Archive for the ‘Yahoo’ Category

How to emphasize the relevance of keywords?

Saturday, February 6th, 2010

It is very important to emphasize on the relevance of keywords while doing the search engine optimization. It can prove to be a tough task, but following some little things can make it easy. Here, is a look at some tips to emphasize the relevance of keywords in a webpage with regards to each other as well as the other content from the entire page.

  • Ever page needs to have a specific theme or should have content related to a specific topic. It obviously does not apply to the homepage.
  • It is important to utilize a broad spectrum of keywords. The keywords can be both generic as well as more specific. Also the keywords can be highly competitive as well as the even more obscure ones.
  • The words should be in a jumbled up pattern within the various phrases in a bid to accommodate the different search patterns for the various users.
  • The page title and headings are really important; hence they should be designed to contain the important keywords.
  • The sections or the paragraphs have to be organized in a way that the relevant words are place very close to each other. This is very important as the close proximity of the various related terms can easily help to increase the apparent relevance of the search term with regards to the contents of a webpage.
  • It has to be remembered that the search engines are smart and they are becoming even smarter with the passing time. It is of no use to try and fool them by placing some hidden unrelated text. It is of no use, period. It is usually done to con the visitors in visiting the irrelevant page which is not at all related to the term being searched by the visitors. The fact is that it still works, but the search engines are fast catching up with this con and hence it is dangerous territory.
  • The owners should remember to put a keyword or a set of keywords on the anchor text of the links. Also they should make sure that they should only link to pages tackling the same/similar topic.
  • It is no use spending time in finding the words with the same spelling but different meanings. This is because the search engines can now most of the times determine what a webpage’s content is looking forward to want to convey.

Some tips for feed optimization

Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010

It is very important to optimize the feeds and it not only involves using the Feed Burner ‘activate’ buttons. There are a number of things that can be done to optimize the feed

Some of these things are the same that are used to optimize any normal web pages. They include:

* The use of keywords – the keywords should necessarily be used in the various feed items and the channel titles, anchor text for external as well as internal links, blog posts as well as channel description.

* Properly working links – it is important to make sure that the links work properly. For the purpose it is important to use the full path while linking to make sure that the links are rendered in a proper way.

* The use of H1 and H2 tags – The use of heading tags for channel and feed titles is very helpful in feed optimization. They help to emphasize the titles’ importance. However, if the key items are not inserted in the title then it will simply lead to the emphasis on words which are not meant to be used for the purpose of optimization.

There are some other “feed specific” tips for feed optimization:

* The submission of feeds to the right type of directories.

* Feeds have to be offered for a number of different categories. This is especially important if the website is designed to cover a wide range of topics. In case your blog/website is very specialized, it may not be required. This proves useful for the subscribers who avoid being deluged by the unwanted blog entries but. It is also useful for the syndication entities, interested in certain specific topics.

* Using MyMSN and MyYahoo – In order to get the feeds indexed in a faster way and to make sure that it is frequently crawled by the two major search engines, Yahoo! and MSN, the RSS feed has to be added on the owners’ MyYahoo and MyMSN pages. According to Yahoo, this helps the feed to be indexed approximately within a period of just 48 hours! This tactic may also be used on iGoogle. The simple way to add the feed to iGoogle, one has to just click on Add Stuff and click on the Add feed or gadget link, which is located at the bottom left sidebar, then the feed URL has to be pasted on the box.

How to reap Search Engine Optimization benefits using images?

Friday, January 29th, 2010

Images, like textual contents can contribute a lot to the search engine optimization of the web pages. Not many people know how to do it. Here are some tips on how to reap search engine optimization benefits usingimages.

The first and the foremost tip to be followed, is to use only those images that are relevant to the website’s content.

Alt tags should always be used to help the search engine spiders. These tags help the spiders to understand what the image is about. The tags should necessarily contain the keywords.

The size of the image should be paid due attention. The size here does not mean the file size but the actual dimensions of the image and the actual space on the page that it occupies. This space is to be measured in terms of percentage. The bigger an image is the greater importance or relevance it should have with the page’s content.

The images used on the webpage should be of a good quality. The quality is measured in terms of contrast and blurriness.

Choosing the right image is important but it is not of much use, if the image is not placed on the webpage in a proper manner. The image’s placement is of a lot of importance. There indeed is a difference if the image is put on the top, in the middle or at the bottom of the page. Also when the image is put on the left, in the center, or on the right side of the page, it serves different purposes and offer different benefits. Another thing that has to be remembered about the placement is that the text surrounding the image is also of an utmost importance. Hence, it is important to place the image near the relevant text.

There are a number of images which do not contain any key content. Such images have to be repeatedly used throughout the website. However, it has to be made sure that the different images are placed on different pages.

People often worry about the images’ borders. Well, they are not to be worried of, unless they are really huge. This is because the too small images are simply filtered out by the search engines and do not factor a lot in the determination of page rank.

Preparing your website for mobile web

Monday, January 25th, 2010

With the increasing use of smart phones to browse the web, to send emails, to indulge in social networking as well as for shopping, these phones have emerged as a sort of portable computers for people who want to use the internet while on the move. Still a lot of websites are not optimized enough to be used with smart phones.

Preparing you website for mobile web requires two things, customizing your web site’s design and deciding the way the visitors will locate the website using mobile search.

When it comes to web design, all you need to attach a cascading style sheet (CSS) to your website which can feed up specific instructions to a particular mobile browser. While designing the CSS for the various handheld web browsers, one has to consider a number of things beforehand:

The mobile browser has a limited screen real estate, which is close to just 2×3 inches. Also all the fonts used for mobile web should be used in their most basic form, you do not have to worry about color or typography. It is important to stripe out the images.

All the advertisements have to be removed to completely utilize the limited screen space. Any online application that is not required should be kept hidden. It is important to completely focus on the content.

The background colors also have to be removed with only a basic black text appearing on a white background. Any flash, java or plug-in content has to be necessarily removed. The basic motto is to simplify everything.

Now you have to tackle the problem of making sure that your website is easily located with the help of mobile search. The best way to do that is to that the website is included in all the local search directories with completely accurate profiles. The popular search engines like Google Local and Yahoo local are designed to receive a higher amount of traffic from users who wish to locate a business in a certain area. A lot of people when use their phones to search the web are actually looking forward to visit certain businesses. Another way to be noticed in mobile web is to utilize social networking based links in order to drive web site traffic. In fact the mobile web traffic is going to be highly dependent on a potent combination of search engines and social networking.

The relation between SEO and user habits

Tuesday, December 29th, 2009

Keyword selection is thought to be an important part of the search engine optimization (SEO) process. Still many people do not understand the relationship between the user habits and the search engine optimization process of selecting the keywords. Here is shedding some light on this important relationship.

The first thing that has to be understood clearly is that when it comes to the internet users there habits tend to evolve rapidly. Hence internet has to keep up with this evolution. So how does it actually affect the search engine optimization process when it comes to selecting the keywords?

Well, to state the obvious the user habits do affect the SEO this is because the website owners have to actually take the various user habits into account while choosing the best keywords to optimize the website with.

According to recent finding the user habits are changing when it comes to search. The findings state that the users are learning fast that it is possible to get much more accurate results when the much more specific keywords are typed into the search window rather than simply using the various generic terms, to run a search. It is still a fact that the generic terms are still able to generate a large search volume. However with times more and more users have started to enter specific keywords to find the desired information on a subject.

This simply means that niche keyword phrases have become much more valuable when it comes to using them in the search engine optimization process. With keyword competitiveness coming into the fray the increase in the number of searches as well as a lower competition ratio generates a better ranking in the search engine results page as well as more traffic.

Apart from simply optimizing for the niche keywords, the websites have now started to consider the common misspellings of the various key terms while optimizing their pages. Even the regular typists can suffer from the problem of misspelling the commonly used terms. Well the fact is that the common misspellings can send a lot of extra traffic towards a particular website.

It is important that a website does not primarily optimize for the incorrect spellings, as it will lend the website with an amateurish appearance. However, it is important that a website actually gets itself ranked for the various misspelled words. After all taking advantage of the common spelling mistakes can be very fruitful.

Hence it is important to identify the various common user habits and plan the search engine optimization process accordingly

Using the keywords or key phrases – what is more effective?

Monday, December 21st, 2009

According to an old saying when enough mud is thrown at a wall some of that tends to stay stuck on the wall. This is the way people used to throw keywords in their website’s content until recently. The thought behind this action is if enough keywords are splattered across a webpage some of them will surely attract the search engines, that too the most popular ones. However in recent times the competition has become really tough. This is why it is no longer enough to just find the most relevant and the most searched keyword on Google. What is important now is how these particular keywords are incorporated into the various key phrases.

All the best websites on the internet with the best search engine optimization use a potent combination of keywords chosen carefully. The combination of these chosen keywords help to come with some key phrases that are very popular.

Usually when the people search for a mystery book or search for mystery books, they usual enter two single keywords in the search box – ‘mystery book/books’ rather than typing the keywords with quotation marks at both the beginning as well as the end to establish the whole phrase properly. However, there still are some people who know that using the quotation marks at the beginning and the end of the key phrase offers a much more accurately targeted set of search results.

Using the key phrases with quotation marks in Google brings out close to 35,000 websites and using the key phrase or the keywords without any quotation marks can bring out only 300,000 websites. Therefore, when the two keywords ‘ mystery’ and ‘book’ are incorporated into a full sentence even without using any particular quotation marks, then the combination of keywords mystery book is recognized by the various search engines as a phrase which is completely genuine.

A lot of people misspell a lot while they search for a variety of items on the Internet. This can be used to the advantage of the various websites. In fact of a website can use a key phrase or a set of key words inside their content without it actually looking like a misspelling. For example; they can mention mystery book in their content as ‘A mystery book offered by the Mystery Book Company at really low prices is a virtual steal. This way they will work really well and will attract a lot of attention from the search engines.

SEO Link Building Mistakes

Tuesday, December 1st, 2009

Link building is a very important part of search engine optimization. However, many websites are suffering everyday just because they commit a lot of link building mistakes. Here is a look at the common SEO link building mistakes that you should avoid.

  • Mass Link Package

The internet is full of websites selling link packages that are just not right for you. Most of the times, they simply come up with some pop-up ads or can link to a network full of spam. These links are as bad as the various infamous spam email lists. In some cases the link may taker you to a banned website that can hurt your website’s ranking with Google or any other popular search engine.

  • Link Exchange

Link exchange was a popular SEO link building strategy till some time back, but Google can now easily run a trace on these reciprocal links, they are not considered good anymore.

  • Linking to the non-indexed websites

Many websites commit the mistake of linking with the non-indexed websites. It is very important that the websites with which you establish a link should be properly indexed. Otherwise, your link will not be considered right. This means it is a waste of time to establish links with the non-indexed websites.

  • Lack of Anchor Text

Many websites when building links without any relevant anchor text can be considered as the spam website that do not get any worthy links. It is important to use the anchor text as it is what provides your website with the required link juice, thereby making them relevant and increasing their perceived value.

  • Inorganic links

The Google page rank system is designed to work in an organic manner. It only considers those links that come to the website in a natural way. It means that the links should slowly and consistently be built with time from a variety of related websites. The websites that build links in an inorganic way are considered inappropriate by the search engines.

It is very important for you to understand that SEO link building should be a completely natural and organic process. It is important for you to build links that are relevant and enjoy a high enough page rank. Do not fall for any of the too-good-to-be-true promises made by the online frauds. If you successfully avoid all the mistakes mentioned above, you will never have a problem with the SEO link building for your website.

Website redesigns must take SEO into account

Saturday, November 28th, 2009

Website redesigning is a necessary process to help upgrade the website as well as to reach across to a larger number of people, from the targeted demographic. Many companies these days get their website redesigned on a regular basis. However, not many of them realize the importance of Search engine Optimization (SEO).

If a company does not take into account the importance of SEO, when they re-design their website then it can result in the website losing its “equity” of the on-page optimization.

It is to be understood that when a website is redesigned it is not done for peanuts; it takes a lot of money. Hence, it is very important that everything is done just right when the website is being redesigned. When the SEO is taken into account as soon as the redesigning starts then the company which owns that website can save a lot of money. Also the SEO done during redesigning will make the website better equipped to generate higher revenue in a quicker way, as soon as it is launched.

Usually the facilitation of SEO for a website re-design requires an efficient migration plan. A migration plan inventories all the digital assets and current content of the website and helps in the creation of the matrix of old to new. Whenever a change is made the dependencies are noted down along with the actions that have to be taken to make the whole transition process smooth for all kinds of audiences. Also the various naming conventions for a variety of things like anchor text and link URLs can also be considered.

In case some major changes are made to the website’s design, URL structure and content, an effect on the search visibility is difficult to avoid. However, if SEO is taken into account from the start than some key insights can be incorporated into the overall process. In fact, it can help in avoiding short term effects, like the cost that has to be paid for the redevelopment of the content management systems and the long term effects like getting stuck with inappropriate content causing loss of links and traffic.

When a company takes SEO into account while redesigning along with things like branding and maintenance, it will help the website to accommodate the requirements of the various regular and prospective users, the search engines as well as the content managers.

In short, the website redesign process should include a proper consideration to SEO.