Work From Home

The most important place on a web page to put your keywords, beside the Title on the page, is in your page’s META tags. In your html page codes’ heading section, they look like this:

<meta name="description" content="A description of your website here.">
<meta name=”keywords” content=”Your five, best keyword, phrases here,
separated, by commas”>
<meta name=”author” content=”Your name here”>
<meta http-equiv=”title” content=”Page title repeated here”>
<meta name=”copyright” content=”Your copyright info here”>

There are many other META tags as well, but these are pretty universal, and really only the top two here, Description & Keywords are vital. A major mistake most web authors do is to make their META tag block once, and then just post the same block on every page of their site. Each page on your site should be targeted individually, and contain the keywords from the meta tags in the body copy as well.

To put it another way, your page on Peanut Butter Cookies must have that keyword phrase on it, in the Meta Tag as well as the content, and not the same 5 keywords on your main Peanut Butter web site home page… Remember, Google and the other big SEs judge each page one by one for for their results, not whole websites.

Technorati : META Tags, seo

Both Google and Yahoo! let you write a “map” of your website and submit it to them, so their spiders will know in advance exactly what to go index and how often. This has nothing to do with your website’s “Sitemap” page, those are for a human being’s eyes, although technically those make it a little easier on the spiders as well.

Google’s spider map is commonly a file named “sitemap.xml” that must be placed on the main web directory of your server host. Google demands that it be written in the XML language, which looks a lot like HTML except for a few other commands. Don’t worry, you won’t have to write a single line of code for this. There’s an excellent free tool coming up in a minute to write these for you.

Once you’ve got your file written, you’ve got to tell Google that it’s there, so you can get Googlebot to come out and spider your website as soon as possible. Without doing this, you have no control at all when your website will be first indexed. Where do you do this? Simply go to www.Google.com, log into your Google account, (the same account for Gmail, Analytics, AdWords, AdSense, or any other of Google’s services) and click on “My Account,” then “Webmaster Tools.” From that page you’ll be able to add websites and watch their progress. Yahoo!’s Sitemap is different. It’s just a Text file (.TXT) that is nothing but a list of URLs on your domain. If you list an URL there, it will index that page. If not, it won’t. I love the simplicity of their method. They call it a “Feed” however, and you have to submit that too.

Simply go to www.yahoo.com, and click at the bottom where it says “Suggest a Site.” Choose the top option of “Suggest a Site for free,” and the page will then take you to an account login screen if you’re not already logged in. Do so, and then the next screen will be a website URL suggestion form. The account “Feed” it is looking for is the Urllist.txt file that you have to make. It can be added there at the end of the URL to your website in their form, and Yahoo! will start spidering your site immediately as well.

So where do you get your Sitemap.xml and Urllist.txt files made? There are hundreds of places online that offer the service of writing these files for you. Until recently, all the free versions were very limited, only allowing 50 to100 links on your site, or not allowing certain time variables. Lately there’s been an addition that has no such limits, making all the rest of these obsolete:

http://www.auditmypc.com/free-sitemap-generator.asp

About 10% of the way down that long page is a box on the Right side with a big “G” on it, which will open up a Java application. Play with this app until you feel like you’ve included everything on your site that you want Google and Yahoo! to see, and hidden away everything else. It can then output the sitemap.xml and urllist.txt files for you, all for free.

Upload those to the main folder of your server host and tell Big G and Y! where they are as fast as you can. All the rest of SEOing your website has to do with link building, but there are some other details that can help as well. I also recommend a great program called WebCEO that helps automate all of this work from one suite of tools, and
they even have a free version as well. It even gives you reports of work left to do and campaign effectiveness.

Technorati : google site map, site map, sitemap

Technorati, Del.icio.us, Fark, Furl, Digg. Web 2.0’s hottest trend has created over 100 of this new breed of “Tagging” websites in fact, where humans share their online bookmarks with each other. This is essentially just a way for us to duplicate Google’s work to the same end.

Why would we go through such trouble? Because computer algorithms still just don’t “know” their resources the way humans do. Having another person select a website and “tag” it as relevant to your keyword is much more intuitive for us to find resources with. It has its problems too, mainly when combining keywords, but overall it’s becoming an extremely popular way for people to find other websites. This of course means that you, too, need to be Tagging your website for others to find.

Essentially the way these things work is that you set up an account with each of the ones you want to use, add a little button or two to your browser bar, and “Tag” any website instead of bookmarking it the traditional way. Those tags could be kept for personal use (Who in their right mind would want to do that…?) but as a default they are shared on that bookmarking website for others who search for the term. The websites that have been tagged the most for a certain keyword come up the highest on the list when that keyword is searched. It’s actually a very simple & elegant system.

From a marketing standpoint, however, it is chaotic. First of all there are too many of these sites! Submitting to Google and Yahoo! is one thing, but could you imagine opening an account in all 100+ of these things and hitting the “tag” button for all of them? How about providing a review in each of them? Second, people still go to google.com to search unless you make it easier for them to search a Tag elsewhere. It’s still not quite worth our time. Finally, the problem it has with multiple keywords (Search engines handle keyword phrases as a single query… Bookmarking sites handle each word as a query and add them together) leaves a lot up to interpretation. The end result Is that you need to be supplying MUCH MORE keywords to a bookmarking site than you would to a search engine.

The best tool I’ve seen to date to alleviate these problems is a very simple web
application at:

http://www.socialbookmarking.marketersgiveaway.com/

There’s still no way to get around having to stuff in all those keywords, but at least this creates a way to allow everyone visiting your website to Bookmark your site in as many of these sites as possible.

Technorati : Social Bookmarking, digg, fark, furl, tagging