Archive for Category: SEO
The use of CSS nowadays is important to all web designers out there. If you are a certified web designer then you should know the importance of having CSS. Your work is being displayed to see by millions of people every day and you must attract the attention of these users. One of the main instruments to make your task a lot easier is with the use of a CSS. If you want to get your website on top you have to increase the volume of visitors in your website.
There are certain things that you have to remember when using a CSS. You have to abide some rules to post your works properly. First, check if your portfolio is free from any kind of errors before posting. You have to ensure that all internal links are functioning. The graphic files must be included and should be properly linked; pages must be structured correctly to have a successful CSS gallery listing.
The site should be free from any errors because it will reflect your credibility as a web designer. It can affect your career and your clients trust to your work. Make sure that the site work properly before you submit or it will hit your reputation. Another important thing to remember when submitting in design gallery is the coding. Be careful with the code because a lot of users will use your code and your syntax should be well organized. All web designers make use of this CSS for the advancement of their career and it is important to maintain their quality of work.
First thing you need to understand is how a web directory works for your benefits and how it can be helpful to those who want to be visible and attain a successful career over the web? For your information, a web directory doesn’t use automated method of reviewing and checking. They use manual method and rank each of those submitted stuff under a category. This is the primary reason why there are times when your submission can be rejected. They do manual checking to make sure only those that are highly qualified will be approved. If you are not aware of this method, you can check the web or better yet check the submission directory you opt for so that you will be able to refer to their guidelines. Directories vary in rules and you need to check on these from time to time.
Web directory also commonly known as link directory increases web traffic on your site. It allows you to do marketing freely without exerting so much effort. There are 2 types of web directory and it’s up to you where you want to engage your works. There are paid and free directory submission sites you can engage these days. Although they both provide the same services, most of this free website contains lots of listing each day. Your listing might not be noticed by most people who will visit the site unless you have a featured listing. It is also important for you to think of ways that will make your listing noticed by more audiences.
Here are some important talks about your dropped site, written by Dave Davies, hope it will help you take good decision regarding yoour site.
It’s happened to all of us. You wake up one morning feeling like a million bucks, you stretch and if you’re like me, you notice the eye-rolling as once again your significant other catches you with a toothbrush dangling from your mouth and a laptop or iPhone in front of you while you check rankings and emails. And then it happens - you start your browser with a search phrase already set to display and you notice that your site no longer holds it’s previous position and the move is not in the right direction. We’ve all faced it and the longer you’ve been an SEO or website owner the more times you’ve seen it happen. But still … what do you do? To quote the immortal Douglas Adams, “Don’t panic.”
Believe me - I know how hard it is sometimes. It’s easy for me to say this to clients when I see an engine fluctuating or a site has dropped only a position or two and we’re working to react but it’s a completely different thing when it happens to you and (might I add) a good reminder to SEO’s as to what our clients go through. But I still haven’t answered the question have I? What do you do? What … do … you … do?
There are five basic steps one must take when their site drops (I like to keep things simple and a 5 step check-list is a great way to do that). These steps assume that to start with you had a well-optimized website with good SEO practices followed. If you don’t then the reasons you dropped are pretty clear but if you’ve got a well-optimized site and your site has fallen - then this is for you. You should:
1 - Build Links
It’s very difficult for people to not want to do something proactive when they notice their site drop. I know - I’ve been there. One of the easiest things to do to keep yourself busy while working on the other 4 steps below is to build links. Building good, solid links to your site will never hurt and will only help you out so even if one of the later steps might show you other actions you need to take (or not take) you’ll never go wrong with some solid link building and if nothing else - it’ll make you feel like you’re doing something and stop you from doing other things that might do you more harm than good.
I’m not going to go into all the different types of links you could build or what the anatomy of a good link is. Many articles, forums and blog posts have been written in the past and are easily found online. I’m sure if you monitor a few good SEO forums you’ll find more being written every day. If you can - find articles by Eric Enge. While he doesn’t give it all away (who does?) - you won’t go wrong taking his advice and even seasoned SEO’s are likely to learn a thing or two from reading his work.
2 - Relax For A Couple Days
Before you rush to your favorite site editing tool - relax. Slight tweaks in content are unlikely to make much of a difference (if any) to your rankings. If you’ve got solid, well-optimized content and suddenly your site’s fluctuating - cramming in a few more instances of your targeted phrase will likely do more harm than good.
Now - when I say relax I basically mean, don’t touch your site. There are steps (such as link building) that you can work on including the analytical work noted below. Just don’t go editing all your copy to try to chase some tweak in Google’s algorithm. Relax.
3 & 4 - Analyze The Sites That Have Out-Ranked You (Onsite And Offsite)
One of the best things you can do is to take a look at the sites that are out-ranking you to find out what they’ve done. This will tell you two things: One - are there some good tactics that you’re missing, and Two - are these rankings likely to hold or are they flawed? There are two areas you’ll want to look at and those are the onsite optimization and the backlinks.
When you’re looking at the onsite optimization you need to only briefly look at their keyword densities, H1 and title tags, internal linking structure, number of indexed pages and the amount of content on the page. Remember: I’m assuming that (as you were ranking previously) you have a solidly optimized website with some good SEO practices and content guidelines followed. If you look at these and compare the newly ranking sites with your site and with other sites that have held their positions and dropped you’ll get a feel for whether there are trends. If there are common traits among the sites that have moved up then you may be on to something. Remember the common trends among the sites that have climbed and held and also remember what they have that the sites that have dropped do not. Remember: there may be no common trends or nothing you can find out with this small a sample. Once this step is complete it’s time to move on to backlink analysis.
Backlink analysis is a good practice to undertake every few months regardless of updates but definitely necessary now that you’re dropping. What you need to do now is to analyze the backlinks of the sites that are out-ranking you. Depending on the competition level this can be a brutal task in that it’s not just about numbers. You should use Yahoo!’s link:www.domain.com command and visit many of the sites in your comeptitors backlinks. What you’re trying to do is get a full view of what their links look like. You’ll also want to download SEO Link Analysis (A Firefox extension you’ll find at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7505/). When you’re doing a backlink check it automatically displays the PageRank and anchor text of the backlinks though I’d still HIGHLY recommend visiting a good many of the sites to see what kind of links they are.
Once again you’re going to be looking for the architecture of the backlinks of the sites that are moving up. What tactics they’re using, what their links look like on the page, what anchor text distribution they’ve got. Once again you’re going to compare that with other sites on the rise, your site and other stable sites to see what is common between those that are climbing and holding their grown vs those that have fallen.
Once we’ve collected this data it’s time to act. Collect all the common traits that the climbing and holding sites have and …
5 - Take Action
You’re done waiting around preforming the tedious task of link building. You’ve got your data and you’re ready to launch into action and get some stuff done. But wait (oh no - did he say wait again?) is action really the best thing?
When you’ve pooled your data you need to decide what it means. Let’s take for example a situation where the newly ranking sites have very low word counts and tons of footer links (looks paid to me). Do you REALLY want to follow their lead? The question you need to ask yourself in this case is do the factors that are apparently working RIGHT NOW overall going to provide better or worse results? Is less content more or less likely to results in a satisfied visitor? Do paid footer links help Google deliver quality results over the whole of the Internet? In these cases the answer is easily “no” but your findings might be more subtle such as an extremely disproportionate use of targeted anchor text among the ranking sites or sp@mmy copy with keyword densities at 8 or 10%.
What you’re in a position to do now is figure out a moving-forward strategy. If the common trends among the top and improving sites are bad or sp@mmy then you know the algorithm will correct itself eventually and you shouldn’t chase it. If you need to do something – build some additional links and look for new phrases to rank for on other pages to help stabilize your traffic when individual phrases decline.
If you find that the factors that have created the new results are legitimate and will lead to better results overall you know you need to make some changes to what you’re doing and fortunately – with the research you’ve just done you’ve got a great starting spot in that you can probably get some great resources and tactics from the lists of backlinks and onsite optimization you’ve just collected.
It may take hours or even days to properly perform this research but then – you needed something to do while your rankings are down. It might as well be productive.
A link is a form of online communication among two websites. Websites over the internet are interconnected to each other through a complex network of links which make it easy for visitors to browse internet fast and efficiently. Link building is the most important Off-page SEO technique resulting in the better positioning of your website in certain search engine.
Before starting a link building campaign make sure that you are going to acquire short cuts for link building as its injustice to your link building campaign and won’t prove fruitful for the long term. Nicely placed link building campaign is the most rewarding activity among the other SEO activities.
Linking to irrelevant and spammy websites can adversely affect your PR hence diminishing your value in certain search engines. While designing your link building campaign make sure that you are crafting a legal link building campaign as poor ways of link building can get you banned from Google.
Make sure that your link building campaign is not focused on acquiring links form any website you come along. Links from the website opposite your niche are not beneficial in boosting up your ranking.
Make sure that press release distribution is an integral part of your link building campaign as press releases containing a link of your website at their bottom can contribute a lot to your link building campaign.
Try to start directory submission when your website is fully functional and rich with information on a particular topic. A successful link building campaign makes sure to submit your website to the worthy and valued directories. If you are focusing on the forum submission make sure that post on the active and well classified forums.
Before starting a link building campaign make a complete analysis of your keywords and select those keywords as anchor text of the links which you think are the most relevant to the theme and the subject of your website. Select pages with high page rank to place your link as you will get a part of strength of the PR of that particular page. In your link building campaign make sure to not go for site wide links as they are considered inorganic by Google and other search engines. In the beginning, try to concentrate on building links for the home page of your website. Link your home page to the internal pages of your website to indirectly transfer the link building reimbursement to internal pages.
Always try to run a link building campaign with a positive attitude as link building is a long term project it needs your patience to get your website efficiently linked with the other websites.
As a webmaster and blogger, people often say search engines are not indexing their websites or not indexing fast. In my personal experience, I’ve found some common but effective ways to index new contents very fast.
Content is every thing, unique contents index faster and stay in SERP longer. Where as some people buy or copy articles from different article directories to have more traffic. But this is partially wrong. If Google find same content in different website, it give priority to higher page ranked website.
Anyway, here are some tips:
1. As soon as new content is added to the website, webmasters should try to use social bookmarking site like Digg, Stumbleupon, Technorati to bookmark. I have noticed Google indexes Digg pages in less than 2 hours!
2. Wordpress and other CMS applications has plugins to create automatic sitemap. Google Webmasters tool, Yahoo! Siteexplorer or Live Webmaster becomes handy when we talk about indexing. Automatic sitemap plugins create dynamic sitemap as soon as new content is added and sitemap is requested by bots. For other website, sitemap should be submitted regularly onces or twice a month depending on new content. Free version of XML-Sitemaps creates xml sitemap upto 500 links, I found another sitemap creating tool GSiteMap does excellent work. It not only create unlimited links but also uploads and notifys search engines about new content.
3. Important contents should not be away from homepage more than 3 levels. If it can’t be avoided, deep linking becomes necessary. Creating a dynamic deeplinking list in hompage is very important.
4. If any website have more than 500 links, sitemaps can be compressed in .gz format or split into several sitemaps.
5. People have misconception that links in blog comments help in indexing. But according to Google, Google bots visit through those links but Google donot index those pages. But good news is, there are some blogs those accepts dofollow links, webmasters should use those blogs.
6. Its a good practice to reference one page to another. It ensures no page is remains untouched. This is one way of deep linking.
Let’s face it, MOST of us fail while dealing with AdSense for the first time. Some publishers even can’t earn a lot from AdSense, so they go to affiliate marketing or another way of making money online. To avoid doing the top mistakes that people people usually do with AdSense, read on!
What Google really wants:
Google wants quality content from publishers or advertisers. You can’t earn a lot from AdSense if you have a content full of typos, broken links, and with low or no value at all. You can’t also have a good CPC while advertising with AdWords if your landing page is ugly.
Top 15 Mistakes:
1- Building a website that specifically targets search spiders, with nothing unique to offer human visitors.
2- Building a website just to make money from AdSense.
3- Providing targeted content that will help Google advertisers to capitalize your traffic.
4- Building a website specifically to target High-Value keywords without planning on developing quality content!.
5- Thinking making money with AdSense is very easy or very hard. Most of beginners think that if he/she builds up a website with AdSense ads, everyone will come to click!.
6- Clicking on your own ads or telling others to click.
7- Choosing a bad template.
8- Not using AdSense channels.
9- Not reading Google AdSense TOS.
10- Putting AdSense on pages that does not have enough content.
11- Creating multiple AdSense accounts.
12- Revealing your AdSense data(CTR, Impressions, eCPM …etc).
13- Putting images next to your AdSense ads.
14- Playing around the AdSense code.
15- Choosing the wrong niche that has a low CPC.
Finally, try to avoid anything that may hurt your earnings. To earn a lot per month, you need to be patient.
When you think about your business or services, first of all, you think about to make more money and to make more money, you need more customer who will buy your products, or take your services. But how will you get more customers? Nowadays, even the smallest company uses the Internet as a main tool in building a customer base, keeping in contact with their clients and this is also their most basic means of advertising.
Designing a company web site is cheap and effective, not to mention essential because the world wide web is the only medium that offers instantaneous information access to millions of users around the globe.
Any web developer worth his salt should know about search engine optimization or SEO.
This is the key towards building an effective web site that would get a lot of hits and visitors. A web site that nobody visits is useless so the challenge lies in leading Internet users to visit your web site.
Thus, your web site need to be “found” when users type in keywords in search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, Altavista, AOL and others.
Once a keyword relating to the products or services that you offer is keyed into a search engine, a direct link to your web site should emerge on top of the list.
You should employ search engine optimization techniques to lead traffic your way, and get more hits that would later on lead to more profit for your company, which is your goal in the first place.
Here are some tips on how you can make it to the top of the list of search engines, and use your SEO techniques to benefit your web site and your company:
1. If you have an existing web site and domain, just optimize the one that you currently have instead of purchasing a new domain.
It will take some time before your web site will show up in a particular search engine, like Google, so it better to use the one that you currently have instead of switching to a new one.
2. Know who your target audience is and aim for them.
If you are in the manufacturing industry and a user types in your product in a search engine, then you would immediately have your target right in front of you.
As soon as the user hits the Enter button or clicks on ‘Search’, then the person will be lead to your web site.
Make sure that your target market will get ‘hooked’ on your web site. Once the search engines show the link to your web site, their job is done.
What you should do next is to make sure that your visitor will not leave your web site without them trying out your products or services, or at least leaving some pertinent information so that you can contact them in the future for marketing and advertising purposes.
When hitting a particular target market, learn about their interests, location and age to have an idea of what you can offer them in return.
Also, you can somehow link their interests to your products and services.
3. Search for the right keyword.
When some one works on a website design, it is important that the look will remain same in all browsers. But creating a consistent interface for users is a constant struggle for every application designer. Building consistency on the web is especially tough because the visual rendering differences across browsers and operating systems are wildly different and almost arbitrary in what can and cannot be done.
As is, the input with the type=”submit” is either too ugly (Firefox), a little buggy (Internet Explorer) or completely inflexible (Safari). I tried a lot to make them look same in all the browsers, but couldn’t find any easy way. Finally, I have got the solution form one of my friends, Mr. Kevin Hale. In one of his tutorials, he showed how easily we can do it by using images and a little trick with css.
Here I want to share the technique, if anybody finds it helpful, then let me know, I will try to come with some more examples in the future.
In this example, the first one acts as a submit button, while the other two work as links. You can change them according to what you want.
The HTML Part:
<form name="form1" method="post" action=""> <div class="buttons"> <button type="submit" class="positive" name="save"> <img src="images/apply2.png" alt=""/> Save </button> <a href="" class="regular"><!-- class="regular"--> <img src="images/textfield_key.png" alt=""/> Change Password </a> <a href="#" class="negative"> <img src="images/cross.png" alt=""/> Cancel </a> </div> </form>
The CSS Part:
.buttons a, .buttons button{
display:block;
float:left;
margin:0 7px 0 0;
background-color:#f5f5f5;
border:1px solid #dedede;
border-top:1px solid #eee;
border-left:1px solid #eee;
font-family:"Lucida Grande", Tahoma, Arial, Verdana, sans-serif;
font-size:12px;
line-height:130%;
text-decoration:none;
font-weight:bold;
color:#565656;
cursor:pointer;
padding:5px 10px 6px 7px; /* Links */
}
.buttons button{
width:auto;
overflow:visible;
padding:4px 10px 3px 7px; /* IE6 */
}
.buttons button[type]{
padding:5px 10px 5px 7px; /* Firefox */
line-height:17px; /* Safari */
}
*:first-child+html button[type]{
padding:4px 10px 3px 7px; /* IE7 */
}
.buttons button img, .buttons a img{
margin:0 3px -3px 0 !important;
padding:0;
border:none;
width:16px;
height:16px;
}
/* STANDARD */
button:hover, .buttons a:hover{
background-color:#dff4ff;
border:1px solid #c2e1ef;
color:#336699;
}
.buttons a:active{
background-color:#6299c5;
border:1px solid #6299c5;
color:#fff;
}
/* POSITIVE */
button.positive, .buttons a.positive{
color:#529214;
}
.buttons a.positive:hover, button.positive:hover{
background-color:#E6EFC2;
border:1px solid #C6D880;
color:#529214;
}
.buttons a.positive:active{
background-color:#529214;
border:1px solid #529214;
color:#fff;
}
/* NEGATIVE */
.buttons a.negative, button.negative{
color:#d12f19;
}
.buttons a.negative:hover, button.negative:hover{
background:#fbe3e4;
border:1px solid #fbc2c4;
color:#d12f19;
}
.buttons a.negative:active{
background-color:#d12f19;
border:1px solid #d12f19;
color:#fff;
}
/* REGULAR */
button.regular, .buttons a.regular{
color:#336699;
}
.buttons a.regular:hover, button.regular:hover{
background-color:#dff4ff;
border:1px solid #c2e1ef;
color:#336699;
}
.buttons a.regular:active{
background-color:#6299c5;
border:1px solid #6299c5;
color:#fff;
}
Over the years there has been lots of discussion in the SEO community regarding building links to a web site. The debate is particularly heated at the moment, as Google rolls out its “Jagger” upgrade.
Let’s start with what we mean by inbound links, also called backlinks. These are links from other sites to your URL, which direct the surfer directly to your site when the link is clicked. The basic premise is that if you have high ranking sites linking to you, then you must yourself be important and have valuable content, and hence you should rank highly. The way in which Google ranks sites is called Pagerank and can be seen as a green line on the Google Toolbar representing ranks 0 to 10. As Google states:
PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”
Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query.
So, back to the question “Does having inbound links to your site help your site’s credibility”, and hence visibility when searched. The broad answer to this question is “yes”, but with a number of very important caveats which we will cover in the other sections.
OK, so backlinks are basically good, especially from high ranking sites, so how do we get them? The first way, and best way, is by having such great content on your site that all these high-powered sites want to link to you. Downside to this method is that it is slow and takes lots of time and effort on your part. But don’t worry, when anyone tries to build a level playing field there are always people out there that will provide work-arounds.
The first one was reciprocal links, whereby you say that you will link to a site if they also link to you. That’s stretching the original idea, but it’s not too bad because how many of these sort of links are you going to set up? Well, actually, some people have created thousands of such links between sites, maybe not what Google initially intended!
But then, due to the emphasis Google placed on link popularity, the concept of link farms was born. These are sites that link to other sites purely to increase the links to the site. Pay a few dollars and get thousands of links to your site. Too good to be true - you bet. Google hates link farms and sees these links as spam and will actively penalise sites that use such links. So, the first rule of linking is do not use link farms. The second rule is do not use lots of reciprocal links, Google can easily check this and the “Jagger” update that is currently rolling out seems to be particularly focused on penalising sites with lots of reciprocal links. The jury is still out on whether “themed” links will be treated in the same way. “Themed” links are links to sites that are very closely aligned to the same primary topic as your own site. If you think about this, it makes a lot of sense and is much more likely to be based on real content-based linking.
We believe another area Google is focusing on is how quickly your site gains backlinks. If your site is one month old, it is hardly believable for it to gain 100 real backlinks in that time. So, the third rule of linking is to ensure your links build in a realistic way. In all of these ways, Google is trying to ensure fairness and that’s why new sites are often held back in the results pages.
Finally, we should mention the sites that will improve your ranking - the Directories. There are many of these, but the most important is DMOZ, also known as the ODP. DMOZ is the Open Directory Project and is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors. It gets the name DMOZ from the acronym for Directory Mozilla, as it is administered by Netscape Communication Corporation. It’s Pagerank is 9 and hence a link from DMOZ will help your site. We recommend that everyone visits http://dmoz.org and attempts to get listed, it’s free. The Yahoo directory is also important and free for non-commercial sites, but $299 a year for business.
So, in summary, by far the best way of getting links is by having a quality site that other people want to link to. So again, we are back to content. If you provide quality information, over time, more and more sites will link to you, and if they are in the same business sector as you, so much the better.
Originally written by John Fowler, Source: www.a1-optimization.com
