Category Archives: SEO

SEO Tip – View State in ASP.Net

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SEO Tip – Alt tags for images

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  • Users on slow connections will see the ALT text until the image downloads.
  • If the image fails to load in the user’s browser, the ALT text appears.
  • People using text browsers or browsers with images turned off will see ALT text instead.
  • Alt tags also make your site more accessible to visually impaired people using text readers. Even if your web site is content rich, the alt tags allow you to reinforce what is highly important, the key terms, within the content. People with disabilities visiting your site should not be subjected to an hour of the same keywords being repeated to them over and over again via a screen reader.
  • Be sure to use the keyword phrases that you also used in the copy of your page, title tag, Meta description, and other tags.
  • Do not try to stuff all your keywords into the “alt” attribute. It is recommended using no more than 2-3 per image.
  • Describe the image – do not just list keywords.
  • ALT tags are currently considered by all 4 major engines in their page rankings
  • Google would only consider Alt Tags if it was in a link and therefore considered anchor text.
  • The same rules apply to alt tags as to all other content – be sure it is natural, otherwise it may hurt your rankings instead of helping it.

SEO Tip – Meta Tags – Part 5 – Other Meta Tags

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  • Character Set
    • This tells the browser what character set to use to display the characters, or letters, on your web page
    • meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=iso-8859-1″
  • Language
    • This indicates to the search engines what language this content is associated to.
    • This helps search engines display language-specific versions of your page to the right users
    • META HTTP-EQUIV=”CONTENT-LANGUAGE” CONTENT=”en-US”
  • Author
    • The Author Tag should contain the name of the company that owns the site. This tag will help you get a very high position for your company’s name.
    • META name=”author” content=”Bristol-Myers Squibb”
  • Expires
    • This tag should only really be used if you have a dynamically driven site, or if your content changes so frequently, you do not want it to be cached
    • META name=”Expires” content=”Mon, 22 Jan 1973 12:58:00 GMT”
    • META HTTP-EQUIV=”PRAGMA” CONTENT=”NO-CACHE”
  • Link

SEO Tip – Meta Tags – Part 4 – Robots

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  • Allows or disallows indexing into search engines by robots or crawlers on a page-by-page basis
  • This is very different from the robots.txt file. The Robots Meta tags will not be seen if the robots.txt file blocks indexing, since the crawler will never get that far.
  • You can find out more about this meta tag at :
  • Here is a list of all the attributes for the robots tag:
    • NOINDEX – prevents the page from being included in the index.
    • NOFOLLOW – prevents crawlers from following any links on the page. (Note that this is different from the link-level NOFOLLOW attribute, which prevents crawlers from following an individual link.)
    • NOARCHIVE – prevents a cached copy of this page from being available in the search results.
    • NOSNIPPET – prevents a description from appearing below the page in the search results, as well as prevents caching of the page.
    • NOODP – blocks the Open Directory Project description of the page from being used in the description that appears below the page in the search results.
    • NOYDIR – sell Yahoo to not use Yahoo Directory information to make a title and/or description for your web page listings
  • Here is a standard sample of a tag that allows all robots to index the page (Note, this is actually the default if the tag was not included on the page)
    • META name=”ROBOTS” content=”INDEX,FOLLOW”
  • Here is a sample of robots tags that are targeted at each of the four major search crawlers:
    • meta name=”TEOMA” content=”NOINDEX”
    • meta name=”GOOGLEBOT” content=”NOARCHIVE”
    • meta name=”MSNBOT” content=”NOODP”
    • meta name=”SLURP” content=”NOFOLLOW”

SEO Tip – Meta Tags – Part 3 – Keywords

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  • Words or categories that identify what the page is about
  • As time has progressed, the misuse of keywords has encouraged search engines to rely less and less upon them. There is still debate about how much of an impact keywords have on SEO.
  • Some SEO experts have recommended putting your important keywords first. This can’t hurt.
  • Google, and many other search engines, stores location information for all hits and so it makes extensive use of proximity in search.
  • Include common plural forms of your keywords
  • Include common misspellings of your keywords
  • A good rule of thumb for the keyword tag is 1000 characters or less
  • Repeating your keywords too many times can do more damage than good. Once or twice is fine, with different spellings or with misspellings.
  • <meta name=”keywords” content=”HTML meta tags metatags tag search engines internet directory web searching index catalog catalogue serch seach search engine optimization techniques optimisation ranking positioning promotion marketing”>

SEO Tip – Meta Tags Part 2 – Description

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  • The Description Meta Tag should be a brief summary of the contents of the page
  • Keep this concise, as if it gets too long it could be truncated.
  • A good rule of thumb for the description tag is 200 characters or less
  • Here is a good example:
    • <META name=”description” content=”Search Engine Optimization Best Practices”>

SEO Tip – Meta Tags – Part 1 – Overview

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  • Meta tags are page elements that help a search engine to categorize your page properly. They are inserted into the HEAD tag of the page, but a user cannot directly see them (other than by viewing the HTML source of the page).
  • Meta tags should be applied to each page, should be unique to the page, and should match the page’s contents
  • Any keyword phrases that you use that do not appear in your other tags or page copy are likely to not have enough prominence to help your listings for that phrase
  • Meta tags are not the be all and end all of SEO, and are not a magic bullet. However, they are one tool in an entire toolbox that you can use together to optimize your pages
  • Overuse or misuse of Meta tags can do more damage than good. Keep meta tags simple, relevant, and concise

SEO Tip – The Title Tag

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  • The title tag is one of the most important SEO tools in the toolbox.
  • Changing the title tag is one if the easiest changes to improve page rankings
  • The title of your page is stored in the HEAD tag of your HTML page
  • It should describe the specific contents of the page, and be as unique as possible
  • This will be the title of the page that is shown by the Search Engines to the users
  • Important things for the title tag to contain are Company names or Brand names
  • Other important things to include are keywords from the keywords meta tag that are relevant to the page that fit naturally in the title
  • Here is a good example:
    • <title>SEO Article – Make a title tag that search engines will like</title>

SEO Tip – Use robots.txt file

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  • Robots.txt files tell Search Engines what should and should not be crawled
  • NOTE – This is very different from the Robots Meta Tag. The crawler will see this file before it tries to call the page, so this file will override the Robots Meta tags on the pages.
  • Robots.txt files should be stored in the root directory
  • Remember, the point of the robots.txt file is to exclude pages from being crawled. So if a page or directory is banned, it will never even get to see what code is on those page(s). Accordingly, no code of those pages could change the bots behavior to re-index the page. So, robots.txt will overwrite the meta and robots tags on the page.
  • More information regarding robots.txt can be found at http://www.robotstxt.org
  • Sample robots.txt file to allow all pages to be crawled:
    • User-agent: *
      Disallow:
  • With one minor adjustment, you can prevent all robots from indexing your site:
    • User-agent: *
      Disallow: /
  • Here is a sample that will not index a specific directory for the Googlebot crawler:
    • User-agent: googlebot
      Disallow: /seo/