Archive for the ‘Search Engine Optimization’ Category

This list is a reference for myself, my classmates, my clients, and all inquiring web masters. It is semi-inspired from my December 2007 Web Design Meetup Group in Gig Harbor, WA. I will be adding content here when I find additional noteworthy articles, so be sure to BOOKMARK THIS NOW! Photo from Stock.XCHNG

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From: Site Reference

Engineering Smarter Landing Pages
by Dan Lok
40 Simple Ways to Build Trust in Your Website Visitors
by Ankur Patel
Reaching The Top of Page One In Google In As Little As One Week
by Clinton Douglas IV
Web Marketing - Webmaster Tips - Not all web marketing needs to cost money.
by S. Housley
Top 10 Reasons Why You Might Want to Redesign Your Website
by Rajesh Tavakari
Create Professional RSS Feeds
by S. Housley
Using Stats to Succeed With a New Site
by Cralan Deutsch, Eddie Moojen, Wart Fransen

From: SiteProNews

Sitemaps Improve Site Value
by Lisa Barone
Selecting a Quality Domain Name
by Shelley Lowery
Establishing Your Web Presence
by Vishal P. Rao
What do People Want Online?
by Jay Conrad Levinson
The A to Z Guide to Getting Website Traffic
by Shawn Campbell
Tools for Online Tracking
by Sharon Housley

From: Miscellaneous Sources

2007: More Web Design Trends & Cliches or The Biggest Web Site Cliches of 2007
by Stuart Brown
How to choose a web host
by author at plusone.com
How to Choose a Web Host - Frequently Asked Questions
by author at twospots.com
How to Start / Create Your Own Website: The Beginner’s A-Z Guide
by Christopher Heng
How to Choose Your Ecommerce Hosting
by Joshua Mabilia
The Google Sandbox Explained
by author at twospots.com
Google’s PageRank Explained - and how to make the most of it
by Phil Craven

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Being new to web design has its advantages; you aren’t caught up inside of traditional concepts, over-alluring attention grabbers, and misconceptions of search engines.

Today’s top-edge designers are bringing more relative, optimized content to the internet. We are seeking out what a client needs to get traffic on his website. Rather than creating attention-getters, we are creating attention-keepers - user friendly, search engine optimized, usually accessible, and generally clean of coding errors.

We are fresh, we are new and we are the competition. Why offer a client the option of good design or high page rank, when they can have both? Getting hits to a website is no longer the responsibility of an SEO (search engine optimization) pro - today’s top-edge designers are now required to include optimized coding that is noticed and easily read by search engine spiders. After all, what good is a website if nobody visits it? Why would a client use your services if you cannot design with good conversion in mind?

Before I got into web design, I spent three years sitting in front of my monitor, searching web content. I’ve never been a “gamer,” I’ve always been a seeker. And seeking for information, sometimes 50 pages deep into Google, I taught myself keyword discovery.

Approaching my second year of web development training, I can now code pages without any errors. I can generate a website that receives its formatting from a separate (CSS) style sheet. I can create product specific copyright, company specific design, image enhancement, and image manipulations, including Photoshop font imaging. To combine all that into a search friendly website doesn’t require rocket knowledge, the main requirements is to use spider-attracting markup, and repeating desired key words.

After much study on website traffic, I came across this article that motivated my writing, “Successful websites built on ‘good foundations’.”

“Good foundations underpin the potential success of any website,” said Matt. “And it is vital that every website is built so it can be as search engine friendly as possible.

“In the same way a building will fall down if it no has foundations, a website is rendered invisible on the Internet if it is not built in a way that allows it to be easily signposted online.

“If it came down to a simple choice, I’m sure every business would rather have a mediocre looking website which attracts lots of visitors, than one that is stunning but nobody can find it on the Internet.”

“For many years we, along with other SEO’s, and search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN) have been trying to re-educate web designers to consider search engines and how they navigate websites.”

“Building search engine friendly or accessible websites is not complicated, in fact it’s relatively easy …”

It makes me wonder - if I had received my web development training five to ten years ago, would I be one of those web designers that don’t consider search engine importance? Would I seek training in this area? Maybe like so many designers, I just wouldn’t have the time for it.

So when seeking out a web designer, be sure you get a designer that doesn’t suggest or outsource search engine optimization - they include it.

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With all of the (so called) experts advising us on search engine optimization, it’s difficult to sort fact from fiction, greed from truth.
And then, to understand it all, you need a master’s degree in marketing. Prior to this publication, to get any worthy information, you would need to chance-purchase a variety of literature (likely from a mini site), sort through it all to find what might work, Google a few hieroglyphics phrases, and experiment with all the suggestions.

Dan Thies has been in the Search (and marketing) industry for over 6 years; he has earned a solid reputation for accurate information. He speaks at SES conferences, teaches SEO, mods for High Rankings, is a member of the SEOPros executive committee, and can write so that the layman can grasp a full understanding. Dan has also written the “Search Engine Marketing Kit” for SitePoint.

Anything this guy puts his name on is not just good… it’s great!

What I’ve created here is more than just a book – it’s a framework for learning SEO. In fact, it’s a framework for understanding SEO, for managing SEO projects, for developing better methods, for teaching, for communicating with clients, and more. One important goal is to teach beginners a simple process that consistently delivers results. But this book isn’t just for beginners.

Even the most jaded veterans of the SEO wars can use this framework. If you don’t like what we’re doing at any particular step in the “fast start” process, just plug in your own process for that step.

The people who are exceptionally good at SEO also have a lot of knowledge about the technical side of search engines and web sites. I think I’ve proven over the years that I am one of those people… and I want to help you.

… when I start work on a new web site, I expect that we’ll be able to start seeing significant traffic from search engines within the first month or so, and that we’ll start seeing page one rankings for our key search terms within six months.

So go now, go get this FREE e-book and thank me later!

Search Engine Optimization

stevestuff

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Article from htmlhelp.com. I consider this reading to be one of the best SEO write-ups I’ve come across.

In order to fully comprehend the rationale for the forthcoming recommendations, one must first understand that there is, in essence, a war raging between the search engines and those that would manipulate them for their own selfish gain.

This document aims to equip Web authors with the information necessary to adequately prepare their Web pages for search engine placement in accordance with the most basic rules of the World Wide Web. Absolutely no promise is made as to the end result of the use of this information; however, HTMLHelp.com has effectively demonstrated that the techniques outlined within are effective and long lived.

The architecture and design of any Web site will play a major role in search engine rankings. A design emphasizing aesthetic values and flashy gimmickry may command a big “WOW” factor, but they will seldom be readily indexable by the machines employed by search engines. One could potentially end up with a fantastic site that no one else can find.

Conversely, a site with rich content but devoid of any aesthetic value may not meet all the needs of Web authors or end users despite otherwise fantastic search rankings. For these and many other reasons, Web authors must take special care when designing their sites to ensure that they will be accessible to all users - mechanical or human.

Read the complete article.

Search Engine Optimization

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First of all your site has to be indexed by the search tools: search engines and web directories.

You’re wondering why, right? Well, one or more of the following reasons might apply:

1 - Your submission was not accepted by the search engines especially if you used spamming techniques, such as:

• Repeating keywords in the keyword meta tag or using text in the same color as the background, some search engines might refuse to index your site.
• Page redirection — including cloaking — or building artificial links farms can sometimes be seen as spam by some search engines. These links farms involve building web pages for the sole purpose of creating links to the targeted site.

Some Search Engines also have difficulty in indexing pages that use frames or Flash.

2 - Your submission was accepted, but your site is not listed in the Top 10-30. Because very few people check pages after the first 30 results, you want to be in the Top 10-30. There are many reasons why a site is not listed high.

The most common reasons are:

• The lack of your main keywords in the content of the page, in the title tag and in the description and keyword meta tags. Ultimately it all depends of the search engines’ algorithm - the criteria used by the search engines to rank pages.
• HTML errors. Examples include unclosed tags, unquoted attributes, improperly nested tags, missing the ALT attribute on images. Any of these will affect your site’s accessibility, reducing your potential client pool.A Web site with HTML errors can look fine in Explorer, strange in Firefox or Opera and totally unreadable in a text browser. Although Explorer has the largest market share, an important percentage of net surfers use other browsers. Don’t forget the more than 50 million people in the USA with disabilities. Many of the latter use text/voice browsers.

Other Types of Errors in Web Sites

So Do We Dot-Com or Not?

The answer is a resounding YES! But with one condition, learn from your predecessors.

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