SEO no-no: Things you should avoid

There was times when people trying to trick the search engines and it worked for a while. But these old tatics that worked well before should never be used today. I am going to talk the strategies that you should stay away from.

some on page strategies:

• hidden text
• alt image spamming
• meta tag stuffing

other than on page strategies you should avoid, there are some off page optmization strategies that you should avoid:

• Don't exchange links with a site that has "farm links".

• Don't use outbound link to site that is penalized by google.

• Link exchange with a site that irrelevant to your site will not help you but may harm you.

SEO Lesson: Use a CSS-driven Design

Guess what!! Just a few 1 week ago, my site bestplatform beds.com only have 1 page indexed by Google but when I check it today, I have 29 pages indexed now!! I am so happy and I know that I should thank for the CSS design. When I first started my platform beds site, I used java script for creating my lovely top navigation buttons. Sure it really looks nice and attracting with all the rollover effect. With a bunch of java scritp there, poor Google bots can not find all my sub pages. So I decided to use CSS to redesign my navigation system. After redesigning with CSS, I am still be able to create the same stunning effect but more importantly, it makes all my sub pages "visible" to search engines.
Just a slight change can really makes a big difference. You can see my new CSS-driven site: Platform Bed

SEO lesson- Don't follow SEO Content Optimization

When talking about SEO, alsmot every one knows what should he/she do to create a title, keyword, description and page content that is SEO-driven. We know the the common tricks such as using keywords, using H1 headings, or using bold font to stress your keywords. However, when constructing our page content, what we should focus on is our targeted audiance instead of search engine. If you get too obbsessed with SEO, you may tend to place and stress your keywords in places even though it does not make much sense to do so. In one word, our content should be sales-driven or customer focused instead of SEO-driven. Some gereral guidelines you should follow when creating your page content:

• Know your targeted audiance, always!
  
• If possible , make emotional appeal
  
• Place keyword where it make sense to your audiance
• Make it flow!
• Spell out the benefits instead of just listing features of your products

As search engines getting more and more smart, they won't just simply look at how many times does your keyword appear in your content. If your audiance like your content and your content convert to sales, search engine will also tend to favor your content more than the content stuffed with keywords.

SEO Lesson-Quality Inbound Links

What is inbound links? It is the link that points to your site from another site. Google and other search engines will take quality inbound links into account when determining how imporatnt or relevant your site is to a specific keyword you are targeting. The more inbound links you have, your site will be more valuable to search engines.
However, be careful, these links need to be "quality" inbound links. What do we mean by quality here. A site might provide quality inbound links to you if it meets the following criterion:
1. The page is well designed and is informative
2. It has a decent PR
3. It is relevant to the content on your page
4. The links that provided from his site must not be far from its home page level
5. You are in control of how your link can be displayed, otherwise, they may make your link "invisible" to search engines.

As with inbound links, we also have the concept "outbound" links, it is not as important as inbound links to search engines, but I will talk about it tomorow anyway.

SEO Lesson-Manage your dynamic page URL

What does people mean when refering to "dynamic web page"?? It is not about something "dynamic" as we might think, such as rotating image, some flash. Here, "dynamic" simply means the web page is connected with a database and some other language other than html is required, such as php and asp. Since we are talking about SEO, we will not get into detail thses server-side language.
Now, suppose my url looks like this:
http://www.bestpaltformbeds.com/platformbed/retrobed.php ---this is fine to any search engines

http://www.bestplatformbeds.com/platformbed/retrobed.php?png=2---This is still ok, at least with some of the search engines

http://www.bestplatformbeds.com/platformbed/retrobed?&ID=2234=CAD&=ID_97
Now, this kind of URL will cause me some trouble. A lot of parameters are contained in this URL. Thus, this page may not get indexed by Google or even if it get indexed, it would not get ranked in the top 30. So how can we get it fixed?
1. Modify URL so they does not look like they are pointing to dynamic pages. You can achieve that by removing some special characters such as #, !, ?, * and reducing the number of parameters.

2.Use URL rewrite trick---- you can look more in detail here httpd.apache.org/docs/mod/mod_rewrite.html

Create Navigation Systems that Search Engines Can Read

When building your navigation system, make sure search engines can "read" it. Sometimes, what we want to do is to use rollover effects or flash buttons to make make it looks fancy and "high-class". However, if you create your navigation system in that way, it will be invisible to search engines. Because usually these techniques requires the use of Java script, which is something that seach engine robot will ignore. If you do want to use Java scripts to create some eye-catching effects, then follow some tips below:
1. Make sure you have the text link appear on some other places in the same page
2. Don't throw all your Java script into one page, make an external file to store the script, and use php code point to the files that contain the Java scripts. (I also have a blog talking about php)
3.When you use images as buttons, make sure write the corresponding alt tag for image

In some other cases, you may want to block search engine robots crawling your page when you have a page that is under construction or that page is only for internal uses, then you use the following code:
META NAME=”robots” CONTENT=”noindex, nofollow”
here, noindex means don't index the page and nofollowing means don't follow any of the links in this page.

Where to put the keyword "platform bed"?

Yesterday, I talked about how to find your approriate keyword. Now it is the time to place the keyword. So for my site Bestplatformbeds.com, where would I put the keyword "platform bed"? Generally, there are 3 places where we can put the keyword. First, I will put "platform bed" on my page title, this is one of the places that search engine gets clue what your site is about. Second, and obviously, I will put the keyword in my meta keywords, 10-15 will be an approriate amount. Third, I will put in meta description. In meta description, try to write the most concise and keyword-heavy sentence that describe the site, and it usually should be less than 30 words. Other than the above 3 common place, URL can be another place you should target on. For example, if I have a page for platform bed design(actually I do), I will name the URL http://bestplatformbeds.com/platform-bed-design

Find an approriate keyword for you

A lot of companies have no idea (they usually think they do though) on how to pick keywords. Of course, the first we need to know is that what keyword that most people is searching for. A easy way to check is to use keyword selector tool . You can type a relevant keyword in the box and search to see how many people are searching this keyword. So for my bestplatformbeds.com, i would try to use "platform bed", "best bed", "platform bed design", "build platform bed". Thus, whatever comes the first may be the one that i will focus on when developing my meta tags. Here i used the word "maybe" because another strategy is to try to target niche keyword since you won't have many competitors and thus you will have a greater chance to get ranked higher.

Be careful, don't stuff the keyword as you may be considered as spamming by search engines.

For separating different keywords, you can use either space or comma.

Other than using that keyword selector tool, you can also follw the tips below:

1. Find obvious keyword(for mine, of course it is platform bed)
2. Look at the web site's access log
3. Brainstorm with your colleagues

Bestplatformbeds.com- A Real Case for SEO

Hello, Everyone

For any of you who owns a website, SEO undoubtedly will be a challenging and ongoing subject. SEO is not only a job, a task, but also an art, i would say. There are a lot of theroies around the web you can look for. But personally i think some of them are not well written or just throwing everything there. In here, I will share my experience and my understanding about SEO. I just have my site Bestplatformbeds.com up and thus this will be a real case for me to implenment SEO strategies.

Every week, I will talk about each area in SEO, maybe a lot of the stuff you already know, but hopefully you will still find something useful. Let's together rock Google and Yahoo