Monday, July 6, 2009

Shades of SEO

Shades of SEO


  1. Dark Inky Black Hat SEO: So evil he’s a typosquatter installing spyware. Plain illegal, too.
  2. Charcoal Hat SEO: Optimizes really unrelated pages for all kinds of queries, but within the bounds of legality.
  3. Dark Gray Hat SEO: This SEO is e.g. a splogger stealing content from other sites. (What, that’s better than charcoal?)
  4. Slate Gray Hat SEO: An SEO creating link farms and such.
  5. Gray Hat SEO: An SEO who actually reads the search engine’s webmaster guidelines, but then tries as much “evil” as she can get away with.
  6. Light Gray Hat SEO: This SEO creates original content (lots of it), but the content is still only aimed at search engines.
  7. Off-White Hat SEO: This guy not only ensures the site is indexable – he’ll also make sure to get lots of backlinks from friends.
  8. White Hat SEO: This person puts up the content that people are actually searching for, and prepares the site to make it very accessible. White Hat SEOs only optimize those of their pages they deem worthy to be ranking top in search engines.
  9. Luminescent Pearly White Hat SEO: Not only does this SEO do everything the White Hat SEO does, the LPW Hat SEO also makes sure pages will not show up for irrelevant queries.

8 Things That Makes SEO Work

Understanding your business goals is what makes us different. It is very necessary to improve the website quality to be a successful leader in the market. Spending time on improving the quality and PR of the website is always worth, instead of listening to some smart geek and using the unethical methods means to expand the websites short-term popularity.

SEO Tips

To make SEO work you need a complete approach focusing few important things. Lets checkout the 8 things that makes SEO work.

  • Your Keyword Selection, Prioritize your keywords
  • Registration of your domain, Domain name including a keyword, Keyword in filename, Website Address Length
  • Proper Placement of Keywords in title tag, Meta Description tag, Meta Keyword tag, Keywords in Content H1, H2 and H3, Keyword Font Styles
  • Linking Tactics – Avoid the use of unethical methods
  1. Internal Links – Keyword in links to internal site pages, valid internal links, Efficient linking
  2. External / Outgoing Links – Quality Links, Inspecting your Links, Title and Description, Limit number of links on a page
  3. Incoming Links (backlinks) – Quality of Referrer, Trend of link popularity, Anchor Text, Age of Link, Number of Outgoing Links on Referrer Page, Position of Link, Trusted Websites, JavaScript/Flash Links
  • On-Page Factors – Home Page: Over optimization penalty (OOP), Getting Reported, File Size, Freshness of Pages, Frequency of Updates, Website Age, Dynamic Pages, Texts inside Images, Excess JavaScript, Inline Frames and Frames, Hidden links / texts, Cloaking, Duplicate content, Understandable Content
  • Off-Page Factors – Traffic Buying, Link Schemes, Minimum one backlink, Buying Links, Server IP Address, Links from bad websites, your web server Reliability and Uptime
  • User Activity – Search Engine Traffic, Click through Rate (CTR), Time spent on page, Managing Bookmarks, Leaving the Website
  • Gathering Links, Collecting Links, Unique Content, Articles, Press Release, Forums, Blogs, Sponsoring Directories, Link Exchange and much more

Saturday, July 4, 2009

SEO and Your Website Design


SEO and Your Website

Design


There are many elements that go into SEO. Keyword implementation comes to mind along with quality inbound links. One of the most essential components of all is your actual website. When preparing to embark on an SEO mission, the first thing you need to ensure is that your site has a user-friendly feel. This basically means that your pages are navigable, links visible and set up correctly. It also helps if your site is built with complete, intriguing, quality content. If the navigation of your site is sloppy with misspelled words and improper grammar, your SEO efforts will likely be less than effective.

When designing your site with SEO in mind, it is important to provide usability for your visitors and accessibility for the search engines. A proper design will ensure that visitors can get around with ease and do not run into pages that take too long to load. You should also know that Flash and errors in HTML code could possibly prevent from search engine robots from properly crawling and indexing your site. A good site structure is one that caters to both your visitors and the search engines. As a website owner, achieving a site optimized for the search engines could be a challenge, especially if you lack design skills. When this is the case, you may need to rely on third-party professionals.

Expertise is Key

Because these elements are so important, several companies have emerged to offer their services. Some even employ both SEO experts and web designers, allowing you to kill two birds with one stones by having someone make sure your site is optimized, and another to ensure that its easy to navigate and use. The key is to do your research and take a little time evaluating different firms. The best company is one that responds to your inquiries in a timely manner with satisfactory answers. Rather than making claims about how fast or where they can ensure your rankings, they are honest and confident that their expertise will deliver results. In short, you want a reputable firm that has proven the ability to create designs that meet W3C compliance and posses an understanding of the latest web trends as they relate to SEO.

No Guarantees

Even when turning to a professional web designer, one should never automatically assume that shelling out cash will guarantee you a top spot on Google. The internet has opened up numerous opportunities and because of this, the web is a very competitive arena. Chances are, there are thousands of entrepreneurs who share your ambition for succeeding online. They could even be targeting the same market as yourself. You can spend a pretty penny on web design but without optimized content and a good marketing strategy, your beautiful website will get buried in Cyberspace.

Expectations will constantly be higher as the web continues to evolve. Your visitors expect more feature-rich content while search engines increasingly prefer fast loading sites. For this reason, the proper coding and effective optimization of your site are crucial. If you don’t get it right the first time, you could find yourself paying even more to get the right design.