25 Tips To Optimize Your Blog For Readers & Search Engines

25 Tips To Optimize Your Blog For Readers & Search Engines

Everyone have started up a blog these days, but many people just aren’t taking the steps needed to optimize their blogs for both readers and search engines. While blogs can be business related (another blog about mesothelioma anyone?) they can also be personal where you talk about the great ham sandwich you had for lunch today or the crappy service you had at that trendy restaurant last night.

But whether your blog is business or personal, you should ensure that you are optimizing your blog for both your readers (after all, you want to keep those readers coming back) and the search engines. Unfortunately, optimization is an important step that far too many blogs seem to be skipping over, even those that have a broad appeal to surfers and have the potential to be monetizable.
However, optimizing a blog is a bit different than your standard website search engine optimization (SEO), particularly because most blogs run off standard blog platforms, or worse, run as a hosted blog on someone else’s domain name. And there are design issues that can be unique to blogs which can impact your rankings.

Let’s face it, when you commission a styling’ new blog template, most blog designers focus on making your blog look the way you want it to. But unfortunately for bloggers, not very many of those great blog designers are also SEOs by trade, meaning that the blog design you use could actually be hurting your search engine rankings. While you may have a great design that looks wonderful to readers, new readers might not find you if your blog isn’t ranking well organically in the search engines.

Also, when you optimize your blog for the user experience, you make it easy for users to return and engage in your blog without dealing with any of the hassles that can cause them to abandon other sites or blog entries. Repeat visitors are the cream of your blog, so by following these tips you have given them the tools they need to return as well as the user experience that makes them want to come back.

Fortunately, if you are on the case to make your blog rank well while not hindering your visitor’s experience on your site, there are definitely things you can check – and fix – to prevent any indexing issues from occurring, and ensuring your blog a happy and healthy existence in the search engines.
So here is advice on how you can optimize that blog of yours for both users and search engines without alienating one or the other.


1) Dump The Default Template - Looks Count!

I cringe when I see a blog using the “out of the box” Wordpress or MovableType template. Hire a designer to create a unique look for your blog, or at the very least, take advantage of some of the free templates available and customize it a bit with a unique logo or a slight color upgrade.


2) Just Say No To Bad Color Schemes

While a hot pink with lime green color scheme might be your favorite, consider what your readers will be expecting. That color scheme might work perfectly on a teenage gossip site, but would look extremely out of place as the corporate blog for a men’s suit company. Likewise, gamers would think nothing of a black background on an Xbox 360 blog, but it would look horrendous on a parenting or pregnancy site. So while you should experiment with colors to find a good mix for your blog, keep in mind user experience and their expectations.


3) RSS Me!Make sure you have RSS available.

Many hosted blogging solutions don’t have RSS automatically available, so you will need to add it. And when you do add it, ensure you have those RSS links in an obvious spot. Don’t tuck them away at the very bottom of your index page after your most recent 20 entries, or hide them on a separate “About Us” page. Place all those handy subscribe links in your sidebar, which is exactly where people will look for them. If you use Feedburner currently, have a look at their new MyBrand option which allows you to host your own feeds for a seamless user experience.


4) Offer RSS & Feed Subscription Buttons

Yes, when people want to subscribe to a blog, they will often look for that orange RSS logo as well as the logos of the standard aggregators such as Bloglines. So it is worth the time to add the most popular ones to your blog so visitors can easily do their one-click subscriptions to your feed without it require much effort on their part. If you make it hard to subscribe, most just won’t bother. FeedButton offers a service that allows you to offer multiple RSS aggregator and feed reader buttons with a single expanding rollover button.


5) Offer Posts Via EmailSome people just don’t get RSS.

So cater to them by offering them an option to get your blog posts by email instead. The most popular service to do this automatically is FeedBlitz, although there are also many other tools available to do this.


6) Decide On Full Or Partial Feeds

Do you offer full feeds or partial feeds? This is a personal preference, and is often dependent on what market space you are blogging in. One option is to offer two feeds, one being an ad-supported full feed, with an RSS ad included, and the other being an ad-free snippet copy of the feed, where readers won’t see ads but will have to actually view your blog in order to read your full entry. But this will often come down to personal preference, and the preferences of your readers.


7) Write Compelling Snippets/Descriptions

If you do use snippets for your RSS feed, be sure to make them compelling or leave readers with a cliffhanger to encourage them to click and read the full entry. This will get you many more readers to your entries than just using the default option of including the first X number of words in the blog post as the snippet. Use your excerpts to generate interest and clicks.


8) Pay Attention to How You Write.

One of my favorite bloggers has the unfortunate habit of writing detailed long entries… without a single paragraph break and with the double whammy of also writing with a font size smaller than usual. If I look up for a moment, it is hard to find my place again in her 1000 word entries. As a result, I don’t read it as often as I would like to, simply because reading it is such a painful experience.


9) Spelling CountsSpelling is also worth mentioning.

Add one of the many spell checkers to your internet browser and run a quick spell check before you publish your entry. Every word doesn’t have to be perfect, and I am certainly guilty myself of letting on occasional typo slip through unnoticed. But I also get annoyed when I am reading typo after typo after typo in an entry. And yes, if it happens enough, I will unsubscribe out of sheer frustration.


10) Fontography Counts

Make the font easy to read. Some bloggers think it is cool to have their handwriting turned into a customized font, or use a trendy font that would be better suited to a scrapbook layout. But not everyone has those wild and weird fonts installed, which means that those people will see a standard font such as Times New Roman, and it can really kill the look of your blog. So instead design the text of your blog entries to use a standard font in a standard size.


11) Don't Forget Navigation

Is this blog part of a larger site, such as a corporate blog on a site for a major company? Don’t just link to the main page of the blog. Syndicate your recent headlines in the sidebar to encourage visitors on the main site to check out the blog too.


12) How Fast is Your Host?

Another one of my favorite blogs has such a slow response time when I click from the snippet in my RSS to the full blog entry that I only actually end up waiting around for it to load about 10% of the time. Don’t lose readers because your hosting company thinks 30 seconds is a perfectly reasonable amount of time to load up a page.

13) Avoid Widget Overload!

Yes, there are definitely some cool widgets you can add to your blog, such as MyBlogLog or a Flickr photo box tied to your photo gallery. But be aware that having a large number of javascripts can slow down your site. So don’t sacrifice timely loading time for nice-but-not-all-that-necessary widgets.


14) Have Descriptive Titles

Some blog software actually makes your entry titles seem pretty repetitious in the search engine result pages, and can result in a lower click through than you might have had otherwise with highly optimized titles. If your title’s say something like “Jason’s Tech Industry Rants & Ramblings Blog >> New Xbox 360 title announced for April release” you should change it to “New Xbox 360 title announced for April release”. Unless you are well known as an authority blog in that market, the blog name is simply wasting crucial space at the beginning of the title tag and causing the rest of the entry title to end up getting truncated in the search results. And make sure your titles actually enhance the entry and don't leave the reader wondering what on earth the blog entry could be about. Ensuring you have great titles when you have a small readership and are depending on search engines to send you readers is one of the first steps you should take to optimize your blog.


15) Look at your Cascading Style Sheets.

Most blogs use a tremendous amount of CSS to create that custom look. And while most of the “out of the box” designs that come standard with the installed template include all CSS in an external file, there definitely are some blog designers who will put their CSS on the individual template pages rather than placing it all in an external CSS file. And when you don’t place CSS in an external file, it can clutter up your pages and result in the most important part of the page – the entry text – being much further down in the HTML code when it has to go after the masses of CSS coding lines.


16) Post Often

The more frequently you post, the more likely Googlebot and other bots will stop by on a more regular basis. If you only post once in a blue moon, expect that it might take a while for Google to stop by and see that you actually have updated again. Google loves updated fresh sites, so it make sense to feed the bot what it wants.


17) Spread the Link Love

If you are blogging about a story, link up the original story as well as other’s commentary on the same topic. When you do so, you will often make those bloggers aware of your blog’s existence (if they weren’t already) when people click from your blog to theirs. And it also increases the odds that they will either link to you on that story or on something you blog about in the future.


18) Be Aware of Your Anchor Text

When you link to someone’s blog entry, or even a previous blog entry on your own site, make sure you link well. This means instead of linking to someone’s blog entry with the anchor text “click here”, you link to them using anchor text related to the blog entry, such as “Jason’s scoop on the new Widget Xbox 360 game”.


19) Create Unique Stories

Bloggers love to link to other bloggers. When you write original blog entries, rather than just rehashing something someone else has already said, you increase the odds that someone will find yours interesting enough to link to and talk about. And a reader of that blogger’s blog might read the entry and decide to write something about what you said as well, meaning yet another link as well. And if you are fortunate, it will go viral, meaning suddenly it seems like every blogger in your market space is talking about what you wrote. Rinse and repeat as often as possible for maximum exposure and link juice.


20) Use a Related Posts Plugin

Not only does this make sense to keep readers around for other articles on your site that are related to your current post, but it also allows you to deeplink from a current page on your blog to older entries. Often, older entries get buried several pages deep on an archive page, and this allows you to showcase entries written months or years previously and give those “oldies but goodies” an extra little kick in the search engines. There are several related post plugins available depending on which blog platform you use.


21) Ping Other Sites

When you add a new blog entry, you might want to ping site such as Technorati and FeedBurner to let them know you have a brand new blog entry on your site. You can also now ping Google’s Blog Search as well for faster indexing in their blog search engine at blogsearch.google.com. Automatic pinging is an option in the control panel of most blog platforms including WordPress and MovableType. And Ping-o-Matic offers a service that allows you to quickly pick and chose what to ping.


22) Buy Your Own Domain Name

Don’t always think your free blog hosting company will be around forever. What will you do if you build up a loyal readership then one day you discover yourblogname.examplebloghost.com no longer works because examplebloghost.com has gone out of business? You want to make sure the search engines have a URL they will always find your blog at, rather than have to worry about them re-indexing your previously well-ranked blog on am entirely new domain… that is if you are lucky enough to get your blog posts from your free hosting company. Both Google's Blogger & Wordpress allow you to use their hosted blog service while displaying it on your own domain instead of their own branded one.


23) Manage Your Trackback & Comment Spam

You don’t want Google or Yahoo to find masses of spammy links on your site to all manner of less-than-quality sites submitted to your blog by a blog spammer. Use one of the many tools on the market for your blog platform to manage both comment and trackback spam.


24) Use a Good URL Structure

Don’t use “permalinks” such as www.yourblogsite.com/?p=123 . Instead, use www.yourblogsite.com/2007/01/01/blog_entry_title_here. Most blogging platforms allow you to change from the standard numbered permalinks to this style of search engine friendly ones. And just in case the blog platform you use has funky dynamic URLs for each entry, you will want to ensure that the bots can crawl them easily or use a mod rewrite to create a good structure such as in the example.


25) Use Great Categories

When you write a post, place it in 1 to 3 different categories related to the post. For example, and article on the television show Grey's Anatomy could go under "Grey's Anatomy" and "ABC". Avoid the temptation to add it to ten different categories though, such as including "drama," "hospital," "interns" and "Seattle" because that is just overkill. But if you wrote something great on Grey's Anatomy, you have made it easy for your reader to find all your posts on Grey's Anatomy because they simply have to click on the category link at the top or bottom of the entry.

While some bloggers insist that search engine rankings will come naturally to those who wait, who really wants to wait for Google? A blogger can run into several unique challenges when it comes to optimizing for search engines, and it makes sense to get the jump on it now than simply hoping that if you write it, the bots will come. It is far easier to ensure you have a well optimized blog now than trying to figure out what the issue is 6 months down the road when only your blog’s index page is found in Google!

Step 4: Increase the link popularity of your web site

Step 4: Increase the link popularity of your web site

What is link popularity?

Link popularity has become a very important factor for high search engine rankings. Generally
speaking, link popularity is the number of other web sites that link to your web site.

The more other web sites link to your web site, the higher your search engine rankings will be. The idea behind this concept is that search engines think that your web site must be important if many other web sites link to your site.

Of course, the number of links alone is not enough to improve your search engine rankings. It is also important that the other web sites are related to your web site. Links from unrelated web sites won't do your own web site much good. If the links to your web site include your important keywords in the link text, the effect on your search engine rankings will be much higher.
If you want to be found for the search term "brown shoes" then it's much better to get links like

brown shoes

than links like

Peter & Wolf Inc..

If the link to your site includes your search term, search engines think that your web site must be relevant for this search term.

High link popularity alone won't bring you high search engine rankings, of course, your web site
content must also be optimized for search engines. It doesn't make sense to get many incoming links if your web site doesn't have much content. If search engines find that the links to your web site and the content on your web site match, they will give your web site high search engine rankings for its topic.

Tips and tricks

Tips and tricks

To which sites should you submit your web site?

You should submit your web site to all search engines, Internet directories and special interest sites that are related to your web site. A listing on the Internet directories and search engines can bring your web site very targeted web site traffic.

In addition, the links from the Internet directories will increase the link popularity of your web site. A high link popularity can have a positive effect on your ranking on many search engines.

Do not submit your web site if the Internet directory or special interest site is not related to your site. These directories will not list you and they might consider your submission as a spamming attempt.

Being listed on as many Internet directories and search engines as possible will bring your web site many visitors and new customers. Even if a single search engine might not bring you many visitors, it all adds up and you'll benefit from increased link popularity and higher rankings in other search engines.

How often should you submit your web site?

In general, it is not necessary to re-submit your web site once a search engine has indexed it.
Search engine spiders will automatically come to your web site and find new pages. If you have to re-submit your web pages, we recommend to not submit your web site more often than every four weeks.

Only submit your web site to those search engines that are relevant to your business and to your country. Search engines that have nothing to do with your web site topic will not list your web site and they might consider your submission as a spamming attempt.

It is also not necessary to submit more than your index page. Search engines will follow the links on your home page and they will index every page on your site. Just make sure that all pages of your site can be reached through the links on your site. If you don't have a sitemap yet, it might be a good idea to build one. Further information about site maps can be found here.

Note that search engines take some time to index a web site. Most search engines won't deliver
immediate results. Usually, your web site will be indexed within 4-12 weeks.

Do not submit redirections

Your web site should have its own domain name and the domain name should point directly to your web site. If your domain name is only a redirection to the actual domain that hosts your web site, you won't get good results.

The importance of valid HTML code

The importance of valid HTML code

Many webmasters overlook a very important aspect of web site promotion: the validity of the HTML code.

What is valid HTML code?

Most web pages are written in HTML. As for every language, HTML has its own grammar, vocabulary and syntax, and every document written in HTML is supposed to follow these rules.
Like any language, HTML is constantly changing. As HTML has become a relatively complex
language, it's very easy to make mistakes. HTML code that is not following the official rules is called invalid HTML code.

Why is valid HTML code important?

Search engines have to parse the HTML code of your web site to find the relevant content. If your HTML code contains errors, search engines might not be able to find everything on the page.

Search engine crawler programs obey the HTML standard. They can only index your web site if it is compliant with the HTML standard. If there's a mistake in your web page code, they might stop crawling your web site and they might lose what they've collected so far because of the error.

Although most major search engines can deal with minor errors in HTML code, a single missing
bracket in your HTML code can be the reason if your web page cannot be found in search engines.

If you don't close some tags properly, or if some important tags are missing, search engines might ignore the complete content of that page.

General optimization tips

General optimization tips

The following tips and techniques canhelp you to improve the ranking of your web site:

• Don't use frames
  If at all possible, avoid frames. Many search engines have difficulty with frames and it is very difficult to get high search engine rankings for web sites that use frames.
  Google says about frames: "Reasons your site may not be included: Your page uses frames.
  Google supports frames to the extent that it can. Frames tend to cause problems with search engines, bookmarks, emailing links and so on, because frames don't fit the conceptual model of the web (every page corresponds to a single URL). If a user's query matches the site as a whole, Google returns the frame set. If a user's query matches an individual page on the site, Google returns that page. That individual page is not displayed in a frame -- because there may be no frame set corresponding to that page."
  Yahoo has a similar statement: "Yahoo! Slurp follows HREF links. It does not follow SRC links. This means that Yahoo! Slurp does not retrieve or index individual frames referred to by SRC links."
  Don't use frames on your web site if you want to have high search engine rankings!

• Avoid Flash and other multimedia elements
  Most search engines cannot index Flash pages. The normal text content on your web pages matters most to search engines. If you must use Flash on your web site, make sure that you also offer normal text for the search engines.

• Don't use welcome pages
  Some web pages use a "Welcome to our web site" image with a link to the actual site as the index page for the web site. Don't do this. Some search engines might not follow the link on the welcome page. In addition, most web surfers don't like these welcome pages.

• Avoid dynamically created web pages
  Databases and dynamically generated pages are great tools to manage the contents of big web sites. Imagine having to manage the Web site contents of the New York Times without databases.
  Unfortunately, dynamically generated Web pages can be a nightmare for search engine spiders because the pages don't actually exist until they are requested. A search engine spider is not going to be able to select all necessary variables on the submit page.
  Some search engines can index dynamically pages to a point, but even Google states that they have problems with dynamically created pages: "Reasons your site may not be included in Google: Your pages are dynamically generated. We are able to index dynamically generated pages. However, because our web crawler can easily overwhelm and crash sites serving dynamic content, we limit the amount of dynamic pages we index."

• Make sure that you allow search engine robots to index your site
  Imagine you're an Internet marketing service company and you keep trying very hard to get top rankings in the search engines for your customer. Even after several weeks, the customer's web site hasn't been listed in any search engine. Then you start to realize that the search engine spiders and robot programs cannot access the web site because your customer blocks them because the robots.txt file is not properly configured. Details about the robots.txt file can be found here.

• Make sure that search engine spiders can access your web site
  Search engine spiders don't have the functionality of full-fledged Web browsers such as Microsoft Internet Explorer, Firefox or Netscape Navigator. In fact, search engine robot programs look at your Web pages like a text browser does. They like text, text, and more text. They ignore information contained in graphic images but they can read text descriptions.
  This means that search engine spider programs are not able to use Web browser technology to access your site. If your Web pages require Flash, DHTML, cookies, JavaScript, Java or passwords to access the page, then search engine spiders might not be able to index your Web site.

• Avoid special characters in your URL
  Most search engines have problems indexing web pages when their URLs contain special
  characters. The following special characters are known to be "search-engine-spider-stoppers":
  * ampersand (&)
  * dollar sign ($)
  * equals sign (=)
  * percent sign (%)
  * question mark (?)
  These characters are often found in dynamically generated Web pages. They signal the search engine crawler program that there could be an infinite loop of possibilities for that page. That's why some search engines ignore web page URLs with the above characters.

• Choose a reliable and fast hosting service
  Your web page should be hosted by a reliable hosting service. Otherwise, it could happen that your web server is down when a search engine spider tries to index it. If your web site fails to respond when the search engine's index software program visits your site, your site will not be indexed. Evenworse, if your web site is already indexed and the search engine spider finds that your site is down, you'll possibly be removed from the search engine database. It's essential to host your web site on servers that are very seldom down.
  Search engine crawler programs that index Web pages don't have much time. There are
  approximately 4-6 billion Web pages all over the world and search engines want to index all of them.
  So if the host server of your Web site has a slow connection to the Internet, you may experience that your Web site will not be indexed by the major search engines at all.
  You may also want to limit the size of your homepage to less than 60K. It'd also benefit the still numerous users that connect to the Internet with a slow modem. For even the casual Internet user, the performance of a Web site can make the difference between pleasure and frustration.

Step 2: Optimize your web pages

Step 2: Optimize your web pages

How to optimize your web pages

When you have found the right keywords for your web site, you have to optimize your web pages for high search engine rankings. Only optimized web pages can have good search engine rankings.

Optimizing your web pages involves two steps:

• you should optimize your web pages for your important keywords
• you should make sure that the HTML code of your web pages is error free Optimizing your web pages for your keywords makes sure that your web pages can be found for these
  keywords. Checking the HTML code of your web pages makes sure that search engines can parse your web pages.

Why you should optimize your web pages for multiple word

Why you should optimize your web pages for multiple wordkeywords first

Single words cannot be promoted effectively. For example, it is not likely that someone looking for "free accounting software download" is going to type just "software" into the search box.

Avoid the most popular keyword phrases because you'll be competing with millions of other pages for a search engine's attention. It is unrealistic to think that a new web site could rank number one on a popular phrase like "mp3". More established companies who have been on the Internet for several years will have the big advantage of a high link popularity.

People who whose multiple word keywords are in the compare or buying phase. They are more likely to purchase goods or services than those using fewer words (source: Oneupweb Research).

Search engines analyze all pages of your web site and put them in a context. Start with multiple word keywords and then extend your keyword list. If you're selling MP3 files, you should optimize your web pages for keywords such as "independent bands mp3", "alternative grunge mp3", "80s pop music mp3 download" and similar keywords first.

If your web site many rankings for these keywords, search engines will find out that your web site is relevant to the mp3 topic. As soon as search engines consider your web site relevant to this topic, it will be much easier to get high rankings for keywords such as "mp3 download" or even "mp3".


What can happen if you target the wrong keywords?

You will lose a lot of time and you will lose a lot of sales if you target the wrong keywords. You will invest a lot of time in optimizing your web pages for keywords for which your web site cannot get high rankings at the moment. Or you will invest a lot of time in optimizing your web pages for keywords that don't convert to sales. In both cases, you won't get much sales.

It is very important that you choose the right keywords that lead to high search engine rankings and sales. Make sure that you choose the correct keyword type.

STEP 1 Right Keyword

Step 1: Using the right keyword is the cornerstone of successful SEO

How to find the best keywords for your web site

Keywords are the words that web surfers enter in search engines to find web sites. It is important that your web site has good search engine rankings for popular keywords that are related to the theme of your web site. In this manual, we use the term "keywords" for single word keywords and for keyword phrases, for example "hiking boots shop chicago".

The right keywords are important to the success of your SEO activities!
It's pointless to optimize your web pages for keywords that nobody uses in the search engines. In addition, in order to get targeted visitors, the keywords must not be too broad or too general.

Which keywords are the right keywords for your web site?

Use focused and targeted keyword phrases that are common enough so the web searcher will use them, but selective enough that they don't return millions of matches. Very specific keywords generate highly qualified, targeted traffic that increases your sales. The first step in choosing the right keywords is to make them very specific.

• use keyword phrases that consist of two to four words
• avoid very competitive keywords
• be specific
• only check the keywords that are important to you

For a successful online marketing campaign, you have to target the right keywords. The keywords you use should be relevant for your web site and web surfers should be searching for your keywords. Most people use a two to four word phrase in a search, so phrases are very effective.

Single words cannot be promoted effectively. For example, it is not likely that someone looking for "free software download" is going to type just "software" into the search box.

Avoid the most popular keyword phrases because you'll be competing with millions of other pages for a search engine's attention. It is unrealistic to think that a new web site could rank number one on a popular phrase like "iPOD". More established companies who have been on the Internet for several years will have the big advantage of a high link popularity.
Internet users who use four-word searches are more likely to purchase goods or services than those using fewer words

Start with multiple word keywords and then extend your keyword list Search engines analyze all pages of your web site and put them in a context. Start with multiple word keywords and then extend your keyword list. If you're selling iPOD files, you should optimize your web
pages for keywords such as "independent bands iPOD", "alternative grunge iPOD", "pop music IPOD download" and similar keywords first.

If your web site many rankings for these keywords, search engines will find out that your web site is relevant to the mp3 topic. As soon as search engines consider your web site relevant to this topic, it will be much easier to get high rankings for keywords such as "iPOD download" or even "iPOD".

Three different keyword types

When web surfers want to purchase something online, they go through three research phases. Web surfers usually start with general keywords. After becoming more educated about a particular product or service, they will use more specific keywords. As soon as the web surfers know what they want, they use specific keywords.

For that reason, keywords can be divided into three types:
· Keywords for browsing
· Keywords for comparing
· Keywords for buying

1. Keywords for browsing
During the first research phase, web surfers use general keywords to find information. For example, a web surfer might be interested in an MP3 player. The keyword that the web surfer might use in search engines could be:

mp3 player

People who use keywords for browsing are usually looking for information only. Keywords for
browsing usually have a very high search volume. Getting a top 10 ranking for these general
keywords is very difficult and nearly impossible.

2. Keywords for comparing
In the second research phase, web surfers narrow their selection because they now know what type of product they want. For example, the web surfer might have found out the he is interested in an USB stick MP3 player with 1 GB flash RAM. The keywords of these web surfers are more specific:

mp3 player 1 GB
mp3 player usb stick
mp player under $100
trekstor mp3 player
samsung mp3 player

People who use keywords for comparing are more ready to buy. Comparing keywords are probably the best keywords that you can target for your search engine optimization campaign. They often have much lower search volume than general keywords but they will lead to more sales and it is much easier to get top 10 rankings for these keywords.

3. Keywords for buying
During the last research phase, web surfers know what they want to purchase. They are just looking for the web site with the best offer. For that reason, these surfers use very specific keywords:

trekstor i.beat cebrax 1 GB
trekstor i.beat cebrax 1 GB free shipping
philips SA178/07 1 GB

People who use keywords for buying are ready to buy. However, these keywords won't help you
much if you offer competing products.

What is unethical search engine optimization

What is unethical search engine optimization?

Some search engine optimization companies and software developers use unethical techniques and tricks to artificially boost the search engine rankings of a web site. This dilutes the quality of search results and calls into question the accuracy of search results.

For this reason, the search engines are continuously trying to counter the spam techniques which webmasters might be using and penalize or ban them.

They continue to reconstruct their algorithms to prevent spammers from flooding the results page with irrelevant or low quality content.

If you use a web site promotion tool that uses these unethical techniques, you'll put your web business at severe risk.

DO NOT use following method:

• automatically generated doorway pages
• cloaking and false redirects
• keyword stuffing
• hidden text or hidden links
• pages loaded with irrelevant words
• duplicated content on multiple pages
• misspelling of well-known web sites
• unrelated and centralized link farms
• other methods that try to trick search engines

You might get short term results with these techniques but it's very likely that your site will be banned from search engines if you do. You'll put your web business at severe risk if you use one of these methods.

Ethical search engine optimization is about everyone winning Ethical search engine optimization leads to a symbiotic relationship:

• Search engines: They win as they are provided with pages that are easy to understand and that contain the quality information that their visitors search for.
• Searchers: They win as they are getting what they ask for from the search engines. They search for "Computer" and get a page about computer.
• Web site owners: They win as they are getting quality visitors who are interested in what their web site has to offer

A single spam element can destroy your work

Before you start with your search engine optimization efforts, you must make sure that your web pages are spam free. This is very important. If you use a spam technique on your web site, all other search engine optimization efforts are pointless.

If a search engine has tagged your web site as a spam source then you have to remove the spam
elements from your web pages before the search engine will take another look at other elements of your site.

Most search engines consider the following spam:

• cloaking (the web server returns different pages for search engine spiders and human web surfers)
• doorway pages
• misleading redirections
• hidden text (text has a color that is very similar to the background color, text in very small font sizes, text that has been hidden with CSS tags etc.)

If you use one of these techniques on your web pages, remove them now. You might get short term results with them but it is extremely likely that search engines will ban your site if you continue to use them.

When you're sure that your web pages are spam free, you can start with your search engine
optimization activities.

How Engine Rank The Page

How do search engines rank web pages?

Search engines use mathematical formulas to determine the rank of a web page. These mathematical formulas are called ranking algorithms. All major search engines use the same principle to rank web sites. The exact ranking algorithms differ from search engine to search engine but the principle is the same. We'll use the ranking algorithm of Google as an example.

How does Google rank your web pages?

"Traditional search engines rely heavily on how often a word appears on a web page. Google uses PageRank™ to examine the entire link structure of the web and determine which pages are most important. It then conducts hypertext-matching analysis to determine which pages are relevant to the specific search being conducted. By combining overall importance and query-specific relevance, Google is able to put the most relevant and reliable results first."

PageRank and hypertext-matching analysis?

Google uses PageRank (which is a mathematical formula and not the green bar in the Google toolbar) and hypertext-matching analysis to rank your web pages. To get good results for the PageRank factor, you need good links from related pages that point to your site. It's a simple principle: if page a links to page b then it is a recommendation from page a to page b. The more links point to your web site, the better your rankings.

The quality of the links is also important. A link that contains the keyword for which you want to have high rankings in the link text is better than five links with the text Click here. A link from a web site that has a related topic is much better than links from unrelated sites or link lists.

While the linking concept is easy to understand, the hypertext-matching analysis factor is a bit more complicated. Google explains hypertext-matching analysis as follows:

"Hypertext-Matching Analysis: Google's search engine also analyzes page content. However, instead of simply scanning for page-based text (which can be manipulated by site publishers through meta-tags), Google's technology analyzes the full content of a page and factors in fonts, subdivisions and the precise location of each word.

Google also analyzes the content of neighboring web pages to ensure the results returned are the most relevant to a user's query."

How to optimize your web pages for Google's hypertext-matching analysis

As Google analyzes the full content of your pages you also have to optimize the full content of your web pages. It is not enough to edit your meta tags. You have to optimize all factors that can influence your engine ranking.

The problem is that many webmasters don't know which page factors can be important. As mentioned in the explanation of Google's hypertext-matching analysis, Google also analyzes the
content of other web pages on your site to ensure that your web page is really relevant.

That means that you should optimize different pages of your web site for different but related search terms. The more web pages of your web site are optimized for keywords about a special topic, the more likely it is that you'll get high rankings for a special keyword that is related to that topic.

Things you should know before you start

Why do you have to optimize your web pages for search engines?

There are billions of web pages on the Internet. It's obvious that not all of them can be listed in the top 10 results on search engines. Search engines only list web sites that they find relevant to a specia topic. You must make sure that your web site is such a site.

If search engines cannot find out that your web site is about fishing equipment, they cannot give your web site high rankings for that keyword. The process of optimizing your web pages so that search engines find them relevant is called search engine optimization (SEO).

Only a few web surfers look further than the first or second result page of a search engine
75% of searchers never look further than page one (Source: Georgia Institute of Technology). Most search engines display ten results on the first page; and very few searchers click the links to look at the second page.

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"Users almost never look beyond the second page of search results."

"Being listed 11 or beyond means that many people may miss your web site."
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For that reason, search engine optimization is crucial if you want to be successful with your web site.

How To Optimize Search Engine

What high search engine rankings can mean to your website success

According to recent statistics, more than 1 billion people used the Internet in 2005 (Source:
Nielsen/NetRatings). Web users spend twice as much time online as watching TV (Source: StanfordInstitute for the Quantitative Study of Society). Consumers spent $143.2 billion online in 2005, 22 percent more than in 2004 (Source: ComScore).

A survey conducted by market research firm TNS revealed that 75% of all online shoppers said that company size was not a factor in having their online shopping needs satisfied. Only 15% said theypreferred to shop with large retailers (Source: TNS).

More than 80% of all Internet users find new web sites through search engines (Source: Georgia
Tech/GVU Users Survey). That means that about 650 million people use search engines to find web sites.

Search engine users are some of the most qualified and motivated visitors to your web site you will ever have. After all, they have taken the initiative to hunt for online resources on a certain topic. And then they clicked your link to learn more.

Important: You must do the right things in the right order

It is very important that you do the right things in the right order if you want to have high search engine rankings.

It is not enough to submit your web site to search engines and to wait for the results. Search engines use a variety of factors to rank web sites. You have to work on all factors if you want to achieve good results.

1. Find the right keywords for your web site
   The right keywords are not always obvious. In this manual, you'll learn how to find the right keywords that will work best for your web site. It is very important that you target the right keywords before you start with your search engine optimization work.
2. Optimize your web pages for these keywords
   Optimizing your web pages for your important keywords is crucial if you want to have high search engine rankings. Optimizing one or two pages is not enough. Search engines analyze all pages of your web site and they put these pages in a context. It is important that the combination of your web pages shows search engines that your web site is relevant to a special topic.
3. Submit your web pages to all important search engines and directories
   After optimizing your web site for several keywords, you can submit your web site to search engines and Internet directories. Although search engine submission is not as important as it was (many search engines will find your web site through links on other sites), it can still help you to get your web site listed faster.
4. Get links from other web sites and make sure that these links contain your keywords
   Links from other web sites are extremely important if you want to have high search engine rankings. They are so important that we added an additional manual to IBP that just deals with inbound links. Your web site must have good incoming links to get high search engine rankings. High search engine rankings are always the result of optimized web pages and good incoming links