Affordable Webdesign & SEO

Content is King

2008-02-12T15:40:00.000Z

The most important part of any website from all aspects including for successful search engine ranking is content

If you concentrate on just one thing then make it content, there is a phrase used very often in the world of search engine optimization SEO and that is content is king and this saying is very true

So if your website is targeting key phrase border collies then make sure that your website contains the phrase border collies throughout the text on your site

U.S. Search Engine Rankings, September 2007

2008-01-19T13:15:00.000Z

Of the five major or "core" search engines, Google held a substantial lead over its rivals in September 2007, according to comScore research.
Of the 9.4 billon searches performed at the five major engines, Google maintained a 57 percent share over competing search engines Yahoo (23.7 percent); Microsoft (10.3 percent); Ask (4.7 percent); and Time Warner including AOL (4.5 percent).

Video's can improve your Search Engine Rankings

2007-03-17T10:28:00.000Z

Just as with the previous post regarding images can help your search engine rankings or more importantly they can improve the number of visitors to your site so can Video

Both Google and Yahoo have a video search solution a;though in my experience Google is much better and do list relevant videos to the search term used where as Yahoo doesn't always work correctly

All you need to do is to have a small video clip , it doesn't have to be hosted on your actual domain but make sure that the video is accurately named and has your website address embedded into the full video and in the credits at the end , most decent video editors will allow you to add this

That way anyone that downloads the video will see your web address and if the content is relevant they can type your website into there browser

This sort of work is more related to successful marketing but it can defiantly increase visitors to your site , its then just a matter of converting them

Images can help bring more Visitors than Search Engine Hits

2006-11-25T11:41:00.000Z

OK I hear you thinking what an earth is he on about images bringing more visitors than people coming from keyword searches??? well its very simple but often overlooked

Both Google and Yahoo have a service where you can search for images rather than keyword web searches , many people overlook this as an important opportunity to get there images listed in the image search

You do not have to do anything special to get you images listed just follow my previous posts and make sure you name your images and use the ALT tags with relevant keywords and phrases, again we will use the border collie web site as an example

On a page we have a picture of a border collie ,

The image is called black_white_border_collie.jpg
the Alt tag uses the description black and white border collie

When someone searches the web for black and white border collie your web site might not come up on the first few pages BUT if you search the images for black and white border collie your web site will more than likely come up much earlier

Ok so your pictures are ranked high in google so what? well if you use the image search you will know that as well as looking at the images you have the option to go directly to the actual page that the image is hosted on "YOUR SITE"

You will find some advanced searchers and just curious people will follow on to check out your site if the image they find in google is of interest to them

Its very simple and often overlooked

Image Renaming a Simple rule

2006-11-25T11:33:00.000Z

Make sure that when you rename the images you dont leave a space in between the words otherwise renaming a image on your pc like this "border collie called ben" will look like this when its displayed on the internet border%collie%called%ben.jpg

This is because the spaces cannot be understood by the browser and so it inserts the % sign obviuosly this is counter productive for helping to increase your search engine ranking and so there are two better ways to rename images to help with this

Either rename with a hypen inbetween each word or use and underscore between each word examples of both are listed below

border-collie-called-ben or border_collie_called_ben

I prefer to use the last option as it can display better isf the image is viewed thorugh a browser independantly of a web page but either will over come the problem discussed above

How Image ALT Tags can improve your SE Rankings

2006-11-25T11:05:00.000Z

One areathat can have substantial results in improving your rankings within the search engines is the ALT tags on images included in the pages of your web site you will be amazed at the amount of people that forget to use the image ALT tags

Again as per my last post use your relevant keywords in the ALT tags , not only are the ALT tags used by the search engines they are used by surfers that have poor eye sight , by running the mouse pointer over an image on a web page you will see a description of the image thiss what the ALT Tag does

Using the border collie web site theme again if you have a pictures of a border collie called Ben on your site make sure that you use the word "border collie" in the ALT tag , don't go mad using exactly the same keywords over and over for all images on your site , try to mix them up a little but keep them relevant to you website content

The image ALT tags can be very effective in increasing your rankings in the search engines

Using Image File Names to improve your SE Rankings

2006-11-25T10:35:00.000Z

One area that most people often overlook is images , always name your images with relevant keyword names

For instance if you have a website dedicated to the border collie dog breed then make sure that you name your pictures of any collies on your site with keywords in them

Imagine you have a picture of a lovely black and white border collie called Ben on the page , make sure sure rename the picture something like "border collie called Ben" or "black and white border collie" etc

Don't simply use the name given to the picture by your digital camera as they tend to name them with generic file names for each manufacturer such as Fuji cameras which use the file name DSCF.jpg

Any search engine trawling your web site will come across your images and if you have done your homework correctly by using relevant keyword content etc then it will see you image with the word border collie in the file name and it will find you page more relevant than if it found all you pictures called DSCF001.jpg etc as such file names have no meaning or relevance

Improve your Google Rankings

2006-11-03T14:37:00.000Z

Keywords in the Title

Yes its is more keyword work that will help you improve your rankings in Google , as in my last post it really does pay to research you keywords very thoroughly

Always have 1 of your keyword in the titles , 2 keywords is even better but dont stuff your title full of keywords 3 is the absolute maximum and make sure that they are relevant to the content of you page , if you simply stuff your title full of keywords that have nothing to do with the content of the page you will be seen as spamming the search engines and your rankings will fall

The golden rule is make sure your content is relevant

Content is King

Research your SEO

2006-10-30T13:59:00.000Z

As hopefully the little that you have already read on my blog regarding getting your web sites high up on the rankings that the key to success is doing the research, making sure you fully understand the subject matter

This is where the vast majority of amateur web masters fall down it is not simply a matter of building a site with some text and a few photos; if you want your site to be successful you need to do a whole lot more

Knowing your subject and all the important keywords and phrases is very important more than just for the Meta tags which are no longer as important as many years ago

More Meta Keywords Tips

2006-10-27T11:18:00.000+01:00

Meta Keywords

Make sure that you also have a list of good meta keywords for the content tag again use the same rules make sure the words you use are relevant to the actual page i.e. they are mentioned on the text and if possible use ones also used in the description and in the H1 and title tags

Dont under any circumstances spam these keywords but listing them more than once this can in fact damage you search engine listing, use the plurals for the words as well as the singular ones

Keep it simple and dont try to cheat

Simple Effective Website Design

2006-10-25T09:47:00.000+01:00

Cheap web site design doesn’t have to mean a poor quality web site to my mind any effective website should be simple , full of relevant content, easy to navigate and visually attractive to the surfer

Simple effective web site design can be seen as cheap web site design in our view here at affordable webdesign, after all as a web site designer its important to build and design a site that gets your message across

Simple web site design greatly helps in achieving higher search engine rankings and after all what’s the point in having a website if no one can find it!! sure you should include you web address in all you literature, advertisements etc

But the internet is the biggest audience that you could ever reach so why not do every thing you can to help surfers (potential visitors) to find you

Cheap Web site Design Tips

2006-10-12T12:35:00.000+01:00

Another important issues with flash movie entry pages is for surfers on slow internet connections they can takes ages to load deterring potential customers , currently the feeling within the web design industry is that such splash pages are to be avoided as they are counterproductive

Another way to help achieve cheap web site design is to use a simple web site navigation system

Again there are many visually attractive menu systems that can be created with java and more importantly flash , its a well known fact that non of the search engine spiders can travel through the links on your website if all your navigation is created in a flash menu

Where can I find cheap web site design?

2006-10-09T11:02:00.000+01:00

This is a question I here a lot , then the other question that also pops up is well if it cheap it must not very good

Well the truth is that keeping your web site design clean, simple, and using an easy to navigate menu system will make your web site design cheap to design and build

How you may well ask? Its common sense really will give you an example

Often client will ask their web designer for a highly visual animated flash intro page , your web designer will obviously oblige but if he is well versed in the art of Search Engine Optimization he will point out that this page will do nothing to help you search engine rankings.

In fact it will more than likely reduce your rankings but more importantly complicated animated flash movies, logos or similar will take many hours to create pushing up the design costs of your website

Now I am not saying that a cheap website design should not look visually pleasing, obviously any website has to be pleasing on the eye but in the end it is the content and the ease at which relevant content can be found by your web site visitors that matters

Keywords and common misspelled words

2006-10-07T13:20:00.000+01:00

Today most of us rely heavily on the F7 key far more than we really should do in my parents generation before home computers were around it seems that they were much better at spelling and grammar probably because they practised it in the hand written style and were taught it at school

Most people are not always taking a lot of notice when they are searching on the internet especially if they search like me with a number of tabs or pages open searching concurrently on the big 3 search engines

This leads to carelessness and the occasional misspelled keyword search, you can utilise this in your web page design to help you score higher on a misspelled word, I would build into the meta keywords one or two misspelled keywords

You could even misspell some words on the content of you site if there are so close that surfers would not notice but they best way would be too use some of these misspelled words in the ALT tags on some of your images

Misspelled keyword selection needs a lot of thought and you need to do your homework by misspelling them in the big 3 search engines to see there effectiveness but they can bring substantial rewards

Uppercase vs. lowercase

2006-09-15T12:41:00.000+01:00

Meta Keywords

Most search engines do not notice any difference between lowercase and uppercase type and as a result placing the same keyword in both uppercase and lowercase is a waste of time and more importantly it can be seen as spam

Another point to consider is: when people type in words and phrases into a search engine query, they tend to type words very quickly. The quickest way to type in words is not to use any capitalization.

Meta Keywords Tips

2006-09-13T14:03:00.000+01:00

OK here is the most important of the meta tags the keywords , here are a few tips

Also try to use keywords that are mentioned in the text of your page as there are some SEO experts that think using meta keywords that are not listed in the text on your page can be considered as spamming

When creating your keywords list, place the version of the keyword that your site visitors use the most at the beginning of your keyword list this may sound obvious but it is often overlooked

Meta Description How Many Words to Use

2006-09-08T16:22:00.000+01:00

How many words should there be in the Meta Description well I would aim for 25-30 maximum but no more than 30

This tag is extremely important because it is what will be used by many engines when they display the description of your web site in the search results. So, remember to make your text sound inviting. Descriptions that are obviously designed purely for high ranking are unattractive to everyone

If you are unsure how to create them then use one of the online generators such as http://www.addme.com/meta.htm

Meta Description and Keywords

2006-09-01T10:29:00.000+01:00

First we need to insert your meta description , make sure that you insert them into the header area of your page and try to get them close under the page title

Your meta description should contain 2 or 3 keywords in a sentence describing the detail of the page

For example if your page is about widgets it could be something like

Blue widgets available at low prices and manufactured in quality stainless steel

Blue widgets would be the key words, its also best to try and get the keywords at the beginning of the description

Meta Tags and Keywords and SEO

2006-08-16T14:51:00.000+01:00

Next we want to use the keywords in the Meta Tags which are located inside the code of your page, you along with any surfers that find you page will not see these Meta Tags but they are still important for Search Engines

Before we get deep into Meta Tags I think that it would help to explain a little bit of the history of Meta Tags and Search Engines

Up until fairly recently in the last couple of years or so, it was very important to make sure you inserted the keyword and description Meta Tags in the code of your site, this was because all search engines of the time were Metacrawlers

This meant that they indexed sites based on your keyword and description Meta Tags along with you page title, they did take into account your content but there was a big reliance on your Meta tags

SEO Heading H1 Tag and Keywords

2006-08-14T14:13:00.000+01:00

In the last post we discussed the use of a keyword in the title and the importance of having a decorative title which is often overlooked by the amateur web designer

Just as important is the H1 tag or Heading , when creating pages make sure that you also create a heading for each page this will insert the H1 tag into your html

As with the title try to make sure you have a relevant keyword or phrase in this heading

Make sure that the keyword is relevant to your site and this particular page

Keywords more uses for achieving good SE Rankings

2006-08-11T18:22:00.000+01:00

Those key words and phrases that you worked so hard on have lots of uses so make sure you keep a list of them in a text or word processing document

The importance of your Title

Make sure that when building your site and adding new pages that you add a title, often in WYSIWYG html editors you use the create new page function to launch a new page, these program automatically defaults the title to Untitled Document

You would be amazed at how many websites have pages with the title Untitled Document simply because the creator forgot the change the title

This is where the keyword comes in again, use one or two of your keywords in the title for example

Your company manufactures or sell widgets and you are creating a page about blue widgets giving details of the sizes etc that you make, then you would title the page Blue Widgets Types and Sizes

Search Engines look at your page titles and check them with the content on the page to make sure they are both relevant to each other

If they are you will rank you higher in the Search Engines, but dont simply stuff your page titles with keywords use just one or two and keep the page titles relatively short

Quality Content Counts

2006-08-09T14:58:00.000+01:00

Relevant quality content is the most important issue in helping your search engine optimization, we have discussed this in our last post.

The more relevant quality content you site has then the more likely it is too score above your competitors in the search engines

This is why some listing sites have forums relating to the listing for instance property rental in a certain area, at the back of this site they may have a forum where you can discuss all thing related to the listing site and area

As 100s of people will be posting messages onto these forums often mentioning the keywords and key phrases, this will increase the listing sites rankings.

Often listing sites will offer a system for making your listing more visible by offering you the chance to earn points by writing personal reviews of a subject related to the listing site or area

This also has the effect of increasing their rankings within a search engine by increasing the keywords and phrases but also it will have the affect of showing the search engine spiders that the site is updated with fresh content

This is another way to increase your search engine fresh regular new content

Keywords and Content

2006-08-07T13:56:00.000+01:00

OK so now we have done some homework and have found some good keywords and keyword phrases, you now need to use these in the content on your site

I mentioned in an earlier article that the most important aspect to consider in successful SEO is content, this mean that the information on your web site must be relevant to the keywords that you have selected

The keywords and phrases that you have selected are an estimate as to what surfers looking for a product or service that you sell will be using in a search engine

Your site must have information that is connected with the surfers keywords that they type into Google and searches on and you must keep this in mind when you are writing the text for your page. Search engines take more that just the text into account but the text (content) is the most important area to consider

Make sure that you mention the keywords you have chosen in the text up to about 3 times and make sure that you also mention the alternative keywords and phrases also

Do not simply fill the pages with badly written sentences made up of keywords as the search engine spiders will mark this as spam and NEVER list a load of keywords at the bottom of the page and try to hide them by making them a similar colour to you background, this is a very old idea and will get you banned from search engines

Good Keyword Choices and Alternatives for SEO

2006-08-04T18:15:00.000+01:00

How to choose Keywords

In my last post we discussed keywords and how to select relevant keywords for your site and more importantly choosing the less completive keywords by spending a little time searching on the big 3 search engines

Sometimes its difficult to come up with enough keywords that have the same meaning but are different so that you do not end up using the same keywords over and over on your site

This is also important because if you simply keep repeating the same keyword over and over a search engine will score this as spamming and as a result your search engine rankings will be greatly reduced

Everyone who has Microsoft office installed on their PC has a simple tool that they can use to help them choose words called Thesaurus you may or may not be aware of this

Simply select the keyword in word and press Shit+F7 and you will see a list of other words with a similar meaning this I have found this can be a very useful tool

Ok so now you have a good number of keywords, keep a note of them because you will need them later when you will insert the Meta keywords into the code of your pages

Most Important Consideration for Successful SEO

2006-08-01T11:24:00.000+01:00

What is the most important thing about successful SEO ?

The No1 thing you should consider when starting your SEO campaign is good quality relevant content , this should be your first item to consider above all else

Content what is content you will ask , well this mean lots of written text within the pages of your web site that is relevant to your chosen keywords or key word phrases

Careful planning before you start to build your web site will help you greatly in this area
Sit down in front of your PC and think of the keywords that you would use to find your web site , type them into Google , Yahoo and Msn and look at the results

For example I did a search on affordable webdesign and Google came back with the following stats

Results 1 - 10 of about 43,800 for affordable webdesign

Another search with different keywords used cheap web site design

Results 1 - 10 of about 154,000,000 for cheap web site design

This tells me that there is 3 times more competition for the keywords cheap web site design

So I would be better using the keywords affordable webdesign in the content of my site