Creating Unique Content

A lot of people out there are always asking and looking for article rewriting scripts and programs. I do not condone to this type of thing but, we do have an article rewriter on here for download.

Having unique content is something that search engines like. If you are just writing about something that a couple million other websites already covered, it is just old news. If you have something new and fresh, search engines and visitors alike will eat it up like a fat kid bum rushing the cake on his birthday. Hehe.

Also never, NEVER, plaigiarize content and steal from other people. You will get penalized or even banned from search engines for this. In some cases you could even have a lawsuit filed against you! Would it really be so hard to spend 10 minutes on an article? People come to your website for YOUR opinion and what YOU have to offer. So keep it real, don’t steal.

If you don’t think someone wont find you, wrong! That is what copyscape is for.

Sometimes, or in most cases, webmasters and authors are afraid to speak their mind and their opinions because of the bad feedback they think they might get. Even if you do get bad feedback, it is still good feedback. It is your website and you are speaking your opinion so let it be heard. There are always going to be critics whether you like it or not, learn to embrace it.

Meta Title, Page Body Titles

You want to focus on your page titles, this can make you or break you in most cases. In your page titles you want to use the keywords you are trying to rank for but at the same time make the title look appealing to visitors. If you are ranking first page in a search engine, you want to grab their attention.

Using a keyword phrase in each page title will help with the keyword you are trying to rank for , for that page. So let’s say you have a page with an article on SEO Tips for learning how to use anchor text. You could simply make your page title something similar to this:

SEO Tips – How to use Anchor Text

Now you are bettering your rank for seo tips and anchor text. If I were searching on how to use anchor text, I would click on this and feel like I know for sure that I am going to get the information that I am looking for.

Now in the body title of your page article, I would prefer to use an <h1> tag which is a basic HTML heading tag. Reason being is that these tags weigh the most in the body of a page when trying to rank.

So you would of course include a keyword or 2 in that with your short description/article title. This will help bring up the keyword when someone is searching for it along with the first 2 lines of your body in the page description in search engines. Also you want to optimize your meta description tag with something similar depending on which the search engine will bring up. Which ever is more relevant to the search.

Amount of text on a page seo

The amount of text on your page is a large factor in ranking within search engines. If you have a page that is just consisting of a couple sentences, it will not be enough content to properly describe your page. As we have noted in other articles, using keywords in your articles play a large role. Now with only a few sentences, you will not be able to accomplish much.

Search engines favor sites that have high content. Please remember that your content needs to be unique. If you have a well written article that isn’t around, google will favor it as oppossed to just giving the same information that a million other websites have.

The optimum page size is 500 – 3000 words. If you were counting by characters this would be within the range of 2,000 to 20,000 characters. Your visibility within the search engines is maximized by how much content you have. The search engine might bring up pieces of information in your article on accident which can bring you a lot of traffic with a larger article.

Make your page friendly to search engines and to readers.

Keyword phrase for one page

Your best bet when optimizing a page is to optimize for one keyword. Focus it on this. You can usually choose two or three phrase which are related to your main phrase. Even try to use maybe a mispelling which are common typo mistakes people make. Again, as explain in previous articles, you can use a keyword tool such as google keyword tool.

When optimizing for 5-10 or more phrases at once this will probably produce little or no effect on page rank. Also focusing on certain keywords plays a role in monetizing your page for google adsense ads.

So remember, focus on between 1 through 3 keyword phrases for the best results in page rankings.

Main Page Of Your Website – SEO

Optimize the main page of your site (domain name, index.html) for word combination’s that are most important. This page is most likely to get to the top of search engine lists. My seo observations suggest that the main page may account for up to 30-40% percent of the total search traffic for some sites.

When registering a domain name, try to use keywords with in it that you are ranking for. If you can get a genuine domain name that hasn’t been taken, jump on it! Also for the main page of your website, try to use different combination’s of keywords that will bring you traffic and bump you up in rankings. Always keep your eyes peeled on your stats, rankings. You can use a keyword tool to see what keywords are most competitive and which aren’t, which different combination’s are being used and the whole 9 yards.

For example if you have a wallpapers website, using a domain name with the keyword wallpapers in it can play a huge part in ranking for that keyword. Unfortunately it would be almost impossible to get a domain name like www.wallpapers.com or www.freewallpapers.com . You could always try to put in a back order so that once the domain expires you could try to snatch it.

You see that the keywords are in Bold text. Also if you view our article on using meta tags , descriptions and optimizing the first sentence or 2 of your website you will learn how to optimize better for ranking in search engines. Always remember that you want to use keywords while making your description and title look appealing. Give the visitor a reason to click your site or in other words try to give them the thought of if they click it, they know that they will find what they are looking for!

Now doing this plays a big role with your main page. For most cases, your main page will show your meta description, for other pages, it will usually show the first sentence or so in the description. Now you see above it is showing the meta description and title for the main pages. If you have other pages that are ranking, here is an example of the search engine crawling the first sentence and listing it within the rankings.

As you can see, page isn’t optimized well for the search engine. It is up to you what you can do with it.

Avoiding subdirectories

If you website is not that big, you want to avoid using sub directories. A sub directory is a directory/folder within the root, or folder of your website.

Search engines consider pages within the root directory of your website to be more important than ones in sub directories. So, if you have a larger website, simply make sure your main pages are within the root folder of your website. When using sub directories for other pages, simply use a format for your directory/folder names like so:

Instead of let’s say, using a folder named root/tips/ , root/seotips/

Simply put a – in between words. Use the main keywords that your are trying to rank for for these folder names also, don’t just use general keywords. So here is an example:

root/seo-tips/

Why use a “-” ?

We want to use a “-” because search engines consider these spaces. Let’s say you have three words within your keyword you are trying to rank for. Simply just put 2 dashes in between to space them out.

Using text over images with seo

One common error people make when designing a website is embedding text into images. This is done through any photo editing program. A lot of web designers focus too much on images, image links, and embedded text into images to spice up their website. This is the same concept as our other article “Focusing On Navigation Menu’s” .

Search engines cannot and I repeat CANNOT read text in images. If you are using an image with text in it to link to another page within your site, simply scratch that image and put a text link in there (anchor text link).

An anchor text link is just a basic URL/Href. Instead of putting a URL in it for the text, you put a keyword of whatever you may be linking to. Visit our other article on Anchor Text for more information on what they are and how to use them properly.

Search engines determine what your website is about by reading the text on every page. Using <h1> , <h2>, <h3> tags really helps with optimization. These tags weigh more than regular text. Bolding and italicizing text also weighs out.

What weight means is, when a search engine crawls/reads your page, use of these tags makes these words stick out, <h1> being the most. Use these for category names and article headings. When using any of the others, you don’t want to over due it for it will make the users experience miserable, for example bolding way too many words. Bold keywords that you want to rank for.

So the conclusion of this is, keep image use at a minimum when linking or using category names/keyword names. Using CSS can spice everything up AND use all of the text you need.

Focusing on Navigation Menu’s

A Navigation Menu in SEO can play a huge role in optimizing your website for search engines. The reason being is when a search engine crawls your website, it is going to read everything in the header and the first 100 or so keywords in your body which would usually be your article..

In this lesson we are going to discuss using targeted keywords, using text, why not to use image or flash, and why css is your best bet when it comes to header, footer and other navigation menu’s / bar’s.

Using targeted keywords in navigation menu’s

I am sure you have seen websites which use flash or image navigation menu’s in their headers. If you are trying to optimize your web site, this is a major SEO Mistake which has been added to the SEO Black book on here as reference.

The reason this is a no-no when it comes to SEO is because, search engine crawlers are not human, no matter how much you may want them to be. They cannot read images and flash. This is where using a CSS menu comes in handy. The reason this will come in handy is because you can spice up your navigation menu with awesome looking graphics and effects but at the same time you will use text to overlap every item on the menu. When designing a menu and adding categories and items, you want to use keywords that you are trying to rank for in search engines. We are going to discuss more of this below.

Using targeted keywords in your navigation menu’s

This will play a crucial role in your site ranking for keywords that you are targeting. In a normal menu you will see it categorized like this for example:

Home | News | Forum | Reviews | Tips | Tutorials

These are just general keywords. Now let’s say you have an SEO site like www.therantandrave.net and you are optimizing for SEO Keywords. When getting a site off of it’s feet, you want to use keywords in your menu until you start ranking for main keywords that you are aiming for. For example below.You would want your menu to resemble something like this:

Home | SEO Tips | SEO Tutorials | SEO Forum | SEO Tools

Now that you have a hint, these are keywords that I am trying to rank better for (SEO Tips, SEO Tutorials, SEO Forum, SEO Tools). As you can see in the top header navigation menu on our site therantandrave.net and on this site, our menu’s are in CSS. If you use wordpress, almost every wordpress theme comes with CSS menu’s which saves you a lot of work.

notice that the keyword “seo” is used in each phrase. It is alright to use it in there like so when a site is getting off of it’s feet. Once you start ranking for the keyword “SEO” in this case, you then can change it up to just tutorials,forum,tools , for the search engine will start grabbing the information seo + tutorials, seo + tools in the future especially if you are building pages are given keywords.

Your best bet is using text/css navigation menu’s in your header, sidebar’s and footer using targeted keywords.

If you are new to CSS or just need a little bit of help, here are some resources for you below:

• How to make a CSS menu
• CSS navigation menu
• Building a Dynamic Menu with CSS
• Building an Expanding CSS Menu
• CSS Menu Generator

Learn SEO – Design & Structure

Now that we have introduced you to search engine optimization let’s move on. Design and structure play a crucial role in developing your website. You want to make it appealing but then again crawlable by search engine spiders.

Navigation

As I have explained previously, with navigation you don’t want to use images or flash in place of your text for categories. Using images behind it with text layered over it or css menu’s works fine. The reason being is search engine spiders cannot read the text for your categories when they are an image or flash object. They read text.

Now with your categories you don’t want to use titles for example if you have an seo site:

tips , tricks , tutorials and etc..

Try to use some of your targeted keywords in it that define your websites categories like:

SEO Tips , SEO Tutorials, etc..

Meta Tags:

Optimizing your tags may be tricky for some, let’s discuss meta keywords first. These will not help your page ranking anymore because of the abuse in the past but it is still good through put a few of your targeted keywords in there. If I remember the limit is 600 chars in the tag. I would only use 25 or less words to really describe my site / page.

Using a meta description for each page describes what it is about in the search engine listings. Try to make it stick out from the other sites. Now for meta title and pages titles you want to base it off of your pages topic with one or 2 keywords in it. This will help your ranking and is appealing to the user searching for selected content.

Layout

Designing a nice layout is always hard. As explained in the intro, you always want to draw out a rough draft on paper before you begin to put it to action. Don’t make your layout too overwhelming with links,text,images crammed all over. I usually stick with a nice simple structure with a few decent images and what not. It all depends on what kind of site you are running. With gaming websites you can get away with all of the cool images everywhere and what not. Remember, css does wonders.

Sitemap

Having a site map let’s spiders know all of your pages updates and what pages you have. Anytime you add new content or update a page you want to make an update your you site map. You can find free sitemap websites all over the net that make it simple to create one. You want to submit it to Google when you are done. I will just discuss the robots.txt file here. With this file it will tell search engine spiders which directories that you want crawled and which ones you do not. This helps if you have private things or just stuff you don’t want listed in search engines.

The next addition to this tutorial will be on Content. Stay tuned!