If your website is directly under Wikipedia and you want to beat them you can make changes to the Wikipedia page to give yourself a small advantage. This won’t work if they are beating you by a long shot. Just go in and edit the page so that the keyword is not mentioned as many times. Try to make sure the article still reads well. If you remove all of them or make the article read bad somebody will just come in and fix it.
I have been reading posts in forums where people are scared to death of getting a penalty from submitting to a bunch of free directories. Some even say that it is bad to submit to any free directories other than a few select high PR ones. This is complete nonsense. Read more…
Rice University starting an SEO class in Houston, TX Wednesday 3-7-07.
I did some searching and found some places to submit my rss feed. It is also a good idea to find people at mybloglog that have sites in your same area and add them to your contacts and join their communities. You will find some great sites you never knew about and also increase your exposure. When I did this I got a big spike in subscribers to my rss feed.
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One of the things I often have to do when I take over a website is convince the owners that their current site is turning people away. There is a nice article about this at inforworld.com called “What users hate most about Web sites” that expresses what I have been trying to say for some time. I wrote about some of this a while back.
When most people get on the web they are looking for information. Most people that come to a companies website are looking how to contact them. If you sell something they are looking for your product and the price. People do not like to read. I used to have a business on ebay and I would put stuff in huge red 28 point letters that gave the shipping information. I constantly got email when people were surprised about the way I did shipping. I read over at www.digg.com a lot and it is very common for people to digg an item or makes a comment on an item just from reading the items title. You need to get them what they want as fast as possible. Don’t get me wrong some people do read every word on your site but they are a very small minority. Put the text furthor down the page. The first seen part of your page or fold as some put it should be clean with few choices.
I was just posting a comment on a blog and noticed they had a note that said “Note: all links are nofollowed “. That just set me off. I know everybody does it because most up to date blog software installs it by default and makes it difficult to remove. I understand how some may not even know it is there. But I don’t understand why major SEO blogs leave it up and some even embrace it as a good idea. What does it accomplish? Has anybody seen a drop in spam? If anything spam has gone up. If you are going to allow comments you should allow people that leave good comments to get a link.
If you really want to stop spam you need to customize your template. Take off any text that is default to your blog software. Take off any text that is used on most blogs. If you need that text use an image instead. Make it so people have to be logged in to leave comments. The only people doing blog spam anymore are the amateurs. As soon as some technique becomes well known the real spammers have moved on to something else.
For those who want to remove nofollow from WordPress there is a plugin.
Internal linking is very important in SEO. One of the first things you can do is change the link to your front page. Most people put “Home”. You should change that to your keywords like widgets or my service or whatever term you are trying to get on your front page. You could even have a different keyword per page. Another mistake is people put the link to their home page as /index.html. Don’t do this your going to be telling search engines you have 2 front pages. They will see www.domain.com and www.domain.com/index.html as 2 pages and they will see them as duplicates. You will not be passing any of your internal link value to the home page. I try to use absolute URL’s. (i.e. http://www.domain.com/page.html) If someone hijacks your site they can only hijack one page this way. Every so often to hack comes out where somebody can hijack your site. It does not happen often but why risk it. Another thing I try to tell people is don’t put a link to your home page on your home page. You are just wasting space.
Next you want to have all your pages pointing to other pages on your site. If you have a small site with 10 pages or less you can just have each page point to each page. If you have more you will need to pick a number of links you want on each page. Then you will need to make sure that each page has that many internal links plus the link from the front page or directory page. So if your number is 6 then each page should have at least 7 internal links. Be sure that the links to each page have the right anchor text for that page.
This will give you the power of keyword rich anchor text to help boost each pages rank. It will also make sure that when you do rank for something you will get a second indented result in the SERPS because you have that keyword on at least 2 pages. It is good to organize the links into groups so that you also get more keyword density on the page that has the links.
I have recently spoken to a few webmasters that say no. I saw one website that was 1.5 MB in size with 66 objects. That is a bit out of the norm. Most often you will see sites that are around 200k which best case will load in 45 seconds. This does not mean they don’t see anything for 45 seconds. Often your text will come up but not your pictures or flash. If you just really need to have a big web page make sure you have useful information in text that comes up quickly. If you design a web page you want people to see the whole thing. If your sites takes 20-60 seconds to load they are not going to wait to see the whole thing. They may just give up and hit the back button and try the next site on the search engine they used. In another article I posted a link to a CNN story that showed 76% of rural users have dial up and 61% of urban/suburban users have dial up. This is a huge group of people to eliminate.
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This is from a thread I posted on www.webmasterworld.com in the Supporters section on Nov 29, 2004.
Many people talk about backlinks and anchor text and that it is the most important aspect of SEO for the Google search engine. Don’t get me wrong they are important but on-page SEO is still very important. If you do the on page stuff right you will need much less PR and anchor text.
Here is a list of important factors. I will discuss each one further down. They are not in any particular order. Some people like to order them and give the values of how important they are but I just make a list and do all of them.
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I am writing this article to be a guide on the proper way to set up the front page of a website. There are two things to consider when creating a front page: getting visitors to your site and getting them to do something on your site. One of the biggest mistakes that most web designers and company owners make is that they think a website is similar to other media like TV, magazine, and radio. Most people are on the web to find information quickly. They are moving from site to site and spend very little time deciding if your site is worth using. I have some rules about what to do with your front page. Some are general website rules and some are SEO (Search Engine Optimization) rules.
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php using html extension
I know a lot of my readers may already know this but I get asked this question about how to run php with an html extension enough that I thought I would get it down in print so I can just send people to it.
I often get the question “How do I use php without changing my url’s?” or “How do I just make one header and footer file to include in each page so I only have to change them once when a change is needed?”. Read more…
