Houston Web Design

I’ve been on Digg now for a little under a year and I think the site is great when it comes to all the latest headlines and everything else in between. My only complaint is that there are quite a few Diggers out there who are quick to jump on you and put you down for whatever reasons they may find justifiable. Voice an opposing opinion and you will be flamed and bashed. Diggers are notoriously known to be the most rude, tech-savvy, know it all, I hate you, crowd. Digg.com is a great site but I think its demise will eventually be caused by its community.

Enter Mixx.com. Yet another Digg clone, it’s only about 2 months old, but has the potential to throw Digg off the top. The big difference between Mixx and Digg? Well the members of course! Mixx members are laid back, they will not make fun of you if you misspelled a title heading, they will not call you names, and I have yet to see anybody curse at someone. Mixx is still very new and has a long way to go but the potential is there, I just hope the community doesn’t turn sour the way the Digg community did!

We all know how Diggers hate SEO submissions, and they are quick to bury you if you submit from your own blog. I found this out the hard way when I thought I had a great article on my old blog, I submitted it only to get buried and never saw the light of day. So now I’m going to put Mixx to the test. I will attempt to submit this post and see what kind of reaction I’ll get from the Mixx crowd.

Original article from the Houston Web Design blog

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SEO for keywords and content is relatively easy. Choose your keyword. Write content around that keyword. Use an SEO optimizer program to make sure you have done it right.

Long gone are the days of writing unrelated content, and then typing "Britney Spears" 100 times at the end of the article. Today's search engine spiders can spot the "Black Hat" SEO techniques a mile away, and your site can be banned for life.

Here are a few tips for SEO optimization:

Be focussed in your meta keywords - 1 to 3 SEO optimized keywords is enough Put your keyword at the beginning of you page title tag. Make sure you title tag is the first tag in the head section Make sure your keyword appears in the alt tag for images and in link text, but no more than 3 times Put your keyword in bold Put your keyword in the H1 section of your page, and H2 if you can Have a keyword weigh in your article between 3-6% (higher is "keyword spamming") SEO for domain names Going back to the Nike example from my "SEO for Google" article. Since the keyword weight is 0%, how does Nike get to billing when you search for them? Easy, Google gives a rank weight to domain names.

Make sure your primary domain name reflects the main purpose of your site (domain SEO). This site, for example, is all about my desire to "retire with millions". The site is subdivided in to many SEO optimized sub-domains each with a URL that denotes the sections. For example, all my SEO articles are in a sub-directory called ../seo.

Many articles have been written about search engine optimization (SEO) for Google. Google is the largest search engine (for now) and getting your SEO right for the Googlebot can make your site top ten site getting millions of hits a day. On the other hand, poor SEO and your site may never be ranked and your campaigns for Adsence will never net you any real money. Even worse, bad SEO might mean that your cutting edge product is un-finable by your customers.

Google page rank is determined by a number of factors:

SEO keywords SEO content SEO domain name Originality of content Number of links from external sites SEO keywords and SEO content will be dealt with in another article, lets focus on the other 2 for now.

Original Content Having original content on your web site is a no-brainer. It is the "why" that escapes many SEO web content developers. We have all seen the ads promising "150000 Adsense and SEO optimized pages". If it were this easy, all of us would be multi-millionaires by now. The reality is, Googlebot applies a penalty for non-original content, no mater how SEO you might think the page is. Think about it - why does "Nike" come up number 1 when you type Nike into Google? You or I could probably write a better SEO page about Nike than Nike. In fact, Nike keyword density for "Nike" is 0%!!!

Links from External Sites Google take into account the number of links you have from external sites. Each link is like a "vote" for your site. Before you go and sign up for a link exchange program, consider this, some links do not count, in fact, being a "link spammer" can kill your ranking, no matter how good your SEO.

There are ways to generate quality back links:

Create a blog on blogspot (a Google Site) and write about your web page - include properly formatted links Join blogs on respected sites and comment on articles, putting your URL in your signature Write "press releases" when you update your site and post them on the free press release sites around the web Take out classified ads in respected on-line newspapers Make small donations to charity sites that keep a "Thank You" page and include your web site with your name These are just some tips to compliment your SEO work to get a good Google ranking.

Organic vs PPC vs Paid Inclusion

Many search engines had to find new revenue streams as the dot com bubble burst and targeted pay per click text ads provided that stream.

Yahoo! also has a paid inclusion program which is said to ensure coverage but not to have any effect on relevancy. Listing in their paid inclusion does get your site a human review though, so it may help improve your relevancy scores some.

• Regular organic traffic: Organic search results are the free results off to the left side of the page.
• Pay per click ads: Pay Per Click ads are usually at the right side of the page. Some search engines also place a few at the top & bottom of pages. Typically PPC ads in most search engines (such as Google, MSN, and Yahoo!) are above or below the search results are in a colored box. AOL and Ask Jeeves do not make it as easy to distinguish their paid listings though.
• Paid inclusion: Paid inclusion sites list in the regular organic listings but paid inclusion is said to have no effect on relevancy. They are blended into the search results and can not be easily distinguished from the other search results.

AltaVista was known to have a problem with mixing paid inclusion and organic ads for a while. Google feels paid inclusion is a conflict of interests with relevancy and has never had a paid inclusion program.

Why the Name Organic Listings?

They got the name organic listings because they are usually ideally unaltered by humans and not paid for.

Why Organic Listings Are "Pure"

If people thought their searches returned nothing but a bunch of advertisements, they would stop searching. For that reason these organic listings are pure, or at least the search engines want us to believe they are pure.

Google has been praised heavily for returning what many have deemed the most relevant search results while keeping their revenue stream clearly isolated from the organic listing results. As time passes though pressures have degraded Google's search relevancy.

SEO Tips to Improve Organic Rankings

There are many stages to achieving great organic listings.

• 1. Your site should be about something you are an expert on.
• 2. A good web site plan should be thought out before you begin marketing.
• 3. Scope out the competition to see how competitive your keyword landscape is.
• 4. Decide what keywords you want to use prior to making your site (and before each page), and include them in your meta tags , page copy, page title, and file names when possible.
• 5. Your site should be easy to navigate and search engine friendly.
• 6. Each page should have a specific focus which is strongly and thoroughly maintained throughout.
• 7. Submit your site to the directories.
• 8. (not required) Search for spam in your keywords and report spam results. Some search engines (such as Yahoo!) actively edit their search results and you may be able to get spammy competitors removed.
• 9. Build a linking campaign. (Link building is the single most important step to EFFECTIVE SEO.)
• 10. Repeat what steps you feel necessary until you achieve top rankings. This is an ongoing process for most sites (especially in competitive fields).

Listings that appear off to the side or in another color than the rest of the results are not typically organic listings. These are typically pay per click paid listings.

Many of these paid listings come in a colored box as well.

SEO Timetable

While the linking campaign takes time to develop, for non competitive keyword phrases the SEO process can be completed in a few weeks.

If you are in a competitive field you will need lots of keyword rich links that take months to build. Google also seems to have incorporated some sort of delay into their ranking algorithm such that it takes about 3 months at a minimum to rank well for fairly competitive terms.

Why Content Matters

If your site sucks then it is harder to get inbound links. If you have questions about any of the different aspects of site creation or promotion feel free to ask me or read books on the various topics you need help in. For your convenience (and for my learning) I have reviewed a bunch of internet and marketing related books.

Also with content quality usually matters much more than quantity. One thing I did wrong with this site is that I made a huge site before I knew enough to make a huge site.

Hardest & Most Valuable Part of the SEO Process

One of the main goals of good content is to help you with link building. Link building is the single most important part of the SEO process. It also is usually the most time consuming and most expensive part of the SEO process. Need help? Contact Clientside SEM if you need optimizing your organic search presence.

It is not hard to be barking up the wrong tree when it comes to getting search engine traffic because there is so much out of date information being circulated.

Not only is there out of date or invalid Search Engine Optimization advice getting around, there is also information which if acted upon, can result in your pages being banned.

The SEO tips below should assist the reader in forming a basic understanding of how to create human friendly web pages which are easily understood by the most popular search engines.

Know this. There are thousands of search engines but only two of them will bring you most of the traffic. They are google and yahoo. Another search engine that brings me a little traffic is msn but I do not focus too much on tactics for that engine.

Focus your attention on the engines that will bring you the most visitors first and work your way down.

Basic SEO

1. Insert keywords within the title tag so that search engine robots will know what your page is about. The title tag is located right at the top of your document within the head tags. Inserting a keyword or key phrase will greatly improve your chances of bringing targeted traffic to your site.

Make sure that the title tag contains text which a human can relate to. The text within the title tag is what shows up in a search result. Treat it like a headline.

2. Use the same keywords as anchor text to link to the page from different pages on your site. This is especially useful if your site contains many pages. The more keywords that link to a specific page the better.

3. Make sure that the text within the title tag is also within the body of the page. It is unwise to have keywords in the title tag which are not contained within the body of the page.

Adding the exact same text for your h1 tag will tell the reader who clicks on your page from a search engine result that they have clicked on the correct link and have arrived at the page where they intended to visit. Robots like this too because now there is a relation between the title of your page and the headline.

Also, sprinkle your keywords throughout your article. The most important keywords can be bolded or colored in red. A good place to do this is once or twice in the body at the top of your article and in the sub-headings.

4. Do not use the exact same title tag on every page on your website. Search engine robots might determine that all your pages are the same if all your title tags are the same. If this happens, your pages might not get indexed.

I always use the headline of my pages as the title tag to help the robots know exactly what my page is about. A good place to insert the headline is within the h1 tag. So the headline is the same as the title tag text.

5. Do not spam the description or keyword meta tag by stuffing meaningless keywords or even spend too much time on this tag. SEO pros all agree that these tags are not as important today as they once were. I just place my headline once within the keywords and description tags.

6. Do not link to link-farms or other search engine unfriendly neighborhoods. A good rule of thumb is if your pages do not contain any words that reflect the content of the site you are linking to, do not link to it.

7. Do not use doorway pages. Doorway pages are designed for robots only, not humans. Search engines like to index human friendly pages which contain content which is relevant to the search.

8. Title tags for text links. Insert the title tag within the HTML of your text link to add weight to the link and the page where the link resides. This is like the alt tag for images.

My site contains navigation menus on the left and right of the page. The menu consists of links not images. The links are keywords. When you hover over the link with your mouse, the title of the link appears. View the source of this page to see how to add this tag to your links.

9. Describe your images with the use of the alt tag. This will help search engines that index images to find your pages and will also help readers who use text only web browsers.

10. Submit to the search engines yourself. Do not use a submission service or submission software. Doing so could get your site penalized or even banned.

Here is the submission page for google: http://www.google.com/addurl.html

Submit only once. There is no need to submit every two weeks. There is no need to submit more that one page. Robots follow links. If your site has a nice link trail, your entire site will get indexed.

If you follow these simple steps, in due time you should see your website rank high in within the search engines.

Strictly for beginners only, if you are a CSS guru you probably know how to make a better content box.

This tutorial will be pretty straight forward, there isn't any real css tricks or hacks involved. But I really like the simplicity of this CSS content box and I thought I'd share this with all the aspiring designers out there. What you see above is actually a div with an image of a folded corner otherwise known as dogear for obvious reasons.

Here's what the dogear image looks like by itself, as you can probably tell this image will be sitting on the upper right corner of our content box. Let's do some basic coding, here is the css code for our content box and our dogear image:

div.contentbox{
    background: #F7F7F7;
    border: 1px dotted #ccc;
    padding: 6px;}

img.dogear{
    position: relative;
    top: -7px;
    right: -7px;
    float: right;}

That's basically it, we have 2 CSS class, one for our content box and another for our dogear image. I told you this was straight-forward! And now let's take a look at the html code:

  
<div class="contentbox">
    <img class="dogear" src="images/dogear.jpg" alt="" />

    Blah blah blah the contents will be placed here...blah blah blah..
</div>

Pretty simple right??? Of course you can place the dogear on any of the corners by playing around with the CSS class for that image. Alright that's all for now, I've done my good deed for the day, now I can be be bad all week long... muhahahahahaha!!!

Are you looking for ways to generate a sitemap for your favorite search engine? At one time, Google had it’s own sitemap format, Yahoo had their own version and everyone else was trying to catch up. Fortunately, a standard was developed for XML Sitemaps which are now accepted by Google, Yahoo and others.

There is still the traditional html sitemap, and we have taken that into consideration when building the sitemap generator; our webmaster tool provides you with the option to generate a XML sitemap or HTML sitemap – how you export (save) the file is up to you.

Creative web designers have been using sitemaps to get their content recognized by search engines for years; these html sitemaps predate Google and XML site maps. The nice thing about this type of sitemap is that it can be read by humans AND search engines.

To create these older style sitemaps, website owners need only use our program to generate an HTML sitemap, upload that file to their server’s root directory (same location as the website’s main page) and place a link to that file in their footer (bottom of the website’s main page)

XML Sitemaps now the standard

A Google Sitemap (XML Sitemap) and the traditional sitemap differ in a number of ways. The XML sitemap is for made for search engines such as Yahoo, Google and MSN and when viewed by a human, it’s not pretty.

The traditional sitemap (HTML Sitemap) is a graphical way to present your website’s layout to humans to further aid in their navigation of your site.

If you want the search engines to see your webpages, a XML sitemap is the way to go. You can a Google sitemap (xml sitemap) and standard sitemap (html) running side by side and it will not negativly impact your site.
Why the Sitemap Generator

Google Sitemaps is a service that allows webmasters to submit an XML map of their site containing information such as change frequency, priority, date created and more. Google suggests a great sitemap program to create the site map, but you must have Python in order for it to run. For further reading on Google’s program, visit Google Sitemaps FAQ.

Free Site Map Builder

This free and easy to use site map builder is fast, efficient and allows you to build sitemaps that can instantly be submitted to Google. The only requirement is a popular browser that supports java, such as Internet Explorer, Firefox and others.

Check out this awesome tool at:
http://www.auditmypc.com/xml-sitemap.asp

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