5 Steps To Optimizing Your Website For Google And Yahoo  
by Justin Maddox

The mere thought of SEO is enough to send most webmasters into a flutter. A good ranking in the search engines is a sure-fire way to make money from a website, yet it is not an easy task. But while the exact ranking algorithm used by top search engines is one of the world's best kept secrets there are some basic principals you should always keep in mind:

1. Site Design

The structure of your site is important because this is how search engines see how each page relates to another. When your site is spidered, the search engine will quickly be able to judge the relevance and quality of your site from the sitemap.

Creating a good site map involves naming pages using your top keywords, while at the same time ensuring you are giving it an accurate and succinct name. Keyword spamming has penalties! Google's sitemap is a good example at http://www.google.com/sitemap.html.

2. Optimize for your audience, not for the search engine.

Search engines prefer sites on a specific subject because specialized information is more beneficial to search engine users. So, for example, your site would have a better chance of ranking highly if it was dedicated specifically to lamp shades rather than home furnishings or lighting in general. This is because someone searching for 'lamp shade' would be better satisfied with a website full of information specifically relating to lamp shades, rather than a general home furnishings site with only a paragraph or two dedicated to lamp shades.

Many sites have been successful by focusing solely on providing a website that meets the needs of their audience, rather than the needs of the search engines. If possible, survey your users to find out what they want out of the site and if they have any suggestions. The more you know about your audience, the better the design you'll be able to create. Make it easy for visitors to interact on the site and for you to answer their questions too.

3. Label your internal text links and image alt tags

Why? The main reason is that search engine spiders can't read images. Anything without text means nothing to the spider. Other benefits of labeling images include the ability for the image to be searchable in browsers such as Google Image search. Image text also enables visibly impaired visitors to use your site more effectively and it helps to generally improve the text content of your page for search purposes. An image label is just a clear description of the image using keywords. Just don't include too many keywords in the alt text as there are penalties for keyword stuffing!

4. Update your site regularly

Your site ranking will be enhanced if the search engine spiders can see it is being updated frequently. Aim to add new content at least once a week to create a living site. The more frequently Google has to come back to respider your site, the better you will rank. Pages that don't change will eventually be downgraded in favor of sites whose pages are fresher.

5. Link to Subject-related sites

Good quality backlinks are vital to SEO as these tell the search engine spiders that the site is popular and/or important. Backlinks are links that are directed to your website from another site. Thus, linking to relevant sites is a great way to increase your search engine ranking. If you can, try to implement circular linking, where the sites you link to also link to each other and back to you again. For example, you link to Site A and Site B, who both link back to you and also link to each other. The more clusters of links you can get like this, the more relevant your site will be deemed to be.

Did you realize that broken links can actually harm your search engine optimization? If you set up a link, and your linking partner pulls that link in 6 months time, your ranking could reduce. Thus it is critical to check your links regularly to ensure that you are being linked back to.

Search engine optimization is not something that can be done once and then left alone. It requires constant effort and attention. The best way to keep up to date with new SEO developments is to continue read commentary and recent articles by SEO experts. In general, remember that the top websites are always the ones people want to use, such as the BBC, eBay, Apple, and NASA. If your main priority is creating the best website for your users, then you are on the right track.

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Two Quick Search Engine Optimization Techniques  
by Uche Okoroha

If you have even the tiniest bit of web experience, you know that when it comes to obtaining exposure on the internet - search engines play a big role. You could have the most creative, informative website on the face of the internet, but if no one sees it - whats the point? This is why it is important to utilize optimization techniques. Using optimization techniques will help your website rise to the top of the search engines where it will be easily viewable to people searching for what you specialize in. Contrary to popular belief, optimization techniques are not hard to learn or implement. In fact there are two quick optimization techniques that you can utilize right now that will go along way in bringing traffic to your website.

The first of the optimization techniques is - make sure you use keywords that result from a full keyword analysis. When doing a keyword analysis you want to initially have a large list of keywords you can choose from. Try to think of every aspect of what you offer on your website, and how you would search for your OWN services if you were using a search engine. This is the most important of the optimization techniques. Try to also think of any obvious spelling mistakes. For example look at the following example of how often the single word 'calendar' is searched for every day in different variations:

'calendar': 10,605 times 'calender': 2,721 times 'calander': 1,549 times 'calandar': 256 times

As you can see, about thirty percent of all searches for the word 'calendar' are misspelled! This is why it is important to not only target your main keywords while implementing optimization techniques, but try to find places where you can plug in obvious misspellings as well. In fact, you can go as far as creating duplicate pages on your website dedicated and optimized to misspellings. This is an easy way to pick up traffic without having to fight over keywords, and it will not hurt your overall appearance any because the only people that will see the page with the mistakes - are the ones who searched using the mistakes! Optimization techniques focused on spelling mistakes are not very common, so you can be assured almost free traffic. Many choose to use keyword tools in this process to make sure they are using the most profitable keywords. Keyword tools will not only give you variations of the keywords you want to use, but will also give you the most popular misspellings of these words and which words will bring more traffic than others.

The second of the optimization techniques is - create a good TITLE right below the HEADER tag. This is the first thing search engines will look at to see if the page is relevant to a term that is being searched for. When implementing optimization techniques, if you have a good keyword or two in your title that competing pages don't have, you will have a good chance of reaching the top of search engines. When going through optimization techniques, many website owners skip right over this and often waste potential by making very generic TITLE tags. For example: Welcome to VirtualOfficeAid.com - Home Page. This is very generic and not beneficial for search engine optimization. Using the words 'welcome to' is especially a waste of space, assume that your visitors will feel welcome without you having to say so - and use the space to tell search engines what your site is about! A better title for this website using optimization techniques would be: Administrative Aid, Website Design, Desktop Publishing, SEO. This gives the search engines and the reader information on EXACTLY what they will find on the website. Also when using optimization techniques in your title, try to place only 40-60 characters between the TITLE tags.

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