blogging 102

Reading time: 1 – 2 minutes By Matt Colyer 1) Title Tag – The title tag is the most powerful on-site SEO technique you have, so use it creatively! What you place in the title tag should only be one thing, the exact keyword you used for the web page that you are trying to optimize. Every single web page should have it’s own title tag. 2) ALT Tags – ALT tags were meant to be for text browsers because the images didn’t show in text browsers and the ATL tags would tell the visitor what it’s about. You should put your main keyword(s) in the ALT tags, but don’t over do it because you could get dropped in the results or even worse banned for life! 3) Link Popularity – Link popularity is the most powerful SEO tool out of all them. Most search engines don’t even consider web sites if there is not at least one or two links pointing to the web site. Having another site(s) link to your web site is important when it comes to getting your site a good... 

Reading time: 2 – 2 minutes By Craige Stacey Recent studies suggest that more than 80% of new visitors to any web site get there as a result of a search engine query. If this study is to believed, it certainly suggests that working to get high rankings in the search engines might be the most effective thing you can do to bring traffic to your site. The following 12 design tips will help you get started in optimizing your site’s search engine placement. 1. Design for Specific Search Engines – there are hundreds of different search engines, but for best results you should design your site to take full advantage of the search criteria of the big three – Yahoo, Google and MSN. If you can get high rankings in these three, you won’t need to worry about the other search engines. Knowing how these search engines rank sites (as well as why they will penalize a site) is important. The rules change often, but the tips below are the most current. 2. Know your target audience.... 

Reading time: 2 – 3 minutes By Leonardo Wood The most powerful strategy to consider when optimizing your website to get ranked on the first page of Google is the Title Tags of your web pages. This is because when Google searches its database of pages to give you your search results, it actually looks at the Title Tags to determine if the page is relevant to your search or not. The Title Tag or Page Title is the text that you can see in the blue bar on the left hand side at the top of a web page (where the minimize/maximize buttons are). If your chosen keywords that are relevant to your web page are not in the Title Tag then Google is going to find it very difficult to find your page and determining that your page is relevant to the search being carried out. Most people do not realise the importance of having your keywords in the Title Tags of their web pages and this is why, when you visit a lot of websites, you will see that the Title Tags of the page only contain the Company name... 

Reading time: 2 – 3 minutes By Leonardo Wood When someone searches for a keyword or set of keywords on Google they are presented with a series of results. Each of these results are used as the free listing and are taken from the webpage they are on. They are made and from three separate parts; the Headline, the Description and the URL or domain name. By ensuring that you include your keywords within these three sections you are making your page extremely relevant for those keywords and, as Google loves relevancy, you will then be climbing in the Google rankings until you get to that sought after first page position. First of all include your keywords in the headline of the web page. This is the Page Title (also know as Title Tag) of your page which is the white wording in the blue bar at the top of your page. Also use your keywords in the meta data or description of your web page. This is normally within the back end of a website, but if you do not have a page description already...