Search Engine Optimization Articles

SEO - Use Proper Semantic Structuring in your Web Pages

What Are Web Page Symantics? In the beginnings of the web, web pages were fairly simple and structured semantically. What this means is that the way the code was written for a page was interpreted and presented pretty much as it was written. For example, this simple HTML code: <h1> This is my heading </h1> <p> This is my paragraph </p> <h2> This is a secondary heading </h2> <p> This is another paragraph </p> Would output

SEO - Inbound Links Rule your Rank

One of the most difficult and most critical aspects of getting your site indexed by search engines is getting inbound links, or links from another site to yours. If there is one factor that most affects your ranking on search engines, it is the number and quality of inbound links your site has. How inbound links work On the web, every link to your site counts as a measurable vote of confidence. When another site links to yours, what they are saying virtually is "I think this other site

SEO - Unlearn Outdated Search Engine Optimization Strategy

The Ghost of Search Engine's Past As the owner of several web sites, I've had to learn, unlearn, and teach numerous people how to let go of the "common knowledge" of search engine optimization. There is more information on the web than ever before regarding search engines, and while some of it is pure gold, most of it is simply fodder to feed unwarranted superstition. Too much (search engine) information The web contains several generations of documents, ranging from the beg

SEO - Keep Your Web Page Code Clean and Concise

What a WYSIWYG is and How it Works Using more code on your page than necessary means two things: 1) Robots won't be able to index as much content on your site and 2) The content on the page is diluted by the code around it, and thus is interpreted as less relevant to the keywords you are targeting. The goal of this section is to give you the tools you need to pare your code down to the bare minimum, letting the search engine robots do their work faster, and get your site ranked higher. Under

SEO - Multiple Web Pages Beat Long Web Pages

In contrast with the printed word, which has been around for thousands of years, the web page has only been around for ten years. We're highly influenced by printed word user interfaces like books, magazines and newspapers, and our relationship with the printed word often causes us to make our web pages longer than they need to be. Web surfers move from one web page to the next by means of hyperlinks or search engines, meaning that a web developer has little control as to what pages a visitors

SEO - Search Engine Voids to Avoid (Frames, Flash and Folly)

Search Engine Robots are People, Too Search engine robots are far from invincible. In fact, there are several things you can do to your web pages to make them nearly invisible to search engines. There are two major approaches to circumventing these "black holes", the first of which involves "cloaking" - creating two versions of a single page, one for search engines and another for users - and the second of which is simply avoiding them altogether. The first method of cloaking is less preferab

SEO - Web Page File Names are Important. Really!

URL Filenames Count This simple lesson will work wonders when it comes to fine-tuning your search engine optimization strategy. We have already covered how choosing the right title and headings for your web page will give the search engine robots a clear idea about what your page is about. One commonly overlooked, yet very powerful method for giving your keywords more coverage is the use of your web page URL. What Web Page File Name Did Widget? (groan...) Say for instance that you have a

SEO - Duplicate Content Waters Down Web Pages

Issues With Duplicate Content Duplicate Content Duplicating content on the web is easy to do, on purpose and inadvertently. Without keeping a close watch on techniques that can be interpreted as duplicate content, you run the risk of running afoul with search engines and simultaneously reduce the power of your pages on the SERPs. There are three major reasons to take the effort to make insure that you are avoiding duplicate content. Reason #1: It can be interpreted as a violation of a sear

SEO - Incoming Link Text Matters

Incoming Link Text Matters Big Time Incoming Link Text Matters Big Time Search engines consider the text of a hyperlink to a page to be important when deciding what the destination page is about. A hyperlink usually consists of a short, descriptive, and often keyword-rich summary of what topics are covered on the destination page. If the hyperlink is coming from another web site, then the description is also theoretically objective - meaning that the owner of that site is offering their ow

SEO - A Few Ways to Get In Trouble with Search Engines

Some Ways to Get in Trouble with Search Engines Some Ways to Get in Trouble with Search Engines Search engines are fickle, and there is a lot of competition for the top spots on their SERPs. This combination makes for a fairly volatile marketplace where web sites generating great traffic from a search engine one day can be dropped from their index the next. Businesses relying heavily on search engine traffic often watch their revenues dry up when they unexpectedly get banned from the SERPs fo