SEO Blog - Asia SEO Blog

It is imperative to make certain that your website is optimized for the search engines, but at the same time it is important not to forget the prospect of just who you are essentially seeking to attract – site visitors are not search engine Bots, they are human beings who are like me and you, visiting site to buy or having inquiry about your products and services or searching, with this regard whether we write content or placing keywords we should consider to not forget that point using spamming words over and over in order to attract the Bots not only might banned your site But ! It will reduce the sell!

When optimizing your site, you should make certain of some aspect that the content not only should include the most important key phrases of your products in the search and appearing at the top of SERPS, but that it should make” sells”. Whether this sale is a term to action by your site visitor, like call us now, sign up to our newsletter, getting the RSS feed from blog, or it encourages the website visitor to look further at your products, buy, offer or recommend to a friend, the real value of SEO is not only to use every available sources to bring traffic to your site but to make sure website is being optimized not for Bots but for real visitors, you should always keep bear in mind that each visitor to your site whether they arrive through a search engine query or through a Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign or link seeking answers to their questions or research , we do know that with billions of pages floating on the world wide web they will decide to stay or leave your website within 10 seconds or even less , It is not an easy task to convince them that they are in the right place if you have any spam looking content which it is being designed to please the Bots!
Furthermore! What you have to take under consideration is that website visitor directed to the information they are searching for, it is very crucial time as mentioned above they decide to stay or leave within 10 seconds, this is where the creation of landing pages are designed to take care of the issue, to put the precisely results base on visitor’s query on the search engines or Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign that is what the landing pages should be specifically optimized in content base on setting keywords destiny in order to turn every single visitor to stay on the site as well as considering the importance of a single call to action rather than a cluttered page which it confuses the website visitor. It is time to have one call to action on each landing page like fill out a feedback or contact form, take part in a poll, download a white paper, sign up to your mailing list?
But! What ever you choose you have to be certain that there is only one call to action on each landing page and not more! One call to action is also useful to track conversations
as well as results.

Author: Shahram Azin
http://www.asiaengine.com

There is no point in building a website unless there are visitors coming in. A major source of traffic for most sites on the Internet is search engines like Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Altavista and so on. Hence, by designing a search engine friendly site, you will be able to rank easily in search engines and obtain more visitors.
Major search engines use programs called crawlers or robots to index websites to list on their search result pages. They follow links to a page, reads the content of the page and record it in their own database, pulling up the listing as people search for it.

If you want to make your site indexed easily, you should avoid using frames on your website. Frames will only confuse search engine robots and they might even abandon your site because of that. Moreover, frames make it difficult for users to bookmark a specific page on your site without using long, complicated scripts.
Do not present important information in Flash movies or in images. Search engine robots can only read text on your source code so if you present important words in Flash movies and images rather than textual form, your search engine ranking will be affected dramatically.

Use meta tags accordingly on each and every page of your site so that search engine robots know at first glance what that particular page is about and whether or not to index it. By using meta tags, you are making the search engine robot’s job easier so they will crawl and index your site more frequently.
Stop using wrong HTML tags like <font> to style your page. Use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) instead because they are more effective and efficient. By using CSS, you can eliminate redundant HTML tags and make your pages much lighter and faster to load.

A lot of successful websites depend on returning visitors to account for a major part of their traffic. Returning visitors are easier to convert into paying customers because the more often they return to a site, the more trust they have in that site. The credibility issue just melts away. Hence, keep your visitors coming back to your site with the following methods:

1) Start a forum, chatroom or shoutbox

When you start a forum, chatroom or shoutbox, you are providing your visitors a place to voice their opinions and interact with their peers — all of them are visitors of your site. As conversations build up, a sense of community will also follow and your visitors will come back to your site almost religiously every day.

2) Start a web log (blog)

Keep an online journal, or more commonly known as a blog, on your site and keep it updated with latest news about yourself. Human beings are curious creatures and they will keep their eyes glued to the monitor if you post fresh news frequently. You will also build up your credibility as you are proving to them that there is also a real life person behind the website.

3) Carry out polls or surveys

Polls and surveys are other forms of interaction that you should definitely consider adding to your site. They provide a quick way for visitors to voice their opinions and to get involved in your website. Be sure to publish polls or surveys that are strongly relevant to the target market of your website to keep them interested to find out about the results.

4) Hold puzzles, quizzes and games

Just imagine how many office workers procrastinate at work every day, and you will be able to gauge how many people will keep visiting your site if you provide a very interesting or addicting way of entertainment. You can also hold competitions to award the high score winner to keep people trying continuously to earn the prize.

5) Update frequently with fresh content

Update your site frequently with fresh content so that every time your visitors come back, they will have something to read on your site. This is the most widely known and most effective method of attracting returning visitors, but this is also the least carried out one because of the laziness of webmasters. No one will want to browse a site that looks the same over ten years, so keep your site updated with fresh bites!

Every web surfer has encountered the dreaded 404 page not found error message.
The generic error page is horrible to look at and it does not encourage web visitors to explore more of your site.Imagine being able to setup a custom error message page that looked good, told the visitor what had gone wrong and then suggested some alternative links to other locations on your site, such as the home page, sitemap or even a search page.

If the visitor wanted to, they could then visit other parts of your site.It is very easy to setup a custom 404 error page (The 404 error is the error number returned when a page or directory is not found on your site). The easiest way to redirect visitors that encounter a 404 is to either send them to your sites home page or to your sitemap page We do this by placing a one line of code in your websites .htaccess file

ErrorDocument 404 /sitemap.html

This would redirect all 404 error messages to the sitemap page.

The path to the page you want to display, must already exist on your web server, otherwise the web server will tie itself up in a never ending loop.
The full path to the error page must be specified and it must be relative to the root path of that account (remember, placing a / at the front of a file name or directory specifies that it’s relative to the root directory).

To make a custom error page, simply create a page using your favorite webpage editor such as MS FrontPage or DreamWeaver. The page can contain anything you wish, such as images, links etc. Save the file as something easy to remember (such as 404errors.html)

I would then suggest you make a directory directly off your /public_html/ folder and call it “error” and place your error files in here.

This would now mean that your .htaccess command line would now look like:
Error Document 404 /error/404errors.html

Now whenever a 404 error was generated on your site, your custom error page will be displayed, and keep your web visitors happy.

In the upcoming article, I will expand on this idea, and show you how to you can receive an email notification that a 404 error has occurred on your site. It will tell you what caused the error, and the offending page. Allowing you to try and fix all broken links leading to your site.

UsabilityAccessibility and Usability issues

Since Googlebot is actually designed to simulate the behavior of an average Internet user, it will check web pages for accessibility and usability issues as well. In general, the algorithms identifying major problems of a web site are highly refined, thus errors, misused code or hard to comprehend layouts are all playing a role in deciding the ranking of the pages. While a few errors will most likely be ignored, major problems, site-wide navigational inconsistencies, and especially intentional misuse or even overuse of certain elements may very well lead to a decline in rankings.

Known issues

Accessibility and usability checks are heavily relying on browser compatibility, which in fact is an ever changing factor. Some practices may now be more widespread than they were about a year ago, yet still be viewed as a hindrance, because of a minority of web browsing software still can not display them correctly. Google is updating its algorithms and Googlebot constantly, thus is expanding the methods a web site may utilize in its design to get its content properly indexed. The results try to be on par with the majority and technical advancements. Shockwave Flash content is analyzed for its textual content, javascript based links are followed the same as anchor text links ( although they don’t pass any parameters ), image maps, information in the <NOFRAMES> tag, and other advancements in standards are evaluated in the same manner for relevance and trust. However the broader range of browsers a web site can serve, the more importance it will be given to. There is still a hierarchy in judging usability issues, rendering the most accessible sites above the specialized designs. For example, text link references will weigh more than image based links, references buried in heavy code will likely to be followed at a slower rate than easy to access navigation.

+ Resolution: The W3C standard for web pages is a good hint on whether web sites are ready to be evaluated by Googlebot, based on the simulated user experience. While a page does not need to comply with all standards, major errors, and problems that are not only browser specific differences will less likely be ignored. Asking yourself the question whether your web site is easy to use, and whether it is accessible with most common web browsers is also a hint. A simple checklist might be to watch out for broken links, orphaned pages, loading time, number of links within the navigation, and the overall navigation communicating a consistent and coherent page hierarchy, images being labeled with ALT tags, the use of unique TITLE and META description tags, proper page encoding settings, language settings, text of readable size and color, no hidden text, no overuse of anchor text in links, no cloaking or off-screen content, no invisible layers, no redirect chains, no overuse of keywords to an extent where the content becomes meaningless, use of all necessary but also closing of all HTML tags, use of proper layout emphasizing the parts unique to a page, and the code not relying on yet to become standard practices. While the list of things to keep an eye out for could seem long, once thought over, the knowledge of web page coding and some common sense applied will save most pages from becoming a burden to your web site, or the visitor trying to decipher them. The most common errors are still the most obvious ones, with misused or vital but forgotten HTML code leading the list of problems, and cause many of the instances of a drop in rankings.