10 Tips to Easily Blend Your Content and Your SEO Keywords

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  • Site content should actually contain the keywords you choose… actually a better way to think about it is that your keywords should be chosen based on your site content
  • It is important to drive home a very important point – forcing keywords into places that do not belong will be clearly evident to indexers, crawlers, and your readers. Be sure your keywords fit naturally within their locations.
  • Think “specific keyword phrases” not “keywords”. Due to the extreme amount of competition for general terms in the search engines, if your keyword phrases are too general it is very unlikely you will rank well in the search engines. You stand a far better chance to rank well for specific phrases where there is less competition. The resulting traffic, since it is more highly targeted, should also be much higher quality too!
  • Keywords should appear within the first paragraph on your page
  • Keywords should also appear in H1, H2, H3, etc. Tags.
  • Only one H1 tag is recommended on a page. Note that changing the style of your header tags (H1, H2, etc) will not affect rankings
  • Bold and strong tags emphasize the importance of words to crawlers too
  • Keyword density should be between 3-10% of the content on your page
  • Keyword Proximity is also important. Be sure to place keywords close to each other
  • Keep in mind that the order in which the terms are typed will affect the search results

10 Essential Site Organization and Structure SEO Tips

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  • Organize according to themes and logic based on your keywords phrases (key phrases can also be a single word).
  • Use book-like structure, with chapters and blocks delegating importance.
  • Each page should have one concept, i.e. – one or maximum two main key phrases that are more important than the rest.
  • A single, unified concept (without additional data) will greatly increase weighting (importance) of that page in the world of pages that exist for that key phrase.
  • Content Layering
    • http://www.seomoz.org/blog/layering-content-to-maximize-visibility
    • It is generally recommended to keep as flat a structure as possible when planning your web site presence. That does not mean however you need to throw everything in the root directory for best results. You should not go more than 2-3 levels deep in your directory structure.
    • Each major theme or category should become a subdirectory within the root. This is a simple, easy, efficient way to organize your site.
    • To increase visibility, each layer must act like an independent Web site
    • Search engines tend to treat a sub-domain as its own site. In other words, a search engine sees http://google.searchengines.com and http://searchengines.com as essentially 2 different sites.
    • If you’ve only got 10 or 15 or even 50 pages in your sub-domain, chances are it won’t rank as competitively as it would have as a sub-folder of a larger site. But larger sub-domains are a great idea.
  • Site map pages are extremely important
    • http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3588136
    • Site maps are a great way to be sure all of your pages are indexed.
    • A link to a site map page on all of your pages is a great idea.
    • They make it easy for the crawler to crawl the whole site
    • Make sure the site map is available to your users, not just the crawlers. This will increase usability, and give your users a list of links that point to the important parts of your site.
    • If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.
  • Short link paths are better – users should be able to access sub-pages by traversing a minimal number of pages from the start page. The deeper the page, the more specific the content should be, and the less importance search engines will give it.
  • Don’t use pop-ups. These are penalized heavily by Google.
  • Use header tags (h1, h2, h3) for content hierarchy: h1 tags for the page topic (ie. use only one per page), h2 tags for a topical headings, and h3 tags for sub-topical headings.
  • It is recommended that you have an identical navigation menu on each page, with navigation links based on keywords.

5 More Query String SEO Tips You Need To Read

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I have been asked to post some information regarding my resources for my query string post. The original post is located here – http://btw73.blogspot.com/2007/06/seo-tip-querystrings.html

So the resources that I used when compiling my information were the following sites:

Here are also a number of other issues to consider when constructing URLs (note that some of this is subjective and not necessarily related to SEO):

  • http://www.seoconsultants.com/articles/1000/urls.asp
  • Dirty URLs – Complex, hard-to-read URLs are often dubbed dirty URLs because they tend to be littered with punctuation and identifiers that are at best irrelevant to the ordinary user
  • Dirty URLS are bad because:
    • Dirty URLs are difficult to type
    • Dirty URLs do not promote usability
    • Dirty URLs are a security risk
    • Dirty URLs impede abstraction and maintainability
  • Dirty URLs are good because:
    • They are portable
    • They can discourage unwanted reuse
  • How to Clean a URL:
    • Keep them short and sweet
    • Avoid punctuation in file names
    • Use lower case and try to address case sensitivity issues
    • Do not expose technology via directory names
    • Plan for host name typos
    • Plan for domain name typos
    • Support multiple domain forms
    • Add guess-able entry point URLs
    • Where possible, remove query strings by pre-generating dynamic pages

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.

eBay Entrepreneur

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Well, I had posted the Transformers on eBay that my brother and I found at my parents house. They went very quickly, and fairly successfully. Eleven of the fifteen I posted were sold successfully. There were 35 people watching the Optimus Prime and Devastator auctions each. Most of the others had five to ten watchers. Slag, Warpath, Brawn, Snarl, Hot Rod, Thrust, Hound, Skids, Windcharger, Optimus Prime, and Devastator all sold. Twin Twist, Topspin, Grapple, and Astrotrain did not sell. I will try to repost them this weekend. I want to be sure I stay on the wave of the movie – it is free advertising and the demand is high for Generation 1 Transformers. I saw advertisements to eBay for G1 Transformers on the Gizmodo and Engadget web blogs, as well as a permanent link on the eBay home page.

I also posted a number of my comic books this weekend. I posted them in lots of five to ten comics. The included lots of Spawn, McFarlane Spider-Man and Eastman & Laird’s original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. These did not get anywhere near the amount of attention that the Transformers did. Only two of the lots sold – one set of McFarlane Spider-Man books, and one of X-Factor books.

Blast from the Past

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So this weekend I went to a wedding for a good friend at work. His name is Frank Thompson. It turns out that he is the uncle of an old friend of mine.

I grew up in Rutgers Village, a small neighborhood in New Brunswick, N.J. right where U.S. 1 and Route 18 meet. The neighborhood is on the border of East Brunswick and New Brunswick, and has always been in an appealing spot. It has an East Brunswick location, with New Brunswick taxes. There is a water pumping station, a stream, a fire house, and a small elementary school all right in the neighborhood. The Fire Chief, much of the police force and fire men, and the part-time mayor all live in this small neighborhood. Crime has been fairly low, and the neighborhood is kept fairly well.

I moved to the neighborhood when I was 7 years old. I used to walk to Woodrow Wilson Elementary School, right in the neighborhood. I played in the three-team baseball league. I was in the neighborhood cub scout troop. I used to ride my bike all weekend long. We used to walk under the U.S. 1 overpass to the Route 1 Flea Market. Ah… the good old days.

So back to the wedding this weekend. It turns out that Frank is the uncle of Ben Thompson… I didn’t make the connection until he introduced himself. Then I remembered. Benji. Benji Thompson. We all used to play baseball together, ride bikes together, go to scouts together. His mother was my scout leader. It was great to see her again. We talked about old neighborhood friends – Kenny Puritz, Mike Blue, Jason Kormondy, David Cleary, Steven Eckert. The rest of the evening, I thought about all of my other friends – Nikki Francisco, Gary Chiang, Steve Aamland.

Strange thing, time. As time moves along, you remember less and less the bad things, and more and more the good things. I know I did not get along with a lot of the kids in the neighborhood. I was a nerd, and easy to pick on. But now that time has worn away the rough edges of those memories, I wonder how all of my old friends are doing. I hope that they stumble across this old blog post, and give me a call. I would love to talk to them again.

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”