Don’t Forget Your Internal Links

Much has been said about getting third party links to your blog or website in any effort to improve page ranking, in this post I will go through how to use internal links in the best way possible. For good examples you can check the Webbhotell site and their seo posts.

There are external links, but internal links are just as important.  If you have a number of pages in your site, the objective should be a homogenous page ranking of all these pages, not just your homepage.  On many sites, it’s not unusual to have different Google page ranks in your pages. So doing SEO for all pages can be challenge.

Internal linking is a proven effective way to achieve this.  Your anchor text or hyperlinked text of your link should be your keywords as this can signal search engines the type of content in your page.  Get our internal pages linked through these keywords in articles to direct visitors to more important pages in your website. Don’t overlink! Select the most important pages and place them on the frontpage, where most PR is. Try to merge pages into one for best PR. The more links you have, the lower PR you will get per page. In the longrun that can affect your rankings.

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Managing Comments in Blogs

Visitor comments on your blog can be a rich source of interesting content for your blog. Most bloggers edit comments to correct spelling and grammar, take out abusive language or just make them more interesting.  Many blogs allow comments from visitors.  And there are just as many that don’t.  I know of some bloggers that have issues with comments and so promptly disallow it even on blog platforms that do.  So how can you make your blog site interesting without comments?

You can use programs like ForumUp that allows you to attach a free forum on your blog. That way, you can allow your visitors to click on the forum link where they can post their comments.  Another is to invite readers to submit articles as guest writers to your blog.  You can then edit these articles and post them.  Just make sure to acknowledge your guest writers.

Hope for Flash Based Websites to Rank High

Flash designers might rejoice that Google does index flash sites.  But for the webmaster, bear in mind that Flash sites will require a lot more tweaking than HTML pages to get a content-based site rank high.  Search engine crawlers use your site’s text content to determine relevancy and while Google can now parse SWF files to see textual content in the file, most Flash animation just make it difficult if not impossible for Google to make out the text right. 

Most, if not all, Flash developers enjoy breaking up text and graphic elements for animation effects and this can confuse Google’s parsing algorithms.
If you need to have that fancy Flash for your website, try to discourage your Flash developers from too much text animation.  Flash is perhaps the best thing to happen in making your website look great.  But just don’t expect to get great SEO results.

Getting Your Flash Website to Rank Well

It can be done.  While Flash pages remain a challenge to optimize in search engines, it is interesting to note that some websites with all-Flash pages rank high on Google.  Search for “chocolate” and the number 1 and 2 sites are Godiva and Hershey – sites with no text and all Flash.  So what’s giving them a high Google presence?  It’s all about linkage.

It looks like the primary search algorithms are about optimized website content, but on getting the most relevant content to a search.  That means they have the most links from relevant chocolate sites. 

From blogs, forums and websites that deal with the subject, the brand reputation seems to do the trick.  This may have evolved over time and have a brand name that’s most recognizable even outside of online presence.  Unless you have that much market awareness of your product, it’s still safer to have a mix of Flash and text-rich HTML pages. This is more SEO-friendly than having an all-Flash website.

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Flash and SEO, like Oil and Water

One of the worst nightmares of any SEO practitioner is to learn that the site he has labored to get a high Google page rank has been upgraded with all Flash pages.  That essentially throws all the SEO work out the window.  While Google has enhanced its search engine algorithms to recognize and index Flash based websites, there’s still no evidence that SEO works on them.

Using Flash no doubt creates an engaging and appealing website, if the designer knows what to do with it.  While SEO can be done, here are some tips to make it even more SEO friendly.

• Continue to use keyword-descriptive page titles and meta tags.
• Embed your flash file into HTML pages with regular text links on your internal pages.  Otherwise, create non-Flash versions of your site or create text representations using noembed tags.
• Rather than having your entire site in one Flash site, break it up into different Flash files embedded on HTML pages.
• Use JavaScript plug-in for detecting Flash that are XHTML compliant.  They are said to be better than non embedded tags.

Write Articles as a Guest Writer to Bring Traffic to Your Blog

You may notice that some blogs have sections with interesting write-ups on a topic related to the blog.  These are guest writers who submit articles to bloggers containing a back link to their own blog sites.  If the article is well written and generates interest in people visiting the blog, they are almost certain to click on the blog’s URL on the article to learn more about what the guest writer is talking about.

One tip about writing such articles is to make them both interesting and neutral without sounding like your advertising your own site.  A 400-600 word articles is just fine and you can email that to as many colleagues you know have blog sites that share the same interests as yours.  You’d be surprised that many bloggers would welcome having an interesting article on their site.

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Meta tags + Good Site Content = High Page Rank

Editing your HTML meta-tags is the easiest SEO method in the book. Of course you need to learn about HTML coding first but even graphical web development tools that allows web design without HTML coding can do the job.  Just go to HTML or source code view mode and you’ll see your meta-tags. You can then edit right there by inserting your keywords.

But be sure your meta-tags match your site’s content.  Nothing can be more disappointing to your visitors than to get to your site only to find your content doesn’t match or is different from what it was searched for.  There’s really no substitute for having good site content.  And your meta-tags that properly match is a good SEO trick.  But being tricky is another thing.

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Yahoo Answers and Blogwalking Increase Traffic to Your Site

Getting people to visit your site and increase traffic to it is always the aim of many bloggers.  Doing SEO methods to increase your page rank can get this done.  Back linking is a sure SEO method that is often left out by novice webmasters. 

Blogwalking  can do that .  It means visiting blog sites that interest you and posting comments with your URL as a user signature.  You can also register as a member in forums that share your interest and get your signature or avatar to contain your blog’s address. Just make sure the site allows it.

Then you can get to Yahoo Answers and try to contribute your share to answer questions leaving you blog site name and URL below your post.  You don’t have to limit yourself to Yahoo, as there are many other question and answer sites that allow visitors to share their insights.

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An SEO Trick – Deliberate Type Error

There are SEO methods that increase your page rank and there are SEO tricks that further boost your ranking.  Seldom used, you should take advantage of this trick.  Once everybody does it, you loose the edge.

It is common knowledge that using the right keywords can boost your page rank.  The trick like is misspelling your keywords on top of having the correctly spelled ones.  If your keyword, for instance is “audiophile music,” you can have articles on your pages with misspelled “audofile music” or “audiophile musc.”  Get at least 5 misspellings of the phrase which you think are common errors that people could make in searching for this topic.  So when surfers mistype it on a Google search, your site gets to land first page.  This trick is often called TYPO among SEO circles.

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Benefits of Having Unique Content in your Blogs

The internet is really all about content, be they images, text, animation or video or a mix thereof.  Your blog site will certainly benefit from articles or posts with interesting, entertaining and thought-provoking content.  They are sure to attract visitors and even get other blog owners to link to your site.  But it should stand out above other blogs of the same content.  You need to be unique. 

Quality writing and original posts create a steady influx of readers to your site. Having unique content can also prevent penalties that some search engines like Google might otherwise impose if your site has duplicate content with one that has a high page rank.  Just be sure that you sustain your site’s content uniqueness.  The last you want is to lose your reader base that’s you’ve taken pains to build up.