SEO - Search Engine Optimization

SEO - Bloggers unite in acts of kindness

2007-12-17T02:41:00.000-08:00

Getting plenty of backlinks pointing to your website is a very important search engine optimization technique. One of the ways you can do that is to participate in online activities such as BlogCatalog's Blogger Unite in Acts of Kindness. All you need to do is to to do something good offline — an act of kindness — and then post about it on your blogs. Subsequently, post the URL of these posts to Blogger Unite Group to receive your backlinks and start a chance to win attractive prizes such as 8GB of Apple iPod Touch. It's that simple! Today my act of kindness was that I rekindled my colleague's interest in her work.

Use H tag for SEO

2007-12-15T22:13:00.000-08:00

In terms of search engine optimization, one of the best way to highlight your keywords would be to use the H tag. According to Russ Jones, Thomas Bindl and Marcus Tandler, some of the leaders in the field of organic search engine optimization, H1 tag is one of the various factors that are estimated to comprise Google's ranking algorithm. However, like most search engine optimization techinques, don't abuse it.

Bold or italic your keywords

2007-09-30T04:54:00.000-07:00

As mentioned previously, search engine optimization is about optimizing your webpage for certain keywords that you would like to position at. Besides increasing the keywords density of the page, bolding or italicizing the keywords does help in your search engine optimization effort. This is because the indexer, which is one of the components of a search engine, actually rips apart a page into various components and analyze them. These include the title, heading, bold, italic and other style portions of a page. When you bold or italic a word, the indexer will interpret this word as of higher importance and relevance than other words in the same paragraph or statement, thus helping your search engine optimization effort.

SEO - bloggers against blog abuse

2007-09-27T07:42:00.000-07:00

As mentioned previously, having plenty of backlinks pointing to your website is a very important search engine optimization technique. There are many ways to get backlinks and one of them is to participate in activities such as BlogCatalog's Blogging for a Great Cause Challenge. For this activity, all you need to do is to blog about putting an end to some sort of abuse on Sept 27th (you decide what kind of abuse to blog about). In return you will receive a link to your blog post from the Blogcatalog blog when they will list everyone who have participated. Since I'm very enthusiastic about blogging, I would like to blog about putting an end to blog abuse. Using blog as a platform to promote child pornography, racial discrimination, violent and hatred is being socially irresponsible. We should refrain from blog abuse.

Google SEO Sitemap

2007-09-07T06:16:00.000-07:00

Previously, I've talked about the importance of interlinking your website wisely, such as by using Sitemap to facilitate the search engines' crawlers to get around your website more easily. Actually it's possible to further search engine optimize your Sitemap to make it more Google-friendly. Basically, the technique is to use Google's Sitemap Generator to generate a Sitemap and submit it to Google. Please refer to "Managing my Google Sitemaps Files" and "Using the Sitemap Generator" for step by step instructions on how to create a Google-friendly Sitemap.

Optimize your graphic for SEO

2007-08-18T21:56:00.000-07:00

To optimize your graphic for SEO purposes, you should always use keywords to name your graphic files. For examaple I named the file below as "seo-alt" which includes the "seo" keyword. Next you should include the ALT attribute text in the IMG tag as search engines sometimes use the ALT text as one more clue about the website's subject matter. Similarly, the ALT text should also be rich in keywords. For example my ALT text description for the graphic below contains keywords such as "search engine" and "seo". When you place your mouse over the image below, you will be able to see the ALT text appearing to provide a description of the image. The graphic below is an illustration of the HTML code that optimizes a graphic for SEO purposes:

Online awards

2007-08-17T05:45:00.000-07:00

One of the search engine optimization techniques is to get your website an online award. An online award not only adds credibility to your website's content, it also helps you to get more backlinks at the same time. There are many websites that give out online awards and one of them is favourite website awards. If you own a blog, you can also try your hands on some blog awards such as those given out by Best of Blogs and Bloggy Award.

Article directory

2007-08-14T05:05:00.000-07:00

One way to get targeted traffic to your websites and quality backlinks at the same time is to write and submit articles to high page rank article directories such as Article Dashboard. There are a lot high quality article directories online that allow you to submit your article to their database for free. Simply type "article directory" or "free article directory" in Google and you will get a lot of article directories to submit your articles. Most article directories give the author an opportunity to promote their websites or products at the end of the article and this is where you usually get your backlinks.

Submit to video sites

2007-08-09T06:00:00.000-07:00

One way to get more backlinks and webpages indexed in the process, is to create a video and upload it to video sites such as Google Video and You Tube. The process is easy and free! Just remember to include your URL on the video. You can use any video recording device to create your video, and then polish it up with some editing software such as Windows Movie Maker.

Art of commenting (2)

2007-08-05T00:11:00.000-07:00

Continue from my previous post "Art of commenting (1)" I'm going to highlight some more pointers about leaving your URL on other websites' comment section in an attempt to gain more backlinks. Try to leave your URL in the form of keyword/s e.g. SEO instead of just URL e.g. http://seo-hub.blogspot.com/ as search engines tend to give a higher value for backlinks that are like the former as compared to the the latter. However, more importantly you should try to leave your URL on websites that have high page rank. There are many free tools and websites out there that allow you to check a website's page rank. Personally, I recommend Google toolbar.

Art of commenting (1)

2007-08-04T06:00:00.000-07:00

One very important step in search engine optimization is to increase your website's link popularity, i.e. the number of websites out there linking to your website (backlinks). There're many ways to increase your website's link popularity and one of the ways is simply to comment on other websites. Many websites, especially blogs out there allow you to leave comment on their websites. Simply comment on these websites and leave your website URL on them to increase your website's link popularity. However, there are a few important pointers to take note when leaving comments on other websites. When you leave your URL on other websites' comment section, check whether the backlink is a direct link or a redirect link. A direct link is more valuable than a redirect link, thus you would want to focus your effort on commenting websites that offer direct backlink. To check whether a website offers direct backlink, simply place your mouse over any URL left by the previous comment and see whether your browser status bar shows a direct URL or redirect URL to that website.

Technorati

2007-07-29T23:53:00.001-07:00

Previously, I discussed about how to submit your webpages to directories and social bookmarking sites as a search engine optimization technique. Continuing from there, I would like to recommend Technorati, a very popular site that offers both blog directory submission and social bookmarking services. The reason why I recommend Technorati is because unlike most blog directory, it approves your blog submission immediately and doesn't require any link back to them.

Webring

2007-07-27T07:16:00.000-07:00

Webring is a group of websites, generally using a common URL to list themselves together in a circular structure. All the sites on a ring will be simlar in nature and have a common navigation bar that contains links to the previous and next slide. Joining a webring can help you generate more traffic to your website and is considered to be a search engine optimization technique. One of the most popular webrings is WebRing, which is quite similar to a search engine.

Add This

2007-07-27T02:36:00.000-07:00

Previously, I talked about the importance of getting your website listed in social bookmarking sites to gain more traffic. To make it easier for your visitors to add your site to the social bookmarking sites, I strongly recommend you to get a social bookmarking widget from Add This to place on your site. Besides social bookmarking widget, Add This also offers feed widget. All these widgets are free.

Avoid WSYWIG HTML programs

2007-07-26T07:13:00.000-07:00

Websites created by WSYWIG HTML programs such as Front Page and Dreamweaver, produce an enormous amount of code bloat and deprecated code, i.e., center and font tags that will soon no longer be supported by some browsers. What this implies is that search engines may avoid these sites created by the WSYWIG HTML programs, depending on the amount of errors. One of the remedies is to check the code that these program puts out with the W3C validator to see if they are up-to-date.

Use javascript wisely

2007-07-19T07:35:00.000-07:00

Sites without JavaScript in the design will usually rank better than sites with JavaScript. This is because some scripts prevent the search engines spider from indexing the text on a web page. Use JavaScript wisely. My advice is that only use JavaScript if it adds value to the readers.

Directories

2007-07-16T21:56:00.001-07:00

One very important step in search engine optimization is to generate plenty of quality inbound links i.e. webpages linking to your site. To achieve this, submitting your URL to directories is a very good way of generating quality inbound links. One very famous free directory that you must submit to is the Open Directory. Getting your site an optimum listing in the Open Directory is of vital importance because Google gives a lot of importance to sites being listed in the Open Directory.

Social bookmarking

2007-07-16T21:56:00.000-07:00

Social bookmarking is a way for internet users to store, classify, share and search Internet bookmarks. From a search engine optimization perspective, social bookmarking represents ample opportunities for your websites to get noticed. Simply submit yours posts to social bookmarking sites such as Digg and del.icio.us and users on these social bookmarking sites might find your posts. If your posts do get popular through this method, usually the traffic doesn’t last long. However, in the process you just might be able to retain some extra new readers. Remember don't spam social bookmarking sites for the sake of gaining traffic.

Ping

2007-07-16T05:08:00.000-07:00

After updating your website, you will need to let the search engines know by pinging them so that they will trigger their robots to come visit your blog. Fortunately, you don't need to know the technical aspect of pinging as there are free pinging services out there that help you to do this. Personally, I recommend Pingomatic for free pinging service.

Submit to search engines

2007-07-15T22:27:00.002-07:00

One of the most direct ways for search engines to find your website is simply to submit your URL to them. Fortunately there are a lot of free services that promise to help you submit your URL to all the popular search engines. Personally, I recommend submitexpress.com for free search engines submission.

Submit RSS feeds to MyYahoo and MyMSN

2007-07-15T22:27:00.001-07:00

By submitting your RSS feeds to MyYahoo and MyMSN, these search engines will add them to their own tracking systems which are linked to their indexing system thus helping your page to get indexed faster. To do this simply create an account on the respective search engines and customize the home page to include your RSS feeds. This is done by adding content and listing the URL to the RSS feed.

Interlink your site

2007-07-15T22:27:00.000-07:00

By interlinking your site wisely, you're actually making the search engines' crawlers get around your blog easier. This is because the way search engines index your blog is to send little robot crawlers to your site to track what you’ve written and follow the links. One of the way to interlink your site is to provide some sort of Sitemap, which means every page on your blog is just a link or two away from every other one. For bloggers who find creating a Sitemap too tedious, you can still interlink your page by making sure your category pages are in your sidebars.

Meta keywords tag

2007-07-15T07:05:00.000-07:00

A meta keywords tag is supposed to be a brief and concise list of the most important terms of your website. It allows you to provide additional text for crawler-based search engines to index along with your body copy and helps to reinforce the terms you think a page is important for the few crawlers that are still supporting this tag. A meta keywords tag looks like this:

Meta description tag

2007-07-14T07:32:00.000-07:00

The meta description tag is an important html code for search engine optimization. This is because it is used as a summary of your site by many search engine. The meta description tag usually consists of 25 to 30 words or less using no more than 160 to 180 characters total (including spaces). The key to writing a good meta description tag is that it must be relevant to the content of your page and full of keywords. A meta description tag looks something like this:

Title tag

2007-07-13T02:15:00.001-07:00

A title tag is a piece of HTML code that describes a specific web page's content. It is deemed to be a very important guide for all search engines in determining what is in the content of a specific web page. In fact creating a relevant title tag is one of the most important steps in attaining high search engine positioning. Generally, the title tag should consist the website's core keywords of the most important services and offerings. You can search and edit it under the HTML code. A title tag looks something like this:

Keywords selection

2007-07-13T02:15:00.000-07:00

The foundation of a good search engine optimization campagin is selecting the best keywords that your potential viewers will use to find your website. If you select keywords which won't bring targeted traffic to your site or if you select keywords which no one searches for, all the time and effort that you spend on optimizing your web site for the search engines will be wasted. For your target audience to find your site on the search engines, your page must contain keywords that match those that your targeted audience is typing into the search queries. Here I'm going to recommend 2 very useful free websites that will help refine your keyword list. These 2 websites are http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ and https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. Enter one of your keywords into the search box and it will generate a list of popular search terms related to your keywords. Look through the list and refine your keywords accordingly.