Furthermore, does your site’s hierarchy or information architecture make sense? You can certainly have a link leading off the home page called “Products,” but if you have a lot of products you might even want to group them under logical subheadings: “Home Widgets,” “Automotive Widgets,” “Office Widgets,” or whatever kinds of subheadings make sense. If your site navigation and architecture is poorly constructed, your users can’t find what they’re looking for, and neither can the search engines. You can also submit high quality articles to article submission sites, so as to generate increased traffic. Well-written articles have higher chances of being accepted in these submission sites. Once you are able to provide excellent information to the readers through the articles, they will be more inclined to click on the link to your website provided at the bottom of each article. Another matter to consider is your site’s general usability. How easy is it for a visitor to navigate your web site? Do the links on your site describe where they lead well enough? Do you use breadcrumbs so that they know where they are at all times? If you want to achieve higher rankings of your web pages, you can avail of the services of excellent SEO service providers. It is always encouraged to go for one that guarantees high rankings for your site and one that has a comprehensive list of available services. Not all SEO services command high prices, so make sure that you are getting what you actually paid for. Finally, a good SEO services company provides round-the-clock support to their clients. This is one of the important factors you must know about directory optimization. Not all directory optimization companies are created equal, so look for one that provides you with what need. Don`t Make These Common SEO Mistakes! - Customer Service? It’s not too unusual for me to get lost – but I don’t appreciate being insulted when I do get lost, especially if it’s not even my fault. I mention this by way of introducing an online staple that I really hope is dead: the insulting 404 error page. I can certainly understand why a company might want to customize its error page. If the site can’t find the URL that a visitor used, then a custom-built error page might be able to steer him or her in the right direction. But will they even want to be bothered if they encounter an error page that says something like this: “404 Error. You’ve obviously typed in the wrong URL. Either that or the page you are looking for no longer exists.” Excuse me?! That was the actual text of at least one custom-designed 404 page. Jordan notes that the page contained “No apology for the missing page, no recommendation to use the navigation to find what they were looking for, just an insulting message that accuses the user of being an idiot.” If I ever encountered that error page, you can bet I wouldn’t be returning to that site any time soon. If your company handles any kind of personal information for your users, it should be secured so that it can’t be accessed by the malicious – and it can’t be published by the unwitting. Speaking of “unwitting,” make sure that anyone who publishes information to your web site – your website designers, for example – knows what should and should not be published. You may want to keep sales tactics on an “internal only” section of your web site that your customers never see; after all, you probably don’t want them to know the tricks you use for up-selling and cross-selling your products. Timing may also play a role in what you want the public to see. For example, you may not want a press release published before a particular date. Think what would happen if Apple’s own employees published announcements of the company’s new products a day before Steve Jobs presented them! 25.SEO: A Career with a Future It’s not unusual for those working in respected fields to be asked questions by those just entering (or re-entering) the job market. Naturally, the newcomers want to know about the future prospects of those fields. directory optimizers face those questions regularly. So what will the field look like five or ten years from now? Is it a good career choice? This question pops up with some regularity on SEO forums. It has been discussed more than once on our own SEO Chat forums. Before we address whether it’s a good occupation to pursue, there is a great deal to consider. Is directory optimization an actual career or more of a skill set? With what skills should a good SEO be armed? How much money can be made in the field? What does a good SEO need to do to get ahead? As to the linking area, there are a variety of issues connected with finding out how many back links you have, to say nothing of getting those back links in the first place. The area of “other issues” simply deals with points that didn’t seem to fit neatly into one of the other three categories. That doesn’t make them any less important however. Without further ado, then, let’s start discussing the things you need to make sure you’ve done with your meta tags and on-page optimization when performing SEO on a web site. The field itself has not been around very long. Starting in the mid-1990s, it fell to webmasters to optimize web sites so that they showed up high in the directory results pages. A landmark of sorts was reached in 1996 when the first email spam touting SEO services started hitting electronic inboxes. Usenet references to SEO did not appear until 1997. Nowadays, a search on the phrase “directory optimization” in Google (without quotes) yields well over 43 million matches. The acronym SEO delivers 118 million matches. There are forums, blogs, articles, companies, independent contractors, and many web sites devoted to the pursuit of SEO to make money one way or another. With all that action, one would suppose that it is a promising field. The technical issues category deals with the kinds of things that are easy to check with a computer, (usually) easy to fix, and probably don’t affect your users on a conscious level. Even so, they’ll affect whether a web surfer is likely to find your site in the directories and follow a link to become a visitor. Once the visitor arrives, some of these factors will also affect whether or not he or she wants to stay. 34.Picking An SEO-friendly Web Designer As an SEO we get two kinds of sites; those that were designed in the past and where the designer is no longer involved, and the sites where the design is either ongoing or we are working with the web designers from the start. Both of these have their pros and cons as an SEO but there is a clear advantage of one over the other for the client. Don`t Make These Common SEO Mistakes! - The Wrong Kind of Exposure When I talk about the wrong kind of exposure in this case I don’t mean bad publicity. I mean exposing information to the public that they were never intended to see. Jordan gives one example involving a common web site management platform that stored site statistics in a folder labeled /statistics/. If that folder wasn’t password-protected, anyone who knew that such a folder existed could read it, which meant that “many unwary webmasters unwittingly published full traffic data for their site on the Internet,” Jordan explained. That security hole may or may not exist today, but the principle certainly holds: if you don’t want the whole world to see a particular file, secure it. Another example of the wrong kind of exposure is what happened when AOL published a search data report in 2006. Its publication was intentional, but it was not well thought out. Supposedly AOL tried to scrub the personal information off of the search data it published, so that searchers would remain anonymous. It didn’t quite work that way; at least one major publication was able to identify one of the users from her searches. The mess led to the resignation of the company’s chief technical officer. First, let's discuss the pros and cons to the SEO. If we are coming in after the design is completed there are more than likely (and by that I mean 99.9% likely) some structural and or major design issues that will need to be addressed. Unless the web designer is skilled in SE-friendly design we are going to have our work cut out for us just dealing with structural issues. On the positive side of this scenario, we're left to just work on the site with no designer taking it personally when we tell them we need to make changes (and that can lead to some issues). Finally, here are a couple of domain name mistakes I hope most of you know better than to make. The first is buying the .biz version of a domain name when the version is available; top level domains are still better known and more respected than .biz domains, and will probably remain so for the foreseeable future. And the second is promoting a site you don’t even own. Make SURE you buy the right site and spell it correctly in all of your marketing literature and advertisements. Now let's look at the other scenario. Working with a designer has it's cons which is generally – we're going to have a designer taking it personally when we need changes made to the structure of a site or challenging us when we're arguing that while an all-Flash site is visually appealing, it leaves something to be desired from and SEO standpoint. This conversation generally goes something like this (and all you SEO's out there can sing along): SEO – Flash cannot be properly read in the same way as HTML and we need to have easily spidered content for the directories to see. Designer – Flash can be read by Google. SEO – But not in the same way. We need multiple pages of optimized content and Flash just isn't going to provide that. Designer – Well I disagree (probably read in some forum somewhere that a misc. guy had no problem ranking for “bob wyverniuschuck artist” with a Flash site) but even if that's true – it's the conversion that counts and this Flash site is going to convert.
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