SEO STEPS TO WIN SEARCH ENGINE RANKINGS

Search Engines are built to help the searchers. Search Engines strive to put the best fit/standard websites on top rankings so that searchers get their required info within few clicks. How do Search Engines know a website’s standard and its relevance with searched keywords? What are the steps you should follow for a complete SEO to improve your website’s rankings?

This article covers Search Engine Optimization in two levels - the first is On-page optimization, and the next is Off-Page Optimization. An effective On-page optimization together with good Off-page optimization will improve your Search Engine Rankings.

 

On-Page Optimization

Define your Business& Target Audience - The first step in any business starts with analysis. Determine what kind of services your website is to provide and what kind of audience you want for your website?

Don’t Purchase a New Domain - If you already have a good domain name don’t try to purchase a new one, as some search engines look for the age of the website as a ranking factor.

Choosing your Domain Name - If you are planning for a new website, try to get a domain name with keywords included. If you target regional customers, you can have your domain based on the region, say for example .uk or .au or .in

Make your Website look Clean & Simple - Now you have a domain name and you know whom you want to target. Website design is the key factor which keeps your visitor to stay for a while in your website and navigate your services. Make sure your website design has a good feel & look, clean and simple.

Evaluate your Website - If you have an existing website, and now you want to do SEO for it, then evaluate your website:

Navigation structure - think in a visitor’s point of view - Can someone navigate and reach the product/services they are looking for? Make your navigation user friendly, no visitor should leave your website due to confused navigation.

1. Check for W3 compatibility of your website.
2. Check for any broken links in your website and fix if any.
3. Your website should load fast so that it doesn’t check on your visitors’ patience.

Observe your competitor - Find your competitor websites. Analyze and gain knowledge on their tactics, the keywords they use, the techniques applied. With the help of this analysis you will learn what is working and what is not working, which will help in your SEO process.

Research on Keywords - List the Keywords your target audience would search for and the ones used by your competitors. Make use of keyword research tools like Overture to know more on your related search terms. Now refine your list and make your final list of target keywords.

Structure File name - If you have control over your file names - modify file names with your keywords included.

Search Engine Friendly Sitemap - A well structured search engine friendly sitemap can help Search Engines to index all your pages. With good anchor text for your navigation links you can improve your rankings

Write an Attractive Title - Why is your web page title so important? The web page title is displayed in SERPs which in turn help in attracting your visitors. Web searchers do their search with a term and look for titles in the result pages that best fit their search. Hence make your title attractive, with targeted keywords included. Try to incorporate related keywords too. For example you target for Montessori School, you can write title as ‘ Montessori School, the Preschool for your Children’. (in this way you add 2 related terms).

Meta Description Tag - Description tag is also displayed in snippets of any SERPs. This description helps to motivate searchers to visit your website. Make an effective and optimized description tag. Snippets are also taken from surrounding text of the searched keyword. You may need to edit your content a little to make your description look good.

Meta Keyword Tag - Though there is saying that Search Engines like Google doesn’t look for Meta keyword tag, there are some smaller search engines, which still follow the conventional way and spider the keywords tag. So there is no harm in making of the Meta keyword tags. Your meta keyword should contain keywords that appears in your body text.

Have Robot tags - If you don’t want any of your files of your website to be indexed, say an image or a text file, you can write your robot file insisting the search engines not to crawl those pages.

Alt Tags for images - As the name infers it acts as an alternate text for any image. This tag is both user friendly and search engine friendly. Search engines cannot read images; instead it indexes the alt tag given for any image and assumes it as the description for the image. This alt tag is not so important by Search Engines, as many spammers try to put irrelevant alt tag for the images to improve their rankings. However for an image link with a proper alt tag (keywords included) will work as great internal anchor link.

H1 & H2 heading format - Though no one is sure on whether this helps in rankings, try applying the header options, as this practice is good for any web development

Improve Keyword Prominence, Density & Proximity -Keyword prominence will increase if you have your keyword at the beginning of text part of your webpage. Keyword density refers to the ratio (percentage) of keywords contained within the total text content of the page. Keyword proximity refers to the closeness between two or more keywords. And this is yet another factor which has not much proven records but still exist in SEO practice.

Make Content look rich - As many SEO experts say content is the king. Optimized content with keywords included, along with other SEO factors working well the website can rank well in Search Engines

Keyword Rich Anchor Text - Anchor text for both internal links and external links is powerful element for Search Engine rankings. You can notice websites which doesn’t have the keyword in their web pages rank well which is all because of their anchor text of their inbound links.

Make Flash files work for you - Its better to avoid including flash files into your website. But under compelling circumstances, you can try adding keyword rich text somewhere in your file, since Search Engines like Google can index the text part of flash files

Bring your PDF files on SERPs - PDF file is a good source for keyword rich content. Most Search Engines can read & index PDF files and a few search engines shows PDF files in SERPs too. Make sure you have a good title and file name for your PDF file

Off-Page Optimization

Why Search Engines give so much of importance for inbound links?

It is easy for any website owner to optimize their website with good content, navigation, title, etc. But does that mean it’s a good website and people would love to check it out? Search Engines try to know and evaluate the standard of a website through many factors and the most significant of them is incoming/inbound links. When a website receives inbound links from related & standard websites, it obviously means that it is worth looking at. Search Engines learn about your website through inbound links and to be precise it’s through anchor text.

So natural linking with different & targeted keyword rich anchor text works great for any website. Here are a few ways to increase your inbound links/ backlinks.

Search Engines - Submit your website manually to search engines including regional search engines.

Directories - There are many directories available online for free submission. Submit your website into the category that best fits your services, most importantly with good anchor text. Try submitting in your own regional directories to improve your local business.

Forums - Participate in your industry related forums & discussion boards. Post your comments, thoughts and also provide a link to your website (without spam).

Blogs - Having your own official blog helps to post your company’s updates, product release, etc., and also inbound links. There are directories for submitting blogs. Submit your blog with proper keyword tags which helps in your blog listing.

Articles - Write keyword & content rich articles on your own and post in article junctions available online. There are article junctions which accept articles in HTML format, so you can include your links with good anchor text. Write fresh articles on your topic, post and see your traffic increasing.

Press Releases - You can post Press Releases, which also works like Article junctions & directories; however it should look more like a Press Release and not like an article.

Bookmarks - Social book marking - it serves two purposes: It gets you incoming links and it popularizes your website in your community. Make sure you put keyword rich tags for your bookmarks.

Classifieds - You can see some websites displaying free classifieds. You can put your advertisements there with link to your website.

This is a guest article from  Deepthi Kumar                                               Courtesy: http://www.useseo.com

 

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USE YAHOO PIPES TO MAKE WIDGETS FOR BLOGS

Yahoo Pipes is a free online service that lets you use feed types such as json, xml, rss, and atom to regenerate data using a visual editor. Pipes helps you to create feeds from web sites that don't have an RSS/XML. Pipes will help you to provide your own web projects, or publish and share your own web service without writing a code. Pipes is also very useful as its visual editor allows you to drag pre-configured modules onto its canvas and wire them together. In short, Yahoo pipes works with the help of a Yahoo Pipes editor which is a JavaScript authoring tool that lets you create and edit Pipes in an intuitive visual interface.

The main advantage of Yahoo pipes is that you can use simple commands that can be combined together to create output that meets your needs as to combine many feeds into one, then sort, filter and translate it, geocode your favorite feeds and browse the items on an interactive map, power widgets/badges on your web site, grab the output of any Pipes as RSS, JSON, KML, and other formats.

Know Yahoo Pipe Editor

Yahoo Pipes editor is a JavaScript authoring tool that lets you create and edit Pipes in an intuitive visual interface. The editor consists of the following three panes, Library pane on the left hand side lists available modules, saved Pipes, then Canvas pane in the center is the main work area for assembling Pipes and Debugger which is a resizable pane at the bottom which lets you inspect Pipe output at various stages in your Pipe. You can build and then edit Pipes by moving modules onto the Canvas from the Library pane and wiring them together with your mouse. Just check out what yahoo says about Yahoo Pipes.

Library

The Library pane shows a list of all of the available modules (you can see this same list, with a description of what each module does, in the module documentation.) Modules are grouped by functionality:

Sources are data sources (such as Yahoo Search) that return an RSS feed

User Inputs are input fields that your Pipe's users can fill in at runtime

Operators are basic features like foreach, sort, count, and filter

Url contains modules for building and manipulating URLs

String contains modules for handling strings

Date contains modules for manipulating dates

The Library also holds a list of your favorite Pipes from other users, and your saved Pipes. You can use these subPipes as building blocks within new Pipes just like you would use a module. This lets you build useful complex components that can be reused across multiple projects.

To add a module or subPipe to your Pipe, drag it over to the canvas or click on the arrow to the right of the module name to have the editor place it on the canvas for you.

 

The Canvas

The canvas is the main work area for assembling and testing your Pipe. You can drag modules around and arrange them in whatever way looks good to you, or ask the editor to auto-arrange everything by clicking the Layout button.

Double-clicking the title bar of any module will collapse the module by hiding all its parameters, while double-clicking again (or clicking the maximize box in the corner) will restore the module to its full size. This can be useful when working with Pipes that have many components.

To make your Pipe work, you'll need to wire modules together. You can do this by clicking the output terminal of any module, then clicking on the input terminal of the module you want to feed that data to. The editor will flash compatible terminals in orange to indicate which connections are permitted. You can mouse over the terminals of any module to see what kind of data that terminal expects to emit or receive.

To sever a connection between modules, click on either of the terminals at the end of a wire (a small scissors icon will appear).

Many modules have configurable parameters and input fields. You can fill these in like regular form fields, or supply them with appropriately typed input wired in from another module. Use the User Input modules to let users supply their own input to the Pipe at runtime.

A subPipe is a Pipe from your saved Pipes list that you drag onto the Canvas. A subPipe behaves just like a regular module, with the addition of an "open" link. Clicking on this link opens a new tab in the editor where you can edit the subPipe on the fly. Click the title tabs in the toolbar to toggle back and forth between editing your main Pipe and subPipes.

 

The Debugger

The debugger pane shows the contents of the Pipe immediately downstream from the currently selected module (shown in orange). To see the final output of your Pipe, select the output module itself. You may occasionally need to click 'Refresh' to make sure the debugger is showing the latest data from your Pipe.

You can use the debugger to inspect each segment of your Pipe to make sure it is behaving as expected. The debugger will show the titles of each item in a feed; click on the small triangle to the left of each item title to examine its contents in more detail.

Saving and Running Your Pipe

Once you've finished editing your Pipe, you should save it using the button in the upper right corner of the canvas pane. You'll be prompted to give your Pipe a name, and you can also choose to make the Pipe public by publishing it. Publishing makes your Pipe visible to everyone, and will allow people to clone a copy for their own use.

Once the Pipe is saved, you will see a link that says, "Run Pipe...". You can also run it by going back to your Pipe list page ("My Pipes") and selecting it from the list.

Source: Yahoo

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