SEO WILL NEVER DIE

SEO WILL NEVER DIE


Infografia SEO

Read More

Touch Screens Explained

Stand-alone classic vector infographic on the cover of the Health and Science Section about different types of touch screen technology and future developments. Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop.

Online version: www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/touchscree...

Touchscreens: How they work

Read More

Bing Roadmap to SEO Success

Just before the launch of the Bing decision engine from Microsoft, Rick DeJarnette, a member of the Microsoft Webmaster Center Team, announced a new series of community posted geared toward website owners (diy seo) and search engine marketing professionals.

Basically, the new series runs under this pretense:

“We know you are going to be performing search engine optimization (SEO) to try and rank higher in our decision engine, so here are the criteria you need to follow and we won’t ban you for doing something stupid, stupid!”


In coordination with the new series of blog posts, they also launched a forum for members to share ideas and strategies of what works and what doesn’t. Good or bad advice, always take it with a grain of salt…

However, the Webmaster Center team has already had a series of posted outlining some detailed criteria you need to begin optimizing you website. So, straight from the horses mouth to you here is a summary of the key items you should be working on:

Step 1: Selecting Keyword Phrases

1. Brainstorm your keyword phrases, come up with as many as possible
2. Use the adCenter Excel Add-in Keyword Research Tool to research these and additional keyword phrases
3. Select keyword phrases (not individual keywords) that convert – meaning keyword phrases that deliver targeted visitors that drive your business
• Leave out “jargon” terms only your current customers would use
• Select at least a few unique phrase per page that contains content
• Identify relevant niches
4. Develop a theme for your site with the keyword phrases

Step 2: On-page Keyword Placement

1. Emphasize your keywords in the following tags:
• Title Tag
• Place important keywords at beginning of tag
• Suggested length: 5 to 65 characters
• Unique Title text for every page
• !Avoid the following special characters: ‘”<>{}[]()
• Body Header Tags
• Anchor Tags (links)
• Description META Tag
• Create a unique description for each page utilizing keyword phrases
• Suggested length: 25 to 150 characters
• !Avoid reusing title tag text as a description
• !Avoid the following special characters: ‘”<>{}[]()
• Keywords META Tag
• Choose words that may be secondary keyword terms (save the primary keywords for use in the Title and META Description tags)
• Okay to include typographical errors
• Suggested length: no more than 874 characters
• !Avoid repeating an individual keyword more than 4 times
2. Include keywords and keyword phrases in your Body text
3. Use Strong Tags to highlight keywords in body text
4. Images with text should be supplemented by using the alt attribute – placing keywords here is okay
5. !Avoid Over Utilization i.e. keyword stuff in Title, Meta Tags and Content

Step 3: Consider Your Content

1. Content is still King!
2. Focus on quality content as quality content delivers links & industry authority
3. Expand your site’s keyword depth by expanding your content
4. Build content over time
5. Keep it fresh and insightful
6. Great sites have great content
7. ! Avoid placing content within scripts
8. ! Avoid over using Flash, Silverlight animations as bots are still having difficulty getting this right
9. ! Avoid Duplicate Content – Plagiarism is a violation
10. !Avoid Hidden Text

Step 4: Links

1. Links are an endorsement – get endorsed and be an endorser
2. Build them overtime
3. Get them from relevant sites or pages to your sites theme
4. Link to sites that are similar to your sites theme (enhance your customers experience)
5. Focus on quality over quantity
6. !Avoid paid links
7. !Avoid “bad neighborhoods” including:
• Meaningless domains for link exchange or link farming
• Questionable IP locations
• Linking requests promising page rank boosts
8. !Avoid link triangulation i.e. Site A links to Site B, Site B links to Site C then Site C links to Site A
9. Bad neighborhood inbound links will have less impact on your site if they are outweighed by good neighborhood, relevant links

Step 5: Site Architecture

1. File & Directory Naming
• Use keywords in naming scheme
• Use hyphens not underscores
2. Directory Structure
• Keep it shallow – no more than 4 levels deep
3. Move Javascript code to external files
4. Move CSS to external files
5. Use 301 redirects when moving pages of content or websites
6. Canonicalize or 301 redirect all homepage variations
7. Always use absolute URL naming over relative naming
8. Always use proper URL syntax:
• Links to directory root files should be the ‘/’ not the index or default page
• Links to non-default pages should include file name
• Dynamic links should utilize only the & (ampersand) not & code
9. Use title attribute in anchor tags for internal links
10. Identify the canonical URL for each page
11. Minimize the number of parameters in dynamic URLs (the MSNBot can read more than 30 variables) but please keep it to a minumum
12. Utilize the rel=”nofollow” attribute in links to keep the bot from following certain links
13. Increase usability by creating a custom 404 page
14. Properly identify your !DOCTYPE in the Head section of your pages
15. !Avoid Javascript redirects or META refreshes
16. !Avoid Frames
17. !Avoid using pages that require session ids or cookies
18. !Avoid pages that have a list of non-contextual links

I know there is a lot to digest here but it looks like the roadmap is still in progress. On the plus side, everything you see here is generally accepted “white hat” SEO techniques and it is safe to say that the guys at Bing Webmaster Central know their SEO stuff.

Leave a comment on how you feel about Microsoft’s new affinity to the SEO community. Let me know what you think about them outlining a roadmap for SEO success, is this pretty much spelling out their algorithm, giving away the special sauce or do think it is great to have this type of transparency on how to get your site working best with the new Bing decision engine?

Read More

Graphic's Negative Effect

Many copywriters think that they must have all of their keywords written in the copy to be effective and end up with a full page of text. Remember people like a sense of things being “real”, they like to be part of something. That is the benefit of graphics. I often think of graphics to have the same effect of having an office with a window. It gives you a “break” from work. Well, graphics give the customer a “break” from the text.

What you can do is break up your copy and insert keywords in other areas of your website. This will please the search engines as well as give your readers a “break” from seeing a full page of text.

For example, you can delete maybe a whole paragraph of “filler” and just add the keywords from that paragraph to a sub-heading below the main heading of your page. You may want to move some of your keywords to table headers or page footers. Either way the search engine will find your keywords.

Add keywords to regular phrases! This is my favorite. Adding your keywords to regular phrases that may be table headers, footers, categories, departments etc can add up to huge keyword targeting. Here are two examples:

Instead of saying “Sign up for our newsletter”, you can say; Sign up for our internet-marketing newsletter.”

Instead of having the table header for your navigation say “Navigation”, you can change it to say “Marketing Navigation.”

As webmasters and online internet marketers, we sometimes loose sight of what the real goal in marketing is – to sell products and services. We must remember that we are here to provide the best products and the best services to the best customers. Let us not drown them in sheets and sheets of text. Break up your text with images and give them a break!

Read More

Graphics And Good SEO

Webmasters and online internet marketers, we sometimes lose sight of what the real goal in marketing is – to sell products/services. It often happens that we end up writing most of our content to please the search engines. Let me tell you, search engines do not buy shoes! Where am I going with this?

1. Make sure to provide alternate text representations for every single graphic on your website including horizontal lines, bullets and background images. You can do this by manipulating the ALT tags. Make sure you use short descriptions for the graphics on your webpage. Many people abuse ALT tags and actually “stuff” 10 – 20 keywords and keyword phrases behind graphics. This is not only bad SEO technique, but it may get your website banned when it comes time to submit it to the search engines!

2. You can insert a small 8pt or so keyword rich description just below your main graphics. For example, if you have a picture of an e-Book on your website, you can put a small sentence below the picture saying “Website Marketing Bible – Get Years of Internet Marketing Experience in One E-Book!” As you can see you get the keywords; Website, Marketing x2 and Internet.

Read More

Importance Of SEO

Up-to-date Content.

Keep your site very content rich. Have a lot of pages. Update the site even twice a day if you have the time. Content is a golden word in SEO. If your content is Original then it’s a big plus. High ranking websites in Google, Yahoo and MSN have a plethora of content. You can gain much on a poorly updated site.

No Spam and No Duplicates

Updating your site does not mean that you copy paste content from other sites. That will only push your rankings further down. Don't have any duplicate content. At the same time, don’t spam multiple content across the same website.

Clean URLs

Clean Search Engine Friendly URLs have always been known to help.

URL’s like domain.com/articles.php?id=344 are not bad.

But domain.com/articles/name-of-article/344.html is a great option.

Have the Web User in Mind

Build your website having the general layman who spends time on your website in mind. Having a site with good accessibility always has a good future.

No to excessive out bound links

Don’t have too many links on a single page. Instead split your content into sections/categories. Too many outbound links are not good for SE rankings as well as visitors. It may look like a link farm or directory.

Never link to illegal sites

Linking to sites that are not doing lawful stuff may get your site blacklisted. Stay away from such sites even though you might loose some bucks.

No Spy ware / Ad ware

Never make your site a home for spy ware and ad ware. Try to keep your site clean and easy to use.

No cloaking text/keyword stuffing

Never ever try to hide text in a web page to a user, and show it to search engines. Search Engines are smart these days and are not text only anymore. They even give important to the graphical information on the site.

Read More