Other noticeable improvements in Firefox beta 4 include:

• Smarter location bar that tunes itself to your browsing habits. As you type in part of the URL it will offer suggestions based on where you’ve been before.
• Better native look-n-feel on Vista, Mac OSX, and Linux. This includes continuing work on icons, menus, native controls.
• Zoom just the text or the whole page. Zooming the text was one feature I missed from Firefox 2.
• Reduced memory usage. This is the main reason I switched to Firefox 3 for my everyday use. The old version often became unstable after a long session with many tabs open.

To see all the changes made so far in Firefox 3 read this excellent summary by Percy Cabello or see the release notes. Mozilla watchers expect one more beta before the production version is released.

Being able to properly exploit SEO will increase website traffic and consequently sales, giving these Web business owners a comparative edge over their online competitors.  But because of lack of full awareness of the operation and potential benefits of search engine optimization, online businesspersons sometimes commit a few mistakes in the process of utilizing such tool.  Here are the top 5 SEO pitfalls they fall into.

Spending too much time on the design and not on the content of the page won’t help. It is important to remember that “real consumers” will be looking for information that will cater to their need, and only the “contents” can deliver this information to them. An over design will attract mostly superficial visitors and could eventually end up as wasted resources. One tip- invest first on copywriting then spend on the design later.

Webmasters often forget the importance of a good, fresh content. Creating great, new contents is the best way to entice new visitors and even attract previous ones to come back. Unluckily some business owners fail to realize and implement this in their websites. This strategy is one effective way to generate the right traffic wished for. If, however, the web business persons only desire to improve search engine ranking, they may not consider this tactic and instead, add a blog that can motivate web visitors.

Not offering something unique, especially in the site’s content. Online business owners could encourage clients to connect to their site by providing something special and interesting in their site’s contents. By introducing media options such as blogs and fora, more people will link into your site. Great benefits for your site could result from this innovation.  

Using inappropriate words and phrases is a bad thing. One thing that web business owners must always remember is that to get the right kind of visitors, the right kind of invitation must be given. An optimal search engine result could be expected if the appropriate keyword phrases are selected and used in the specific areas of your web page.

Webmasters often fail to label links and images descriptively. There are instances when web business owners fail to label and describe their links and images properly confusing their visitors as to what and where they are being led to. Apt description and correct labels guide visitors in finding the information they are looking for in the site. They also facilitate online business owners trying to sell a particular product or service direct potential buyers to their site.

1. Improving layout of webpage: The layout of a webpage is very important if you would want a visitor to remain browsing your page. If the layout of your webpage is not-visitor friendly, chances are, your visitor will leave your page no matter how good the contents of the page are.  Following are helpful tips to come up with a good layout:

- Place the most important information at the top of the webpage so the reader can readily and immediately see it.

- Distribute the contents into paragraphs each of which should not be more than 100 words.

Use bullets, bars, tables, white spaces, margins, etc. appropriately to facilitate reading.

2. Improving size of webpage: The size of the webpage is also important in holding a reader to the page. It should not be too long because readers do not like to scroll. Besides, long pages take more time to load compared to short pages. Here are useful tips for improving page size:

Always keep your page below 32K to make it load quickly and not longer than 8-10 seconds.

Avoid the use of scrolling in your page but if it cannot be helped, add internal navigation so the users can directly go the information they need.

3.  Improving navigation of webpage: Navigation has also an important role to keep your user. Her are some tips for improving navigation tools:

- Navigation links must be clear, easily accessible and at the top of each webpage.

- The navigation structure must be the same on every page of a website.

- If you have a complex website always add a search function in each of your web pages.

4.    Improving fonts of a webpage: The fonts of a webpage are likewise important to make the page user-friendly. Too small, too large or too complex fonts could be hardly readable to some browsers. Be wary therefore on using fonts in your page so as not to drive away your visitors. Here are the tips for improving fonts:

- Always create a webpage that uses common default fonts like Arial, Times new roman, Verdana, etc.

- Always make your headings and titles in bold and underline the most important lines of your webpage.

- Avoid using uncommon fonts unless they are in graphics. Use plain texts as they are more legible than italics.

- Do not use light texts on dark background for it creates visibility problem in reading.

5.  Improving content of a webpage:  Content is the primordial part of the webpage and there is not substitute to a good content. It is the reason why a visitor is browsing your page. To encourage your visitor to remain reading the contents of your page, here are some helpful suggestions:

- Make your contents informative and yet unique.

- Avoid grammatical and spelling errors in your page.

- Use hyperlinks to enable your readers pursue the details of a particular topic.

- Make your texts scan-able inasmuch as some users prefer to scan the internet.

The above tips will help you create a good, user-friendly webpage. If you have an existing webpage that is not getting a good number of visitors because of page’s layout, size, fonts, navigation, and contents, following these tips will most likely help you improve it and come up with more visitors and users.

Find your keywords: Use available research tools for identifying your keywords. These are available in tools like Overture or WordTracker which are intentionally designed to generate keywords that people would most likely type in search for products online.

Avoid single keywords: You must desist from using single keywords because when searching, people usually opt to use a combination of two or more keywords than a single one, such as “cough medical syrup” instead of simply “syrup”. This normative practice of visitors give single keywords a very low chance of being “matched” by the words typed in by clients to search for products in the net. Besides, a single keyword may no be able to capture a complete description of your product.

Summarize your site: Use summative statements to identify your site. This will give your site a unique personality and minimize the number of others sites that a prospective customer will be locating. If your site is about tigers, lions, giraffes, bats, whales, rabbits, etc. in the Philippines, Myanmar, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, and Vietnam, summarize your site into “Southeast Asian Mammals”.

Place the keywords at the heading: It is necessary that you set your keywords at the heading of your website to enable your visitors to find out what you are presenting to them at first glance. Inasmuch as the heading is also featured in search engines, with the keywords, right there and then, your clients will already see what you are offering.

Include synonyms, acronyms and misspelled words:  There will be prospects who will be searching for your product but who may be using different terms and even wrongly spelled words. So as not to lose these customers, you need to include in your site other words that have the same meaning to your keywords, acronyms and even deducible errors.  If you are promoting “Bachelor of Science in Electronic Commerce” you may also post “BS in E-Commerce”,” BS in E-Calling”, and “BS in E-Business”. If you are offering “Bookkeeping” services, you can include “Bookeeping”.  People searching for a “Portable Play station” may type in “PSP”.

Reiterate your keywords: People looking for a particular product or service in a site need to be affirmed of what your site is all about. It is therefore important that you put your key words at least 3-4 times in your site, preferably once in the introduction, twice in the body and once in the conclusion. However, you must avoid repeating them excessively because it could bore your visitor and may cause a negative view of your writing style.

These search engine optimization strategies are simple, understandable, easily applicable, and most of all evidently practical. All you need is do some research, organize, implement and wait. Many clients will be visiting your site you’ll see.  

Unique Differentiators

A search engine optimization company must be able to project the distinct, outstanding features of the products and services that it posts. The outstanding uniqueness of your products will invite buyers to select them over the others. On the side of the search engine company, this calls for a better understanding of these products/services for the identification and usage of the most fitting words and phrases that will describe them.

Some tip to achieve this is to use key phrases that will effectively raise the product/service above or distinguish them from the rest. Offering customer-specific products or problem-delimited solutions will be a good strategy. By choosing the best-fit, distinctive terminologies, you will be able to attract exactly the type of web page visitors that you are targeting.

High-profile Segments

Generally, inside companies there are products and services that are more profitable than the others; likewise, there will be new products and services to sell. These are information that express the importance of making priorities in advertising in-company products. If the search engine optimization company will not be aware of these data, it might end up developing a web page that does not address your real marketing need. For you to be able to get the best marketing campaign from the search engine optimization company, you must provide the data that will enable it to appropriately describe the products and services that you yourself consider as priority.

Defining Prospects

In making your campaign, you must know very well your target consumers. What particular products/services do they need? What is their economic status? What is their educational background? To what products and services are they exposed?

Knowing the most likely profile of your target clients will be vital for the success of your campaign.  You must give this information to your search engine optimization company for it to be able choose the most suitable terminologies and approaches for the kind of client you want to reach.

Change over Time

If your enterprise is not among the very few that remain stagnant for the last five decades, it is very likely that your marketing strategy always adapts to the new challenges and new opportunities that come. As part of this change, your company would be offering new products/services, cater to new prospects, or even concentrate on other ventures.

It will be unfortunate if these developments in your business organization will not be relayed to your search engine optimization company. Your search engine company will always want to be informed of these issues primarily because they are indispensable in continuously making your campaign relevant and updated. This persistence in learning any change in you marketing strategy and in ensuring that such is properly addressed is the “mark” of a pro-active search engine optimization company.

Search engine optimization companies may not fully understand your organization the way you do but definitely, those with outstanding track records could understand your organization better than the others. The proper blend between you sharing your organization’s data and the search engine company’s optimum utilization of such will spell the success of your campaign. A search engine optimization company that takes for granted relevant from your organization is not after your success, so better replace it.

Keywords in Domain Names

If you have the opportunity to research keywords before you pick your domain name, you can use your keywords in your domain names to have a better impact on your SEO results. If your keyword is “web content writing,” you can choose the domain name www.web-content-writing.com. You should limit the use of words in your domain to three. Any more than that and your domain name becomes difficult to remember and you run the risk of losing potential customers.

Keywords in File Names

Your file names can also utilize your keywords to achieve better SEO results. The file name usually follows the slash after your domain name. For example, in www.site.com/articles, the file name is articles. Using your keywords here can help you better optimize each page of your site for the search engines. If your keyword for one of your pages is handmade soap, you can create a file named handmade-soap.html. When visitors access this page of your site, it will be displayed in their address bars as http://www.soapsite.com/handmade-soap.

Keywords in Title Tags

In HTML, there is a tag known as the title tag. If you open up your favorite site right now, you’ll notice that the upper left corner of your browser window probably has the site’s name or industry displayed. To make even better use of this space, use your keywords in your title tags. You should use only the one or two keywords you are optimizing for on each individual page of your site. The title tag is right near the top of your site code, so the search engines will see your keywords more quickly if they are used within this tag.

Keywords in Meta Tags

Meta tags are used to provide information about a site, such as who created it or what it’s about. Many of the major search engines look to meta tags to build a search engine index. If you want to make good use of meta tags, stick to the keywords you are using on each individual site. You can also use a meta tag that gives information about your site that will be displayed when your site is returned as the result of someone’s search.

]]> http://ausseo.com/seo/keyword-positioning/feed/ http://ausseo.com/seo/top-seo-mistakes/ http://ausseo.com/seo/top-seo-mistakes/#comments Fri, 28 Dec 2007 00:04:15 +0000 Saad Kamal http://ausseo.com/seo/top-seo-mistakes/ Because search engine optimization seems expensive to many business owners, some people choose to do their own optimization without hiring a professional SEO consultant. There are many things that you can do on your own to improve your search engine rankings. However, there are also many things that you can do that seem like a good idea but can really hurt your optimization efforts. If you decide to optimize your site without the benefit of having an SEO professional by your side, there are some basic SEO mistakes that you should avoid. Learn about these mistakes and you can save yourself a great deal of time, frustration, and money.

SEO Mistake #1  Using Link Farms

Link farms (also known as link directories) are basically long pages stuffed with links to Web sites. Many amateurs think that using link farms will help improve search engine rankings since link building plays an important role in optimization. However, using link farms is not a good way to build links to your business site. There are several reasons why link farms can have a negative impact on your results. One is that the search engines consider link farms to be low in quality. While you need to have good content on your site to get linked to by a blog or another business owner, anyone can place a link on a link farm. Another is that you have no way of knowing what kind of links your link will be grouped with. Link farms can have a link to an accounting firm next to a link to a lingerie shop. Since relevant links are important for optimization success, using link farms does not have a positive impact on your results.

SEO Mistake #2  Keyword Spamming

Many business owners also think that more is better when it comes to using keywords. This is why you’ll often come across Web pages that make absolutely no sense; they have so many keywords stuffed in their text that no one can make sense of them. When it comes to keywords, less is actually more. Achieving a balanced keyword density gives you two opportunities to improve your business. One improvement is that you have a better chance of attracting the kind of traffic you want for your business. The other is that you’ll reduce your chances of being penalized for using keyword spamming as an SEO tactic.

SEO Mistake#3  Using PLR Content

While many people think that content is number one when it comes to successful site optimization, unique content is actually the best thing for a site. Many business owners make the mistake of buying PLR content that is also bought and used by other site owners. Now that the search engines are frowning on duplicate content and adjusting the search engine rankings accordingly, using PLR articles is no longer a good way to successfully optimize your site. Instead of using PLR articles, write your own or hire a freelance writer to develop unique content that will draw your visitors in and keep them on your site long enough to make some purchases.

]]> http://ausseo.com/seo/top-seo-mistakes/feed/ http://ausseo.com/seo/optimizing-video-for-search-engines/ http://ausseo.com/seo/optimizing-video-for-search-engines/#comments Sun, 05 Aug 2007 04:01:58 +0000 Saad Kamal http://ausseo.com/seo/optimizing-video-for-search-engines/ Here are some of my tips which you can look into when dealing with videos -

1. Place videos on themed pages with content relating to video content.
2. Place videos in divs or tds that have the video container object paired with a caption.
3. Create keyword relevent links to videos, possibly on a separate ’site map’ like set of pages
4. Text nearest the video code should be keyword heavy.
5. Make sure to link to the page with keywords.
6. The first and last frame of the video should have keywords on the screen. (newer vid engines like blinkx will ocr and read them)

7. Load the video at video sharing sites and include the url to the video at your site in the meta keywords if they allow you to add them.
8. Check the format you are using to see if it allows embedded Meta Data. If it does - load it up with keywords.
9. Engines will block videos loaded via a popup.

Upload to all the locations you can. You can put up a preview clip and give some away with the tagline: “see the full clip an http…”. Hit sites such ast, AOL UnCut, DailyMotion, Google Video, MetaCafe, MSN, MySpace Video, Ifilm, Revver, Yahoo! Video, Soapbox, and ye classic YouTube.

There are a number of risk factors that go with the publishing of copy or duplicate contents. The related internet laws are very strict on this subject matter. The search engines put major concern on this duplicity. They have got high level program algorithms to detect such plagiarism. They do this not for the sake of the websites’ contents been copied but for their own sake because they want to keep their search results relevant and up to the standard. Well, it is easily understandable then that the search engines are going to take active action on any such unfair means are found. One of the prime actions taken against such attempt can lead to the removal of that site from the search engine. However, it does not end only at this point. When you are copying from some site, that site will ultimately come up in the ranking when it will be detected as a site been copied. The supplementary content that is found also experiences a vital raise up. It may lead to the removal of a genuine and high quality webpage if it is accompanied by other duplicate contents.

Duplicating does not only mean the ‘copy-paste’ formula. But there are many other forms of plagiarism that can be actively detected by the search engines. Among them includes circular navigation, using the popular printer-friendly version and following the product only pages. Sometimes, armature webmasters try to get away by adopting these sorts of plagiarism means. But the search engines are putting effort continuously in order to develop their system for plagiarism detection. One can easily understand that the major search engines like Google, yahoo and msn are introducing new and upgraded versions of logarithms that play their part in identifying the duplicate contents and enlist to push them out of the search pages. Well, the easier it is to get listed in the search engine, the harder it is to find a place back once you are dismantled.

The thing that must be kept in mind by the webmasters and content providers is that taking any attempt to duplicate will not ultimately lead to get away situation. Rather it is going to make you sacrifice you place and also highlight or prank the supplementary contents. The search engines are very efficient these days to rectify these means and adopt immediate penalty measures for the crime.

How to check your site for Duplicate Content?

- Go to CopyScape and enter your site url

- Click on Go and wait for results page to show up

Notice on the top of their home page they have this banner of a child which says - “every day’s a new day”. Now of course this single image beside their yellow navigation buttons makes their site more ‘presentable’ and ‘alive’. However you need to understand that the search engines don’t see or read web pages like the way we humans do.

Its very easy for a human reader to interpret the image into its meaning. However for a Web crawler the whole interpreting process is completely different. Search Engine Spiders can read text from your website line by line, just like the way you see it when you view the source of your page in a web browser. But for images/videos and advanced objects like javascript & flash, web crawlers usually just skips those lines and moves to the next line. Thus if your website has extensive amount of images and less content, a web crawler might find no indexable content in your site that they would want to add into their web index.

But don’t worry too much. There are certain ways by which you can optimize images for search engine. Once you do proper Image Optimization, your images will be more ‘readable’ by the web crawler and the images will be also listed in the Image Search Engines like - Google Images.

How to Optimize Images for Search Engine

Image optimization is one of those things that falls under the ‘best practices’ heading for Webmasters. Simply put Image Optimization as de facto benefit, if you are truly planning to run your site in the right manner.

Every standards-compliant, Google-sensitive image reference should contain 5 key items:

1. A src attribute specifying the URL of the image
2. A width declaration in which the width of the image is specified in pixels
3. A height declaration in which the height of the image is specified in pixels
4. An alt attribute that describes the content of the image—this is the #1 element of image-oriented SEO
5. A title attribute that contains text to be displayed when the user hovers his/her mouse over the image

The width and hight of the picture is not compulsory if you have already resized your image according to your requirement. In wordpress or in any other popular CMS, You can actually select an image and resize it in design view by using the resize handles which are located at four corners of the image. So when you use the resize handles to resize an image the cms will automatically put the width and height attribute for you in your image code.

Image Optimization Explained: How to get more traffic from Google Image Search

• Alt text — ALT text or Alternate Text, is the text to describe your image when your mouse moves over an image on your web page. The text should be meaningful but remember to keep it short. You should use search keywords for ALT text. If your browser can’t display the image for some reason, the alt tag is used in place of that particular image. Here is sample image code with ALT text:

## < img src=”http://imagelocation.jpg” alt=”Image description”> ##

• File name — always use meaningful file name to your images, use image file name like “apple-iphone-cover.jpg” instead of meaningless “pic123.jpg”. Keep image file name same or similar to ALT text. Also, try to keep the path to your image theme such as:

images/phones/apple-iphone-covers.jpg

• Image Title — always use the title tag in images which will show the title as tooltip when a user moves his mouse over the image. Example of an image with title tag:

## < img src=”http://imagelocation.jpg” alt=”Image description” title=”Title of the Image”> ##

• Surrounding Text — always place a paragraph of descriptive text directly above and below your image, with the keywords from your ALT text and Image Name

• Page Title — Include your keywords in your Page Title and Meta Description. It helps Google define the theme for the page which helps in Image Searches and Google Search Index.

• Page Theme — Keep the theme of each page. Do not mix the content with other topics.

• Links — Whenever you want to link to your image, use the image keywords in your link text. Example: use “Picture of Apple iPhone”, instead of “Click here to view picture”. The link text tells Googlebot that it is a link to a picture of Apple iPhone.

Thats pretty much it. If you can follow this properly, I am sure you will get heeps of traffic from Google Image Search (Especially if you have a shopping/celebrity or any site that has a lot of images). Its also good for SEO purpose, because now you are letting the Search Engine know about all the images of your site.