Blogs are great for SEO

One of the best ways of increasing traffic to your site and in all honesty the main reason for this post, is by using Blogs. They are a great way to get your content onto other people’s websites and because you are responsible for creating the content, it’s a great way of getting good quality, relevant back links to the articles stored there.

A good quality back link from a relevant article on a Blog is given more weight by Google and is a must for any Search Engine Optimisation campaign. To see how Virtua Webtech can help you get the best results from your website visit our website for more information.

Well Formed Meta Tags

So much for trying to update this blog everyday! Well anyway, hello again! Today I am going to discuss Meta Tags and why they are important in search engine optimisation.

Although a website will work perfectly well without a Meta Tag you simply must include them into your header code if you want to make life easy for the search engines trying to index your website.

There are many meta tags that can be included in your website. Some give information about the author of the website while others provide copyright information. However the four main meta tags to concern yourself with are as follows:

• META name="resource-type" content="document">The only resource type that is currently in use is "document" This is the only tag that you need to put in for indexing purposes, but use of the others is a good idea.
• META name="description" content="a description of your webpage">This text will be displayed along side the title tag of your website and gives the user and indeed the search engines a snippet of what your webpage is about. Remember this description should be a true reflection of the content on your webpage.
• META name="keywords" content="your, keywords, go, here,">Enter the keywords and keyword phrases that you have targeted in the content of your webpage. Avoid stop words (I will discuss later) and remeber that any keyword entered should appear somewhere on your page.
• META name="distribution" content="global"> There are 3 settings for the content in this Meta tag but I have never yet been able to get past the global setting. Local and iu (international use)seem to be, in my mind at least irrelevant, as surly the whole point of the internet in the first place was to make the content of websites global and therefore available to everyone?

SEO website considerations

What should I avoid when designing a website to rank well in the search engines?

It is important to remember that a "search engines spider" must be able to read your content in order to index it. Stay away from Flash only websites, websites designed in frames, websites with image maps or Java Script as the only form of navigation.

Flash only websites

Flash is very effective in its place but web pages designed totally in flash are not very well read by search engines. Now I’m not saying avoid flash with your life, but place it sparingly on your web site and keep all of your main content in regular HTML on the page.

Avoid frames with your life!

I cannot see any reason to use frames whatsoever. Many search engines simply do not index them and those that do, do not do it well. Let me ask you a question. When was the last time you saw a frames page in any search you have done? I’m guessing not often, maybe even never (certainly not for a competitive search). Even the most optimised of frames sites do not rank well in Google so forget them!

Avoid websites with image maps or Java Script as the only form of navigation.

Search engines find it difficult to read image maps and impossible to read Java Script. However both of these features can have a place in your website. Java Script often adds to the sites functionality while image maps are optem more pleaseing to the eye.

REMEMBER: make sure that the primary navigation for the site is simple(HTML) and easy to find by the search engines and you wont go far wrong.

Avoid dynamic URL's

Most database driven websites produce their pages with search engine unfriendly URL's that appear in the address bar like the example below.

http://www.babyjacks.co.uk/index.php?main_page=indexcPath=126

Instaling a mod rewrite module to your website will re write the urls on the fly displaying a search engine friendly url.

Feel free to visit virtuawebtech for more useful seo tips

Keywords the foundations for your website

Keywords are the foundation that you build your website upon. Get those foundations wrong and your website will never get found and no matter how eye-catching the graphics or inspiring the text, nobody will ever see it!

So how do you pick the right keywords for your website?

Always begin by looking at your competitor’s websites. What keywords are they competing for? You can find out by right clicking on the webpage in question and clicking on view source. This will bring up the html code for the website and somewhere near to the top of the page you will find code similar to that below.

meta name="keywords" content="seo"

This is the keyword Meta tag from the Virtua Webtech home page and shows the keywords that I am currently trying to compete for. I thought this might save those of you that are trying to copy what im doing a few seconds and a couple of mouse clicks...don't say I dont think of you!

Anyway enough frivolity, Its time to enter your keywords into a " keyword research tool. This will help you find out how many people have actually searched for your keywords in previous months. Google has a free keyword research tool to get you started and often comes up with niche, less competitive keywords offering a better chance of a successful ranking.

Search through the results and choose five or six keywords to build the content for your whole website upon. When choosing your keywords, remember to balance the amount of searches against the amount of websites competing for them. (There is little point trying to compete for a keyword that is searched for 100 times if 100,000,000 websites are competing for that phrase, so choose wisely!)

You will find it is much easier and sometimes sensible to choose keywords that are not as competitive, in order to bring people to your website quickly.

If you would like some help making your website seo friendly feel free to visit our website at http://www.virtuawebtech.co.uk/ for more information.