Posts Tagged ‘SEO’

Finding the right keywords

Tuesday, November 9th, 2010

Keywords are a crucial component of a successfully optimized website and identifying the right keywords for your product or service is essential. When thinking about keywords that you want to target take a look at your competitors and see what they are targeting. It is also recommended that you make a list of the main products or services that you want to come up for in the search engine. Remember that targeting the most common or general keyword you can think of is not often the best idea. This will often have the most competition and be harder to optimize for than a specific keyword that is regional.

Take the example of the keyword: ‘jewelry’

As you could guess the keyword ‘jewelery’ would be very competitive because it is so general. You could have anybody looking for information about silver jewelry, jewelry retailers, jewelry repairs, formal jewelry etc. coming up under this search term. The trick is to be more specific, and target keywords that are more relevant to your business such as ‘energy jewelry’.

This has two main advantages:

#1.  Less competitive making it easier to get to the higher ranking
#2.  Bringing much more targeted traffic and visitors to your website.

Some Additional Tips

- Identify keywords that are specific to your business.

- Consider important factors such as, do you want to target Research keywords or Buying keywords.

- Know your customers. Try and ask your customers what keywords they would type in to find your website. This might help you identify some keywords that you overlooked.

- Check out your competition. See what keywords they are targeting. They might be targeting some keywords that you will want to include in your website.

- Don’t forget about keyword variations, such as plurals, synonyms and hyphenated words.


Our consulting fees to look at your overall website performance and optimization is $50.00 an hour. IHF Members get a 50% discount ;-) .

Tips on Improving your Web Ranking

Monday, July 26th, 2010

The following information is included with SEO Suite 8 except for the changes that I have personally made. I have been using this program for several years now to manage my website SEO and can also use it to help yours ;-) .

The best way to improve your odds of getting listed–and highly ranked–on any search engine or directory is to use the right words. I also recommend that you keep changing your site regularly with valuable content.

With directories, those words include choosing the proper category where your site should be listed, and making sure that your pages are interesting enough to catch the editor’s eye. Creativity can be the key to getting a good directory listing.

You need to be creative in a different way to attract a search engine’s attention. Search engine spiders sort and rank sites using “keywords”–terms that they think describe the content on your site. These keywords can be located in one or more places on your page: the title, the first few paragraphs of text, and inside Meta tags on your pages. Not all search engines look for keywords in all those places, however. And some weight words in different places higher than in other places.

The content of your web page is the key to get your web site to be list on the search engines. If your web site is only designed for “Good Looking” such as contain only the images, flash, javascript etc, but there are no “valuable” contents on the page, your website will be simply ignored by the search engines because the search engines will index websites which contain the “valuable information” not just “good looking” image.

Choose a right Title
First of all, make sure each page of your site has a descriptive title. Because search engines usually give the most weight to the page title, you should place a descriptive phrase between the tags. For best results, however, keep it in 200 characters and to the point. Also, your HTML title should be both descriptive and attractive since search engines return the title as the search results. </p> <p>For example, the following title describes the site appropriately, and therefore is a good choice: </p> <p><TITLE>Hypnosis School – become a certified Hypnotherapist.

Tags
You can control how search engines catalogue your site with tags. Not all search engines make use of these tags, but using them will definitely improve your position in those that do. All tags should be placed within the … portion of the document.

Description Meta Tags
The description tag lets you specify a short summary about your web site. This tag should clearly describe what one could find at your website. Here’s an example:

Some Search Engines limit the description to 200 characters. To be on the safe side, make sure your description does not exceed 200 bytes (characters). If you do not use tags to describe your site, the web page description will be derived from the first 200 characters in the HTML … portion. Also note that there should be only one descriptive tag per page.

Keywords Meta Tag
The keywords tag lets you specify a set of keywords that a search robot will give precedence to when cataloging the page or how people can find your web site. Here’s an example:

The keywords can include up to 1000 characters of text. Be sure that the keywords you choose are relevant to the contents of your page. Note that the keywords are used in the indexing process but will not be displayed on your web page or on a search response page. Try to incorporate singular and plural cases of words, as well as active and passive verbs. Also make sure your keyword list includes both general and specific words related to your site. You rarely want to target a single keyword, because, with the billions of words indexed on the web now, one word simply won’t cut it. Always use phrases, not plain words, in your list.

Frame
Sites using frames should definitely make use of tags. The main HTML file contains the tags, but fails to provide robots with any real useful information about the website. Therefore, you should utilize the description tag to provide a description summarizing the site’s contents. If JavaScript (or any other scripting language) makes up the first several hundred characters on your page, you should use the description tag so your site comes up with a meaningful description in search results.

Web Site Contents
Search Engines rely mostly on word density (frequency relative to the total size of the page) or distribution (how well the word is spread throughout the page). Some search engines even give precedence to text near the top of a web page, so make sure you place the most important stuff at the top. Furthermore, search engines that do not support tags use the first 200 (or 250) characters for the site’s description, so the first paragraph should describe/sell your service.

Use for headers, rather than the tag definition. Some search engines consider header text particularly important.

Image Description
If your site mainly consists of images, you should use the ALT attribute to describe each image. Most search engines index the ALT attribute in the tag. The following HTML definition shows how to use this attribute:

Hypnosis Training

SPAM
The overuse and repetition of keywords may result in a lower relevancy score and possible omission from some search engines. Most search engines count only the first few occurrences of a keyword or phrase, and some even penalize you for repeating words to improve your site’s ranking. Infoseek and Lycos are two search engines that penalize sites that are suspected of repeating keywords, and AltaVista will disallow URL submissions from those who spam the index. Some Search Engines penalize your site if a keyword is repeated more than three times.

Don’t try to fool a search engine by using the phrase “hypnotherapy promote” three times, and the phrase “hypnotherapy promotion” another three times. Search engines are smarter than that, but they are still not smart enough to associate “promote” with “promotion.”

General Rules:

·Most of the engines have chosen not to keep up and cannot spider frame sites. Make NO FRAME sections in web pages.

·Always make sure your website is completely finished, spell checked, online and working properly before attempting to get indexed.

·One of the most common problems people encounter in getting their website indexed is due to a spider not being able to reach the URL for indexing. For example, embed your URL in a imagemap or javascript.

·Make sure your website is up and responding.

·Alta Vista and some other Search Engines will index all words in your document (except for comments), and will use the first few words (e.g. first 250 characters) as a short abstract to serve back. It is possible for you to control how your page is indexed by using the META tag to specify additional keywords for indexing, and a short abstract.

·First paragraph of the text is the most important for search engines. Brainstorm with friends and colleagues, etc. and put the most important keywords into a carefully crafted paragraph at the start of your HTML document.

·Make sure that the HTML code is using the proper tags in the proper places (called validating your HTML). Most search engines do not tolerate invalid HTML code, that is, if your code contains invalid HTML tags most search engines will not index your web page or worse yet, not index you correctly.

·Most Search Engines can take up to 3 to 4 weeks before getting around to index your website. Be patient. Keep track when you request to have your web site indexed and check often. Requesting to be indexed over and over again will not help speed up the process.

·Since about 70-80% information searchers find in the Internet are provided by the major search engines, the best way to attract visitors to website is the high ranking in the main search engines. Before submitting your site to the search engines and directories, spend some time reading about how to write your title, Meta tags and the first few paragraphs of each page to obtain better ranking. After submitting your website, you should periodically review your ranking in the search engine listings by the key phrases.

·To improve or maintain the position of your web site in the main search engines, you may need to rewrite pages, add new content and additional web pages, change your description and keywords, etc. If you need to learn HTML to do this, do it because the reward is worth the effort.

If you are looking for assistance in submitting your site to search engines or would like to discuss different ways to improve your site you can contact us at info@docmagi.com

We will submit your site to hundreds of search engines for a flat fee and we also will provide you a detailed optimization report of your site if you request.

Magi Institute of Natural Medicine