Category: Optimization

Complete SEO Checklist

In my previous entry, I wrote about the myths of search engine optimization. As I’ve said and as discussed by the related reference, SEO is not the complete solution to successful websites — content is. This time though, we take this useful SitePoint article for our discussion. We’ve said that SEO is not everything, but it can be very helpful in getting good content to those who seek them. If you have the content that you think is of value to other web users, you can get it where it should be through SEO.

This article discusses the many details involved in optimizing your pages for search engines. The ones I find really important are:

Plan your web site’s SEO before you create the site. Though this is debatable, it pays to have a focused outline for your site, especially for determining what you want to do with it. You can’t have a site with no clear goals, especially if you’re putting a significant amount of effort into it.

Target keyphrases rather than single keywords. You have to do this because users do not always search for keywords, but specific keyphrases as well.

Include keywords and keyphrases in your site’s information architecture. If your site is about bananas, it has every right to have banana written all over it.

Use focused keyphrases within each web page’s <title> element. The title element defines the content of the whole page and should contain the relevant details.

Use your focused keyphrases within the page’s <heading> elements, beginning with the <h1> element. Break up your content into subheadings to enhance readability, and label your subsections with the appropriate title using the right heading tags.

Avoid the use of splash pages. You should’ve known this many years ago, and if you just learned it now you should do something about it. Now.

Create search-engine friendly HTML text navigation and cross-links. Cross–linking your site’s content is your way of pointing search engines and users to relevant pages within your site. Strive to keep your users reading your content.

Use structural markup, and separate content from presentation as much as possible. This is the only right way to go. Good markup looks good to search engines, and your users benefit.

Read on for more, and consider these tips for your site. Good SEO can only help you.

SEO Myths

Post author By markku
Post date July 20, 2006
5 Comments on SEO Myths

Everyone praises search engine optimization (SEO) like it’s the holy grail to a successful website — it isn’t. First of all, always remember that content is king. If you do not have good original content and just link to other sites without even providing valuable insights, your sites have less chances at good traffic growth. Even having good content can be less effective if not published at the appropriate time.

A recently popular article over at digg entitled “5 Myths in SEO” lists the following pitfalls: “Overnight Results,” “Placement Can Be Guaranteed,” “Meta Tags,” “Submitting to Search Engines,” and “More Links > Good Links.” Any SEO company or practitioner who promises you these things is most likely lying, or too confident with his illegal methods.

My personal SEO recommendation: Write to your heart’s desire. Write with passion, and always try to provide something unique.

News Optimization Traffic Building

Isulong SEOPH!

SEO Philippines last week launched a keyword ranking contest open to everyone. The keyword for the competition is “isulong seoph,” without the quotes. Whoever is on top of the google.com.ph search results on the night of September 29, 2006 wins a hefty sum, with the prizes at stake currently totalling 130 thousand pesos.

As early as minutes after the announcement of the contest, domains with the relevant keywords were selling like hotcakes. I was able to get isulongseoph.net, which is currently ranked at number one on the google SERPs. However, the next few weeks should prove to be very exciting as most of the participants are employing various strategies to grab the highly coveted top spot. Keep yourself tuned!

Commentary Links Optimization Traffic Building

Conversational traffic

Blogging can be a very daunting task especially when your efforts does not translate to visits, inbound links, and comments. Fortunately, one very effective way to build traffic is through interaction. And by interaction, it usually means through comments. And if you can’t get people to comment, might as well comment and interact with blogs of the same topic. Amy Gahran discusses this further in her article, “Strategic Commenting: No blog is an island.”

Personally, this is a tried–and–tested method to increase the visibility of your weblog, one that I employed successfully on my personal weblog. Read on.

Links Optimization PageRank Problogging Tools

Visual PageRank

Google’s PageRank has always been dependent on the inter–relation of sites, pages, and links. To summarize it bluntly, links to a page determine its level of authority, in an ideal world wide web.

Checking changes in your PageRank would generally show very little variation across several weeks. You need to manage links to and from your site’s pages, and know their PR values as well. Using this visual pagerank tool, the PR of your outgoing links are displayed right in your pages — very useful for seeing how valuable are the pages you’re linking to.

Links Optimization PageRank Problogging Tools

Monitor Your PageRank

Post author By markku
Post date April 20, 2006

Your site’s pagerank directly affects the relevance and readership statistics, an important metric that separates your pages from the rest of the other pages competing for the same keywords.

There are several things you can do to optimize your site for better pagerank, but you need to have an idea what your PR is across all Google data centers. With PageRank Watch, you can check for PR growth or decline from a simple form. This is an essential problogger tool.

Links Optimization PageRank

Pagerank checklist

Everyone’s gone gaga over Pagerank, so this article should be very helpful in analyzing and breaking it down for you. Now make sure you’ve gone through all the steps. 🙂 Here is the outline of the checklist:

Do you know how Google ranks pages?
Do you know if Google has indexed your page?
Do you know your Page Rank?
Do you create new page rank for yourself?
Do you conserve your page rank?
Do you concentrate your page rank where it will do the most good?
How many inbound links do you have?
Do you use enough keywords?
Do you monitor the progress of your keywords?
Are your <title>, <h1>, and <h2> tags descriptive?
Do you use META keywords and description tags?
Is your URL consistently in the same case?
Do your links have relevancy to the page you’re linking to?
Do make it easy for Google to find your dynamic pages?
Do your inbound picture links use attributes?
Do you avoid the temptation of link farms?
Are you listed with DMOZ.org?
Do you avoid using frames on your website?
Does your Flash website have an alternate HTML site?
Do you use include files for your JavaScript?
Do you submit all your software to download sites?
Are your webpages less than 101k?
Do you use your Robots.txt file effectively?