Experience Your Site From The Eyes Of A Spider

admin    SEO Flash     experience, Eyes, from, Site, Spider

Experience Your Site From The Eyes Of A Spider

Experience Your Site From the Eyes of a Spider

Making efforts to optimize site is good but it is considered best only when it gives fruitful results. It is not possible to get top rankings soon but you can make efforts. In order to check the performance of your site you can make use of Search engine Simulators.

Spiders Explained

In order to calculate the performance of your site, search engine spiders first crawl the page of your website and index them. then they make use of various algorithms in order to determine how relevant are they and to give page rankings. So in order to get good rankings you must know what spiders are looking for in your website.

Spiders are also known as Robots. They don’t read the whole content of your website but only search for particular things. Since spiders determine if humans will find your site, it is worth to consider what spiders like and what don’t.

Flash, JavaScript, Image Text or Frames?!

Flash, JavaScript, Image Text or Frames all these are not visible to search spiders. Especially frames. they are very harmful for search rankings. If you are making use of flash pages that are full of keywords then it will not help you in any ways. If you will see this page using Search engine simulator you will find this page as blank.

As Javascript is not SEO favorite similarly these things are not liked by spiders instead they prefer text files. In stead you can make use of alt attribute of tag for images. There you can describe the picture and can use your keywords. But don’t stuff the keywords.

Are Your Hyperlinks Spiderable?

The search engine spider simulator can be of great help when trying to figure out if the hyperlinks lead to the right place. For instance, link exchange websites often put fake links to your site with _JavaScript (using mouse over events and stuff to make the link look genuine) but actually this is not a link that search engines will see and follow. Since the spider simulator would not display such links, you’ll know that something with the link is wrong.

In order to avoid this you should make use of tag. This is because javascript based menus are not spidered.

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Trust Your SEO Company with Your Eyes Open

admin    SEO Video     Company, Eyes, Open, TRUST

Trust Your SEO Company with Your Eyes Open

Copyright (c) 2009 Ajay Prasad

In business we have to trust our service providers. SEO companies are our gateway to online success. But it’s a good idea to keep a tab on what they are doing on our websites. Remember in the online world the website is your business store and you wouldn’t want a wrong description or profile projected! Or worse you wouldn’t want to be taken for a ride after paying those dollars!

Ask them for a keyword list and make sure that they get them right.

This is important. Take time off for it or you’ll spend five times over trying to rectify the error. You may not know what words your potential customers are using in search engines to try and find a business like yours. That’s why you’ve hired a SEO company in the first place. But instead of appearing stupid.

- Ask them for examples of your competitor’s sites

- Ask them for a keyword list.

- Select a mixture of keywords. Remember that the single word keyword will be the toughest to optimize for and they may not be the most suitable. Though there may be 5040 searches for ‘insurance’ per day there is no point in spending money optimizing for it. ‘Auto Insurance’, or ‘health insurance’ may be more suitable. Some thing like ‘dental insurance’ may be more specific. However, “call center” (treated as one word) can result in huge business.

- Ask them the difficultly level of keywords. 45% or less are relatively easy to optimize for and higher the difficulty, the toughness of optimization increases.

- Ask your SEO company to prepare a list of existing web pages on your website which target suitable keywords. That way you will know which page targets what keywords and how many more pages of content will be needed on the website.

So you get to control the costs.

Your chance of appearing at the top of search engine results is greatly enhanced if you focus your website optimization efforts on two/three word phrases instead of single words.

Check your webpage title

Now that you know what phrases which webpage is targeting check the title of the l page. You can view it in the top browser bar when you open your website. Your page title on your home page is the biggest indicator to search engines of what your website is all about. The page title originates in the Meta Tags, which are not displayed in the normal view of your website. – A page title should be between 10 to 60 characters long including spaces. – It should preferably be in the format main keyword, sub keyword, brand name Remember that the company should optimize each page title on each page to get the best result. A random check is sufficient.

Get the Description Right

The description that appears below your URL in Google search engine is the metatag description that was included in the source code of your page. The Description should contain an enticing and informative snapshot of what the website is about and it should appeal to all search engines to appear. While Google takes a page description of 150 characters, MSN often takes the initial 100 characters from the Meta Description. The description should make sense, convey all relevant information about the web page and entice the reader to read the page. It is also worthwhile placing one related keyword phrase within the Meta Description. If possible add a phone number in the description metatag.

Web Page Names

If your SEO Company is a genuine company, they will most probably get it right. But step in here to ensure that the most important pages of your website can be told over the phone. After all it’s you and your team who will conduct the business. It should not be too long to fit in the business card. There are times when it is technically not possible. Ask them for a redirect.

Let People Find You

Add your contact number and office address prominently. Let people know that you have an office space. Give visitors a number to enquire for business.

Consideration for the Media

You may not be a big company right now, but as your business grows and your brand becomes recognizable the press may decide to follow you. Create a media corner. Put all your press releases, speeches and videos over there all at one place. Keep adding the latest press release to the site. Post your press release on the site a day or two earlier that the official press release.

Some Questions to Ask Your SEO Company To Keep Them On Their Toes

What ‘H’ Tags are you using? H Tags or ‘Heading Size’ were originally introduced to aid the formatting of HTML documents. Because their presence indicates page heading with larger text, many search engines have decided to count this as a significant part of their ranking. Websites should not be designed just for their look and feel. Equally they should not be designed only for search engines. However, with a bit of thought and creativity, web pages can be built with both visitors and search engines in mind.

Are you using the keyword in Alt Tags? Alt tags short form for Alternative Tags were originally designed to contain the text to be displayed on web pages instead of images if a user’s computer did not have the capacity to be able to display images. Alt Tags on images provide a great way of getting your keywords near the top of your pages without reducing your website readability. Alt Tags can also positively impact your internal website keyword linking. For a website to be successful, you have to create a new site entrance by adding Alt Tags to each image to appeal to search engines more effectively. With this, not only you are appealing to more users by using Alt Tags to your images, you will also be complying with website design standards for disabled users of your site.

Is the site navigation in text? As said earlier if your SEO company is genuine they will insist on text navigation and even navigation without menu. Generally, websites have their navigation links on the top or side of each web page. Unfortunately, many website navigation menus are image based. This means that search engines often won’t spider the linked pages as they do with text-based menu links.

Are you using the keywords to link to webpages? In technical parlance the phrases used to link to a particular webpage is called anchor text. They are given a lot of importance by search engines

Are all pages on the website linked by some page? Is the internal linking 100%? Well, we do not like loose ends, neither do search engine because they have been made by human. Make sure all the pages on your website can be reached by some page.

Work In Tandem

No SEO company can work effectively in isolation. They need your feedback, your suggestions (off and on). Ask for a monthly report to check your website’s keyword progress. Remember SEO is a long drawn process. Competitive keywords may be harder to optimize for. Once you reach page 1, the progress becomes slower. If you have found a good company all you have to do off and on is an occasional nip in the toes to ensure there is no scope for complacency.

100% Flash Layouts: Good on the Eyes, Bad on the Rankings

admin    SEO Flash     100%, Eyes, Flash, Good, Layouts, Rankings

Joe Netuser gets home from a long day of work, loosens his tie, and plops down in his comfortable arm chair to browse the internet. He checks his email, flirts with his girls on MySpace, and looks for the latest deals on iPods. What he does not do, as he partakes in the most common pleasures of the internet, is come across a website that has been designed entirely with Flash.

Of course, this does not occur to Joe as he checks the score of the Yankees game; he is just intent on passing the time until dinner. However, there comes a point that Joe receives a link from a well-intentioned friend that takes him to an artist’s website. The page pops up with a loading bar, quickly finishes loading on Joe’s upper-middle class broadband connection, and proceeds to knock his socks off with flashing and fluid imagery. After the splash page is done fascinating Joe with an in-depth look into the life of the artist, Joe begins to think.

Like any normal internet user, Joe thinks to himself, “Wow, that was really cool. Definitely very different from everything else I normally see on the internet. It just looked so much better. I wonder why everyone doesn’t have a cool website like that?” Some possible reasons float through Joe’s head, but each seems less likely than the last. It can’t be high-cost, because espn.com certainly has a larger budget for their website than some unknown artist. It can’t be artistic design, because the introduction to the artist’s website was far superior to the pictures of piled rusted metal featured in the artist’s gallery. What could it be then?

Unbeknownst to Joe, there is a very logical explanation for the lack of domination of “jaw-dropping” websites on the internet: websites designed entirely in Flash are not good websites. Dropping the allusion to a situation which no one really cares about, there are certain key elements which make a website successful. What makes a Flash website bad is that it can contain, at most, only two of the primary elements.

For purposes of this article, we will break a quality website down into five main categories, which can be referred to as VUSAF (The acronym is not particularly relevant, but I like to be able to easily refer to a paradigm). Each category covers a unique aspect of a website, some of which are often not considered by the average user. However, all of the elements are very important to a successful website, if not equally so.

The first element of a website considered by the average user is Viewability (No, this is not a word. Does it really matter?). Viewability is the ability of a website to be looked at. I know it may seem like I am phrasing this definition oddly, but give it a bit of consideration. I am positive that anyone reading this article has come across a GeoCities website in their time. Those websites have no ability to be looked at. Flash websites, on the other hand, high a very large ability to be looked at. According to Joe (I won’t allude again, I promise), flash websites have the largest viewability of any website. Joe’s view is shared by a fair number of website developers, who design websites with Flash solely for their viewability.

Usability comes next in our acronym, and also next in our rankings of Flash’s performance. Usability (a word this time) is the ability for a website to be used. How well can the average internet user get through the website and do what he needs to do? On one hand, Flash layouts can be more user-friendly, helping guide the user to where they “should” be through use of animations and highlighting. On the other hand, it can be difficult to get where you need to be if you are stuck staring at a bar slowly growing across your screen. Though the typical Flash website loads in no-time on my home cable internet connection, it is sadly not so for everyone. With a few quick rough estimates, I would say that a Flash website that takes me 3 seconds to load will take the average dial-up user up to 3 minutes.

Thus far, it must seem like I am making a case for Flash websites, not against them. At the very least, I have not provided enough evidence to condemn Flash websites to the fiery depths of purgatory. I thought I would show you how impartial and fair I could be to Flash in the beginning. Enjoy the rest of the article. If you do not mind, I will now abandon the ordered ranking of Flash websites’ capabilities in favor of our acronym. If this does bother you, please skip down to F (Come on, really?).

Searchability (my last made up word) is the ability of a website to be accessed, indexed, and ranked by search engines. Though many people do not realize it, searchability is an incredibly important aspect for the vast majority of websites. It is also the aspect of a quality website which Flash designs completely and utterly fail at. A huge part of modern internet marketing is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO is all about optimizing your website’s searchability to make it rank as high as possible on the top search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

When a search engine finds a website, it does a lot of things to analyze how good it is and where it should be ranked. It looks at the name of the site (the URL), the title of the page (the short description at the top of the browser), the meta-tags (bits of code on each webpage specifically put there to give search engines more information about the page), incoming links (how many other quality websites link to that one), and webpage content. The importance of each factor depends on the search engine, because each is designed with its own proprietary software.

A Flash website can do fine at all of the elements except one. Unfortunately, that one is arguably the most important. No matter what, a Flash website will get absolutely no points for content. This is the inherent nature of Flash websites: the content is put in the Flash file, not the actual webpage. The primary result is that a designer can produce good looking content. The secondary result is that a search engine has no idea that the page has any content what-so-ever.

If the search engine can not find any content on a webpage, it will automatically assume there is none. It is virtually impossible for a webpage with no content to get any decent sort of ranking on any search engine. What I am trying to get at should be obvious by now: Flash websites do terribly on search engine rankings. There are ways that designers can attempt to work around this draw-back for Flash websites, but the point is that a 100% Flash-designed website simply will not fair will in any sort of marketing campaign.

Another very important feature of successful websites is accessibility, or, the ability for a website to be accessed by a user. Often while browsing the internet, a user will come across something interesting and either bookmark it so show someone later, or share the link with a friend via email or a chat service. This is a great way for any website to increase its traffic. If it can provide content which will be accessed again or shared, it is helping itself grow.

The unfortunate thing about Flash websites is that their accessibility is virtually non-existent. Flash websites do not change webpages while navigating; instead, they change frames within the Flash file. This means that the URL will never change and if a user attempts to link directly to a specific webpage, they will end up linking to the beginning of the website. Developers might try to work around this by having a different Flash file for each webpage, so that the URL does change. The result is a massive decrease in usability, as the user will have to wait for the Flash file to load again on each page.

Flash websites rank interestingly according to the last element of a successful website: functionality. Functionality is does not refer to a website’s ability; functionality is the sum total of all of the features a website offers to the user. Instead Flash comes with a built-in programming language called ActionScript which has the potential to greatly increase the functionality of a website. Any user which likes to play games online has likely witnessed this functionality. However, there is another programming language called JavaScript, which is native to most browsers today. JavaScript has the capability to do just about everything ActionScript can, but without being embedded into a Flash file.

There are certainly arguments for and against ActionScript as a means of increasing functionality, but it essentially comes down to the fact that a website designed entirely in Flash is not at all necessary to achieve the functionality offered with ActionScript.

When attempting to design a successful website, any web developer must look at all of the aspects of VUSAF. They must then come up with the best method of designing the website so that it excels as much as possible at each element. Flash websites simply are not capable of succeeding at each element, and therefore should be avoided when designing professional-quality websites.