Archive for August, 2008
It is time to talk about the concept of social media optimization. Social networking is all about joining communities online, which will give you and your website a wide exposure. Top Social Bookmarking websites such as Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Furl, Reddit, and Technorati present a way to save your favorite webpages and media online, and share it with others. This is a nice way to promote your own website or products as well. Sites as MySpace and Squidoo allow users to create a page about yourself and share your information, which can bring lots of quality targeted traffic to your website.
Adding your website to these social bookmarking sites is really easy. Most offer a toolbar or button. With a single click you can be listed. For the most part, the popularity will be based on the public. You cannot force a person to like something that isn’t interesting or unique. But there are a few things that you could do to help your entry and draw traffic.
- Create eye-catching headlines
- Write a meaningful description
- Content is king so your content should be fresh and meaningful
- Make it easy for others to vote / bookmark your site by adding buttons to your website
- Allow comments and feedback
- Make them public
- Network with other users
The key to Social Networking is easy: The simple idea is to reach out to as many people as possible in order to make your website popular. If you have great content and simply share it with as many people as you can, it will see success.
![[del.icio.us]](http://conceptual-seo.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/delicious.png)
![[Digg]](http://conceptual-seo.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/digg.png)
![[Facebook]](http://conceptual-seo.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/facebook.png)
![[Google]](http://conceptual-seo.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/google.png)
![[LinkedIn]](http://conceptual-seo.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/linkedin.png)
![[StumbleUpon]](http://conceptual-seo.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/stumbleupon.png)
![[Technorati]](http://conceptual-seo.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/technorati.png)
![[Twitter]](http://conceptual-seo.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/twitter.png)
![[Windows Live]](http://conceptual-seo.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/windowslive.png)
![[Yahoo!]](http://conceptual-seo.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/yahoo.png)
![[Email]](http://conceptual-seo.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/email.png)
Many web designers are so focused on the design part of building a website, that they will unintentionally affect its search engine rankings. It is a total shame to create an attractive website that does not attract any visitors. There is no point to all that beauty if no one can find it. Here are some ordinary design mistakes that should be kept away from whenever possible.
Image Links
If your navigation menu consists of images to form the buttons instead of text, the search engine bots will be confused. It makes it difficult for search engines to spider and index your site. What if you do not have any other option than image links in the navigation bar? Add ALT text to the image links to give meaning to the image. Make sure that you have text links somewhere else on the page as well. The footer is a nice place to have a few more links.
Frames
When using frames in a site, the problem is that most search engines will only see the frame loader page and ignore the rest of the page within. If you do not have any choice but using frames, offer lead-in pages that are not placed in frames. This means that you can put all of your beautiful frame-based pages in other locations.
Splash Intro Pages
Beautiful intro’s or entry pages, often using flash animation, are impressive to human visitors, even though many of them will ‘skip the intro’ quickly to get to where they want to be. For search engines, however, such a introduction is not impressive at all. The spiders will think that this is the index page and will not find it useful at all. Often, the only text on these intro pages is “skip intro”, which does not say much about the rest of the site.
In order to get the top rankings in the SERPs, your will have to help the search engines a little bit. Their spiders will have to find your site, and be able to navigate the site, and read all of your content, before they can rank it. Some graphic elements will affect the accessibility of your website and are better avoided. Surely it does look nice, but who is there to see it if your site does not attract any visitors?
Posted in search engine optimization, webdesign | 
Tags: design, graphics, seo, spiders | No Comments »
To start with, you need to let search engines come across your website. Search engines use a computer program called Spiders to find new websites. As soon as spiders find your website, they will put it in their databases. However, for brand new websites, it is hard to get found by search engines.
What a lot of webmasters do is to submit their sites to Google and Yahoo by hand, but there really is no need to do that. Here are 5 ideas to get your website indexed by search engines fast:
- Include a sitemap.xml file in your root directory. This xml file is like a list of the URLs of all pages of your website. This will help the spiders of the search engines with crawling your website. Once you have uploaded it to your root directory, you should set up an account at Google Webmaster Tools. Here you can submit the sitemap.
- There are a few barricades that prevents spiders from reading the content of your site. Get rid of them. If your website is coded in flash or frames, it is hard for spiders to crawl your website. The spiders prefer languages as HTML or PHP. If spiders cannot crawl your website, they won’t be able to index it either and it will not appear in the SERPs
- Submit your site to social bookmarking platforms. A good way to get your website detected by search engines is to let them naturally find it. A way to let this happen is to submit your site to social bookmarking sites like Digg, Reddit, and Del.icio.us. Spiders generally visit these sites several times per day. If your site is listed on one or more of the bookmarking sites, chances are high that it will be found and indexed.
- Get a link pointing to your site from a website with high PageRank (PR). Getting a high PR backlink to your site certainly helps successful indexing and it is also possible to get good organic rankings on search engines. Directory submissions are one of my preferred ways to get links pointing to a website. Chose directories with high PR and submit your website to them. Some of the popular directories such as Yahoo need payment before you get included, which could be well worth the money.
- Write articles and submit to popular article directories. Article marketing is a popular way to get your site noticed by search engines, and it can also attract some traffic to your website. Write an interesting article and include a link in it pointing to your website. Then submit it to popular article directories as WebRaydian and ArticleCube. Spiders are known to visit article directories frequently and once they crawl your article, they will follow the link in it and find your website.
Getting your site crawled by search engine spiders is undeniably a necessity in order to have good rankings in the SERPs. Try some or all of the ideas above and get your site indexed quickly.
Posted in manual submissions, search engine optimization |
Tags: indexing, search engines, spiders | No Comments »
In order to get the best rankings in the search engines, you need to understand how they work. Regrettably, the answer is complex, and actually secret as well. It all has to do with SEO, which stands for Search Engine Optimization. In fact, very few SEO experts, SEO consultants, SEO software and SEO companies can actually give you a perfect SEO explanation, simply because nobody knows the exact truth.
We do know the basics of how search engines work, for more detailed information, you can read on at other blog posts or contact an SEO expert offering SEO services.
Here is what happens in short:
- The search engines visit your website every now and then, and store information on your site in a database.
- Then they compare different factors of your site to the factors of other websites in their database.
- The search engines then rank the websites for each keyword searched, according to different parameters set, with the best website on top.
If you have a website or blog, you probably want to get it to the top search engine rankings, because that will bring in a lot of visitors. With a little bit of money you can hire an SEO consultant to help you with it. Some SEO companies also have simple packages of SEO that you can buy.
You can also do some basic SEO by yourself. This way you can save some money, but you will have to spend quite a lot of time. SEO is a time consuming job, not only applying of SEO techniques is time consuming, it does also take time before you can see results of your efforts. Even an SEO expert will need at least a couple of months to improve rankings of a website.
For DIY-ers, your first step would have to be reading more about the topic – reading about meta tags, keyword research, link building, and organic SEO. Inform yourself on free SEO tools and services and SEO software. This blog is a good place to start with.
Posted in search engine optimization |
Tags: rankings, search engine optimization, search engines, seo | 1 Comment »
SEO is the abbreviation of “search engine optimization” or “search engine optimizer”. It is quite a strange term, since we are not optimizing any search engines. It is a term invented in 1997 to describe the process of achieving top rankings in the search engines for a website’s most relevant keywords, something that had been going on for over a year already.
In the old days, SEO mostly consisted of optimizing the content of a page and the meta tags. Search Engines did not yet use off-page factors in the algorithm of their search results. Larry Page, one of the founders of Google, was the first to add off-page factors to the order of rankings by use of counting and evaluating links from one website to another. From then on SEO included link building as well.
Now, SEO is a complex and ongoing process with many factors included. It is becoming more and more difficult for a webmaster to manipulate all these factors. As a result SEO is becoming a separate occupation and SEO expert is often not the designer or manager of the website.
Large companies can hire all the experts in the field, or outsource the SEO work to specific SEO companies, while owners of smaller websites often do basic SEO themselves.
When you have a website, but not the traffic or sales that you expect, it is time to start to read on topics as Search Engine Optimization and Link Development. There are a lot of things that you can do by yourself or outsource. But you do need to take time to understand and learn some SEO techniques before barging on a project. The internet is a good place to learn. Here at this blog, you will be able to read all the basics of SEO, in order to do some yourself and outsource some basic jobs.
