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In this search engine optimization tutorial, let us talk about the importance of having a SEO-friendly web design and architecture. Before you can do any optimization on your site, what you must do is to have a SEO-friendly web design. Why is this so important?

If your website is built on Flash and JavaScript, search engines will not be able to crawl the content of your website. With no content, it is impossible for search engines to award your site with good rankings. Therefore, if your site in built with either of the above platforms, you must change the architecture before any optimization effort can reap reward.

So what if your site contains dynamic pages? A dynamic page contains an URL which looks something like this: “yourdomain/products.asp?productid=59″. When search engines index a dynamic page, it eliminates every thing after the “?” and index “yourdomain/products.asp” which displays nothing. With this, search engines will not be able to index your dynamic pages. Hence, no good ranking will be awarded too.

Therefore if you want to achieve good organic ranking on search engines to drive quality leads for your business, you need to have a SEO-friendly website. It is a norm for every SEO agency to review your site before any optimization can commence. If they find your site unsuitable for SEO, they will suggest changing the architecture of it.

In order to optimize more keywords on your site, pages with quality content are very important. Therefore, it is important to plan the sitemap of your website properly. Let’s say that you wish to optimize a particular product called “Product ABC – Model ZZZ”of your company. The best practice is to create a page which only talks about this product. Place the product name in your Title and Meta tags, and within the content of the page. You should also name the page according to the product name such as “Product-ABC.html”. This will make this page highly relevant to search engines when someone searches for “Product ABC – Model ZZZ”. This will make search engines to give your listing a higher ranking in the search result page.

To add more interactive to your website, instead of building it entirely on Flash, you can use Flash banner instead. Flash banner adds interactivity to your site, without jeopardising the need to have quality content for search engines to index.

Good SEO performance always results from having good website architecture. With a SEO-friendly website, you are on the right track to obtain high organic ranking on search engines.

After an email inquiry from a small business website owner who had considered adding a flash presentation to their website, it’s time to emphasize the search engine optimization value of flash and other multimedia website content. For a small business commercial website design, my advice is avoiding content that requires a large file size such as multimedia. Unless it is absolutely required and does NOT load automatically, visitors on dialup will leave immediately due to the intolerable load time.

Exceptions might be photographers or graphic artists showing high resolution versions of their work, or perhaps a recording studio with sample music or videos. The average small business owner does not need autoloading multimedia.

Here is a response to the email from the site owner previously mentioned who was considering flash:

“Why would you want to add a flash scene to your site? In my list of “Don’t do this” for website design, flash is at the top of the list. It has zero SEO value, and the file size is intolerable for people on dialup. With more than 50% of internet users still on dialup you cut off half your potential visitors by having flash. Unlike videos that allow visitors to make a choice of play or not, flash loads automatically and cannot be avoided. People visit commercial websites for information. Flash is “entertainment” and most people want answers to problems, so my advice is stay focused on text content that search engines can index.”

Let’s consider audio and video next. Another client wants background music to play automatically when a visitor arrives at any page of her restaurant website. This is an intrusion of the visitor’s expectations and privacy, and could actually get them in trouble. Imagine a visitor at work with their speakers turned up, and searching for an area restaurant to visit that evening. The embarrassment of being caught engaged in non-work related surfing on company time could get them fired. Giving visitors a choice with a play button would be more appropriate.

The real question for any small business owner is deciding if music or video in their commercial website design will enhance the sales of their product or service. If the value is strictly entertainment, don’t do it. Another client insisted having flash content on their site, and stated their average sale is $500,000 and they were confident their target market all use high speed internet access. That seems appropriate at first. However, a site done entirely in flash has zero content when it comes to search engines. A 100% flash website will not get traffic driven by search engines, so the owner’s success depends on direct marketing and driving visitors to the website.

Audio, whether voice or music, may be appropriate. Video certainly provides an opportunity to introduce your business, demonstrate a product, or provide advice as a tutorial. As long as these do not autoload and the visitor is given the choice of listening or viewing, multimedia may enhance the experience and sales potential. A visual or audio experience may create a more lasting impression as long as it’s not forced on the viewer. Weigh the pros and cons first.

Next, consider the marketing basics of matching target customers and their needs to what you offer, and then decide the most appropriate method of delivering your sales message. Multimedia is content that cannot be viewed or rated by search engines, so if search engine optimization and driving traffic to your site is important, be careful with multimedia choices for your small business website design.

Finally, people search the internet for information with answers to problems. Problems are perceived needs that visitors want to have solved. The goal is the same whether you call their motivation “information” or a “problem”. If your website is optimized for people first, and then considers search engines, you are more likely to convert visitors to buying customers. People looking for answers are impatient. If your competition has a small business website that uses flash or other autoloading multimedia and you do not, potential customers are more likely to find answers quickly on your website.

Understanding what visitors to commercial small business websites really want, could give you the competitive edge.

The process of search engine optimization involves tweaking various aspects of your website and deals only with the organic search results. It has nothing to do with paid search also known as inorganic search or PPC. In order to improve your positioning in the organic search results, these guidelines will point out the tactics on how you can improve the visibility of your website.

Page Title:

Page title also referred to as the ‘title tag’ needs to be unique for each page of your website. This tag tells search engines and also the visitors what that particular webpage is all about. The title tag of each page should contain the business/website name followed with important information that relates to the webpage. One must avoid the following:

Recording a title tag that is not relevant to the information present on the webpage. Recording the same title tag across all the pages of the website. Recording long title tags.

Meta Description:

The Meta description tag gives both the search engines and also the visitors who perform a search on the search engine an idea on what the web page is all about. That’s why it’s important to precisely summarize the content of your webpage. It’s always safe to keep the meta description tag within 160 characters (including spaces), as the rest of it gets truncated. One must avoid the following:

Writing a meta description that is not relevant to the information presented on the webpage. Recording the same meta description across all the web pages of the website. Recording the meta description with only keywords.

URL Structure:

It’s important to create a URL structure that is friendly to the search engines as this will help in better indexing of your website. For this reason, it is essential to create appropriate filenames and expressive categories on your website. One must avoid the following:

Recording long URLs Recording the same URL across all the web pages. Recording deep nested subdirectories Recording irrelevant directory names.

Website Navigation:

A website that is easy to navigate can help the visitors to find the information they are looking for. It also helps the search engines in indexing the pages appropriately. It is important to ensure that all the web pages of your website are interlinked properly and also show the correct page when clicked on. The use of sitemaps both HTML and XML help the spiders to crawl the website easily and also index it. One must avoid the following:

Creating complex websites that are difficult to navigate. Creating drop-down menus. Developing a HTML sitemap in which the pages are not organized. Indexing the 404 page in the search engine.

Unique Content:

The content that is hosted on your webpage needs to be informative, such that it can elicit action. Ensure that the content is not copied and is 100% your own creativity. Keep the content focused around your primary keywords and ensure that the keyword density is around 2.75% to 3.21%. It is also good to keep changing the content on your website so that the visitors can see that the site is not static but dynamic with its content. One must avoid the following:

Using images that serve as textual content. Using long sentences. Incorrect grammar and spelling mistakes. Duplicate content on the web pages of your website. Stuffing keywords unnecessarily.

Anchor Text:

Anchor texts are links that direct visitors to the internal pages of the website or to an external page/website. Anchor text helps the users to easily navigate between pages and also helps the spiders to understand what the page is all about, that it is linked to. One must avoid the following:

Using general anchor texts. Using anchor text that is not related to the content of the webpage or is off topic. Using long sentences. Creating unnecessary links.

Heading Tags:

Heading tags are used to represent the heading of the content of the webpage. Heading tags range in 6 sizes – h1, h2, h3, h4, h5 and h6. These tags should only be used at the appropriate places. One must avoid the following:

Using one heading tag for the entire content of the webpage. Using too many heading tags throughout the content of the webpage.

Alt Tag Optimization:

Images can’t be read by a spider when they crawl on the website. Therefore, it is important to use alt tags for the images. It is best suggested to use the primary keyword as the alt tag following the contents that describe the page. One must avoid the following:

Using long filenames. Stuffing excess of keywords in the alt tags.

Robots.txt File:

A robots.txt file is used to prohibit the robots to crawl a particular page based on the nature and content of information that is available. This file must be placed in the root directory of your site and also named as robots.txt. One must avoid the following:

Search result pages to be crawled.

Website Promotion:

You can promote your website using offline promotion, online promotion, social media sites, AdWords optimization, Google’s Local Business Center, forming groups, forums etc.

Once you have implemented or taken note of all these tactics, do use the Google Webmaster Tools that will help you in solving many of the issues that are related to your website. You can also monitor the performance of your website by using Google Analytics.

Search engine optimization requires many hours of research before the process actually begins. SEO tools are a great saving of time, often for information and data in seconds rather than the duration of control of the hand for SEO related information.

Even if an SEO tool offers the possibility of saving the time needed to obtain data quickly, the tools do not replace the need to become familiar with the experience and SEO guidelines. Before an SEO tool can be useful, it must first get used to each of the

major search engines and their algorithms in order to better understand and apply the data you are looking for in your SEO project.

Example of tools that help a webmaster of security are the detection time of sand tool, ranking tool, back link tool, keyword tool. Search engine seo tools are tools that can make a web master for success in achieving the information in a short period of time.

There are many seo tools found on SEO Tools Are Real Time Savers Search engine optimization requires many hours of research before the process actually begins. SEO tools are a great saving of time, often for information and data in seconds rather than the duration of control of the hand for SEO related information.

Even if an SEO tool offers the possibility of saving the time needed to obtain data quickly, the tools do not replace the need to become familiar with the experience and SEO guidelines. Before an SEO tool can be useful, it must first get used to each of the

major search engines and their algorithms in order to better understand and apply the data you are looking for in your SEO project. Example of tools that help a webmaster of security are the detection time of sand tool, ranking tool, back link tool, keyword tool. Search engine seo tools are tools that can make a web master for success in achieving the information in a short period of time.

There are many seo tools that can be found on the Internet. I propose that every tool you search the website and make sure there are no restrictions on this tool. Find copyright before downloading a tool. More SEO tools can be found by searching on Google for referencing Tools’ internet. I propose that every tool you search the website and make sure there are no restrictions on this tool. Find copyright before downloading a tool. More SEO tools can be found by searching on Google for SEO Tools.

You’ve spent hours upon hours building and tweaking your website until you’re finally proud and satisfied to show it off to the world. You check daily for the traffic of visitors to wander through, and praise all your hard work. Days go by, and still only a couple of people have checked anything out – what’s happening?!?

Well, chances are that nobody really knows your site is online. While it’s true that the search engines may eventually stumble upon your site if it finds a link on another webpage somewhere online, you’ll likely be indexed so low in the listing that very few people will find you. Let’s fix your problem using the huge arsenal of Webmaster Tools you may have missed the first time around. We’ll break down all the tools into three categories: SEO (Search Engine Optimization), Site Link Submissions, and Tracking systems.

SEO TOOLS

Though you’ll be tempted to send a link for your site into the search engines (SE) right away, don’t do it! Yes the search engines will accept adding your website to their long waiting list, but you’ll be standing way at the back of the line if you don’t prepare your pages properly first.

Search Engines will actually give a higher priority to accepting pages that have already done some of the work for them. The first Webmaster Tool to check into is the Meta Tag Generator. Hopefully you’ve given each page a short “Title” (which will appear at the top of the browser when people look at your page), but we definitely want to include at least two more Meta tag code types on each individual webpage.

Description

Include a short description about what’s on that specific webpage. This is the description which will appear under the link for your site when it’s listed in the search engines. Think of this as your classified advertisement – you want the description to attract enough interest that users will check out your site.

Do not fill the space with random hype. The SE will give a much higher relevancy score when the description matches phrases from your actual content. Get rid of as many filler words (the, and, of) as possible for the best results.

Keywords

These are the main words you want the SE to consider when listing your site. Don’t list every word you “want”, and DO NOT include words that aren’t actually in your content. The search engines may include you temporarily, but they will drop you just as quickly when they realize you’ve added words that aren’t even in your webpage.

Rather than listing single words, concentrate on specific phrases (of 2 to 4 words each) that appear in your webpage. Many people make the mistake of listing every word or phrase they can think of or want, but the engines generally only consider the first 20. Focus on the main phrases in your keyword list: the search engines will find the rest on their own. Separate the words/phrases with a comma. If you need help picking out some of your best keyword choices for that page, use the Keyword Density webmaster tool. It will help pinpoint some of your best options.

You can add in other fields as you want, but the generator only really needs the number of days for the SE to revisit. Just enter 7 days (even if the page changes daily) for normal pages, or 365 days for pages that won’t be changing for a year. The search engines assign their own revisit schedule, so setting the days lower than 7 to try fooling the SE is foolish.

SUBMITTING YOUR WEBSITE

You could set up a webmaster account with each of the main search engines, but the Simple Submission tool will take care of getting your website included in the queue with just one button. It may take a while before the search engines actually check out your website (there are almost a million new sites added to the internet each month), so use the submission tool to make sure the main SE know you exist.

TRACKING SYSTEMS

Welcome to the most useful (and most overlooked) devices to pinpoint exactly how your website is succeeding, and where it’s failing! To save yourself hours of time and frustration, use the Pages Indexed tool as your number one guidance to see if the search engines have started indexing your website. You could go to each SE in turn, and try entering the name of your site, but unless it appears on the first or second page, you could spend hours looking for it (if it is even listed yet). The pages indexed will not only let you know which SE have picked up your site, but also which specific pages it has included in its listings.

Want to find out how your keywords or target phrases are doing with the Big-Three (Google, Yahoo, and MSN), then do it all in one step using the Position Checker. It will tell you right away how close you are to the top of each SE. If the results show you’re way down in the listings, this will be the perfect time to re-optimize your page and keywords for better phrase choices that can get you to a higher ranking position.

Are you getting slaughtered or not showing up for important phrases? Then it’s time to spy on your neighbor – which, in this case, is your competitor. Uses the Competitor Analysis to see how they are getting the keyword listings you want. Tweak your site a bit, and you may quickly overtake them.

MORE TO EXPLORE

There are so many fantastic tools available, and each serves its own specialized purpose. Make use of every Webmaster Tool available to build your ranking score … and check out the Crazy Egg tool – it’s probably one of the hottest tools you’ll ever find!