Blog to get better search engine rankings

I’ll start with the summary…

1. Structure your web pages so that the search engines can index your content and provide enough content so they can understand what your site is about. Don’t embed your content in images or flash.

2. Routinely provide fresh engaging content that users will want to read, find interesting, and feel compelled to share with their peers.

Monitoring and Leveraging Communities

Every industry has an online community of some size. Some industries — such as travel in particular — have literally thousands of forums and blogs talking about deals and experiences. Savvy marketers can leverage these platforms by becoming an active participant — without being “spammy” or invasive — and gain traction within rankings as a direct result of this community participation strategy. Additionally, there’s lots of user generated content about products and services in these communities, providing both invaluable feedback for refinement of current offerings and services, as well as an excellent base for R&D efforts.

Keep Content Fresh by Updating it Regularly

For some organizations, content is hard to update on a regular basis. For example, a company that sells one type of widget that never becomes obsolete may seemingly have no reason to update its content. However, the majority of sites on the Internet could benefit from occasionally “sprucing up the place.” Bottom line: if the content seems like it’s “getting stale” from your human perspective, imagine what a search engine that crawls it every month may feel.

http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3627642

http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3629342

The importance of the TITLE tag

Here’s a goodf article on the importance of your title tag. I’m interested in hearing about other peoples current title tag process and strategy.

http://www.marketingprofs.com/8/title-tag-strategies-basics-brown.asp?adref=znnpbsc148

Walmart to offer SEO services……huh?

http://samsbiz.com/page/1dmiu/Online_Advertising.html

C’mon, honestly…who’s going to Walmart/Sams Club for Web Design and SEO/SEM services? “Hey honey, I’m running over to Sam’s Club to pick up 500 rolls of toilet paper, a gross of beef jerky, and one of them search engine optimized web site thingies…anything else you need me to pick up while I’m out?”
If Walmart’s attempt at increasing search engine rankings through viral social marketing campaigns (gone bad), then I can’t wait to see the fallout from their “professional web services”.

…though the viral part was successful…for all the wrong reasons – http://kevin.lexblog.com/2006/10/articles/public-relations/fake-blog-walmart-gets-caught-with-its-pants-down/

Optimizing HTML Code for Maximum SEO – Use CSS to remove excess code, incorporate anchor text

One element that Search Engines take into consideration when ranking your web pages is the code to text content ratio.

• One of the factors that search engines use in ranking a webpage is the percentage of text in the web page.
• Simply put code to text ratio is % of text in the page / % of html code in the page.
• Search Engines use this ratio to determine the relevancy of your page and higher this value more your chances of ranking higher.

Here’s an article about using CSS to reduce your code: http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/166/Optimizing-HTML-Code-for-Maximum-SEO/

SEO Part 1: You’ve created a website, but how do you get people to see it?

What’s the point of having a website if no one’s going to look at it? 

The best way to get traffic to your site is to have it listed as a relevant result in search engine results.  Step 1 (of many) is creating a website that can be easily spidered and indexed by search engines.  One of the best resources I found 3-4 years ago was http://www.searchenginewatch.com.  This website is a great starting point for all web designers, developers, QA/business analysts,  marketers, and anyone who has a hand in creating websites.  SearchEngineWatch.com has many free tutorials the cover the principals of search engine optimization. You can also subscribe to their email newsletter which includes alot of highlights from SEO related blogs and articles.
With many web dev jobs being out-sourced to companies overseas, having SEO knowledge will not only help you get job in the web industry, but will also help you to create better websites, with better content that’s relevant to search engines and your audience.
Search engine optimization goes hand in hand with quality practices in Coding, Usability, and Accessibility – all of which comprise the bigger picture…Web Standards means better quality which really comes down to one thing…a better user experience.