Some SEO terms commonly missed in Web development

1.Perform Keyword Research before Developing the Site

SEO starts with keywords. And if you’re planning to market your site in the search engines, you should know what keywords you want to rank for before you even start building the site. Make sure this is done FIRST.

Here some link to the Keyword research:

• Keyword Research Gems from PubCon
• How to Create a Huge Keyword List
• Use All the Tails in Your Search Marketing Strategy

2. Put Non-www to www Redirects in Place

It amazes me how many sites load with and without the www in the URL. The problem with this is that it creates an automatic duplicate of your site, and can waste a lot of link value as people link to both versions. Decide which version of your URLs you want to use, then 301 redirect everything else to the preferred version.

3. Use a Static, Keyword Based URL Structure

Dynamic URLs can cause a lot of problems if not handled right. So rather than going through all of the headache that they cause us SEO-types, just set your site up with good URL rewrites so that you don’t have dynamic URLs in the first place.
Here some link to related Url Structure:

• Checklist for Changing Your URL Structure
• 3 Common URL Problems and How to Fix Them
• Absolute URLs – Better Safe Than Sorry?

4. Have Unique URLs for Each Product/Service

Even if a product or service can be found multiple ways on the site, make sure that there is only one unique URL for each product or service your company offers. This helps to eliminate unnecessary duplicate content problems.

5. Include Redirect Capabilities

You never know when you’re going to want to take a page down and redirect it to something else. The mistake a lot of sites make is that they just take a page down when they don’t need it any more. When this happens you lose the link value that page may have gained while it was live. So do yourself a favor: make sure you can 301 redirect that old page to a new page that can use the juice.

6. Create a Custom 404 Page
Having a custom 404 page makes it so that if someone lands on a 404 page, they at least know they’ve reached the right site. Without a custom 404 in place, they may just assume the site is down and move on to your competitor’s site.

7. Include Keyword-Rich Alt Attributes 


Alt attributes are very easy to overlook. But if you use them the right they can be another signal to the search engines to tell them what a page is about. One quick tip on this one: don’t abuse this attribute by using a keyword phrase on every single bullet point image or stuffing a bunch of keywords into the attribute.

8. Make Room for Sufficient Content

Sometimes designers and developers get carried away with the look and feel of the page and forget to include room for text-based content. That’s what the search engines read, so you have to make sure there is a logical place for that content. Ideally, plan on having at least 150-200 words of optimized content on any page you want to rank well.
You should also make sure that your content is structured right. Have one H1 tag at the top of the main content, and then break out other sub topics with H2-H6 tags as appropriate. Make sure to use your keywords in these headings and in the content, but once again don’t overdo it.

9.Set Up Internal Linking Structure

I think that internal linking is one of the most commonly overlooked things for most sites. In fact, Ken Lyons wrote a great post about it that goes into more detail than I can in this post: Want More Link Juice? Here’s an Easy Way to Get It

10. Decide on a consistent Title Structure

A site should use the same title structure throughout the site. Pick your convention and stick with it. A good format to follow is to have a phrase that includes main keywords for the page and describes what the page is about, followed by a separator (- or | are common), and then your brand name. For example, "Professional SEO Services for Organic Website Optimization | SEO.com". Keep these titles to under 65-70 characters so they don’t get truncated in the search results.

11. Include Meta Description on Every Page

Since most of the search engines can choose to use your meta description as your snippet in the search results, you should have a unique one written for every page. Include the main keywords and a call to action to encourage clicks. DON’T just make this tag a list of keywords.

12. Incorporate Social Media Sharing Buttons

In case you missed it, social media is a pretty big thing right now. I’m not a big fan of the generic ShareThis button, but you need to have some kind of social media sharing buttons on your products and other important pages. Do some research to decide which social networks are best for your site and then stick with those.
More general information about social media:
• 4 Ways Any Business Can Benefit From Social Media
• So Your Industry Is Boring – Don’t Let That Keep You Out of Social Media

13. Install Analytics Tracking

If you don’t have any kind of analytics tracking installed, you have no way to tell where you traffic is coming from, what’s working, and lots of other crucial information. Pick a solution and get it installed. Popular ones include:
• Google Analytics
• Omniture
• Mint
• Stat Counter
• And a lot more…
Make sure that the software you go with will allow you to block your office IP address, track conversions, ecommerce revenues generated through different online sources, and anything else that will help you to understand what is actually affecting your bottom line.

14. Set up and verify Webmaster Tools Account

Through Google Webmaster Tools you can find out a lot about how Google sees your site, and can give them indications on how to handle certain parameters, submit your XML sitemap, and be notified of problems they find with your site. Bing's Webmaster Center is coming along, so it’s worth it to go ahead and verify that one as well.

15. Follow Web Standards for HTML, CSS, and Database Programming

The more you follow standards, the easier it will be for someone else to come along later and make changes or modify the site. It’s a real problem when a site’s backend code or database is so complex that it has to be rebuilt later in order for it to be changed.

16. Generate an XML Sitemap

It only takes a few minutes to do it, but once the site is live make sure you create and XML sitemap and submit it to the major search engines through their webmaster tools accounts. It’s even better if you can set this up so that it automatically updates and pings the search engines whenever a change is made.

17. Create a Robots.txt File

When you create your robots.txt file make sure that you are disallowing any pages or directories that you don’t want the search engines crawling. Standard examples would be login pages, search results pages, and shopping cart pages. You should also include a link to your XML sitemap as well. Also, make sure you test this file in your Google Webmaster Tools account to make sure it is working correctly.

Here's a great site that talks more in detail about how to create a robots.txt file: About /robots.txt

SEO TIPS - Benifits of Web optimization and discover targeted traffic in a website.

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SEO Tips – reimbursement of On-page and Off-page

As nation of the twenty-first century, we all depend on the internet for our day by day professional and community lives. We have two type of optimization in the web:

On-Page Optimization

On-page optimization activities involve modifications in various components of a web page. Some of these activities include—ensuring the presence of identified keyword(s) in the page title, Meta description, keywords, header tags, anchor tags, body text (the actual page content) and so on. The keywords should also be present in in-bound and out-bound links and Alt tags of images. The search engine spiders view websites differently than humans do. The search engine tries to find out the essence of a site by analyzing its underlying HTML code. If it identifies a string of words (keywords) spread across various HTML elements of the page, it attaches due importance to the page with respect to these keywords.

Off-Page Optimization

The off-page optimization involves a set of activities that promotes the site from behind the scenes. Stated simply, SEO professionals promote a site by back-linking to the site from various other relevant sites. If more links point to your site, higher importance is attached during calculation of the search results. It is to be borne in mind that both the number and quality of back-links matter. For instance, the back-links generated by link firms to a site can ruin the site’s SEO prospects. Even, the site can be blacklisted by leading search engines for practicing illegal SEO activities. SEO practitioners always try to provide back-links from quality sources (with good, relevant content) to the site being optimized.

Both On-Page and Off-Page Optimizations are important

In this age of competition, both on-page and off-page optimization are needed one after the other. If the competition for a keyword is weak, we can do away with the later; but such cases are extremely rare nowadays. With the continually changing algorithms of the search engines, both these techniques carry high importance. However, the on-page SEO activities need to be completed first.

We all are aware about the role the search engine plays in providing us information on a variety of topics. Owners of websites try out some tweaking activities to have their sites listed towards the top of a search list. This set of tweaking activities that allow a site to gain higher search rank is known as search engine optimization (SEO). The basic intent is to first identify a set of keywords that correspond to the product/service the website highlights, and modify the site according to some rules considered legal by the search engines.

Research suggests that 42% of the search engine users find their desired results by clicking the links in the first page of the search results. Only 11% turn to the second page links, and this percentage deteriorates drastically for the later pages. In this article, we will explore two important aspects of SEO - the on-page and off-page SEO.

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Targeted Website Traffic – Discover the Secrets

 

If you are the owner of a business website, then you must learn Internet marketing strategies to get the most out of your web presence. If you have a site up and running, then you need steady web traffic to your site and maximum possible conversion of this “interested” web-traffic to “actual” sales closure. You need to have the right strategies in place to get people interested in your products/services offered through your site. In this article, we will explore a few of these strategies.

Common Pitfalls that Dissipate Web Traffic

At the outset, let’s have a look at some of the common mistakes that website owners commit that have a negative impact on web traffic generation.
• Some sites are loaded with jazzy banner ads that lack aesthetic sense.
• The content is sometimes written in corporate style that laymen often fail to interpret.
• The sales pitch is often made too quickly.
• Sometimes the enterprise owners remain anonymous, which raises the eyebrows of the visitors. After all, we engage ourselves in business transactions with people whom we know.
• Too many products and too many cross-links leave a negative impression on the visitors.

Steps to Improve the Impression of your Site

Here are some of the tips that can increase your site’s (and hence your products & services) acceptance to the visitors.
• Keep your paragraphs and sentences short, because people do not want to read long online.
• Write the content lucidly, so that every visitor is clear about your offers.
• Impart an attractive headline (if applicable, sub-headings too) within the page content.
• Do not use a small font size that readers find difficult to read.
• Stress on proper layout of the web page. Every element on the page should be properly spaced.
• Place the sign-in form link at a conspicuous place so that people can sign up easily.

Determine your Target Audience

It is surprising but true that many website owners do not have a clear understanding about the site’s target audience. One of the first things you need to determine is your site’s target audience. Determine the demographic aspects such as age, sex, race, and hobbies etc. Try to frame the idea of a person who is a probable candidate to buy the product. Once you frame your target audience, you are in a better position to position your site accordingly.

Targeted Advertising through Social Networking Sites and PPC Advertising

Today’s Internet activities are dominated by surfing popular social networking sites. People, mostly surfers of the younger generation, visit these sites to build and maintain social networks. They get benefited by a lot of stuff - from friendship to jobs. These social media sites offer targeted advertising facilities. By investing in this scheme, you can narrow down fruitless web traffic to focused visitors.

Another method of getting targeted web traffic is investment in Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising. It doesn’t involve a huge financial outlay, but helps you to reach your target audience quicker. It is in fact one of the most traceable forms of online marketing. People who are interested in your line of products will find the positioning of the PPC links highly relevant and would want to explore the sites.

At the end, we can conclude that getting web traffic is not as important as getting targeted web traffic. You need to do your basic homework first to identify your target audience, design your site accordingly, and invest in online marketing to pull targeted web traffic to your site with the potential of increased sales.

Important in a websites using Sitemap

With HTML and XML sitemaps you can help Google, Yahoo and other search engines to:

• Index your entire website including blogs and forums.
• Speed up finding and showing changed content.
• Ease the bandwidth load on your webserver.
• Decide pages shown in search engine result pages.

The most important sitemaps you can create:

• XML sitemaps protocol: Ping Google, Yahoo, Ask, MSN with XML sitemaps / Google sitemaps.
• Google mobile sitemap: Google XML sitemap for mobile phones content.
• Google news sitemap: Google XML sitemap for news content.
• Google video sitemap: Google XML sitemap for videos.
• Google code sitemap: Google XML sitemap for source code files.
• Google image sitemap: Google XML sitemap for images and graphics.
• Google base feed: Google Base extends RSS feeds. (Only common tags are supported.)
• RSS sitemap feed: RSS feed files use XML and often used for blog and forum websites.
• ROR sitemap feed: ROR sitemaps extends RSS feeds with more information.
• ASP.net web sitemap: ASP.Net website navigation and menu controls use Web.sitemap files.
• Text sitemap: Sitemap URL list format used by some search engines, e.g. Google and Yahoo.
• HTML sitemap: Many websites use HTML sitemaps as a navigation aid to visitors.
• HTML menu: HTML sitemap templates can also create URL lists for JavaScript and CSS menus.

Download sitemap generator program and:

• Let it crawl your website to find all pages.
• Have our sitemap generator create and upload sitemaps.
• Submit and ping XML sitemaps to all major search engines.
• The free sitemap generator 30 days trial is fully functional.