SEO - Bloggers unite in acts of kindness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.