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	<title>ajaxtime.com &#187; seo</title>
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	<link>http://www.ajaxtime.com</link>
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		<title>Those factors in the Google Web site ranking</title>
		<link>http://www.ajaxtime.com/those-factors-in-the-google-web-site-ranking.html</link>
		<comments>http://www.ajaxtime.com/those-factors-in-the-google-web-site-ranking.html#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 22 Apr 2009 02:11:56 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>admin</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[seo]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[sec]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.ajaxtime.com/?p=502</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[What are the factors that affect your site's ranking in google? SEO we are doing first and foremost attention should be paid to what? I said that under the simple things should be noted, not much, but very suitable for new interpretations.]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Key words:<br />
1. Key words in url (the first and second word is the most valuable &#8230;&#8230;)<br />
2. The domain name in the key word (in English the advantages of Web site) (Head Part I)<br />
3.Title tag the words (10-50 characters, and does not contain special characters)<br />
4.Description tag the words (less than 200 characters, this parameter is now Google is no longer as important parameters, but still frequently used)<br />
5.Keywords tag the words (less than 10 words, single words must Body portion of the page more than 2 to be valid, otherwise, may be assessed as Spam punished, Google official has stated that he would no longer based on this parameters of evaluation, but in fact still in use)</p>
<p>(Body Part)<br />
6. Key words in the text of the Body density (5 &#8211; 20% &#8211; (all keywords / total words))<br />
7. A single keyword density (1 &#8211; 6% &#8211; (each keyword / total words))<br />
8. In the H1, H2, H3 in the key word (using the H1, H2, H3 fonts)<br />
9. Keywords font size (using bold, bold, italic, &#8230;&#8230;)<br />
10. Keywords proximity (between the two neighboring words is the best)<br />
11. Key words phrase order</p>
<p>(Other parts)<br />
12. Keywords in Alt text (Alt attributes of graphics)<br />
13. Key words in the external site link (anchor text)</p>
<p>Navigation &#8211; some internal links:<br />
14. The words within the page (link page should contain keywords)<br />
15. All internal links must be a valid<br />
16. The structure of the tree (any page depth of not more than 4 links)<br />
17. Low-level appropriate links between pages</p>
<p>Navigation &#8211; link to external components:</p>
<p>18. The words of external pages (Google patent excellent site link to be directed not to link frame)<br />
19. The anchor text of external links (Google&#8217;s patent should be launched in the theme and narrative)<br />
20. Link the stability of (Google&#8217;s patents to avoid the link at any time change)<br />
21. All external links are effective<br />
22. Less than 100 external links (Google official said the restrictions on 100, allowing 2-3 times the actual 2000)</p>
<p>Google ranking factors (b)</p>
<p>Other factors on the page:<br />
24. Level domain (. Edu is the highest rating, followed by. Org, and. Com contains a lot of spam as a result of information, so Google will be subject to scrutiny)<br />
25. File size (page size is absolutely no more than 100K, less than 40K for the best)<br />
26.URL of a hyphen (1 or 2 is the best, more than four will be considered to be spam, 10 very likely to be demoted)<br />
27. Page update rate (Google patent for news, retail, auction sites, such as updating the sooner the better)<br />
28. The update rate of the number of pages (Google Patent page the old page with the new ratio)<br />
29. Links to the update rate (Google have not been able to patent analysis)<br />
30. Update frequency (refresh rate = Spider&#8217;s crawl frequency)<br />
31. Page theme<br />
32. &#8230;.. Keywords derivatives<br />
33. Semantic association (synonym, etc. &#8230;)<br />
34. Latent semantic indexing<br />
35.URL length (as far as possible, small, in IE only allows 2000 characters or less, the best control in 100 characters or less)<br />
36. Site Size (Google that the larger site that greater financial support, and better organization, better structure, so it would be a good site)<br />
37. Site age (Google patent the older the better)<br />
38. Page site age and the age of other pages</p>
<p>Google ranking factors (c)</p>
<p>39. In the image of the form described in the text, but not the real Body of the text in the description;<br />
40. Mirror site<br />
41. Over-optimization<br />
42. Link to a bad site (do not link each frame &#8230;., external links for regular inspection site in the state of Google)<br />
43. Redirection or refresh metatags (unless the user clicks on, or do not automatically jump page)<br />
44. Do not use the vocabulary of some uncivilized<br />
45. Poisons words<br />
46. Plethora of horizontal links (in the WEB server, you have more than one site, their link will be seen as horizontal invalid vote)<br />
47. Pictures, text anti-navigating to www.sina.com.cn.<br />
48. Key words repeat filling (reduction in rank to deal with)<br />
49. Keywords dilution (the existence of too many pages of non-relevant keywords, you will reduce the importance of real content)<br />
50. Page content would reduce the consistency of editing (Google Patents Google older cache on a regular basis with the new cache to compare, if we find that words, the theme has changed, will affect its evaluation, it is Google for effective SEO Tools)<br />
51. To change the frequency content (Google patent is too often negative)<br />
52. Anchor text update rate (Google patent is too often negative)<br />
53. Dynamic pages (this is the search engine defects, may be to shorten the URL, such as ways to reduce the variables, it is best not to use dynamic pages)<br />
54. Plethora of JS code (do not use hidden links redirection and function)<br />
55.Flash pages (search engine spiders can not crawl flash content, flash page if they must be imported at the same time there is a static page)<br />
56. The use of frame<br />
57.Robot set up a &#8220;no index&#8221; of the tag<br />
58. A single pixel of the link (will be considered to be a link鬼祟)<br />
59. Invisible text (text and background color of the same page is not visible, but the spider can be retrieved)<br />
60. Portal page (Google Patents)<br />
61. Content duplication (Google is usually the oldest of the election of a push to the front of the push to go on the other)<br />
62.HTML code to be consistent with the W3C standards</p>
<p>Google ranking factors (non-page) (iv)</p>
<p>Reverse link:<br />
63.PR (point to sites based on the quantity and quality of links)<br />
64. The total number of backlinks (link: www.xxx.com Google axy linkdomain: www.xxx.com Yahoo &#8230;.)<br />
65. Backlinks page PR&gt; 4<br />
66. Link popularity (Google patent would be advancing too fast is considered cheating)</p>
<p>Each reverse link:<br />
67. Every page of the PR involved<br />
68. Link to your site&#8217;s anchor text (Google bombs)<br />
69. Link time (Google patent longer the better)<br />
70. Anchor text to change the frequency (Google patent the higher the frequency the more bad)<br />
71. Relating to the popularity page<br />
72. Involved in a number of external links page (the better to prove the importance of you)<br />
73. Relating to the location of the link page (the best in the HTML code)<br />
74. Related to the page&#8217;s keyword density (for search keywords)<br />
75. Relating to the title page<br />
76. Link from the &#8220;expert&#8221; web site (Google patent greatly advance)<br />
77. Relating to the theme of the same page</p>
<p>Contents:<br />
78. DMOZ included were (a huge advance because of the Google directory is obtained from the DMOZ, there are generally 28 months before they can be included)<br />
79.DMOZ Classification (It is said that the comprehensive category and geography included the most suitable type of theme)<br />
80 included in the Yahoo directory (a great advance, but need to pay 299 U.S. dollars per year)<br />
81. Of Indexed LookSmart<br />
82. Inktomi be included<br />
83. By other directory-type Web site included<br />
84. The introduction of large link site<br />
85. Site show that the more stable a long history (for new content at least 1-3 weeks can be driven)<br />
86. Site Directory Tree<br />
87. Site Map (Key words embodied in the anchor text)</p>
<p>User behavior:<br />
88. Page traffic (Google patent number and the trend visters)<br />
89. Page selection rate (Google patent is often the number of clicks on the page)<br />
90. At the time the page (Google patent relatively long period of time that the recognition of the content)<br />
91. Users bookmark this page (Google Patents)<br />
92. The user to delete this bookmark (Google Patents)<br />
93. Users have gone after the departure of children (back? Click on the link ?&#8230;.)<br />
94. The words users<br />
95. In the name of the time spent</p>
<p>Web site main acts:<br />
96. Domain Name Registration time (more than 5 years is a worthy)<br />
97. Whether or not to join the legitimate Union (refusing to spam, copyright protection, etc.)</p>
<p>Google ranking factors (non-page) (v)</p>
<p>98. Flow to buy (which flows into a low rate, conversion rate or even 0, is considered to come from bad external link)<br />
99. Link analysis (link to the old value, new value of the link temporarily not to prevent the rapid change)<br />
100. Zero external link<br />
101. Purchase links (Google Patents)<br />
102. Site priority ranking (Google Patents)<br />
103. Hidden (to the Google spider is reading a particular page, the real show is a separate page)<br />
104. From the bad site links<br />
105. The domain name theft (illegal acts will be removed)<br />
106. If the same IP to Google sent 100 times the same request, may be the IP will be BAN<br />
107. Server reliability&gt; 99.9% (Note that Google updated your time, not this time as far as possible maintenance)<br />
108. Page was removed from the large site<br />
109. Ranked against their competitors to deal with as a result of</p>
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		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Hit Tail, how to improve your SEO and improving long tail traffic</title>
		<link>http://www.ajaxtime.com/hit-tail-how-to-improve-your-seo-and-improving-long-tail-traffic.html</link>
		<comments>http://www.ajaxtime.com/hit-tail-how-to-improve-your-seo-and-improving-long-tail-traffic.html#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 16 Apr 2009 09:29:45 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>admin</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[seo]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.ajaxtime.com/?p=114</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Some may argue that all you can do to optimise your blog/website for search engines is use correct markup and some basic SEO practices. I've never been an advocate of keyword analysis either, taking natural search engine traffic as it comes. However, today I discovered HitTail which might have changed my mind.
]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Typically (like many other writers) I focus more on the content itself than stuffing it beyond recognition with keywords; spending time writing meaningful paragraphs and enticing headlines rather than bowing to the god of SEO. I&#8217;ve always done okay with the search engines and currently bring in 300-400 visitors a day through Google alone &#8211; which is acceptable but it has remained at this level for the past 3-4 months. So today I went in search of ways to improve my SEO and stumbled across a fascinating service.</p>
<p><strong>Enter HitTail &#8211; helping you understand the long tail</strong><br />
HitTail</a> is an online analytics provider unlike anything I&#8217;ve seen before. You install a Javascript urchin on your site (as you do for Google Analytics) and every visitor to your site is recorded to HitTail. It isolates those who entered via search engines and extracts the search terms upon which they entered &#8211; it logs these (as any analytics tool does) and provides information based on this. It shows you live data (to the minute) of visitors entering your site and highlights the keywords (as per the below screenshot)</p>
<p><a href="http://www.ajaxtime.com/wp-content/uploads/1-sml.jpg" target="_blank"><img title="hittail" src="http://www.ajaxtime.com/wp-content/uploads/1-sml.jpg" alt="hittail" /></a></p>
<p><strong>What HitTail does</strong><br />
It&#8217;s able to chart which of your keywords are your primary ones and which constitute the &#8220;long tail&#8221; of your site. I&#8217;ll explain what the long tail is shortly&#8230; This helps you gain an understanding of how people are finding your site and which keywords are working well for you. In addition to highlighting this information, HitTail offers keyword &#8220;suggestions&#8221; on terms that help constitute your long tail &#8211; under the premise that you should target these to increase your overal natural search engine traffic.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.ajaxtime.com/wp-content/uploads/3.jpg" target="_blank"><img title="hittail" src="http://www.ajaxtime.com/wp-content/uploads/3-sml.jpg" alt="hittail" /></a></p>
<p>While the suggestions aren&#8217;t always useful (as a couple of mine haven&#8217;t been), they do offer some insight into keywords that you could be using to greater effect. Therefore you can add suggestions to your &#8220;to-do&#8221; list, prompting you to blog about them and therefore increase your overall search engine presence.</p>
<p><strong>So what is the &#8220;long tail&#8221;</strong><br />
Some of you will have heard the term before, but remain unsure as to exactly what it means. The long tail refers to the seemingly never-ending list of obscure interests that populate the Internet. Let me explain using an example of a website that sells shoes:</p>
<p>The primary set of keyphrases for a website that sells shoes will be things like:<br />
&#8220;shoes&#8221;<br />
&#8220;buy shoes&#8221;<br />
&#8220;red shoes&#8221;</p>
<p>Whereas the long tail is a massive list of keyphrases that are deemed more obscure, like:<br />
&#8220;indian wing-tip shoes&#8221;<br />
&#8220;buy cheap red leather shoes&#8221;<br />
&#8220;cowboy boots from the old west&#8221;</p>
<p><img title="long tail" src="http://www.ajaxtime.com/wp-content/uploads/longtail.png" alt="long tail" /></p>
<p>While most website owners only focus on the primary keyphrases (because they are the most obvious), they only constitute around 40-45% of the search engine traffic for your site. Completely disregarding the importance of the long tail is kissing goodbye to 55-60% of your potential traffic.</p>
<p><strong>How HitTail shows me my long tail</strong><br />
<a href="http://www.ajaxtime.com/wp-content/uploads/2-sml.jpg" target="_blank"><img title="hittail" src="http://www.ajaxtime.com/wp-content/uploads/2-sml.jpg" alt="hittail" /></a></p>
<p><strong>Long tail = sales</strong><br />
The ironic thing is that while many bloggers/site-owners neglect the long tail keywords; because they are the most direct and specific they often convert better into sales than idle, generic terms. &#8220;Buy italian wing-tip shoe&#8221; is likely to convert better than &#8220;buy shoes&#8221; because it&#8217;s more specific and the user has a very focused information requirement.</p>
<p><strong>So, without digressing too much from my original topic, HitTail is a great service (free up to 100,000 visitors per month) and I believe it really has the potential to improve your natural search engine traffic. I&#8217;m going to be giving it a go for the next month or two and we&#8217;ll see how things improve. But my advice is to <a href="http://www.hittail.com/">try it and see how you get on.</strong></p>
]]></content:encoded>
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		</item>
		<item>
		<title>How a corporate blog can improve SEO and offer a good ROI</title>
		<link>http://www.ajaxtime.com/how-a-corporate-blog-can-improve-seo-and-offer-a-good-roi.html</link>
		<comments>http://www.ajaxtime.com/how-a-corporate-blog-can-improve-seo-and-offer-a-good-roi.html#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 16 Apr 2009 09:21:25 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>admin</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[seo]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.ajaxtime.com/how-a-corporate-blog-can-improve-seo-and-offer-a-good-roi.html</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[It's an interesting question; if you're selling products should you just land a massive PPC campaign on it and hope for the best or should you try and go the "natural" SEO route. Typically your SEO on a shop will have less of an impact than a direct PPC campaign, so isn't this a good reason for you to have a corporate blog?
]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Corporate blogs have the potential to be one of the most boring things on the Internet. There&#8217;s nothing worse than reading what the CEO did for lunch and that their latest &#8220;REVOLUTIONARY&#8221; stapler has just been launched. Unless you deal in a very cool industry or have astonishing stories to tell (such as the MD being flown out on a private jet to play with Ferrari&#8217;s) then no one actually cares.</p>
<p><strong>The subject matter is tricky</strong><br />
A company blog needs to remain objective. You can&#8217;t just write about the last company night out because it belies the professionalism you need to continue trading, nor can you write about the dull tedium of your business &#8211; because unless you&#8217;re a broker of fireworks, kittens and sports cars there will be acres of tedium that will do little more than induce fatigue upon your reader.</p>
<h2>Remain objective, your mission is to improve business. Whether that&#8217;s through brand recognition or a strong SEO push, you need to have something compelling for the reader otherwise it&#8217;s time wasted.</h2>
<p>The main point I&#8217;m giving here is that you need to have a purpose behind your company blog. Where I work the idea has been thrown around a fair bit but there were some crucial problems &#8211; namely the quality of content. What you need to do is write a blog that departs the wisdom your business holds upon the world &#8211; providing useful resources. That way people will recognise your brand as being synonymous with the field you blog about &#8211; which should help bring in revenue.</p>
<h2>How make your company blog worthwhile</h2>
<p>Let&#8217;s look at the key points needed to make your company blog worthwhile.</p>
<p><strong>#1 &#8211; Regular, high quality content that experts use as a resource</strong><br />
Whatever you&#8217;re selling, whether it&#8217;s a service or a product your company blog should offer insight into the business. If you&#8217;re a search agency your blog should contain high quality resources about improving your SEO. If you&#8217;re a web development agency then you should offer tutorials, advice, hints and tips on how to create the best work. This is really important because it helps establish your brand as excelling in the field you&#8217;re in &#8211; which helps generate natural sales (which are entirely FREE don&#8217;t forget).</p>
<p><strong>#2 &#8211; Professionalism and strong branding</strong><br />
It&#8217;d be completely folly to have a very formal brand which has a very informal blog; you need to remain consistent. If you go back against your branding or professional image then your blog is likely to have the opposite effect. After all, would your customers be happy buying services from you knowing that your CEO was rumoured to be high on narcotics at the last Christmas party?</p>
<p><strong>#3 &#8211; Someone MUST take charge</strong><br />
I speak from personal experience with this. Where I work it would be nigh impossible for someone to take ownership of the blog; and the problem is that the person who would take ownership isn&#8217;t necessarily the person who can provide the high quality content that the blog requires. You do need someone to be the top-level boss of the blog, but you also need people who can dedicate time and ideas to the project, otherwise you&#8217;ll have crap content and no one will be interested.</p>
<p><strong>#4 &#8211; You cannot stop blogging</strong><br />
Once you&#8217;ve started you cannot leave it for long periods without an update. Customers will think you&#8217;ve disappeared off the face of this planet and they will assume that your service/support is likely to be as timely. If you only update the blog rarely, it&#8217;s worth making that very clear at every level or avoiding placing any dates on the content.</p>
<p><strong>#5 &#8211; You need people to commit their content</strong><br />
This is another problem I have in the real world. Where I work there are a couple of us with personal sites/blogs and it would be very hard to sign off good content to our employers when we could just as well stay quiet, take that idea home and profit from it ourselves. You need people who are good writers and experts at their field to commit content to the cause &#8211; which is harder said than done.</p>
<h2>This is all well and good, but how is it going to help generate revenue?</h2>
<p>The funny thing is, it might be possible to offset the cost of the time spent blogging against the business it could bring in. If you are writing regular, high quality content then you&#8217;re likely to have visitors. Visitors who come back. Visitors who tell their friends. Visitors who also own blogs and write about your blog. They will also have visitors, who also have visitors &#8211; suddenly you have a blog that behaves like viral marketing. Suddenly you have thousands of people coming to your business for free advice.</p>
<p>Now, if you&#8217;ve got thousands of people coming to your business for free advice, isn&#8217;t it possible that some of them would pay for your services? I&#8217;d say it&#8217;s entirely likely. The bonus of that is that you haven&#8217;t had to actively chase down clients and use your sales people to corner them until they surrender a brief of the work they&#8217;re after. Any sales that are generated as a direct result of your company blog are essentially &#8220;free&#8221;, with the only cost incurred being the time spent blogging.</p>
<p><strong>Naturally, high quality content and readers means people will blog about you. This yields massive natural search engine gains. Suddenly after 5-6 excellent posts on your blog you&#8217;ve got hundreds of people linking to you and sending visitors you way, giving your SEO a massive boost in the process. These sites will be within your niche, your PageRank should increase and having a company blog suddenly became a more profitable and sustainable venture than a heavy PPC campaign.</strong></p>
]]></content:encoded>
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		</item>
		<item>
		<title>How to SEO your site: Episode 1 &#8211; Marking up your website</title>
		<link>http://www.ajaxtime.com/how-to-seo-your-site-episode-1-marking-up-your-website.html</link>
		<comments>http://www.ajaxtime.com/how-to-seo-your-site-episode-1-marking-up-your-website.html#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 16 Apr 2009 09:20:17 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>admin</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[seo]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.ajaxtime.com/in-episode-one-i-mused-that-many-bloggers-spend-hours-deliberating-how-to-mark-up-the-content-for-maximum-seo-effectiveness-without-even-checking-their-templates-for-crucial-elements-like-h1-tags-so.html</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Welcome to the first in my series of articles explaining how to sensibly SEO your site. This isn't a hardcore guide explaining how to decorate your posts with heavily researched keywords but more an explanation of how (and why) you need to structure your site. Let's begin.]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>This series is looking at how to SEO your site properly and we&#8217;ll be starting at the very beginning; looking at your templates and what information you need to focus on. This includes the correct use of header tags, appropriate title structure and meta tags.</p>
<h2>Episode 1: Marking up your template for SEO</h2>
<p>Time after time I see bloggers worrying about keyword density and researching which keyphrases they need to focus on in their content&#8230; Yet they&#8217;ve never actually checked whether their Wordpress template even has an H1 tag &#8211; it&#8217;s an odd balance. I know a lot of bloggers don&#8217;t want to be &#8220;hands on&#8221; in terms of code but the reality of it is that you probably need to be. So let&#8217;s look at the important factors:</p>
<p><strong>Title tags</strong><br />
The title tag is one of the most crucial elements to get right when SEO&#8217;ing your website; the reason for this is because that&#8217;s what your link appears like in Google. Let me explain using the below example/screenshot:</p>
<p><img title="google search results" src="http://www.ajaxtime.com/wp-content/uploads/auto_save_image/2009/04/02201721G.gif" alt="google search results" /></p>
<p>The &#8220;Kitten &#8211; Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia&#8221; line is the title tag of that particular page. When you&#8217;re scanning through a list of search terms it&#8217;s the thing you read the first and it&#8217;s an element that Google places a lot of weight on. Therefore it&#8217;s important that you structure your title tags correctly; far before considering keyword usage you need to ensure that you&#8217;re presenting the most relevent information first.</p>
<p>Therefore if you&#8217;ve got content that people will be searching, such as blog posts or articles &#8211; you&#8217;ll want the title tag to contain the article title above anything else. I recommend the structure of &#8220;Post title &#8211; Website Name&#8221; e.g. &#8220;Why I love Kittens &#8211; Seopher.com&#8221;. This means that if someone searches for &#8220;why I love kittens&#8221; the first terms Google matches are the first few words in the title tag &#8211; thus increasing relevance.</p>
<p><strong>Header tags</strong><br />
It&#8217;s important in SEO terms to ensure that you&#8217;re set up to use header tags correctly because proper semantic markup helps Google work out what content is relevent on your website. Therefore you should ensure that every single template you&#8217;re using has at least an H1 tag. Typically I&#8217;d recommend using the H1 tag on the homepage (and other non-search-worthy-content pages) to mark up the site branding. I.e. wrap &#8220;This is my website, about this, that and the other&#8221; in H1 tags to support your website branding.</p>
<p>However, if you&#8217;re on a content page (i.e. the blog post explaining &#8220;Why I love kittens&#8221;) then it would be more prudent to make the blog title the H1 tag and do away with the branding. It ultimately depends on your goals but to maximise your natural search engine traffic it&#8217;s worth focusing your header tags on the entry point (on the homepage the entry point is for the branding, the overall mission statement&#8230; On individual content pages the entry point is the post title).</p>
<p><strong>Meta tags</strong><br />
I have a different attitude to most convential SEO writers because I have a very dogmatic and real understanding of the search engine market. Whatever statistic you read you can ignore it; Google owns 90% of the search engine market. People have disagreed with me numerous times over that statistic but I&#8217;ve been around on the Internet long enough to see how much traffic each search engine sends. See my proof on my has Google got 97% of the search market post.</p>
<p>Because Google is the only search engine worth catering for, meta tags are an increasingly pointless gesture. Adding meta-keywords and meta-description tags to all your content is more hassle than it&#8217;s worth for the most part (especially for bloggers). Google doesn&#8217;t care what meta information you enter for the most part; it cares more about your title and header tags (as well as keyword density etc, but more on that another day). As far as I&#8217;m concerned it&#8217;s only worth adding a meta-description tag on your homepage so that you can write a bespoke strapline to support your title &#8211; which is exemplified below:</p>
<p><img title="google search results" src="http://www.ajaxtime.com/wp-content/uploads/auto_save_image/2009/04/02201721G.gif" alt="google search results" /></p>
<p>Using the same example as before, the content that sits below the &#8220;Kitten &#8211; Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia&#8221; is where your meta-description content would sit. It&#8217;s only worthwhile adding that to the homepage as far as I&#8217;m concerned because realistically that&#8217;s the only one you&#8217;ll be bothered to maintain. Google doesn&#8217;t add much weight too it so I don&#8217;t see the point in spending time focusing on a token gesture that 97% of the market will ignore anyway.</p>
<p><strong>Images and accessibility</strong><br />
SEO is an accessibility bi-product on the most part. If you use images you MUST have alt and title attributes for them because Google counts that as information. Ensuring your site is largely accessible is a good step for SEO because it means that non-conventional browsers can interact with your content well. This means that search engine spiders can also index your content more effectively and that&#8217;s a desirable thing.</p>
<p><strong>I hope episode one has been useful. In episode two I&#8217;m going to talk about marking up your content, keyword density and generally SEO&#8217;ing things that fall outside of the template.</strong></p>
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		<title>How to SEO your site: Episode 2 &#8211; Marking up your content</title>
		<link>http://www.ajaxtime.com/how-to-seo-your-site-episode-2-marking-up-your-content.html</link>
		<comments>http://www.ajaxtime.com/how-to-seo-your-site-episode-2-marking-up-your-content.html#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 16 Apr 2009 09:18:22 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>admin</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[seo]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.ajaxtime.com/how-to-seo-your-site-episode-2-marking-up-your-content.html</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Welcome to the second in my series of "how to SEO your site". If this is your first visit I recommend you look over episode 1 which discussed how to SEO your templates. This article is focused on how you should mark up your website content.
]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>In episode one I mused that many bloggers spend hours deliberating how to mark up the content for maximum SEO effectiveness without even checking their templates for crucial elements like H1 tags. So it&#8217;s similarly possible that many users (myself included) don&#8217;t actually mark up our content effectively (for whatever reason), thus undoing the good work you&#8217;ve done at a template level. So let&#8217;s look at how you should do things.</p>
<p><strong>Use heading tags properly</strong><br />
You should be using h2, h3, h4 and h5 within your content to mark up your headers (NOT strong/bold tags like I use). Search engines pay a lot of attention to heading tags, so it&#8217;s worth spending the extra time putting them into your content. It&#8217;s important to ensure that you&#8217;re using the right keywords in your header tags too; it&#8217;s pointless taking the extra time to correctly SEO your content structure without SEO&#8217;ing the content too. Filling headers and titles with words that no one is ever likely to search for is not a good idea; instead get a feel for what keywords people actually use and write your headers around them.</p>
<p><strong>Use &#8217;strong&#8217; markup properly (unlike me)</strong><br />
Search engines also look at words you&#8217;re adding emphasis to and the strong tag is no different. Therefore it doesn&#8217;t hurt to bolden up important words or phrases; how much weight is placed on them is questionable but it&#8217;s worth doing if it helps you make a point.</p>
<p><strong>Links</strong><br />
As I said above, search engines care about keywords you emphasise and words wrapped in links are no different. If you can help it you should avoid links like <a href="http://www.ajaxtime.com/wp-admin/#">click here</a> or <a href="http://www.ajaxtime.com/wp-admin/#">my post</a> because there is no useful search-friendly content associated with them. Let me give you an example: I run a website selling shoes, which statement is a search engine going to like more?</p>
<p>Click <a href="http://www.ajaxtime.com/wp-admin/#">here</a> to buy Italian shoes OR Click here to <a href="http://www.ajaxtime.com/wp-admin/#">buy Italian shoes</a>? Don&#8217;t forget your search engine reputation is derived largely from who you link to and who links back &#8211; so it&#8217;s best to add more weight to the link by providing meaningful text.</p>
<p><strong>Images</strong><br />
If you must use images ensure that any content contained within that image is available through the ALT attribute of the image. This is not only good for accessibility but Google cares about that content; if you&#8217;ve got a website selling shoes you&#8217;re going to be more reputable if you have images of shoes too. The only way to tell search engines that you have photos of shoes is by having meaningful ALT text and TITLE attributes.</p>
<p><strong>I don&#8217;t do this properly&#8230;</strong><br />
A quick browse of the source code from Seopher.com shows that the content itself is actually not very SEO friendly. I really only use H2 tags within the content and my headers are all STRONG tags, rather than H# like they should be. Because of the custom editor I built for the back-end I&#8217;m limited to using line-breaks rather than correct paragraph markup&#8230; I&#8217;m going to start SEO&#8217;ing my content once I&#8217;ve finished this series of articles.</p>
<p><strong>Anyway, hopefully this fairly basic advice is useful to someone other than myself. I too shall be following this advice when I find the time to do so. In episode three I&#8217;m going to be discussing keyword density and a number of other ways you can make your content more effective. </strong></p>
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		<title>How to SEO your site: Episode 3 &#8211; Keyword density and keyphrase research</title>
		<link>http://www.ajaxtime.com/how-to-seo-your-site-episode-3-keyword-density-and-keyphrase-research.html</link>
		<comments>http://www.ajaxtime.com/how-to-seo-your-site-episode-3-keyword-density-and-keyphrase-research.html#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 16 Apr 2009 09:16:26 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>admin</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[seo]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.ajaxtime.com/how-to-seo-your-site-episode-3-keyword-density-and-keyphrase-research.html</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Welcome to the third in my SEO series: how to SEO your site. In this episode we're looking at the importance of keyword density, keyword research and how correct use of both can do wonders for your natural SEO.
]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I&#8217;ve found that asking regular bloggers what &#8220;keyword density&#8221; means is often met with confusion or muddled definitions. &#8220;It&#8217;s the density&#8230; of the keywords&#8221;? Yes, that is indeed true but what does it mean in real terms? It&#8217;s actually an interesting and important aspect of SEO that you really should pay attention to.</p>
<p><strong>What is keyword density?</strong><br />
Like most experienced Internet users I made my way to the Wikipedia page for a textbook definition and while the page is rather empty it does hold the sentence &#8220;Keyword density is the percentage of words on a web page that match a specified set of keywords&#8221;. So if I have a piece of content that says &#8220;The most important aspects of natural SEO is keyword density&#8221;, &#8220;SEO&#8221; as a keyword has a 10% keyword density (as it appears once in 10 words).</p>
<p><strong>How can keyword density be used to improve my natural SEO?</strong><br />
If you&#8217;re trying to rank on Google for &#8220;improve your SEO&#8221; then you need to continually use the phrase &#8220;improve your SEO&#8221; throughout the piece of content. Search engines use keyword density as a way of scoring the relevence of your content against the specific search-phrase. Which is understandable when you think about it: if I search for &#8220;improve your SEO&#8221;, a site that has that phrase on the page 10 times is likely to be more relevent than a page that only has 1 instance of the phrase.</p>
<p>Therefore it&#8217;s important to think about your keyphrases before writing your content (especially if you&#8217;re trying to target a specific search phrase on the search engine results).</p>
<p><strong>The pitfalls of trying to abuse it</strong><br />
While no one has a precise figure for &#8220;desired&#8221; keyword density, it&#8217;s important that you don&#8217;t abuse it. In days gone bye webmasters would create pages filled with keywords and lists of keyphrases in a way to fool the primitive search engines that existed at the time. However, things have come a long way since then and Google is clever &#8211; clever enough to punish you for trying to be deceptive.</p>
<p><strong>Synonyms and readability</strong><br />
In my experience it&#8217;s crucial to avoid stuffing your content with keyphrases to the extent it becomes unreadable. Whatever website you&#8217;re running you&#8217;re trying to present your information to users in a useful way; stuffing it beyond readable limits is counter productive because for all the extra traffic your SEO campaign will bring, the users will become frustrated with your content and leave anyway.</p>
<p>I find adding synonyms to the content is one of the best ways to improve SEO and readability: you&#8217;ll rank higher for the alternative keywords anyway. Google won&#8217;t think you&#8217;re trying to be deceptive and users will be able to digest your content &#8211; thus improving natural traffic (theoretically).</p>
<p><strong>Keyword research</strong><br />
Unless you&#8217;ve already got a natural SEO campaign in mind (with specific keywords/phrases you want to target) then you&#8217;re going to need to research what keywords to focus on. It&#8217;s no use focusing on keyphrases that no one actually searches for is it? The best tool I&#8217;ve found for this purpose is the Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool</a>, which gives you an indication of how often the word you enter is searched. More importantly it gives you other suggestions with their relative popularity &#8211; helping you shape you SEO campaign.</p>
<p><strong>A useful tool</strong><br />
If you&#8217;re still unsure, it&#8217;s worth having a look at this <a href="http://www.keyworddensity.com/">keyword density analysis tool which breaks down your keyword density for a given page.</p>
<p><strong>That&#8217;s all I have to say on this topic. It can be awfully tiresome researching keywords and savvy readers will recognise a shameless attempt at keyword stuffing. Even if you mean it in the most sincere way you genuinely can&#8217;t over-do it because either Google or your readers will punish you for it. In episode 4 I&#8217;ll be talking about the use of social bookmarking/news as an SEO tool and how it can be suitably leveraged for natural SEO gains.</strong></p>
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		<title>How to SEO your site: Episode 4 &#8211; Social news as an SEO tool</title>
		<link>http://www.ajaxtime.com/how-to-seo-your-site-episode-4-social-news-as-an-seo-tool.html</link>
		<comments>http://www.ajaxtime.com/how-to-seo-your-site-episode-4-social-news-as-an-seo-tool.html#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 16 Apr 2009 09:14:45 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>admin</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[News]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[sem]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[seo]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.ajaxtime.com/how-to-seo-your-site-episode-4-social-news-as-an-seo-tool.html</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Welcome to episode four in the 'how to SEO your website' series. Last time we looked at the importance of keyword density. Today we're looking at the use of social bookmarking / news as an SEO tool and how it can be used to your advantage.
]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I&#8217;m not an SEO analyst nor am I a PPC guru; I&#8217;m a web developer who just happens to spend too much time blogging and on the Internet &#8211; this means I have a broader opinion of SEO and how it can be used to your advantage. A conventional SEO analyst wouldn&#8217;t dare of quoting something as lucrative as social news as an SEO tool but there is sufficient reasoning behind my thinking.</p>
<p><strong>How could social news ever be related to SEO?</strong><br />
The Internet moves quickly and you need to move with it. Social news is a massive figure in the Internet landscape so to avoid it would be silly, especially when you&#8217;ve seen first hand the effects it can have on your content. The problem with social news is that it is lucrative, difficult and very circumstancial &#8211; which makes it inconsistent and frustrating but equally worthwhile if leveraged properly. Before I use any more adjectives it&#8217;s worth explaining what social news is.</p>
<p><strong>What is social news/bookmarking?</strong><br />
Social news is where a user base decides on the value of the news they are presented with &#8211; essentially giving items a thumbs up or a thumbs down depending on whether they think it&#8217;s worthwhile or not. This uses the wisdom of crowds</a> philosophy; if you&#8217;re given a large enough number of users they will automatically seek out the best content and award it as such. In context this means that only the worthwhile pieces of news are deemed popular. Sites such as <a href="http://www.digg.com/">Digg</a> and <a href="http://www.reddit.com/">Reddit</a> are major players in this. Whether social news or social bookmarking; both models require a positive action from a percentage of the userbase before that specific news item is &#8220;promoted&#8221; to the front page where the mainstream will find it.</p>
<p><strong>Okay, so why should I care?</strong><br />
Social news sites carry a lot of traffic because the very best content is automatically presented to you without having to dig around (get it?). Therefore these sites are where a lot of savvy readers go to get their news; many blog about what they find. Therefore if you&#8217;re able to write content that is deemed worthy, being made popular on these social sites suddenly sends thousands upon thousands of visitors to your site. Some users will choose to blog about what you&#8217;ve done and it is here that the SEO gains are made.</p>
<p><strong>Get some news published and the backlinks pour in</strong><br />
Social news is one of the best ways of securing free publicity for your site, certainly more effective than landing an expensive PPC campaign on your homepage (unless you&#8217;re selling a product). If people like what you&#8217;re doing they&#8217;ll write about you = backlinks. Lesser news sites that feed off the larger ones will also pick up your content = backlinks. Users will then find your content through the lesser news sites, like your content and blog about it = backlinks. Other users will read the blogs of others and blog about it themselves = backlinks. Getting your content popular on a social news site is the equivalent of sending your content viral, with a network of backlinks connecting the dots.</p>
<p><strong>Easier said than done?</strong><br />
Absolutely &#8211; because you&#8217;re dealing with the wisdom of crowds it becomes difficult. Users are savvy enough to spot shameless self promotion when they see it, so your only hope is writing link bait. Link bait is a piece of content tailored to the demographic you&#8217;re trying to reach: in this case you need to have useful information presented in an easy-to-read manner to attract the attention you need. Social news users are lazy so you need to spoon feed them your content in bite-sized pieces. I recently wrote a post explaining <a href="http://www.seopher.com/articles/how_to_get_success_with_social_news_bookmarking_sites">how to get success with social news sites</a> which paraphrases another post I made back in February (<a href="http://www.seopher.com/articles/how_to_get_on_the_digg_front_page">how to get on the Digg front page). With these two posts you should have a rough idea of how to leverage social news sites; it&#8217;s a case of writing good link bait and having the tenacity to keep trying when you fail.</p>
<p><strong>This was quite a short &#8220;how to SEO your website&#8221; episode but next time we&#8217;re going to be looking at something quite clever &#8211; how to use competitions and give-aways as an SEO tool, discussing the pros and cons of doing this and the maths required to make it work. If you enjoyed this post, please subscribe to the feed (below) and come back for episode five.</strong></p>
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		<title>How to SEO your site: Episode 5 &#8211; Competitions as an SEO tool</title>
		<link>http://www.ajaxtime.com/how-to-seo-your-site-episode-5-competitions-as-an-seo-tool.html</link>
		<comments>http://www.ajaxtime.com/how-to-seo-your-site-episode-5-competitions-as-an-seo-tool.html#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 16 Apr 2009 09:13:02 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>admin</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[seo]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.ajaxtime.com/?p=103</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Welcome to the fifth episode of my "how to SEO your site" series. Last time we looked at the lucrative world of leveraging social news sites for natural SEO gains, today we're looking at how running a competition can be used to improve your SEO.
]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>As with the last episode, proper SEO analysts wouldn&#8217;t dare refer to running a competition as an SEO tool &#8211; but as I said last time, I&#8217;m not a proper SEO analyst. I&#8217;m just someone who lives in the &#8216;real&#8217; world of blogging and I think there&#8217;s more to improving your natural SEO than we looked at in the first couple of episodses. So how could running a competition possibly improve your natural SEO?</p>
<p><strong>How can a competition help my natural SEO?</strong><br />
If you have an attractive price that requires a token gesture on the part of the user, then you should get a good number of entrants (with sufficient promotion). The trick is offering some level of incentive to the user to talk about your competition &#8211; thus sending it viral.</p>
<p>The most obvious means of doing so is making the users create a blog post about the competition as their entry into it; although there are pitfalls with doing so (discussed later). This means that you have a faux-viral campaign running because you increase your exposure exponentially; the entrant&#8217;s blog should have readers, some of whom will also blog about it to enter, blah, blah, etc, etc and before you know it you have a LOT of entrants.</p>
<p><strong>Remember rule #1: backlinks = SEO</strong><br />
Lots of backlinks are good in SEO terms and while you can&#8217;t make sure that everyone who links back to you is within your niche (thus increasing the relevancy of your backlinks), it&#8217;s more likely in that you operate in the same niche as your readers. Your readers&#8217; readers should also be within that niche (or a chinese-whisper of it) and therefore the backlinks shouldn&#8217;t be too random (on the most part).</p>
<p><strong>How to make a good competition to improve your SEO</strong><br />
You need something desirable; a couple of Nintendo Wii&#8217;s and an iPhone would attract sufficient attention. Although desirability is subjective and something that is often adjustable depending on your demographic &#8211; but you get the general idea. I recommend getting users to enter the competition by creating a blog post about it; this removes the element of chance from the creation of backlinks.</p>
<p>Further improvements could be offering referal codes to users; giving them more entries for the more users they refer who also enter the competition. The benefit of doing this is that you&#8217;re leveraging your users to heavily promote your competition under the premise that they stand to benefit from it. So if you get a big player on board it could make the difference between them giving you a minimum-effort post and promoting it heavily (thus giving you a few thousand more entries (backlinks too).</p>
<p><strong>The pitfalls</strong><br />
Heavyweight pro-blogger John Chow highlighted the biggest problem with leveraging your SEO in a militant way using the competition idea. He kept running competitions where you could win fabulous prizes, all you needed to do was link back to his site using the text <a href="http://www.ajaxtime.com/wp-admin/#">make money online</a>; this meant he received thousands of links referring to his site using the keyphrase &#8220;make money online&#8221;, thus making him the #1 result on Google for the term. This is known as gaming the search engine and they don&#8217;t take it very lightly. Infact he got banned for doing it. Banned from Google &#8211; now that&#8217;s a big hit that most bloggers wouldn&#8217;t be able to take.</p>
<p><strong>Avoiding the pitfalls</strong><br />
So that doesn&#8217;t mean that the concept is flawed but you cannot specify the terms upon which the users link back to your site &#8211; because Google will see this as you gaming their system. Instead you should specify terms like the length of the post (minimum 300 words, for example) and that it must be on a blog with more than [x] posts. This means that you&#8217;re not getting users make a token 5 word post about your competition purely to enter &#8211; you get a meaningful piece of content for the search engines to get their spiders around and add weight to the backlink.</p>
<p><strong>Promoting your competition</strong><br />
It might be worth sending a few choice people an email letting them know that the competition exists and offering them 5 entries just for blogging about it (or something else tasty in return). It&#8217;s not easy getting the word out sometimes and ultimately it might be easier doing this than buying a bundle of ReviewMe or PayPerPost reviews.</p>
<p><strong>So there you have it, if done the right way with the right prize a competition can be a powerful tool. In SEO terms you can get a lot of backlinks &#8211; but you could leverage it differently if you wished. I&#8217;ve seen some competitions that required you to sign up to an RSS feed to enter, or just leave a comment. But seeing as this is an SEO guide, backlinks are key. In episode six we&#8217;ll be looking at PPC campaigns as a way of SEO&#8217;ing your site.</strong></p>
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		<title>PPC and Google Content Network &#8211; why I keep them apart</title>
		<link>http://www.ajaxtime.com/ppc-and-google-content-network-why-i-keep-them-apart.html</link>
		<comments>http://www.ajaxtime.com/ppc-and-google-content-network-why-i-keep-them-apart.html#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 16 Apr 2009 09:10:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>admin</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[seo]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[google]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[PPC]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.ajaxtime.com/?p=101</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[An important question when dealing with Google for your PPC needs is whether to turn on the "Google Content Network" option... Let me explain why I never turn it on.]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>When using Google Adwords to manage your PPC campaign you&#8217;re offered the option to show your advert within the &#8220;Google Content Network&#8221; (here-after referred to as GCN). This option is enabled by default so you have to consciously decide to turn it off for your ads to only be shown on Google search results. I&#8217;ve never fully trusted GCN and let me just explain why.</p>
<p><strong>The information need</strong><br />
Get into the mindset of the user upon being presented your advert; if they&#8217;ve found it through searching on the keywords you specified then they have a specific information requirement that your advert is tailored towards. This means that a user searching for &#8220;Buy iPod&#8221; has the interest in buying an iPod. Therefore you would expect a higher percentage of these users to convert to your &#8220;Buy an iPod&#8221; PPC campaign. On GCN your advert would be displayed within an Adsense pane on a page where your keywords were mentioned; the article might be about &#8220;how much the iPod sucks and why would anyone ever buy an iPod&#8221; but the contextual engine will see &#8220;buy an iPod&#8221; and show your advert. Would you expect that to convert equally as well?</p>
<p><strong>Publishers are complete #$@%ers</strong><br />
To be a profitable blogger you need invasive adverts; ones that users may click on accidentily. Look at the majority of Adsense placements that you see (even mine) &#8211; they&#8217;re invasive to ensure users click on them every now and then. As a publisher I don&#8217;t care whether my reader buys your product, I just care about the CPC I get from them hitting my Adsense. So looking at it from the other direction is interesting because it&#8217;s entirely likely that you&#8217;ll be paying out for accidental clicks if your advert is displayed in an Adsense pane on the GCN.</p>
<p><strong>What sites is it displayed on?</strong><br />
You have absolutely zero control over what sites you advert is displayed on; it&#8217;s questionable how much control Google has over this too. Would you be happy having your legitimate advert being displayed on piracy websites? Warez? Porn? No, I wouldn&#8217;t either. I appreciate that &#8220;technically&#8221; Google doesn&#8217;t allow these people into the Adsense programme but do you really believe everything they say?</p>
<p><strong>I don&#8217;t trust Google enough</strong><br />
I&#8217;m not confident that Google are able to track clicks across the GCN accurately enough. I&#8217;ve seen enough odd things go on with my Adsense that I wouldn&#8217;t want my PPC campaign to fall victim to the same oddities. There are literally hundreds of thousands of websites showing Adsense code and I genuinely believe Google is unable to track the clicks on them all accurately. Not that I don&#8217;t trust Google but there are a few insider things I&#8217;m aware of that make me distrust their tracking a little.</p>
<p><strong>That&#8217;s it really; through mistrust or my belief in a search engine user&#8217;s &#8220;information requirement&#8221; I dislike the option of the Google Content Network. I just don&#8217;t see how it&#8217;s worth having the same CPC on a clearly less reputable envionment. At least the search results are more controlled whereas anything goes in the great-wide-web and I don&#8217;t want my money relying on it all being kosher.</strong></p>
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		<title>STOP! 5 seo tips to optimise your titles and get maximum search engine exposure</title>
		<link>http://www.ajaxtime.com/stop-5-seo-tips-to-optimise-your-titles-and-get-maximum-search-engine-exposure.html</link>
		<comments>http://www.ajaxtime.com/stop-5-seo-tips-to-optimise-your-titles-and-get-maximum-search-engine-exposure.html#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 16 Apr 2009 09:07:07 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>admin</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[News]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[search]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[seo]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.ajaxtime.com/?p=98</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Ever wondered why your good content doesn't ever have anyone read it? It's probably because you gave it a title that no one would ever search for - lots of bloggers do that to give their post titles a "natural, human friendly feel" but what you forget is once it's off the front page of your blog, it's dead!

]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>You need to think; how are readers going to find this post? Quite a few will visit it from your homepage when they visit but that&#8217;s a really short time in the lifespan of a post. Once it&#8217;s more than a few days old it&#8217;ll disappear into your archive. The rest of the people are likely to find it organically by using Google (or Yahoo, whatever) and that&#8217;s what you ALWAYS need to consider when writing your post.</p>
<p><strong>Look at the statistics of it</strong><br />
If you have 100 people who visit your homepage each day out of habit, that&#8217;s 100 people who will read your post. A few days of posting later that piece of content is no longer on the front page and it&#8217;s now in your archive; so lets say you&#8217;ve had 150 people look at it since it got posted. Now, if search engines didn&#8217;t exist you&#8217;d be lucky to have 5 people read it per day purely by browsing your site. But if you use a good title, you could have 20-30 search hits to that content PER DAY. So 5 days later that SEO friendly search title is bringing in more readers.</p>
<p><strong>Would the homepage visitors not have read it without a friendly title?</strong><br />
If you have readers who visit the site out of habit, would a less organic title put them off? Probably not &#8211; provided it was still obvious what the post was about.</p>
<p><strong>Would the search engine visitors have found the post with the friendly title?</strong><br />
Absolutely, but that&#8217;s not the point. Using properly researched keywords in your title will help ensure the maximum number of search users are directed at your content. A good search-friendly title can deliver 30 people a day for the next year &#8211; that&#8217;s a lot of visitors.</p>
<p><strong>Think about the conversions!</strong><br />
30 people to that post every day for a month will be 900 extra potential readers. Even with a 1% conversion rate you&#8217;re looking at 9 readers per month and that can really build up. Imagine if you&#8217;ve got 20 posts going out per month, each of them picking up 30 visits per day. That&#8217;s a lot of new traffic. That&#8217;s also a LOT of new potential readers. Now do you see?</p>
<p><strong>#1 &#8211; Think about what your content is about</strong><br />
Think about what the message you&#8217;re conveying in this post is. What are you trying to tell people about?</p>
<p><strong>#2 &#8211; What would you search for to find this post if you needed the information from #1</strong><br />
While you may not be entirely representative of the Internet you at least fit your site&#8217;s demographic; so try and think of terms you&#8217;d search for to find the information you&#8217;re offering.</p>
<p><strong>#3 &#8211; Check the keywords</strong><br />
It&#8217;s worth doing a quick Google search using the keywords you&#8217;re considering to see how competitive they are. If there are 100,000,000 results then it might be worth going for more long-tail words because you&#8217;d be buried miles back in those results.</p>
<p><strong>#4 &#8211; Remember the rule of search engine listings</strong><br />
It&#8217;s better to be #1 for a less-popular search term than #74 for a really popular one. Look at the keywords until you find a combination that seems relevant yet competitive on the search engine results.</p>
<p><strong>#5 &#8211; Don&#8217;t be afraid of synonyms in the title</strong><br />
It&#8217;s a little naughty, but placing alternative search terms into the title (naturally) can really help. For example &#8220;how to improve your site&#8217;s search engine listings (seo)&#8221; allows you to target not only the original keyphrase but combinations that include &#8220;seo&#8221; too. So make it natural and you should fair slightly better.</p>
<p><strong>Other advantages are that people tend to link back to you using your post title, so if you&#8217;ve got a search-friendly one it can be an instant SEO boost for those terms. Remember, 150 readers today pales in comparison to the 30 a day you could receive from the search engines* </strong></p>
<p>*these numbers are just examples, you might have less, you might have more. But they are proportional. Just don&#8217;t neglect the SEO future of your content for immediate gain.</p>
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