You may have noticed I don’t use dashes in my URLs.  I’d like to but the blog platform I’m using isn’t letting me.  One more tweak for the redesign.

Here on one forum site is lifted subject about that тег “external nofollow” is taken into account google when ranking rather then is taken into account only in clean type rel="nofollow" That think the gentlemen?

Gah noooooo!!!!!!

OK, first a little introduction. I actually work in SEO as a profession. I’ve been published in Accountancy Age, have an upcoming article in New Media Age, have an enviable track record in the field and have been doing it for around 5 years, give or take.

Now, let me outline the most important things in SEO (at this current point in time)…

Title Tags. The number one most important thing. For those reading who don’t know, the title tag is what goes between these tags in your HTML - <title></title> Write it in such a way that it has keywords for the search engines (but don’t just list hundreds, make sure it’s actually relevant to that individual page, and go for one or two), and so that it makes sense for a human reader. So if you’re writing a post on the emergent Church, you might title it “The Life and Times of the Emergent Church :: SiteName”. That way you’ve covered the keyword - emergent Church, and it reads properly.

Meta Description. Probably the second most important thing. If the keyword someone searches for is found in this, then search engines will show it in the listing as the descriptive part, under the title. If the keyword isn’t there, they’ll make up their own. So again, you want to use just one or two keywords here, but still write it in a way that’s readable and compelling to people. Sticking with the last example, a good description would be “A short post examining the current state of the emergent Church around the world”.

URLs. Make sure the URL relates to whatever the content is, and again has that one or two keywords. So a good URL for that post would be “sitename.com/global-look-at-emergent-church.htm”. There’s no real advantage to using - instead of _ other than it looks nicer, especially when pasting the link into a document (underscores look like spaces when the link is underlined).

robots.txt. Ensure that you don’t get duplicate content issues, by blocking sections that could cause this with a robots.txt file. I won’t go into how to do this too much, but if you want more information, there’s plently around if you google it. It’s more a problem for dynamic sites than static ones.

Check out the one at my site if you’re looking for a good example for WordPress powered sites.

Images. Make sure every image has an alt attribute. This will allow the search engines to better understand what the image is about, as they can’t “see” it. And really make sure this one makes sense, as it’s used by people using screen readers to audibly tell them what that image is.

Anchor text. Make sure all links inside your site have anchor text that relates to the page they’re pointing to. So don’t say “click here” unless it’s a direct call to action. If you want them to go to a page, name the page sensibly, and use that as the link instead.

Keywords in copy. Make sure you stay on topic with your content. If you’re writing a post about the emergent Church, write about that. Don’t go off and talk about what you did on the weekend, unless it relates.

Inbound link level. Do everything you can to attract links from sites both within your niche, and outside it. More links = better rankings.

I could go on and on, but I won’t. If you want more information, check out http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

And don’t believe everything you hear. Test everything. The ultimate proof is if it works!

You never know what you’ll find here and this is a gem.  I am not a techie nor could I play one on YouTube, but am learning (keep the brain working).  DH is even reading this post - a rarity since he won’t read MY blog.  Especially appreciate the comments of Pete W. “And don’t believe everything you hear. Test everything. The ultimate proof is if it works! “ Amen Pete - a good rule of value for anything.  Thanks for sending some tide our way - we are a LONG way from tide waters but got the image.

THANKS PETE!

I’m no SEO guru - which is why I quote other people in this post.  Good to have another expert opinion.

Anyone else?

Thanks for the mention! If you want, I’ll write my take on SEO and general online marketing as a guest post sometime.

Just setting up your URL’s and filenames to be seo friendly will probably not make a significant difference in your search rankings. 

A friend of mine says “SEO is like football it’s a game of inches”.  You need to be doing a lot of the right things to get good SEO results.

There’s no one thing that is the silver bullet of SEO.  However, the most important thing you can do is get quality in-bound links to your site. Ideally, those links will include anchor text (relevant keywords in the link). But even this does not guarantee a good search ranking if your site is not SEO friendly.  The following are some things you can do to make a page friendly to the seach spiders:

1. Optimize the page for one or two keyword phrases.
2. Have at least 200 words on the page and mention them frequently in the copy.  For instance, once in the title of the page, twice in the opening paragraph and once in each subsequent paragraph.
3. Feature the keyword phrase in your title tags, meta description and meta keywords.
4. Feature the keyword phrase in your alt text.
5. Feature the keyword phrase in your image names with multiple words separated by dashes.
6. Feature the keyword phrase in your URL with multiple words separated by dashes.
7. Also, make sure your site has plenty of text links for the search engine robots to follow.  Flash based sites are notoriously difficult to get search rankings for.

Visit http://www.compassion.com/about/musicartists/seventh-day-slumber-experiences-the-hand-of-god.htm to see an example of a page using these techniques that has a page one listing on Google and Yahoo for the search phrase 7th Day Slumber.

This_makes_my_head_hurt.  I_am_glad_we_all_have_different_loves_and_passions!

I’m with you Brian!

B_e_t_h

I just wrote a post at my site about how confusing some of this stuff is for a lay person like me. There are experts who seem to take different stances on the same topic. Here’s another blog I ran across dedicated to SEO with a Category just for Blogs. It contradicts some of the items listed above too. But I’m not sure whether its really a contradiction or just the difference in networks or just a changes turning over so fast that not everyone is on the same page.  Good Luck!

http://www.searchengineoptimizationjournal.com/2008/03/17/how-to-properly-build-anchor-text-links-from-your-off-site-blog-to-your-website/

I am with you too brian lol

Don’t begin your post with an image?
Oh no ,sometimes users like that!

You point of view is important ! not the pictures !

Pictures are important ! Its a modern world !

This post has covered the basic SEO principals quite well. If webmaster follow these principals to design and maintain their websites, the website should be better than 90% websites in the internet.

Nice Article.

I must say you have very well presented it

Thank you so much for explaining.

I was not aware of this point that is “Don’t begin your post with an image” and also you have explained the reason behind this.

Thank you for sharing here.

Hi, excellent post, and great comments too!  I just thought I would add some things that should generally be avoided:

Never Duplicate Content: Of course, some content will always be duplicated, e.g. headers and footers, however, your main content should never exist in multiple locations; you run the risk of being penalized by some search engines, or simply ignored by others. 

Flash is notoriously difficult to crawl, as mentioned above, however, Google and Adobe have recently collaborated to at least improve Flash indexing.  Nevertheless, animations, videos, and graphic text are obviously still not capable of being crawled. 

Lastly, avoid worthless links, especially link farms.  So many beginners make this mistake thinking they have stumbled upon a plan to outfox search engines and Google Pagerank.  Of course, you risk your entire domain being removed by search indexes.

Regards,
Philip is a marketing genius

This is exactly what I was looking for. Thanks for sharing this great article! That is very interesting I love reading and I am always searching for informative information like this! You are bookmarked!
Thx,
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