Do you like to wait for pages to download? Neither do your site users. Read on and find out how to speed up that download time…

1. Lay out your pages with CSS, not tables

CSS downloads faster than tables because:
*  Browsers read through tables twice before displaying their contents, once to work out their structure and once to determine their content
* Tables appear on the screen all in one go – no part of the table will appear until the entire table is downloaded and rendered
* Tables encourage the use of spacer images to aid with positioning
* CSS generally requires less code than cumbersome tables
* All code to do with the layout can be placed in an external CSS document, which will be called up just once and then cached (stored) on the user’s computer; table layout, stored in each HTML document, must be loaded up each time a new page downloads
* With CSS you can control the order items download on to the screen – make the content appear before slow-loading images and your site users will definitely appreciate it

To learn more about CSS and the amazing things it can do for your website, check out our CSS resources1 area.

2. Don’t use images to display text

It’s our old friend CSS to the rescue again. There’s no need to use images to display text as so much can be accomplished through CSS. Have a look at this code:

a:link
{
color: #ffffff;
background: #ff9900;
text-decoration: none;
padding: 0.2em;
border: 4px solid;
border-color: #99f #008 #008 #99f
}

a:hover
{
color: #ffffff;
background: #ffaa11;
text-decoration: none;
padding: 0.2em;
border: 4px solid;
border-color: #008 #99f #99f #008
}

This will give you a really simple button that appears to be pushed down when you mouseover it.

3. Call up decorative images through CSS

It’s possible to present images as part of the background, called up through CSS. If you’ve got an image that’s 200px by 100px you can use the following HTML code:

<div class=”pretty-image”></div>

And this CSS:

.pretty-image
{
background: url(filename.gif);
width: 200px;
height: 100px
}

This may at first seem a little pointless but this technique could really improve the download time of your pages. Browsers basically download background images after everything else. By using this technique, your text will load instantaneously and your site users can freely roam about the page while your 50kb fancy image downloads.

This technique disables the ALT attribute though so if you really want to have one then replace the above HTML code with this:

<image src=”spacer.gif” class=”pretty-image” alt=”description” />

Spacer.gif is a 1px x 1px transparent image. Now you have a 50 byte transparent image and the main content loading first, and your great big decorative image, complete with ALT text, loading second. Perfect.

Please note that this technique is only good for decorative images and not informational ones. Any user who has CSS disabled will not be able to see your CSS-embedded images (or their alternative text).

4. Use contextual selectors

This is inefficient:

<p class=”text”>This is a sentence</p>
<p class=”text”>This is another sentence</p>
<p class=”text”>This is yet another sentence</p>
<p class=”text”>This is one more sentence</p>

.text
{
color: #03c;
font-size: 2em
}

Instead of assigning a value to each individual paragraph, we can nest them within a <div> tag and assign a value to this tag:

<div class=”text”>
<p>This is a sentence</p>
<p>This is another sentence</p>
<p>This is yet another sentence</p>
<p>This is one more sentence</p>
</div>

.text p
{
color: #03c;
font-size:2em
}

This second CSS example basically says that every paragraph within class=”text” should be assigned a colour value of #03c and a font size of 2em.

At first glance this doesn’t look too important, but if you can apply this properly throughout your document you can easily knock off 20% of the file size.

You may have noticed the colour values are shorter than normal. #03c is a shortened version of #0033cc – you can assign this abbreviated value to any colour value like this.

5. Use shorthand CSS properties

You can use the following shorthand properties for the margin CSS command.

Use:

margin: 2px 1px 3px 4px (top, right, bottom, left)

…instead of

margin-top: 2px;
margin-right: 1px;
margin-bottom: 3px;
margin-left: 4px

Use:

margin: 5em 1em 3em (top, right and left, bottom)

…instead of

margin-top: 5em;
margin-right: 1em;
margin-bottom: 3em;
margin-left: 1em

Use:

margin: 5% 1% (top and bottom, right and left)

…instead of

margin-top: 5%;
margin-right: 1%;
margin-bottom: 5%;
margin-left: 1%

Use:

margin: 0 (top, bottom, right and left)

…instead of

margin-top: 0;
margin-right: 0;
margin-bottom: 0;
margin-left: 0

These rules can be applied to margin, border and padding.

6. Minimise white space, line returns and comment tags

Every single letter or space in your HTML code takes up one byte. It doesn’t sound like much but it all adds up. We’ve found that by working through your page source and eliminating unnecessary white space and comments, you can shave off up to, or even over (if your HTML is really inefficient) 10% of its file size.

7. Use relative call-ups

Try to avoid absolute call ups as they take up more space. An example of an absolute call up is: <a href=”http://www.URL.com/filename.htm”>. Much better would be <a href=”filename.htm”>. But what if some files are in different folders to other ones? Use these shorthand properties:

* <a href=”/”> – Calls up http://www.URL.com
* <a href=”/filename.html”> – Calls up http://www.URL.com/filename.html
* <a href=”/directory/filename.html”> – Calls up http://www.URL.com/directory/filename.html
* <a href=”./”> – Calls up index.html within that directory
* <a href=”../”> – Calls up index.html one directory above
* <a href=”../filename.html”> – Calls up filename.html one directory above
* <a href=”../../”> – Calls up index.html two directories above

8. Remove unnecessary META tags and META content

Most META tags are pretty much unnecessary and don’t achieve very much. If you’re interested, you can see a list of META tags that are available in another article. The most important tags for search engine optimisation are the keywords and description tags, although due to mass abuse they’ve lost a lot of importance in recent times. When using these META tags try to keep the content for each under 200 characters – anything more increases the size of your pages. Lengthy META tags are not good for search engines anyway because they dilute your keywords.

9. Put CSS and JavaScript into external documents

To place CSS in an external document use:

<link type=”text/css” rel=”stylesheet” href=”filename.css” />

To place JavaScript in an external document use:

<script language=”JavaScript” src=”filename.js” type=”text/javascript”></script>

Any external file is called up just once and then cached (stored) on the user’s computer. Instead of repeating JavaScript or CSS over and over again in HTML files, just write it out once in an external document.

And don’t forget, there’s no limit to the number of these external documents that you can use! For example, instead of making one huge CSS document, have one main one and some others that are specific to certain areas of your site.

10. Use / at the end of directory links

Don’t do this: <a href=”http://www.URL.com/directoryname”>

Do this instead: <a href=”http://www.URL.com/directoryname/”>

Why? If there’s no slash at the end of the URL the server doesn’t know if the link is pointing to a file or to a directory. By including the slash the server instantly knows that the URL is pointing to a directory and doesn’t need to spend any time trying to work it out.

These are all pretty small changes, but difficult to implement after you  have deployed your site.Get it right first, and you’ll reap the benefits!

DM

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and is probably one of THE most important things you can do for your website. You could have the best designed site with the absolute GREATEST content, but without being optimized it wouldn’t make much of a difference.

Tip #1: Use Lowercase URLs

This is probably the easiest and quickest little boost you could give your ranking.

Depending on your server’s operating system, file names and/or directories may or may not be case sensitive. So, casing in your URLs could mean trouble.

For example, http://www.yoursite.com/portfolio.html and http://www.yoursite.com/Portfolio.html are two completely different URLs if your server is running a UNIX system. However, if your server is Windows based, then those two URLs would be one and the same.
Now just throw in the fact that www.yoursite.com and WWW.YOURSITE.COM are always going to be the same domain, and the possibility of confusion is almost inevitable.

So, the best idea is to make all file and directory names lowercase by default. This way you do not have to worry about whether or not your URLs are going to get processed correctly.

Tip #2: Dislodge Your Underscore Key

Ok, so you don’t really have to remove the underscore key from your keyboard… However, it is certainly a good idea to refrain from using the underscore and/or periods in your file names.

We’ve all seen them… The super long page name separated by underscores.

http://www.yoursite.com/my_photo_gallery_page.html

File names like this are all too common, and are detrimental to SEO.

So, why do we do it?

1. Three main reasons:We think like humans, not like computers.

We look at a line of text and read it as words, and therefor attempt to separate it accordingly. Computers on the other hand do not. A computer sees characters and couldn’t care less about it being “human readable”.
2. Underscores are promoted when picking usernames and/or email addresses

Most sites will allow the underscore to be used as a separator when choosing your username and/or email address. This makes it all that much more common for us to use the underscore key more often.
3. Underscores look more like spaces

When viewing a page and/or file name that has been separated by underscores, our brains process the gap between the words first as a regular “space”. So, it isn’t too far fetched to say that this could be a contributing factor in why people use the underscore to separate words in page/file names.

So why is it bad?

Well, the underscore is often difficult to notice and even more difficult to type. Also, using separators of any kind when naming files is usually a sign of a poorly designed site structure.
So how do we fix it?

Easy! Simply put… DON’T USE UNDERSCORES!
If you find that you just have to use some sort of separator in your file names, it is less detrimental to use the hyphen ( – ).

Tip #3: Be A Title Tell

Have you ever visited a site and noticed that in the browser’s title output area, it only reads “index.html” or “Blank”?

This is because that person did not utilize the <title> tag. The title tag (or “title element”), is used to identify the contents of a page. It is one of the most important steps to improving your optimization level, yet it’s one of the most frequently discarded.

Another thing people don’t seem to realize is that each page has to have it’s own unique title. I have personally seen countless sites that use the exact same title for each page. This gives no indication as to what kind of content is on each individual page.

It is important when picking your title, you should use keywords and/or keyword phrases that are targeted in that particular page. For example, if we had a page where we were selling Keebler Elf Memorabilia and our shop is located in Arkansas…
Ideally our title should look something like this:
<title>Keebler Elf Memorabilia | Arkansas</title>

There is no “set length” for the title tag, however you should be aware that if it is too long it can and could be truncated. I would recommend keeping your title tag text below 63 characters (including spaces).

Tip #4: HALT… In the name of SEO!

A critical, but all too often overlooked step in optimization is including the “alt” attribute to your images. This is quickly becoming more and more important to SEO, and should not be taken lightly.
Also, the alt attribute is required for valid (X)HTML.

I won’t go into a full blown explanation as that only bore you. Just know that there are a few guidelines for the alt text you add to your images.

1. Don’t try stuffing your alt attribute with keywords

This is an approach which many of the “less reputable” SEO consultants will use to attempt to get a higher keyword density. However, this approach can actually hurt your page more than help it. If your keyword density is too high, that could automatically trigger the spam filter.
2. Convey in text what the image conveys visually

This is probably the most commonly mistaken aspect of the alt attribute. The alt attribute is not necessarily supposed to be a description of the image.
* Here are a few examplesIf you have an image that’s used as a button that leads the user to the “checkout” page, the proper alt text would not be “Checkout Button”. Instead, it should be “Go to checkout” or something relatively close to that.
* Say you have an image of a magnifying glass used as your “search button”, the corresponding alt text should read “Search” or “Submit Search” or “Submit Query”
* If you are using an image which is purely for “decoration” purposes, that image should either be used as a background image in CSS or you should add the alt attribute and leave it blank.
Like so: alt=” “

That’s as deep as I’m going to get into that particular subject, as it’s nearly never ending. I will however, point you in the direction of where you can find more detailed information if needed.
Google’s FAQ is chock full information about the matter.

Tip #5: Update Update Update!

Though it may seem like a rather monotonous job to update your site with new and fresh content frequently, this can dramatically increase your rankings. A steady flow of new and RELEVANT content can help to get your site noticed by the major search engines.

This doesn’t mean that you can post 10 blog entries per day about absolutely nothing and get a better pr score, you need to post content which is relevant to the overall scope of your site and that includes targeted popular keywords and phrases.

Keep in mind that this is only the “tip of the iceberg” so to speak. These are just simple, quick ways that you can help to improve your relevancy to the net. If you put into practice each of the tips mentioned above, you can expect to notice a difference in your ranking.

I’m not guaranteeing that you will be bumped to the top, but you should notice a difference no matter how small. Every little bit counts, right?

DM

2. To appear higher in Google’s organic search results, the foremost thing you should do is to remove spider traps, like long URL’s, too much JavaScript, Flash or other rich media on your pages and improper URL redirects. Check your site if it is clearly mapped out for Google (Yahoo!, MSN etc) to get your site indexed easily. You may want to use content lists, like categories or a sitemap too.

3. The file name of the webpage plays a small role in improving the search engine relevance. Using short keywords in the file name not only helps identifying the page content but also improves page relevance for the term. Therefore, it is better to name a page like – http://www.datamouse.biz/blog/wordpress/is-your-site-chrome-compatible/62/ rather than http://www.datamouse.biz/blog/wordpress/Page?page=62. Also, make sure you use hyphens ‘-’ between keywords instead of underscores ‘_’. Google considers hyphen as a space and underscores as a merged single word.

4. Avoid using subdomains unless absolutely necessary as search engines often treat them as a separate domain and limit the pass-through of the trust value of your main site to it.

5. Make sure to mention your geographical information like your real world address on your pages. This information should be included in HTML so that the spiders can read and distinguish it. Modern bots are looking for area codes, zip codes and city names to assist their Search Engine users in locating stores and services near their location. This will provide you a competitive advantage when someone searches for your business.

6. If for some reason, you have no option other than using flash, there is something called Macromedia SDK that helps search engines to understand what the page (or website) is about as it helps the bots to crawl through the flash page. You may also want to add more keyword rich content in ‹NOEMBED› tags.

7. Don’t just rely on a single way, for Search Engines to index your website. Most importantly, you must put link to new pages on your site map. Update your Google site map every time you add a new page. If there’s a corresponding page on your site that you can use to link to the new page, do so. Don’t forget to mention your new page on your blog. In case of blogs, ping Google, Yahoo, technorati, etc every time you post a blog.

8. It always helps your ranking to have a keyword in your domain name, given that you have strong internal and external linking for the same keyword. If you have useful content on your website, people will link to your website using your domain name as anchor text (which carries your keyword), so your ranking for that keyword will improve. But even if you don’t have a keyword in your domain name, there’s no need to worry as the off page factors contribute to rankings. For e.g. consider Adobe, it is the top result out of 3 billion results for the keyword phrase “click here”. This is because of the off-page factors, and not owing to presence (or absence) of “click here” in Adobe’s domain name.

9. You must pay attention while writing the title and description for your website. Your page may only be ranking number 5 or 6 on Search Engines, but if you’ve taken enough time to create an enticing title and description for all your pages, you may still manage to earn the same CTR as the one sitting on the number one spot. Similarly, a website ranking number one for a keyword might have a poor CTR if the webmaster hasn’t put in enough thought while writing the website’s title and description.

10. Anchor text is one of the best places to insert your keyword phrases. Go through your website and look for phrases like ‘Click here for a quote’, ‘Click here for more information’ etc. Suppose ‘Click here for a mortgage loan quote’ or ‘Click here for more Denver coffee shop information’. But make sure the entire sentence is a link or if not, at least make the keyword phrase a link.

11. If you are serious about doing a long term online business, don’t engage yourself in black hat SEO practices. Even though they can give you short term Search Engine advantage but will hurt you badly in long term:

• Don’t use hidden text or hidden links.
• Don’t employ cloaking or lightning fast java redirects.
• Don’t load up your pages with irrelevant words.
• Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.

12. At SMX, all of the engineers from all the search engines made a statement that 301 redirect will not carry the full effect if the content of the redirecting website is topically not the same. We should avoid redirecting our website to a site which is topically irrelevant to our website. For e.g. if you are planning to redirect (301) your website about cars, then you should not redirect it to a website selling watches. An inappropriate redirect will not lead to any benefit to your website.

13. Dumping new content on your website in one go is not such a good idea from the search engine’s point of view. Make sure that you consistently add new posts and articles on a regular basis. This will not only increase the bot crawl frequency of your website, but will also result in frequent repeated traffic.

14. For an optimized body copy, it is extremely important for a website to not only have the most important keywords, but it must also read well naturally. Modern search engines use artificial intelligence (called Latent Symentic Indexing), that is a measure of how well the supporting content and text match to the theme of the website. So there is no point of wasting your time on keyword stuffing anymore; instead you must look to refine the content as much as possible.

15. Did you know that on May 12, Google announced a preview release of Google Friend Connect, a service that helps website owners to grow traffic by enabling any site on the web to easily provide social features for its visitors. Google Friend Connect lets you grow traffic by easily adding social features to your website. With just a few snippets of code, you get more people engaging more deeply with your site. It helps you to attract more visitors, enrich your site with social features and the best part is that you need no programming skills whatsoever to use Friend Connect on your site.

16. If you want to make sure that Search Engines index each and every link on your website, you may want to add a link to your sitemap on every important new page that you create on your website. This not only improves the Search Engine Indexing but also also consolidates the internal linking of your website.

17. Followed by the red carpet seomoz Web 2.0 awards 2008 was the ‘.0′ update from Google when Google decided to deindex the seomoz web 2.0 award page just because the URL of the page ended up with a ‘.0′. The page earlier used to rank number one for semoz web 2.0 awards but as the back link weightage shifted from ‘web2.0/’ to ‘web 2.0′, Google picked up the latter and decided to unindex it as Google internally uses ‘.0′ extensions to recognize the files they don’t want to follow. So here is a new way how you can hide your pages from Google – simply end up the URL with ‘.0′. It works.

18. When your search engine rankings fluctuate, or even if your site drops from the rankings, don’t panic. Understand that these things happen in this industry, and they WILL happen to you. What you DON’T want to do is make any changes to your web pages because of fluctuations in the rankings or because your site drops out of the rankings. Step back and wait to see what happens- monitor your rankings, watch the industry and read the news. In all likelihood, your pages will reappear right back where they should be (or close to those rankings), if you haven’t done anything wrong (such as using spam). Fluctuations in rankings are normal. Far too many people panic in the short term, when they would be wiser to just take it easy and not start making changes so quickly.

19. While you are optimizing a page for a specific phrase, think about why a searcher used that specific phrase. If you are optimizing a ‘Frequently Asked Questions’ page, are you delivering your most frequently asked questions? Think of the circumstances that might lead an individual to search for certain specific phrases like:
“infant pillow support” (Would this attract parents of newborn babies?)
“Meaning of babies names” (Would this attract “soon to be” parents?)

20. Discover Your Competitors: It’s a fact that search engines analyze incoming links to your website as part of their ranking criteria. Knowing how many incoming links your competitors have will give you a fantastic edge. Of course, you still have to discover your competitors before you can analyze them.

DM

One might think SEO is an arcane science that only a few experts have mastered. There is quite a bit to it, and there are times you might want to employ an SEO firm or expert to help you optimize your site. Often this is a costly solution that’s not feasible for individuals or small businesses.

The good news is Search Engine Optimization doesn’t have to be rocket science. There are quite a few things you can do on your own. I’ve got a few proven, and easy to do tips and techniques that will help people find your content and make it easy for Google (and other engines) to crawl and index your site.

Lead with good content.

My number one tip for SEO? Provide frequently updated content that people want to read. Incoming links are key and if you can provide content that people will read and get something out of, there is a good chance they will link to that content.
Research your keywords.

You can use a Keyword Suggestion Tool or simply put yourself in the mindset of your target audience. Learn which terms people will search with and get those into your content and meta information.

Provide a good, clear title.

If SEO is important to you make sure you don’t get cute with the titles for your pages. Write titles that are clear and contain your keywords. Once you’ve got that title written, make sure it appears in your title tag as well as in your top level heading tags (h1) on your pages.

Don’t use splash pages or Flash.

Search engines like text. A Flash or image intro can block an engine’s crawler right at your homepage. If you do use images, be sure to add keyword laden descriptions to your alt attributes. There are discussions about Google now being capable of “reading” Flash content. This is not entirely true.

Google can apparently read text from Flash files, but cannot yet put that text into context with the rest of your site. You may have Flash text elements that say “click here” or similar,with the bulk of your other “text” actually being images. These are still invisible to google and I would still advise against using for the time being.

Use Robots.txt

Make sure you provide a robots.txt file that will help tell crawlers what to index on your site. There are quite a few neat things you can do with your robots.txt file, so you might want to read up on them.

Code your pages with standard, clean and semantic markup.

The cleaner your code the easier it is to crawl. Use markup as it is intended with the proper tags tied to the proper information. For example, place your headings with in heading tags, paragraphs within paragraph tags, etc. Another good idea is to move all your presentation into a CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) file. This makes your code lighter, faster and easier to index.

Don’t get tricky!

Whatever you do, don’t try to “trick” your way into more traffic. Duplicate pages, hidden links and other less-than-honest techniques can get you seriously penalized and ruin any positive work you’ve done.

Be patient and don’t forget the people!

Search engines are constantly updating and re-indexing. It may take awhile after you’ve made some changes to see the results. Hang in there, keep working on your content and keep providing something that people find useful.

It’s easy to forget that the reason you want to optimize for search in the first place is that you want to bring people to your site and your content!

DM

1. Optimizing for the wrong keywords:
The biggest sin anyone can make in a SEO campaign is to choose the wrong keywords to optimize your site with. If your Site is ranking high for a keyword that is not being searched for then even a very high ranking cannot bring you any traffic. On the other hand, if you are ranking high with wrong keywords then you would get you traffic but will not convert into transactions.

2. Spamming:
Search Engines are getting smarter by the day. Over a period of time Search Engines have evolved from “Ignoring” spam to a point where they now ‘penalize’ websites for using spam techniques. Following are the prominent Search engine spam techniques you should avoid.

Hidden text:
Hidden text is using the same color text on your page as the background color. In order to get a higher keyword density, webmasters sometimes add a lot of keywords as hidden text because they are not visible to the human viewer but can be read by the search engine crawlers in the source code of the page. Most search engines can now detect which pages use such techniques and ignore or ban such sites.

Doorway pages:
A doorway page is a web page designed for search engines so as to rank well for specific keyword phrases and redirect a user to a different page on visit. This is called “bait & switch” technique. These pages usually rely on frequent repetition of the keyword phrase, and try to “trick” search engines into ranking them well. Most search engines can now detect techniques such as “Meta Refresh” and penalize such sites. If you’ve used doorway pages on your website and it is still not penalized, you stand a good chance to come out clean by deleting these pages immediately.

Doorway domains / multiple domains with same content:
This technique uses URL-redirection meant to display another web address for the same web page or several domains show same content. In a typical example, the user types in a web address such as www.new-blue-widget.com but the URL is redirected to www.widget.com. Alternately, both these websites show identical content in the hope that one or the other may rank high in the search engine result pages (SERP). Most of the time these domains are registered by the same party. Many people also use ‘disposable’ domain names in sending out email spam so as to protect their main domains. Search engines can easily detect these techniques.

Duplicate content:
Many site owners try to increase their content base by creating multiple pages of the same content either on the same site or copying the same site over several domains they may own. Search engines avoid cluttering their index with duplicate content and penalize sites which do excessive content duplication in order to ‘trick’ their algorithms.

Cloaking:
Cloaking is a technique of serving keyword-stuffed spam pages to search engine spiders by detecting their IP address, while serving totally different pages to human visitors. This is different than geo-targeting where you may show different content to different visitors based on their region or language. The search engines can differentiate between the two and might penalize your site if you are attempting to ‘trick’ them. If you want to avoid any penalties, the thumb rule is to show the same content to search engines that you show to the visitors.

Keyword spam:
Keyword spam is a technique to stuff lots of keywords all over the page – in the Title tag, Meta tags, Anchor texts, Alt Attributes etc., in an attempt to increase keyword density or accommodate large number of keywords on the same page. This not only results in the page text to sound stupid to your readers, but you also lose the ‘theme’ of the page. Search engines rate pages as per ‘themes’ and credit pages which have content classified in nicely laid out ‘themes’. For best results, one should always focus on optimizing a page with 2-3 themed keywords rather than trying to optimize with lots of keywords. Over-optimized pages with keyword spam may invite search engine penalties.

Excessive HTML markup:
It is common knowledge that search engines give more credit to text marked as Headline <H1> / <H2> or other attributes like making the text bold, underlined, colored, italicized etc. In an attempt to improve importance of the text, many webmasters do an excessive HTML markup of their page content and hide the ugly display behind a craftily made CSS. Search engines have a fair idea of a balanced markup and penalize sites which do excessive HTML markup in an attempt to ‘trick’ their algorithms.

3. Creating search engine roadblocks:
If you are developing a website, it helps to know of ways you can prevent creating search engine roadblocks. Your SEO efforts may not get results if your site structure is such that search engines find it difficult to index your site easily. Following are some of the problem areas which create a hurdle in your site indexing -

Having Flash-based site:
Sites built in Flash may have a greater aesthetic impact but perform poorly in search engines. Most search engines cannot read text or links embedded in Flash. It is best to limit the use of flash for content which absolutely requires flash or make a text-based alternate for your website so that search engine crawlers can index your site content easily.

Having text in images:
Search engines cannot read text embedded in images. If you have too much content and navigation using graphic, image maps or image buttons, it would be good to either convert them to simple text or have an alternate navigation bar at the bottom of your website. It would also help to have appropriate text in the Alt-Text tag for each image. Similarly

Having frame-based sites:
If you have built your website using frames, you might have a major problem indexing content sitting inside frames. The way frames and the content page URLs are structured, most search engines find it difficult to reach the inner page content of your website. It is best to restructure your website and remove frames so that you can get your site in the search engine index.

Having free content behind login:
Some sites & forums prefer the visitors to login before they can reach the real content of the website. Due to lack of awareness or inadvertently, if you have placed all your content behind a login, then the search engines cannot index your site as their crawlers cannot fill in a login-password or ‘register’ on your website. You might want to restructure your website such that you can show the publicly-available content without the need to login to your website.

Poor site inter-linking:
Poor site interlinking not only poses hurdles to search engines for indexing your site but also makes your site navigation difficult for your site visitors. It is advisable to have a good navigation bar and a site map on your site so that each page is not more than two clicks away.

Deep directory structure:
A deep directory structure is generally difficult for search engines to crawl. While it is not a rule, it would be good if you can keep your directories not more than one or two levels down, neatly classified into ‘themes’. Deep directory structure also makes your inner pages URLs look too long which discourages other sites to link to your inner pages.

4. Having less content / Non-original content:
Search engines thrive on text content. They are mainly looking for text content on your website and reward sites which have lots of easily accessible, non-duplicate original text content. If your sites has less or non-original content picked up from other sites or your affiliate sites, it is unlikely that you would be rewarded, no matter how many efforts you put in optimizing your website. A good way to generate original content is to write nice, keyword rich, descriptive articles classified in themes, about your product or service, its usage, benefits and tips etc.

5. Using session IDs:
Session ID is a long string of jumbled characters appearing in the URL of your website which changes on each visit. They are usually used to track a visitor ’s online shopping cart contents. When a search engine crawler visits your website, your server assigns it a session ID and the crawler indexes your content and associates it with that session ID. Most search engines have hundreds of bots crawling and re-crawling the web. On each repeat visit of the crawler to your website, they index a fresh copy of your content and associates it with different URLs (session IDs) resulting in cluttering the search engine database with lots of duplicate content. Since search engines are not very good at tackling this problem, they often drop the site from future indexing. If you wish to track as user’s session, a better solution is to use cookies instead of session IDs. Cookies are information files stored on user’s computers and perform the same task as a session ID.

6. No efforts in getting incoming links:
Incoming links to your website are very important and are responsible for high rankings on search engines to a large extent. Link popularity determines how important your site is. Link building is an important part of your SEO campaign. No extent of site optimization can get you high rankings if you do not carry out a supporting link building campaign.

7. Relying on one-time SEO:
Search engine optimization is a constant process. You need to update your website SEO when you add new content, update old content or change the theme of your web pages. Addition of new content often requires you to update site interlinking, improve navigation and add links in your site map. Search patterns and keyword phrases also change over time as the search community matures or industry trends change. This requires a fresh keyword research and SEO perspective on your site. Changes may also become necessary if your current SEO strategy is not paying off. In any case, optimizing your site once and expecting it to give you sustained results without further efforts is a mistake.

8. Showing impatience:
SEO of a website rarely show instant results. If your site is already indexed in search engines, it may take about 4-8 weeks to index your new content. New sites may take 4-6 months to get indexed for the first time. It takes time for SEO results to show up. It is easy to think the past efforts were not good enough and get tempted to change the optimization techniques. It is not advisable to change the optimization of your site pages before you are able to see the results of your previous SEO efforts.

If you keep the above points in mind while carrying out SEO for your site, you would be safe from any penalties. If you are outsourcing your site SEO to a professional company, make sure they adhere to the above guidelines and do not risk your site into a search engine penalty. Remember, just a few precautions can go a long way in having your site rank high and stay away from undesirable search engine penalties.

DM

Checking your site ranking of this magnitude can be very painful, especially if you wish to do it every month, unless you are using rank-checking software. Google and most other search engines discourage the use of automated software to check site rankings. Most search engines clearly mention this in their Terms of Service. Understandably, they would like to provision their server resources and bandwidth for human visitors and not waste their resources feeding content to software based queries.

If a rank-checking software like WebPosition Gold is setup to check ranking for 50 keyword phrases in the first 5 result pages, Google would have to deal with 50 x 5 = 250 software driven search queries. If the ranking were checked every month, Google would have to deal with 3,000 search queries per year for every site owner running automated rank checking software. Imagine the search volumes the search engines deal with even if a fraction of the billions of websites use the rank-checking software.

Most webmasters are aware that checking site rankings using software is disallowed. However, they do not have many ‘legal’ options to check where their sites rank. It is unrealistic to expect webmasters not to check their site rankings using software. Even if webmasters check the website ranking manually, Google does not really save server resources spent on such search sessions. Webmasters on the other hand also waste a lot of time, energy and resources (and often) dial-up bandwidth in evaluating the website ranking.

Website Ranking Report (in 0.74 Seconds)
Now imagine a scenario, if you could type in 100 keyword phrases along with your site URL in a special Google interface, and in a jiffy, Google shows up where your site is ranked for each of your keywords along with a count of number of pages ‘competing’ for each keyword. All this in Google’s famous 0.74 seconds! Looks too good to be true? Read on…

If Google and other search engines were to offer this rank-checking facility, it would greatly help webmasters in checking their site ranking and would take away a lot of pain associated with the task. As you would read further down this article, the webmasters would not be the sole beneficiaries. The search engines too would gain tremendously.

What should Google do?
Google should provide a rank-checking facility focused towards the webmasters, as a separate search interface, perhaps in their advanced search section. A proposed interface is suggested below:

• Check your site ranking on Google
• Site ranking result page

Google could offer two methods of rank checking. One as an interface proposed above and a second one through web API’s, which can be queried through rank-checking software.

Does Google have an Ability to offer Website Ranking Check Facility?
Since the database index is available to Google for querying in any manner, Google has the capability of querying its database and completing such a search in a single stroke, as against dealing with 100’s of queries to get to the same result. Sure they would have to write new codes and interfaces to offer this but the effort would be well worth it.

Who Benefits from a Web Ranking Search Facility?
There are several categories of Internet users who can benefit from a website ranking check facility. The following are the prominent gainers -

Benefits for Webmasters, Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing Companies
It would save webmasters precious time, bandwidth and resources. Results would be faster than anything they would have experienced in the past.

Some webmasters set a monthly (sometimes weekly) scheduler in the software to run periodic reports. If the website rank checking facility is freely available, they do not need to set an auto scheduler in their software. They can use the facility on as-needed basis, saving unnecessary resource wastage.

Benefits for Search Engines
Google would save significant bandwidth and server resources by handling such queries as a single search. Since, Web API search queries generated by software can be easily isolated from their main search traffic, Google would have more accurate data of real human traffic. This will give them more accurate information for evaluating traffic patterns and planning their future business strategies.

Google can prevent serving AdWords to the Web-API based software queries and get higher yield on serving AdWords to human visitors.

Google would be able to claim and publish traffic figures of higher integrity gaining industry and advertiser trust.

Google will have a focused audience of webmasters, SEO/SEM companies querying ranking on their human interface versions. Google can leverage this highly focused audience to sell AdWords to premium advertisers, such as SEO/SEM Companies, PPC companies, web development companies, web hosting companies, E-commerce solution providers, payment gateway providers, software companies or any company wanting to sell products to site owners.

Traditionally, the Search Engines and SEO companies have been in opposing camps. This one step can win Google friends in the SEO industry and build brand loyalty.

Benefits for PPC / AdWords Advertisers
Google advertisers using AdWords are forced to maintain a minimum click-through ratio (CTR) to keep their campaigns live. Unfortunately, AdWords are also served to non-human software-based queries, since Google cannot differentiate between software and human queries. This dilutes the advertisers’ CTR throwing their campaigns into ’stopped’ modes while also portraying an incorrect picture of their CTR. If software driven queries were isolated, advertisers would get the benefit of continued campaigns and a higher yield by serving AdWords only to humans.

Benefits for Rank-Checking Software Makers
Website Promotion software companies will find it easier to simplify their rank-checking software modules and improve rank-reporting efficiency by tying up their software codes with the Web APIs for rank checking.

Website Promotion software companies have to constantly update their search code to keep in tune with the changing search engine interfaces and sponsored listing locations to report ranking in natural results. An access to a Web-API can help them get free from this constant code updates.

Benefits for Search Engine Analysts and Statistics Companies
It is needless to point out that Search Engine Analysts and Statistics Reporting companies would have access to a more accurate industry data, which will help them in a more accurate industry analysis.

Summary:
Search engines are unlikely to succeed in warding off webmasters from frequently checking their website ranking on their search properties, no matter how many stringent rules they have in their “Terms of Service”. Perhaps the age old saying holds good – “If you can’t beat them; join them”

Google, are you listening?DM

But your visitors aren’t buying you products and/or services. What’s happening?

This is something that SEO can’t help with. This is to do with the behaviour of your human visitors, rather than Googlebots and spiders.

Not to worry. You can convert more of your traffic into sales without having to spend a lot of money. There are hundreds of ways to improve your conversion rate and the persuasiveness of your website, many of which can be done very quickly and most will cost you close to nothing to implement.

1. Use real customer testimonials with authentic customer photos…no stock photography. Shoppers can quickly tell the difference. Also, in many countries, using false testimonials is an offence. Be aware of this before you start typing up how great your site is.
2. Make sure your marketing effort attracts qualified traffic. For example, if you sell digital cameras, don’t advertise that you sell lenses just to get more traffic to your site. This may drive more visitors, but they are visitors with no intent to purchase, thus decreasing your conversion rate.
3. Get a toll-free number and make sure the placement of that number on your site is prominent and consistent.
4. Include points of reassurance at every point of action. For example, if you are requesting that a viewer provide you with their e-mail address, clearly state that privacy is very important to you and that you will not share that information with any other party. Offer a link to your overall privacy policy.
5. Use SSL (secure server certificates from a well known SSL authority) and make sure that the user knows you are using it. Display a prominent “Secure server” note at the top of the page. This shows users that you will protect their details when they’re purchasing or providing information. Also, many web browsers, such as Firefox3, are now actively advertising your SSL status.
6. Build trust. Subscribe to a service like VeriSign, Thawte or ScanAlert and prominently place these logos to reassure your customer that you care about the security of their information.
7. As previously mentioned, have a clearly defined privacy policy and link to it from all pages. Ensure that it is written in easy to understand English language – not legal jargon.
8. Include a physical address on your site. This shows that you are contactable “in person” if anything were to go wrong.
9. Don’t always concentrate on just making the “buy now” buttons the most prominent on every page, but rather concentrate on styling the “primary action” buttons the most prominently on every page. For example if you sell books, provide the customer with the ability to select a few related books and compare them before they can buy now. Make that compare button/link the same style as you would the “buy now” button/link on a page in which the button exists. This will help herd customers through your sales funnel.
10. Clearly Define your return policy in the same way you would for your privacy policy.
11. Make sure to include an “About Us” section on your site. The majority of my customers will visit or look for that section before making a purchase. It’s also a great way to show customers your “personal” side, your values and make them understand that you’re not a faceless ecommerce site. If you have staff, include pictures of them too.
12. Make your site load fast, easy to navigate and user friendly. I cannot emphasise this more; customers will leave if they cannot find what they need fast. No need for horizontal scrolling, excessive vertical scrolling, large animation files or intrusive pop-up windows. Keep it simple; make it work.
13. Keep your “buy now” button consistently and prominently placed on all product pages. The closer to the top of the page, the better.
14. Provide clear good quality images of your products with an “enlarge image” option. Don’t have a large image and squash into a small area. I’ve seen this so many times on osCommerce-based sites. It makes your site look les professional if you have distorted images.
15. Make your checkout process as usable, intuitive, reassuring and simple as possible. Losing a shopper during your checkout process is a CRITICAL loss.
16. Don’t make people type their e-mail address twice. Get the site to remember and do it automatically.
17. Don’t force people to install crazy plug-ins just to make a purchase from your site. Stick with JavaScript, Flash and the other breads & butters.
18. Read your copy, make sure it’s compelling, yet not exaggerated and too loud. Check for typos and spelling errors.
19. Identify your unique selling proposition and exploit it. If you are the only seller of medium-sized green widgets in the UK, clearly state that and be proud of it.
20. Implement a search box and make sure it is accurate. Not only it will allow users to find what they want quick, it will give you an insight as to what they are shopping for and what terminology(keywords/key phrases) they are using so you can tailor your copy (and ad campaigns) accordingly.
21. Don’t just focus on the many features of your product, but rather on the benefits those features will provide you customers with. Don’t just say “folding ladders”, say “Our folding ladders will save you valuable garage space”. The simplest way is to use the phrase “which means that”: “The ladder folds, which means that it can be stored away easily and save you space.”
22. Display your prices, shipping charges and tax clearly BEFORE the checkout process is completed.
23. Don’t use a drop-down for the “country” or “state” list over your order form. Many people are using scrolling mice these days, many are sure to accidentally scroll off of their correct state. If you must use a list, keep it to the bare minimum contents.
24. Let customers copy their shipping info to their billing info if they are identical, with one click.
25. Remove distractions as much as possible from the final checkout process such as the main navigation that existed during the shopping portion of your site.
26. Clearly provide a checkout process indicator. If your checkout process has 3 steps, clearly indicate at the top of the page what step they are on and how many steps there are to complete the order.
27. Clearly identify what info you really require during your checkout process. Eliminate unnecessary text fields/questions.
28. Use easy to understand, friendly error messages. No ”INCORRECT USER INPUT IN STATE FIELD!” messages. Instead, “Please enter a state.”
29. If your checkout error messages occur on a page other than the page with the errors, preserve the information that the user has already input and get the site to input it automatically.
30. Double-check the spelling on your site. And the spelling on your error messages. “Ers in input filed” would look very unprofessional.
31. Try and get good reviews from shopping authority sites (shopping.com, epinions.com, bizrate.com, etc) and from previous shoppers.
32. Don’t use complex formulas for shipping price calculations, Example – ‘if you buy 13.5 kilograms worth of x”, then multiply that weight by y shipping rate. Get the site to do the calculations and show the shopper the price.
33. Consider shipping the product free. This is often a very good selling point with online shoppers.
34. Display the stock status of the selected item and do so BEFORE the user puts the item in their cart.
35. If you don’t sell or run out of or discontinue an item, remove it from the site. Your site is not lap-dancing club; people don’t like being teased.
36. If you are offering a lot of products, users should be able to sort them by important criteria…price, size, colour, etc.
37. Provide an easy way for shoppers to compare details of similar products.
38. Use a custom 404 not found page to link people back to the important areas of your site.
39. Give a clear estimate of the delivery time.
40. Accept a wide variety of payment options and clearly display those options.
41. Important information should not look like ad banners. There really is such a thing as “ad blindness” and people will automatically skip over this important information.
42. Make sure you have a “first-time visitor” page. This is where you are going to explain why and how you are different from your competitors. Perhaps add this at an account creation page.
43. Update your copyright statements on page footers. Make sure that the current year is displayed….fix that 2003 copyright statement!
44. Let customer make a purchase without having to register with your site.
45. Consider making every link the last part of the statement “I want to…”. Don’t just have a link that says “the privacy policy”, but rather “read the privacy policy”. Do you get it..? The shopper wants to Read the Privacy Policy. Please bear in mind your anchor text optimisation with this point.
46. Don’t use too clever names for your shopping cart like “widget basket” or “widget box”. Call it “My shopping cart” or “My shopping basket”.
47. Don’t make the shopper specify select an option when there is only 1 option. If the product only comes in red, don’t make the shopper select the red radio button or choose from the drop down. Get the site to do it automatically.
48. Provide clear shopping instructions in an empty shopping cart. Don’t just say “your shopping cart is empty”.
49. Provide a “special sale” or “special clearance” section. This will attract the budget-conscious shoppers.
50. The most important golden rule…you must portray a lot of trust and credibility to instil shopper confidence and get them to make a purchase. Good luck!

DM

However, with the majority of your SEO impacts coming from off-the-page activity (i.e. work done outside of your HTML statement, such as link building), just how much impact do Meta tags have on your site’s ranking? Also, there are loads of different flavours of tags – do they all impact your site in the same way?

The short answer is, unfortunately, not. In a bid to bring some clarity to the party, this article has been written to highlight some of the impacts and issues of your Meta tags so that you can take advantage and improve your ranking over your competitor’s sites.

What are Meta Tags?

Meta tags are included in the <head> section of your HTML code of your web pages. In this section, you will find the Title Tag plus other information that is not visible to your human web-visitors, but is intended for search engine crawlers.

These tags are included so that the search engines can more easily list your site in their indexes. View the source code from any web site and you will see these tags and their contents.

As they are only viewed by the search engine crawlers, it is not necessary to include Meta tags in your HTML. Indeed, many WYSIWYG editors such as DreamWeaver and FrontPage do not place blank tag entries in your auto-generated HTML. There are many websites that don’t have any Meta data stored at all.

Why are Meta Tags used?

When originally developed, Meta tags were designed to give webmasters a way to help search engines to understand what their sites were about. Search engines could then know how to index and rank sites in their results pages (SERPs).

The first major search engines to make use of Meta tags were Infoseek and Altervista back in 1996, and were followed soon afterwards by Inktomi and Lycos.

As creating the Meta tags in code is very simple, and the search engines were heavily reliant on them initially, this led to massive keyword spamming. As a result, most search engines withdrew their support of Meta tags, and particularly the “keywords” tag.

From being considered as one of the most reliable and important tool, Meta Tags are now often abused. In the present day scenario a vital feature that the Meta Tags provide to the websites is the ability to control, to a certain extent, how some search engines describe its web pages. Apart from this, Meta Tags also offer the ability to specify that a certain website page should not be indexed.

Using Meta Tags provides no guarantee that your website page will rank highly in the search engine rankings. Indeed, due to this wide-scale abuse and manipulation of the Meta keywords Tag, most search engines don’t support it anymore.

Types of Meta Tags

There are literally tens of Meta tags that could be discussed. Below is a list of the most important tags and their uses, as well as their misconceptions.

Click on each to visit their own blog page:

The Title Tag

The Description Meta Tag

The Keywords Meta Tag

The Robots Meta Tag

Other Meta Tags