Head Resist

There goes a popular belief in the world of search engine optimization and that “Content is the King”. A website which provides fresh and relevant content is going to reap the benefits from the search engines in terms of search engine rankings. Google and other major search engines have one primary goal and that is to provide the internet surfers with the most relevant search results for the keyword that they are searching for.

Quantity and Quality of Content:

The first thing to keep in mind when writing content for your website is the quantity of quality content per page. You need to have a good amount of information and text on every page of your website in order to get importance from search engine for your page and its keywords. At least one should have 250 words for each page of website that to get indexed by Google . It’s roughly three average size paragraphs. You need to have this much content on each page in order to make your website informative and relevant. Search Engines only wants to show relevant results to the user and it is quite doubtful that a site with one paragraph would be going to be useful for a searcher.

Having a high quality content which is relevant to your business expertise will help you gain back links automatically. If you are offering tutorials related to SEO, then having plenty of useful content on your website will help you gain back links from other websites.

Usage of Keyword

Another important thing to keep in mind when writing content is usage of keywords. Your keywords should constitute 5% of your total content. A particular keyword should only be repeated 5-8 times in a paragraph consisting of 250 words. You should also make sure to include relevant keywords. A gaming website should not try to optimize content for charity. You should make sure that your keywords are synchronized with the actual content on your website.

Keep providing fresh Content

If you can, then try providing fresh content to Google. Search engines like those websites which produce quality and fresh content on regular basis. Updating and adding content regularly to your website pages will help you gain higher search engine rankings. You can also try to add a Blog on your website. This will help you update your content on regular basis. Writing a Blog at least once a week will make sure that search engines will keep finding fresh data from your website and thus will find your website useful.

It is an incredibly common situation to find yourself in; you have created your first website and you are very proud of how it looks and what it does, you have lots of great information on it, or products to sell, but there is just one thing missing…visitors!

You are not alone, and all is not lost.  What you require is a basic knowledge of search engine optimization, or SEO for short.  SEO is a huge subject, which cannot be covered in detail in any one article, but I will highlight some of the most fundamental points that you need to be aware of in order to drive traffic to your website.

Unless you are prepared to pay for traffic to your website by using adverts on other websites and on search results pages, you need your website to show up in the results pages when someone uses a search engine.  This is the only way to get a constant flow of visitors that you know are looking for what it is you can offer.

The best starting point is probably a rough overview of how search engines work, which will help you understand what it is you need to be doing to keep them happy.  While you must understand that this is a drastic simplification, what a search engine such as Google does when someone searches for something, is along the following lines.  It will sift through all the records it has of every web page it knows about, and see which ones are most relevant to the term being searched for. It then presents them in an order with the sites which it thinks are the most authoritative sources for that subject at the top.

What SEO involves, therefore, is doing the things that will let Google know what search terms your site is relevant to, and demonstrating that your site is an important and authoritative one on that subject.  The slightly more complicated part is how exactly you do that!  Google judges the importance or authority of a website to a large extent by looking at the number and type of other sites that have links to it.  Google sees a link to your site as a vote of confidence in your website by other webmasters.

You can roughly divide SEO activities into two main areas.  There are the things you do to your actual site, which you clearly have direct control over, and then the things you need to do which are off-site.  Building links is the main off-site activity that you will need to engage in.  As it is not possible to go into all aspects of SEO in one article, I will focus on link building as this is the main activity that will help your site rise up the search engine rankings.

Without lots of links from other sites to yours, your website will never appear at the top of the search engine results for any search phrase for which lots of other sites are competing.  It is fair to say that if your site does not appear in the top thirty results of a search, it may as well not exist.  In addition to that, I would say that the difference between being number ten and number one can make an enormous difference to the amount of traffic you get.  A huge number of people do not look further than the top three results

All links are not equal, and links from other sites that Google does not think are important will not count for much.  Neither will links from sites which are about a completely unrelated subject matter.  By far the most useful links you can have are those that come from sites which are about the same subject as your own, and which Google already considers to be an authority on that subject.  One good link is worth dozens of bad ones.

SEO is a vast subject, and the first thing you need to do is read up on it.  It involves a lot of work to get your site to the top of the search results, but it can be done, and there are various useful tools available which can help to speed up the whole process and guide you through the steps you need to take.

Sitemaps

Sitemaps are a great way of telling Google what pages you want to be indexed.

Google will index your site regardless of using a sitemap, however, this tool makes it easier for Google to index those pages you want it to. You can exclude pages if you really want to, but you can use a generator to create the XML formatted file.

Here are some generators:

- DMXZone provide a Dreamweaver extension that will build a sitemap for you in the correct format – http://www.dmxzone.com/go?10538

- Google provide a long list here http://code.google.com/p/sitemap-generators/wiki/SitemapGenerators

- Google talks about Sitemaps here – http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=40318&hl=en

Content Analysis

One of the things Google hates is duplicate content, even worse is duplicate Titles and Descriptions (These are the important Meta Tags)

Webmaster Tools will allow you to see if there are any pages with duplicated titles or duplicated descriptions. This is a very important tool to get the most out of these tags

Web Crawl Diagnostic

Once Google has crawled (indexed) your website, you hope all of your pages are visible in the index. This tool can help you find out if Google had problems finding and pages.

Obviously, if Google can find a page, it wont be in the search engine listings.

This can be bad links, moved content or other easily picked up issues

External Links

This shows all of the links into your website from other pages on the internet.

The best thing is the link on the right hand side that allows you to see all of the inbound links.

(Note: this does not show all of the times your website is mentioned, only the working links people can click on to find you)

In basic search engine terms, the more inbound links the better for you

Geographic Targeting

This one is bit more advanced and will affect a smaller number of people. One of the key changes in Google’s delivery of search results is the pre filtering that is done when you search.

Google will filter your results, even if you don’t ask it to.

As an example, if you do a search for a topic and DO NOT select the “web pages from this country” button your results are still biased towards the country Google believes you are in.

Alternatively, if you select the “web pages from this country” button, you will get results that Google think are directed to that country.

How does it do this?

It shows results for either websites with a country specific suffix ie .nz for New Zealand, or websites that are hosted in that country.

However, if you have a .com website hosted not in New Zealand, you will not be found in the search results for that country specific search.

The solution is to use Google’s Geographic Target, where you can specifiy the county you want to target (Only one, though)



There are plenty of other Tools, including Keywords, Search Phrases etc.

So Webmaster tools is a must have for all Web Designers, but also for those business owners who are keen to see how their sites are performing in Google.

Free? Can’t be any good then! Not so!

The quality, availability and range of free open source software for windows is superb and rivals, if not betters some mainstream software.

So what kind of applications are available?

Just about anything you can think of. I don’t intend to list all that’s available because it would take pages and you can easily do a Google search in your browser but be prepared for long list to go through.

A good place to start for Windows is www.opensourcewindows.org. This site doesn’t list everything rather it lists the most popular.

So let’s have a look at some of those.

One of the most popular is Open Office. Which is a large, full featured suite of tools for word processing and spreadsheets. compatible with and a free replacement for Microsoft Word documents. It also supports the OpenDocument Format and has something that other office suites don’t have, the ability to turn your documents into PDF format.

Best of all, OpenOffice can be downloaded and used entirely free of any licence fees. OpenOffice is released under the LGPL licence. This means you may use it for any purpose – private, commercial, educational, public administration. You may install it on as many PC’s as you like. You may make copies and give them away to family, friends, students, employees – anyone you like.

OK, we’ve saved $500 approximately.

Let’s see what else is on offer.There are browsers, email clients, FTP clients, media players, personal finance and so on and on and on.

One of my favourites and one that I use a lot is Gimp. Full name, GNU Image Manipulation Program. It’s a lot more than a mere manipulation program however. Gimp, in fact is a rival to Photoshop and it’s uses extend to graphics creation, photo enhancement, special effects, drawing, the list goes on covering just about any graphics operation you can think of.

One big plus with Gimp is the ability to open Photoshop PSD files along with the layer information enabling you to edit the PSD’s quite freely

I first came across Gimp on the rare occasions that I happened on a Linux system and assumed it was just the Linux version of Windows Paint accessory. Boy, was I wrong!

Whilst it will be fairly easy to begin using the Open Office suite Gimp is a whole new learning curve. It is, after all a fairly specialist program. Fortunately the internet is full of tutorials of varying degrees and quality covering the different aspects of working with Gimp.

Unfortunately because there are so many it can take hours if not days sorting out the wheat from the chaff and really getting what you want to know to get going. A lot of them are text and screenshots only which aren’t always as easy to follow as video where you can actually see what’s happening.

Being a frequent user of Gimp I have put together a series of 12 video tutorials on getting going with Gimp.Whilst some of these are aimed at creating a salespage the majority cover the essentials of working with Gimp to get you off to a flying start. As well as basic techniques there are advanced techniques covered, such as creating reflections and shadows.

We’ve now just saved ourselves a minimum $700.

Whilst there are many more open source free applications out there to be reviewed I will have to finish here and cover more of them in other articles, so keep an eye out for those.

It really is worth reviewing the open source software available. Apart from really specialised software you can almost certainly find all the programs you will ever need for free.

God bless those programmers who give of their time and talent to create these superb free applications.

There are many aspects to search engine optimization and much discussion about the merits of different approaches, but there is little disagreement about the importance of getting links to your site.  It is generally accepted that when a search engine is asked to search for something, it first of all sifts through its vast database of known websites to find which ones are relevant to the term entered, and then presents all the results in order of importance.

It is how a search engine judges importance that leads us to the subject of links.  Google is a search engine that values good websites, and by good I mean quality ones full of useful information and advice.  The Google guys want to see a web full of sites that offer things people want.  So they make the understandable assumption that if a site is a good one, other websites will link to it to improve their own visitors’ experience.  A site with lots of links going to it from other sites will therefore be taken to be one of some authority in its chosen area.

Important sites in the eyes of Google are those with lots of links pointing to them from other sites, so these are the ones that the search engine will put at the top of its results pages.  We all want our sties to be at the top of the search results because that is the way to get lots of free website traffic.  For your site to be up there where everyone will click on it, you therefore need to get lots of links pointing to it.

An important detail when it comes to links is that all links are not equal in the eyes of Google.  A link from a site that Google considers to be an authority is worth much more than a link from a site it considers to be unimportant.  Similarly, links from sites with a similar theme to your own are worth more than links from ones completely unrelated.

There are many ways to get links to your site, one of the most common ones being link exchange.  This is the process of contacting other webmasters who have similar sites to your own, adding a link to their website and asking them if they would be prepared to link back to yours.  This is a mutually beneficial arrangement which lots of webmasters are happy to participate in.

You need to organise your links carefully to ensure that you get the most benefit from them.  ‘Pagerank’ is Google’s rough measure of a page’s importance and you can check the pagerank of any web page by downloading Google’s toolbar and using the pagerank function on that.  In the same way the links to your site increase your site’s importance (or pagerank) links going out from your site will ‘leak’ a little bit of pagerank too, so you need to manage this carefully.

The best way is to organise all your outgoing links into new directory pages, so that you do not lose any pagerank from your existing and main web pages by putting any links there.  Set up a main link directory page with different categories on it, then have sub pages within this which contain the actual outgoing links for each different category of website.  When you are arranging for other webmasters to link to your site, the links should be directed to a variety of pages, but mainly your home page.

This process can take a lot of time, but it can bear magnificent fruit.  There are also various tools available that can help you speed up and manage this process.