Meet Our Authors
- Bob S
- Dee Anne Kotzer
- Gabe Y
- Gerry V
- Jane H
- Jeff Tincher
- Kelly Kilpatrick
- Marge R
- Mike G
- Neall A
- Peggy S
- Sheri T
Simple Ways to Make Sure Your Site Is SEO Ready
By Jeff Tincher
Image via Wikipedia
How do you Search Engine Optimization (SEO) a website to improve your search and page rank? That is one of the most asked questions by companies and web designers on forums and blog sites. Even when a business asks a designer or developer to create a website, they are specifically asking for a Search Engine Optimized Site, knowing that this fine-tuning is needed to give the site a chance at reaching the top on Google or other search engines.
Listed below are ten simple ways to SEO your site or blog that will have an immediate improvement to search engines.
- Rule Zero: Do Not Cheat Google, they will find out.
- Rule One: Stick to Your Keywords
- Rule Two: Content is King
- Rule Three: Clean Code is Searchable Code
- Rule Four: The Home Page is the Most Important Page
- Rule Five: Links Have Meaning
- Rule Six: Title Tags for the Win
- Rule Seven: Alt Tags Matter
- Rule Eight: Ignore Most Meta Tags
- Rule Nine: Have a Site Map
- Rule Ten: Design for Humans
Visit this link for more details on the above tips!
For further reading I recommend this SEO Guide for Designers.
Do you have any SEO tips you want to share? Please leave a comment.
Filed Under SEO |
SERPs - Taking Control
By Marge R
Ok, I promised you some specific HTML tags for controlling your web page’s description in the search engine results pages. If you remember, the different search engines display different things … your meta description tag, the description from the Open Directory Project, or the Yahoo Directory description.
Under all circumstances, you want to add a meta description tag to your web pages, since this is the most utilized. This should be positioned in the HTML <head> section:
<meta name = “description” content = “Your page description here.” />
If you don’t want the search engines to grab the description from the Open Directory Project, use a robots tag to tell them to ignore that description:
<meta name=”robots” content=”noodp” />
To tell Yahoo to ignore their directory description:
<meta name=”robots” content=”noydir” />
The other piece of information that the search engines like to use is a text snippet from the page content that matches the keyword searched. There is nothing you can do to control this. But really … as searchers, many of us like to see that there is content that matches our search on the web page before we follow the link to the page. So the text snippets are probably not a bad thing.
Filed Under Dreamweaver, Expressions Web, FrontPage, General, SEO, Web Technologies, search |
Search Engine Results Lists
By Marge R
It’s me again, with more information about search engines and how they work. This time I’m looking at the search engine results pages (SERPs) … and how they come up with the descriptions that they use for your web pages.
Have you ever wondered how the search engines determine what to display on their results list pages describing your site? Sometimes it is an excerpt from your page content, although not always the same excerpt. Other times they grab the description meta tag information. And other times it seems to come out of nowhere.
So here is how it is done:
Google uses the description from the meta tag, if there is one. If the description meta tag is missing, they will use a sentence from the page that contains the searched keyword. And if the web page is listed in the Open Directory Project (dmoz.org), Google sometimes uses the description in the DMOZ directory.
Yahoo uses a combination of the first part of the meta description tag’s content, along with a text snippet from the page containing the searched keyword. If there is no meta description tag, Yahoo will use the description from Yahoo’s directory. If there is no description in the directory either, Yahoo will just display relevant text snippets from the page.
MSN/Live uses the first sentence on the page that contains the searched keyword. If the searched keyword doesn’t appear on the page, they use the first sentence on the page. If a description exists in the DMOZ directory, MSN/Live will use that description.
So how do you take control of your description in the results list? Check back here for specific HTML tags for controlling your page’s results list description …
Filed Under Dreamweaver, Expressions Web, FrontPage, General, SEO, Web Technologies, search |
Source: WikipediaAre you using Dreamweaver templates for your web site to make the management of pages simpler? Have you ever tried to do any SEO and could NOT change the meta tags on specific pages linked to the template? Here is a quick and simple solution that will get your site ready for SEO.
Open up your page template and look at your template in code view. Locate where your meta tags begin and insert the following line just before the first tag.
<!-- TemplateBeginEditable name="meta or whatever you want to name it here" -->
After the last meta tag insert this line
<!– TemplateEndEditable –>
Ok, you should now be able to edit each page associated to the template file and edit the specific meta tags.
This is good practice to get used to. Proper meta tags, and title are key to SEO rankings.
Filed Under Dreamweaver, SEO | 3 Comments
You Gotta Love Google!
By Marge R
We’ve all learned to expect the clever manipulations of the Google logo on holidays (check out Google Holiday Logos).
Here are some other lesser known tidbits about Google:
You can set the Google homepage, messages, and even the buttons to display in the language of your choice (check out the list of Google languages). My favorites are Swedish Chef and Pig Latin.
Google does currency conversion. Go ahead, try it. Just type something into the search text box … like 500 euros in USD … and when you click Search, it will return something like 500 Euros = 737.25 U.S. Dollars.
Google is a calculator. Again, type your calculation into the search text box. Some sample queries provided by Google to demonstrate the power:
5+2*2
2^20
sqrt(-4)
half a cup in teaspoons
160 pounds * 4000 feet in Calories
You can search for content on your own computer using Google Desktop.
You can use Google to find definitions by preceding the word, or term, with “define:” in the search text box. For example: define:turkey.
Want a review of a movie, or a list of movie showtimes in your neighborhood? Try Googling it:
Need a quick stock update? Google it.
Ok … I think that’s enough for one blog entry. But expect more from our friends at Google. In fact, Google is currently planning to build a research center on the moon, codenamed Google Copernicus Hosting Environment and Experiment in Search Engineering (G.C.H.E.E.S.E.).
Filed Under General, SEO, Web Technologies |
For those of you who have been following my recent posts, you know that we are conducting some search engine optimization experiments on the Tiny Toes Portraits website, trying to move it forward in the Google rankings. Our original rank was non-existent, unless you typed ‘Tiny Toes Portraits’ into the search text box. With a little keyword research, we identified the main words and phrases that we wanted to target, and made a minor change to the page title … including some of those keywords. That put us in the rankings. Not at the top … but we were within the top 50 out of 75,000. So that was progress.
We have made a few more changes since then.
First, we added an opening page. This is a page that will just show up when you first navigate to the site. It’s purpose, from a SEO point of view, is to give the search engine a compacted overview of what Tiny Toes is and what it does.
Next, we changed the page title again. In fact, we took Tiny Toes out of the title altogether, and replaced it with a more descriptive: Children’s Portrait Photographer Philadelphia, Pittsburgh - Family, Newborn Baby, Maternity Portraits
And when Google crawled the site again, we moved up!!! Here are our current rankings:
children’s photographer philadelphia: #3
family photographer philadelphia: #1
baby photographer philadelphia: #9
We’ve got other keywords and phrases that we are tracking … can’t list them all here … but they are also moving up in the rankings.
This is all good news. Again, as we make more changes, I’ll keep you all posted.
Filed Under General, SEO, Web Technologies |
Search Engine Optimization: A Start
By Marge R
Good News! Our site has made it to the SERP’s (Search Engine Results Pages). We’re nowhere near the top of the list, but we’ve been found.
If you remember from my previous post, we have embarked on an effort to move Tiny Toes Portraits up in the Google rankings.
The first and most important step in SEO is keyword research … using some of the available tools, exploring competing sites, even questioning potential clients, if available.
Once a list of target keywords has been developed, our site’s content needs to be rewritten and reformatted to emphasize those words. With our list in hand, we made one very small and quick change to the Tiny Toes site … we modified the home page title from just “Tiny Toes Portraits” to “Tiny Toes Portraits : Children, Babies, Family, Maternity Photography - Pittsburgh, Philadelphia”.
And our timing was perfect. Google crawled our site the very next day … and added us to their index for some of our target keywords and phrases. I’m not going to list all of our keyword rankings … but let me at least report the following:
children’s photographer Philadelphia: #43
family photographer Philadelphia: #24
baby photographer Philadelphia: #11
Next … let’s look at trying to move closer to the front.
Filed Under General, SEO, Web Technologies |
