
Internal Linking Checking Please also check whether your website has broken links. They may stop directory spiders to crawl other web pages in your website, it may result in loss of hundreds or thousands website traffic per month, and waste your directory optimization effort.If your web pages cannot get indexed, you definitely get no rankings no matter how many SEO effort you make. Basic SEO: What Search Engines Love - Keywords I mentioned keywords briefly in the last section. It goes without saying that these are vital when it comes to SEO. However, there are a few basic concepts you should keep in mind when designing you site. For one, it is a good idea to make a list of keywords relevant to your site's main focus. Be sure to rank them in terms of what is searched for the most. Each page in your site should be optimized for one or two keyword phrases. 6. Multiple-level Navigation Menu Many websites use multiple-level navigation menu in Javascript. However, the coding usually leaves within the HTML body. This is no good in terms of SEO. I recommend seperate Javascrpt from HTML coding by using external Javascript file. It's important to remember that the searchbots (what search engines use to index pages) do not follow all the instructions placed in the page's code when it loads a page in order to index it. No, we’re not done yet. Check your external CSS or JavaScript file; there should be key words in the filename. Also make sure that key words are in an HTML comment tag. Do optimization with lots of research, study and web marketing tactics. You will surely be on top of search engines listings. If you put all these points into practice, you'll soon have a well-tuned web site that delivers an excellent return on investment. And a nice ROI is enough to make any site owner purr like a brand-new Ferrari. 2) Directories Submission – submitting a site to free directories like Dmoz and paid directories like yahoo directory which is the most important technique to raise your website up in search engines. There are thousand of free submission website and paid directories on internet. Directory submissions will make a website link popular by giving listing to that website in their directory category or categories. Like if you have submitted your website in 500 directories, then your website link is 500 times popular, if got listed. a left-hand side navigation menu with a blank page on the right-hand side. b. Re-direct techniques. For some reasons, web designers may make some re-direct pages or adopt Javascript re-direct techniques and re-direct visitors from one page to another content pages. Since directory spammers usually use this technique to trick search engines, this technique could get your website being penalized by search engines. The first thing to consider is what hosting company to use. A good hosting company will put your site on their web server and register your domain name. Make sure you pick a company that allows you to upload web pages that you've created on your own; it is vital to have control over the HTML on your pages. The company should also let you use your own domain name. And finally, they should offer some log-analysis tool, which tells you the number of visitors you had and how they got there. WebHosters should have several articles in its archives that discuss how to choose a hosting company. 8. Flash Web Design Web designers may sell you to build a full flash website or make a flash intro page as your home page. Their point is that flash makes your website more appealing and it would improve effectiveness of your website. However, it is not always the case. Before you even begin to design your website, I highly recommend reading this entire article, along with the second part, which deals with what search engines hate. Aside from this, the only other prerequisite is that you or your web designer know and understand basic HTML and Cascading Style Sheets. Feel free to rummage through the DevArticles archives for a wide variety of articles covering these two languages. First of all, you can store the session information in cookies on the user's computer, despite the fact that some users block cookies. However, the server should not require cookies because searchbots don't accept cookies (or do they?). You have to decide whether you want to take that risk. You can also omit session IDs when a searchbot requests the page from the server. The research collects findings from 121 Hong Kong trading firms involving in foreign trade through telephone interview. Also, a separate focus group was held with 8 marketing managers and 1 directory optimization (SEO) specialist. We believe the implications also apply to other geographical areas. We have extracted part of the results to present in this article. If you scroll down to “Quality guidelines – specific guidelines,” you’ll see that many of the bulleted points now contain hyperlinks that take you to more information about specific issues, such as hidden text. The server sets cookies (text files containing information only that particular server can read) on the computer with the session ID and the developer can see where the user was at the end of his/her last session. Most search engines probably won't read a page if it recognizes a session ID in the URL due to the fact that each time the searchbot returns, the original session ID will have expired, creating several URLs for the same page. And if it does read the page, it either won't index it or will index an undetermined number of URLs pointing to the same page. However, there are ways to avoid running your site through URLs with sessions IDs. 1. Employed SEO service or Exercised SEO Before? 103 (85%) respondents reported that they have neither employed any directory optimization service nor self-exercised any directory optimization service. However, 18 (15%) respondents pursued some sort of directory marketing including directory submission to directory optimization. Basic SEO: What Search Engines Hate - Session IDs Session IDs can cause many of the same problems as parameters if they are in a URL. A session ID is used to identify individual users visiting a site at a specific time. It allows the server to keep track of what pages the user views and what actions he/she takes, making it easier for web developers to create interactive sites. 2. Importance and Concerns of directory Marketing/directory Optimization A rating scale of 1 to 5 was employed, with 5 means Very important and 1 means very unimportant. Respondents reported that they perceived that directory marketing could be a cost-effective method to help them get new overseas customers.If you have a web site and you are optimizing for a particular key word, then you must have that key word in your web copy. If it means you rewrite your entire web copy to have a key word density of 10-14 percent, by all means rewrite. It is impossible to properly optimize for a keyword and not have the keyword anywhere on your site. Here are some brief overviews on a number of ways to fix your dynamic web page so that search engines will look at it. Respondents also considered the following factors whether they would use a directory marketing firm: 1. Pricing (4.6), 2. Deliverables (4.8), 3. Guarantee Clause (4.0), 4. Ranking against rival firms (4.7), 5. Possibility to get to Top 10 ranking (4.1), 6. Chance to increase response rate (4.8) Implications to Business Firms In general, it was a consensus that directory marketing could help to generate new business leads. However, it was not a simple activity. First of all, you can check to see how many parameters are in your URL. A URL has a parameter if it ends in “something=” (e.g. ObjectGroup_ID=81). Having one parameter should be OK for the major search engines; having two or more definitely increases the likelihood of there being a problem. Your best bet is to have a page that looks static (i.e. without parameters). To be sure though, check each directory to see whether your site is indexed (see their "help" pages for more information). 3. Paid for Performance directory Marketing This question has an explanation about the meaning of paid for performance directory marketing. The question includes pay-per-click and paid-for-inclusion plan. The problem is that many searchbots have trouble reading dynamic web pages. For one, there could be hundreds of similar pages with only minor changes on each, or the pages might change too frequently. The URLs can also change, leading to dead links. They also use parameters, and some search engines may not index pages with two or more parameters. Nevertheless, there are ways to find out if your site is causing trouble for search engines.JavaScript event handlers, Flash animation, etc, especially if it's above the page content, because it can prevent some search engines from reaching it. Basic SEO: What Search Engines Hate - Dynamic Web Pages Let's say you have dynamic web pages. What does this mean? Are they really energetic? Actually, no. It means that the web server pulled the page from a database program in the process of compiling it. They are created and exist only when they are requested by the browser, as opposed to a static page, which doesn't come from a database. Once the dynamic page is requested, the data is put together with an ASP, a PHP, or a CGI program (any content management system as well). Finally, rounding out key words and links, do you have key words in the anchor text of a link to a site that has a PageRank of 8 or better (for example, .gov or .edu sites)? This is because there are two types of instructions that allow the server and the browser to create the page: server-side instructions and client-side instructions. Server-side instructions are visible to searchbots because the web server follows the instructions before sending the information to the searchbots. Client-side instructions are not visible to searchbots because these are instructions sent to the browser after the server has completed its task. The searchbots get the page directly from the server. I’d like to note that he doesn’t discuss how to determine what key words you should be using for your web site; that’s an entirely separate topic, and worth an article (or several!) in its own right. Once you have decided what key words you want to use on your web site, however, the meta tags and on-page optimization category (perhaps the largest of the four) explains exactly how to use them. Myth Two: Key Word Density is Everything The idea that any one thing is everything is probably the most dangerous concept. Google's PageRank algorithm has over 200 factors it considers and MSN's Ranknet considers over 600 factors. Onsite factors on their own are just a start to SEO; off page factors are also important. What is SEO? Basically, directory optimization means making adjustments to a web site so that it scores high on the directory results pages for particular key words and key phrases. This calls for making a variety of changes to the pages of a web site; some of these will be visible to those who view the site, and others won’t. But that’s only the beginning. Since Google’s algorithm counts links to a web site from other sites as “votes” for that site, one of the jobs of an SEO is to build back links. There are a number of ways to do this, from buying links to soliciting reciprocal links; the rise of blogging, web 2.0, social search/bookmarking sites offer other ways of building back links. One tried-and-true method involves building “linkbait” – content that is so useful and compelling that visitors to your site naturally want to link to it and tell others. This is only possible, however, if the owners add a blog that contains something that can interest their site's visitors. This is where our third mistake comes in. There are some Web business owners who do not bother to offer something unique, especially in their site's content. If you are able to properly optimize your site by offering something unique and interesting to your targeted market, then your site can greatly benefit from the improvement in directory results since people will be linking to your site through different mediums such as blogs and forums, creating more inbound links later on. Another mistake that online business owners commit is their use of inappropriate keyword phrases. 4. Understanding of directory Optimization This question asked about their knowledge of directory optimization techniques. Respondents were given 3 choices: 1. Yes, Follow these steps to create an external CSS file: 1. Select the code you want to remove from the HTML (everything between and including ) and save it in an external text file. 2.Save this file to your web server. There are online tools you can use to check this, such as the aptly-named Code to Text Ratio tool on SEO Chat. What is your page size, and how long does it take to load? If your pages are very big and take a while to load, visitors won’t wait until they finish; they’ll head back to the directory results they received and click another link. 3.Use the tag to call the file in your HTML. For example, As a rule of thumb, you should never copy text from Microsoft Word and paste it into your page. Therefore, you should make sure you have content in all the important places, like your home page. Search engines like to see at least 250 words here. It stands to reason that the home page will tell your visitors what your site is all about, so you should pay special attention here. We can’t apply a single regular SEO technique for a travel website because we got several packages related to different places and to different targeted peoples rather than having a single targeted keyword or place. Every page has its own demand with the different offers or services. An image map is an image that contains multiple links. If you have these on your page, you should move all code that defines the links to the bottom of the page (right before
). Obviously, this doesn't actually remove the clutter, but it does prevent it from clogging up the space between the top of your page and the content. This should make it easier for the searchbots to reach all pertinent information. 2. No, 3. Don't know. 31 respondents perceived that the major task of directory optimization was adding keywords in Title and Meta Tags while another 62 of them were not sure about the answers. 101 respondents did not realize that content analysis and improvement measures such as keyword density ratio and keyword proximity ratio played a role in directory optimization. In general, most respondents believed that they did not possess sufficient knowledge on directory optimization. Basic SEO: What Search Engines Hate - More Clutter The next trick that helps reduce clutter on your page involves Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). It is basically the same technique we used when we created external JavaScript files, only this time I'm referring to external CSS files. Using these will not only help optimize your site, but it will generally make modifying your website a lot easier. If you want to change the body or heading text in some way, all you have do is make a change to the CSS file and it will automatically affect the whole site. I'm pretty sure this is what CSS was designed for anyway. 5. Focus Group Another 8 marketing managers were invited to a focus group interview. 4 of them had experience in employing directory optimization firms, and another 4 considered using directory optimization services but finally had not taken action. An SEO specialist was acted as a moderator in the interview. Allocation of targeted keyphrases must be in line with your marketing strategy in order for you to get the most out of the campaign, and a quality directory optimization company will pursue the data that it needs to make a proper allocation. prospect profile, or decide to focus on other areas of business without letting the directory optimization company know that its marketing strategy has changed. SEO Tips to Avoid Critical Mistakes - So what are server-side redirects anyway? Now to server-side redirects. Using a command file called .htaccess, redirects can be smoothly added to avoid old and dead links. As the .htaccess file is checked before the browser loads the page, a few lines will redirect pages easily. A 301 error code is used on pages to indicate a moved page and 302 for temporarily moved pages. For a complete tutorial on using .htaccess, visit the Apache site at http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/howto/htaccess.html. It is a nice walk through and will explain the process. In a nutshell, this will only work on a Linux server. Sorry, if the site is on a Windows server, these methods cannot be used, so refer to my paragraph above on redirecting if this is the case. 6. Current directory Rankings - I don't just mean the top ten or even top 40 results, because chances are you can do all of this yourself. Look for a company or individual who can access 500 to 1000 or more results in more than just one search engine. The method used to achieve this is server-side redirects. Check with your host to make sure that this can be done. If not, each of the pages in question will need to be edited to state that the page no longer exists. Then you need to put a link on the page that will take the visitor to the required content. It is a good idea to automatically redirect the page after about five seconds.