Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Blog

Just as there are steps you can take to improve your site's search engine performance, there are also things that can hurt your chances at optimal rankings. Below are some of the major culprits:

Avoid Frames

Sites utilizing frames typically separate the content of the page from the frameset, making it virtually impossible for search engines to find, let alone index and produce, the content of the framed pages in their results. If you have framed pages that you want to optimize for search engines, your best bet is to convert them to standard non-framed pages so that search engines can see what they have to offer for content display them properly.

Dynamic URLs

Dynamic URLs (e.g. containing "?" or "ID=") have traditionally been difficult for many search engines to crawl and index properly, although they are getting better at it. To play it safe, monitor your dynamically generated pages to assess whether or not the major search engines are finding them and, if necessary, create non-dynamic, search engine-friendly, versions of those pages on your site (e.g. yourorganization.com/about/default.asp). (more…)

Originally posted 2007-03-09 23:40:07.

Popularity: 6% [?]

What are Keywords?
Keywords are phrases you want your website to be found under. Often corporate climates force people to refer to things using special phrases. Keywords are not about what you call your stuff. Keywords are what the (more…)

Originally posted 2006-11-27 01:03:34.

Popularity: 27% [?]

One of the primary ways that search engines find site pages is by following the links from your home page to other inside site pages (this process is also known as "spidering" or "crawling"). In order to allow search engines to effectively crawl your site and locate your inside pages, it is important to ensure that your menu structure does not present search engines with any barriers that interfere with their ability to follow internal links. Complicated JavaScript or other dynamic menu features can sometimes get in the way of effective crawling. As far as search engines are concerned, when it comes to finding links to your site pages, the simpler the better.
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Originally posted 2007-03-08 23:36:15.

Popularity: 5% [?]

In Search Engine Optimization, an important way on how to boost your SERP (search engine results page) ranking would be to rely on meta-tag keywords. For the newbies in this field, keywords do not automatically exist in meta-tags. In fact, every word you find on your page would be referred to as the keyword. What you have to do is to make key phrases by stringing keywords together. In order to get more traffic from search engines, come up with key phrases that are closely related to your titles and content.
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Originally posted 2008-06-28 09:16:08.

Popularity: 6% [?]

You may have hear it here and there, get links, get lots of links to your website. By getting links, it is the solution to your website problem. Well, what people are saying is not a myth according to my experience and I believe that they are true.
Getting a related backlink to your site will boost up the authority of your site in the eyes of search engines. Having related and relevant content with each other's site represents the legitimacy of your site to search engines that it is not just another spam blog. The whole idea about related backlinks is that as long as it is relevant, related and natural then it's all good.
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Originally posted 2007-10-11 06:33:42.

Popularity: 8% [?]

The first reason could be that your site has been banned or blocked for further viewing due to reasons like cloaking, spamming and link building. Find out where the problem lies, make amendments and ask to be reconsidered. The second reason is that the installation of new robots.txt file or the spam bot blocker or changing the htaccess file could have interfered with the functioning of the spiders of Google.
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Originally posted 2008-08-22 19:02:08.

Popularity: 5% [?]

On-page Optimization Explained

There are two main types of search engine optimization – on-page and off-page. On-page is probably the simplest of these two aspects of search engine optimization. It relates to the elements on the web page itself. That is, the words, and what importance is given to the words on the page.

Search engines want to know first and foremost what a web page is about. So they will look at the various word elements. Search engine robots (or "bots") cannot read images or things like javascript or most other scripting languages. So they have only the pure text to rely on. They look for various clues within the HTML (hyper text markup language) on the page to find out the important words.
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Originally posted 2007-03-17 19:13:00.

Popularity: 19% [?]

I use the free Digital Point keyword ranking tool to determine where I rank in Google. The Digital Point keyword ranking tool also supports Yahoo! and MSN. Tracking various sites helps me determine some of the ways Google may be changing their algorithm.

If you sign up for the Google API service and are doing lots of sketchy stuff, then it makes it easy for Google to cross connect your websites. Google generally is the slowest of the major search engines to trust and rank new websites.

Originally posted 2008-03-08 01:15:46.

Popularity: 7% [?]

To allow quick loading, it is a good idea to specify image sizes on the page so the text can load before the image is rendered.

<img src="/images/blah.gif" alt="Blah picture."
title="Picture of Blah." height="300" width="200">

If an image is simply part of the design or navigation, you can just use a blank alt tag as the image does not contribute to the page theme. Also, stuffing 100 words in the alt tag does not likely add much to your SEO efforts and could make your pages seem spammy.

If you are unsure whether a page is using text or images, you can view the page source or hit control A to highlight the text and images.
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Originally posted 2008-02-09 16:00:22.

Popularity: 7% [?]