The fact that SEO does not fall on any of computer science’s theoretical realm nor does it fall in any academic aspects makes it an open ended process, which is prone to constant change of facts or figures. This means that what may be true in SEO today may not be true tomorrow. That is how dynamic SEO is, no concrete ground rules to follow, unlike in Physics where there are constants and equations that can be used to solve specific problems. This is the reason why some SEO company, SEO consultant and SEO companies are vulnerable to committing errors or processes that might go against the standards set by search engines. Although it is a fact there is no concrete basic guideline for the entire SEO process there are pieces of guidelines focusing on specific aspects of SEO one such guideline that emanated from the experiences of SEO consultants, SEO companies and other online-marketers is the guideline of what to avoid during your SEO campaign.
The first thing you have to avoid in your SEO campaign is the use of black hat techniques, black hat techniques are SEO strategies that employs surreptitious means to get the desired ranking. This type of technique or method is detrimental to your SEO campaign as it will, when detected by the search engine, result to the banning of your website.
Second is to avoid making your website a graphic website. This means that you avoid using graphic headers and graphic navigation bar. Although this method may seem to contribute to the aesthetics of your website design, the use or excessive use of images where texts would suffice may cause your ranking to go down. This is due to the fact that spiders or the search engine in general does not recognise images as data for consideration in ranking the website. You can however remedy this by including an ALT attribute to all the images that you will be using.
Third, avoid using scripts like JavaScript, VBScript and the like, this is because of the fact that spiders has no capacity of interpreting scripts. If you need to use such scripts then make sure not to bind them with your HTML tags and instead place them in a separate external file.
Fourth, do not incorporate session identifiers in your websites’ URL. Session identifiers help website owners to track their visitors, collect useful data and even their behavior. But unfortunately, search engines’ spiders are not capable of directly identifying session identifiers, since every visit to the website means a different ID or URL then the spiders will interpret it as a new web page thus it will not be able to collect data relevant to ranking or indexing your website.
These are just few of the guidelines that will enable you to avoid committing mistakes in your SEO campaign, still other guidelines might develop throughout the course of the development of new SEO techniques or strategies.
Since the inception of the world wide web consortium, the use of the lingua franca of the web or the use of HTML or XHTML had been standardised. Although standard usage of the hypertext markup language tags were regulated by W3C there are instances when these set standards are not being followed but are still capable of displaying the desired web page output. This is one of HTML’s weaknesses, the easy recognition of the tags without identifying any syntax errors. This non-identification of errors in the use of tags in your website design will in the long run would create more problems such as difficult detection of fault or errors and what seems to be a perfect web design on one browser will be horribly imperfect for the other browser. These are just some of the problems that one might encounter if proper use of tags for web design is not executed. It is therefore imperative for a website designer to know the different standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium or W3C and these are:
1. All opened tags must be closed – this means that non-empty tags or those tags that has a corresponding closing tag must always be properly closed using the said closing tag. For empty tags or tags that do not have any partner closing tag should still be closed by using the forward slash. To illustrate:
Non-empty tag: <b> </b>
Empty tag: <br/>
The proper closing of these tags is beneficial to your website design by properly identifying where a tags’ effect starts and where it ends.
2. Nest your tags properly – tag nesting is done when there are several tags used in a consecutive manner, for example in your website design you would like to highlight a certain text by underlining it and turning it into bold letters, thus, the use of the underline and bold tag are to be used or applied on a single specific target text. If such situation is encountered the proper nesting rule to follow is that the first tag to be opened will be the last tag to be closed.
3. Use lowercase letters in your tag name – in HTML, the practice was the use of uppercase letters in naming the tag, i.e. <B> -for bold. A recent W3C standard now dictates that lowercase should be followed in naming the tags instead of the uppercase letters. This is also attributed to the fact that DHTML and XML is added in the field of Website design and to make web pages universal the use of lowercase should be practiced.
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Article writing is one of SEO’s main contributors in increasing the search engine rank of a website. Article writing may come in various forms like blog posts, copywriting or even forum posts. This process greatly aides your SEO campaign due to the fact that it allows you to utilise your keywords that helps in your search engine optimisation campaign. If you have been frequenting websites that are ranked chances are, there are web pages within its website that is dedicated to publishing the articles, and everyone in the field of Search engine optimisation would agree that the inclusion of such articles or blog posts in ones’ own website will greatly boost the search engine optimisation of the website as a whole.
Aside from the fact that article writing will increase the presence of your keywords in a relevant writing piece, which the search engines love, article writing also increases your chances of getting links from other website to your website. This is due to the fact that articles must be written in such a manner that it is relevant to your website content, and most of the time people considers blog posts as relevant resources that they would provide a link to that specific web page, and if you are getting lucky it might even be featured in news alerts that are related to your keywords.
So how do we write a good web article? For one make sure that the blog post or article that you are going to write will have original contents. This means that before you could actually start writing you must have a good knowledge of what you are writing about. Your article when done, must pass the plagiarism test tools that are available over the internet such as Copyscape. Second, you have to remember that you are writing the article as part of your SEO campaign thus, you have to put your keywords into play. For every article it is advisable to get or make use of two keywords, get the top two of your keywords that you shortlisted for your SEO campaign giving priority of course to your highest ranking keyword.
Third you have to write using a good command of the language that you are going to use. If you opt for regional ranking only as your main goal in your SEO campaign then writing in using the vernacular will suffice but for an international recognition we use the English language. In addition, when you use your keywords make sure that the statements are coherent and are grammatically correct. Do not waste your time writing article statements that will compromise the quality or correctness of your grammar just because you want to insert your keywords.
Fourth you have to take into consideration the fact that other people might want to link your web page to theirs as part of their resource links or the fact that you might want to incorporate other related articles within your website. Therefore you have to consider incorporating keyword rich links in your web page to facilitate the link exchange and the internal link building process.
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The field of web design has come a long way since its inception, from the simple publication of information over the web to the most complex web design used for e-commerce, indeed web design became a part of the daily internet use. Web design have for it purpose to create an aesthetically pleasing web page for the purpose of building a good company professional reputation. We have to remember that once a website is visited the first thing that the user will notice is the overall design of the website before he or she would start reading the site content of before the user even starts to navigate the website. It is for this reason that web design proper should always be one of the initial steps to be considered greatly along with usability. With the advancement of web technology web design had been provided with several tools in order to aide web designers in making an aesthetically beautiful website. Some of these tools are the following:
1. HTML editor – nowadays you can already make use of editors made especially for web design. HTML editors are very useful as they provide error checking on your script coding. Do not be confused by the name because it does not only provide checking for HTML tags but also for JavaScript, PHP and other scripting languages as well. Unlike for the normal text editor where you are not aided in terms on your code function, features or errors the HTML editor provides real time check on your use of the different scripting languages for web design.
2. Image Editor – the incorporation of images as part of a web page design has been widely accepted and used. Fortunately, today we have image or picture editors available for our use such as Photoshop and Illustrators. These image editors provides avenue to web designers to create interplay of text and images to create a whole unit of a website. The incorporation of colors, font designs and image designs are made possible by these image editors.
3. Animators – several websites nowadays have incorporated animation to their web design to add more “spice” to their overall aesthetics. Moving images can contribute to a websites’ popularity as it adds to the beautification factor of the website. These animation programs such as flash and gif animators have aided web designers in making web page look a little bit more dynamic.
These, coupled with the different scripting languages available for web designers’ use will greatly change or transform a dull web page into a usable and beautiful Website Design uk.
Search engine optimisation or websites undergoing SEO campaign focuses its entire arsenal for one purpose that is to please the target search engine enough for the website to be indexed and ranked. Looking at this perspective it is clear that search engines play a vital role in one owns SEO campaign or in general, ones’ online-marketing campaign. Thus, every SEO company and search engine optimisation consultant must know or at least have a good idea on what or how a search engine functions. Search engines have three so-called “engines”, each engine having a specific role that is contributory to attaining the central engines’ purpose. The following are the three engines.
1. Query Engine – the query engine is the searchers’ or users’ interface when looking for websites relevant to the keyword or key phrase he or she entered. To be more descriptive this is the text box provided for by the search engine company where any visitor could enter their desired keyword or key phrase. Contrary to common knowledge, the query engine does not search the web for websites with the relevant keywords that a user has entered but rather it searches it’s own database for the different relevant websites that were indexed by the search engine. This is why SEO is important because one of SEO’s initial aim is to get the target website to be indexed in search engines.
2. Spider Engine – there are programs that are tasked to do one thing and that is to look for new websites that are qualified to be added to the search engine indices. Again, in SEO the spider engine is considered as the most important visitor of your website thus your website must conform to the spider engines’ manner of searching or commonly known as crawling, one such manner is the ease of navigating through the website through the correct addition of links.
3. Indexing Engine – after the spiders have crawled your website they return the data gathered to be processed in the indexing engine. The indexing engine analyses the content of your website and will then decide on whether your website is qualified to be included in the search engines’ indices. Further if your website is qualified it will then make such website available for public viewing when searched upon.
Before your website can be ranked among its search results using specific keywords your website must first be indexed. Indexing is the process of adding to a search engines’ database your websites’ URL for display in a search result page using specific keywords or key phrases as basis. The process of indexing entails a lot of waiting time due to the fact that although your website is SEO-optimised newly created websites must wait for a certain period before such website will be indexed. There are two ways where you can have your website indexed in a search engine.
The first one is by submitting your websites’ URL to search engines. This is done by filling-up a prepared form provided by the search engine, using this method would mean that you are informing the search engine about the existence of your website. Search engines usually require you to add only the URL for your home page and let the spiders navigate through your other pages. There is a downside to this method though, you will see in the notification also provided by the search engines that your website might get indexed in about more or less than six weeks. Unfortunately, due to the condition known as the sandbox some websites submitted to search engines took more than six weeks before their site were indexed. For some other websites’ they have experienced an SEO nightmare because their website stayed in the sandbox and was never indexed. It is for this reason that SEO companies, SEO consultants and SEO practitioners have developed an alternate way of getting indexed.
The second method of getting your website to be indexed by search engines is by allowing spiders to search for your site without notifying the search engine through submission of the forms provided by said search engines. This SEO strategy can be accomplished if you manage to at least have one inbound link. This means that you have other websites, preferably websites that are already ranked in the search results, linking to your website. Using this strategy will cut down your waiting time for the indexing of your website and this is made possible by the fact that a spider that will crawl to the website which you have a link to your website will allow such spiders to also crawl your website and if the data it gathered would satisfy the search engines’ criteria then it is going to index your website without the long waiting period as compared to the first SEO method. Find out more information on our own SEO Blog.
Web design or the manner on creating the overall appearance of a web page or a whole website is a very important factor that is being considered if such website will be subjected to an SEO campaign. When you are considering optimising your website it should be created in such a manner that it shall conform to the standards of Search engine optimisation. For a novice SEO company it is imperative to take into heart the different basic but essential parts of a web page that should be considered in your website design approach. The approach should be to create a web page or a website for that matter that is SEO-friendly, and this can be achieved by following the basic and essential guidelines in building your website.
1. Incorporate a navigation bar or a navigation menu – the incorporation of a navigation bar in your website design is not only going to increase the SEO-friendliness of your website but also it will increase the websites’ usability. The navigation menu will provide the avenue for the spiders to easily navigate through your website and thus in return would enable the same spiders to gather more vital data about your website which can be used for your websites’ indexing and ranking in search engines. In addition, you have to, as much as possible, use keywords in your links to maximise the use of such keywords.
2. Optimise the Home Page – your homepage will most likely the first to be indexed, ranked and displayed in the search engines’ search results page. Therefore, you have to focus your initial optimisation strategies on your websites’ homepage. This can be achieved through the use of keywords in your homepage content, using the link to your homepage in a link exchange or link building process.
3. Consider expanding your total page number – the more web pages in your website the better, this is due to the fact that a website with lots of web pages increases the websites’ chances of being visible to the different search engines.
4. Update your website regularly – an update on your website is interpreted by search engines as an expansion of the website, and this consideration will in effect increase your ranking. One way to update your website regularly is to add to your website design plan a provision for making an articles page where you can daily update by uploading articles relevant to your website.
In a recent study conducted by RankingMeasures.com it was found out that websites with contextual advertisement are more likely to rank lower. RankingMeasure.com had taken around 15,000 keywords and subjected it to a system of analysis where they found out about the effect of contextual advertisements such as Google adsense in your SEO campaign. This contextual advertisement inclusion strategy emanated from the pay-per-click scheme where the revenue that emanated from a website visitor clicking a link or an advertisement present in a website is practically divided among the website owner who included the contextual advertisement and the search engine company.
This is one main reason why many websites are including the scripts for the inclusion of several random links or advertisements. Unfortunately, because of the abuse of some SEO or PPC advocates, the advertisements are slowly deteriorating in terms of their reliability due to the fact that several advertisements and links are directing users to spammy websites. The emergence of spammy websites linking to contextual advertisement is because of the fact that revenue is being generated just like in the case of Googles’ adsense where the company offers you to include several advertisements in your website with the agreement that you as the host of the ad will get a portion of such generated revenue.
The fact that spammy websites are being used in PPC advertisements to generate more income to the detriment of the visitor, it had been the conclusion that use of such strategy resulted to the algorithm update for Google that the algorithm included such advertisement inclusion in their flagging system preventing websites to rank higher.
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Press release is not an actual aspect or focus of Search Engine Optimisation. This is actually inclined on both the PPC or the Pay-per-click side, and SEO side where this aims to create an avenue for you to build your link. As we all know PPC actually increases your SEO efficiency by adding to the rate of conversion of your website visitors. After all, the entire end goal of both SEO and PPC is the purchase or acquisition of your company’s products and or services respectively. Writing press release is a tedious task but it is nonetheless an important addition to your SEO campaign. Since writing press releases is a daunting task it would be proper to know different steps or guidelines to help starting SEO practitioners and or Press release writers. The following are the said guidelines:
1. Learn from pre-existing press releases – to get a more detailed overview on what a press release is, looking at an existing press release will give you the basic information that you need. If you further analyse a press release it will show you its importance in your SEO campaign and moreover it will show you the fundamental parts of a press release which you could use as a pattern in writing your own press release.
2. Utilise the basic five questions – when writing a press release you need to write a good lead which will answer the five basic questions of who, why, when, where and the what. Answering these five questions may even aide you in your SEO campaign on the aspect of keyword or key phrase writing.
3. Always write in third person – writing in third person will create a feeling of comfort to your readers, comfort will tantamount to reliability and relevance which is also another focus of SEO in term of the website content. Writing in third person gives a feeling of comfort to readers or visitors because of the fact that it implies that the writer is writing his or her opinion or take on the product on an outside perspective and not coming from the company itself which common sense would dictate that promotion of their own product or service is done extensibly and might even go beyond what the company, product or service can actually provide.
4. Avoid distractions – distractions in press releases can diminish your SEO campaign’s worth aside from other consequences, it is for this reason that distractions in your style of writing such as improper inclusion of the trademark or registered sign, the use of complicated language where the writer is trying to extend a simple point in other words you have to keep it simple, also the use of advertising words or phrases remember you are not promoting your company, product or service in a form of advertising rather you are writing a press release which although is a form of promoting your company, it is more inclined in the realm of journalism.
Every web designers know that HTML or the Hypertext Markup Language is the lingua franca of the web. This means that the common language that the web or even the field of web design recognises is Hypertext Markup Language. HTML started as the only scripting language being recognized by the web but as time goes on web designers and web developers have discovered other scripting languages. The incorporation of different scripting languages had diminished the features of HTML in web design, but even though with the presence of this diminution web designers have found that HTML is here to stay because it is still the main language being recognised by the internet. The imperfections of HTML led to the development of other scripting languages to augment the missing elements that would aide web designers in their quest to making an aesthetically pleasing web design. These imperfections are the following:
1. HTML cannot interact dynamically with the server – since all web pages are to be uploaded on servers the use of HTML during its advent had only given a static output, nowadays with the expansion of the internets’ functionality the need to make web pages and web designs dynamic in terms of communicating with the server requires the use of another type of scripting languages known as PHP or ASP. These server-side scripting languages has the ability to decide the web pages to be displayed depending on the command of the user making it more interactive where HTML has no capability of doing or replicating such function.
2. HTML has limited web design properties – Hypertext Markup Language can only do so much in terms of web design. This is due to the fact that HTML tags are limited in capabilities which causes the web design to be locked on a specific pattern or output only. One concrete example in web design that is limited by HTML is the use of background where if the image is too small to fit the web browser screen it will automatically be set in a tiled position. This is just one of such problem that HTML purists are encountering thus the Cascading Style Sheet scripting language or CSS was developed. CSS was developed to take care of the presentation aspect of a web design and many commands used here are pertaining on how to position the different elements of your web design.
3. HTML is limited on client-side interactivity – this means that HTML cannot create web pages that can interact with the user even if the codes of the web pages are already downloaded in ones’ own computer. Aside from its’ server side limitation, HTML also is limited regarding the client side web design interactivity. Such interactivity like form validation before sending the information to the server is not handled by HTML but rather by the use of either JavaScript or VBScript.
Although the Hypertext Markup Language is limited in the above mentioned properties the use of such scripting language is not totally removed because HTML nowadays handle the structure of the web design.
