The latest Site Reference newsletter is reprinted here. Read the featured article titled “SEO – Virtues ‘n’ Sins” by Abid Sultan. [Newsletter Reprint]


The latest Site Reference newsletter is reprinted here.

Site Reference Home Unsubscribe from this List Advertise Here

SEO – Virtues ‘n’ Sins

by Abid Sultan

Search Engine Optimization is a process in long run, undergone by a proper defined strategy Anyone who opt for SEO must have good knowledge about search engine strategies, broad view of the underlying factor involved in optimization process and a roadmap to deploy the policy depending upon the nature of your business domain with do’s and dont’s of it.

There are several factors which most of the SEO professional either do not care much about, or give lesser importance which is a great felony. While you carryout SEO for any website you must take care of the following virtues and sins.

SEO Virtues

Select Right Keywords

The foundation stone of your search engine optimization campaign is to select proper keywords by spending some time on keyword research in order to lay the base of optimization process perfectly. Make it sure that your selected keywords are right in the context of your business or your realm. Keywords must be relevant and should reflect your dominion.

Proper META Tag

META Tags quite significant from different perspective. Firstly META just feeds up search engines and also brings you the traffic. As you may see the result pages of Google, the particular 2 line are taken from the description META tag. Therefore the importance of META becomes obvious as it take visitors to your site if the description is written properly. Secondly META tags varying available for various purpose, either to specify how the crawlers behavior or site information.

Proper TITLE Tag

Title tag is the most important tag as it goes in the anchor by the search engines and it just reflects what you page is all about and it play major role in driving the traffic to your site because it is only source for the visitor to have a quick impact and vision about your site, that is it worth visiting or not. So title tag must be accordingly to the page contents and should draw the attention of the visitor.

Keyword rich Content

Content means the text and data presented on that particular page. The contents must be relevant to which page is all about. It should be descriptive and must have keyword focus in order to build relevancy of the page. Your SEO campaign must deploy some good copy writing techniques which may include formatting and worth reading text which may build the visitors interest rather giving inducing bizarre.

Use of ALT Attribute

Search engine crawlers are not able to read images; they just can read the text. So the page which is having images or graphics should use the ALT attribute in the IMG tag, it’s specifically used to guide both, the visitor and the search engines in the case image is not displayed. ALT attribute must be appropriate and it may be used to focus keywords but keep it in mind that using ALT attribute just to reflect your keywords may turn into SPAM.

Relevant Anchored (and/or Titled Anchored)Linking

Linking is the most crucial part that is to be considered highly. Improper or irrelevant linking may cause penalty from search engines. So while linking your pages you must take it into account that what text you are going to use as the anchor text in the link. If would add more worth if Title Attribute is also used to make it more focused, Title is more significant in the case when navigation is image based. While linking you must take care about the page you are linking and the page to be linked, both must be relevant in order to build the consequent relationship among the pages, but the most important thing in this issue is the anchor text, which must be relevant and should demonstrate the context of linking page.

Theme of the Website

Website is a related collection of web pages which are inter-linked with each other. As it’s a collection it must be having a common theme or the page appearance, remember that you have developed your website for visitor/clients not for the search engine, but you optimize it for search engines. Theme is having not much concern about search engines but it must seem to have strong integrity between the web pages. Well the theme may include the following things,

>SE Friendly Site Structure
Website must be easy to crawl and to be indexed by search engines; there should not be complex directory structure and linking such that it may lead to mess only.

>SE Friendly Navigation
Site navigation must be easy to locate web pages both for search engines and visitors. In order to keep the visitor not to get lost in web pages, let them know what and where they are surfing on your website using breadcrumbs or properly manage navigation.

>Proper Sitemap
Sitemap is quite significant for visitor and search engines perspective. It not only provides a road map to the visitor to go directly on the desired page without wasting time but also guides the visitor if lost in surfing different pages. Sitemap is also important for search engine findings, as search engine locates sitemap it easily crawls the links in the sitemap quickly and helps in the better ranking of website in search engine listing.

Quality Back Linking

The backbone of whole search engine optimization process is backlinking; BUT relevant and quality backlinking. Backlinking involves getting other related websites to get links to your website and if the linking text is contains your keyword(s) then its more fruitful only in the case if it’s pertinent. While getting links to you site you MUST take care of everything that may take you towards spamming and getting penalized by search engines. Link pointing to your website should be unique and be coupled with keywords in anchor text to bring the more credit from search engines, doing this not only helps you routing traffic to you website but also bring higher ranking in search engines result pages as the link grow older and older it becomes more worthy specially for Google.

Validated Markup

Markup of any webpage must be clean and according to the standards. Infect code is everything which makes up the web page either full of graphics, animations etc. or very simple, but that’s for visitors and what about search engines (crawlers)? Search engine’s crawlers just look up the web pages from the server and extract all of the text from the web pages. So the crawlers just parse out the markup and check whether is it according to the standards or not, if in the case its not validated and not well managed, than it will not be credited by search engines. Therefore markup should be very accurate, properly managed, optimized and should not contain any garbage code, which is mostly generated by different web page editors.

On-Going Content

Content is the major in search engine optimization process, because search engines significantly give more importance to the text written in the web pages which not only explains about the web page or any product but also defines its integrity and consistency that how much the text is relevant and unique over the existing millions and billions of web pages. Search engines mostly expect the unique and correlated content which should have some semantically association with the overall website or whatsoever is that web page is all about. Therefore content of any web page must be commendable and kept on growing because fresh content brings more value towards the creditability of your site by search engines.

Robots.txt

The first thing most of the search engines look for is robots.txt. Incase it is available then crawler follows it, otherwise the scenario may be stern because search engines can locate any website and may index them thoroughly, there may be any page which is not optimized or not yet completed, but reached by the crawler because there is no restriction on it that either it should be crawled or not. In addition to this there may be any web page which may contain some sensitive data or information which must be restricted from the approach of search engines. How to avoid all this? Only way to be secure and to keep the crawler away is to create robots.txt. It is quite important from various aspects, like to secure you receptive data from crawler which shouldn’t be and to provide a guide map to search engine for crawling and indexing by limiting it in the robots.txt

SEO Sins

Keyword Stuffing

Search engines are getting more and more intelligent and the way they crawl and filter the content of the web pages is quite smart. It’s recommended to write keyword rich content but it must not be a mess of keywords and it should not be like wadding pearls on a necklace. Content or META tags full of keywords is surely SPAM and its must be avoided. It looks stupid to do this and also results in loosing the context of the page. Keyword should be focused in a reasonable manner in proper sentences which should give a relevant meaning to the context. This will not only help in enforcing over all relevance but also automatically gives focus in targeting you keyword phrases.

Duplicate Content

Normally a web page profusely contains textual data which is also a key point for any search engines. Content plays a vital role in rankings acquisition and loss. Most of the time webmasters create several web pages in order to grow the content of the website by duplicating the same content of older pages or creating multiple duplicate sites over different domains. When search engines encounter such situation they simply penalize those websites because of facsimileing the content, those tried to play trick with search engine algorithms. Therefore avoid doing this severe tactic.

Hidden Text

Similar to duplicating content, many people try to be smarter by hiding the text either using CSS hidden div, or by matching the text color to with background color, that really too malicious approach. Mostly webmasters stuff a lot of keywords in hidden text and seek in drawing crawler’s attention in their favor, which goes inverted. Search engines detect such spamming techniques very quickly because the hidden text which is infect not visible to the visitor only but its quite obvious to crawler and can easily be identified. In response, search engines highly penalize those sites/pages.

Heavy Graphics & Flash Animations

A website is normally a blend of text and images, if a website which is only textual may bring you good results but if the website which is only loaded with images and images may not be that useful to bring you higher rankings. Search engine’s crawlers are not able to read the images but the Alternate Text on the images. So if the website is having immense graphics in body, navigations, buttons etc. then it may not be good. To avoid this it’s better converting those navigations and buttons to text or providing alternative textual navigation and adding ALT attribute to images. Instead of images CSS can be used and it will not only help in reducing the markup but also provides compatibility with web browsers. Similarly, heavy flash animations are not recommended to use. Search engines mostly not capable of extracting text from flash animation and it causes snag for indexing a website. Therefore using flash animation should be limited though it draws the visitor’s attention but it is no benefit from search engine’s perspective.

Wide-Ranging Markup & Heavy JavaScript

In a webpage the HTML should be limited by using CSS, because the crawler just parse out everything in a webpage and if there is extensive markup, it may overlap the value of content. Using HTML tags again and again for formatting is actually bringing more nuisances for the crawler to reach to the content. Instead writing quite wealthy amount of markup, CSS classes will be something really great. Similarly with the JavaScript, if used in a bulk; just right in the beginning of the webpage or in the page anywhere may not be useful. In the case if JavaScript and CSS are used externally may be good because it does not lengthen the markup.

Invalid Markup

Invalid markup means that the HTML or the code of the webpage is not meeting the defined standards and it’s erroneous. When crawler finds out those error in the markup it just goes for diminishing the creditability of the site. The importance of valid markup is quite obvious as the content is also the part of markup and that’s the backbone of you website. Therefore the markup of the webpage must be validated; it will be more fruitful if the CSS is also validated.

Improper Use of FRAME

Most of the search engines expect the website without frame based structure, because the way framing is done, it causes difficulty for the crawler to reach to the content and mostly crawlers do not reveal the real content of the pages. Therefore the website may not be indexed or even if it is indexed then it is quite possible that indexing is not through. So in order to be friendly with the spider; website structure must be simple and easy to navigate so that you web pages get indexed well by the search engines.

Lengthy & Non-Friendly URL’s

Search engines like simple and friendly URLs. If your website having complex URL’s which include query strings like http://www.example.com/forumdisplay.php?f=34&daysprune=-1&order=asc&sort=postusername , are not appreciated by crawlers instead if the URL is http://www.example.com/forumdisplay.php is given more credit, because its not only very simple but also very friendly to understand. In a case where the URL is simple but it’s too lengthy and going into deeper directory structure, then it also won’t be that much beneficial. Therefore the URL’s must be simple and short to get more feasible for the visitor and search engines.

Bad and No-Alternate Navigation

A website must have an appealing navigation which is the key for the visitor to navigate through the web pages. But if you site is having graphical navigations and nothing for the crawler to extract anything from the navigational links then it is bad. There must be some alternate navigation (textual) at the bottom or top, at least to feed the crawler with the URLs. This is not only for the search engines but also for the visitors.

Improper Site Structure

Site structure often exposed through internal linking and that’s the majoring issue both for the visitors and for the search engines as well. Proper and consistent website structure shows the integrity between the pages and that’s the key to get honored by the search engines. Good and comprehensive internal linking between the pages of the website builds cohesive organization and if the keywords are used in the anchor text while linking the pages internally will be highly advantageous and this also bring higher ranking in the search engines. From the visitors perspective site structure is quite significantly important. A visitor must know what he/she is surfing and should have a track back browsing. A sitemap will be great for crawler, as it is taken as a guide map for crawling the web pages and also and aid for the visitor to browse.

Excessive & Deep Directory Linking

As the importance of friendly and easy to navigate site structure is quite obvious, thereby the internal linking within web pages must not be strict and deep. For example if one page is linked with another page and that page resides in a subdirectory within another director and that’s again a subdirectory. In this case the linking pages will be creating a complex mesh and that’s what not recommended at all, because it is not only friendly for the crawler but also difficult to manage in the case of broken link tracking.

Bad & Irrelevant Back Linking

Back linking is the most important factor of any search engine optimization campaign and it is given high worth by the search engines. Backward linking is the key to success for any campaign and causes high ranking in search engines. But if back linking is done without considering the factors involved in getting penalized may hurt your ranking. Bad linking or irrelevant linking is actually out of context linking which is of no use and can be taken as spam by the search engines. For example if the website is related to real-estate and it is linked with another website which is related to casino. So what is the relationship or degree of relevance between both of the site, of course there is nothing related. Such back linking is irrelevant and may be taken as spam.

Multiple Mirror Websites

As duplicating content is highly discouraged by search engines, the same way if you have multiple website with the same content as mirror website, that’s also spam. It not only duplicates the content but also simply stupidity to have multiple website with the same content over and over again. Some people use redirection extensively or redirecting from one domain to another domain, which is not anymore worth to do.

Doorway Pages

Doorway pages are those pages which are just stuffed with the keywords and used to malicious purposes only. Mostly doorway pages are used to make the crawler fool by putting a lot of keywords in anchor text just to build the relevance. When the page is visited for those keywords which are anchored then redirection is made to another webpage. This is the way doorway pages used and that’s now easily detectable by the search engines. So to avoid getting penalized by search engines never use doorway pages.

These are the factor majoring in any search engine optimization campaign to get either high ranks or chastised by search engines. So if you are doing SEO for you site make it sure that you keep track of all of the above factors to be at safe place and if in the case you have hired a company for doing SEO for you website then confirm that if the company follows proper white-hat SEO strategies and above aspects.

About this author

Abid Sultan is an author, SEO andDirector Marketing at Hostbreak Web Technologies.
You can reach him at abidsultan786@gmail.com

Webmaster Discussions

For a Perfect Beginning!

I think following are the right order of activities involved in generating organic traffic to a website. 1. Submission to Search Engines 2. Submission to Directories 3. Reciprocal Linking from similar websites. 4. Article Marketing. 5. Making a Blog with a link to your website. 6. Ensuring unique contents periodically. What do you think?

Apples anyone?

We recently looked at our website through a Mac and the graphics were distorted plus everything was out of place! Could it just be the browser on that mac or is it macs in general? How many people actually crawl the net with mac’s anyway?

Multiple KW Phrases for Each Site Page?

Conventional wisdom suggests that each page target a specific keyphrase. SEOs who actually keep on top of the game will talk about phrase based optimisation – a term that could be interpreted as keyword optimisation as keywords and keyphrases are often used to mean the same thing. Rather than choose a keyphrase to talk about, choose a topic and talk about it. The natural language structure will generate several keywords and phrases all meaning the same thing.

How can you expalin that?

I had a company and a site. Since I got rid of the company, I deleted the content of the site. About a week ago I put the same set of pages under a subdomain of my new domain. Wihtin 24 hours it hit first page for 3 out of 5 key phrases, and after 48 hours of glorious performance just disappeared. What would cause this?

Do Spiders only read html tags?

Does a spider only read tagged html, or is the spider capable of “reading” the content of the page itself? I have omitted description tags, because each page on my retail site is a detailed description of the item I’m selling. Do the spiders see that or not?

More Articles

Internet Marketing for 2007 – Affordable Efficiency

Start out the New Year by learning what tried and true marketing methods work on-line. Use already existing resources like blogs, e-zines, article directories and more to push your business to the top!

A Guide To Moving Your Websites

Web hosting doesn’t last forever. Maybe you have a host you’ve been with for years and years but it’s just time to move because you’ve outgrown them and the initial plans you had for your business when you started with them. In any case here’s a handy checklist for you to keep by your computer when moving web hosts so the move will go without a hitch.

Article Marketing Return on Investment: How To Determine Your Article Marketing Success

When prospective clients call and ask about our article marketing service, two of their most frequently asked questions are: ” How do I measure my article marketing return on investment?” and “How do I know if my investment in time, energy and manpower is really paying off?”. Here are two formulas you can use to determine your article marketing success.

Facts you never new about Yahoo, Google, Ask Jeeves, and AllTheWeb

Almost 85% of all knowledge obtained online starts with somebody doing research on one or more search engines. Weather it be a product or a service, search engines are the most likely tool people are using to find what they want. You would benefit greatly to gain an understanding of how search engines can help grow your business.

Do you like Site Reference, but don’t want to receive newsletters? Use our RSS feed to get our latest articles and forum discussions. You can find out more about our RSS feeds by checking out RSS Feed Section.

Newsletter Information

Want to read more articles? Go to the front page of Site Reference. We also have plenty of articles in our archives.

If you no longer wish to receive this newsletter you may unsubscribe by going to http://www.site-reference.com/memberManagement/index.php or by clicking here.

Our address:
2554 49th Street East
Inver Grove Heights, MN 50076

*IMNewswatch would like to thank Site-Reference for granting permission to reprint the latest newsletter.

 

 

 

 

Sharing is caring