Do you want to get your website listed on the first few pages of the search engine? Do you wish that its page rank should increase on Google? Are you planning to go to a company to do these jobs for you? Then please hold and read on, because listed here are some simple ways to get a good page rank by SEO techniques. You can apply these to your website and can get significant results.

Just go to your website’s source code and you will see some meta-tags at the top, such as Title, Keyword tags and Description. Although Title tag is not in the category of meta-tag but since it is very important, it is considered one of them. All you have to do here is give a good title. The title should consist of a keyword or two but avoid stuffing the title with too many keywords.

In the description tag, again the technique is similar; avoid pushing in a lot of keywords. It should be more like a sentence than a set of commas. Just give one or two variations of a keyword in the keyword tag and move on to the next keyword.

Another important tag is the heading tag(h1). It provides the search engine, the user, and the web browser some of the key points about the webpage. Equally important tags are
h2 and h3…these give priority to content and page.

Moving from tags to images, give the images a descriptive and concise alt attribute. This way you will be able to put more relevant text on page and increase its chances of getting noticed by the search engine.

Coming up next is another important part of a website – link. Try and make links more descriptive as it helps the user and the web browser to know more about the upcoming page. Use “tool tip” which will pop out some text whenever a mouse will be rolled over the link. Instead of giving a keyword, give a description in the “tool tip”.

The most important quality a website should possess is relevance. The content of the website should be relevant to the user as well as to the Search Engine. It is important in terms of SEO that a webpage consists of lots of keywords to get a high page rank but it is equally important that the page content should be revolving around the keywords. Just giving good meta-tags, tool tips, alt attributes will not solve the purpose as the user is more interested in the information contained in the page. The retention of the user to the website is ensured mainly with the content.

Next in the list of Simple ways to get a good page rank by SEO techniques is page rank. There is no fixed formula with which the browsers can calculate it. The algorithm of SEO keeps on changing. So let’s talk about an important factor contributing to it – the number of links pointing to your website. One easy and effective way is to link your website to others and they will link back to yours in exchange.

Apart from technicality, another factor that plays an important role is social networking. Reach out to your network of people and help your peers and colleagues, give them meaningful advice and tell them about your website. You can reach out to social networking sites as well and promote your website by writing blogs etc. But keep in mind that you don’t have to push the content. People should reach out to your site because of its usefulness. As a consequence, the traffic on your website will increase.

So don’t wait now, just follow these simple ways to get a good page rank by SEO techniques and give your website a good start.

Simple ways to get a good page rank by SEO techniques is a post from: Fort Myers Web Design

I spent a few minutes today putting together a little table and comparing the prices of various SEO hosting companies. The company I use is SEO Host which I moved to from HostGator’s SEO Hosting because the prices were great. As you can see below I’m getting my hosting about 505 cheaper now that I moved over to SEO Host. Go to one of the following two sites for more information on SEO Hosting or Multiple C Class IP Hosting.

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SEO Hosting Reviews is a post from: Fort Myers Web Design

The term “SEO” stands for search engine optimization. SEO refers to the process of getting your site primed and ready for the search engines. There are things you do to your own site and things you do on other sites that will effect your SEO. In this post we will go over a few of the different factors.

First we will go over the different things that you can do to your own site which will effect your search engine placement. Everything I’m about to say are basically educated guesses because with the exception of Google engineers, nobody knows exactly what works and what doesn’t.

The main parts of on site SEO are: META tags, page titles, and text

Page Titles

The most important part of on page SEO is the page title. If you want to rank for “keyword 1″ in Google then your page title should ideally be “Keyword 1″. Sometimes a client will want to have their company name in the title as well as the main keyword so it may look something like “Company Name | Keyword 1″ which isn’t quite as good as the first variation but it’s still pretty good. I’m sure we have all seen page titles like this:

Company Name | keyword1 keyword2 keyword3 keyword4 keyword5 keyword6 keyword7 keyword8 keyword9

One may think this is a superior page title because it contains so many of the desired keywords right in the page’s title. Unfortunately the more keywords the title contains to more watered down and less important each keyword is. You want to keep all your page titles short and sweet and make sure each page title accurately describes the page that it represents.

META Tags

Today META tags aren’t nearly as important as they were back in the day. Years ago the search engines would pretty much take META tags at face value and rank you according to what you had in your META tags. Of course you can probably guess how that worked out in the end so today there is much less importance placed on the METAs.

This doesn’t mean you should ignore the METAs, you should always write unique keywords and descriptions for each page if possible.

Text & Content

You must have unique content if you plan on ranking for any terms which are worthwhile. The text should ideally contain the keyword or phrase that you want to rank for at least once or twice. For example if you want to rank for “naples web design” then you would try to get that phrase into the body of the text once or twice, put it in the page title, and even make sure you get it in the META tags too.

You can never have enough unique content, ever. Think of it as fishing and you’re fishing for leads, sales, or new clients. Each article or post on your site acts as the fishing pole, the more content you have on your site the more poles you have in the water. We all know that the guy with 20 poles in the water is probably going to catch a lot more fish than the guy with one pole.

That pretty much sums up the major parts of on page SEO. The factors above are certainly not the only parts of on site SEO but they are the main ones.

The main parts of off site SEO are: external links, the authority of the external links, and the anchor text

External Links

The art of getting other websites to link to you, without a doubt the most important part of off-site or external SEO.  You can do this by tricking webmasters using link bait, creating blogs or profiles on their sites and doing it yourself, blogging on 4rd party sites, exploiting security holes in the script the host is running on, and various other ways.

Authority

There is a lot of debate on how important this is. There is no question that a link from a site like microsoft.com is far better than a link from napleswebdesign.net. What is open for debate surrounds how much effect low authority sites have on ranking. Many people say that it depends on the site being linked to. For example, if you took microsoft.com and pointed 500 low quality links at it you would probably rank for the keyword you were going after because of the trust and authority microsoft.com already has, so Google is going to take that into account. Now if you were to go to GoDaddy and register a brand new domain and then point 500 low quality links at it, it will probably raise some red flags with Google because you have an untrusted site getting lots of backlinks from other untrusted sites.

Anchor Text

Anchor text refers to the text that the actual link is made up of. Here is an example of Anchor Text. When you get links to your site you should definitely try and get your keywords in the anchor text but don’t always use the same anchor text, mix it up some. When I get links to this site I may get 20 links with the anchor text of “naples web design” then 20 that say “naples website design” and so on. The words you use in your anchor text directly effect how Google ranks you so you should be sure to choose your anchors wisely.

If you don’t have enough time or patience to do your own search engine marketing I encourage you to contact us and see how we can help you.

Naples Search Engine Optimization is a post from: Fort Myers Web Design

Have you ever seen or heard the term search engine marketing or commonly called “SEO” which is the easy way of saying search engine optimization? Well if you’re a business owner you need to know about it because it can literally turn your struggling company into a monster, even in these rough economic times.

When you hear people talking about search marketing, SEO, search engine optimization, or any of the other terms that are out there, they are talking about getting your site ranked at the top of the search results for a list of given keywords or keyphrases.

I’ll try to explain this for people who don’t really get the internet, search engines, and how it all works. So let’s say you own a lawn service company in Naples or Fort Myers. Now put yourself in the shoes of your customers who are looking to hire a lawn service company. More and more people turn to the internet to find what they need. If you go to Google and type in naples lawn care, does your company site show up? Is it #1? Is it on the first page? Maybe it’s on the second page? The point is that if you are unable to find your site then how are your potential clients supposed to find your site?

That’s where we come in, we can take your site(if you don’t have one we are also a full service web design company) and put it at the top of the search results for the search words or phrases you want most. I don’t need to tell you how bad the economy is right now and we both know companies, especially small local companies, need all the help they can get when it comes to finding new clients and leads. Being at the top of Google search for your desiered search words is crucial to your online sucess.

So what are you waiting for? You can come by our offices or give us a ring Monday – Friday 8am – 8pm and see how we can help you realize your online dream.

Naples Search Engine Marketing is a post from: Fort Myers Web Design

Everybody wants their website to rank highly in Google. The higher SERP you have, the more exposure you get, which equals more visitors who should translate into more customers.

We all know about keywords and their impact on achieving a higher SERP placement. If the word or phrase you are trying to rank with is a competitive one then this is where quality comes in. It doesn’t matter how many times your keyword of phrase appears on a page, Google has moved on from there. It got wise quite quickly to keyword stuffing, Alt text and all the other black hat tricks that webmaster were employing to get ranked higher.

Now the overall quality of the site is judged. Both by how often the site is updated, and how many inbound links there are. Those links are then in turn judged on how relevant to the site content they are and ranked accordingly.

If you want to give your site the best start possible there are a few things you can do.

Write a good page title between the tags for each page. It should accurately describe what’s going on each particular page.

Try and create new content each week. If you or the site owner can’t do that, get someone to do it for you. Continually evolving sites, with value being added regularly appear much higher on SERPs. Make the new contact good quality content, while wanting to appeal to a robot, your site also needs to appeal to human traffic.

Link to good quality relevant sites, and try and get reciprocal links back from them. Each relevant link to you is counted as a “vote” by Google. Every single one will count in getting the site higher.

Lastly, don’t be tempted to trick Google into placing you at the top. They employ teams of very, very clever people to program out as many tricks as possible. They also have a policy of “blacklisting” sites they think are trying to play the system. If you want to use Google, play by its rules. There are still plenty of legitimate ways of getting what you want.

The main thing to remember when designing a site to rank well is quality. Ignore the SERPs and concentrate on creating a useful, useable site with quality content. The quality is the element that will make it a success or not. It’s like businesses who concentrate on good customer service instead of the bottom line. Look after the customers, create a pleasing experience for them and the money will follow.

Thinking like Google for a moment. If you were a multi-billion dollar business whose reputation and profit came adverts shown with search engine results, would you want to be known for showing quality websites that fulfil the search criteria, or for returning sites that knew all the tricks? The reason Google works so well is because you get what you search for. If that changed and all of a sudden your search just returned amateur sites that you didn’t want, you would stop using it.

The key to a good SERP position is quality, not quantity.

Quality over Quantity. is a post from: Fort Myers Web Design

A common misconception by webmasters is that most traffic will come from a few “money” phrases or keywords. This isn’t true for any good, content rich websites as they can get traffic from phrases over four words in length. These are called long-tail keywords and are extremely valuable to any website.

The best keywords are two to four word phrases that accurately describe the website using language people searching for your kind of site would use. The art is choosing the phrases that don’t have so much competition that you can’t afford to compete. If the search terms are too general they will be expensive and even if you do get a good SERP from them, the conversion will probably be poor because the searchers might be looking for something specific. On the other hand, make the keywords or phrases too specific and you won’t see many visitors at all.

Single word keyword terms are a poor choice for optimizing a website. They are too broad and will be very competitive. Most SEO’s don’t go near these unless the client has money to burn. Put yourself in the shoes of a searcher for a moment. When you enter something into Google for instance do you use a single word or a phrase? Chances are if it’s something specific you use a phrase. This behavior needs to be mirrored in your search terms.

Even using keyword terms instead of a single word can be broad. Try to avoid this at all costs as it will have exactly the same result as above. Conversely don’t choose terms that are too specific. There is no real point in achieving a top SERP position for a term that nobody searches for. What’s the point of being at the top if nobody sees you.

So a good keyword phrase or term is long enough and descriptive enough to bring targeted visitors to your site, but not too specific that nobody uses them. This is a hard balance to make and a lot of thought should be given to these details. You want any optimization to target real visitors who are likely to turn into paying customers, not random people looking for something specific.

For example, if designing a site for a freelance copywriter you wouldn’t use “writer” because that would return over 11 million results. The term “copywriter” returns just under 4 million so these terms are too generic for an effective optimization. What about “freelance copywriter”? That returns 711,000, which is getting warmer, but we aren’t quite there yet. Drilling down a little further to “freelance copywriter, Naples”” returns 4,700 results, which is much better, and the term is specific enough to mainly send you qualified visitors.

The more time and research you expend on selecting keywords or terms the better results you will have. Although a website wants visitors, its only when those visitors become customers that you start earning money.

Why It’s Good to Have a Long Tail. is a post from: Fort Myers Web Design

The internet is an amazing and fascinating place of infinite scale. One of the few remaining examples of global co-operation and communication. Somewhere where we can express ourselves, meet, comment, sell, buy, or generally just hang out. We all have our favourite sites and places to visit, and they work for us because they are appealing. Sites you like or dislike are extremely subjective. Like anything, taste is down to the individual, but there are a few underlying principles in making a web design appealing to the masses, or to just a few. We will cover a couple of them here.

Don’t blind your visitors with flashing or blinking images or text, scrolling titles, animated gifs or sound. Unless done very, very well these should be avoided at all costs. All of these elements distract your audience from the sites message. At worst they annoy them enough that they leave altogether.

Web audiences scan pages, they don’t read them. So when a flashing banner ad or scrolling text keeps drawing their attention away from what you’re trying to say, the website fails. It’s like trying to read a newspaper while a small child is poking you. Not a good position to put your audience in.

Biologically speaking, the human eye is drawn to movement. So theoretically, a moving or flashing banner should attract the eye. While this is true, the reason for grabbing that attention is what annoys the visitor. On any web page, the text should be your advert. It should engage, interest and sell to an audience. Banner ads, and the scrolling text or other annoyances will always be that, annoyances.

In a similar vein, avoid using popups at all costs. Nothing annoys web users more than unsolicited popups. As a website owner, you may be more interested in making money than engaging an audience, but the kind of ads are going to quickly drive traffic away from your site. You aren’t going to make money with no visitors. As a web designer/owner you have to put yourself in the shoes of the audience. See things as they would see them. Try this on a site with popups and you will quickly see why they are a bad idea.

The last piece of advice I’m going to share today is to not use images as backgrounds. It doesn’t matter what quality picture you use, it looks cheap. If you are considering using one in a design, firstly, don’t, but surf a few of the most popular sites you know and see what they are doing. They don’t use them do they?

Design is all about doing things differently and making something stand out, but that has to be achieved the right way. Using images as a background isn’t one of those ways. It looks amateurish and practically screams “home-made site” or “low rent”. Not only does it destroy the appearance of a site, it also slows it down. Even with broadband, loading up a background image can take a while and certainly isn’t worth the wait once it’s loaded. MySpace may be able to get away with it, but as useful at the place is, an example of good design and usability it isn’t.

Keeping it Clean. How not to Turn Off Your Visitors. is a post from: Fort Myers Web Design

There are two type of Search Engine Optimization. On page and off page. Off page optimization is anything done separate from the site, i.e. article pr, social networking, linking and directory submissions. On page is where you refine your website to make the most of the advantages SEO can offer.

Title optimization is the most important element of on page optimization. It should be short but descriptive. It needs to tell visitors enough about your site as it is the first thing that is shown in the search engines. It should include your or your business name and few targeted keywords.

Next is meta tag optimization. Although these are nowhere near as important as they used to be, they take such little effort to do, it’s worth the effort. The meta description should contain your USP straight away. The USP is your Unique Selling Point. What makes you or your business different from the others. What kind of speciality do you offer and market yourself as offering. Whatever it is, include it here with a clever scattering of keywords. Depending on the type of business you are running, there is a school of thought that says it is useful to add your phone number in the description. The belief is that visitors who see a phone number in the SERP are more confident in the legitimacy of the site and the business itself.

HTML tags are another page element that need a little SEO attention. Your headers are considered important by Google at least. H1 tags should be used to define the site’s title or heading. H2 and H3 are used for sub titles, headings, post titles and other important sections of the site. Separating page content with headers enhances human readability as well as search engine.

Keyword optimization is the most used phrase of any SEO conversation. This takes some thought and planning before implementing to get the most out of it. The idea is to create website content that is readable and relevant while being populated with your target keywords. There are plenty of tools on the internet that can help you with keyword selection, but only good judgement or a good copywriter can weave them into your website copy so they don’t stand out.

It is important to not overdo the keywords. Even if you can create good quality content to hide them in, the search engines are believed to penalize website they think are ‘keyword stuffing’, i.e. just adding keywords to spoof the search engine.

Alt text is another important facet of any website. The search engine spiders can only read text. They simply don’t see images or video. So even if your site is content rich and is always updated, if you don’t add text to your media it won’t do you any good. Alt text is a method of describing the media on your web page. This does two things, one it tells any visitors that something relevant is missing of something happens to the media and two, the spiders can read it.

This is by no means an exhaustive analysis of on page optimization, there simply isn’t enough room to go through it all. It should be enough to give you a basic idea of how it all works, and encourage you to read further.

On Page SEO Optimization is a post from: Fort Myers Web Design

Whenever anybody mentions Search Engine Optimization, our thoughts automatically go to Google. Seeing as it is the world’s search engine of choice it isn’t difficult to see why. The field is always shifting, and moves at quite a pace. It’s a full time job for us to keep up with the changes and incorporate them into our strategies.

Now Microsoft have entered the fray with Bing, and going after Google with a vengeance, what does this mean for SEO?

One the surface it doesn’t mean a great deal. Although very different beasts, Bing uses a similar algorithm to Google. Both systems are quite different, and will produce different results, the rules are much the same.

Both engines like quality linkage and good content. They both have sophisticated spam filters and won’t tolerate rubbish. In fact the MSNBot crawler is pretty much the same as the one used in Live Search. It has had a few upgrades as you would expect, but it is pretty much the same.

As the specific mechanics of search engines are a closely guarded secret, leaks and reverse engineering are the main tools of the optimizers. The release of Bing has divided the web community with one side saying that there are no fundamental changes to the way page rank is calculated, so no need to change the approach, and the other saying that the differences are such that they need much more investigation to understand properly.

So far the main differences have been seen with the presentation of search results. Specifically with the left side of the screen and the addition of categories. This just seems like an extension of your search at first glance, but digging deeper finds that Bing actually sorts results into these categories.

It also automatically removes duplicate returns from the search results. This is something I like the sound of, as each result is going to be a different resource and will save lots of time when searching. It should also give users confidence that each result is a genuine and discrete one, rather than different versions, or pages of the same site.

As new and as shiny as Bing may be, it only have a tiny amount of market share. Google is still the giant among men and it doesn’t look like that’s going to change very soon. So the question now becomes, ‘if Bing needs extra SEO strategies is the return on investment worth it?’

The answer is going to come down to how much extra work will be involved to optimize a site for both search engines. If it isn’t that much and all we need to do is add broader terms to compete on then it isn’t too much of an effort to factor Bing in to your strategy. If however there is more to it than that, until the market share increases significantly, I don’t think the extra effort is worth it just yet.

SEO for Bing is a post from: Fort Myers Web Design

Have you ever seen or heard the term “SEO hosting“? It’s not a very well-known term outside the SEO circles but some people believe deeply in it, including me. Nobody except the Google engineers and programmers know for sure if it works but by my own trials and tests I’d say it definitely has a fairly large effect. In fact, this site you’re on right now is hosted on SEO hosting and the week I moved it over to this hosting setup the site shot up in the rankings for various search terms.

The main idea with SEO hosting is that it enables you to get links from other sites you own. So if you own, say, 50 sites and all 50 of those sites link to a selected website it’s great for SEO, right? Well, many people in SEO think that Google takes into consideration the C-Class IP the sites are hosted on and if they are all hosted on the same IP Google takes that into consideration and either discounts the links or possibly even penalizes you in cases where there are large link networks going on.

This idea, or paranoia, depending on whom you ask, has spawned what we now call “SEO Hosting”. It’s a bit more expensive than the normal flavor of hosting that many of us are used to but depending on your needs it may just be worth it.

SEO Hosting is a post from: Fort Myers Web Design