Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Website Keyword Placement Advice For Maximum Search Engine Exposure

This article is intended to outline the best places in your web pages to place keywords for maximum search engine benefit. It covers HTML tags and which ones are most beneficial to use when marking up your text content and keywords.

It may seem like an obvious thing but I would like to make the point that you really need a shortlist of keywords that you would like to promote on each page. To keep your pages on topic I would suggest a maximum of 3 related key phrases per page to achieve optimal results. If you try to optimise a web page for lots of different phrases it becomes a huge mess that isn't really focused around any keyphrase in particular - a situation that ought to be avoided!
Search engines love text! As a general guide the more text that is on a page the better for search engines as it gives them more text to analyse to determine what the page is actually about. I suggest a bare minimum of 300 words for a search engine targeted entry page.

Once you have your shortlist of keywords down on paper it is best to highlight what you consider to be your best and most popular target key phrase. This is important as it will be placed in some important places that are essential for effective search engine optimisation.

When you begin to build your web page you should make sure that you include your main target key phrase in:

Your pages META title tag (this will display in the blue bar at the top of your browser)
Your pages top level heading tag or H1 tag
You opening paragraph
Throughout your subsequent paragraphs

These places in your pages are essential as this is where search engines give special priority. Any keywords and key phrases that you can get into your pages in bold, italic or anchor tags are also a benefit and promote your pages relevance to these terms.

The opening paragraph of your page is given a heavy weighting by search engines as it is assumed that most people use this paragraph to describe the page content that follows. A good tip is to use level two heading tags to mark up this paragraph. I use CSS to style the resulting text and this trick usually works a treat!

The main text content of your page after your opening paragraph should be broken up into sensible chunks and marked up with, yes you guessed it, - paragraph tags. When writing the body text for your page use your keywords as liberally as you can feasible use them without making your text sound too repetitive. Remember your text has to be readable to users as well as attractive to search engines.

Conclusion:

By using this simple strategy for placing your keywords you can make sure that your content is laid out optimally for effective 'on page' SEO (the easy side of SEO). On page SEO may be easier than off page SEO but you still have to get it right! Putting your keywords in the right places is essential in todays crowded online marketplace.

http://www.articledashboard.com/Article/Website-Keyword-Placement-Advice-For-Maximum-Search-Engine-Exposure/258920

Creating Search Engine Friendly Websites

Webmasters therefore need to use body text on any pages on the site that they want indexed by the search engines and ranked highly for matching search queries. Not graphical text that was created in design software, but actual, visible body text. Not sure if your site uses graphical or body text? A good rule of thumb that I learnt from search engine guru Danny Sullivan is to try and highlight the text with your mouse. If you can drag your mouse over individual words in the text when viewing it in a browser, chances are this is body text and the search engines can read it.

The most important page on which to use body text is the home page. Above is an example of a home page that uses graphical text instead of body text. Figure 1 shows what content the site visitors see, while Figure 2 shows the content a search engine sees and indexes.

How much information about a sites content does a page like the one above provide a search engine? Thats right, very little. With next to no text to be found, the search engine would have to rely on the pages Title and META Tags to tell it what the page is about. With such little information to go on, it is unlikely that a search engine would consider this page a relevant match for search queries relating to its content. To remedy this, it is widely recommended that each web page you want listed in search engines should contain at least 250 words of visible body text.

Keyword-Rich Text

While its a good idea to use plenty of body text on web pages, if that text doesnt contain relevant keywords and phrases that people type in to the search engines, theres not much point, because a site isnt going to be found for logical search queries anyway. Many web sites make the mistake of including text on their site that is either unrelated to their products and services, or full of marketing-speak like an Internet solutions or superior services. The Internet is plagued with web sites selling particular items without once making reference to those items in their site text. Weird huh?

For a search engine to find a site relevant for a particular search query, it MUST find that search query somewhere in that site. The easiest way to ensure this is to include logical keywords and phrases within the visible text on web pages, as well as in the Title and META tags. The best way for webmasters to find keywords that searchers are actually using is by conducting keyword research of their target market on a site such as Keyword Discovery or WordTracker.

Once it is determined what search terms perspective visitors are commonly typing in to search engines, they can then be compared to the goods and services offered on the site and the body text can be adjusted accordingly. Sites lacking any keyword research tend to use very generic, unfocused body copy, or sales-oriented. Neither style contributes to high search engine rankings.

Target keywords and search phrases placed strategically throughout your body copy give your pages a much higher ranking potential on search engines for related searches. But its not as easy as throwing the keywords into your site text willy-nilly. You must ensure that the keywords are integrated seamlessly so their repetition is unobvious and so that the text flows smoothly for the reader.

Don't compromise the readability of your copy to achieve this - hire an expert copywriter to strike the right balance if need be.

SEO Copywriting

Before writing your web site copy, you should research potential keywords and phrases that your target audience may use in search engines and then narrow the list down to your priority terms for each page, sorted in order of importance. You should then use those target search terms as a basis for the creation of optimized Title and META tags for each page on your site. Once youve done that, its time to integrate those same target search terms into your visible web page copy. We call this SEO copywriting. But exactly how do we do it?


http://www.articledashboard.com/Article/Creating-Search-Engine-Friendly-Websites/258957

Benefit From Special Skills In Seo Workshop

Why, on Earth, would you need to attend an SEO workshop? If your business is trying to make a name for itself on the online world, then perhaps, there is no escape from SEO. And there is no better way of learning about SEO skills than at an SEO workshop. If your business is based in the United Kingdom, then you are at a much advantageous position, for as regards SEO services, UK is among the best in the world. The skillful SEO professionals of UK have been quite regular in holding such informative and educative seminars in different parts of the country for the benefit of new and established e-entrepreneurs.

A well-organized SEO workshop will be presided by proven performers in this field. This is the first point of distinction between a good and a bad SEO workshop. The importance of the presenters and organizers of an SEO workshop is paramount for its success or failure. For a good presenter will not only educate you about the various SEO techniques that can be employed to generate targeted traffic, but also let you know some finer details and inner workings of the Search Engines and how can they be tamed?

Of course, there is no substitute to an SEO professional for your business, and there is no dearth of professionals offering SEO service in UK, yet SEO workshop will arm you with enough knowledge to understand the fundamental and underlying principles behind this strategy. The skills imparted to the entrepreneurs at any good SEO workshop cannot be achieved through any book. The practical aspects of SEO are explained threadbare in a couple of hours, or a little more.

The attendance of SEO workshop is not important just for the entrepreneurs. It is equally important for the skilled SEO professionals. The latest developments in the field of Search Engine Optimization can be expounded only through close interaction with the participants in such seminars. Moreover, the attendees interact with fellow professionals and can exchange notes and vital information that they might not be aware of.

Overall, it’s a win-win situation for all concerned as far as organizing and attending an SEO workshop is concerned. SO, the next time a professional SEO service in UK organizes a workshop on the weekend, you know how best to spend your weekend.

http://www.articledashboard.com/Article/Benefit-from-Special-Skills-in-SEO-Workshop/259111

Grab Seo Skills Through Seo Course

Are you an e-entrepreneur or aspiring to be one but don’t know a thing about it? Perhaps, you are doing the next best thing right now - reading this article, for in the next few paragraphs, you’ll learn about a vital aspect of doing business online, i.e., SEO. UK has many SEO service providers and you can gain from their expertise quite easily just by paying them good money. By the way, SEO professionals do charge good money for their services in UK. But nothing compares to having some knowledge about the service you are about to outsource. And it’s in this regard that a good SEO course can really lift your business profile to newer heights.

An SEO course is your antidote to ignorance about Internet Marketing. The skills you’ll learn through an SEO course will help you start, albeit on a small scale, marketing your website effectively. However, if you really want to aggressively promote your online business, then its better to hire professionals offering their services in SEO in UK.

Internet has, obviously, made learning easier. Now, you are just a click away to undertake good courses on every topic. There are plenty of websites out in the wild that have their own brand of SEO course on the website. Most of them are quite inferior and a waste of time. However, some extremely good SEO courses are also available on the Net that can be either free or paid (for a small fee). Depending on your levels of understanding, you can choose either course. If you are a novice, always opt for some free SEO courses to get the grasp of things. However, if you have already been initiated into this exciting world, try out the paid ones.

The teaching of these courses is mostly through ebooks. You can easily search for both free and paid ones through Google or Yahoo. These ebooks are mostly prepared by professionals and give you good knowledge about the subject. These ebooks are sometimes accompanied by handy software that can really assist in grasping the finer details a lot better.

Your best bet is to quickly learn SEO basics through these courses. The more technical details should be left to the professionals to handle. After all, you also need to take care of the other formalities and responsibilities of an online business.

http://www.articledashboard.com/Article/Grab-SEO-Skills-through-SEO-Course/259362

What's The Big Deal Over Seo

Search engine optimization refers to any practice related to the end goal of improving your web site's position in the search engine 'free found listing.' The reason you want all of your web pages, or at least your most important web pages, search engine optimized zeros in on what nearly every website owner wants: More new business contacts generated from Web traffic!

According to current search engine ranking requirements, keywords and content on the same page must match a particular set of criteria. Basically, this means - for example - that for every 500 words on a page, you might only be able to write the same keyword 5 or 6 times to maintain the balance required by search engines. But simply adding the keyword to the body of the page is not the only factor. The page title and description (among others) are also factors. It's obvious that every keyword you have for your site can't be positioned accurately in each relevant place on one page. Each keyword, keyword phrase, or keyword set needs its own page to effectively return web traffic to your site.

Keyword stuffing is a big ouch! Repeating your keyword 30 or 40 times in the content is called keyword stuffing, and it gets your web page penalized or banned altogether from search results. It's just common sense not to engage in keyword stuffing. Limit the number of keywords on each of your web pages, and develop individual web pages for each of your most important keywords.

Requirements and standards change rapidly. At this writing, if the web page is unique and if crawlers determine that the page offers viewers substantive content, it passes the first test for ranking.

It goes something like this. The number of words the public sees on a page is analyzed by search engine robots to determine if there are enough words to be valuable to a web visitor who reads the page. If there are enough words on the visible part of the web page, then the robot evaluates the hidden text (called the source code). It looks for key words, descriptions, web page titles, link content and image descriptions just for starters. If the data qualifies, this invisible web page crawler then compares the overall page content with your entire website to look for a consistent theme. In other words, you can't publish a page about your cat on a site that sells chess sets without breaking the consistent theme rule. Every website must have a consistent theme weaved in and out every web page.

If the web pages pass this evaluation, the robot zips on to calculate all the data in various formats. For example, are there too many keywords on the page as compared to the total number of words on the web page? A comparison of image descriptions and link content also plays a roll. Once all of the various calculations are complete - and this all happens in seconds - the calculated percent of substance is compared to all the other website pages on the Internet asking for the same keyword status. Then the robot determines web page ranking position to be displayed in the search engine 'free found listing' when that one key word is used by a web searcher.

It is easy to see why search engine optimizing web pages is a complex, labor-intensive task that requires up-to-date knowledge of search engine standards and requirements, skill in applying the words to comply as closely as possible with top ranking position, and common sense so as to not go overboard (keyword stuffing a page) getting that web page penalized or banned altogether.

Pages that use acceptable standards applicable for each search engine are rewarded in time with a valuable ranking. A top ranking has many benefits for your business, from visibility, free clicks and web traffic to increased sales revenue.

The bottom line is to publish web pages that meet search requirements so visitors can find your page. If it is too time consuming for you to successfully optimize the content on your web site, or if your search engine ranking appears buried on page 99 of the free found listing, you may want to consider a professional SEO service provider. Start by asking an experienced search optimization writer to review 3 or 4 of your existing web pages. Listen to her suggestions and apply them. If budget is limited, engage her services to only optimize your most important web pages. Track results over the following 90 - 120 days.


http://www.articledashboard.com/Article/What-s-The-Big-Deal-Over-SEO/259399