Archive for the ‘seo’ Category

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Best Practices

Aug 4, 2009 pay per click, seo, web building

To leverage your PPC ad spend, it’s crucial to have a website and/or landing page that is optimized for search. The following is a list of some of the processes we perform in order for your website to be easily found on the web.

1. 301 redirect - This is a server setting (in our case Apache) For example, http://yoursite.com will automatically redirect to http://www.yoursite.com This is important since you always want Google to index the “same” URL version of your website.

In the .htaccess file on the Apache server, the following code needs to be inserted

    RewriteEngine on
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^emeraldcoastdesign.com [NC]
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.emeraldcoastdesign.com/$1 [L,R=301]

 

2. Create a “robots.txt” file in the root directory of the server. This tells Google what directories to index and what directories not to index. For example, if there is a directory where all of your video media is stored, you would want to “Disallow” that directory to be read. Whereas, if you have a directory that contains the majority of your keyword-rich content, you would want Google to read that and only that content since it is relevant to the search terms that you would like to be found for.

3. Always separate the “style” from the “content” by creating a separate style sheet. This makes it easy for the Google Bot to distinguish between your relevant “content” and your source code.

4. Always provide keyword rich descriptions in the “alt” tags of your images.

5. Try to use text in your navigation bar rather than images. This is because text can be “crawled” by the search engines.

6. Name your directories with good descriptive words. For example, if you have a “beach condo” website, name your main content directory “beach-condo”. By doing this, the search engines “see” your site as very relevant to “beach condo”!

7. Use a blog powered by Wordpress. Wordpress blogs are already fairly optimized for search engines and blogs are simply a great way for you to get great content uploaded quickly that the search engines love.

8. Use includes where possible. If you need to make changes on a site, make it easy on yourself by having common elements on your site split up into “includes”. There’s nothing more agonizing than wanting to make a small tweak for SEO sake, and realizing that the change has to be made on dozens of individual pages:(

9. Create individual titles for your pages. The “title” tag is one of the most important, from an SEO perspective.

10. Customize the meta content and keyword tags. This is important in that these are the tags that “describe” your page’s content to the seach engines.

These are just some of the search engine optimization techniques we use here at Freedom Florida. Contact us today for a free analysis of your website.

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What is Search Engine Optimization?

Apr 7, 2009 seo

Search Engine Optimization gets a bad rep. There are all kinds of slick sales people trying to sell the latest trick, the latest gimmick that will guarantee you that coveted number 1 spot on Google. There are legitimate methods of getting you to the top of search engines within days. These methods are somewhat more expensive. A professional web developer can use Search Engine Optimization methods to get you to the top of Google over time. Once you are there, you’ll pretty much “stay” there as long as you have your website “maintained” properly by someone who knows how.

Another reason SEO gets a bum rep is just the name itself. Search Engine Optimization… somehow the name implies that you can “optimize” the search engines. The reality is the search engines just “are”. They crawl each website exactly the same way giving no preferential treatment to certain companies or striking secret deals. No, you can not manipulate the search engines, but here is what you can do. A professional web developer codes your site in a way that the search engines finds “friendly”. Do you have great content, yet low Alexa rankings? Chances are the way your content is “shown” to the search engines is not optimized. Our web developers at emeraldcoast.com will gladly analyze your website to see if this is the case.

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Google Likes Directories Named “Descriptively”

Apr 7, 2009 seo

OK, you have a golf country club website and your boss wants you to have a section of the website devoted to the 2009 Masters Golf Tournament so you have your web developer throw up a few pages. The developer puts them in a directory called “mastersgolf”. That’s all well and good, but if you go live and serve pages from the directory called “mastersgolf”, you’ve missed out on a huge opportunity to score major points with Google. You could have called that directory “2009-masters-golf-tournament”. Why does this help? Simple, people who search for information about The Masters Golf Tournament don’t punch in “mastersgolf”, they punch in things like “Masters Golf Tournament”! The names of your files and directories are a huge factor in how Google “sees” your content. That is why we have directories like “destin-online-advertising” at www.emeraldcoastdesign.com. Simple see! No more work for the web developer, yet many search engine points scored :-)

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Secret SEO Tip - Don’t Tell Anyone!

Apr 7, 2009 seo

Website owners…

Want more people to find your site on Google?

Want Google to crawl your site more often?

Want to rise quickly in your target audience demographic?

Here’s a top SEO secret that almost no one actually does. It’s incredible. I can’t believe we’re giving this information away for free. Are you ready? Are you sure you’re ready?

OK, here’s the secret to SEO…

Create original content

No tricks, no gimmicks.

Now, of course you are going to want to make sure that you have well formatted, well laid out code that is professionally done to make sure that each one of your web pages will benefit from your great content. The web developers at EmeraldCoast.com can help you with the source code side of things, so that you can focus on your core business.

It’s important, as a business owner to view your website as an outsider would. If you came to your web site, would you “stay”? Or would you quickly go elsewhere to another website because this isn’t the content that you were looking for in your Google search? If you would go elsewhere, then you need more pages on your website with more content in order to build credibility with your customers so there is a level of confidence to purchase from you.

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SEO Tip - Importance of the Anchor Tag

Apr 6, 2009 seo

Try this experiment. Go to Google and type in “click here”. You’ll get adobe.com or apple.com or doubleclick.com. Why? It all has to do with the importance of the text that you put in your “anchor” tag. The reason, sites like these come up first in the Google search results page is because, all over the internet, on all kinds of websites, users are given the opportunity to “click here” to download their software.

The text that goes between your “anchor” tag is often the most overlooked SEO “trick”. It is important to note the only real SEO “trick” is clean disciplined source code, but more about that in a later blog.)

Let’s look at an example. You have a business here in Destin. When you place a hyperlink on your web page, rather then saying “To find out more about Online Advertising in Destin, click here“. Google would prefer you to code it like this. “Find out more about Online Advertising in Destin.”

By creating the link in this manner, you are “describing” your link to the search engines. The search engines see this as a link about “Online Advertising in Destin” which is a much more descriptive than “click here”.

There is no one magic bullet when it comes to search engine optimization, but this is another example of how to “please” Google.

Find out more about how our web developers code our websites.

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