Saturday, 2 March 2013

Lesson 6

Web context so in web terminology a keyword is a term that a person enters into a search engine to find specific information. Most people enter search phrases that consists of between two and five words. Such phrases may be called search phrases, keyword phrases, query phrases, or just keywords. Good keyword phrases are specific and descriptive.
There are following concepts related to Keywords which helps in optimizing keywords on a web page.

Keyword Frequency:

This is calculated as how often does a keyword appear in a site's title or description. You don't want to go overboard with frequency, however, since on some engines if you repeat a word too many times, you'll be penalized for "spamming" or keyword stuffing.
In general though, repeat your keyword in the document as many times as you can get away with, and up to 3-10 times in your META tags.

Keyword Weight:

This refers to the number of keywords appearing on your Web page compared to the total number of words appearing on that same page. Some search engines consider this when determining the rank of your Web site for a particular keyword search.
One technique that often works well is to create some smaller pages, generally just a paragraph long, which emphasize a particular keyword. By keeping the overall number of words to a minimum, you will increase the "weight" of the keyword you are emphasizing.

Keyword Proximity:

This refers to the placement of keywords on a Web page in relation to each other or, in some cases, in relation to other words with a similar meaning as the queried keyword.
For search engines that grade a keyword match by keyword proximity, the connected phrase .home loans. will outrank a citation that mentions .home mortgage loans. assuming that you are searching only for the phrase "home loans".

Keyword Prominence:

A measure of how early or high up on a page the keywords are found. Having keywords in the first heading and in the first paragraph (first 20 words or so) on a page are best.

Keyword Placement:

WHERE your keywords are placed on a page is very important. For example, in most engines, placing the keywords in the Title of the page or in the Heading tags will give it more relevancy. On some engines, placing keywords in the link text, the part that is underlined on the screen in a browser, can add more relevancy to those words.

Best Places to Put Keywords:

Here is a list of places where you should try to use your main keywords.
  • Keywords in the tag(s).</p> </li> <li><p> Keywords in the <meta name="description"></p> </li> <li><p> Keywords in the <meta name="keyword"></p> </li> <li><p> Keywords in <h1> or other headline tags.</p> </li> <li><p> Keywords in the <a href="http://yourcompany.com">keywords</a> link tags.</p> </li> <li><p> Keywords in the body copy.</p> </li> <li><p> Keywords in alt tags.</p> </li> <li><p> Keywords in <!-- insert comments here> comments tags.</p> </li> <li><p> Keywords contained in the URL or site address, e.g., http://www.keyword.com/keywordkeyword.htm.</p> </li> </ul> <h2> Finding Keywords:</h2> <p> There are many different ways to find keywords for your website. Some good keyword ideas are:</p> <ul class="list"> <li><p> Words people would search for to find your product or service.</p> </li> <li><p> Problems your prospective customers may be trying to solve with your product or service.</p> </li> <li><p> Keyword tags on competitors websites.</p> </li> <li><p> Visible page copy on competitors websites.</p> </li> <li><p> Related search suggestions on top search engines.</p> </li> <li><p> By using an online tools like: <a rel="nofollow" href="https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal" target="_blank">Google Keyword Tool</a></p> </li> <li><p> By analyzing your website carefully and finding out proper keywords. This task can be done by expert SEO Copywriters.</p> </li> <li><p> Pay attention to stemming for your keywords - Particularly to what the root word is and what Google considers to be a match for that word when optimizing pages over time.</p> </li> </ul> <h2> What is Word Stemming?</h2> <p> Google uses word stemming. Word stemming allows all forms of the word - singular, plural, verb form as well as similar words to be returned for a given search query.</p> <p> So if someone types in "house plans", not only will pages that are optimized for that phrase be returned, but so will pages that contain all variations of that phrase, for example: "house plan", "house planning", "house planer".</p> <p> <br></p> </div>

Thursday, 28 February 2013

Lesson 4

A web site design and layout gives first impression about your site. There are sites which are too fancy and regular net surfers will just reach on those sites and will come out even without creating a single click.
Search Engines are very smart but after all they are software and not human being who will read the content of their interest. If you make your site too complicated then Search Engine would not be able to parse the content of your site properly and finally indexing would not be efficient which will result in a low rank.
The actual page content should have a keyword density of about 10% and should weigh in at about 200 words - but there are as many opinions about this as there are SEO experts. Some say keyword density should be 5% and some say it should be 20%. 10% works for me.
Here are few guidelines which should be considered while designing a web page.
  • You should have more text content than HTML elements.
  • No frames. They are the enemies of Search Engines and Search Engines are Enemies of Frames.
  • No ads if possible. Because most of the ads uses Java Script which is not advised to be used.
  • No JavaScript. If you need JavaScript, call it from an external file rather than dumping the code in the HTML file. JavaScript drop down menus prevent spiders from crawling beyond your homepage. If you use them, be sure to include text links at the bottom of the page.
  • Nothing that does not fit perfectly into the page topic; There should be no doubt in the search engine's mind (or in he user's mind) what your page is about.
  • No unnecessary directories. Keep your files as close to the root as possible.
  • No fancy stuff (Flash, Splash, Animated Gifs, Rollovers etc.) unless absolutely necessary.

Lesson 4

One of the simplest methods to improve your search engine optimization is to look at the way you name your files. Before writing this tutorial I did lot of research on file names and found that search engines like Google give too much importance to file names. You should think what are you going to put in your web page and then give a relevant file name to this page.
Just try giving any keyword in Google search engine and you will find file names highlighted with the keyword you have given. So it simply proves that your file name should have appropriate keyword.

File Naming Style:

  • The filename should preferably be short and descriptive. It's always good to use same keywords in file name as well as in page title.
  • Don't use file names like service.htm or job.htm. But use actual service name in your file name like computer-repairing.htm
  • Don't use more than 3-4 words in file name and separate them with hyphens rather than underscores. Try to use 2 keywords if possible.

File Name Example:

Here are some file names which should be preferred from SEO as well as from user point of view.
slazenger-brand-balls.html
wimbledon-brand-balls.html
wilson-brand-balls.html
Notice that keywords are separated by hyphens rather than underscores. Google sees file names as follows:
seo-relevant-filename as seo relevant filename(good)
But Google sees
seo_relevant_filename as seorelevantfilename (not good)

File Extension:

It should be noticed that .html, .htm and .php and any other extension do NOTHING for your visitors, and they are simply a means of offloading some of the work of configuring your webserver properly onto your visitors. In effect you are asking your site vistors to tell your webserver HOW to produce the page, not which one?
Many Web masters think that its a good idea to use filename without using extension. It may help you but not a whole lot.

URL Sub-Directory Name:

From Search Engine Optimization point of view URL sub-directory name hardly matters. You try giving any keyword in any search and you will not find any sub-directory name matching with your keywords. But from user point of view you should keep very much abbreviated sub-directory name.

Key Point:

Finally, I will suggest to keep the following points in mind before naming your files:
  • Use web page file name short, simple, descriptive and relevant to page content.
  • Try to use maximum 3-4 keywords in your file name and these keywords should be appeared in your web page title as well.
  • Separate all keyword with hyphen rather than with underscore.
  • Keep your sub directories name as shorter as possible.
  • Keep the file size fewer than 101K though because Google chops almost everything above that.