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A key element of your Internet marketing strategy is search engine optimization or SEO.
SEO helps the search engine spiders to read your site correctly and to rank it appropriately.
==> Search Engine Optimization For Your Website <==
In Lesson Three we looked at Keywords and Keyword phrases.
Choosing and placing keywords is related to today's
subject, which is "SEO", or Search Engine Optimization.
What is Search Engine Optimization?
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Search engine optimization is simply the process of making
changes to your website to improve your site's search
engine ranking for specific keywords.
SEO is a universally recognized way of setting up your website so that it will climb the search engine rankings more easily.
When people use a search engine to find information about a
particular topic, the search engine lists results based on
the best matches it can find.
Optimizing your website for the search engines is simply a
matter of providing content relevant to the keywords you
want to be found for, AND presenting it in the way that
search engines prefer.
When you do those two things, your
website is guaranteed to climb up the search engine
rankings.
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SEO IS NOT DIFFICULT
Anyone can do SEO when they know the basic steps. It is
simply a matter of being methodical and applying the same
principles to every page on your website.
In Lesson Three you learned about placing keywords between
snippets of html code such as (H1)(/H1) (with pointed brackets) for your headline
and so on. Those actions are done for the purposes of
search engine optimization, so you are already familiar
with some SEO operations.
In today's lesson I am going to show you what else you need
to do to your webpages in order to optimize them for the
search engines.
SEO OF MENUS AND SIDEBARS
It may surprise you to know that the placement of your menus
and sidebars, or the titles of the buttons and links will
affect the optimization of your website.
Search engine spiders read the HTML on a web page from the
top to the bottom of the page, left to right. So, if you
place your navigation menu at the top or on the left hand
side, the spider will read it before it reads the main
content of the web page.
If you have used your keywords in your menus then there is
no need to worry about the placement of your menus. HOWEVER,
if your navigation menu is at the top or on the left and
contains content that bears no relation to your keywords
then you should either place the menu in the right hand
column, to the right of the main content, or add your
keyword phrases to the menu if you prefer to leave it on the
left or at the top of your web page.
If your website is already up and running and you don't want
to change the design, you could get over the problem by
placing your keywords in the left hand sidebar - write a
short piece about the theme of your website, or a catch-
phrase to encapsulate the spirit or purpose of the site.
PLACE YOUR KEYWORDS HIGH UP ON THE PAGE
Search engines give more weight to keywords that occur in
the top quarter or third of a web page, so it is good SEO
practice to make sure that your keywords crop up near the
top more frequently and with more prominence than other less
important phrases. You will need to adapt your writing style
so that you can slot in keywords without sounding false or
strained. (See Lesson Nine.)
ADD A SITEMAP TO YOUR SITE
A sitemap is simply an ordered list of links to all the
pages on your website.
A sitemap helps both your visitors and search engine spiders
check the contents of your site. Placing a sitemap on your
site ensures that the spiders find, crawl and
index every page.
If the prospect of building a sitemap to catalogue every
single page of your site does not appeal to you, you can use
this tool to generate and maintain a sitemap automatically:
http://www.xml-sitemaps.com
Once you have made a site map, head over to Google and
set up a free webmaster account at:
http://www.google.com/webmasters
You will then be able to add your sitemap URL and have
Google crawl your website.
LATENT SEMANTIC INDEXING (LSI)
The purpose of a standard keyword search is simply to
checks whether a web page contains a given keyword or not,
and how frequently that keyword occurs.
Latent semantic indexing takes the process a stage further
by considering the relationship of all the words on the
page, but particularly those words and phrases which have
similar meanings to each other.
Most search engines are now capable of LSE analysis so it is
important to take account of this when you write copy for
your web pages.
As well as placing your keywords as described in this and
the previous lesson, it is also important to deploy some
variations of your keywords throughout the body of the page,
and also in some of the links and the alt="" section of
html image code snippets.
Actually, writing web page copy to cater for LSI will
produce a text that reads more naturally than one that has
been written around a single keyword phrase. It will be less
mechanical and repetitive. It will flow more naturally because
the semantic variations more closely represent the way
people tend to speak or write in ordinary life.
Similarly, you should also vary the keyword phrases you use
in the anchor text that you use in your external links that
point back to your site. (See Lessons Three, Nine and Twelve.)
TOOLS TO HELP YOU FIND LSI PHRASES
If you are not sure what kind of keyword variations you
should use, do a Google search placing a ~ character in
front of your keywords to find similar phrases.
Also, if you have subscribed to Empowerism, you can use
their Keyword Suggestion Tool.
Enter your keyword into this useful tool and it will list dozens of keywords and
phrases, and their search counts, to give you valuable suggestions to add to
your keyword/phrase list.
To find out more about Empowerism click here.
HTML VALIDATION
Search engine robots will give up crawling a website with
invalid HTML, preventing it from achieving a high rank for
its given keyword terms.
You can prevent this from happening to your website by
using an HTML validator.
Again, if you are a member of Empowerism, you will have free
access to an HTML validator.
You can find out more about Empowerism here
An HTML validator checks the HTML coding on your website and reports
any errors or problems that could result in the search
engines not indexing your page correctly.
Although the
errors reported may or may not be critical, you should
confirm that you're not losing visitors to your site and
search engine ranking as a result of an HTML issue.
It may be a simple matter of broken links or incomplete
code which anybody with a little experience of HTML will be
able to trace and correct.
JAVASCRIPT AND SEO
If your web pages have javascript code on
them, move the script to a separate file because search engine
spiders are unable to read javascript.
Javascript also fills
webpages with code that search engine spiders cannot read. Javascript increases download time and makes it
likely that fewer of your keywords will get read and indexed
on the search engines.
It is easy to remove the javascript code from a web
page. Simply cut all the code from "" to
"" and paste it into a separate file with a .js
suffix attached.
Next, replace the javascript code on the web page
with:
Best wishes,
David Hurley
http://grasp-the-nettle.com
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