Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Tips for SEO Beginners - #1

I recieved a newsletter from SitePro News in July 2008. The newsletter had an article on checklist for SEO Beginner's written by John Metzler. The article had good tips for SEO Beginners. Good Luck Beginners.!

Here goes the tip on creating Search Engine Friendly Content and tomorrow's tip will be on "Choosing Right Keywords"

1. Create Search Engine-Friendly Content

Unique web content is your most valuable asset, and ensuring search engines can read it is crucial. Text embedded in images or Flash cannot be read, so make sure you use important keywords, headings, and hyperlinks in plain text form. Instead of using images as navigation links, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) makes it easy to format those links to look more like 'buttons', thus creating powerful anchor text as well as making it visually appealing. Use heading tags properly and don't try to hide keywords or text by making it the same color as the page background or shrinking it so it can't be seen. Make sure the keywords you wish to rank high for are used frequently in the page copy but within reason.

Now that you've created good content, is it actually being crawled? Copy and paste a page's URL into a search engine to see if it has been indexed. If you've just created the page, it may take a few days to show up. Aside from age, many factors can lead to web pages not being indexed by search engines, such as duplicate content (ie. a printer-friendly version of a page might be indexed and the normal version not, or vice versa); links generated by JavaScript instead of HTML; poor site architecture (ie. using too many sub-directories); lengthy, dynamically generated URLs using special characters; and orphaned pages.

About The Author
John Metzler has held executive positions in the search engine marketing industry since 2001. He is the Founder of FreshPromo, a Canadian-based search marketing firm and updates his blog regularly

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