Here's a number of SEO tips I've picked up along the way and a link to the full article...
Keyword Introduction and On-page Factors
Following Search Engine Guidelines will Increase Your Rankings
Webmasters and search engine optimizers often search for ways to get their site better indexed and improve their rankings. You can scour Search Engine Optimization (SEO) forums, read books and talk to other webmasters. But often, one of the most valuable ranking resources is forgotten: the search engines themselves. All three major crawlers, Google, MSN (Windows Live) and Yahoo! offer comprehensive, webmaster-friendly help sections on optimizing your site. Before setting off to optimize your site, make sure you got the basics down by following the rules of the game. The following white paper is a summation of "keyword best practices," as outlined by the major search engines, to maximize your placement on Search Engines.
"Natural" Search Engine Optimization
The process of trying to get your site ranked better in search engine results has become known as "natural" or "organic" search engine optimization (SEO). Since search engines are extremely popular with users and bring in pre-qualified traffic, many sites want to know how they can improve their rankings in non-paid search results. Anyone can launch a pay-per-click campaign on Google, but only a few sites rise to the top of search results. Why is it important to be ranked high organically? Only 20% of browsers ever click on pay-per-click links. The other 80% click on the organic results.
Before you can understand how each search engine scores web sites, you need to understand the various factors they consider. These factors can be divided into two categories, on-page and offsite.
On-page factors are concerned with keywords and their placement in the HTML:
Off-site factors are not related to the content of your HTML, but rather to the overall quality of your site, search engines perceive it. The major off-site factor is Link popularity and everything related to it, such as the following:
Achieve results
You can improve most of the above factors to achieve higher rankings. We recommend that you work on both on-page and off-site factors at the same time. This is especially important for sites targeting general and highly competitive terms. The search engine marketing landscape is simply too competitive right now to ignore either page-related factors or link popularity.
Digital Hill is in the process of launching a series of microsites targeting specific geographic regions with web design. This is an effort to continue to get the word out that Digital Hill is available and ready to serve the web design, e-Marketing, and web application needs of the greater Michiana area.
A few of the sites launched thus far include websitedesignsouthbend.com, and chicagowebdesignshop.com. These sites serve the specific geographic areas of Elkhart, South Bend, and Chicago which Digital Hill services from our web design main office in Goshen, IN.
Digital Hill is a full service web design agency offering a complete set of web services for business and organizations.
New SEO tools and expanded full-service e-Mail Marketing campaigns are just a few of the tools that Digital Hill is offering to clients in the greater Michiana region.
Digital Hill services clients nationwide while maintaining a specific focus on regional clients.
Here's a good article on Search Engine Optimization.
We often want to put in place a bunch of "tactics" that involve the programming but search engines, especially Google, are getting smarter and able to more and more read sites exactly as humans do. By the way, Google is up in the mid-60's now in marketshare of all search engine traffic. That means more than 60% of all searches by people being done on the web are done via Google. As well, stats say that more than 50% of people use a search engine to find your site as opposed to directly typing in your site url into the browser.
All this means that CONTENT ON YOUR SITE MATTERS in terms of how you register in the organic (free) search results.
Also, tracking your data is critical as well to improve your website SEO. To improve your tracking of where you rank for different keyword phrases, we recommend you use a web tool for this. Here is a SEO tool from WhatsmySERP that can really help you with the tracking.
Read more here from this blog post by Toma Bonciu.
Excellent simple slide shows are available to view at vizedu.com.
Marketing is changing. Learn about the shifts and be prepared to shift to e-Marketing!
