Archive for SEO
SEO for Bing
Posted by: | CommentsSearch Engine Optimization for Microsoft’s new Bing search engine involves different steps than with other search engines. With Bing, you don’t have to submit your site to search engines or get a bunch of links from other sources just to be indexed.
As soon as Bing was released, online marketing experts wanted to know how to get their websites to the top of the results page. Here are a few SEO tips to help you maximize your exposure with Bing.
To bubble to the top of Bing, you should have a title that is directly connected with the subject. Linking out is encouraged, also. The problem is that many marketers are afraid to link out too much for fear their page rank will be lowered, particularly on Google.
Bing appears to prefer pages with at least 350 words of text, so try to have enough text on your page. In most engines, this isn’t really a big factor, but it is with Bing.
Bing also tends to care about how long ago the domain was registered. So there may be times when it would be beneficial to purchase older domains to improve results positioning in Bing.
Keep your HTML clean. Try to use only well-written HTML on your pages. Make sure that you close all the paired tags and check to see that all the links open on the right web page. You can find out more on validating your HTML code using either HTTP Conditional Get Test Tool, W3C Markup Validation Service, or HTTP Compression. If your site has broken links, then the MSN Bot will have a hard time indexing your site effectively, which could prevent people from accessing all your pages. To learn more about identifying broken links, search on Bing’s Help topic for the “Webmaster Center’s Crawl Issues” tool.
Make sure that if you’ve moved a web page that you’ve also set up the original web page’s URL so that it will redirect to the new web page. It is also good to indicate if the move is permanent or not. Be certain that the MSN Bot is allowed to crawl your website. If you have a list of web crawlers prohibited from indexing your site, check it to see if the MSN Bot is on it.
Use a Robots.txt file or use tags to help control how the MSN Bot and other crawlers index your site. The Robots.txt file can be used to prevent web crawlers from crawling on specific files and folders. It is a good idea to keep all your URLs simple and unchanging. Complicated URLs, or those that change a lot are hard for the MSN Bot to index as link destinations. And it makes good common sense. A meaningful, steady URL is easier for people to remember so they can bookmark it. That helps keep your site visible by attracting links from other websites.
This should apply regardless, but do keep an eye out for malicious software. Find out if links to pages on your site lead to malware on third part sites, or contain corrupted documents or images, bad JavaScript, or ActiveX controlled. These will be highlighted or even disabled as malware in the Bing result listings. While back links are important to your ranking in Bing, it is important to monitor the quality of those links. Never use link farms or paid link services, and make sure your content is directly relevant to your keywords.
SEO Tips for WordPress
Posted by: | CommentsThere is a reason that WordPress is such a popular platform for blogging. The way it is designed can significantly boost your search engine rankings, meaning you get many more visitors. Even so, you should also do what you can to maximize your search engine standings. Here are some tips.
Put keywords in your blog post titles. While you can get away with less than optimal post titles for your regular readers, you need to attract new readers as well. Therefore, you want to give your blog posts titles that are search engine friendly. To do that, use keywords in them. And to keep those new readers, you have to make the title relevant to the actual content.
Build back links. Each back link (a link from other sites to yours) is a vote of confidence in your site. The more of them you have, the better regarded your site is. If you have plenty of back links, it means that you’ll be more successful in competing for popular search engine keywords, and you’ll bubble up toward the top of the listings.
Permalinks are your friend. Permalinks are links that go directly to specific forum or blog posts even after they scroll off the page into the archives. If a particular post gets lots of attention via permalinks, that means it’s a “sticky” post and helps your search engine ranking. Whatever permalink structure you use, make sure the title of the post is in the URL. It’s another way to squeeze a little more work out of those keywords. Read More→
Getting the Right Kind of Traffic to your Site
Posted by: | CommentsIf you have a website from which you wish to profit, you want it to be as attractive to the major search engines as possible. The more relevant your site looks to a search engine, the higher your ranking, and the more traffic will get to your site.
While traffic numbers are important, they aren’t the whole story. If that were the case everyone would put porn on their site to maximize the traffic. No, to rank well with search engines and float up to the top of their rankings, you not only have to have quantity traffic, but also quality traffic. That means the kind of traffic that’s likely to stick around and buy something. Optimizing your website means finding those visitors and getting them to visit and come back.
There are numerous things you can do, but perhaps the most important is to have good content on your site. Search engines know when you’re just stuffing your site with keywords, and they’ll think you’re spam. But the bigger reason is that if you did stuff your content with keywords and did successfully rise to the top of the search engine rankings, it wouldn’t really matter, because people don’t like spammy sites and don’t want to buy things from them. Read More→
SEO Tips for WordPress
Posted by: | CommentsThere is a reason that WordPress is such a popular platform for blogging. The way it is designed can significantly boost your search engine rankings, meaning you get many more visitors. Even so, you should also do what you can to maximize your search engine standings. Here are some tips.
Put keywords in your blog post titles. While you can get away with less than optimal post titles for your regular readers, you need to attract new readers as well. Therefore, you want to give your blog posts titles that are search engine friendly. To do that, use keywords in them. And to keep those new readers, you have to make the title relevant to the actual content.
Build back links. Each back link (a link from other sites to yours) is a vote of confidence in your site. The more of them you have, the better regarded your site is. If you have plenty of back links, it means that you’ll be more successful in competing for popular search engine keywords, and you’ll bubble up toward the top of the listings. Read More→
