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Probably the most important part of search engine optimization is building good quality links back to your website. Anyone will tell you that a good SEO campaign consists mostly of a good linking campaign. Well what does that mean? What is a good linking campaign?

Search engines assign different weight values to different types of links and the higher the weighted value, obviously the more that incoming link helps your website. The goal to a good linking campaign is getting the most valuable links without wasting your time with links that the search engines do not give any weight to. Below is a list and description of different types of links, how to get them and what they do and do not do for your website:

No-follow links

These are the worst links to get and for the most part they are a waste of time. A no-follow link is a link that links to your website but in the code there is an attribute value (no-follow) set to tell the search engine not to follow the link. The only beneficial value to a link with the “no-follow” attribute is that your link is visibly seen which may or may not get users to click on it to go to your website; but the search engines will not give any value to these links because they do not follow them to your website. Some of the most common ways of getting links with the no-follow attribute are as follows:

• Lower quality directories sometimes use no-follow for their free submissions


• A lot of blogs have the no-follow attribute set for the comments section (this is to ensure that people don’t spam on another person’s blog because they have nothing to gain).


• If someone wants to display your web address on their site but does not want you to get the benefit of a link from them.

Reciprocal links

These are some of the most common types of links that consists of two sites that link to each other so they both gain some sort of SEO value. These links are usually fairly easy to get from directories or other websites but they require that you put their link on your website in return. If the content on the two sites are similar then the links will be viewed as more valuable but even still, reciprocal links are not valued to high in Google or other search engines. For example, if two sites about banking both linked to each other, the value of those links will be higher for both websites than if say a banking website had a reciprocal link with a pet store website. So it is better to get reciprocal links with sites similar to yours in regards to topics and content. But even if the two sites are not related you can still look at it as a link is a link. It may not have much weight to it but it is still a link and that only helps you and will not usually hurt you. The best way to get reciprocal links:

• A lot of paid directories offer free links with reciprocal


• Link exchange programs can be found on a lot of online communities


• Contact webmasters of sites similar to yours and request link exchange


• Some bloggers will offer to write a blog post about your website in their blog in exchange for their blog link on your website

One-way links

The best links that you can get to your website are one-way links. These are links from other websites to your website without you having to link back to them. These links hold the most value because in the search engine’s algorithmic mind, if someone is linking to you with no link back, then your website is probably offering some sort of service, product or information that is important enough to not require a link back. Just like with reciprocal links, the more the content and topics on the site linking to you are related to you, the more weight Google will give that link. One way links can be acquired from a lot of different sources:

• Article writing


• Directories


• Blogs


• If you provided a good service for someone it may be worth them linking to you


• Forum signatures


• Resource websites

So when you are trying to get links for your website, keep a look out for these three different types of links and try and get the most value for your time. Look for part II of this article soon as we will be going into detail about the different ways to get links and a little bit more on link weight and Pagerank values.

Labels: link types, linking, linking campaign, no-follow links, one-way links, reciprocal links, search engine optimization, seo

There is a very popular saying in the world of search engine optimization and that is “Content is King.” He/she who writes the most and best content is going to reap the benefits from the search engines. Google and other search engines have one primary goal in mind and that is to provide the internet searcher with the best search results for the keyword that they are searching for. These results are based on advanced search engine algorithms that primarily look at your pages content to determine keyword relevancy for each page in your website (I know, it’s kind of a mouthful).

The first major aspect to keep in mind when writing content for your website is the amount of content per page. You want to have a good amount of information and text on each page in order for the search engine to really give weight to your page and its keywords. It is usually recommended to have a minimum of 250 words for each page of your website that you want Google to index. This is about three average size paragraphs. You want this much content on each page because you want your website to be informative and have a lot of information on a certain topic/keyword. Remember the search engine only wants to show relevant results to the user and it is pretty doubtful that a site with 25 words on it is going to be relevant to the searcher.

Second thing to keep in mind when writing content is usage of keywords (for more info on choosing keywords check out SEO Tip Number 1: Choosing Keywords). You want your keywords to make up about 2% or 3% of your total content. So for a page with 250 words on it, you probably want your keyword to be repeated about 8-10 times. You want to primarily use the exact keyword or phrase but you can also break it up here and there if it fits more naturally (for example, if your keyword is something like “professional web design” you would want to use that phrase exactly most of the time but here and there you can use “web design,” Professional,” “professional design,” etc.). Sometimes this is necessary, especially if you are using key phrases, because a long key phrase does not always flow smoothly with the context of a sentence. This brings me to the next point.

Make sure your content flows smoothly because search engines read content very similar to a person. If you are just listing off keywords hoping the search engines will see you, they will; but then they will ban you for spamming. You want your keywords to flow with your content almost to the point that if someone was reading your text, they would have a hard time noticing the fitting of the keywords. Doing this will ensure that when a search engine spider crawls through your content, it will see that your website is truly about the keywords you posted in your meta tags and it will count your website as a good resource for that particular keyword.

One last important factor in content writing is staying on top of your content. Google and other search engines like to see websites that are constantly maintained and updated. Updating and adding content to your pages every so often will ensure that the search engines index your pages more often. Blogs are a great way to do this because they are easy to make posts and update content on the fly. Writing a blog post a few times a month or at least once a week will show the search engines that you are keeping up to date on your site and the website was not just something that was created, put live and then forgot about.

Good content is one of the most important aspects of an SEO compatible website. While there are many other factors that are involved in search engine optimization and a true SEO compatible website, “content is king.” Writing content is not usually the most fun thing in the world so there are companies out there that are professional content writers that can write SEO compatible content for you for a price such as http://www.pearlywrites.com. Whether you write the content yourself or you have someone else write your content for you, it will definitely be worth it in the end because the best SEO results come from good content and all other SEO efforts become less and less valuable if you do not have good content on your website.

Labels: content is king, professional web design, search engine optimization, seo, seo compatible

The term “spider” in search engine optimization refers to the way Google and other search engines look at your website. When a page gets indexed by a search engine, the search engine spiders crawl through your site and its contents almost like a human reads. The spiders do this insanely fast and they are very smart.

The first thing the spider does is look at your title and your meta tags to determine what it is looking for. This is where you would have your keywords to let the search engine spider know what to look for as it crawls through your content. If you do not have any meta tags or keywords listed then the spider will most likely discard your site and move on. This is why it is extremely important to make sure you have proper meta tags and well-chosen keywords.

After the spider knows what to look for it will start to crawl through your content. They start in the upper left hand corner and read through the content looking for the keywords that it found in your meta tags. Try and bold keywords and the important parts of your content to show the spiders that these are important words or phrases. As I said before, the spiders are very smart so if you have a list of keywords or if your content is not actually relevant to the keywords then the spiders will count it as spam and this will only hurt your website, not help it. The spiders are similar to humans when they read so they can tell if the content does not make sense.

If you have clearly defined links in your content the spiders will follow these links to your other pages and crawl through them. You should put links to your important pages so the spiders will crawl through and see that you have multiple pages with the same or similar keywords and it will show that your website is actually about those keywords. This is where the bottom text navigation comes in. It is extremely important to have a bottom text link navigation with your important pages in it because this is the last area the spider goes, and you want the spider to follow the links and crawl all of your important pages. You should try and include your keywords in these bottom links or at least somewhere in the footer so the spider sees the keywords one last time before it leaves the page.

Things to avoid:

• Because the spider starts in the upper left corner, avoid putting flash or javascript as the first thing on your webpage because it is possible that the spider will see that mess of code first and get lost or just move on and not even look at your entire page.
• Make sure that most of your page has text in it. The spiders cannot read graphics, so if your page is comprised of mostly graphics then the spiders will have nothing to read.
• Avoid too much content. It is good to have a lot of content but if you have way too much on one page then the spider may skip a lot of it because it wants to be efficient.
• Don’t just list your keywords. The spiders are smart so they can tell if you are spamming your site with keywords. Try and space out every keyword throughout the content. Avoid putting two different keywords right next to each other.

For more information about SEO or to contact us about our SEO or professional web design services, feel free to scan through our website: SEO Compatible Design.

Labels: google, professional web design, search engine, search engine optimization, seo, spider, website

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Labels: professional web design, search engine optimization, seo compatible design, seo compatible websites

When it comes to optimizing your website, the first and most important aspect of SEO is choosing keywords for your website. Choosing keywords is surprisingly more difficult than it seems. There are three major points to consider when choosing keywords for your website;

· Search popularity

· Site/content relevance

· Competition

When trying to find good keywords for your website, one of the first things you need to consider is the keywords search popularity. The keywords that you choose need to be words or phrases that are searched often. If you choose a word that is never searched then it really doesn’t matter how relevant the word is because nobody is looking for it anyways. For example, if your website is about puppy adoptions, you would not want to choose a key phrase like “cheap puppy adoptions” even though it sounds like it might be a good keyword/phrase. That phrase is not searched hardly at all so it is not going to benefit you a whole lot to optimize your site for that keyword; instead it would be better to try something like puppy rescue, or puppy rescue adoption or even just puppy adoption. There are many tools online (some for free, some for a price) that can help you find how much a keyword or phrase is searched.

Keywords cannot only be chosen based on search popularity because you also need to make sure that the keyword or phrase that you choose is relevant to your website content. When writing the content for your website, you need to try and include your keyword or phrase as often as possible without making your content look awkward. In other words, it needs to be a smooth read for your visitors as well as for the search engine spiders. When a search engine spider crawls through your site it is looking for the keywords that you have specified in your meta tags and it is verifying that your site is actually about those keywords.

The third aspect of choosing your keywords is to look at the competition for those keywords. If your website is brand new, or even fairly new, you do not want to choose a keyword that is super competitive (competitive meaning it is searched a whole lot like “real estate” or “web design”). The reason for this is because your goal is to get your website up on the first couple pages of the search engine and there is no way a search engine is going to rank your site first on a keyword that hundreds of thousands of companies are optimizing for. You want to choose a word that is searched often but not too often. Going back to the puppy adoption example, it would be better for you to optimize your content for a word/phrase like “puppy adoption” or “puppy rescue adoption” than a phrase like “dog adoption” or “pet adoption” because these keywords are incredibly competitive and there is no way your website is going to get ranked on these keywords (at least not for a couple years).

As you can see, there is a lot more to choosing keywords than just choosing them and there is also a lot more to search engine optimization than just choosing keywords. You also have to look at your html code, link building, amount of pages/content, etc. We will be posting tips about all of these topics periodically so feel free to check back often for more tips and news. If you would like a little more information about SEO or professional web design, feel free to navigate through our site, we provide a lot of information about the services we offer.

Labels: keywords, professional web design, search engine optimization, seo, web design