Archive for the ‘SEO Tips’ Category

SEOnoobs.com

Tuesday, January 29th, 2008

Today i was lurking one of the many webmaster forums, and came across this contest. This would have to be one of the ” now thats different ” contests out there.

If i may quote the original SEOnoobs.com website:

SEOnoobs.com is hosting a SEO contest?

Glad you asked! Basically, at 8pm Central time on February 4th (Monday night), a post will go up here on SEONoobs.Com announcing a keyword or keyphrase that returns ZERO search results. The point of the contest is to build a brand spankin’ new site, and at 8pm Central on March 4th, whoever’s site/blog ranks highest for the said keyword/keyphrase, wins all sorts of fabulous stuff, including a grand prize package worth over $700! (maybe more, who knows!)

I know a lot of folks that visit this blog are pretty new to SEO, so I figured, why not put some of their newly gained SEO knowledge right to work! Not only will you prove to yourself that you can properly SEO a website or blog, but you’ll also have something to stick on your Resume (haha!), not to mention MASSIVE bragging rights, and you’ll walk away with some awesome prizes”

Here is the link to the latest update.

Now! Didn’t i tell you it was “different”

So what are you waiting for, all you SEO gurus out there.

” Go For It “

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SEO H1 Tags

Friday, January 25th, 2008

This SEO tip moved my website 300 places on google.com.au

Some search engines will give words found in the “H1″ tag a boost in relevancy. The H1 tag is used to specify page or topic headings. The problem with the tag is that it’s often too big and ugly to use very much. In most browsers H1 is an oversized font that often looks out of place on a page.
The good news is that there is a clever way you can get the best of both worlds by using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). With CSS, you can specify that the browser display the H1 tag or other tags on your page anyway you please. This is great since you can get both a boost in relevancy and get better control of your page’s appearance in one easy step. How?
In the <HEAD> area of the page, put the following STYLE lines:

<STYLE TYPE=”text/css”>
H1 {font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: black}
</STYLE>

The above will force all H1 tags on the page to use a 12 pt Arial or Helvetica font in black text. You can adjust the point size or font to whatever values look best on your page. By using this CSS tag, you are free to use the H1 tag on ALL your pages to gain extra relevancy WITHOUT sacrificing the look of your pages. Since many engines give more weight to keywords that appear within H1 heading tags versus the regular body text, this is one tip you’ll definitely want to implement today!
or

H1 {
font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size: 12pt;
color: #000000;
background-color: #ffffff;
}

or

h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 {
color: #000000;
font-size : 12px;text-decoration: none; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;}

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Page Title SEO

Sunday, January 20th, 2008

You have your site all setup but no-one is visiting! That is where you need SEO – search engine optimization. You can pay money to a SEO expert but it is also possible to do it yourself, FREE.

There is much debate about whether the domain name should include one of your main keywords. I look at it as another little plus in our SEO plan. So if you have a domain name without one of your main keywords you can still use these tips.

We are using our other site www.zipposuperstore.com as an example.

So we have our three popular main keywords for our zippo store:
zippo lighters
zippo tricks
zippo collections

If you look closely all contain the word “zippo”. This is to make things easy when we look at off page ranking, which we will talk about in future blogs.

First thing we need to look at is the page title. The page title should only include our main keywords. Try not to use too many words as Google will give more weight to each of your keywords and you will rank higher.

Please, the page title should not say, “Welcome to our website”. Also do not use say ” zippo lighters and zippo tricks and zippo collections”. Though the last does contain our keywords it does looka little long.

So we will shorten it by doing this “zippo | zippo lighter tricks | collections. Notice We took out the “ands” and replaced them with a “|”. Also only used “zippo” twice for keyword densitity. When possible always combine your keywords to cut down on the total number of words used in your page title. When google looks at our title it will see all 3 of our keywords.

Next SEO blog we will look at ways to boost your ranks by nearly 300 pages by using one simple method.

Album i am listening to: Johnny Cash at San Quentin

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Keyword SEO

Friday, January 18th, 2008

We shall use our sister site www.zipposuperstore.com to show you how easy SEO is, and that it can be done free. Zipposuperstore.com is an Australian site, but these tips can be used globally. Australian customers are our main focus, so we will use the stats from Google.com.au for our main keyword, zippo. As of 18/01/08 there are 28,700,000 pages listed, so if we want to rank on the first page for this targeted keyword we need SEO. First thing you need to do is find which keywords are being searched for. The two keyword research tools we use are:

http://inventory.overture.com/ ( when it works )
and
http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/index.php

Searching zippo on these sites, gives us these following most popular searched keywords: zippo, zippo lighters, zippo tricks and zippo lighter tricks. These are the keywords we want to target. But other searched for terms are collections, faqs and collectors, so we will want to use these keywords too. This will improve keyword densitity, which we will explain in future blogs.

Keywords of single words is useful to attract the general audience and helps in getting high ranks,if the web site is new. Keywords of single words should be used more in the root level pages or top level domain pages. This is because these pages are the ones that attract the general traffic & are generally the pages which do not specify specifics. Hence single word keywords based on themes can be targeted for on these pages. (more…)

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SEO Basic Tips #1

Thursday, January 17th, 2008

I look at a lot of sites on a daily basis. There are a lot of common problems I see on sites. Some people may have tags set-up improperly or use tags that have no real purpose. I have compiled a list of the 5 top do-it-yourself SEO errors. It’s safe to say that many do-it-yourselfers may have at least one of these errors on their sites. These should help you omit these often costly mistakes and pull you up in the ranks.

1) Keyword tag – A keyword tag is for keywords, but not for any keywords. You can’t just stuff this tag with keywords that your entire site is related to. The tags should reflect keywords only on that particular page; not the entire site and not every keyword you think your site might be searched on. Also, you should have no more then 20 words in the tag. You should not repeat any word more than 3 times. If you sell tickets, for example, don’t write: Broadway tickets, circus tickets, hockey tickets, boxing tickets and so on. Do use Broadway, circus, hockey, boxing, tickets and so on.

2) Abstract tag – It is sometimes used as a replacement for or combined with a description tag. However, more and more people are using these to stuff keywords. Search engines like Google are interested in what is on the page. More specifically, what visitors can view. In my opinion, the abstract tag has no place on a site.

3) Description Tag – The whole point behind this tag is to describe what the “page” is about. Keywords related to the page should be implemented as well. The limit on words should be 20 – 25. I see many website owners stuffing this tag with keywords, or having a description that is entirely too lengthy. Stay within these guidelines and you will be fine.

4) Title tag – This, to me, is the most important tag. This is the first tag the search engine reads. It tells the search engine what the” page” is about. Don’t put your web address here. Do not add your company name in the beginning of this tag either. It should not exceed 60 characters.

5) Content- If you notice, I have been commenting on relevancy to the “page”, not your overall site. Each page has it’s own keywords. Tag the title tag, description and keyword tags. All of these keywords should be the same. Add them to your content as well. Now your page should be fairly well optimized.

Why do sites fall short? Simple, content is not optimized. Search engines are, for the most part, pretty basic. You type in a search term and it retrieves sites containing those terms while also taking a few other factors into account. So, if your site doesn’t have these terms, how will you be found? You won’t. Over do it with keywords and you will experience the same result, but for different reasons. Sometimes reading everything about SEO can be bad. Trying too many tricks, tips or methods is like too many cooks spoiling the soup. In the end they can do more bad than good. These are very basic rules that should be followed by all. In, doubt? Always consult or hire an SEO professional.

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Basic SEO

Wednesday, January 16th, 2008

You can achieve high rankings and even have your website listed on pages 1 or 2 on Google for your main keywords simply by applying certain rules.

The one i think about most is… How can i help the search engines provide relevant search results!

While I am far from being an Search Engine Optimization ( SEO ) expert, i am just sharing experiences here, I’ve achieved some fantastic results by following these basic rules and without resorting to any ‘tricks’. More importantly, these are rankings that will last.

Please i am not suggesting you shouldn’t learn about SEO or use genuine search engine optimization software that helps, you should. But as usual i will try do this all free, as i have done on our site and will show you links to the websites we use for our search engine optimization a bit later.

You do not need to spend any money on SEO ebooks or other programmes when it is all available on the net free!
SEO can be done FREE, it just takes a little time and patience.

Sometimes SEO can even be fun, especially when i am spying on our competiors to see what they are doing.

Here are our rankings for our some of our main keywords

Google.com.au as of 28/12/01

zippo: rank 7 out of 28,600,000
zippo lighters: 3 out of 139,000
zippo tricks: 11 out of 42,500
zippo lighter tricks: 14 out of 36,500
zippo collections: 2 out of 147,000

On google.com

zippo: 42 out of 28,600,000
zippo lighters 18 out of 137,000
zippo tricks: 15 out of 42,600
zippo lighter tricks: 11 out of 36,800
zippo collections: 7 out of 147,000

While these are not exactly earth shattering results i think it’s not a bad effort for a first time website and done totally FREE. In the next few blogs i will be revealing all my secrets.

So please, check back and let me know your opinion on our SEO tips, how these tips have worked for you or maybe let us know about your search engine optimization tips

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