The list of website mistakes at your disposal is probably not infinite but is certainly not limited to what I have identified here.  Reorder as you see fit. As with many walks of life put this in perspective, doing it right does not guarantee success but will generally lead you in that direction. Of course you could do it all wrong and just get lucky! (more…)

Catch-22

Inbound links are critical to website success. Without them in the eyes of search engines a website is of very limited importance and your key phrases won’t amount to much. If you have an incredibly niche market with uncommon niche phrases and/or competition which hasn’t done their homework, then you may get fair results, but in a competitive market this isn’t commonly the case.

So you contracted with someone to build you an attractive website. The next thing is to go after links, right?

No, wrong, go back to Go, do not collect $200!

The next thing to do is to evaluate the content – and you can start by asking yourself, “Why would anyone link to my website?”, but from the other person’s perspective. Have business associates do this if you don’t have the budget to hire a search engine optimization specialist or copywriter. (more…)

There are lots of folks out there trying to make a buck out of nothing. Sometimes the offers come through email or postal mail and occasionally via fax. They may have bold claims or perhaps scare you into thinking that if you don’t that you’ll lose some incredible opportunity. One such offer cleared my spam filter, a rare occurrence these days, so I thought I might share it with you.

The email subject line: Domain Notification: ROBERT MEETIN This is your Final Notice of Domain Notification – DOTTEDI.BIZ

Action required: Don’t do it!

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This question might also be rephrased as “How do I stop Google from indexing a page?” or “How do I prevent search engines from indexing a page?” Regardless of how the question is worded the general idea is to keep a page from showing up in the results output of a search engine. There are a couple options:

1. Assuming the page is being regularly indexed if you update the content of the page that will solve the problem the next time it is indexed.
2. To prevent a page from being indexed in the first place you can set up a robots.txt file or include meta tags on the webpage to instruct Google to exclude the page from search results. As not all search engines honor these rules (as Google, Yahoo and the other professional ones do) you may need to get specific with offenders.

In setting up a web page, typically at the head of the html document just below the first [html] line is a section referred to as the head. If the page is set up according to good development standards, it will include html markup for the title tag, meta description, meta keywords, the character set, links to the cascading style sheet and javascript include files if there are any, and perhaps other constructs. (more…)

The question is a little more complex than that, but certainly it would be useful to know if they get indexed and also if links/URL’s you input into comment sections or public profile sections display as clickable links. (more…)

It’s important in the world of internet findability to get other sites to link back to yours.  When I talk about this I use an analogy regarding restaurants.  You’re hungry but not so hungry that you’ll eat anything in site.  You look around and see 10 restaurants, all but one with waiting lines.  In fact it’s empty.  Do you take a chance or follow in the steps of the masses?

In the world of search engines links into your site are analogous to patrons in the restaurant, the more the merrier.  It takes a little footwork to determine links from other sites back to yours.  There are a number of tools out there to help you along this path.

When I think of links I think of links coming from unique sites to your site.  20 links from different pages of a site linking to another site isn’t my goal.  I want to know how many unique sites link back.  Unfortuately many of the tools out there give an abundance of information all over the map.

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Overview:

What is search engine optimization? Answer – It is the process of organically developing your website so as to increase your rankings of specific keyword phrases. By ranking I am not talking to page rank which you might see on the google or other toolbar. I am referring to your audience doing a keyword or key phrase search and finding your site preferably on the first results page and near the top of the organic search results. (more…)

When you have a small business in a small town there are some fairly easy tasks to get the site recognized for that specific town. You can:

• Include your business address on your contact form
• Include your business address in the footer of every page
• Include your city/state in the page header title tag
• Register your website with google local, yahoo local, etc.

But what if your service region extends beyond your postal address and town? Say you offer service to a set of zip codes, surrounding cities, perhaps counties, or heaven forbid, a radius of 50 miles? What are some steps and techniques you can use to make this happen? How do you you make your site rank well for a geographical region? (more…)

The limit of the title tag depends on what you are trying to accomplish. From what I can see it appears to be 70 characters for Google to display the full title in the search results.  However rather than truncate a long word say at character #4 or 10 it will not display the word and instead substitute three dots to indicate there is more.

Even though it only display 70 characters Google and Yahoo will index up to 95, meaning you have another 25 characters to use in the page title.