Why Valid HTML (XHTML) is important to SEO

August 16, 2010 By Tony

Why Valid HTML (XHTML) is important to SEO

What are do many webmaster write non valid HTML? HTML or “hypertext Markup Language”, is vastly misused and written poorly throughout the web. HTML is what the world wide web is made of and should be taken much more seriously. The validity of the HTML coding or programming is a very important. But, you ask why is that important? Most web pages are written in HTML or HTML is produced once a database query is asking for a page to be built on the fly . Just like any other language on the planet, HTML has its own syntax, vocabulary, and grammar. In other words, it needs to be readable by another computer and that very same computer will need to display it properly. Every online document written in HTML is supposed to follow these rules. In the natural progression of today’s internet, programming languages have long been perceived by the mainstream programmers as a “natural art” for designing websites and other web applications. In the early days of the web, it was all text based and not graphical at all. Once graphical user interfaces came to light on the web, so did HTML.

What is valid HTML code?

Valid HTML code is simply said programming code that is built in accordance with Web standards, and provides one of the most reliable guarantee that future Web platforms will handle it as designed. Validation is one of the simplest ways to check whether a page is up to snuff to today’s standards.

Why Web professionals choose to validate for Valid HTML?

Valid HTML allows for greater accessibility, cross-browser compatibility, and can even possibly help your search engine rankings.
When a search engine like Google crawls your site with it’s search bots, it has to parse the HTML code of your web site to find the actual relevant content to what you’re writing about. If your HTML code contains errors and is NOT valid HTML, search engines might not be able to find everything on the page.
Search engine crawler programs obey the HTML standard. A non compliant site makes it extremely difficult to crawl or index your site if it the coding or programming is NOT compliant to the HTML standards set today. While on your site, if the search engine locates an error in HTML, it may simply cease the crawling of your site just because of the error.

Although most major search engines can deal with minor errors in HTML code, a single missing bracket in your HTML code can be the reason if your web page cannot be found in search engines.

There are many uses for coding or programming your website(s) to be HTML valid or HTML compliant.

Professional webmasters use validation as a debugging tool
Professional webmasters use validation as a future-proof quality check
Professional webmasters use validation to cross check their coding or programming skills. It’s is one of the simplest ways to check whether a page is built in accordance with Web standards, and provides one of the most reliable guarantee that future Web platforms will handle it as designed.
Professional webmasters use validation to eases maintenance
Professional webmasters use validation to help teach good practices
Validation is a sign of professionalism

Imagine telling a friend who has never been to your house and telling them directions on how to come over for a party. You start to give them some directions based off a map but halfway through you start speaking in nonsense and gibberish. The friends wouldn’t have much luck in finding your house, would they? The same is true for websites that are broken and have invalid HTML. Valid HTML is one of the most important aspects of Search engine optimization.

Social Media….Optimize for it!

August 13, 2010 By Tony

Social Media….Optimize for it!

Social networks, social media and optimization with those networks is really flying through the web with a large popularity. Social networks as FaceBook, MySpace, Twitter, Linkedin, Ning, Tagged, Classmates, Meetup, Friendster,etc. have been in the news lately talking about how popular they have become in the past few years. Some have even been lead to beleive they they may “become the web”. Some others also include You-Tube, Del-icio.us, the list almost can go on and on! All of these give you some sort of ‘presence’ in the virtual world. More and more these days businesses and regular people are using the social media or social networks to to optimize and promote their presence through the web.

Social Media Considerations – deepen connections and relationships.

Bloggers and website owners, these days, mostly use social bookmarking sites such as Digg.com, StumbleUpon and Del-icio.us. How these sites work is that they give feedback on articles that you webmasters submit, then a judging process “judges” the articles and bumps them up based on the number of votes. This type of social media campaign, can bring massive number of visitors to your site. An article that is accepted well, can deliver a large amount of traffic and comments to that article. When a webmaster or site owner is considering their search engine optimization strategies, it’s most efficient to choose the right path for your optimization. By using all three of those social media sites, they will help a bunch, but they all differ in what they can deliver. Digg will take many votes to deliver excellent traffic, but StubleUpon will take less votes to deliver just some traffic. If you can get enough Diggs from Digg.com users, you just may get the front page of Digg. By utilizing social media the proper way, it can raise your exposure throughout the web. The more pages that a search engine bot travels throughout the site, the better ranking you could possibly have. When a write is aiming to get higher rankings, building the popularity of the site is of utmost importance and your website traffic statistics will show the story. Users will visit your site simply because they like to read your blog or your rich content. Building up a huge “friends list” on any of the social media platforms is what you want to do, if you desire to promote your business online.. You can now promote your site over and over again to your friends list. the best way is to aim to your target audience with the same ideas, feelings, and collections. You, as the writer, know these people since you are one of them..

Social Media, Working For You!

To get “Social Media” to work FOR YOU, you will need to understand and think just like the social network platforms that you are targeting. The best way to get your site looked at by Google (indexed) is to construct articles on your website or blog regularly. Social network articles, posted regularly, will allow sites as Google to have a search engines so that it makes it easy to locate your blog fast and easy. Once you get you site into the search engines, the sky i s the limit. You can get a lot of organic traffic from being indexed. Undoubtedly, this should bring some organic traffic and making it easy to direct them to social networking site of your choice. With daily,monthly or regular posting of social networking articles, you should be able to people’s trust and respect because you can provide them information they need and want.

Keep in mind that when you write articles online, consider search engine optimization alongside utilizing social media platforms for exposure.

Who is your target audience?
What time of day is your target audience online?
What is your goal with the article?
Which keywords are you looking to get more exposure on?
Have you placed hyperlinks throughout your article to include internal and outside links
Have you styled your content styled to help with reading it easier?

This might include:

Bullet points
Clearly defined subheadings (search engines appreciate this to help with indexing)
Key points and fascinating quotes
Is the article informative or educational?
Do you have your RSS feed setup to show targeted from the articles?

Social Media Campaigns take work. Take your social media campaign and promote it around on the social networks! Promote Promote!. Take the time to build your webtraffic organically by promoting your site(s) through your choice of social networking. If done correctly, using social networking to promote your blog or site can work. Social Media Optimization does work.

Improving Website Rankings with Search Engines

August 6, 2010 By Tony

Improving Website Rankings on Search Engine (s)

Many webmasters are spending a lot of time trying to find a way to improve the rankings of their websites without “gaming” or “tricking” Google. With the number of websites, online businesses blogs, e-shops, articles, and social networks on the web increasing each day, webmasters and content generating people are facing a stiff competition to get their websites to grab some of the market share for their websites, online businesses blogs, e-shops, articles, and social networks.

When internet surfers cruise the web, people are unlikely to check the 4th or 5th page of the SERP (search engine result page) on search engines when they are searching for something It is very influential for webmasters to have their websites listed on the top positions in order to get “organic” search engine directed traffic.

There are so many methods that you can utilize online to “Perk Up” your website’s search engine rankings. You can use SEO (search engine optimization) or PPC (Pay per click) ads. However, these methods may not be suitable for every webmaster.

I’ll now list out some examples that will help in some basic ideas on increasing visibility for your websites, online businesses blogs, e-shops, articles, and social networks for search engine ranking increase.

SEO (search engine optimization)
- If you search hard enough, ironically, you will find 10,000 different ways to improve your SEO (search engine optimization). You will find a ton of ways to get more information about SEO methods on the web, but it is hard to find the ideas that provide the important details on how to really improve rankings. An internet newbie often confused by so many theories that he/she found, and some theories even work against each other. It is important to understand the fact that SEO can actually harm the business if not being done correctly. If you are in the practice of trying to “game” Google, you could be delisted or deranked from their SERP (search engine result pages). One of the solutions that you can do for SEO is to use the service of an SEO specialty company. The problem is, using the service of an SEO company is generally expensive, and you have to make a long term commitment so that you will end up spending even more money before you can get the results you are looking for.
PPC (Pay per click) ad Campaign
- Basically, a Pay per click (PPC) campaign is an Internet advertising model used on website’s around the world, where advertisers pay the advertisement host only when their ad is clicked. With search engines, advertisers typically bid on keyword phrases relevant to their target market. Content sites commonly charge a fixed price per click rather than use a bidding system. PPC campaigns are displayed within SERPs. You have to pay for every click that somebody do on your ad even if the click does not result in a sale so that you might end up spending a lot of money without getting the expected results. You may get traffic but very few conversions from those clicks. For example, if you bid 50 cents for each click and your ad get 100 clicks a day, you would have to pay $50 a day. There is a very relevant chance that you won’t make any sales (conversions from clicks) for that day. The $50 that you spent that day will end up being a total waste. Another huge disadvantage of using PPC is that once you have spent your limit for that day, your advertisement ends up NOT showing up anymore. It will only keep working if you keep spending the money and if you don’t, the ad disappears. When you are out of money to spend on advertising, the PPC campaign will stop while you haven’t done anything that can improve the value of your brand at all.
What to Do to Improve Rankings (10 steps)
- Publish new UNIQUE Articles
- Try to find competitive keywords that your competition isn’t using
- Learn from your competitors
- Make sure each page on your site has cross links to other pages on your site
- Try to include a few outbound links to high ranking sites
- Use Google sitemaps to it’s fullest
- Get invlovlved with communities, get the word out about your sites(s)
- Spell check your content
- Have keywords in your head section of your site
- Valid XHTML or valid HTML
You don’t have to worry because there is a tool that can help you to get your website listed on at least the first three pages of Google’s SERP. You can use the advantage of Web 2.0 to rank well in most search engines. You can also use the power of video in order to boost the search engine ranking of your website. Almost all aspects of SEO (search engine optimization) can be handled using this innovative tool from link building to article marketing.

On-page optimization Guidelines for Writing SEO Friendly Content

August 2, 2010 By Tony

On-page optimization Guidelines for Writing SEO Friendly Content

FOR Hotshot SEO, writing excellent quality content and expecting Google to list it on the first page of the search results is just not enough. We need to consider some technical aspects and adjust some elements and work in a smart way. The secret is comprised by on-site SEO and off-site SEO, two branches of search engine optimization. Off-page optimization holds around 90% of web page rankings, but on-page optimization still has its role in the ranking power. They guidelines for on-page SEO will be explained further in this article.

Title Tag: The Title tag is very important in obtaining great SEO. It is one of the most important things in on-page optimization.

The reason is because the title tag represents the first communication between the webmasters and search engines. It is the channel that allows search engine robots to find what a web page is all about. To write a compelling page titles, you need to place the keywords within the first visible 65 characters and finish it with the name of your website or your brand.By doing this, you have started to build relevancy of your website, so that the search engine Bot will be able to know the key terms of your website. To express the association better, you can place the pipe symbol between the page title and the site name. You have to remember that getting listed in the first position of search results is only half of the mission. The other half is how to make people click the link and visit your website.

Keywords Density: Many people wonder the proper percentage that they should put within articles.

Keyword density is not really an important thing. However, you can consider putting the keyword in the beginning and the end of your paragraph. The suggested amount of keyword is 4%. There is other relevancy metric called LSI terms that Google use. LSI terms are group of words that are associated with the same contexts.

Meta Keywords and Description: You should use keywords and LSI words in your content, and keep them at around 7 to 9.

A description tag should contain the further explanations of the things in the title. Try to mention some details about the benefits offered by the web page. It is not a good idea to fill it up with the Meta keywords because that will let your competitor to know your targeted keywords.
You should make your contents well structured using Headers from H1 to H4. You must not use more than one H2, two H2, two H3, and one H4.

Keywords: Put your keywords in H1, but be careful because the header tag is very spam sensitive.

You should emphasize your target key terms using Bold or Italics. Using one per article is enough. One other thing that you should do is to put meta-image tags for the relevant pictures that you put on your web page. One great wordpress plugin is the All-in-one-SEO pack. It offers great SEO capabilities and a unique way for allowing you to tweak your page’s SEO.

Referring Other Quality Content to Gain Trust: Find some trusted websites and link to them with keywords and phrases as the anchor text. Spread the links on relevant articles that you have get increase your SEO.

Simplified Search Engine Optimization

July 31, 2010 By Tony

Simplified Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization is an effort to make a website rank higher on the search engines SERPs (search engine results pages) so that potential customers can find it easily. Most internet users never open the 3rd, 4th, or further pages. They only visit the websites listed on the 1st or maybe 2nd page of the search result pages.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is complex

Most business people don’t understand the concept of search engine optimization, and the things required to make their websites have good page rankings. This is also caused by the fact that search engine optimization is intangible and complex. Search engine optimization can also be very expensive and time consuming, so that most small businesses ignore it. Seeing the fact that search engine optimization is unknown for most business people, we need to simplify it.

Search engine optimization (SEO) and the benefits

Search engine optimization can bring a lot of benefits and ROI to companies that applies it, because it has the lowest long term customer acquisition cost. A company that understands the importance of SEO can work on it internally or cooperating with an experienced Internet Marketing Consultant.

We can simplify Search engine optimization (SEO) , relevance and authority

SEO Relevance The search engines are actually brokers that help internet users to find the contents that are most relevant to what they are looking for. Achieving SEO relevance can be done through on-page SEO by focusing on content quality and metadata to make sure that the contents are search engine friendly. This method is known as “Content Optimization”. Good aligned contents will boost a website’s rankings in the SERPs. There are more detailed steps to be done in this “On-page” SEO that can be found in later articles.

Search engine optimization (SEO) – SEO Authority

The search engines don’t just make sure that a website is relevant to what is being searched by an internet user. It also needs to make sure that a website is popular, credible, and authoritative. “Off-page SEO” is basically about accumulating links, or having a website’s web address mentioned on many other websites throughout the web. If other websites are willing to link to a website, then the website must have some sort of authority or good content quality. Of course, there are so many things that can be done in order to get many links.

Search engine optimization (SEO) content and links

To have good rankings, a website must have a good combination of “On-page” and “Off-page” SEO so that it can establish its Relevance and Authority. The search engines are using their own algorithms, but basically they are considering the combination of Relevance and Authority.
Successful SEO Needs Contents and Links

Search engine optimization (SEO) conclusion

Search engine optimization experts have many different opinions about this. Some say that getting links is the most important thing, while others say that well aligned content with keywords and Meta tags are more important. The truth is that we need to integrate content creation and link building. If one of them is ignored, then the website will never be able to get good rankings and traffic that can generate sales.

So to get the best Search engine optimization (SEO) results, we must focus on Relevance, Authority, Content, and Links.