June 12th, 2008 at 08:01pm
Under seo
One of the single most important things you can do SEO wise for your website’s ranking in the SERP’s is to optimize your title and meta-tags.
Now it used to be back in the stone-age when I began SEO that the meta keyword tag counted for something but due to abuse it has been almost completely eliminated from factoring into most search engines ranking algorithms and in the case of Google it is not counted at all, however some minor search engines will still take it into limited account.
This is not true for your title and to a lesser extent your meta-description tag. While the meta description tag does not count for much, your title counts heavily in Google’s algorithm although not as much as it used to.
I know… I can hear you saying it now to yourself. Everyone knows that so why bring up such a basic SEO point? The reason is that I still see so many people utilizing these important SEO tools wrong.
The most common mistake I see with the title and meta-description tag is that people simply try to jam too many words into them thereby decreasing thier effect at best and at worst incurring a penalty by the search engines.
What you need to know about title and meta-description tag is that the weight given to each word and the tag as a whole decreases with every word. Moreover the search engines spider will discontinue reading your title and meta-description tag after a certain number of words anyway, so not only will they not see the words you enter past a certain point but you are effectively watering down the words that they do read.
You should never enter more than around 15 words for these tags and preferrably no more than 10 especially for the title. Ideally you should have about 5 words for the title and 10 to 15 words at most for your description tag.
Another common SEO mistake I see people make a lot with regard to these tags is putting thier URL in thier title which is a waste of prime SEO real-estate, since generally speaking if someone types in professionalseo.com for example my site would come up #1 anyway and the same goes for your site as well. The one exception to this is if your domain name is a prime search phrase then you might consider doing so but the .com at the end is unnecessary.
Lastly, with regards to the decription tag, do not make it a carbon copy of your title. Your title should encapsulate the overall theme of your site with a few well chosen keywords seperated by a delimiter like a hyphen or a vertical pipe, while your description tag should expand on that theme and describe your site in a more detailed but natural looking sentence.
By admin
April 15th, 2008 at 07:27am
Under seo
Today the SEO professional wants to talk to you a little about sitemaps and the SEO impact it has on your site.
OK, so some of you may be wondering how sitemaps can help the search engine optimization of my website. Many of you might be aware of what sitemaps are but are used to seeing them in the form of actual HTML pages like professionalseo.com/sitemaps.html
These were the original incarnation of sitemaps, but were really used more for the average surfer to have a handy way to see what content a particular site had and were only used in an SEO context in a peripheral way. Although effective from an SEO standpoint to assist the various search engine spiders in finding your webpages, for those sites with hundreds or thousands of web pages obviously it is not practical to have a sitemap page with thousands of URL’s on it.
Thats where XML sitemaps come in. While many websites have actual HTML sitemap pages, what I want to talk to you about today is the next step in sitemaps for SEO that some webmasters may be familiar with which are XML sitemaps. A couple years ago Google really aided webmasters and made thier SEO work easier with the XML sitemap protocol in order to more effectively spider your website and Yahoo and MSN both have recently added support for them as well.
So what is an XML sitemap and how can it aid me in my SEO efforts?
Simply put, a XML sitemap is a web-standard XML file which allows you to add some metadata to it such as all your URL’s with the last time you updated a particular page, how often you update it, and it’s importance relative to the rest of the pages of your site specifically for search engine bots to gather more information about your site.
XML sitemaps offer the ability for you to give a priority ranking to all your webpages on a scale from 0.0 to 1.0, with 1.0 being the most important and 0.5 being the default “neutral” rank. For example your index page you would give a ranking of 1.0 to, while your terms of service page you would probably want to assign a 0.1 to. This point value system helps the search engines by giving them and thier bots a way to know which pages on your site you value most and therefore which to spider more frequently.
In addition to the point value system is the ability to denote when a particular page was last updated and also how often you generally do update it. The accepted values for this are: always, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly or never, and all this extra information is instructive to the various search engine bots again to know how often to revisit your website and it’s various pages.
OK I can hear you asking now so I will answer your question. “If I assign my index page a 1.0 and my privacy.html page a 0.1 does that mean I will be guaranteed a better “Page Rank” score on my index page?” Sorry, but the answer is no you wont, which might prompt many people to ask why bother then?
The answer is similar to the explanation I gave in the robots.txt SEO tutorial which is simply that assisting the search engines to help find and spider the various pages of your site more effectively and to revisit your key pages more often is a good thing from a SEO standpoint as you are in effect “helping them to help you” since sites with fresher content tend to get better rankings in the SERP’s and anytime you can help the various search engines to help navigate your site is smart SEO.
Creating a XML sitemap is relatively easy but if you have a lot of pages on your site or if you are unsure how to create one just do a search on “XML sitemap generator” and you will find many free resources to create one for you automatically which you can then upload to the root of your site meaning: yoursite.com/sitemap.xml. From there it is a simple matter of submitting your sitemap URL to Google through thier webmaster tools interface.
If you dont have a webmaster account with Google or are too lazy to go around to the various search engines and submit the sitemap URL by hand but still want to get your sitemap indexed faster than by letting the search engines eventually find it on thier own, you can simply place the URL to your sitemap directly in your robots.txt file for sitemap autodiscovery by the search engine bots the next time they visit your site.
By admin
March 15th, 2008 at 07:25pm
Under seo
Whether you know only basic SEO or are into advanced SEO, one of the most important yet simple SEO strategies is optimizing your canonicalization, which is a fancy SEO term for whether or not to use www in your URL’s.
This is a really simple SEO trick and yet I see even so called SEO experts and huge sites with SEO companies working for them making this basic search engine optimization error and as far as SEO goes, this is about one of the biggest SEO blunders you can make because it is something so easily fixed, yet can really drag down your potential PR.
What you need to know about canonicalization is that Google and the other search engines see a site using both URL’s as two different pages.
Yes, you read that right.
If your site resolves to both http:// and to http:// with the www afterwards then the search engines including Google consider those to be two completely different URL’s and will allocate your Pagerank accordingly.
What this means is that for example if you are a Pagerank 4 when you load your site with www and you are also a Pagerank 4 without it then you are splitting your potential Page Rank between those two URL’s.
If you try to type in http://professionalseo.com you will see that I have placed a permanent 301 redirect to http://www.professionalseo.com/ to prevent this.
This is a very simple redirect using .htaccess but a good SEO tweak that will do wonders for getting the most out of your Page Rank.
I have chosen to redirect to www but there is absolutely no SEO benefit or loss to choosing one over the other. The important thing SEO wise is to just choose one and stick with it. Load your index page into your browser with and without the www and simply pick whichever is higher in Pagerank, or if they are both the same then just choose which one you like better.
Take note that whichever URL your link partners choose to link to you with will be a prime determining factor as to which version has a higher Pagerank so make sure in the future after you make this change to always request that link partners are consistent with linking to your chosen preferrence, although since you will be doing a redirect that link-juice will still be translated to whichever version you chose.
Once you have completed the redirect log into your Google webmasters account if you have one and set an association as to how you want Google to view your site. You can find it under: webmaster tools/dashboard/tools/set preferred domain/
It is not manditory from an SEO point of view to do this last step as eventually Google will figure it out but it is more expedient to do so and the change will be noted more quickly.
Hope you enjoyed my SEO tip for the day.
By admin
February 25th, 2008 at 02:40pm
Under seo
Today we will discuss the importance SEO wise of a websites robots.txt file. I am constantly amazed at the number of large and notable sites (including SEO company sites) which have ignored or are unaware of this important SEO tactic.
For those of you who are asking; what the heck is a robots.txt file and what does it have to do with search engine optimization, the answer is that in simple terms this is the traffic-cop of search engine bots and instructs those bots which parts of a website they should and should not follow.
While having a robots.txt file will not have any direct effect on your search engine rankings in the SERP’s (Search Engine Results Pages), the importance of this from a SEO vantage point should be obvious. Helping the search engine robots effectively navigate your site can only aid you in your SEO efforts by getting your webpages properly indexed in Google and the other search engines.
Creating the file is simple. Simply open any text editor like Notepad and copy and paste the following:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
Then save the file as “robots.txt” and upload this file into the root directory of your website.
The asterisk is a wildcard denoting all search engine robots and leaving the Disallow command blank allows them access to any parts of your site. If there are any areas of your website that for whatever reason you do not want the search engine spiders to visit simply place the file or folder name in the Disallow command like so:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /examplefolder/
Or:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /examplefile.html
If you feel that this is all above your head you can also just do a Google search for “robots.txt generator” or check our “SEO Tools” section for both a generator and robots.txt validator to ensure yours is properly formatted.
By admin
December 5th, 2007 at 11:15am
Under seo
Today we start our series of SEO articles and what better place to open than the beginning? Professional SEO strives to be informative and I get so many SEO questions that seem basic to me that I forget sometimes that not everyone has been involved in search engine optimization for nearly a decade so I am going to start my SEO tutorial series with basic SEO principles and work my way up to advanced SEO.
The SEO starting point for any webmaster interested in search engine optimization is of course which domain name to choose as this choice will either ensure you face an uphill battle, or make things a lot easier for yourself. The reason is that all the search engines give some weight in thier algorithm to what your actual domain name is in terms of your ranking within thier index. For example, the domain of this website is professionalseo.com - this makes it infinitely easier for me to rank high for the search term “Professional SEO” as opposed to other sought after “SEO” keyword phrases like “SEO Services” or “SEO Company” etc.
Another equally, if not even more important reason that many people overlook in the importance of choosing a keyword rich domain is the simple fact that the anchor text that other websites and general web directories will link to me as, is of course- “Professional SEO” .
Since the anchor text (the visible text people see in an outbound link) is another datapoint in Google’s ranking algorithm, this is also clearly a big advantage SEO wise. While obviously I could encourage other websites and directories to list me as: “SEO Company”, the fact is that many do not allow this and require that you list yourself as your actual domain URL for your title. While this all may seem common sense, you would be suprised at how many people overlook this basic starting point.
One last note about keyword rich domains as it relates to search engine optimization is; make sure you choose a TLD (Top Level Domain) name like .com, .net, or .org - many people do not realize that most newer domain extensions are actually ccTLD’s (Country Code Top Level Domains) like .tv which is the country code domain for Tuvalu. The reason this distinction is significant in terms of Search Engine Optimization is that Google and the other search engines will most times only rank a TLD highly worldwide in Google.com while a ccTLD’s ranking will only be good within thier respective country. What this means is that SEOcompany.de will rank very well for the search term “SEO Company” in Germany and Google.de, but will most likely be nowhere to be seen in Google.com so unless you want to be the #1 SEO Company in the small island nation of Tuvalu, .tv might not be for you.
By admin
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