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Tag: site report card

  • SEO Factor Blog

    October 9, 2006 There are a bunch of them. I would like to share some of my favorites. First, though, I would like to say a thing. All tools are not 100%. Nothing is. Tools for SEO are online and rely on information given by different sources. For example, there are tools that check link popularity. Google will not ever let you know how many links they consider. This would give a little info on how they determine ranking and they don’t want that. Some tools check for ranking. Ranking is a relative term. Google has many different data centers, and a site that ranks 23 for a keyword on one center, may show a different rank on a different center. So let’s look at some neat tools to use.

    Site Report Card

    This one is a pretty cool overall tool that shows a few different aspects of a site that can and likely do affect rankings. It shows different aspects on a scale of 0-10. It’s a good idea to get everything as close to a 10 as possible, but not always easily done as some Flash conventions are not seen as acceptable for this one. It also shows link popularity and inclusion which is a good way to judge how many of your pages are indexed. Also, the spell check shows less than satisfactory results sometimes, as there are words that we say and type that aren’t in the tool’s dictionary.

    Overture Keyword Selection

    This is a tool that was setup to show how many times a certain word or term was searched for in a month’s time. This can help decide on what terms you want to optimize and market your site for. If you were thinking about a term that got 10 searched last month, might want to look at other terms. If there were 17,234,879,240 searches, might want to look at variation of a term with the next tool.

    Google Keyword Tool

    This is one of my favorites. This tool will show you a vast number of variations of a word or term, so that you aren’t trying to get your site to be number 1 on Google with the term “cell phone.” So you can check into other terms, use the previous search tool from overture, and decide on your best plan of action for optimization and marketing.

    Search Engine Watch, SEO Book, WebProWorld Sometimes, the best tool in the world is the help of others. These are two of my most favoritest forums and my favorite blog (next to mine, of course). I have yet to even ask a question that was not answered, and the amount of information provided here is immense. Make sure to get more than one opinion though. In the real world, people have a tendency to speak on things that they don’t completely understand or even remotely have experience in. Also, learn to know the mods on these. You will start to notice that the majority of the posts are answered by a few individuals, and they are incredibly smart.

    There are also a number of other tools out there that “check meta tags.” Please be wary of these. I’m not saying not to use, but I am saying that everybody has their idea of what is acceptable. WideXL, for example will tell you there are too many keywords or shine out your “poison” words. First, if I have 21 keywords, don’t tell me I have too many of something Google doesn’t look at. Obviously you probably don’t want to have 5000 keywords as there are some search engines that use them, and a hit is a hit (if it’s relevant). And “lingerie” is not a poison word. Look up “lingerie” in Google. See number 1. Look at their keywords. Yeah.

    So, check out these tools, research your SEO, be mindful of the information and/ or advice you get. Even from here. I try my hardest to keep the information here as correct as I can, but everyone makes mistakes. Unless you have tested it and counted the consequence, it hasn’t really happened in your world.

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  • SEO Factor Blog

    October 7, 2006 We shall now go into the actual code of your site. “Code” is used loosely here as HTML is actually a mark-up language, but we aren’t here to talk that. HTML is the language used to create your website. Even if you have a software that makes a site in a strictly interface or visual environment, it still makes HTML in some fashion, whether you see it or not. Knowing SEO doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to know HTML like the back of your hand, but it certainly helps to at least know some of the basics. If you wanna good beginning tutorial about HTML or a few other website development languages, check out Tizag. When a search engine looks at your site, there are a lot of variables that go into the determination of your ranking. One thing can be how well your site is written. Well, not so much that, but how few errors and problems your code creates. You will want to try to be mindful of what tags and methods are accepted, and which ones are not. You don’t want to make use of any methods that keep a search engine from seeing everything on your site. This can make them loose faith in your page and in return give you a lower ranking than the next guy. You can check out the latest of the accepted methods by visiting w3.org. It can really be as simple as having too much code where code is not needed. This is one thing to be mindful when creating a website in any sort of point-and-click environment like Dreamweaver or Front Page. These are both decent products, but create a lot of unnecessary code that will slow or stop a search engine browser. This will also affect your loading time, and that can bug a potential customer into leaving your site before you get a chance to show your goods. One of the first things to be sure of is the Doctype. The Doctype is mandatory for most mark-up languages. It is an explanation of the type of language used in the site for the search engine browser. You will want to make sure that you are including the appropriate Doctype, which can be validated here at w3.org. HTML should also be kept “clean.” What I mean by this, is make sure that you don’t have a lot of code that is not doing anything and has absolutely no need. Make things easy to read. As complex as the program that determines ranking is, the crawler is very simple. It can’t go through too much work to get the information it needs, so don’t try to make it. This is also true for the content on your page. Try to get to the good stuff as soon in your code as possible. This will show to the search engines faster and make things easier on them…those lazy crawlers. Hmmm….perhaps my kids learned this from Google. Don’t make repeating movements like trying to bold an H1 tag. It’s already bold and it won’t help you to double it up.

    CSS is a very good way to manage the layout of your site easily and effectively. CSS will also help to keep your code clean as you can keep a separate CSS file that your page will call to for design information. Make use of this as much as you can. And try to make use of the external CSS when at all possible. Putting CSS in the HEAD of the site adds a lot of code, and thus making for a messy bed. More on learning CSS can also be found on Tizag.

    JavaScript is also a great language that can give your site that extra spice it needs. JS is used a lot for pretty buttons and flashy things, but is also cool for actions like games and such. This can also be called from another file often and should be. If you have to use some in the HEAD of your site, try to make sure it is below your meta information. An error in either CSS or JS can cause a search engine to not even see what comes after it.

    It’s a good idea to be sure that your site is acceptable by the search engines browsers. A good tool to check for errors and warning can be found here at Site Report Card. You don’t want any errors at all, and as few warnings as possible. Things like Flash and some other methods aren’t really covered, so may show as a warning. But not likely an error, so a warning here and there might be OK. You really want to score a 10 all across the board.

    Again, a lot of “easy” website development programs are great for the beginner. But if you want to do the best for your site that you can, it would really help to learn a little HTML and CSS. Perhaps build what you want with a simple-to-use creator, and go through the code with a little knowledge and clean what you can. It will help a great deal and make you SEO life a lot easier.

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