On this blog I will be posting my thoughts and ideas on website development and website design, especially in implementing quality search engine optimized architecture. My own statistics show that about 90% on the Internet are not really optimized and search engine friendly and only 2-3% are really done the way they are supposed to be done and afcourse those website are awarded with high ranking in organic search and receive hundreds, sometimes even millions, hits every day....+|+

This blog is totally dedicated on my struggles to help webmasters and web developers to aim higher qualities and make successful websites. My expertise is mostly gathered from my 10 years experience in the website development world. I started my first websites in 1998 and I know how hard it is in the beginning without having someone to guide you. Therefore I will be here, writing stories on how young webmasters should keep their websites and be awarded well.

Do you like Flash Menus? They are sooo nice, but what is the truth about their usability?

Most of the people don't know anything about the side effects of using Macro media Flash for main navigation and in most cases they are wondering why their website is not properly indexed by search engines and they don't really get any traffic. The story is very simple and easy to understand. Search Engine use the so called "spiders" to crawl the web and index web pages. Those spiders are computer programs that view your HTML code and translate it into their machine language which later on is rated using specific algorithm. The problem here is that "spiders" are not humans and they don't see images or flash animations. They are not able to understand where those links point and therefore they don't follow (index) them....+|+

In all cases its best if you can use footer menu in addition to the main navigation. In the footer menu its advisable to put links to all important pages on your website in order to make sure that they will be indexed properly.

Also its strongly advisable that you should sacrifice the beauty of Flash Menus and put regular links coded with CSS (in order to look nice) because some people don't even have Flash installed on their computers and this will make your website inaccessible for them.

From my own experience I find that styled links are the best way to implement website navigation and this makes it very easy for search engines to index your website and rank you on your deserved position on all search engines!

Recently there was this big discussion if Google Sitemaps is a good thing or worthless extras, but let me share with you the true story.

Sitemaps is one of the best inventions introduced by Google and is now even adopted with Yahoo and you won‘t be amazed when you see the /sitemaps.xml file being requested by "Yahoo SHLURP" bot. The sitemaps as the name explains it is a well structured map of your site - each individual url and its priority for the website. The priority is very nice to be set up carefully and therefore put larger value (1) to the main page www.domain.com/ and less value on the pages that are not going to change after their creation, because the higher this value is, the highest priority in their list this url will have and will be the first indexed on a deep crawl...+|+

On the other hand the Update rate value is really worthless thing because most search engine do not obey it and that‘s a well known fact. Search engines will visit your url only if they stumble across a link to that page and in most cases they will index only the page that is linked. During the deep crawl (which is done once a month) then the whole page with all the urls will be indexed. Don‘t think that when Google opens your website it will get the whole thing at once .. nope .. the situation is a bit different and Google will index few urls, then make a pause and come back again until the whole website is indexed.

Another important part of the sitemaps is that you have to add it on the Google Webmasters Center and verify your website in order to get the maximum benefits out of it. If you‘re using Wordpress or SEO Website CMS they will automatically ping/request Google to get the sitemaps file, but if you are not using those CMSes that has to be done manually - go to the google sitemaps and click UPDATE

Many new web owners have don't know how to start their website to actually receive visitors and that's quite common. People sit and wait for a miracle to happen and their website to rank high and get listed on the search engines, but in reality this does not happen that easy and a lot of work is involved before you get your deserved traffic.

Usually when you make a website (designed by someone else or even yourself), and then get it published on the Internet you'd expect that people will suddenly swarm and start visiting your site and your business will start receiving numerous phone calls from new clients attracted by your new website, but in fact things are not that easy. In most situations we advise people to get professional SEM (Search Engine Marketing) services and help them jumpstart their websites, but that involves a certain amount of money that some of you are not willing to spend or you simple want to do it yourselves. Here I'll explain you some simple tricks to get your website listed on the search engines......+|+

If you have a brand new website, the best way to spread the word is to submit it in as much as possible free directories. This is done relatively easy, but first before starting you must know two very important key features that each web directory will ask you for:

• First Website Title: The title usually is the name of your website (not the domain name aka www.mywebsite.com) or even better the services that you're offering. I strongly suggest that you should choose the services to the name or even a combination of both -- Joe's Laundry Repair Service in New York for example. This way you're telling the search engine and also the visitors what your website is all about not only the company name.
• Second Website Description: This is a short text of about 300-400 character (60-70 words) of what you're website is about. Here you should describe in details (as much as you can with 60 words) your services and I strongly recommend that you put the year when your company was established (if you have one) because this helps build some trust rank. For example Joe's Laundry Repair services should have description like this one : Quick and Affordable Laundry Repairs in the New York City area. Your satisfaction will always be priority for us and that's why we give you 6 month guarantee for each repaired part. Give us a call at 899-999-0000 or click here to visit our website. That's plain and simple with some good advertising text
• Third, some directories might ask you for META KEYWORDS. Those are the words/combination of words that describe your services. Make sure to make them as simple as possible and its not advisable to use technical stuff. For example for Joe's website we can use: laundry repairs, laundry machine repairs, new york laundry machine repairs, ny laundry machine repairs, professional laundry machine repairs or you can make up more words but keep them very relevant to what you do.
• Forth, some websites even ask for Meta Description This is not really interesting and you can leave it blank or copy the original description text here.
• The last thing that some websites ask you is to place Reciprocal Link on your website. Most of them give you a code that you have to copy-paste on a page on your webiste (for example called links.html). To most free directories this is optional and you shouldn't bother with it. If they require reciprocal then you don't have other option but do it.

Now you should be ready to start submitting your website to web directories. You can visit the Directory Critic List of Free Website Directories as they have quite large (3,000 +) website directories that offer free listings and this should be good start. Note that directory submissions takes a lot of time and a new submitter can post not more than 300-400 listings per day (and I mean doing this all day long), therefore there are a lot of companies that offer directory submission services and most of them charge like $30-$40 per 500 directories which is relatively cheap compared to the time one must spend to do this.

If you submit to about 1000 website directories, your website should be listed in about half of them (note that not all web directories are accepting all listings and that's why I'm giving the 50-50 chance of being listed). This amount will most definitely help you get the Search Engine's spiders attention and get some nice organic listings. The next thing you should concentrate on is building quality content and continue submitting to new directories as more links make your website more popular and therefore your website visitors will continue to increase.

For conclusion I'd like to underline some very important characteristics of one good website. The amount of time you should spend on link building (submitting to other websites and directories), the same amount of time you must spend on improving the website itself by adding more and more content. If you overdo one of those you wont get the maximum benefit and only if you do both at the same time your website will flourish.

Few years ago if you knew how to rank top ten on Google and MSN was considered to be similar to Magic, but nowadays things changed quite a lot. The art of Search Engine Optimization grew quite popular the last few years as internet marketing because essential to all businesses. Every business owner wants his website to be ranked N:1 for his particular products and services with free organic search engine listings instead of paying for traffic using Pay-Per-Click programs.

During the past 4 years, I‘ve been studying the search engine ranking algorithms and even made my own search engine in order to understand some of the key elements that are not visible from user/webmaster point of view and this proved to be quite educational. The strive for quality of website content became extremely important and nowadays its top ranking factor for all, but there are still few ways to get around it and rank well even with less popular website and here I‘m going to share with you the secret.....+|+

If you want to rank well on all search engines, and here I mean all search engines not only Google and MSN, there are a strict set of rules that has to be followed and the success is almost guaranteed. There are about eight parameters, which are considered to be the most important criteria, if set properly can boost your website to the top. I'll make you a list here with a short description, and later on I'll write separate post for each of they describing how to do it with simple tricks and techniques to get more out of it as some (for example linking) are not up to you and involve a lot of other people to do it.

• The first thing you have to do is to consider what keywords you wish to rank for. Those keywords should be highly popular (people should search for them) and they should have medium to low competition (you can't jump into the big game with a starter website, its smarter to start low and then get the high keywords). In order to do this you have to write a description of your product/services in a way that the user describes it. Here I want to note that the user sometimes thinks differently from the manufacturer and this has to be considered carefully. There are tools like wordtracker that can help you choose more popular keywords and optimize for them
• The most important parameter is the Website Title Tag. The title should have your primary keyword for the particular page + the primary keyword for your company.
• The second most important is the Headline Tags. Your keywords should be included in the website headline and second level headline h2 for the product that you're describing on that particular page
• Third and also extremely important is the text on the page. The text should contain at least five instances of the primary keyword plus some modifications of it. This way search engine consider it more relevant.

• The other also important factors can help you get over some other well optimized pages if you have your keywords in the domain name, the url and image alt tags.

If you have all of those your onsite-website optimization will be great, but that won't get you listed to the so much desired top listings if you don't have the last and most important key element which give the final touch to all of the above and make the "Google Magic" work. This element is called strong backlinks. Backlinks are links to your page from other websites. Those links are valued as votes of quality for your website. If you have a lot of links/votes then your website should have quite good quality and your page rank would be high, but on the other hand if you have great website but not votes it will be situation that its good, but nobody knows about it, and therefore search engines won't trust you. The backlinks are the trust element for search engines and they form the most important factor in Search Engine Rankings as Organic Listings

As I've promised above, I will write separate article for each element describing how to optimize it and rank N:1, but those are the overall characteristics that you have to cover.

Keywords are the most important factor for your website. Keywords are the "key" elements to your internet success and they have to be chosen very carefully and sometimes it‘s advisable to get professional help in order to bring the optimal search engine performance.

Keywords are basically words that regular people use when the search in search engines. Those are words and phrases that describe what they are looking for. For example when you go to google and you’re trying to find website manufacturing or selling sun glasses you type in "sunglasses" and you get a number of websites containing the term "sunglasses". This is called Keyword. When people get too broad number of results then they look for specific type of sunglasses they look using further description like "sports sunglasses" which now is a bit more precise and will show quite smaller but more relevant number of results. This is called key-phrase. Key phrase is a phrase containing more than one keyword.

Using the same pattern of logic, keywords are simply words that users/regular people describe products and services while searching on the internet. Technically every word can be used as keyword, but regular internet users use some specific words more than others and that’s why choosing the proper keyword is very important as some keywords can bring you tons of traffic compared to other that are quite less popular.....+|+

The best way to find the best keywords for your website is to ask somebody that doesn’t know anything about you and your business and ask him to describe what you do or sell. In this way you’re going to get the customers type of wording not the technical terms that you might use to describe them yourself.

When you get a list of keywords and key phrases, it’s advisable to use some internet free tools that show the approximate number of searches each keyword was used during some period of time. Such keyword suggestion tools are Overture, Wordtracker and Google. They show (some even with numbers) how many searches were done in the period of one month and some suggestions on similar phrases containing your keywords.

You should choose the top 20 keywords that describe your product or services. Also its advisable that one should search on google for example for each keyword phrase using the quotes (for example "sports sunglasses" ) and get the amount of websites that rank for that particular term. The lower this number is, the easier you will rank for those keywords. Note that its recommended that you start with some less popular key phrases and then fight for the highest ranking ones because in the beginning your website won’t be able to fight for the top rankings on highly competitive terms. When your website ages and gets a lot of backlinks, then you will be able to get the top rankings.

Note that each page (not website but only a page from the website) should be optimized for not more than one keyword and one phrase containing that particular keyword. If you try to optimize it for more than one, they you will melt the keyword priority and you might not rank well. Also be advised that its best to use niche targeted websites and therefore have each website targeting one major keyword and each page should contain that keyword and different phrases of that keyword. This brings maximal performance and if you can have that same keyword in the domain name then your success is guaranteed.

For more information on keyword use please see the next articles on title, description, headings, page optimization and off-site optimization.

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Some of you might laugh on that post, but it is a well known fact that about 90% of the websites out there are with sloppy titles that do not convert well. If your website has a good title you can enjoy two major benefits – your pages will be ranked very well on the search engines as the page title is one of the most important elements in search engine rankings; and second, the title page has is the first thing people see when on the search results and good title can bring a lot more people and can convince them to click on your website even if you’re not N:1 listing. First let’s start with what’s a bad web page title.

Can you imagine that there are 30 million pages that are set with the default "untitled page" ? And even more funny is the fact that the Georgia Supreme Court is N:1 listing for untitled page. Yep. Run a Google search and you’ll see what I’m saying.

About 40% of the websites that I know carry the title "company name" yes. Not the actual page title but the company name which is quite dumb. Having title optimized for company name, your website/page is ranking quite well for the company name, but what about services? The most sole purpose of having a website is to attract customers and customers are searching for products and services. If they already know your company, then most probably they’ll simply call you over the phone and they won’t be searching for you on the internet....+|+

The third very dumb thing that I’ve seen around is to have the same title on all pages. The titles vary quite a lot but having the same title is not really wise and does not help with the rankings of unique content.

Each page has to have its own title and that title and that title has to contain the targeted keywords. If you have the targeted keywords/key-phrase in the title, then most search engines will know what this website is all about.

A good way to determine if your website is optimized for particular key-term is to use one of google’s services to check it out. Yes Google AdSense. AdSense is advertising program that publishes keyword specific advertisements on your website. AdSense uses very similar to Google’s algorithms on determining what the particular page is all about and the goal of this test is to make AdSense show ads on your website that are highly relevant to your services/products. If the ads shown on AdSense are different from what you’re selling then most probably (99.99%) you didn’t do good in choosing the title and you should change it! On the other hand if AdSense publishes highly relevant advertisements that you did good and your website will be understood by Google and the other search engines and you will score well for your targeted keywords.

Note that the title tag is very important, but for good rankings your content also has to be optimized very well in order to rank on the first listings.

OnSite Search Engine Optimization the second most important factor for successful ranking. In the previous post we spoke about Page Titles, and now we are going to cover in depth the page content optimization and specially content presentation.

Page content is all visible information on the one page. This content can be text, images, videos, sounds and etc, but only one of those elements is very important for your search engine rankings. Since search engine robots are not humans and they cannot understand the meanings of visual and audio elements the only thing that they can understand is Text. Using complex algorithms Search Engine Robots read the text and run Digestive algorithms which clean it from junk and repetitive words and then rank whatever is left in their index based on keywords and key-phrases. That‘s why the repetition of keywords and key-phrases is extremely important for your ranking as search engines must be able to highlight them as being the description of your page and therefore rank for your targeted keywords instead of something else that‘s on your page. (I’ll write separate article on keyword density because that‘s a whole other science).....+|+

There are few ways to help search engines understand better your website and that‘s with the so called "clean html style". This is not a text writing style but rather text formatting style. As you know and I believe you share my opinion that well formatted newspapers and magazines that allow you to read between the lines (aka highlighting with strong and bold in html) and the use of different font sizes in titles, subtitles, quotations and etc is extremely helpful not only to visitors but also to Search Engines.

Search Engines just like visitors are able to read your text formatting and according to the highlights they also understand what’s important for that page and rank it with priority over non-bolded and non-highlighted texts.

I’m strongly advising everyone of you to write well in clean html and if you don’t know HTML then its very good for your own knowledge to get some book and read it. Its nice and really helpful especially if you’re considering your website for something more than just one time experience.

Another thing that I always recommend to webmasters is to validate their website’s html syntax using HTML validators. Nowadays most of the Website Development Software is with built in error highlighting and offers html validation search and that’s really good because it helps search engines understand your website properly as html coding errors can sometimes mislead them in the meaning of some elements that might be vital to good ranking. When you publish your website you can use the Free HTML Validator from W3C http://validator.w3.org/.

To the people that don’t know what W3C is, W3C stand for World Wide Web Consortium and it’s the governing body of the internet website standards. If you visit their website www.w3.org you can find so much useful information on website coding standards and new technologies like XHTML and AJAX.

If you keep your syntax error free and you format your pages with all proper html markup tags Search Engines will be able to easily understand your websites and rank you very high for your targeted keywords. On the other hand if your websites are not very well written and contain a lot of errors then you might end up somewhere on the big list, but it won’t be the top.

Please do not forget the RULE that you‘re making websites for PEOPLE not for ROBOTS! Make them nice, make them look good, make them convince people to come back again and read more. This is the best possible strategy to rank well. Search Engines are improved every day and their ranking is based on how PEOPLE would feel about your website and this underlines the importance of good page layout and presentation. If you have well presented website that looks like a magazine or newspageper, sooner or later you will be ranked top for your keywords! That‘s where search engines are heading and this can only help you!

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Domaining – the business of buying and reselling domain names had became flourishing industry for people that were able to acquire generic keywords for products and services the last few years. Since the dot Com boom in 1995, domains had become extremely important part of the internet industry mostly due to their significance in Search Engine Ranking and type-in value.

Even nowadays there is still large amount of people that type keywords and key phrases in their address bar instead of the search bar. When Internet Explorer or other browser receives such request, generally they are trying to open website containing those keywords in the domain name, starting with .com, .net .org until they find one or give up with Page Not Found error. These domains are called type-in domains and are extremely valuable since people visit those directly bypassing search engines and etc. Nowadays almost 99.9999% of those domains are already registered, but still new domains are being dug and resold for thousands. A good type-in domain costs from 1,000 to few million dollars.....+|+

Domains are the biggest definition of your website as they are the highest assurance for your website’s are of interest or domain. For example the domain www.autos.com would most definitely lead us to the thought that it’s all about cars and automobiles rather than www.capelle.com which might be your company name. Also it’s well known that Search Engines are aware of this factor and they use it with high priority in their search engine ranking algorithms and therefore rank higher websites containing their particular keyword in the domain name.

Here I would like to stress the importance of a good domain name since this might help you boost up your ranking and bring you more traffic. In most cases I’m eager to accept domain names to be chosen with the services provided instead of company names and therefore help you perform/rank better for the services rather than the company name for which is pretty much worthless since if someone knows your company name it will be really easy to find you (you don’t have too many people competing in search engine optimization for your company name, but you have millions for your products and services and therefore single advantage might help you outrank all of them).

Almost in all situations you won’t be able to register generic type-in domain since most of them area already taken. In such situation you can used dashed domains, but its not advisable to use too many dashes. We’ve noticed that dashed domains rank quite well and sometimes even better than singleword domains, but that depends on your preferences. Almost make sure you put only one dash separating each word not two because that won’t help you much and most probably will make your domain pretty hard to type from customers/visitors if they remember it.

Its really smart to use as-short-as-possible domain name because if it’s short the chances of being remembered are greater and you want your visitors to remember and re-visit your website. For advertising purposes I’m always advising people to get short domains because this can help them advertise in radio and tv with the website .. aka visit mycars.com or whatever, rather than my-cars.com (my dash cars dot com). In this way brand-ability is quite important and you should really think quite a bit before buying your domain.

The biggest challenge I ever had was to find out a nice algorithm for determining the best possible keyword density for search engine onsite content optimization. I red numerous books, articles, and even blogs, but none of them really explained what is the best keyword density. They all shared the same pattern of logic, keywords should be done "naturally" as you’re writing your article and you should be careful not to overdo it, but in reality that is not exactly true in some scenarios.

The keyword density is extremely influenced by the way your content is organized on that particular page that you’re trying to optimize. In situation where your article is in the beginning of the page and below it is the Main Navigation and the other static text (that’s in HTML locations, you can float it so that the sidebar is on the right and then you have the article content first and then menu), the keyword density should be quite low and "natural" keyword repetition is pretty much enough, but about 90% of the websites are not organized in that fashion....+|+

In situation where you have the main navigation, slogan and other text (only few lines or more) above the actual article content, the requirements for higher keyword density increases dramatically. In some of my websites I have very clean articles that are written only with natural occurrence of the keywords and I found out that they don’t really rank well and my AdSense conversion rates were quite low for the same page. That made me think how to optimize the performance of this page and I noticed something really funny. The AdSense ads were totally irrelevant to the content. That was obvious sign that Google and most probably other search engines are not able to determine the exact meaning of that page and therefore they show irrelevant ads and rank me for the wrong category.

It was really funny because the title, keywords and description are quite well done, the header and the article contained quite a few keywords, but obviously the density was not enough. I was wondering if it’s worth it to put few more repetitions and check out what’s going to happen. The result was stunning. When I came back to that page next day (note that the AdSense bot has to re-crawl the page and get the update content and this sometimes takes a day or so) all advertisements were 100% of target. A week later the page popped out on the top 10. Really nice!

If you already have AdSense account, you should give it a try. Put AdSense banner somewhere on the page and look for the advertisements that appear on it. Make sure you don’t click on them, because that’s against Terms of Services and you might get your account banned. If you see highly relevant ads to that particular page then you’re good and your density is ok. Note that if you’re overdoing it, AdSense won’t tell you the truth, so be careful and keep it as natural as possible. Also be aware that if you change the content (edit the keywords or whatever) the AdSense bot won’t show immediate results and might take up to a day to get the new ads up, so don’t get panicked if the ads are still irrelevant even after the change was made.

Note that this is from my own experience and I don’t guarantee that it will work in your particular case as the standards for keyword density is different for each niche. You might try using products like Internet Business Promoter – software that dynamically analyzes the top ranking websites and give you advices on how to optimize the keyword density according to the currently top ranked websites. Note that if you don’t have good inbound links to that page with those keywords, onsite keyword density might not help a lot to your current rankings, but it will still get you some positions up on the index.

There are only few Golden Rules in website development, but the first and most important rule is that Content is Kind and if you have good content, you shall rule the web. That‘s very simple, and most of you might say that it can‘t be really that easy, but the truth is that Good Content is Never Easy.

Most webmasters cry on my shoulder that their websites don‘t have enough traffic and they give all their best to do Search Engine Optimization, but nothing really helps. In such times I always ask them one very simple question in which most of the times i get the plain old NO. Do you think your website has good quality content. Do you think that you‘re going to like what you find on your website if you were the visitor?

Content Creation is one of the most difficult things for webmasters and sometimes it requires much more skills than we have. In general most of my clients don‘t find any difference from Webmaster to Copy Editor and that‘s a big problem because they don‘t have anything in common. In reallity Webmasters are the people that keep you website and overall design up to date, but Content Writers like Copy Editors are the people that provide the content and this is not the Webmaster‘s responsibility!....+|+

Anyway, in most cases we can‘t afford to have good professional Copy Writers so we have to improvise and do whatever we can in order to have something. In such cases I‘m always trying to advice people to try to provide as highest quality content as possible and make their websites really contribute something to the Internet world and therefore have that thing outshine all other websites so that your website will be visible and valuable to people. If you have good quality content you will have good number of visitors because visitors go wherever the quality content is. The same issue is when you go to crappy website, then you don‘t return, but on the other hand when you visit some nice website with nice articles there or any other useful information that you‘re interested in, you bookmark it or even subscribe via RSS and you visit and revisit again and again. It is the same with all other people not just you.

I‘ll be honest with you people. Yes I did a lot of crappy sites myself, but when I sow the difference my view changed drastically. I believe that you‘re going to change also when you run your first successful website and you get about 300-500 regular daily visitors and a nice 20% + return rate. In such moments everything becomes easier and then the whole world changes as new opportunities arrive at your door and you can start monetizing your website and reinvesting in more and more improvements which on the other hand bring more and more visitors.

My advice to new webmasters is the following. Guys/Girls, please take it easy. Think before you do something. Write and Create content just like you have hundreds and even thousands of visitors a day. Make your website‘s content rich and easy to use. When you do this, with time your visitors will increase so much.

On my new websites (the ones that I don‘t pay for promotion), I‘m ob sering that after posting about 10-15 good quality articles in about month or two, I‘m getting steady increase of traffic from 40-50 people a day in the 3rd month, to about 100-150 in 6th month, and then the traffic almost doubles each month. Currently my highest traffic website is getting around 2000 daily visitors and that‘s really nice, but it has more than 300 quality articles that attract people to link to and bookmark so I‘m having really nice return rate and people are happy to revisit my websites.

A friend of mine tolled me this saying and I can‘t stop myself from mentioning it here "Build it and they will come". And its true saying. Content is king, and when you have good content you will rule the web