Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks

Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks
By Junaid Ashraf Mianoor


Search Engine Optimization, popularly known as SEO these days, is the process of improving your website so that it achieves a higher ranking in a search engine search result.  It is one of the most practical and effective marketing strategies now. Knowing the tips and tricks of this aspect of internet technology can help you and your business succeed. The following are some useful tips.



Place navigational links in all web pages. You should allow a search engine to locate all your pages. Search engines look for html link tags. Therefore you should refrain from placing flash or JavaScript navigation links or images on your site.



Provide relevant content. Put as many appropriate and relevant contents as you can in order to have a higher chance at ranking better. People who search for products on a website do price comparisons and research first. So therefore you should include features and contents that will attract the searcher. Once the searcher is impressed, he/she will stick to your website and eventually buy your product.



Place keywords in your text. To improve your web site, you should employ keywords that are related to your field in all your text contents. This will enable search engine spiders to detect them thus giving your website a good chance at ranking higher. However you must not place excessive keywords. Doing so will just be a waste. What's important therefore is consistency and balance in using keywords.



Employ related words and phrases in Meta tags, titles, and headers. This will result in an extensive and consistent range of keywords in your website. More than any other aspect in your website, search engines give a lot of weight on page titles, text, and header meta tags.



Maintain a consistent order or sequence of your keywords. Shifting to another order or sequence of a term or phrase may affect the consistency and balance of your website and may lower your rank in a search engine.


Employ keywords in your file names. Always remember that this is a vital key also in achieving a higher rank in the search results. Use underscore between keywords. This will have a better chance of being detected by search engines. The keywords should best describe the contents of your webpage.
Use keywords in your links. In placing links in your website, use keywords that best describe the webpage link. This will enable the advanced search engines to detect the content of the link.



Submit your website to relevant and widely used sources. Yahoo.com, Zeal.com, and DMOZ.org are some of the most popular manually edited internet directories and are frequently used by widely known search engines such as AltaVista, LookSmart, Google, and Yahoo. Remember also to follow the submission rules of these internet directories to avoid being rejected.



Search engine optimization is the new trend in sales and marketing these days. Following the tricks and tips mentioned will make your website a top business or product site. Gone are the days when we had to spend big amounts on marketing and promoting our products.


Article Source: [http://EzineArticles.com Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks

Local Search Engine Optimization Tips to Know Your Competition

Local Search Engine Optimization Tips to Know Your Competition
By Eric G.




There are several markets that are becoming found online more frequently, in all areas of the country. This is something that is unique in each locale. Search engine optimization becomes a matter of knowing how to tell how much competition is in your market. Here are some tips on how to do basic research on the competition for your online industry.



Choose your primary keywords. The research to determine this should always be the first step in search engine optimization. You may include the name of your city as part of your keyword phrase, especially if you intend to attract people looking for your business within the city.


Check the number of results. This is a basic technique, but by looking through the number of listings that show up in the search engine results, you can know how many competitors you have online quite quickly. Type in your primary keyword phrases into the main search engines (at least into Google and Yahoo). Look and see how many total results show up. Now to find the number of true competitors you have, take this same keyword phrase and surround it in double quotes. Doing this will show only pages that have that exact keyword phrase present.


Check the number of qualified results. Now you already have a good idea how many people are competing for your keyword phrase (or phrases). However, in many cases the keywords are not placed prominently on the web pages that show in the results. Your main competition is in people who know at least some basic search engine optimization. To find these competitors, you will want to search in Google using a specialized option: "allintitle". Simply type in "allintitle" (without the quotes) followed by a colon, and then type in your keyword phrase. This will produce only results that have all the keywords inside the title tag, which is one of the primary elements of solid search engine optimization.


Now you should have a good idea of what level of competition you will be facing when doing your local search engine optimization. Considering the fact that this year, nationally 74.1% of the population is estimated to use the internet (according to Nielsen ratings) -- making sure you are properly targeting your market online as well as offline is important for improving local business.



Article Source:  Local Search Engine Optimization Tips to Know Your Competition

Affordable Internet Marketing - Search Engine Optimization Tips

Affordable Internet Marketing - Search Engine Optimization Tips
By Kathy McGraw

If you're an internet marketing newbie, search engine optimization may seem like a big convoluted mess to you and you may be thinking that there is no way that you can understand it at all. Nothing could be farther from the truth and, in fact, search engine optimization is an extremely affordable internet marketing solution. This article will explain why.



Search engine optimization has two parts. The first part is all about content: if your site is constantly updated with fresh and useful content, Google (or MSN, Yahoo, Bing, etc.) will pick it up. The second part involves making it easier for thesearch engines to find your site through simple coding and website design.



The first part will take some time to develop as you need to create the content and keep updating your site to keep it relevant to users. The second part you can do at any time and this will help users find your content more easily via Google, etc.



So how do you make it easier for search engines to find you? You optimize your site's content by using relevant keywords in strategic places where the crawlers (robots, or bits of code that are sent out regularly by the search engines looking for content) are known to look. Those places are your site's meta tags, your site's title, and your site's heading.

Meta tags: When search engines crawl a site, they will often read the meta tags first. Meta tags are located in the head of an html document and inserting relevant keywords here help search engine crawlers find your site much more easily.



Title: Your website's title is another place that the crawlers will check. Having your best keywords as part of the title of your site is another way to ensure that you get found. This helps the human looking at the search results catch your site within the listings as well. For example, let's say you have a site about grooming cocker spaniels. It would make sense for your title to be something like "Tips For Grooming Cocker Spaniels." This not only tells the search engine crawler, "hey, here's a page about grooming cocker spaniels," it will tell that searcher looking for information about grooming cocker spaniels that this is a site with the information they're looking for.

Headings: Again crawlers scan through your site looking for relevant words in order to return results to hungry websurfers. Having keywords in your headings helps in this regard. This is another area that will help with the human quotient as well.



I'd like to insert a word of caution here: there is a tactic known as "keyword stuffing" that is used by unscrupulous webmasters, and you should definitely not do this if you want to remain indexed by the search engines. Keyword stuffing involves using the same keywords all over your site, over and over again, as well as using keywords that are irrelevant to the subject matter of your site, but popular among searchers. You don't want to do this because, 1: repeating the same keywords over and over again makes your site content read very poorly and people will just click off without bothering to read such garbage, and 2: the search engines have built-in checks to see how relevant the keywords you are using are to your site content. If you are using keywords that are completely unrelated, your site will be removed from the listings.




Search engine optimization is not some mystical, mysterious endeavor that only the most savvy of webmasters are privy to. Search engine optimization is an easy task that almost anyone with a little knowledge on the basics can do to improve his standing in the search engines, and is an extremely affordable internet marketing strategy, since it costs you nothing to implement.


Article Source: [http://EzineArticles.com Affordable Internet Marketing - Search Engine Optimization Tips