Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
What SEO firms have you used and why (or why not)?
Share your experiences with SEO firms and find out what firms other About.com readers recommend, and why.
Choose an SEO Marketing Firm
If you build websites you know that SEO is very important if you rely on search engines to get readers. But it can take a lot of time and effort on a continuing basis to optimize websites for search engines. So it\'s a good idea to look at search engine marketing firms. But there are a few things you should know before you pay them to optimize your site.
How to Choose Your Keyword Phrase - Target One Phrase Per Page
Choosing the keyword phrase to optimize for on a Web page can be challenging. It\'s why so many people would rather focus on one phrase for their entire site. But to be truly successful at SEO, you need to have a clear idea of a keyword phrase for every page that you write. This article will show you the steps to choose a keyword phrase that works for the page you\'ve written or are planning.
What Keyword Density Tool Do You Like Best?
There are lots of tools available for checking your keyword density and other SEO issues. Find out which tools the readers at About.com like the best.
What Keyword Density do You Aim For and Why?
The perfect keyword density is not a hard and fast rule, and some people are happier with lower or higher numbers than others. What keyword density do you strive to hit for your Web pages and why? Or do you ignore keyword density altogether?
Free Keyword Density Analyzers
Keyword density is the number of times your keyword phrase appears on a Web page relative to the total number of words on the page. While it's possible to manually count all the words and then count the keyword phrase, there are many tools that you can use that are easier and give you better results.
Keyword Density - How Much is Too Much
When working on keyword density it can be tempting to make every other sentence contain your keyword phrase. But this can get quickly overwhelming to the reader and look like spam to the search engine spiders. Learn how to write SEO focused pages that have a decent keyword density, but not too high.
What is Keyword Density - How Many Times Does Your Keyword Phrase App…
Keyword density is an SEO term that refers to the amount of times a keyword phrase is found on your Web page. The more often (up to a point) that your phrase is found on the page, the more likely that page will register as being about that phrase in the search engines.
How Do You Optimize a Multi-Page Article for Search Engines?
When doing SEO you should focus on one page at a time. But what if you've written an article that spans multiple pages? Learn how to optimize an article for search that spans many pages.
Most Successful SEO Tip - Tips for SEO Success
What SEO tips have worked best for you and why? Find out what other Web Design/HTML readers have tried to improve their search rankings and what worked for them.
Why Do Search Engines Like H1 Tags
When I am reviewing a page for SEO one of the most common mistakes I find is the designer has built the page with images for headlines and no structured markup, such as h1, h2, and h3 tags. Search engines like pages that have a clear structure that is visible in the HTML because that means that the pages are clearly written and have good organization - or at least some organization. Learn other r…
Free SEO Class
Learn how to optimize your Web pages for search in this free online SEO class.
What is SEO Friendly Content
Search engine optimization or SEO is all about what words are on your page. If you don't have the words, you can't optimize for that term in a search engine. So writing content becomes very important if you're going to optimize for search engine keywords.
Don't Demand Links - Even Asking Can Seem Annoying
Backlinks are a great way to get better rankings on search engines. Especially if you're lucky enough to be linked from a site with a higher Google PageRank than you have. If you've been doing SEO for any period of time, you know this. But asking, or even demanding those links from other Web developers can backfire.
Getting People to Link to You - Link Love, How to (and How Not to) Get It
Getting people to link to your site is an important aspect of promotion. Link love, as it's called, is a way to show you like other people's sites and it's a way to get some SEO support as well as new readers.
What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
If you want your Web page to rank well in search engines, you need to learn how to do search engine optimization or SEO. Search engine optimization is a technique where you make your pages as easy to read by search engine robots as it is for your customers to read. And once your pages are easy to read by the robots, they can determine what your page is about, and rank it in their database.
Search Engine Optimization Step-by-Step
A walk-through how I optimized a page on my site that was doing poorly to help it rank better in search engines.
95 SEO Tips and Tricks for Powerful Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization (SEO) is often more of an art than a science. These 95 SEO tips and tricks will help you improve your search engine optimization. It can take a long long time for changes on your site to result in changes in your ranking, so, SEO can be frustrating to work on. But if you work on just one or two of these SEO tips every...
Search Engine Optimization Made Simple: Five Steps to Build Web Pages that Use Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization can be as simple or as hard as you want it to be. These five steps make search engine optimization easy and fun. You'll have your pages optmized for search quicker than you think. And you'll get more page views when you use these tips for search engine optimization.
SEO Checklist
This SEO checklist will help you evaluate every page on your site for effective search engine optimization. The SEO checklist is divided into 5 sections - high priority, medium priority, and low priority SEO tips, things to avoid doing, and things to never do unless you want to be banned from search engines.
Your Layout Can Impact your SEO
The order of your HTML can make a big difference in the placement of your pages in search engines. This is because search engines read HTML in a linear fashion, and whatever content comes first is given slightly higher importance by the search engines. So your layout can affect how your site ranks in search engines. By using a CSS layout to put your content layer first in the HTML, you can get better rankings.
Every Page is an Entry Page
If you want someone to find your Web site, does it really matter if they find your home page or some other page on your Web site? Many people focus so heavily on optimizing their home page for search engines, that they forget that other pages on their site might be easier to optimize and result in more page views.
Frames and Search Engines
Frames can make your site harder to find in search engines, but they really aren't that incompatible if you're careful
Cloaking: What is Cloaking? Why Should You Not Cloak a Web Site?
This article discusses the issue of cloaking and why some firms will recommend it as a way to improve your ranking in search engines. Web site owners who are working with search optimization firms should read this article so that they are aware of the issues surrounding cloaking.
How can you tell if a site is a link farm?
It's not a good idea to link to a link farm or to participate in creating one unless you don't care that your site may be banned from search engines.
Keyword Density - SEO Through Keywords - About Small Business Canada
Keyword density is a theory of SEO that works on the idea that the more you mention your keyword phrase in your document, the better it will rank in search engines. This article on the Small Business Info: Canada site at About explains more.
Dirty Tricks that Will Get Your Site Banned - About Google
These ten tips are a sure-fire way to get banned from Google and other search engines. From the About Guide to Google.
Avoiding the 5 Most Common SEO Mistakes - SitePoint
If you're going to work on optimizing your site for search engines, make sure you don't make these mistakes.
Don't Sabotage Your SEO Company - Lockergnome Web Developers
If you hire a firm to do search engine optimization for you, make sure that you help them do their job, not hinder them. After all, you knew you had a problem when you hired them, why would you expect them to say "everything's perfect" and walk away?
Yahoo! Search Content Quality Guidelines - Yahoo!
Get your site better ranking at Yahoo! by understanding what they are looking for.
Improving Search Engine Results - Dave's Site
Dave Kristula writes a great explanation of how to use meta tags to improve your search engine ranking. He also includes a form for you to try it yourself.
Meta Tagging for Search Engines - WDVL
This document gives a great overview of how to set up your meta tags to best reach the search engines.
Search Engine Features for Webmasters - Search Engine Watch
If you're going to use meta tags, it's a good idea to know which search engines read them.
Search Engine Optimization - Bruce Clay, Inc.
This site offers a broad range of information and help with search engine optimization. They have built-in tools for analyzing your pages, evaluating your competition, identifying target keywords and much more. This is a great search engine optimization reference.
SEO's Relationship With Website Architecture - Self SEO
There is more to search engine optimization than just using the right keywords. If your site is not built to allow search engines easy access then all the keywords in the world won't get you higher rankings.
Using External Coding To Improve Search Engine Placement - Self SEO
If you use Javascript or CSS embedded in your pages, you may be sacrificing search engine position for your code. Luckily, this is easy to fix.
Why Use Long Tail Keywords for SEO
Learn the benefits of long tail keyword phrases and why you might want to focus on them in your SEO marketing efforts.
How to Use Long Tail Keywords for Website Marketing
Learn how to use long tail keyword phrases to improve your SEO marketing efforts for your website.
Keywords in HTML
Learn more about HTML keywords and how to use them on your web pages for search engine optimization.
Stop Optimizing Old Content and Start Adding New Content
Once you've learned how to do SEO, it can be tempting to keep doing it and tweaking it and fixing it. But doing that can lead to over-optimization which Google is now treating as a bigger sin than not optimizing at all. Your best bet is to just write naturally, for your customers, and keep adding new stuff.
SEO Quiz
SEO Quiz
Is Duplicate Content Bad for SEO?
Duplicate content is one of those confusing things about SEO that many people get wrong. And while Google states there is no penalty for duplicate content, they will still remove your site if they believe that the duplicate content they find is indicative of spam or an attempt to manipulate search results.
What is rel=canonical and Why Should I Use It?
The rel=canonical link is an important tool for web developers and site owners who deal with a lot of duplicate content. By setting the canonical link, you can tell search engines what page is the master or primary copy that they should deliver in their results. This article explains what the rel=canonical link is and how you can use it on your...
How to Set Up Your Site with Bing Webmaster Tools
This article takes you through the steps required to add your site to Bing Webmaster Tools.
How to Set Up Your Site with Google Webmaster Tools
Google provides information about every website that they index, and if you are the owner you can get access to that information by using Google Webmaster Tools. This article explains how to add your site to Google Webmaster Tools so that you can see them.