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Optimize_Your_Web_Site_Pt2
| Optimize Your Web Site Pt2
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6: The hidden benefits to having the right links. Every
site online has an index or default file as its home page file.
But outside of that rule you can name the other pages whatever
you like. So why not cram the names with keywords and/or
keyphrases relevant to that page and your site? We've just
scored again ;-)
Eg exercise-equipment-reviews.htm is our reviews page.
Note the hyphen again always try to avoid using spaces when
naming your files or pages. You will get a horrible looking 20%
appearing, which is something the browsers throw in there to
represent a space.
If we then name the link to this page from our other pages
'exercise equipment reviews' and also make the link bold we'll
score a whole bunch of points on the SE's. If you then use the
other techniques described on this page to optimize the page
exercise-equipment-reviews.htm around the phrase 'exercise
equipment reviews'. You'll be well on your way to getting a top
listing in the engines. ;-)
Keywords and keyphrases in a link and the name of a page file
are very important boosters.Anyone would be a fool not to
optimize them to the hilt. But this is often overlooked and
simply not known about.
7: Name your Images properly and utilise their Alt tags.
Each image file displayed on a site is linked to with a line of
code containing the path to the image. So along the lines of our
link strategy above lets utilise that link and fill it with
keywords.
Eg We have an image on our home page of a piece of exercise
equipment. Lets name that image exercise-equipment.jpg. Most
sites store their images in a folder named images, logical, but
there's a missed opportunity there. Lets call our image folder
exercise-equipment.
So what we have as a link to our image is
src="exercise-equipment/ exercise-equipment.jpg" Very nice.
But there's more, all images should have an Alt tag this tag
controls the text that appears when you role over an image, the
little yellow box that appears with a description? Hmmm
what
should we do with that ;-) You guessed it stick our key words in
there.
Is that it for images ? not quite there's one more trick I'll
let out of the bag here. Its very simple but effective, add a
link to your image to a relevant page or if you don't want it to
lead anywhere link it back to the page its on. Either way you'll
score again for the keywords in the link as mentioned above. ;-)
So you should have something like this - a
href="exercise-equipment-review.htm" img src="
exercise-equipment/exercise-equipment.jpg " alt="exercise
equipment" width="113" height="123" border="0"
Just look at all those juicy keywords. This little technique is
little known and is another wasted opportunity.
8: Site map and doorway pages. A site map simply consists
of links to all the pages on your site. It may be that the way
you have your site structured you will have some pages that
don't link to each other. Having a site map linked to from every
page not only helps visitors navigate your site but also acts as
a highway for the 'spiders' to crawl all of your site quickly
and easily. Plus think of all those juicy keyword and keyphrase
links on the one page. ;-)
Doorway pages consist of the techniques mentioned already on
this page but taken that little bit further. Essentially the
pages focus heavily around a keyphrase and utilise the
techniques mentioned here sometimes to the detriment of grammar
and readability. A doorway page exists to get a listing in the
SE's for its keyphrase and when visited it simply has a link to
the main site.
If your site is pretty small then it may be useful to have some
keyphrase targeted doorway pages. If your sites a little larger
there's no reason why you can't focus the existing pages on a
keyphrase properly as described here and have them do the same
job as a doorway page.
9: Link exchange. Over the last 2-3 years or so the links
pointing to your site have become extremely important.Following
Googles lead the SE's have placed more emphasis on the related
and relevant links a site has. The better these links are the
better your sites ranking. It's important to state that not just
any old link will do although this will help a little a relevant
link would be much more beneficial.
So back to our example site - Our site sells and reviews
exercise equipment that's all. That's a pretty big area by
itself anyway. But what if we exchanged links with a site
selling exercise clothing, exercise-clothing.com. One of our
keywords is in there which is even better. We add value to our
site, exercise-clothing.com adds value to their site our ranking
is boosted in the SE's and the SE provides better results.
Everyone's a winner.
It's not good enough just to find relevant sites. Ideally you
should be finding sites that get good results in the SE's
already. Linking to one of these sites will give your site a
great boost.
But how do you find out how well a site is ranked? Try these two
free tools -
Google
toolbar - I'm sure Google needs no introduction. Other than
to say once you have it installed the little horizontal green
bar in the middle of the toolbar displays the Page ranking(PR)
of any site you visit. Other benefits of the toolbar include,
search Google from whichever site your on, a popup stopper and
an autofill form feature, enter your details once and whenever
you need to fill a form in online you can do it with one click.
Alexa
toolbar - Alexa is a search engine owned by Amazon. This
toolbar goes into even more detail about a site you visit. You
can check its ranking, who's linking to it and even go back in
time and view the site as it was years ago. There's also a
search feature for Alexa and Google, and a search feature for
Amazon built in, so you can search any of them from any site.
Handy for ordering those books, CD's and DVD's.
The other benefit of these toolbars is that they track sites
that you visit. Not in an intrusive way and totally anonymously.
What this means is that if you visit your own site regularly
just by having the toolbars installed you will boost its
rankings. ;-)
I recommend you install both these tools. They install across
the top of Internet Explorer underneath the address bar. It only
takes a minute or two for installation and its done without any
need to download software. Once installed you can always right
click them and close them if they get in the way. Very handy
little things.
To check a sites link popularity try this handy
online tool
10: Search Engines and Submissions. To round off this
article and tie things up I'm going to say a little bit about
which search engines to submit to and why, how to go about it
and why you need not pay anything to get into the major SE's.
Google is
king of the search engines producing the most accurate and
relevant results for any search and up until recently it
'crawled/spidered' the web once every six weeks or so, doing
what was called the 'Google dance'. So called because as their
database was updated ranking of sites could shift dramatically
for a few days before settling back down. This has now stopped
as of Q2 2003.
Google now crawls constantly and there is no longer any major
shift in listings. Entry into Google is free and can be very
quick, probably the quickest outside paid listing. A site should
appear in Google within six weeks of submitting the URL. This is
still a long time to wait, but it works out quite well if you
use the next little tactic I'll explain after the next two
paragraphs.
Relationships between the SE's have changed dramatically yet
again over the last 12 months.
(For a very useful and informative illustration of the current
Major SE relationships take a look at this chart. If your new to SE optimising you'll
probably find this a real eye opener)
Google has been supplying search results for AOL and Yahoo
amongst others. Yahoo has bought out the major SE Overture for
millions of dollars and a few months later bought out another
less well known but significant SE, inktomi, who actually supply
listings to MSN, Overture, HotBot, BBC, About.com again for
millions of dollars.
Yahoo is now basically consolidating these engines and will I'm
sure restructure its own sites search algorithms to bring these
engines online. Yahoo currently charges for a listing in its
directory $299 last time I checked. But since they brought their
new search engine seperate from their directory there's no need
to pay to enter yahoo.
By far the fastest and most cutting edge way to get your site
crawled by the search engines is to use a tactic called Blog
and Ping. This will call the main search engine spiders over
to your site when you choose and get you indexed within
days. Keep this up and your whole site, all its pages, will
be indexed before you know it. Click on the link above for more
info from my friend Rick Butts.
(One word of warning stay away from the 'Submit your site to
1500 search engine' style links you find all over the web these
days, you'll just end up with loads of spam emails. The majority
of SE traffic comes from the top six SE's.)
Hand submission or automated software? Well neither
really these days. You can have your home page indexed simply by
finding another site to exchange links with. Google actually
states that they prefer to find sites by crawling the web rather
than through their submission service. This will work much
faster than the submission service.
If you do decide to submit to the search engines then ordinarily
I would recommend submitting by hand one at a time. I've done
this for the last five years. Simply because the software
available to submit a site wasn't up to the job. But finally
there is a piece of software that is up to the job and more than
that it helps with the choice of keywords, checks the
optimisation of your site pages, checks for broken links,
reveals your link popularity, tracks and reports visitors to
your
site and will report on your position in all the major engines
for your chosen keywords.
In the past there was a chance that a site could be blacklisted
or not even listed if it was submitted by software. This
software gets around this problem by simulating a browser
whenever it deals with the search engines, be it submitting your
site or reporting on its ranking.
I now use this for all my own and client sites. Finally I can
save the time I used to spend on submitting by hand. You can
download a free trial from www.webceo.com. If you would still prefer
to go down the hand submission route - Here's a page with
links to the submission pages of around 30 search engines.
Conclusion I hope you enjoyed reading what has turned out
to be a rather long article and found something new and useful
within it.
It goes without saying that you should apply the above
techniques to the individual pages of your site. Start with the
important and most relevant content based pages and work
backwards from there. Finally one more online
tool to help you check your site for errors.
About the author:
How-to-make-money-online.info is a site focused on Making Money
Online listing the many and varied ways of making money
online.
Feel free to reprint and distribute this article as you like.
All that we ask is that you do not make any changes, that this
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