Dec
21
Building a search engine friendly website can be a difficult thing, but it’s absolutely essential to getting quality traffic to your website. There are two kinds of SEO, black hat and white hat optimization. The actual line between the two are very thin, but black hat is frequently referred to websites that use spam and unethical techniques to gain a search engine ranking by beating the system, and white hat refers to websites that gain search engine ranking by having quality content and following the search engine rules.
Black hat SEO has been around since the inception of the internet. For every measure Google and Yahoo take to overcome these schemes, there will always be someone who figures out how to beat the system. You will even find that many people will try these methods and find great success, but what these people don’t know is that they will eventually get caught. When you get banned from the search engines, you get banned forever. To a Spammer, this is irrelevant because they will just find some new scheme to get around it, but to a businessman, it’s the worst thing that can happen.
In 2006, BMW was caught using black hat SEO methods to rank higher in Google. When they were caught, they were banned from the search engines. Their German website was the one that drew so much media attention because their website looked like a normal website, but when JavaScript was disabled, hundreds of lines hidden keywords were found in the page. This was the text that the GoogleBot used to craw the site. When they were caught, they were given a PageRank of 0 and had to rebuild their ranking from scratch.
Build high quality websites filled with quality content that people want to read.
If your website is built solely for changing the rank of another website in Google, you will eventually get banned. However, if your content has been created just for your visitors to enjoy, you’ll find much more success in your online business.
Use ALT tags on all of your images that accurately describe the image you are referring to.
ALT tags allow you to describe an image with words. It is especially helpful for individuals who have disabilities and require screen readers to surf the internet. It is also useful for search engine optimization, but you shouldn’t take advantage of the “hidden” text. Google can penalize you for having several images with irrelevant text in the ALT tags. Here is an example of what an ALT tag should look like:
<img src="http://www.amazingdesignsecrets.com/wp-admin/Jessica.jpg" alt="Jessica, posing for the camera before graduation." />
When testing the keyword density of your website, try not to go overboard on placing random text throughout your copywriting.
When picking out keywords to use in your online marketing campaign, keyword density is essential for the search engines to rank your website highly. Among several other factors, the amount of times a keyword is placed on a particular web page will rank you higher in the search engines-assuming that the keywords are properly placed throughout the copy in complete sentences and in an ethical manner.
Write descriptive titles for your content!
Your title tag has a very big impact on your search engine ranking. Avoid titles only containing “Home Page”, you need to be very descriptive and use your keywords within your title.
Use appropriate anchor text.
Anchor text is a common mistake many webmasters make when creating links. When getting back links to your website, not only is your URL important, but your anchor text as well. What ever you do, DO NOT do this:
<a href="http://www.amazingdesignsecrets.com">Click Here!</a>
Unless you want to rank in these results, you will not achieve a relevant keyword ranking in the search engines by doing what you see above. The search engines use many factors when ranking you in the results, including, your title text, your anchor text, your keyword density, and the categories of sites that back link to you.
When describing a piece of content, use header tags (<H1>-<H6>)
If you are creating some kind of heading for your content, DO NOT use any tag but the heading tag. The search engines really tend to like titles like <h1>HTML Anchors</h1>.
Your header tag should also contain your keywords.
Use search engine friendly URLs, loose the dynamic URLs.
This might not apply to very many people, but your URLs need to be static and your filenames need to be relevant and clear. Do not name your contact page “7.html”, name it “ContactUs.html”. Also, avoid URLs that contain database query information. Do a search for a keyword of your choice, you won’t find very many results that look like this:
http://g.msn.com/0AD00036/931292.1??HCType=1&CID=931292&PG
Try to avoid the query type URL seen above. It should look more like this:
http://shopping.msn.com
Only trade links with relevant websites-this is very important.
Trading links with websites that are not relevant to your website is a bad idea. It will rank you higher in the search engines temporarily, but the search engines are getting smarter every day, I recommend keeping all of your links as relevant as possible. Avoid link farms. It may be tempting to trade links with thousands of people, but it will get you banned.
Build a compliant website.
Make sure that your design follows the W3C’s guidelines to website development. Make sure that your content is U.S. Section 508 compliant for the disabled. Google will rank you better for having accessible content.
Article written by Andrew J. McClary, © 2008, All Rights Reserved.
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