An Incomplete Guide to SEO : Planning your site

Planning your site

Why do you want traffic?

Before you go anywhere you need to answer this question. You can break it down into:

* What is your web site about?
* Who will visit it?
* What will they gain?
* What will you gain?

Write the answers on a piece of paper… no really!
Now you have thought some what about who is going to visit your site, we can talk about the how.

Keywords..
Keywords..
Keywords..

Imagine you are a potential visitor to your site. What keywords will you type in to find it? Take a blank piece of paper. Now, on your piece of paper, write down as many words or phrases as you can that you as a potential visitor would search for to find a site like yours in a search engine. Try to write 20 to 30 keywords or phrases on your piece of paper. If you’re having trouble coming up with keywords, ask your partner, friends or family members which keywords they would use to find your site. At this point you should have a list of no less than 20 keywords or phrases at your disposal.

You need this tool below:

http://www.pixelfast.com/overture/

I use it almost on a daily basis. It allows you to find out which keywords people are using in their searches, which as I’m sure you will agree is very valuable information!

Another useful way of doing this is a beta Google tool:

http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en

Start at the top of your keyword list that you wrote earlier and enter each one into the text box. As you can see, the term suggestion tool returns a list of keywords and how many times they were searched for. As you type each of your keywords into the text box and see the number of searches, write that number down next to your keyword on the page.

You should now have a list of keywords with the number of searches for that keyword from last month on your page. To get the 5 most popular keywords, simply take the 5 keywords with the highest number of searches. Flip your paper over and write them down in order of most to least popular. You should now have your list of 5 popular keywords, maybe something like this:

* Marketing: 1,406
* Advertising: 704
* Web Site Promotion: 442
* Marketing Online: 56
* Branding: 5

These keywords are going to form the basis for all of your site optimization strategies. Keep your keyword list with you as you read through the rest of these articles.

The first way to use these keywords

Engines use your domain name as a factor in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). Now there is a lot of debate here, some think that branding for the viewers is more important than having a keyword in the URL (remember the URL of my lead example?). But, if you can combine both, then great! Notice my domain is www.compassdesigns.net. This will get me a little boost if someone searches for “web design”.

Anyway, you can’t easily change your domain after you have made your site, so this is why we are thinking about SEO before we have even started on the site design. If we can use a keyword in the domain, go for it.
Part 2 Summary:

* Ask yourself who will visit your site, why and what will you get out of it.
* Research your keywords.
* Domain name; branding or keyword?

An Incomplete Guide to SEO

How to earn $1,000’s a day with Search Engine Optimization and Joomla Joomla.

"How you can profit from the EXACT SAME search engine optimization strategies that I used to charge clients $3,590 a day to implement!"
In this web-based, no-hype guide, I'll reveal my simple step-by-step search engine optimization strategy that I have been using for 2 years on over 350 clients and that anyone can use to get a front page ranking on Google:

Do you want:
More web site traffic? More orders? A better cash-flow? A healthier Internet business? A front-page ranking on Google and all major search engines? More money than you thought humanly possible?

... if so, keep reading. Get ready to become a search engine optimization "insider". What I'm about to teach you are the actual secrets that I have used to get unlimited daily traffic for over 350 of my clients from Google. For the sake of your business, you can't afford not to read my search engine optimization guide!



Taken from: http://www.google-search-engine-optimization.com/

Used without permission as an example of how web marketing consultants get a bad name!

There are millions (literally) of these sites on the web. The real truth about search engine optimization is that there is no “silver bullet” any more. It used to be true that you could stuff a few keywords into some metatags and you get lots of traffic. Now, search engines are much smarter. Google recently released its patent #20050071741 on its "Information Retrieval Based on Historical Data" (that's that little search page to you and me). In the document were over 118 factors that effected a web site's position in the search engine's rankings!

This is the real truth about SEO:
There is no such thing as Search Engine Optimization any more.

The only reality now is having a long term web marketing strategy and a commitment to building a site full of quality information.

Having said that, assuming that your site is one of the ones with the quality content, SEO still has its place.

On an average day, about 68 million Americans will go online."
"More than half of them, over 38 million people, will use a search engine."

Source: Pew Internet & American Life Project, January 2005.

There are a lot of people out there, and why shouldn’t they come to your site? Especially if all the “other guys” are still just stuffing metatags. Over the next five articles in this series, I will explain some of the things you can do to increase your traffic and visibility, and make specific references to how this is implemented in Joomla. I will be looking at the steps in a roughly chronological order that you might take as you launch a new site. Follow this guide and some time in the next 6 months, you might be getting that traffic you wanted.

The Most Out of Blogging/RSS

Optimizing Your RSS Feed

1. Subscribe to your own feed and claim it on blog engine Technorati
2. Focus your feed with a keyword theme
3. Use keywords in the title tag; keep it under 100 characters
4. Most feed readers display feeds alphabetically, title accordingly
5. Write description tags as if for a directory; keep them under 500 characters
6. Use full paths on links and unique URLs for each item
7. Provide email updates for the non-techies
8. Offer an HTML version of your feed
9. For branding, add logo and images to your feed

Optimizing Your Blog

1. Simplify archiving structure for shorter, cleaner URLs
2. Use CSS to improve usage of H1, H2, and H3
3. Tweak titles for keyword placement
4. Add robot.txt and favicon
5. Widgets: use them sparingly; test one at a time
6. Blogging platforms WordPress and Moveable Type can make the process more user friendly
7. Use a separate domain

Linking

1. Use keywords in anchor text with links; do this a lot
2. Link to topic authorities
3. Give lots of link love in general
4. Delete the word "permalink," replace with real title
5. Create link lists directing to other useful information
6. Cross-link blog and main website
7. Deep link to content on target site
8. Inbound links are valuable
9. Become a "link hub," an authority site, a real resource

Promoting Your Blog

1. Get content or feeds syndicated in other publications
2. Use full-text feeds – "don't be stingy"
3. Increase items in feed from 10 to 20
4. Highlight popular posts and chestnuts on your blog
5. Publish feed as an HTML page (RSS Digest) or as a podcast (Feed2Podcast)
6. Publish headlines from your blog on your website, your MySpace page, etc.
7. Make sure pinging is turned on
8. Use MyYahoo and MyMSN accounts to submit to these search engines9. Post often if you want to become an authority over time

Source :.webpronews

Number of pages indexed

This tool will generate a report showing how many pages of your website has been indexed by the search engines so far. It supports all major search engines: Google, Yahoo, MSN, Alltheweb, Hotbot and AltaVista.

Tips to get your website indexed quickly
Want to get more pages of your website indexed by search engines ? Here are some useful tips:

1. Site structure
   Make sure your subpages are easily accessible by search engine bots. Create a sitemap page that links to all pages of your website and place a link to it from the homepage. If you have a large website, break the sitemap up in several parts and keep the total link number under 100 per page. Link from your homepage to deep pages to get them and the sites around them crawled faster.
   
   
2. No session IDs
   Get rid of session IDs. Bots rarely index pages with a session IDs because they think that those are different pages (because of the different IDs) with the same content.
   
   
3. No variables in the URLs
   Avoid variables in the URL. They are indexed slowly and often getting no PageRank. Use Apache's mod_rewrite feature to convert your dynamic pages to static. Redirect all old pages to the new ones with a 301 redirect. Note however that if you do that for your established website, search engines will need some time to crawl the new static pages.
   
   
4. Get links !
   Inbound (incoming) links are half of the SEO battle nowadays. Your website needs links from quality, on topic websites. The higher your PageRank the faster and deeper your website will be crawled by bots. Get links not only to your home page, but also to the deep pages. Make sure the spiders can find your site from different places.

Keyword Suggestion Tool - Keyword Popularity Tool

This keyword suggestion tool will help you with the choosing of the right keywords for your website. You can see which keyword combinations are more popular and also get ideas for more keyword combinations. Those keyword popularity results are extracted from two sources - Keyword Discovery and Overture.

Keyword suggestion tips
Choosing the right keywords is critical for a success of a website. Target the wrong keywords and you have lost. There is pure gold hidden in less competitive keyword combinations and variations. Here are some more keyword suggestion tips for your success:

1. Start your research with more general terms. Let's say your website is about widgets. Type in "widgests" into our keyword suggestion box and study the results. Write down all results that are somehow relevant for your website.
   
   
2. Dig for more specific keywords. Based on the list you have just created, do a search for every keyword combination (let's say "red widget", "discount widget" and so on) and write down the new keyword combinations. It makes no sense to search for those new terms as you would not get anything new.
   
   
3. Now think about synonyms that people might search for like "buy widgets" and "purchase widgets". Do a research for them too.
   
   
4. Now you should have a decent list of relevant keywords. Optimize your pages for them. Create new pages optimized for the missing keyword combinations and link to them from your existing pages.
   
   
5. If you are serious about keyword research, we suggest to sign up for Keyword Discovery. You will be able to search their huge database of terms that people search for. Here are just some of their advantages:
   
   
   • Search for keywords and get hundreds of keyword combinations
   • Search for related terms (like if you enter "golf", you will get "tee time", "tiger wood" etc !)
   • Search for common misspellings
   • Check the popularity of all search terms
   • Find the balance between the total number of competing web pages for each search engine, and popularity of the search term. Then attack the niches!
   • Keyword Research
   • Industry Keywords
   • Spelling Mistake Research
   • Seasonal Search Trends
   • Related Keywords
   • KEI Analysis
   • Keyword Density Analysis
   • Domain Researcher Tool
   • Wordtracker™ Comparison
   
   All of these tools will bring you a lot of targeted traffic relevant to your website. Trust us - you will get your investition back in no time.
   
   You can take advantage of this information to:
   
   
   • Optimize the content of your web pages and your meta tags
   • Maximize your pay per click campaigns
   • Take traffic away from your competitors

Link popularity tips

Here are some tips to improve your link popularity:

1. Submit to the major link directories
   Google seems to add weight to the websites that are listed in DMOZ and Yahoo directories. If your site will be accepted in DMOZ, soon it will appear in the Google directory and in hundreds of DMOZ clones out there. If you've got budget, submit your site to the Yahoo directory. If you don't have the budget, try the free submission (don't expect too much though). For non-commercial sites a submission to Zeal.com could be worth the time you need to understand their submission guidelines.
   
   
2. Free directories
   Almost every topic has a directory that accept free submissions. Submit your site there. Do a search on your favorite search engine for "yourkeyword directory", "yourkeyword links" etc.
   
   
3. Link exchanges
   The link exchanges are not as effective as one way links to your website and pretty time consuming but still worth it sometimes. Look around in the Google directory for your keywords. You will find a lot of sites with link pages that do link exchanges with other sites. Simply ask for a link swap. A non-templated personal message can do wonders. A search for "yourkeyword add url", "yourkeyword submit site" etc will pop up hundreds of websites to exchange links with.
   
   
4. Links Quality
   Quality, on topic links work best. Don't waste your time by submitting your site to FFA pages and by spamming guestbooks and forums - this is not a long term solution and those links seems to count less and less in the last time.
   
   
5. The secret to get a lot of good one-way links for free
   Write quality content for your website. Provide some free services that everyone would love. Work really hard and with passion and you will wonder how many people will link to you. Not because of the link exchanges or PR, but because they like your website. At last, that is what the web is about - the links from some sites to other.

7 Steps to Greater Link Popularity and Higher Search Engine Rankings

Link Popularity is one of the most important factors affecting your Search Engine rankings. When your site is popular with other web-sites, the Search Engines love you, but if you are the new kid on the block, they ignore you - totally. It's great to be popular and improving your Link Popularity will also get you higher rankings on the search engines.

Why is Link Popularity important for Higher Rankings?

Search Engines are just software programs that try to analyze the utility and validity of your content with regard to certain keywords. They also try to understand the importance or ranking of your site against all competing sites in their indices.

Just How do Search Engines Learn About the Utility and the Validity of Your Content?

Search Engines just love sites that users love to visit. They love it even more if users spend more time at the site before they browse away. Now how do they know which sites humans love? Obviously with the billions of web pages on the world wide web, the Search Engines cannot manually go to each site and check their content. They let other humans do that work for them. Then they watch as others link to your site. They watch your Link Popularity.

Link popularity simply means how popular are you on the World Wide Web. And your popularity is determined by the number of people linking to your website. The greater the number of external links pointing to your web-site, the greater your ranking. Simple, isn't it?

Here is how to find YOUR link popularity: Go to Google.com and type in "link: followed by your URL". This returns all the sites that link to you in the Google index. eg. link:http://www.yourdomain.com.

How Do You Get a Lot of People to Link to You?

Getting people to link to you is easy if you establish your presence. Show that you are a master of your domain. Even if you deal in manure, and there are people out there wanting to know more about it, you have an audience. And if you establish your presence well enough, the links will automatically follow.

Here are a few ways you can increase your inbound links.

1) Articles: Almost anybody can write articles. This is the easiest way to get started on your way to Search Engine manna. It's just a question of putting down your thoughts in a coherent manner. As long as the information you are providing is useful and valid, your articles will be sought after by publishers out there. There are also hundreds of article directories on the net.

To find article directories, Google 'Article Directories'. You get nearly 53 million hits. There are also some awesome free tools available for this.

For those with a morbid fear of writing, you can find 'Ghostwriters' as well as 'Virtual Assistants' on the Internet. Search on Google for those terms and you will find many a link to sites that provide you suitable services. You may also use sites like Elance.com and RentACoder.com for people who will write articles for you.

2) Blogs: Blogs are not as easy to do as Articles are. But they are a very useful tool, nevertheless. When you have a blog, you have an audience. It's like a fan base. They have certain expectations of you. They want you to churn out hit singles or albums. But they want you to give them more. Even though they started out as mere diaries or daily jottings of a few people, currently they are excellent link building, content management and search engine optimization tools.
In fact almost any industry can have a blog portal. As always run a search and you will find something in your industry. Or you can go to blogger.com or wordpress.com to start your own blog free of charge.

3) Free Products: The easiest way to do this is to write a tool and offer it for download. Or maybe even provide a service for free. The greatest example of building a business with free service that comes to mind is hotmail.com. Once your service becomes a must-have, it's only a matter of time before you can start making money from it. Also you can have people point to your site to give their customers access to your tool.

4) Trackbacks: This is the easiest way to get your links out there. What you do is go to other blogs (Authority Sites) in your industry and become a regular contributor. Or comment on the blogs. Along with your signature, most people offer a link to your web-site. And the more links you have pointing back to you, the more popular you get. Also, when you become a major contributor/commentor, people start valuing your opinion more.

5) Syndication: You can offer your articles to other sites for publishing for free or for payment. Your article links back to your site.

6) Reciprocal links: You offer a link to another peer site, in return for them linking back to you. This is a good way to get your target industry users to come to your site. Also you introduce your users to other sites that they may be interested in visiting. They will be thankful to you for pointing them in the right direction. And they come to trust you more.

7) Partner links: Your local Chamber of commerce, Suppliers, Resellers, Affiliates, Sites selling complementary products etc.

Link Building

There are three types of links which will increase link popularity for a website.
Internal links :

Incoming links :

Outgoing links :

Link popularity is defined as the number of links pointing to and from related websites and it is an extremely important method for improving sites relevancy in search engines.

Internal links :

Number of Links to and from pages within a site is called as internal link popularity. Search engine spiders find and index important related pages quicker if some pages are buried deep within the site when we do cross linking of important related Pages

Incoming links :

Incoming links are of 2 types.

1. (Links from sites we control)
2. (Links from sites we don’t control)

Links pointing to a website from other related sites is called incoming link popularity.
To find link popularity for a website or which sites are linking to our website or competitors website we need to go to Google search box and enter “link:” followed by domain name with out using “www”

>> More on Incoming Links

Outgoing links :

Outgoing links refers to links pointing to other related sites from your site. Search engine spiders will crawl your site's outgoing links and determine that the content of the sites you link to are related to the content of your own site.

How much importance outgoing links add to a site's link popularity rating is still being debated by search engine optimization specialists

>> More on Incoming Links

Site maps :
Site maps leads to links which leads to most or all pages of the website. Site maps are hierarchically organized. Site maps are visual models of web site content that allows users to find specific webpage. If more pages are available in a website it is recommended to have a site map, by using site map search engine spiders will crawl the links and index the entire వెబ్సైటు.

Outgoing links

Outgoing links :

Outgoing links refers to links pointing to other related sites from your site. Search engine spiders will crawl your site's outgoing links and determine that the content of the sites you link to are related to the content of your own site. How much importance outgoing links add to a site's link popularity rating is still being debated by search engine optimization specialists

Link keywords :

It is important to name your internal and outgoing links carefully. Since keywords play a major part in determining the relevancy of a Web page, it is essential that they are also included in link text.

Link quality :

The quality of the links is just as important. The types of sites we should concentrate on getting links from include, Major search engines like (Google.com), popular search portals like (MSN.com), web directories like(Yahoo.com and Open Directory Project - dmoz.org), high trafficked sites like (eBay.com and Amazon.com), news sites like (CNN.com), and sites related to our site's theme.

Link exchanges and farms :

Do not get links from link exchange sites and link farms. Link farms are networks of heavily cross linked pages on one or more sites, with the sole intention of improving the link popularity of those pages and sites. All of the major search engines consider such links as spam, so stay clear of these types of links.