Here are some of the most important factors that the search engines use in determining your rankings:

1. Web Site Content

Content on your site is one of the most important factors for successful search engine optimization. Your web site should provide valuable information on specific subjects relevant to your web site. Furthermore, your content should be updated regularly. It’s not enough to just put up a few content pages full of information on your site and then never add to it. This is a continuous process that will help your search engine rankings if done correctly.

It’s also important that you don’t try to trick the search engines by flooding them with multiple versions of the same page, repeating the same content over and over. Doing that will not help your rankings and will eventually lead to your site getting banned from the search engines.

2. Link Popularity

Inbound links are very important for achieving high search engine rankings. Most of the search engines today regard link popularity as one of the most significant determinants of your website’s rankings.

Here are some of the best ways to get inbound links:

* Articles – Writing and submitting articles to website’s and article directories is a very good way to get inbound links.

* Content – Not only will adding quality content help in your rankings by itself, it will also help you with your link popularity. Other webmaster’s will want to link to your site because it is valuable to them and their own visitors.

* Directories – Submitting your site to online directories will help you gain inbound links.

* Blogs – Start a blog that you update frequently with information related to your website’s niche. Then, link to your site from the blog. You can also submit your blog to various blog directories to get even more inbound links.

* Link Exchanges – Simply find other quality sites related to yours and ask them to link to you in exchange for a link back to them. This is not as effective as it used to be but it is still a pretty good way to get inbound links.

When trying to increase your link popularity remember that the more inbound links you get the better, but quality is always better than quantity. Stay away from low quality sites, FFA’s, and sites unrelated to yours.

The next things that should be considered when doing Birmingham SEO for your web site are the on-site and the off-site elements. Some of the on-site elements are the title tag, Meta tags, heading tags, ALT tags and highlighting of the text using the bold tag. The Link text is an important off-site element.

On-Site Elements:

3. Title Tag and Meta Tags

Meta tags help describe the page where they are placed. Though today the Meta tags are not nearly as important as they once were and are definitely not the only things the search engines look for when indexing your site, they are still somewhat important in deciding the relevancy of the page for a keyword search.

Search engines focus on three primary tags to help them determine the relevance of a website for a particular search phrase. The Title Tag, Meta Keywords and the Meta Description…

Ideally the title tags should contain less than 64 characters with your most important keywords in them and should definitely be relevant to the content on the page. Do not stuff keywords in to the title tag!

The Meta description tag is a summary of the page and its contents. This Meta tag should be 200 characters or less and should contain keywords and phrases you hope to be found for, but it should also read like an introductory lead-in for the page and be appealing to the reader. The description you provide for your page has to convince the visitor that they have found exactly what they were looking for.

Probably the least important Meta tag to search engines is the keyword tag. However, it shouldn’t be ignored. Keyword tags should be less than 1000 characters. This tag should include important keywords and phrases consistent with the body text, title, and content of the page. Be specific and accurate with the keywords and key phrases in this tag. Again, do not stuff keywords here… they should only be those that are actually on the page and do not repeat any word more than 3 times.

4. Heading Tags

The heading tags are given more weight than the ordinary text. The higher the H tag the more weight it carries. You should make use of the heading tags to highlight the important keywords and headings of your page as well as the paragraph headers.

5. Bold Text

Bold text is given a little more weight than ordinary text but not as much as heading tags. Make sure to enclose some of your keywords in bold tags when they appear on the page.

6. Alt Text

The alt tag provides alternative text when images cannot be displayed… This might happen if the users have set the browsers only to download the text and not the graphics, or if the images are too heavy to download for the users internet connection. Only include important keywords relevant to your site and the image and do not stuff keywords in them.

Off-site elements:

7. Link Text

This is a very important factor in search engine optimization to gain higher rankings. The link text can be on pages within your site or what other web sites use to link to you. Either way, it is important. If possible the target page’s main search term should be included in the link text instead of just the URL. Do not use identical link text for every link, but do include the target page’s main keywords in the link text. Links carry more weight when the text around them is relevant to the target page’s keywords and phrases.

Following the above Birmingham SEO information will help tremendously in your search engine rankings. Remember that the search engines are advancing all the time. Don’t try to trick them because they will eventually catch on and that could mean the end of your web site. Stick to the basic techniques above and you will increase your search engine rankings without fear of being banned or dropped.

Every company offering Birmingham SEO related services promises results but few deliver on that promise. To be the exception when it comes to delivering on that promise a Birmingham SEO partner must take an approach that ensures quality results that meet YOUR business objectives.

There are lots of ‘unethical’ approaches to Birmingham SEO that can actually get you banned from search engines. Unfortunately, some Birmingham SEO companies still use these as a ‘quick-fix.’ Unfortunately, you get left holding the bag. Make sure the Birmingham SEO company can explain their approach in terms you can explain and if they can’t you should keep searching.

Here’s what to look for:

First, they should demonstrate that they understand your business need.

Just giving you a questionnaire is not enough. At the beginning of any engagement, they should take the time to understand your business objectives. Your business is unique and a one-size-fits-all approach rarely actually fits every business. By taking the time to understand your business they should be able to tailor their services to best meet your business objectives as well as your budget.

Second, they should use a proven model of optimization that offers ‘realistic’ expectations.

Ignore marketing hype like “Rank #1 in Google in 24 hours” Search engines do not make public the process or rules they use to crawl, rank pages or index website pages. Further the processes and rules change often as the search engines attempt to increase the value of search results. Of course if your keyword phrase is “one of a kind white unicorns hand made by a grandmother in Peoria” then you actually have a good shot of # 1 ranking if anyone actually ever searched for that. Otherwise, it takes time and lots of work to get high rankings.

To compensate for this lack of public information, an Birmingham SEO partner should rely on a proven model to uncover the rules.

1. Analyze Determine where your pages rank today. From this you can learn what may be right about these higher ranking that can be applied to other pages.

2. Target Every web site is unique. Rather than a set of canned optimization recommendations they should determine the right optimization options for your website. To accomplish this they should use a range of methods:
Expert Review. While many Birmingham SEO partners have great in-house experience they should also turn to other experts who study search engines to determine the most likely rules used to determine how pages are indexed and ranked.
Best Practices. They should look at the top ranking competitors in your space to determine how they optimized their pages, particularly those aspects that could influence page rankings.
Learn as they Optimize. They should consider implementing changes to larger sites in stages. Start by optimizing your highest value pages first, then, based on the results modify the optimization approach if needed before continuing.
Its More than Google. While organic search results are a key portion of any optimization effort, they should know that it takes much more to get quality traffic to your website. They should be able to help you go beyond the search engines to find your new traffic.

3. Optimize They should be able to provide the detailed information you need to understand what needs to be done to your website. They should also be willing to let you make the changes rather than forcing you to allow them to make the changes at substantial per hour fees.

4. Analyze – Birmingham SEO is not a one-time effort. Your business changes, your competitors change, your prospects and customers change and the search engines refine rules. This means you will need to periodically review your ranking and re-optimize your site. You should expect your Birmingham SEO partner to provide ‘follow-ups’ to ensure that you got results.

Third, their approach should be comprehensive and include all the aspects that bring traffic to your website, not just search engines. Make sure they will provide

Detailed Site Analysis – You need to understand from where your site is starting.
Keyword Analysis – All keywords are not created equal. They should help you understand which ones to use, and as importantly, which ones not to use.
Page Structure Recommendations – Content, headers, keyword placement, it all matters.
Engine Submissions – Each engine is unique. ‘Submit a link’ programs are not effective.
Paid Search – The internet is like any business, sometimes ‘free’ isn’t worth even that.
Reciprocal Links – As with keywords, all links are not created equally.

Finally, the right Birmingham SEO partner should work hand in hand with you to make sure the changes recommended for your website are the best fit for you. They should share their approach to making the changes to your website and should be flexible to make changes in a way that best supports your business needs.

Selecting a Birmingham SEO partner can be intimidating. With all the marketing hype, it is easy to get fooled. In the end Birmingham SEO is like any other business service you use. You should be able to understand the benefits, and limitations, it offers and make an informed decision about how to invest your money.

By the way, if you find the hand-made unicorns please pass me the URL. I’m in the market :>)

Aubrey Jones is President and founder of Riverbank Consulting, Inc. Through Webs 4 Small Business he is able to bring Birmingham SEO and other internet services to Small Business owners. He has been in the technology and internet industry for over 10 years building and managing large commercial internet services.

Internet Marketers assign names to these updates much the same way the weather service names hurricanes. Last October it was Jagger, before that we had the infamous Florida Update in late 2003, and Austin in early 2004.

Each update is designed to improve search results by either doing a better job of identifying high-quality content on the Internet, or by doing a better job of suppressing low-quality content.

Over the last two or three weeks, many website owners have seen traffic to their sites from Google fluctuate quite a bit. This is normal for algorithm updates as the index is updated on one data center, a site will change positions. The fluctuations occur because the index in the new data center is not completely built, and therefore a site may be placed artificially high or low until all the data is brought into equilibrium.

A few days ago, Google completed a major overhaul of its algorithm this one dubbed BigDaddy and in the world of search engine updates its a category 5 hurricane; well, sort of.

You see, after all the turmoil of the past three weeks or so, most marketers are probably seeing their websites ranked more or less where they were about a month ago. This is unusual. Usually major algorithm changes result in significant changes in site rankings for virtually all sites on the Internet. Both the Florida and Jagger updates changed the landscape of Googles Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) dramatically.

So, Whats the Big Deal About BigDaddy?

At first glance, the BigDaddy update seems to be much ado about nothing. However, there are some welcome changes that have been included in this update that should make Google a much friendlier place for those of us who build valuable content-rich websites.

* Increasing size and scope of the index One of the purposes of this latest update was to increase the size of the index itself. This will allow Google to dig deeper into your site and catalog even more of your content (HTML, JavaScripts, Flash, etc).
* URL Canonicalization Yes, its a scary word, but its actually quite simple. Essentially, canonicalization is determining which URL is the most appropriate for a given page. For example, the following URLs are all valid ways of reaching the homepage of SomeWebsite.com:
– http://www.somewebsite.com
– http://somewebsite.com
– http://www.somewebsite.com/index.asp
– http://somewebsite.com/index.asp
By improving URL Canonicalization, Google is attempting to make sure your site gets credit even though the URLs might be spelled differently on different websites.
* No More Page Hijacking Although not a common problem, there are unscrupulous jerks out there who will find a popular site and hijack its content by using 302 redirects. Google is attempting to eliminated the ability to do this effectively hopefully they are succeeding.
* New Spider You will also see a new Google spider called Mozilla Bot instead of the old familiar GoogleBot. If you are into looking at server logs, the new agent is Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
* Less Search Engine Spam continuing with the recent trends, Google seems hell-bent on eliminating the effectiveness of purchased keywords and link farms. If you are still employing these black-hat techniques, then you probably just found out about the BigDaddy update the hard way. If you didnt, then you will probably be hearing from BigDaddy soon.

BigDaddy Foretells More Changes To Come

In the immediate aftermath of a major update like BigDaddy, there are a number of things you can expect to happen.

The first is that your websites PageRank (PR) will probably change over the next few weeks. If youve been doing the things that Google likes, then you will likely see your PR improve, if you are engaged in unscrupulous (by Googles standards) activities, then you can expect your PR to go down. To see a list of what Google likes visit http://www.google.com/webmasters/.
In addition, some of your sites older content will be re-crawled and older, unlinked content will probably be removed from the index.
Over the next few months, there will also likely be a series of smaller updates that will take advantage of the new infrastructure provided by the BigDaddy update. Flash-heavy sites that were held artificially low may move up in the rankings while sites that rely heavily on reciprocal linking will likely go down.

BigDaddy Not Such A Big Deal
In short, as long as you are not engaged in Black-hat Birmingham SEO, BigDaddy itself is probably no cause for alarm. If your site has recently bounced around in Googles results, then you will notice that things have probably returned to normal in the last week or so, and your rankings have probably improved a little bit.

Moving forward, in the next few weeks you can expect changes to your PageRank, and perhaps deeper crawls by Googles new spider, Mozilla Bot. In the next few months there will likely be a number of smaller updates, mostly pertaining to issues like Flash content and niche-specific algorithm changes.

As with all algorithm changes, there is no reason to panic just because “BigDaddy” blew through town. Like hurricanes in the real world, algo changes blow a lot of loose material around; but if your website’s foundation is sound, you will weather the storm and be ready for business once the storm has passed.

Too often, companies ignore search optimization or shelve requests for it simply because senior management does not understand it well enough to provide the necessary leadership and support. And if top management does not view it as priority, marketing and sales people are disinclined to pursue it. They will apply traditional, accepted tactics, shying away from one of the most efficient, measurable ways to get in front of prospects.

Too often executives focus on the technical aspects of Birmingham SEO and lose sight of the more important strategic aspects. Meta tags, spiders, hits and visits dont mean much to company stakeholders and shareholders. Resultsin terms of better leads and more of themdo.

Here are a few questions every CMO should ask (and be able to answer):

What do we want our web visitors to do?
Whether your desired response is a demo request or a completed inquiry form, management should know and agree upon this primary action and communicate it to all stakeholders. You may have a few different actions that you wish to track.

How many search visitors per month actually do what we want them to do?
Since we are only talking about Birmingham SEO in this article, we are only interested in search visitors. Knowing this number now and tracking it each month, will give you quick insight into the quality and quantity of your search traffic. Do not be surprised to learn that as much as 99 percent of this traffic is not taking the desired action. Pulling in the right traffic and converting it into bona fide leads is a never-ending challenge. Knowing how well (or poorly) youre doing in this area is a big first step.

What percentage of search visitors leave our website within 10 seconds?
This magical statistic, which I like to refer to as short visit syndrome, obviously relates to all of your web traffic. But focusing on search visitors tells us a couple of things. First, are you pulling in the right search traffic? Second, is your website doing an adequate job of hooking them or giving them what they are searching for? It is not at all uncommon for companies to spend lots of money and resources to drive search traffic, only to have the overwhelming majority leave within 10 seconds.

Which search phrases are we focusing on?
You want to come up on the search engines for the phrases that your best prospects and influencers are likely to type. Youd be surprised at how differently people actually search, compared to how your sales and marketing people think they search. This is because most searches occur in the research and investigation phases of the buying cycle. In fact, more than half of all B2B searches for purchases over $50,000 occur between two and six months before a purchase is ever made. And often, the person doing the searching may not have the technical understanding of your product or service. The key is to consider carefully how your audience searches (there are some great research tools out there) and come up with a list of approximately 20 phrases that become your companys target phrases. These are the phrases that you should measure and focus your resources on.

How often are we appearing for our target phrases?
Too often, a webmaster, marketing manager or even CMO assumes everything is up to par because the company appears at the top of Google for their company name or some extremely specific, non-competitive phrase. Its important to know how often you are coming up on Google (as well as other major engines like Yahoo and MSN) for your target phrases as a whole. While it may be more rewarding to focus on where you are coming up, it is more productive to see where you are not currently coming up, and thus missing opportunities.

How often are we appearing compared to the competition?
If its important for you to know which major tradeshows or events your competition attends and exhibits at, wouldnt it make sense to know how often your competition is being found on the search engines compared to you? After all, the Internet and search engines have become the largest, most prolific tradeshow on earth.

Tying It All Together With The Big Picture
Obviously, there are other and even more important things that a CMO would want to know about an Birmingham SEO effort– number of opportunities generated, cost per opportunity, revenue produced, etc. Many executives assume that someone is tracking this information and reporting on it. But more than likely, no one is. Beginning to capture and act upon some of the basic points in this article could be the catalyst to help measure the true effectiveness and production of your internet efforts.

All of this data should be readily available to you if your company has developed a prudent search optimization strategy and implemented some basic and widely available tools. If you are not getting this information, you are missing an increasingly important business development medium. Compared to the amount of energy and resources you are currently spending to generate new business, Birmingham SEO may be the most effective and cost-effective way to fill your pipeline.

Copywriting for search engines should be part of your search engine optimization strategy, but its challenging to say the least. Most of us are either artistic or scientific types; few are both. But thats what online copywriting is all about. Its both an art and a science, and thats what gets most people on the wrong track.

In a nutshell, good web site copy needs to be rich, keyword-specific and topic-based. Many inexperienced web developers simply use brochures for their web site copy. Dont let them talk you into it! Search engines most likely wont find your web site if you do.

The optimal web site page size is around 2 MS Word pages. If you have more copy than that, consider splitting it into two or more. If you find youve got more than one topic on a page, split it into two or more.

If youre like me, your first instinct is to sit down and start plunking away at your keyboard and get as many of your thoughts out as quickly as possible.

And thats fine for your basic outline, but thats about as far as itll get you. Thats the artistic side. And it just might be the wrong side to start with. Ive learned over the years that, contrary to my instinct, starting with the scientific is actually easier and faster.

So, where do you start?

The first thing I do is find the right keywords to base my copywriting on, and theres a relatively simple way to figure out which keywords to use. Open your favorite spreadsheet program (I use MS excel), and head four columns with:

Keyword&nbsp&nbsp #Searched&nbsp&nbsp#Returned&nbsp&nbspRatio

Then, find a good keyword suggestion tool. Wordtracker has one and so does Overture, and both have free trials. There are also several others out there to use.

Tip: Keyword suggestion tools suggest more keywords and phrases for your search terms.

So, what youre going to do is brainstorm some keywords and phrases for your product or service, enter them in the keyword column, and find out how often its searched for in your keyword suggestion tool.

Next go to a search engine and search for the phrase in quotations to find your competition for that word or phrase. And then figure out the ratio of #searched to #returned. What youre looking for is a low number of returns for a highly searched word or phrase, or a relatively low ratio.

Tip: Keyword phrases often work better than keywords alone.

You want brainstorm a hundred or more words and phrases, and choose two to four to use in your web site copy. And as the saying goes, two heads are better than one so ask your family, friends and neighbors for input if you can.

Try a general keyword and start there. Youll find a general keyword will be searched a lot, but youll also find theres too much competition in most cases, so your ratio is too high. Then try different spellings, misspellings and more specific phrases. Youre looking for two to four target words or phrases per page.

For example bodybuilding has a ratio over 4,000, but body building is under 3,000. To get more specific, try targeting women. Body building woman has a ratio of around 500.

Once weve found our target phrases, we can start writing our web site content. But where do we put our targeted keywords and phrases?

Search engines look in specific places to try to determine your web sites theme, yet theyre all slightly different as to exactly where they look and relative importance of each placing.

Nearly all search engines use page title as one of the most important, so try to make sure your page title uses at least one targeted phrase, or better yet, two. Our example title could be Body Building Supplements How to Build Muscle Company Name for example. That uses two of our target phrases and our company name. Or we could substitute the protein shake name for the company name.

Some search engines use meta tags, others do not, so I generally include meta tags for the search engines that do.

Heading tags are next in importance, ranging in importance from H1 and down. If you recall, in our last newsletter, we mentioned that headings are also high on your list for catching clients interest, so h1 heading tags carry lots of weight for both. One thing to watch for is cute headings, which can work for clients, but wont work for search engines. To make the search engines happy, you need to include your keywords in your headings.

The last thing to be aware of for search engine copywriting is keyword density and placement. Again, each search engines seems to want something a little different, but youre pretty safe if you have keywords near the beginning, middle and end of your copy. Youre looking for keyword density balance though because too many and your site is seen as spam by the search engines, while too few mean your web site theme isnt clear enough to be found by your target audience.

So, now you have your keywords and you can start writing, right? Well, you can, but unless you keep a few points in mind, your copywriting wont be as effective as youd like it to be. But thats the subject for another article.

Lets take a look at the benefits that webmasters derive from web directories:

1. Some webmasters might wonder why they should bother to submit to web directories when 80% of all website traffic comes from search engines. The answer is simple when you consider the following: what about the other 20%? When you are attempting to maximize the traffic that comes to your website, every little bit of promotion helps and web directories can help you gain a big chuck of that 20% of web traffic you have been missing out on.

2. Did you know that a key factor in the ranking algorithm of search engines is link popularity? By using web directories you will be creating more links that point directly to your site and the higher your ranking becomes in various search engines across the Internet. Further, everyone knows that a higher search engine ranking is equivalent to easier accessibility and easier accessibility equals more traffic for your website.

3. The first way to increase your link popularity is to include keywords in your hyperlinks. When you submit to web directories, the links you submit should not only lead to your site, but also should possess themed keywords within the links. The themed keywords will not only make your site easier to find, it will also increase the rating of your links in various search enginesagain getting more, free web traffic for you.

4. Links that are created within web directories are votes for a site and they use your keywords within your hyperlinks to associate your link with certain key phrases. As such, the keywords you select are extremely important because they determine how often your links will be pulled up whenever a key phrase is associated with your created links. Therefore, It is a good idea to research the most popular keywords associated with your website theme before submitting your website to various web directories: the most popular keywords can make all of the difference in the world.

5. If you are submitting to various web directories, there are a few things that you need to consider. First, for a directory to be valuable, the pages you submit your listings to must, at minimum, be listed in various search engines. For instance, if you submit your links to a web directory that doesnt appear in any search engines, chances are web visitors will not only have difficulty finding your website, but they will also have extreme difficulty finding the web directory you have listed your site in. In such cases, the listing in the web directory is a fruitless endeavor. Conversely, if you list your web site in several popular web directories and you utilize keywords in your hyperlink and short website description, you greatly increase the visibility and accessibility of your website.

6. The second consideration you must keep in mind when submitting to web directories is that when you are submitting your hyperlinks, you will derive the most benefit from submitting to directory pages that have a comparable theme to your website. For instance, if you have a website that is based on credit cards you will find that you get more web traffic from a web directory page that focuses on credit cards. Thus, when searching for web directories, look for web directories with topics that parallel the central focus of your website.

7. Heres a quick tip for you that can help you derive the most benefit from listing your hyperlink in web directories: watch out for Google Adwords as these are a good indicator of how Google at least categorizes the page. In other words, if you mirror your hyperlinks and descriptions to appear much like those seen in Google ads, you will more than likely increase your search engine ranking as well as your listing in various web directories.

8. In order to be successfully listed in any web directory, you will need to conform to the terms and conditions of the directory. Typically, web directories list a series of specific listing regulations that you must adhere to and it would pay for you to adhere to them. In addition, to improve the chances of your listing being accepted you should try to avoid promotional language and you should choose a category that is as close to your website theme as possible.

9. Webmasters have much to look forward to in terms of web directory posting. In fact, the next generations of web directories are now appearing that allows business card type pages. Not only do webmasters get the opportunity to post a short description of there website, but now they are afforded the opportunity to display their logo and contact information as well. Such offerings prove to be particularly appealing because eye catching logos and easy contact information will make a Webmasters website that much more appealing.

10. In the end, web directories are a valuable part of your web promotional program and should not be overlooked in terms of their value. Along with the use of search engines, and article databases, a Webmaster will be pleasantly surprised at the free advertising available on the Internet. Finally, the increase in web traffic that webmasters will reap is truly astonishing indeed.

The major players in the search engine world, like Google, Yahoo, Alta-vista and Lycos, all have their own systems for indexing and ranking, so what might be great for one of them, may not be so great for another. As there are millions of web pages competing for the top rankings, there are also lots of companies out there promising to make your site achieve top spot. Lets just stop and think for a minute. As with all business’s in life, you will have your reputable ones, and then you will have the opposite. Can they really achieve what they say they can? We are not doubting that there are a lot of professional companies out there who could do such that, but if you do choose to go down that road, we think you should do your research and choose carefully. There are lot of companies offering to submit web designs to thousands of search engines, but realistically, it is the major search engines you should be interested in.

So how can you get your web site in the higher rankings of the major search engines? That is the million dollar question that everyone wants to know and would like to be done yesterday. The answer is not that easy, but then again it is not impossible.

First of all, consider the field your site is competing in. Obviously the first thing you should be looking at are the sites which are ranked highly. What are they doing that you are not? Take a look at their web site. Are they graphically intense. Do they use frames and so on and so on. Viewing other sites which are top of the pile for your chosen subject will give you an indication of how the search engine indexes and ranks and what criteria it uses.

Now, lets take a look at your site. Keep in the back of your mind what you have learnt from looking at other web designs. How does your compare?

Content within your web design. Has your site sufficient content? Search engines love content. This might be hard to achieve if your web site is just a few pages and is of brochure style. Is the content on your site relevant to the overall criteria of your site?
Inbound and outbound links in your web design structure

Do you have links on your site and do other sites link to yours? Certainly Google will look at this when ranking your site. Google uses a page ranking algorithm and judges the importance of your site with the amount of inbound and outbound links. If you do not have any links, or very little, you will not achieve a high page ranking score, thus affecting your overall ranking.
Graphically intense web design?

Take a look at how you are using graphics on your site. A graphically intense web site results in longer download times and bandwidth consumption. Another downside to using graphics, especially for buttons that link to your pages and other sites, is that search engines don’t really see them. If you are going to use graphics for buttons and links, try and make sure that you use text links somewhere on your pages. That way, the search engine spiders or robots will be able to follow your sites link structure. Another good practise to adopt is to always use the alt tag for your images.
Web designing using frames

Try and avoid frames if you can as search engines do have trouble with framed pages. In our opinion, unless you are really sure of what you are doing, leave frames alone and look for an alternative way of designing web pages for your site.

Utilising meta tags in your web design

Although strictly speaking it is not a meta tag, it is certainly the most important part of your web page. The Title! Having a well written and descriptive title is crucial to search engine optimisation. Google displays a maximum of 66 characters from the Title in their search results. Try and write a title that will catch the eye of the surfer, whilst utilising keywords.

Meta keywords are used by search engine spiders or robots to index your page, so think about the audience you are trying to target. Think of words you would enter into search engines to find a site similar to the yours. Think of other combinations of words. Are you targeting the specific area in which you live? If so, make sure you put your location into the meta keywords. Have a look at the example below:

In our example, this is something which could relate to our site, so be creative and think about keywords that could tell the search engines what your site is about. Do not repeat the same words though and most importantly, ensure that these words you use as keywords, actually appear in the main body of your content. Do not put words that are not in your page content!

The meta description tag is also very important and is used by search engines to inform users what your site is all about. For example:

The text within the meta tag description will be displayed under the title in the search engine ranking, so it is important to be descriptive. We recommend that you use a maximum of 155 characters for the description of your page. A well written description is certainly 100% better than just keyword stuffing.

Although this article is not an exhaustive explanation to search engine submission and search engine optimisation, hopefully you will understand a little more of the complexities of search engines. It is no easy fte to get you web design to the top of the pile, but it is achievable. We will let you know when we achieve it for ours

Of course, the whole goal of the search engines’ ranking schemes is precisely to deliver good, relevant content to users. The mechanism for how search engines select and reward good, relevant content is essentially just a technical issue, though admittedly an extremely important technical issue.

But even in purely technical, mechanistic, terms, web content affects search engine rankings three ways:

1. inbound links

2. website mass

3. keyword optimization

1. Web Content and Inbound Links

Inbound links are the number-one factor in getting search engine rankings. They also yield plenty of traffic on their own. The importance of links is what has led many people to say that content is no longer important. But those people forget that content really does play a big role in getting links in the first place:

* At the very least, good content will make potential link partners more comfortable with linking to your site. No one wants to link to a link farm, splog, junk site, or even just an unprofessional-looking site.

* Lots of good content gives other webmasters (and particularly bloggers) a reason to link to your site spontaneously without being asked.

* You can allow other websites to post your content in exchange for a link back to your site.

2. Web Content Mass

More web pages of content = more search engine traffic

Heres why:

1. Adding pages to your site is like putting out extra nets to catch surfers.
2. Search engines see bigger websites as more prestigious and reliable.
3. The more content you have, the more reasons you give other webmasters, particularly bloggers, to link to your site spontaneously, without being asked.

3. Web Content Keyword Optimization

Keyword optimization used to be the most important step in Birmingham SEO. Now it matters little in ranking for highly competitive keywords.

Still, keyword optimization can really help you get traffic from searches not on competitive keywords. While you may never rank number 1 for “finance,” you may still show up tops for a search on “household finance rent federal tax deductions” if you have that phrase somewhere in your content. Such non-competitive searches make up a very large proportion of total web searches.

Web Content Keyword Optimization Checklist:

There are four legs to keyword optimization:

* Research/selection
* Density
* Prominence
* Stemming/Variation

Keyword Research and Selection

You need to identify keywords searched on by your target audience. Use tools such as those offered by WordTracker and Yahoo Search Marketing (formerly Overture).

There are two big pitfalls to avoid:

* “Negative keywords” that look relevant but are not really searched on by your target market. For instance, “website copy” is a synonym for “website content,” but most people searching on “website copy” are looking for software that copies an entire website to the hard drive for offline browsing.

* Impossibly competitive keywords that you have no realistic chance of ranking high for them. How do you know if a keyword is impossibly competitive? One rough measure is to look at the PageRank of the webpages currently ranking in the top three for that keyword. If the PageRank of those pages is much higher than the PageRank your site will likely have in the future, you will probably never outrank those pages.

A pay-per-click campaign with Google Adwords of Yahoo! Search Marketing will help you to find which keywords really are searched on by your target audience.

Keyword Density

Keywords appear in the content the right number of times for search engines to recognize the page as relevant, but not so often that it looks like keyword stuffing. The longer the content, the more times the keyword should appear.

Keyword Prominence

Keywords appear in just the right positions within your web pages for search engines to recognize them as relevant. The page title, headings, and first lines of the page are often considered the most prominent positions.

Keyword Stemming/Keyword Variation

* Using variations of the keyword will help ensure web pages appear relevant to the next generation of more sophisticated search engine algorithms.

* In the meantime, variations of popular keywords helps your site appear for the “non-standard” searches on variations of the keyword.

There are three main types of keyword variations:

* Word-stem variations. A stem of a word is its base. For instance, “optimize” is the stem of “optimized.” Other stem variations of “optimize” include “optimizing,” “optimizer,” and “optimization.” You can also shuffle the component words of multiple-word keywords. Variations of website content would be web site content, web content, content for websites, and site content).

* Synonyms (such as web page content, internet content, or writing for the web for website content).

* Related terms (such as internet, Birmingham SEO or web page).

For many people, the Birmingham SEO side of content feels like a moot point. You need content for your visitors even if no search engine spider ever notices. But every website budget, both of money and time, is finite. If you’re ever choosing whether to invest in another link to please search engines or another page of content to please your visitors, don’t forget: search engines still like content, too.

The technique is in the gray-to-black range. I wanted to mention that first, however if your site has been boxed for a while, this may be an alternative for you. It also requires some coding, and assumes your site is built in PHP although I would also guess there is similar ASP code out there.

First lets look at how this works: You have an established related domain and a new domain which is boxed. By establishing a subdomain on the established site and mirroring the content of the new domain there you will get the new subdomain indexed more quickly because it would inherit some of the trust of the main domain.

Once it has established itself you would use some form of redirect (likely a 301) to redirect crawlers to the new domain. The new domain then inherits whatever the subdomain gained in terms of link popularity transferred from the established, trusted domain.

Sounds simple, but there are a few things you need to do.

First, obviously, is to find an established domain. If you need to buy an expired but still relevant site (and its in your budget) the author recommends you do so. You would also not change the registrar information, according to the author (this would be considered in that dark gray range).

You dont want to change the registrar information because there is a chance that Google will notice the change in ownership and any trust the domain you just bought has previously earned would likely be lost.

So lets say you just bought a related domain thats been around for a couple years and has a PageRank 5. by leaving the site intact and not changing the registrar information you are essentially ensuring the site maintains its existing stature in the engines.

Then you will create a subdomain on the site. Here you will place a mirrored copy of all your content navigation, etc. from your new site. Since the new site hasnt been added to the index yet there will not be a duplicate content penalty.

You will also use some PHP coding to change the page header information to fool the webserver into thinking the page was created earlier than it was (the suggested PHP code is found in the forum post linked above). By telling the webserver the pages are old, you are informing the crawler that the pages are old as well.

This is because the crawler requests this information from the webserver at the time of indexing.

Because youve established a completely new section within an established domain the new section will get indexed sooner than the new domain.

It will inherit link popularity and trust from the parent domain allowing it to establish itself more quickly than the new site.

Once the subdomain has been fully indexed by Google you will want to redirect it to the new domain.

By doing this you have allowed the content to be found by Google which then assumes the pages are properly aged because it has been told by the webserver that the pages are in fact old (even though in reality youve recently created them).

By redirecting the subdomain you are then passing the inheritance and trust given to the subdomain by the main domain to the new site.

The reason this works is because the established site is already trusted by Google. Therefore the vote from the trusted site helps illustrate to Google that the new site is also trusted.

There are some things to consider with this tactic however:

Now that its been widely publicized I wouldnt expect it will take that long for Google to realize the hole and patch it.

Also, the whole trustbox patent is based partly on authority but also on age. So while a page may appear old (because youve altered the page header served) Google may opt to instead consider the pages age from the time it found the page.

In other words, even if the page is a year old, if Googlebot just found the page yesterday then its only 1 day old. While the patent does say that scoring the document based, at least in part, on the inception date corresponding to the document, it also goes on to say that Google could determine that age to be not the page date, but the date when it found the page.

And remember that like any type of blatant manipulation you risk being penalized by Google. Google engineers also visit these forums, dont forget, so they are also keenly aware when new tactics are shared which are designed to circumvent the current algorithms.

Therefore it is their job to fix those holes, and likely also find ways to penalize the sites taking advantage of the holes. While no one can prove or disprove this theory, Ive heard of enough sites which have been removed from the index for doing something they werent supposed to.

Therefore, while this may sound like a great way to get yourself out of the box early, consider the alternatives. What if you do get out of the index early but Google catches on in 3 months, 6 months or more? Do you think they may decide to backdate any changes to your site if they determine that you participated in such a tactic? Then, not only are you back where you started, you could be worse off than if you had just taken your lumps and done things properly.

Of course, every search engine already has an automated program commonly called a “spider” that indexes all the web pages it locates online, and it does this for free. So whether you pay or not, your web page will eventually be indexed by all Internet search engines, as long as the spider can follow a link to your page. The major issue is, then, how quickly your page is indexed.

A search engine that offers a paid URL inclusion uses an extra spider that is programmed to index the particular pages that have been paid for. The difference between the spider that indexes pages for free and the spider that indexes only pages for a fee is speed. If you have paid for inclusion, the additional search engine spider will index your page immediately.

The debate over paid URL inclusion centres around the annual fee. Since the regular spider of these search engines would eventually get around to indexing your web page anyway, why is a renewal fee necessary? The fee is necessary to keep your pages in the search engine’s index. If you go the route of paid inclusion, you should be aware that at the end of the pay period, on some search engines, your page will be removed from their index for a certain amount of time.

It’s easy to get confused about whether you would benefit from paid inclusion since the spider of any search engine will eventually index your page without the additional cost. There are both advantages and disadvantages to paid URL inclusion, and it is only by weighing your pros and cons that you will be able to decide whether to spring for the extra cash or not.

The advantages are obvious: rapid inclusion and rapid re-indexing. Paid inclusion means that your pages will be indexed quickly and added to search results in a very short time after you have paid the fee. The time difference between when the regular spider will index your pages, and when the paid spider will, is a matter of months. The spider for paid inclusion usually indexes your pages in a day or two. Be aware that if you have no incoming links to your pages, the regular spider will never locate them at all.

Additionally, paid inclusion spiders will go back to your pages often, sometimes even daily. The advantage of this is that you can update your pages constantly to improve the ranking in which they appear in search engines, and the paid URL inclusion spider will show that result in a matter of days.

First and foremost, the disadvantage is the cost. For a ten page website, the costs of paid URL inclusion range from $170 for Fast/Lycos to $600 for Altavista, and you have to pay each engine their annual fee. How relevant the cost factor is will depend on your company.

Another, and perhaps more important, disadvantage is the limited reach of paid URL inclusions. The largest search engines, Google, Yahoo, and MSN, do not offer paid URL inclusion. That means that the search engines you choose to pay an inclusion fee will amount to a small fraction of the traffic to your site on a daily basis.

Google usually updates its index every month, and there is no way you can speed up this process. You will have to wait for the Google spider to index your new pages no matter how many other search engines you have paid to update their index daily. Be aware that it is only after Google updates their index that your pages will show up in Google, or AOL results.

One way to figure out whether paid URL inclusion is a good deal for your company is to consider some common factors. First, find out if search engines have already indexed your pages. To do this, you may have to enter a number of different keywords, but the quickest way to find out is to enter your URL address in quotes. If your pages appear when you enter the URL address but do not appear when you enter keywords, using paid inclusion will not be beneficial. This is because your pages have already been indexed and ranked by the regular spider. If this is the case, your money would be better spent by updating your pages to improve your ranking in search results. Once you accomplish this, you can then consider using paid inclusion if you want to speed up the time it will take for the regular spider to revisit your pages.

The most important factor in deciding whether to use paid URL inclusion is to decide if it’s a good investment. To figure this out, you have to look at the overall picture: what kind of product or service are you selling and how much traffic are you dependent on to see a profit?

If your company sells an inexpensive product that requires a large volume of traffic to your site, paid inclusion may not be the best investment for you; the biggest search engines do not offer it, and they are the engines that will bring you the majority of hits. On the other hand, if you have a business that offers an expensive service or product and requires a certain quality of traffic to your site, a paid URL inclusion is most likely an excellent investment.

Another factor is whether or not your pages are updated frequently. If the content changes on a daily or weekly basis, paid inclusion will insure that your new pages are indexed often and quickly. The new content is indexed by the paid spider and then appears when new relevant keywords are entered in the search engines. Using paid inclusion in this case will guarantee that your pages are being indexed in a timely manner.

You should also base your decision on whether or not your pages are dynamically generated. These types of pages are often difficult for regular spiders to locate and index. Paying to include the most important pages of a dynamically generated website will insure that the paid spider will index them.

Sometimes a regular spider will drop pages from its search engine, although these pages usually reappear in a few months. There are a number of reasons why this can happen, but by using paid URL inclusion, you will avoid the possibility. Paid URL inclusion guarantees that your pages are indexed, and if they are inadvertently dropped, the search engine will be on the lookout to locate them immediately.

As you can see, there are numerous factors to consider when it comes to paid URL inclusion. It can be a valuable investment depending on your situation. Evaluate your business needs and your website to determine if paid URL inclusion is a wise investment for your business goals.