Archive for September, 2008

Creating search engine-friendly HTML content

Friday, September 26th, 2008

Search engines crawl websites using intelligent robotic techniques. Some of them are well known to webmasters, some are myths. The reason - shortage of info and it starts spreading from search engine developers blogs and finishes at official press issues. Search companies officially doesn’t want to share their main search business ideas. It isn’t even clear, which SEO technique is good and which is bad . So how to start doing SEO if you can quickly miss and get page outranked ?

I found a brief tutorial of writing SEO content , which explains most of techniques, let’s explore main steps.

1. Find your main keyword phrases

Find the target of the market You want to get in. It is hard now to enter global search market with one popular keyword, because there are lots of keyword competitors (e.g. shoes, cars or windows… ). So you should try starting with keyword phrases (e.g. London shoes, Teddy bugs etc.). Even lots of keyword phrases are taken so don’t stop browsing until You find the less competing one.

Use phrases consisting of maximum two keywords.

2. Pick a right keyword based domain name

If You picked keyword “london bus”, it’s logical to select domain london-bus.com. Not irishairlines.com …. Domain name must describe the keyword. Also it must look easy to remember, nice, attractive to put on add banner and clearly describing the idea.

3. Some MUST-BE tags in HTML

When you finish these first two steps,  start coding html. There are few tags which must be used in html code for better search results. And some rules:

1. Search Engines index only text.

And some flash. Forget about text inside pictures (jpg, gif etc.), design text/info/blog sites. Show that the information is the key on Your web.

2. <TITLE>

The title of the page, short description about Your website. Use keywords in TITLE tag.

E.g. if keyword is “London bus”, create title: “London bus: website of London bus traffic”.

Try to use different titles on different web pages. This extends Your site search posibility.

3. <META>

The second important tag You must include. With META tag You can do two important tasks: describe website and list all keywords. Here comes the main SEO job – describe this very briefly, using all keyword combinations. If it’s possible, try to change some keywords in different pages.

4. Use keywords in <H1><H2> and other heading tags

Try to use keywords in heading tags. But it’s recommended not to use them in every header, heading and so on. This makes site look not natural. 

5. Use keywords in your text

And don’t forget it.

6. Put keywords in alt tags and in title of anchor tags

In every ALT tag of a picture and TITLE of anchor links use some description connected with keyword.

7. Robots.txt file

Use robots.txt file to write a directory list. This list includes or excludes folders from search engine crawling. Learn more information about robots.txt here.

Conclusions

Putting SEO friendly content on the web is important as placing right ad of any product in supermarket. Internet is full of good products and if You want to be seen among them, do things that help to be recognizable. The listed technical strategies function on lots of web sites.

But don’t forget – content is the king…

Greetings to Words in a row celebrating 10 years marketing online. Waiting for some minor changes in Your tutorial :)

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Sleeping or watching ?

Thursday, September 25th, 2008

Sleeping or watching ? Ducks were sitting on stone while I was passing by.

You should care of Your safety even when You sleep – the idea of this story :) The second thesis – watch the security of Your own computer systems.

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Is mobile search market open ?

Thursday, September 25th, 2008

Wnunet has recently released a mobile search market report, where they present Google as the great dominator of mobile search market.

And some interesting facts. According to web monitoring firm comCore:

  • Google dominates Europe and US mobile search markets;
  • Number of mobile users is steadily rising;
  • UK has the highest number of mobile users. 9.5 of all UK subscribers access search services and thus US is beaten by 8.2 per cent;
  • As the number of mobile devices increase, the frequency of mobile activity is growing. 

So what could serve for such G’s mobile seach traffic increase ? Are there possibilities for other search platform to come closer to Google search traffic ?

New fashionable gadgets – new market improvement

After new iPhone released some data analytics said that mobile searches coming from iPhone were 50 times more than any other mobile device. This fact even made company analytics recheck logs twice. It was hard to believe as other smartphones existed far longer. The secret was that Google was set to default home page on iPhone together with Yahoo offered as secondary option.

Old weird systems transformation

MSN and Live Search haven’t larger share among Windows Mobile devices. Amazing, WM6 owners can install Opera Mini as default web browser which swithes Yahoo as default web search engine! So funny, but Windows Mobile users use Opera instead of weird and enormous native system.

Problems arise new markets

The main problem is that Google and Yahoo mobile searches have lots of vulnerabilities and lots of user report bugs, offer improvements. This is normal when developing system. The only fact is that the lack of quality makes users look around and search for some better products.

Entering mobile search engine market

It is not possible to compete the grand nowadays market participants – Google, MSN, Yahoo. But as we see mobile versions of these three doesn’t look reliable yet. So market is open ! The historical list continues – social bookmarking, talk on the go and other popular services quickly finish migrating to mobile world.

And the rise of context sensitive vertical search systems depending on user computing skills is evitable. Personal customizable search systems networks are foreseen in many web conferences. Behance designed system looks so realistic and so clear that I bet in 5 years we can have similar one.

Don’t You believe ?  Please look at the new Sekai product.

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Old tags

Wednesday, September 24th, 2008

All ruins look similar. But in soviet rocket base ruins it is possible to find some TAGS for car drivers :)

 

 

 

  

Here they are ! The picture is taken in old soviet military base located near Kaunas city, Lithuania.

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Before starting your first SEO project

Wednesday, September 24th, 2008

Ooops, you heard a term Search Engine Optimization – SEO! Since that moment Your life changes. You start thinking about sence of every word in Your posts, planning writing time or even separate useful and unuseful HTML tags. What a nonsense – You said ? No, these should be the minimum changes in Your webmaster’s diary. There are lots of basic tasks to do before you start Your SEO project, please don’t forget them.

1. SEO education - build Your knowledge base

Don’t You even try to guess SEO techniques if You don’t know anything about SEO. Try to attend online SEO courses and SEO schools at first. Very few universities prepare professional SEO courses, so choosing right online education site is left to You. I recommend starting from Aaron Walls “Seo Book” (why? try entering “seo book” in google). Subscription costs 100 $ monthly.

Don’t be afraid of the great amount of information on SEO posts and in forum (which is open to subscribers only).

My x-perience:
First month was very confusing for me in seobook.com. Until I decided to choose one SEO strategy (it was cross-linking between two my sites…) and to use it practically. I liked it though I haven’t gigs of traffic. (don’t even believe that with SEO you will build it quickly). After I took another strategy and used it. Some of them were working, some still not as I understood that I must find my business area …

 

2. Searching for business niche

Yesterday You just heard about META description, keywords, link building and other simply SEO strategies. Now try to search for business idea: adsense, adwords, blog, education portal or something else.

Recently I found very interesting post about top web businesses. It seems that blogs became means for business. Hope that You’ll find your own market very quickly or maybe make some explorations in little markets.

3. Explore little local markets

If You have possibility to run local sites on Your local language it is very useful thing. Try finding lack of products, services in local market, search engine market and offer these services in your own little test sites.

This experience:

  • helps understand how quickly new keyword can be found;
  • helps learn complexity of bigger markets – multiplied 100 times;
  • builds page rank of this little site (in case You used legal SEO techniques);
  • makes You hungry of global market :)

My x-perience:
First I explored my little local (lithuanian) market and I wondered how it was easy to enter it. But after two months of work there results showed me that SEO practices help. Even with this knowledge and experience I couldn’t enter global search market only advertising products.

Don’t be afraid of returning to step 1. Learn and evaluate SEO techniques practically and periodically. Don’t try all techniques at a time. Think about these that are close to Your business idea.

4. A C T I O N

So, You started the first project. Don’t forget there is no SEO technique which will make Your site visible in a second. There are gigabytes of traffic on global web, global web market is overfilled. Be patient and wait as I said in previous post – till the first Google query :) Or find needed SEO update…

But there is one must - be technique, what can help build Your site traffic and Your reputation. Because web or accurately saying – web 2.0 – is about people relations, don’t forget to communicate – Digg, Twitter, Facebook, Myspace etc. Communicating, interacting with people attracts attention. And if so – it creates more clicks.

Be innovative, study hard and don’t ever think that You know everything about the web and SEO. No one knows everything about web, because we are the web :)

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Some city expression

Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008

Some cities in Lithuania make me do things I never usually do. For example, here:

Flying, lying or something else… Help !!!

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Waiting for the first search engine query

Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008

When You start writing Your first blog it takes some time till someone finds Your blog on the web. You really must have some strategies on writing articles, but not all of them are successfull. And now I’ll try to write down some software techniques how do I optimize my blog for web search.

1st offer: add All in one SEO pack if You use Wordpress. This is a nice widget with good SEO preferences, like META rewriting, keyword customizations and other, which are not included in Wordpress by default.

After installing ALL in One Seo try to customise .htaccess file (for nicenames with post titles – in Dashboard -> WP Settings -> Permalinks). It is a very strong technique and helps to be found on the web.

And the third main technique  - WP Super Cache widget. It creates static HTML pages from Your posts and saves them to server. Google and other bots find these pages very quickly and cache, which is very usefull in searching. Rewrite time, refresh intensity and other post options and much more setup preferences are included.

After You make these updates please take a cup of tea and wait for the first user from search engine in stats :)

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SEO guru practices

Monday, September 22nd, 2008

Real SEO gurus (I write about ones who have business success and hire forum, blog writers) have never actually opened their secret safes of knowledge. And especially – for free. Until some guys found, explored SEO 2.0 and Web 2.0 practices. Since that moment everything changed. So what did these gurus do with their tons of categorised posts, reviews, user postbacks and great traffic ?

Simple solution. They sold it all together with all discussion forums, prepared some books (like Aaron) fullfilled with e-intelligence, websites trafic and so on. But no one from them haven’t ever told to internet user what they really meant by selling their own experience.

Really SEO gurus sell their tips building good reputation, recognizable name and page ranks of domains, subdomains . So if You give a simply question to any SEO guru ( e.g., how to make good SEO in my site  ? ) such SEO experts suddenly earn all higher mentioned bonuses without any concerns. 

It doesn’t mean that You shouldn’t ask them anything. This means that SEO gurus created good technique to make people ask only them and listen only to their advices. As early descriptions told Web 2.0 is now about relations, not about information. And sometimes it seems that these web sites look very similar not to shops, super markets, but also similar to spiritual places of pray where there is one true story and lots of believers, successors.

If so, shouldn’t we read more human psychology books ? :)

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Fast vegetarian food recipe contest. Vol. 1

Monday, September 22nd, 2008

Hi. Today I am starting vegetarian food contest! Also I want to ask all blog readers to participate in this contest and to share Your food recipes. As award I will prepare the fastest dish using Your recipes and evaluate the taste !

The goal of this contest is: to cook TASTY dinner as FAST as You can. So, I present my first recipe.

Macaronada: macaroni with mushrooms

For 1 person dinner You need:
100 – 200 g macaroni (of any quantity You like, macaroni boiling time should not exceed 10 – 12min.; try all except spaghetti, cannelone and other UFO – like macaronis)
5 medium champignons
1 little onion
1 garlic (with taste – not chinese)
2 – 3 teaspoonfull vegetable oil (only to cover the bottom of a frying-pan)
some chopped cheese
some salt

Add macaroni to boiling water (about 500 ml) and set aside.

Then put frying-pan on very low flame, add oil. Warm up about 1 min.

While boiling water in a pot, slice champignons in medium pieces, cut garlic, onion in small pieces.
When finished cutting, add garlic and onion to frying-pan. After 5 mins add champignons and salt.

After macaroni are finally boiled stop  frying mushrooms also. Strain macaroni off the water, put them in a plate, add mushrooms/garlic/onion to macaroni, mix them. Add cheese on the top of the plate.

Bueno appetito !

Total TIME: 12 min !

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How much time does it take to boot up FM radio station ?

Monday, September 22nd, 2008

The answer – 1 m i n u t e.

Included:
- 15 sec. booting up database server
- 15 sec. booting broadcasting server
- 10 sec. starting FM transmitter, RDS, audio processor
- 20 sec. starting laptop from suspended mode, connecing remotely to both servers and starting Jazler software.

Tested with: radio station Gaudeamus hardware ( Jazz radio Gaudeamus ).

Test date: 2008.09.21

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