Search engine optimization involves the optimization of many different parts of your site and to optimized effectively you need to look at each of the following entities:
- Keywords
- Meta data
- Content
- Inward Links
- Header Tags
- Alt Tags
- Internal Links
- Website Structure
- Website Theme
- Website Code
Before anything else you need to make sure you web code validates and contains no errors. Search engines inspect web site code to make sure the code is valid and passes their validity checks. They do not inspect the presentation they inspect, query, examine and validate the code itself.
Over the past 10+ years companies and individuals that have sought to have their website(s) appear first in the various Search Engines result lists have employed various methods. At the present time the term SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is used to describe the practice and methodology of enabling a website to appear higher up in the order of search engine queries. You’ll hear the terms “White Hat SEO” and “Black Hat SEO” and its not too difficult to figure out what those terms imply. As with many human activities there are ethical and non-ethical techniques as well as the gray areas in between.
In reference to Google if they determine that you have used non-ethical means to ensure that your listing appears higher up in the search results order than they can and usually will hold that against you. As a result if they determine that you have violated their best practices and standards you may have no recourse but to start all over by acquiring a new domain name and building another web site.
If you decide to use Google’s free Toolbar you take advantage of several of the features available via their toolbar. One such feature is the Backward Link Checker. A backward links is simply a link that comes into your website from another website.
Some of the things you can use Google’s Backward Link Checker for are:
- See who links to your website
- Assess the quality of the links
- Find out who your competition or comparative sites to yours are
- Source new links for your website
The Google Toolbar presents you with the familiar browser interface to discover the above information. You simply navigate to your site, hit the backward link button and see if anyone has links to your site.
Once, you have discovered a page that links to your site, you can navigate to that site and find out some information on the site such as the PageRank, the anchor text used for the link and whether or not you can get a link from the page. The toolbar make is much easier to assess this information otherwise the process can become very time consuming and tedious.
Using Google’s Cached Pages Checker (another Google Toolbar function) you can see exactly how Google sees your web page as well as find out when it was last crawled and cached by Google. The cached page checker shows you how Google saw your page when Google last visited your website. If you are using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) this view of your page may be very different then what your page looks like in a Browser. Google is only interested in the content and that is what will be displayed, the content in terms of Google’s eyes. This tool will indicate whether or not Google has picked up (noticed) changes that may have been made to the site and whether or not Google has updated its cache to reflect those changes. In the case that Google has visited your site but hasn’t updated its cache with your changes that may be indicative of the fact that Google may not think the changes make any real difference to the site’s relevance.
Unfortunately the only way to gain access to some of the tools Google has to offer is to sign up for a Google account. However, on a positive note you get access to these tools and Google contains to add more:
- Froogle
- Personalized Search
- Analytics
- AdWords
- AdSense
- Sitemaps
- Google Alerts
- Google Groups
Google Sitemaps
Having a Google sitemap offers the following benefits:
- Understanding Google’s view of your site
- Diagnosing potential problems with your site
- Seeing how Google crawls and indexes your site
- Leadning what search phrases bring traffic to your site
- Sharing information with Google to facilitate the indexing of your site
Sitemaps is one of the more useful tools. It enables you to tell Google when your site has changed and what was done to it. This will give you more control over how quickly Google re-crawls your site after making changes to it.
The other nice feature is Google will feed back to you information about your site and visitors to your site which can aid you in evaluating the effectiveness of your site.
Google Analytics
If you want to see how many hits your site has received on what day and from who then Google Analytics is the place where you will find that information and more. Google Analytics service will provide you with information regarding your site and its visitors.
The Google Toolbar is available for Firefox 3.0 which is good news to Apple users who are interested in Web SEO. If you already have a Google account you can this service to your profile or you can create a new account. The web site for Google Analytics is: .
Once you have established your account you proceed to add the site(s) you wish to have analyzed. You can add other users and grant them either administrative access or assign them a role whereby they can only view reports. During the site registration process a code snippet will be display that you will have to copy and paste into the site’s main page at the location specified by Google. You have a choice between the Legacy Tracking Code (urchin.js) or the newer version (ga.js). The legacy version will not receive features updates whereas the newer version will as those features become available. Google recommends that you do not include both tracking code snippets together on any one page. Doing so may generate inaccurate report data. You can, however, according to Google migrate select pages of your site to the new tracking code while the legacy code remains on others.
Google suggests copying the code block into every webpage you want to track and insert it immediately before the tag. If your site has dynamic content you can use a common include or a template to accomplish this. In the body of the code is a block of text that contains xxxx-x which needs to be replaced with your Google Analytics account number.
If you have secure pages, the Google Analytics tracking code is now the same for both secure and non-secure websites. The new tracking code detects the protocol of the page being tracked and matches the security of your web page automatically. Pages with URLs beginning with http:// will download the non-secure version at http://www.google-analytics.com/qa.js and pages with URLs beginning with https://ssl.google-analytics.com/qa.js. No modification of the tracking code on secure pages is required.
Although previous versions of the tracking code (urchin.js) required you to copy/paste special tracking code into your secure pages, this is no longer necessary if you are tracking your site with qa.js. YOu can use the same tracking code on both secure (https://) and non-secure (http://) pages.
Web ceo
Web ceo is a web site that offers various services geared towards SEO. They do have software that can be downloaded and installed for free with the restriction that its use be restricted to your own site(s). There is a full version that is available for a fee. They also offer a free training program and certificate to everyone who downloads their software. Some of the features their software offers are:
- Keyword research
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Link popularity analyzer
- PPC campaign manager
- Ranking checker
- Web Analytics
To obtain a free copy visit their website at:
The most important part of optimizing any website is the selection and implementation of the keywords. If you do not get this key element right then everything else will be wasted. Target the right keywords and your website will be a success; target the wrong keywords and you will miss out on the traffic and audience you are trying to target.
Keywords are very important to the site because without them your website theme will not be focused resulting in Google not ranking your site very high. Keywords should be identified and incorporated throughout the whole design of your website so that you can ensure it is focused on targeting the ones you have chosen. This will ensure not only that your content stays on track and is more relevant to your searchers but also that Google can see how relevant your website is. This will enhance your chances or gaining a higher position within Google for search phrases that will generate real traffic.
