Easy SEO Tips for Web Site Owners

December 10, 2006 | Leave a Comment

Some easy Search Engine Optimization tips (SEO tips) for helping search engines find and understand your web pages:

  1. Use H1 header tags for your page titles. Sure, graphical images may be prettier, but search engines can not read the text in graphics. Search engines look at the H1 and the Title tag, both, as a base for understanding and classifying the content of a web page.
  2. Do not use the same title for each page. Change your title on each page. The title tag sets the words that show in the top blue bar in IE/Firefox/etc. Again, the search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN key to those, too.
  3. Use “alt” tags in all your images. Add them. Alt tags are important for these reasons.:
    • (a) the search engines use the alt tag to understand pictures,
    • the HTMl standards require them for all images,
    • they are what people using non-graphical browsers, including text web browsers and screen-reading visual-assistance devices, use to show (or say) in place of the image,
    • if your image doesn’t display for any reason, the alt tag will be displayed, and
    • IE treats title tags a little differently than do the Firefox, Opera, Netscape and Safari web browsers, when hovering over an image..
  4. Use a title tag for a web page, make sure that the words are pertinent to the image — and contain pertinent keywords from that page. Do not “stuff keywords” into the tags, unless you want the search engines to penalize you.
  5. if you use a title variable in your image tags, make sure that the words are pertinent to the image — and contain pertinent keywords from that page. Do not “stuff keywords” into the tags, unless you want the search engines to penalize you.
  6. If you have a static image in your header, make it into a link. Link it to your Home page. Ititle tag saying “Home” to the Insurance Writer logo, say “Insurance Writer - Specialty Risk Control - Home Page”. Then, turn the image into a link to the home page — not just a static image.
  7. Duplicate the “alt” tags as “title” tags.
  8. Have a sitemap.xml file.

Google defined an XML protocol for sitemaps. Yahoo and MSN recently announced that they will recognize and use the same protocol.

Yahoo already supports the sitemap.xml file format, too. MSN has said they will, too, but their implementation is not ready yet.

Sitemaps are the best way for you to tell the search engines the sites and all the web pages you have. Each site requires its own sitemap.xml file, by the way. And, if you didn’t realize it, the search engines recognize subdomains as “different sites.”

That is, http://seo.drawingontheweb.com (if it existed) would be recognized as a different site by the search engines. Sometimes that’s a pain. Other times, it’s a neat feature. It entirely depends upon you and what you’re trying to do at the time…

Here’s an short blog entry of mine with pointers to Google’s and Yahoo’s sitemap.xml instructions

After checking out a few alternatives, I’m using the free program GSiteCrawler (www.gsitecrawler.com) to create my sitemaps.

I have more than doubled my visitors from search engines in the last 2 months after adding sitemaps. I’ve posted more in my blogs, too, but I think the sitemaps were the major impact.

Posted by Terry Stockdale | Filed Under HTML, SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Traffic & Linking 

Sitemaps Rule!

November 16, 2006 | 1 Comment

I recently started using GSiteCrawler to create my sitemaps for Google. This program creates XML sitemaps in the open configuration used by Google (Google released this XML protocol under a Creative Commons license).

Now, I’m really glad that I did.

I’ve seen a significant increase in my search engine traffic.
Plus, yesterday, Google, LiveSearch (formerly called MSN) and Yahoo announced that MSN and Yahoo would support the same protocol — one sitemap for all three!

Of course, you still have to validate your sites and register the sitemaps for the individual search engine, but that’s not a bad effort.

Posted by Terry Stockdale | Filed Under Blogs, Internet Marketing, Monetizing Your Site, SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Traffic & Linking 

Improving Website Usability, Revisited

November 9, 2006 | Leave a Comment

No matter how gorgeous your website design might be, if your visitors have difficulty finding your content, then you will lose those visitors quickly.

Here are some usability tips to improve the design of your website to ensure it serves its functions optimally:

First, check the fonts and typography of your content

If you have large blocks of text, make sure to use CSS to space out the lines accordingly. The longer a single line of text is, the greater the line-height of each line should be.

Make sure the fonts are clean, clear and readable. If the fonts are cute and hard to read, your site visitors will go elsewhere — it’s that simple.

Second, break large paragraphs into smaller paragraphs.

Visitors will skim over your content. If you’ve got long paragraphs, they will often miss your message!

You will often find that breaking the paragraphs into smaller pieces not only makes them more readable, but allows you to focus more effectively on the key words and key thoughts that you want to communicate.

Of course, that also means that your articles should end up more meaningful to the readers and the search engines, too. Instant SEO via short paragraphs…

Your grammar teacher would not like the thought. On the other hand, examine the articles in your favorite newsletter, magazine or news web site.

In the world of today, short, sentence-length paragraphs are the medium of effective communication.

Third, make sure the font size of your text is big enough to read easily

Some sites have 10-pixel-tall text in Verdana font. While that may look neat and tidy, you have to really strain your eyes to read the actual text.

On the other hand, usability studies have shown that visitors actually read smaller fonts more carefully, while they will skim over large fonts to see if there is any “good” content.

Fourth, make it easy for visitors to find content that they want on your site

You may have dozens, hundreds or thousands of articles on your site. If a certain visitor wants to find one single article from that pile, you have to provide a feasible means to enable visitors to do that without hassle.

Whether you use an article index, a menu-driven system, a Google search of your site, or even an SQL-driven database search engine, you need to provide your visitors the ability to locate the content they desire.

Fifth, make sure that your site loads quickly.

Most internet users will leave a website if it doesn’t load completely within 15 seconds, so make sure your information is delivered to the visitors as soon as possible.

Be sure to resize images in your graphics program, not just by setting width and height variables for display of the images. If you resize the images and optimize their quality for the display size, you can dramatically reduce their file size.

Last of all, test each and every link on your site before it goes online

When you add pages or content, check the links. Then, load the pages and check them again — you may find that you were linking to images or files on your hard drive and not on your site!

There is little that creates a worse impression in a potential customer than to find broken links when she is looking for information.

Recommended Resource: Don’t Make Me Think

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Posted by Terry Stockdale | Filed Under SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Usability, Visitor Experience 

11 Tips to avoid getting penalized by the search engines

November 9, 2006 | Leave a Comment

The 14th Colony blog has a great list of tips for search engine optimization.

In this case, it’s a list of 11 Tips to avoid getting penalized by the search engines.

There couldn’t me much that’s more important, if you want visitors to your web site. Search engines are a great source of free traffic — if you play by the rules and don’t offend them…

Posted by Terry Stockdale | Filed Under SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Traffic & Linking 

Free SEO Service Predicts Annual Searches and Potential Website Traffic

November 7, 2006 | Leave a Comment

[Source: Fathom SEO press release]

New TrafficScout service helps companies determine whether SEO is worth the effort.

CLEVELAND, OHIO (PRWeb) November 7, 2006 — Fathom SEO today launched TrafficScout, an Internet keyword traffic activity report that helps online marketers find out whether people search for their products and services.

The complimentary service offers a number of features, including:

- Predicts how many annual searches are conducted for select keywords and phrases in a given industry
- Projects website visits based on natural search engine visibility
- Lists key questions to consider when assessing the cost of lead generation resources

The TrafficScout report is available at:
http://www.fathomseo.com/forms/SERV_form.asp

Posted by Terry Stockdale | Filed Under SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Traffic & Linking 

Free Web Advertising

October 31, 2006 | Leave a Comment

One of the best ways to get traffic to your site is by your site more visible in the search engines. And, you know search engines love blogs…

If you know how to use blogs you can easily get more traffic to your website just by posting your keywords in the title and having your blogs indexed.

If you are looking to kill 2 birds with one stone, you can advertise for free on a new BLOG that actually allows you to place your ads for free on their site.

The reason this is good is because you get all the benefits of placing your ads on a BLOG and you get to advertise for free.

Most people would look at this as a no brainer. Although most webmasters do not like people to advertise on their blogs, this particular site was made just for that.

It is free to join and people are flocking to this service to drive to their sites in just days by simply posting one little ad on its home page.

If you want to increase your site traffic (and profits, if you are profit-focused), you should look into this free advertising opportunity. I’m using it…

Posted by Terry Stockdale | Filed Under Advertising, SEO, Traffic & Linking 

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