link in a JavaScript The search engines does not read JavaScript very well, so links embedded in scripts does not pass page rank. The best is to get full direct and static url’s pointing to your site. There are many more factors involved in gaining backlinks, but the above mentioned are the basics. I would strongly recommend reading both Search Engine Optimization Made Easy by Brad Callen, and reading Make Your Links Work by Ken Evoy. The y are both short, simple and to the point. It is the best information you can get, and the absolute best part of it is that they are both FREE!

What not to do in SEO :

- Hidden text

- Meta tag stuffing

- Title tag stuffing

- Alt tag stuffing

- Linking to link farms or banned sites

- Do not use cloaking or sneaky redirects

Important for all who wants to do SEO: Read Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and follow them. A great article on SEO: http://www.seomoz.org/articles/search-ranking-factors.php

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