Showing posts with label seo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label seo. Show all posts

Thursday, February 23, 2012

New SEO best practices 2011


Search Engine Optimization is an art which continues to evolve and improve and if you want to be serious about keeping your site top notch you must ensure that you keep up to date with the most recent SEO practices. The following is a list of modern practices compiled by SEOmoz.

-> Title Tag Format
Recommended Practice:

Primary Keyword - Secondary Keywords | Brand
Or
Brand Name | Primary Keyword and Secondary Keywords

When you are trying to rank highly for a particular keyword / phrase, it is best to include it in the beginning of the title

-> The Usefulness of H1 Tags
H1s are important for users but not necessarily for search engines anymore.

They are very important for establishing information hierarchy and helping with algorithmically determined semantics, but they seem to be less important for search engine optimization.

-> The Usefulness of Nofollow
We recommend using rel= for thwarting would be spammers of user generated content. You can also use it as an incentive for creating active users.

-> The Usefulness of the Canonical Tag
The canonical tag is still young and is only useful as a hint to the search engines to prevent duplicate content. It is not the silver bullet that webmasters are looking for.

-> The Use of Alt text with Images
We recommend including alt text for all images on all publicly accessible pages. We also suggest adding images with good alt text to pages targeting competitive rankings. This is an essential thing which you should be doing anyway.

-> The Use of the Meta Keywords tag
If it is not a problem to let your competitors know your keywords and you are trying to rank highly in, the Meta Keywords tag can be useful. Note: This is different from what we have recommend in the past.

-> The Use of Parameter Driven URLs (I.E. www.example.com/index.php?option=com_conent§iondid=0)
We don’t recommend using them. Mask parameters by creating Search Engine Friendly URLS

-> The Usefulness of Footer Links
Use footer links sparingly. We recommend no more than 25 relevant internal navigational links.
We have seen many examples of Google penalties tied directly to abusive footer links (that "magically" lifted upon removal of the keyword anchor text stuffed footers). Manipulative links in footers are easily detected algorithmically, and appear to have automated penalties applied to them by Google.

-> The Use of Javascript and Flash on Websites
Do not use Javascript or Flash for any navigation important to search engines. Use pure CSS menus!

-> The Use of 301 Redirects
Use 301 redirects as the best way to redirect webpages but warn that they do have disadvantages.

-> Blocking pages from Search Engines
The Meta Robots tag (noindex, follow) is generally a better option than robots.txt. Robots.txt files are useful but should be used sparingly and only if a meta robots tag is not an option.

-> Google Search Wiki's Affect on Rankings
We don’t recommend spending any time or resources on search wiki.

-> The Affect of Negative Links from “Bad Link Neighborhoods”
Link neighborhoods are a real thing but the affect of links from bad neighborhoods on good neighborhoods is minimal if the links are not reciprocal.

-> The Importance of Traffic on Rankings
The metric of visitors to a given site is not used to help determine rankings.

All above are new SEO techniques which are very useful for search marketing work .. it is to give you some great ideas to your mind with latest SEO strategies ..

Ram Babu SEO Professional
Thanks

Monday, December 13, 2010

What is SEO ?

SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” The term may sound like optimizing an actual search engine such as Google, yahoo, MSN, AOL, however this professional service focuses on tweaking a website to do well – to appear among the top listings on search engine results pages (SERPs). SERPs are web pages returned by search engines like Google or Yahoo! after a user performs a search. These pages contain links to web sites and documents that the search engine deems relevant to the word or phrase. These words or phrases are also known as “keywords.”

OK, let’s see a show of hands: How many of you are reading this book because you want a #1 rank in Google? Yeah, we thought so. As SEO consultants, we know how good it feels when your website makes it to the top of the heap. Listen, we sincerely hope you get your #1 Google rank, but it won’t help you if it’s bringing in the wrong audience or pointing them to a dead-end website. So don’t think of SEO as just a way to improve your site’s ranking.


The term search engine optimization describes a diverse set of activities that you can perform to increase the number of desirable visitors who come to your website via search engines (you may also have heard these activities called Search Engine Marketing or Search Marketing). This includes things you do to your site itself, such as making changes to your text and HTML code. It also includes communicating directly with the search engines, or pursuing other sources of traffic by making requests for listings or links. Tracking, research, and competitive review are also part of the SEO package.