Visualfusion.Biz

Have you ever been browsing a website and seen an empty box on the top or side of the page that contained the words “Your ad here”? These are empty ad spaces just waiting to be purchased by site owners like yourself. Now imagine if you could find sites like this in your niche that had a decent amount of daily traffic. This is a great way to get backlinks and targeted traffic from sites that are looking for people to advertise on their site. Perhaps the best part about this kind of advertising is that you can rent ad space on a site for literally $1 per month!

If you find a new forum or blog that is in need of advertisers you may be able to get an incredible deal on advertising, and while these sites may not be able to offer hundreds of visitors per day, every visitor counts, and when compared to PPC traffic this kind of website marketing is far more affordable. Of course the more attractive your banner is, the more effective your banner advertising will be. You can also work with the site owner to see if they will let you move your ad to a particular part of the page for a higher click through rate.

SEO can really be broken down into three essential areas: Architecture, Content, and Links. These are the basics of SEO that you need to understand and get right first. Let’s take a look at some key points to understand in each of these main areas.
Architecture – Can Your Site Be Crawled?

One of the first problems that a website has to address is whether or not their site can actually be crawled by the search engine spiders. You can have the best content in the world, but if the search engine spiders can’t get to it you won’t reap the benefits! Here are some things you can do to help your site be more crawl-able:

1. Avoid things like JavaScript or Flash navigation. Both of these kinds of navigation are not crawled very well by search engines at this time. This could change in the future, but for now it’s best to just avoid JavaScript and Flash navigations.
2. Keep your site’s architecture as flat as possible. Don’t have tons of levels in your architecture. Keep pages as close to the root as possible.
3. Stay away from parameter strings in URLs. By having parameter strings in URLs you could have multiple versions of the same content and will have to learn how to properly use the canonical element. You can avoid this by not using parameters. Instead, have a static URL for each page whenever possible.
4. Use internal linking appropriately. Whenever it makes sense, link to other pages in your site from within the content of the page. Don’t just rely on your navigation to get people (and search engine spiders) to where you want them to go. (More about internal linking.)
5. Sitemaps are your friends. Make sure your site has both an HTML and XML sitemap. (More about sitemaps).

Content – Is It Optimized?

Once you have your website’s architecture set up the right way, the next step is to make sure that your content is well-optimized to help your site rank for your main keyword phrases. Here are a few basic guidelines to follow:

1. Don’t target too many phrases per page. You may have a list of 50 keywords you want to target, but you should only focus on 2-3 main phrases per page. Create other pages around additional phrases as needed.
2. No spammy stuff! Don’t do any keyword stuffing, alt stuffing, meta spamming, or any other spammy techniques. They don’t really work well anymore anyway.
3. Use your keyword phrases in titles, header tags, etc. By using your keyword phrases in your titles and header tags you can give them more emphasis.
4. Use your keywords in your content. Don’t just rely on your titles and header tags. Don’t overdo it; make the text read naturally but make sure you include your keywords and variations of them in the content.

Links – Getting Juice from Other Sites

Setting your site up the right way is one step, but getting traffic to your website takes a lot more than just using keywords on your pages. The other big key to getting a good rank on the search engines is to get other sites linking to you. By getting these links you are showing that your site has credibility and is worth ranking well. Here are a few quick tips to keep in mind when you’re building links:

1. Use a variety of techniques. There are a lot of things you can do to build links: directories, articles, social bookmarking, forums … the list goes on and on. Mix up what you’re doing and get a variety of link types coming into your site. (More about link building)
2. Spread your links over a lot of domains. It’s important to get a lot of links, but it’s also important to get a lot of links spread over many domains. If you follow tip #1 this shouldn’t be much of a problem for you.
3. Use keywords in your anchor text. One problem that I’ve seen over and over is that someone will build links to their site using either their name, their business name, or their URL. This is nice if that’s what you want to rank for, but if you want to rank for a keyword phrase you have to use that phrase as the anchor text of your link.
4. Use a variety of anchors. Don’t just use the same keyword phrase over and over again. Mix it up so that you aren’t spamming one phrase too much. This will help your link building look more natural.
5. The work is never done. Don’t think you can just submit to a bunch of directories and your work is over. SEO is an ongoing process.

While these tips don’t cover everything you need to know about the three main areas of search engine optimization, this is enough to get you started. Spend some time looking over your site to make sure that you are doing these basics. Then, if you want, you can try to get a little fancy.

Many businesses don’t think SEO is difficult, and they are right. It’s not rocket science, but it does require applied strategy, testing, and a lot of patience. Faced with the choice of going all out SEO (in or out of house), or putting it into the hands of a few part-timers to cut costs, some choose the latter. They believe the knowledge to rank a website is now mainstream enough that anybody can do it. A couple of interns would have no problem fixing title tags on a website, but unfortunately for that company, search engine marketing has advanced beyond title and description tags.

It is great news that many companies are seeing value in SEO and SEM. It makes it easier for companies like SEO.com to persuade people to let us do what works. But the basic nature of some SEO services has led some to question whether or not the investment is worth it. It is tempting to view SEO as simply a task that once achieved by a first page ranking can be eliminated or at least outsourced for cheap.

So why is this misguided thinking?

SEO has become something much bigger than most people realize. This is why some use the term ‘SEM’ (search engine marketing), or ‘online marketing’, instead of SEO. SEO plays a very important part in what we do, but when you take into account our people who run PPC campaigns for clients, optimize site layouts for better conversion rates, re-design websites for better usability, and whatever else we do, you have something resembling a full-service web marketing firm.

In SEO there are a lot of little things we can tweak to help a site rank better. This includes improving a site’s URL structure by making it more SEO friendly. The problem is, if you do this incorrectly your rankings could drop significantly and it could take a long time to make a full recovery.

Use the checklist below to first make sure it’s worth it to change your URL structure. If you decide it is, the rest of the checklist will help you to make sure you update everything you should. This will help to reduce your ranking drops (or at least the length of time those drops last).
Make Sure You Are Actually Changing to Something Better

Sometimes it is a good idea to change your URL structure, but sometimes you’re better off leaving things alone. Here are some examples of when it might be a good idea:
Switching from a dynamic URL structure to a static URL structure

The problem with a dynamic URL structure is that you can end up with lots of different variations of the URL getting indexed. This can potentially create a huge duplicate content problem and split your link value. Changing your URLs to a static structure will give you one URL for each product or page on your site. This makes things a lot cleaner and helps to avoid splitting your link value between multiple URLs.

Just changing from dynamic to static isn’t enough of a reason to change your URL structure, though. You still need to make sure that you’re changing to URLs that are more descriptive and actually SEO friendly.
Making your URLs more meaningful/SEO friendly

I see a lot of sites with URLs that don’t explain what the page is about at all, even those with static URLs. For example, what does this URL tell you about the page: www.siteexample.com/store/prod1.html

If your answer was “Not much,” you’re right. Sure, you might be able to assume that it’s a product page, but you don’t know anything about the product.

If your site currently uses this kind of structure, it could be worth changing your URLs to make them more SEO friendly and meaningful to your audience. In other words, use some keywords. Use an appropriate keyword phrase in your URL and it will improve your SEO efforts and make the URL more user-friendly for your visitors.
When to leave things alone

Just as there are situations when you should consider making changes, there are also situations when you should think about holding off. For example, if your site is already ranking really well, you may want to leave your URLs alone.

Sure, there are “ideal situations” in SEO where everything is perfectly optimized, but if you already rank well, you could be better off leaving things alone. This is where consulting with a qualified SEO can be extremely valuable since it is a very case-by-case thing.

If you decide you should proceed with changing your URLs, the rest of the checklist items can help you to lessen the duration of any ranking drops you experience.
301 Redirect Old URLs to New URLs

If you’ve done any reading about SEO, you’ve likely heard about 301 redirects. A 301 redirect is what you use to signal the search engines that you have permanently changed the location of a URL.

So if you’re going to change your URL structure, you have to make sure that you put 301s in place to redirect all of the old URLs to the new URLs. Otherwise, you’re going to send all of that previously accumulated link value to pages that give a 404 error and you’ll basically lose any link value those pages had.

Keep in mind that links that are 301ed lose some of their link value. This is one reason why you can almost always expect a drop in rankings when you change your URL structure.
Update XML Sitemap and Resubmit to Webmaster Accounts

Once you’ve updated your URLs and put your 301 redirects in place, you should also update your XML sitemap and resubmit it to the search engines through the various webmaster tools accounts. This alerts the search engines to the changes in the site and says they should come crawl it again.

Doing this can help your site to get re-indexed faster, which can help your rankings come back faster. The sooner the search engines realize you’ve made a permanent change the better!
Update All Internal Links

Probably the most time-consuming task of updating URL structure is making sure that all of the internal links in your site are updated to point to the new URLs.

You may be thinking, “I set up 301 redirects to take care of this. Why should I update all of my internal links as well?” It’s a good question. Here are a couple of reasons why you should do it

* Maintain all your internal link value. Remember what I said before about links that are 301ed losing some value? There isn’t a lot you can do about external pages linking to you, but you can retain all of the internal link value if you update the links.
* Avoid visitor confusion. If a visitor comes to your site with a slow Internet connection, it’ll be even slower when they click on a link that just redirects them. If this happens, they will likely just leave your site.

When you’re updating your internal links you should start with your navigation, footer links, and HTML sitemap. From there you’ll need to go through and clean up all of your contextual links.

Google Webmaster Tools has a tool that can help with this. Just go to ‘Your site on the Web’ and then ‘Internal links’ and you’ll see a page like this:

Google Webmaster Tools – Internal Links

From here you can enter the URL you want to find links to and the tool will give you a list of the pages that have links to that URL. You might not find everything this way, but it is a great place to start.
Is It Worth It?

There are plenty of situations where cleaning up a site’s URL structure can really help it rank better. But before you go through all the trouble, take some time to evaluate your site’s structure to determine if it is really going to be worth it. Personally, I’d look at everything else I could change before I completely change a site’s URL structure.

If your site already ranks well and has an okay URL structure, you may want to leave it alone. Also keep in mind that almost any time you make URL changes, you’re going to see a drop in rankings. It’s hard to say how long this will last, because even different pages on the same site can be affected more than others.

Once you have made the above changes you should track your rankings frequently. Also keep an eye on search results to see when the search engines show your updated URL. This is a good indicator that things are starting to iron themselves out.

A keyword can be defined as a word or phrase that can be utilized in searching for a website.  Keywords can be placed in titles, a body of text, online catalogs, abstracts, indexes, notes and subject headings. Using the right keywords is very important, and keyword optimization, if done correctly, will aid in driving traffic to your site. In order to know which keywords will be most effective for your site, there are a few things that need to be done:
• Examine your websites’ first page; make sure that it contains a central theme.
• Find the words or phrases that best describe the content on the websites’ first page.
• Make a list of the aforementioned words and/or phrases.
• Do not use highly popular keywords that are being used by a thousand other websites.
• Figure out the popularity of the words you have chosen by utilizing a keyword directory or one of the many keyword suggestion tools.
• You can now narrow your list down to just a few optimal words.

Use the above process for every one of your pages, and you will be able to more effectively optimize the power of your keywords.  Remember that when you are determining what keywords will work best for your site, that there are different types of keywords.  Knowing about each type will aid in the optimization of your keywords.

When determining what words to use as your keywords, you should first determine what the focus of your website is, what value the websites’ information has to offer, as well as who your target audience is.  Knowing these particulars in advance will help you to choose keywords that will be optimal for your website.

Types of Keywords

Generally, keywords can be grouped into three different categories.  These categories are as follows:

• Theme Keywords- these types of keywords are used to target a highly specific audience of people.  They are normally used on every single page of the site, and are quite effective at boosting page rank.
• Single-word Keywords-these types of keywords are normally used between 5 and 7 times on a page, and are used to target a wide, general audience.
• Multiple-word Keywords- these types of keywords, sometimes referred to as “keyword phrases”, are used to target a specific audience, usually in a specific location.  These types of keywords are also good at improving page rank.

Tools to Use

There are many tools available that will allow you to examine just which keywords are overused, which ones are not, and which keywords will best benefit you and your website.  Since there are so many tools available, you will need to figure out the one that you are more comfortable using.  Some keyword tools are free, while for others there is a charge.  Some of the tools that can help you find good keywords for your site are:

• Keyword Search Tools
• Keyword Research Tools
• Keyword Lists
• Keyword Software
• Keyword Databases

All of these tools can be located on the World Wide Web, and will help you in researching certain keywords and phrases and that you may wish to use for your website.

Although finding good, effective keywords can prove to be a bit time consuming, it is better to invest a little more time in order to achieve the best results.  Rushing through the process of choosing keywords and incorporating them into the content of your site will just be wasted time, as it will not get traffic to your site, nor will it improve your page rankings with the search engines.

With so many tools and processes available for you to use in your quest to find the right keywords, with a bit of time and patience you should be able to get your site optimized with the right keywords that will prove to be highly effective.  Remember that good keywords and keyword phrases are vital to the life of your website.  Make the task of finding good keywords a top priority when it comes to your website.  You may be pleasantly surprised when your websites’ traffic increases and your page rank goes up with the search engines; all because of a few, well-placed keywords!

Normal wisdom says that if you use Flash in a web site it will hurt your search engine placement. This is due primarily to search engines having a hard time to index Flash content. But with a little ingenuity we can use that very problem to our advantage.

Let’s first take a look at how search engine indexing can cause you problems on your web site.

Most web sites are built up of menus and context areas. The menus are frequently text based, making them easy to update or change. The content is dependent on our writing creativity. Both of these can lead to search engine indexing trouble.

Search Engines look through the text on your pages, menus as well as content and they create their index on what they find. So far so good. But just how do the search engines do this? They can’t look at your page and decide which is the main content area visually, so they simply start at the top of the code and work down.

If your site follows the standard pattern of a navigation bar on either the top or down the left side of the page and uses a table structure to achieve this, then your whole nav bar will be read and indexed before your main content area. If your site has a lot of variation then this shouldn’t be a problem. But what if your site is focused on one subject and your navigation bar tends to repeat words? As an example you may have a site that sells watches and your nav bar may read like this: Men’s Watches, Ladies Watches, Sport Watches, etc. You can see how easy it is to repeat that word Watches.

Search engines like to give points to sites that contain valuable content that is easily categorized and recognizable to visitors, but they also take away points for keyword spamming. In the above Watch example, the nav bar could easily cause your page to be listed as a keyword spammer.

Here is the first Flash Trick to improve your ranking. Create the navigation bar in Flash. This way all those repeating words are now hidden from the search engine spiders. As an added benefit the code taken up by the Flash will probably be less than the code used in the text based nav bar. This will help the search engine spiders to focus on the main content area of your page

Let’s now look at another common problem with search engine indexing. In this example consider a shopping site selling the same watches as in our previous example. Each watch page will have a description of the individual watch, and that is fine. But each page may also have “boiler plate” text as well. There may possibly be a standard description for a particular watch brand, or possibly warranty or shipping information included on the page.

Another red flag that goes up for the search engine spiders is text repeating from page to page. The more distinct each page is the more likely the search engines will consider the text as relevant. If there is too much repeated text, the search engines may even drop all the pages that they believe have duplicated text. Not a good situation, especially if you don’t want to be forced into creating completely original text for every page on your site.

Here is Flash Trick number two. Keep all the distinct content on your pages as html text and convert any repeating text areas into Flash files that are placed into the pages. This way, only the distinct text is visible to the search engines and your repeating text is hidden in the Flash file. Any text that you tend to repeat from page to page is a prime candidate for the Flash treatment.

So take a look through your web site. Do you have text menus that use repetitive words? Do you use boiler plate text, or have repeated text areas on several pages? If so you should let Flash’s disadvantage of being search engine unfriendly become your advantage on making a search engine friendly site.