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The massive and rapid growth of the internet, along with its inevitable commercialization, has seen the term SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, gain a place in the popular language of the early 21st century. The increasing need for businesses and website owners to drive visitors to their little corner of the web has resulted in the creation of an industry, focused on helping them do just that.

Unfortunately, the pressure to perform and the financial rewards for doing so, was bound to bring forth the shadier side of some people, and, fairly or unfairly, the world of SEO has often been tarred with the fallout caused by some of the sharp practices that have been employed. Depending on your point of view, this is either an inevitable result of intense competition, or nothing but a damaging trend that does little but taint the overall understanding of SEO and the impression it makes upon the internet community at large.

There are of course plenty of practitioners of ‘ethical’ SEO techniques and conversely, there are plenty of others who take the approach that the end always justifies the means.

If you are unfamiliar with the concept of SEO, and the majority of people probably still are, what do you need to know and how do you ensure that either you, or your SEO advisers, stay within the bounds of acceptable and ‘ethical’ methods? There are some simple guidelines that will help you to achieve better rankings without stepping into the murkier side of SEO, and which will hopefully help you to avoid the cowboys whose only real concern is to relieve you of your money.

The whole point of looking at SEO, is of course to improve your position in the SERPS or search engine results pages, in relation to competing websites. Internet users invariably use a search engine to find information online, and your goal is to try and ensure they find you if you are providing what they are looking for. It is no simple task, particularly if the field in which you operate is very competitive. It is usually webmasters who are struggling to rank well, who are eventually tempted by ‘the dark side’ in an attempt to raise their profile. As search engine technology has has improved however, many shady tactics from the past have ceased to be effective and usually end up being more harmful than helpful.

So, where do you begin with a clean SEO campaign? If you are not intending to try and optimize your pages yourself and prefer to use a third party to do the work for you, it is always wise to try and find out a little about them first. Look for testimonials and word of mouth recommendations if you can. Beware of big promises - it has to be said that at the pace things move with the major search engines such as Google, nobody can really guarantee anything and many will tell you that SEO is as much an art as it is a science. Grandiose promises of a guaranteed number one spot on Google are often little more than hot air, or trickery - what search term are you being promised the top spot for?

It’s not difficult to get a top ranking for something so obscure that virtually nobody is going to search for it after all - the simple fact that so few people are ever likely to type in a search query makes it all but useless, so don’t be fooled by slick talking sharks.

You need to decide what search terms you wish to do well with and this in itself is an uphill task if you’re new to the game. There is plenty of advice and tips available online to help you with keyword research so this will be your starting point. If you are using the services of someone else to help with your SEO strategy, it is of course vital that you are both on the same page on this matter.

The techniques employed in SEO and the opinions on which are effective would probably fill a complete series of books so we’re not going to cover them in any great detail in this short article, but a few pointers should help you to start on the right path.

Websites are, first and foremost, for human visitors. You should never lose sight of this while you are delving into the finer points of SEO.

Make sure that your content is relevant, well written, and regularly updated. You need to make your visitor’s experience a pleasant one. Poorly written and poorly organized pages will not encourage people to stay, or to return, so quality is vitally important. It is therefore pointless to exaggerate or manipulate the content of your site purely for SEO purposes. Attempting to mislead, will basically achieve little. Improving your rankings by distorting the actual content of your site may result in a short term improvement in the SERPS, but disappointed humans won’t stick around for long! Ethical SEO practitioners do not encourage such tactics - they are effectively self destructive, nothing more.

When people talk about “black hat SEO” (referring to the practitioners of trickery and deceit to garner search engine rankings) don’t be fooled by the catchy title. Black Hat tactics cannot be dismissed as useless, because in the past, some of the ideas have been extremely effective, but things move rapidly and a lot of so called “black hatters” are still trying to use techniques that have long since been recognized by the likes of Google and therefore rendered ineffective. Even if you are tempted by a black hat shortcut, if you don’t know much about SEO, the chances are you will find yourself in trouble with the search engines and possibly excluded from their results entirely. It’s simply not worth it for most business owners and webmasters.

Ethical and clean SEO is really the only way to go - it may not get you a spectacular overnight result, but if your long term goals are to be fulfilled it is still the wisest course of action. The advocates of Black Hat techniques will of course laugh at the whole concept of ‘ethics’ in relation to SEO and claim theirs is the only path to success. Maybe they are right in some cases, until they are caught or snitched on by other webmasters for using underhand methods - that’s fine if it is their own site(s) that are ostracized by Google and other major engines, but do you really want your painstakingly built pages to suffer the same fate?

I guess you could safely say; “It’s not big and it’s not clever”. Play by the rules and if your site is good and sensibly optimized it will do well enough in time.

If you wish to learn more about SEO there are plenty of blogs and experts in the field who publish up to date and detailed information. A quick search will return plenty of results on what is a very complex subject, but now, at least, you will be a little more aware of how to go about optimizing your sites correctly and not run into any nasty surprises along the way.

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This brief article outlines the importance of using robots.txt files and good sitemaps to help search engines index your website or blog properly.

Having built your website you are probably waiting for that flood of visitors to start arriving but this won’t happen overnight. There is a great deal you can do to improve your chances of good search engine rankings but the whole field of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) can be very complicated and is rarely an exact science. The information is out there if you are prepared to do your research but for many people, time is the biggest limiting factor when it comes to SEO and there is a lot of information to wade through.

There are however a couple of very simple steps that anyone can take to help the Search engines find and index your site correctly. Both will take only a couple of minutes to implement and will repay you well if you take the trouble to complete them.

Firstly, you should ensure that you have a robots.txt file in the root of your domain (the place where your site’s homepage resides) and that it is valid and functioning correctly. The simplest way to do this is to go to one of the many online robots.txt generator and validator sites, where all you will have to do is type in your website address and a couple of options and they will generate the appropriate file for you. We recommend Yellowpipe Robots.txt Generator which will also enable you to choose to banish the robots you don’t want visiting your site, such as known email harvesting bots. There are plenty of other online services available if you search for them. This method ensures an error free robots.txt file which you can then upload to your server. It’s that simple and the search engine spiders will then be aware of exactly where to visit on your site.

The next task on your list is to set up sitemaps, which have become steadily more important in recent times. You may well already have a Google sitemap on your site and if you do, it will probably be called sitemap.xml. Sitemaps also reside in the root of your domain and make it much easier for engines to find and index your content.

There are plenty of ways to set up a Google sitemap and it’s probably the most important one, but it won’t hurt you to have more sitemaps either. The easiest way for you to do this is to use the excellent services at AutoMapIt Automatic Sitemap Service who will not only create six sitemaps automatically for you, but upload them to your server too if you wish. If you prefer to upload the files yourself, you can do so. This is a free service, although you can upgrade at very reasonable cost and benefit from some even more valuable services. Setting up the free sitemap generation is simple and quick and will give you a far greater chance of being fully and properly indexed. Certainly worth a few minutes of your time.

As we said at the outset, these are very basic SEO steps, but nonetheless a good starting point for any webmaster.

Technorati Tags: Free sitemap generator, Sitemaps, Google sitemap, Robots.txt validator, Robots.txt generator, SEO, Building sitemaps, How to build sitemaps, Making a sitemap, Webmaster tools

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Before launching into this review it should be pointed out that Site Build It (or SBI) and SiteSell.com, do not conform to the conventional notion of web hosting as most of the companies represented on these pages. Their services are aimed fairly and squarely at small business and internet marketers and indeed anyone looking to build quality static websites with the minimum of fuss and the maximum return on investment.

Site Build It and their web hosting company SiteSell.com are another Canadian company, the brainchild of CEO Ken Evoy, who have been in business since 1997 and in a nutshell, have grown their reputation by helping a great number of people turn their own ideas into very successful online businesses. The whole philosophy of Site Build It is really to enable people to get an online business set up as quickly and painlessly as possible without the need to know too much about all the technical barriers and “under the hood” workings of their sites and web hosting.

This makes them a very attractive proposition for those who want to concentrate on developing content rich sites but don’t want the distractions of having to learn too much about hosting, web design, marketing and promotion. As we pointed out in our opening paragraph, this is not your normal hosting review. So, let’s look at what this means for the end user in a little more detail.

SiteBuildIt is a controlled environment and this is a very important distinction. Unlike traditional hosting, you cannot upload anything you like to a server because you are working within a controlled FTP environment. There is no access to things like cgi-bin and php files, simply the facility to upload specific file types to certain folders designated for the purpose. Basically the SBI system handles all of the hosting aspects for you and also takes care of things like submissions to search engines and ongoing SEO. The company’s proud claim is that their methods and systems will ensure success and traffic and there are plenty of testimonials to support their claims.

Web hosting design and marketing made simple - Purists may well feel that SBI and SiteSell are therefore not for serious webmasters but this is strongly refuted in the company’s comprehensive onsite presentations and they do have a point. There is no denying that their customers have produced some top percentile websites (based on Alexa traffic rankings). The website presentation is detailed and if you have time to watch their 30 minute video it gives you a good idea of just what the systems can do, and indeed why so many people are attracted to the company. If you have no marketing or technical experience, which let’s face it, accounts for a large number of people, you would probably find SBI and SiteSell a good place to start as a fledgling website owner.

It is important to point out that despite the controlled hosting environment Site Build It is not a generic template type deal, very far from it. You choose your own domain name(s) just as you would with any other hosting service, and build your sites around them. You are the webmaster in control of the websites you build. You don’t need to know any HTML as their site building software does everything, but, if you are familiar with web authoring you can freely design/edit your own pages via any HTML editor and Photoshop. You will have the ability to blog, you will have RSS capability and E-Zine and Newsletter facilities and most of the tools you would normally expect to be using in building an online presence. You will also find things such as automated keyword research, autoresponders, mailing lists, link exchange tools and comprehensive traffic and stats reporting. The attraction is in the automation of many of the hard tasks associated with marketing and promoting a site, In short, if you have a great idea but are intimidated by technology this company could well be the answer to your problems. Even if you already have some website building experience but have had little success, you are also in the company’s target market.

In terms of cost, SBI is not really that much more expensive than a good quality shared hosting program, in fact it equates to about a dollar per day and you are getting a lot for your money. This is why we stated at the outset that this is more than just a hosting company and is probably the closest thing you will find to a “business in a box”. You bring the idea and SBI enables you to convert that idea into an online business. This approach has certainly worked for many people, as to whether it is for you why not take a look at the company’s presentations to help you decide.

As a hosting company we could find very few complaints about reliability, nor customer and technical support although to be fair, we are not reviewing your regular host as we have made clear already. Users have access to a helpful forum area as well as normal company support via telephone and email. Ultimately, if you have been trying to decide on a hosting plan and have read this review, it may well change your thinking a little. There is no doubt that SBI and SiteSell, while certainly not a guarantee of success, do offer all the tools to get your own hosted website off the ground with a minimum of fuss.

In conclusion, if you want reliable hosting but also like the idea of a lot of automation of “the geek stuff” SBI is worth investigating further. As with all things, there are some limitations which will make the company a non starter for a few webmasters but these are probably in a minority. They ARE different but if you are just starting out in the online world or are frustrated by a lack of success, SBI could be just what the doctor ordered.

Technorati Tags: Site Build It Review, Web hosting review, Create a website, Web site design, Web site template, Web site marketing, SEO services, Web site builder, Increase web site traffic, Blogging, Hosting Reviews, Product Reviews, SEO, Web Design, Website Promotion

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Search engine optimisation (SEO) has become big business due to the increased technical expertise required to properly carry out and deliver real measurable improvements. With constant movement of the goalposts it’s testing for even the best SEO experts to stay up to speed. There are however several basic level points we can all keep in mind should the cost of hiring professionals be unrealistic.Analyzing your website has to be a good starting point. Web logs and other forms of statistical information can give early indication where errors may exist within your website. Determining where search bots are struggling will allow you to focus on fixing errors which might otherwise nullify other SEO efforts. Googlebot activity for instance, is well worth spending time to understand. Reports will indicate if pages are running slow and as such perhaps search engines are abandoning the site. If search engines are struggling then its safe to assume regular visitors will also be experiencing slow loading of pages and possibly leaving prematurely.

Sitemaps are another fairly easy way to make it obvious where all your pages are. Combined with the use of robots.txt you can let search engines also learn what’s best left un-indexed. Sitemaps are often presented as a summary page (or pages) within the site displaying links to everything that’s worthy of listing. Google also offers a means to upload XML formatted files whereby you can push the list at Google instead of waiting for the next scheduled visit.

It’s always worth considering how your site actually appears to search engines. To give you something of a feel for how well your pages perform it’s perhaps worth setting yourself up with Mozilla Firefox (if you haven’t already) as this nifty little browser allows you to easily turn off both images and JavaScript. If you find your pages are pretty messed up (as is sometimes the case) it may be that you should consider a design that has a better textual structure with less dependency upon graphics and JavaScript. While it’s not the greatest sin in web design, overuse of graphics as a means of navigation can prove deadly for search engines and full site indexing. As a minimum, a text only set of links mirroring your main structure can be nestled at the bottom of the page. This will at least give search engines something to work with. A good alternative is to use CSS as a method to retain a classy design while also offering linking text. Where images are used it’s always a good idea to remember to use ALT tags. As search engines effectively ignore images, so the ALT tag offers a little bit of something they can latch onto.

Flash animation is another area similar to graphics that offers nothing to search engines. To the user however, they can be massively attractive and provide an area from where a stream of information can be delivered. The best is to use flash in moderation, striking a balance between engaging the user while satisfying the engines. Just like graphical navigation anything important communicated to the user through flash should perhaps be subtly repeated in the regular text somewhere.

It’s often said but nevertheless it’s amazing how many people still ignore the basic meta tags. There’s plenty of information around which will help anyone get a quick understanding of how best to fill out the title, description and keyword meta tags. While meta tags are important they are only a minor aspect of any one page. It’s imperative that meta tags properly mirror the content of a page but of greater importance is that the content has an array of words and phrases that are relevant to the niche in which you are trying to compete. Don’t go searching Google for words you think you should be listed under if your pages doesn’t have them within the content.

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Paul Coupe is lead designer / developer with Zoom Online.
Zoom Online - Providing total online solutions. www.zoom-online.co.uk/
Contact: paul@zoom-online.co.uk

Source: http://www.a1articles.com/article_174634_62.html

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