February 16 2009

Several Blog Search Engine Optimization Areas to Concentrate Your Efforts On

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There is no shortage on advice in terms of what people should do to improve your WordPress site’s search engine rankings. It’s easy to feel baffled if you consume all the information that’s available, because a group of people concur with others while another group altogether differ and provide different advice.

You should be extremely leery of any recommendation provided by somebody who says you should submit your site to the search engines, or use FFA sites.

Recently a distinguished selection of SEO experts gave their consensus thoughts to SEOmoz with reference to what is relevant for good search engine listings in today’s environment.

In short, below are the 4 top search engine optimization ranking factors, according to the experts’ consensus opinion.

The Keywords that are Used in the Title Tag

The use of the appropriate keywords when writing the text for the title tag of a WordPress page is of extreme importance. It does not only assist with higher search engine rankings, it also assists with improved click-through from the search engine listings to the destination page. It’s of little use to be high up in the search results without receiving a high number of clicks. The ultimate goal is to get as many visitors to your web pages as feasible.

The search engine highlights in bold the keywords that were typed in by the user. If the right keyphrase of the title is shown in bold, it gives the listing a better opportunity of being noticed and receiving that click. Nevertheless, highlighted keywords aren’t the only thing to think about when writing the page title tag.

A lot of extra clicks can be attained from a cleverly composed page title, particularly if it invites the searcher to click. It’s more advantageous to receive a hundred clicks from position number five by using a great page title compared with 50 clicks from the 3rd position with a boring page title, wouldn’t you agree?

The Anchor Text that is Used for Links to Your Site

The anchor text that’s utilized in the link that points to your site from an external web site weighs heavily in the search engine computations to decide what your web site is focused on. And, what your web site is all about determines largely what keywords it will rank for in the search results.

If it’s possible that you can exert any influence on the anchor text that third-party web sites employ with their links to your site, then it is a very productive investment of your time.

The more external sites that have links to your site with a certain keyword, or variations of that keyphrase, will cause the search engines to more eagerly compute that your site is focused on that particular keyphrase.

It is even better if the content of the page on your web site contains that specific keyphrase and its latent semantic equivalents.

Overall Link Popularity of the Web Site

The number of hyperlinks that point to your web site is used by the search engines to calculate the importance of your site. This includes both quality of links and the quantity of the links.

The importance of your web site rises in the eyes of the SE’s according to the number of distinct web sites that have links back to your web site.

The building of links doesn’t stop. One can never have enough backlinks pointing to your site. It’s true that it is possible to build backlinks too quickly and that could raise some flags with the search engines. But, if it’s performed as an ongoing effort employing a longer term view, every link deserves the resources spent in getting it. The links all contribute to a higher perceived importance of your web site.

Internal Link Structure of the Web Site and Resulting Link Popularity

The fact is that some of your pages will obtain more backlinks than others. Those that do not obtain a lot of links could be the true income generating pages that you’d aim to rank well in the search engines. The internal linking structure, in addition to the anchor text used in the internal links, is how you disperse PageRank inside the perimeters of your site. The prudent path is to obtain the plugin for professional WordPress SEO that affords you full control of the internal linking on your Wordpress blog.

Some SEO professionals say that an internal link to a page carries the same weight as a link from an external page.

That does not mean the site will gain high rankings with nothing more than internal links.

What it does mean is that you can cause a page to be ranked by having internal links pointing to it even if it does not have lots of external links, provided that the rest of the web site has gained sufficient PageRank from external links.

December 29 2008

The Easy Way To Your First Web Site

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These days, when setting up a business,  it is almost financial suicide not to have a web site developed. In fact there are many businesses which exist solely on the Internet. If you are one of those people wishing to start an online business you may have shocked yourself if you had priced getting a professional web site built by professional web designers. This may have caused you to reconsider starting up your own business but read on as this article examines various aspects of web design focusing on creating your very first site for free or minimal cost using free tools and templates.

One of the main reasons why professional web design is so expensive is that a professional web site really is expensive to create. Not only do you have to cover the wages of the highly trained designer but the company has other costs such as office expenses. Even if the web designer works from home he will be using software and hardware, such as Dreamweaver, Photoshop, graphics tablets and the likes, that is really rather expensive. You will be pleased to hear that not all things related to web design are expensive some are cheap and some are even free, furthermore such tools can be used to create complex and large sites.

Finding the cheap or free alternatives is as simple as a search on your favorite search engine. Simply search for “web design freeware” or “web design shareware”, the difference between the two types is that one is free whereas the other requests a small payment for use (especially if the software is being used commercially). You will find a massive selection of web building tools are available and many are so good that some professionals use them!

One of the really great things about the free web design software is that much of it offers a WYSIWYG interface which makes web site building as easy as drawing. However you will need to learn a little about the programming languages used in web design, HTML & CSS. Even basic knowledge of HTML and CSS will help greatly.

If building a web site from scratch using HTML and CSS is a little daunting then you can search the Internet for free web site templates or free css templates. You will be amazed at the quality of some of these designs which can be easily tweaked to perfectly match your web design requirements.

If even this method is a little too complicated for you there is another alternative which is one of the most popular ways in which to build a web site - blogs. A blog, or weblog, can be about anything or everything and the Internet has millions of blogs covering every topic conceivable.

The really great thing about blogs is that they are free, yes, get that, this amazing web building tool is offered for free! Well not all the time but the most popular, Wordpress and Blogger, are free to use. You are given a small amount of web space to store your posts (pages) and images and the whole process of building a blog is so easy that children do it. The interface is rather like a word processor, you simply type in the text for the page and hit publish and the page is immediately created.

Of course the free blogs are rather basic with some limitations but as your knowledge increases you can upgrade some to include extra facilities and more web space. However it is really not that complicated to change the design of your blog and, if you have downloaded the blog software (Wordpress is best) to install on your own free web space (very easy to install) then you can take advantage of the many free Wordpress themes and templates available.

Remember building your first web site can be as easy as searching for freeware, shareware, free web templates etc. So why don't you head on over to your favorite search engine and get started on your very first web site just now? Take a Look at www.freewebsitetemplates4u.com