Archive for February, 2010

SEO Why Site Width Matters

Monday, February 22nd, 2010

Many search engine optimization efforts are focused on pushing the home page of a site. This is a fundamental mistake that can result in the site missing out on a lot of traffic.

Go Wide, Young Man

In nearly every case, a site should be designed to draw traffic through both the home page and various internal pages. Home pages, obviously, can be tailored to the primary keyword phrases you are seeking, but dont forget the minor pages.

I always find it odd when people ask which keyword phrase they should try to optimize for on their site. They become a bit flummoxed when I tell them to optimize for all of them. The only question is which keywords should appear on which pages.

For example, the site NomadJournals.com sells writing journals for outdoor activities such as fly fishing, traveling, hiking, bird watching and so on. So, which of these subjects should be used as the keyword phrase for the home page? None! Instead, the generic term writing journals was chosen. But what about the specific journal subjects?

The individual pages on the site promoting each journal are optimized for the specific product. The fly fishing journal page is optimized for fly fishing keywords, the travel page for travel keywords and so on. The end result of this is the home page is appearing high in writing journals search results, while each of the internal journal pages are also appearing high.

This can often lead to an interesting visitor situation. As you review your server stats, you may start noting a majority of your traffic is coming in through internal site pages, not the home page. In the above Nomad Journals scenario, the travel journal page far outdraws the home page, which makes for a nice revenue increase.

The home page of a site is critical in a search engine optimization campaign. Just keep in mind it isnt the only page that can draw free traffic and revenues to your site.

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Must Have Features for Your Web Site

Monday, February 15th, 2010

Just dont focus on the home page, keywords and titles.
The first step to sales when customers visit your site to see the products they were looking for. Of course, search engine optimization and better rankings cant keep your customer on your site or make them buy. The customer having visited your site, now ensure that he gets interested in your products or services and stays around. Motivate him to buy the product by providing clear and unambiguous information. Thus if you happen to sell more than one product or service, provide all necessary information about this, may be by keeping the information at a different page. By providing suitable and easily visible links, the customer can navigate to these pages and get the details.

Understanding Your Target Customer
If you design a website you think will attract clients, but you dont really know who your customers are and what they want to buy, it is unlikely you make much money. Website business is an extension or replacement for a standard storefront. You can send email to your existing clients and ask them to complete a survey or even while they are browsing on your website. Ask them about their choices. Why do they like your products? Do you discount prices or offer coupons? Are your prices consistently lower than others? Is your shipping price cheaper? Do you respond faster to client questions? Are your product descriptions better? Your return policies and guarantees better than your competitors? To know your customer you can check credit card records or ask your customer to complete a simple contact form with name, address, age, gender, etc. when they purchase a product.

Does your website give enough contact information?
When you sell from a website, your customer can buy your products 24 hrs a day and also your customers may be from other states that are thousands of miles away. Always provide contact information, preferably on every page of your website, complete with mailing address, telephone number and an email address that reaches you. People may need to contact you about sales, general information or technical problems on your site. Also have your email forwarded to another email address if you do not check your website mailbox often. When customer wants to buy online provide enough options like credit card, PayPal or other online payment service.

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Keyword Density

Monday, February 8th, 2010

Keyword density is an indicator of the number of times the selected keyword appears in the web page. But mind you, keywords shouldnt be over used, but should be just sufficient enough to appear at important places.

If you repeat your keywords with every other word on every line, then your site will probably be rejected as an artificial site or spam site.

Keyword density is always expressed as a percentage of the total word content on a given web page.

Suppose you have 100 words on your webpage (not including HMTL code used for writing the web page), and you use a certain keyword for five times in the content. The keyword density on that page is got by simply dividing the total number of keywords, by the total number of words that appear on your web page. So here it is 5 divided by 100 = .05. Because keyword density is a percentage of the total word count on the page, multiply the above by 100, that is 0.05 x 100 = 5%

The accepted standard for a keyword density is between 3% and 5%, to get recognized by the search engines and you should never exceed it.

Remember, that this rule applies to every page on your site. It also applies to not just to one keyword but also a set of keywords that relates to a different product or service. The keyword density should always be between 3% and 5%.

Simple steps to check the density:

Copy and paste the content from an individual web page into a word-processing software program like Word or Word Perfect.
Go to the Edit menu and click Select All. Now go to the Tools menu and select Word Count. Write down the total number of words in the page.
Now select the Find function on the Edit menu. Go to the Replace tab and type in the keyword you want to find. Replace that word with the same word, so you dont change the text.
When you complete the replace function, the system will provide a count of the words you replaced. That gives the number of times you have used the keyword in that page.
Using the total word count for the page and the total number of keywords you can now calculate the keyword density.

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How Do Search Engines Work – Web Crawlers

Monday, February 1st, 2010

It is the search engines that finally bring your website to the notice of the prospective customers. Hence it is better to know how these search engines actually work and how they present information to the customer initiating a search.

There are basically two types of search engines. The first is by robots called crawlers or spiders.

Search Engines use spiders to index websites. When you submit your website pages to a search engine by completing their required submission page, the search engine spider will index your entire site. A spider is an automated program that is run by the search engine system. Spider visits a web site, read the content on the actual site, the site’s Meta tags and also follow the links that the site connects. The spider then returns all that information back to a central depository, where the data is indexed. It will visit each link you have on your website and index those sites as well. Some spiders will only index a certain number of pages on your site, so dont create a site with 500 pages!

The spider will periodically return to the sites to check for any information that has changed. The frequency with which this happens is determined by the moderators of the search engine.

A spider is almost like a book where it contains the table of contents, the actual content and the links and references for all the websites it finds during its search, and it may index up to a million pages a day.

Example: Excite, Lycos, AltaVista and Google.

When you ask a search engine to locate information, it is actually searching through the index which it has created and not actually searching the Web. Different search engines produce different rankings because not every search engine uses the same algorithm to search through the indices.

One of the things that a search engine algorithm scans for is the frequency and location of keywords on a web page, but it can also detect artificial keyword stuffing or spamdexing. Then the algorithms analyze the way that pages link to other pages in the Web. By checking how pages link to each other, an engine can both determine what a page is about, if the keywords of the linked pages are similar to the keywords on the original page.

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