Search Engine Optimization Techniques

One of the thing I get asked a lot is how to get a website higher in the SERPs. Well, it is going to take a lot of time, effort, and patience.

There are two elements to SEO - what you do on your website and what you do off your website. Let's talk about things you can do on your website to improve SERP results.

1. Hierarchal Design

The web pages you create should be in a hierarchal design with your home page at the top of the hierarchy. Every page of your website should be reachable by at least one static link.

2. Quality Content

You have to have a lot of quality content on your websites about your particular niche. For real estate websites, this can be achieved by news articles, blog threads, events calendar, and thousands of property detail pages.

3. Keywords

You have to use keywords in your content that related to your particular niche. If you just use the keyword "real estate" you probably are not going to rank very high in the SERPs. However, if you use "Holland Michigan Real Estate" for your key phrase, that gives a specific location. Chances are if you have a great website about Holland Michigan Real Estate, then you are going to rank high in the SERPs. By the way, you should make sure you have your keywords in a the keyword meta tag. Try to limit yourself to 10 keyword phrases.

4. Sitemap

You should have a sitemap on your website. This helps crawlers learn about the structure of your site and makes every section of your website reachable. I would make one sitemap for your users and another XML sitemap for the crawlers. Make sure you submit the XML sitemap to google and yahoo using the webmaster tools.

5. Avoid Black Hat Techniques

There are several black hat techniques such as keyword stuffing and hidden text that can temporarily give you a boost in the SERPs. However, in the long run, your website will be penalized and be even lower in the SERPs than you started out with. Stay away from these techniques.

6. Include a ROBOTS.TXT file on your site.

This tells the crawlers what parts of your site can be crawled. You should avoid making your member and admin sections crawlable.

7. Dynamic Content

Most real estate website use dynamic content. If you use dynamic content, keep your URL strings short and do not use session IDs in your URL strings.

8. Linking to other sites

Make sure you only link to sites you trust. Do not link to link farms or websites that have poor quality. Do not create a link farm yourself either. Linking to sites related to yours is good, but watch out for sites that are not directly related. A couple of these links will not hurt you, but if you get carried away it might.

9. Relevant Title Tags / Description Tag

Make sure your keywords appear in your title tag and description meta tag. Check out this home page to see how it is done: Holland Michigan Real Estate

Now, let's talk about what you can do outside of your website to improve SERP rankings.

1. Backlinks

You need to get as many backlinks as possible. However, you should pace yourself. Google knows the rate to which you get backlinks. If you increase this rate to fast, alarms go off and your website may get penalized. Plan on doing about 1 hour a day getting backlinks. Do not spend all day doing this.

2. Directories

Submit your website to directories and lots of them including dmoz and yahoo directory.

3. RSS feeds

There are a lot of RSS feed directories out there. If you got a RSS feed, submit it to these directories. This will increase traffic to your website.

4. Social Bookmarking

Submit articles to websites such as digg.com and propeller. Submit videos to websites such as youtube and google. People will bookmark your articles and videos. This will drive traffic to your site.

5. News Releases

Submit a news release about your website.

I hope you enjoyed this article. I may write another SEO article in the future with more advanced techniques.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Luke_Bouman

Search Engine Friendly Pages - The Way To A Crawler's Heart

As the employment trend is shifting towards self-employment. To be a success in whatever field an entrepreneur is in, he must have the best marketing tools. One of which is a business website. Many business owners are faced with technical dilemmas, caused by the further merging of the business industry with the Information Technology field. Because of this, they outsource the development of their websites.

To enable people or internet users to find YOU, one important consideration in building a website is SEO. It is a process involving strategies to increase quantity as well as quality of traffic to a website. Targeted traffic is what the search engines bring to a website, through algorithmic, natural or organic search results.

Visitors to the site are the lifeblood of the website's existence.

Traffic means business and dominant contributors to this are major search engines like Google, MSN, and Yahoo. Thus, when blueprinting or designing a web page, outsourcing services should ensure Search Engine friendly pages to obtain higher rankings that would lead to more people clicking on the link to your site and more probable sales.

Primary search engines utilize programs or automated scripts that are more known as web crawlers or web spiders. These robots browse through the World Wide Web, methodically indexing web content, checking links and validating html codes. Information is stored and the websites that manage up-to-date content are pulled up into a listing when people type in one relevant keyword/ keyword phrase.

For your website/ web page to get indexed easily, the following are some of the techniques you could apply when designing on your own:

• Avoid the application of frames. The lengthy and complex codes used to create frames causes disarray among search engine spiders making them skip the site and makes bookmarking a lot more difficult.

• Use CSS or Cascading Style Sheets instead of bombarding html codes to style a page. Its efficacy lies in the elimination of redundant html tags that confuses the crawlers and makes page loading faster.

• Meta Tag use and positioning are one factor noted by web crawlers in deciding whether or not to index a site or how frequent they would visit it. So make sure to use relevant meta tags appropriately.

• Flash animations or images are not the best way to contain very vital information. Aside from slow page upload, search engine crawlers only index text in your source code. A good way to use images to represent text are when displaying email contact addresses, as these could be kept private from other bots accumulating unsolicited email lists.



Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Aweng_Moral-Basco

Web Design And Development Vs Search Engine Optimization

Online promotion and search engine optimization is the in thing in the speedy growing internet world. Get an online promotion service for your website through a leading search engine optimization company and your website will be ranking high with the desired keywords. Although, an SEO service provider who is also accountable will cost you heavens, but you will certainly not mind if you are blessed with thousands of visitors per day.

However, do all highly ranked websites are the best providers in their field? Not essentially. So what are the options and how does one can find a GENUINE WEB DEISGN & DEVLOPMENT COMPANY?

While you are thinking of building a website, what would be your requirements? Let see, you would need an enticing website that is also user friendly and eloquent. You may require some dynamic features and therefore need appropriate development resources. Now comes another point worth consideration.

You have spent hundreds of dollars building a website and then pass it to a SEO service provider, who further recommends a number of changes on the website to make it search engine friendly and you end up re building your website, spending hundreds of dollars once again. Why not get a service that provides a search engine compliant web design & development.

Summing up, a typical web design and development requirements, the following are the most common of all:

1. A website design that goes with the latest trend e.g. web 2.0, div based etc.
2. Your website subject e.g. do you want to sell a product, is the website educational kind, revenue source etc.
3. The development requirements & details. Note down each single point/features that comes to your mind, may it be the simplest thing, while sending across the development needs to the company. This is to ensure that there is minimum space for ambiguity.
4. The website should be search engine compliant
5. Primary search engine optimization on the website e.g. unique title & metadata for all pages, optimum keyword density on pages, search engine friendly navigation and website architecture etc.

As of now, this has been apparent that web design & development and search engine optimization goes together. None is beneficial in absence of another. A clumsy and unimpressive website with high traffic will not get leads. Neither an awesome but unfamiliar website will earn revenues.

If you have not taken advantages of the emerging concept of search engine optimization, try to get some by exploring the www.synapseindia.com another web design & development company where information is available in abundance. You can further get reference of search engine optimization company to give you the full information on a search engine compliant website design & development. You may also find a brief detail on the service that may result far-fetched to connect you with your overseas clients and customers. Broaden your wings with the search engine compliant website design & development to reach to your ultimate customers.

Mridu Sinha is working with a leading web design & development company. While dealing with the clients, she has documented some typical problems that a prospective customer who wishes to design or develop a website comes through.



Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Mridu_Sinha