First, when choosing a domain name, make sure to use a keyword or a variation of one of your keywords in the name. If your first choice is taken (and it likely will be), add a related word before or after the keyword.

For example, if you’re aiming to be the top seller of mardi gras beads online, mardigrasbeads.com is likely taken. Choose bestmardigrabeads.com, or mardigrapartybeads.com or a similar name. Look at alternative Top Level Domain (TLD) suffix, such as .net.

If you already have a company main page, you may want to set up another page to link to your home page and gather more hits. You may choose a blog, an ecommerce page, an article site for expert advice, a landing page or a forum. Any of these can be configured for the best SEO effectiveness.

Some basic hints are to use text rather than pictures when possible. Use text as links, don’t provide an image for the viewer to click. Put labels under the photos that spiders will pick up.

You’ll want to include a sitemap of your page, both HTML and XML. The search engines use the XML graphical representation of your site to gather information about your site; especially important if you have a new site.

Don’t use lots of Flash if you want to be highly ranked on the searches. Google and other search engines still can’t find the links and text hidden in a graphic format like Flash. The worst offenders are those who construct their sites with Flash – not search engine friendly.

Don’t duplicate content. In other words, don’t have the same paragraphs of text or the same articles on two different pages of your site, and don’t post an article on your site and submit the same article to a directory. Pages that duplicate content are ranked lower and a seen as less valid and valuable. Keep your content unique.

The professionals here at Webdatamation can make SEO work for you by using the best SEO practices when building your site.

Some webmasters get a great site, make sure it’s got the right structure for search engines and uses the appropriate elements, then they get stuck.

In order to really catch the attention of the search engine crawlers, you also need to provide relevant and authoritative content to show not just those search engines, but also the site visitors, that you have significant and relevant things to contribute about your niche.

Write content-driven articles with actual value for your readers. Make the articles relevant with information that will help your readers.

What kind of content could you provide? How about the most important industry trends, the hottest products, where is current research going, a list of the best resources in your niche, a top ten ideas list, a how-to guide related to your niche, or a planning guide.

Using the keyword research you did to create your site, decide on the most valuable keywords to use, and wisely sprinkle them throughout the copy. A good rule of thumb for the basic SEO writing is to use the keyword in the first sentence, then in the second paragraph. Skip the third paragraph, use it in the fourth and in the final paragraph. An average article on the web is between 300 and 500 words, and an optimized article will use the keyword approximately once for every 100 words.

Sometimes good writing is beyond the average webmaster. If this is true for you, hire out your writing to a good copywriter. Just make sure they understand optimization and do it right for you.

Another mistake rookies make is ignoring the tags: header tags, title tags, link anchor text, and meta descriptions. Make these tags keyword rich as well.

While you want your website to pop with catchy introductions and pithy prose that attracts the eye, when it comes to grabbing the interest of search engine spiders, a few small paragraphs of text on a graphics-rich page is not going to cut it.

Some webmasters get a great site, make sure it’s got the right structure for search engines and uses the appropriate elements, then they get stuck.

In order to really catch the attention of the search engine crawlers, you also need to provide relevant and authoritative content to show not just those search engines, but also the site visitors, that you have significant and relevant things to contribute about your niche.

Write content-driven articles with actual value for your readers. Make the articles relevant with information that will help your readers.

What kind of content could you provide? How about the most important industry trends, the hottest products, where is current research going, a list of the best resources in your niche, a top ten ideas list, a how-to guide related to your niche, or a planning guide.

Using the keyword research you did to create your site, decide on the most valuable keywords to use, and wisely sprinkle them throughout the copy. A good rule of thumb for the basic SEO writing is to use the keyword in the first sentence, then in the second paragraph. Skip the third paragraph, use it in the fourth and in the final paragraph. An average article on the web is between 300 and 500 words, and an optimized article will use the keyword approximately once for every 100 words.

Sometimes good writing is beyond the average webmaster. If this is true for you, hire out your writing to a good copywriter. Just make sure they understand optimization and do it right for you.

Another mistake rookies make is ignoring the tags: header tags, title tags, link anchor text, and meta descriptions. Make these tags keyword rich as well.

But don’t let your SEO efforts stop there. Searchers on the internet are becoming more particular – they don’t want to comb through so many results. Many know that general keywords give them irrelevant returns. So searchers are using sentences, different phrases that have been used before, and more specific inquiries to try to get to the information they want.

This creates an opportunity for you as a businesses. Although these longer keywords – or more correctly, keyword phrases don’t get the large number of hits individually, combined together, they now drive half of internet traffic. More than half of the searchers on the internet use three or more words to get what they want.

So as a marketer on the internet, look at your primary keywords and then begin creating phrases that include those words, but are more specific and unique to your business. Between 20 and 25 percent of Google’s searches are unique – they’ve never been searched in exactly that way before. So you want to grab whatever part of that search you can and attempt to make it relevant to your site.

As you become more specific, you have fewer pages competing for those longer phrases, and that means your site has a better chance of being seen.

Use the shorter keywords you’ve already established as being relevant, and interlink those words with longer phrases. If your site sells tulip bulbs, for example, you likely have already chosen the keywords “tulip bulbs” to market with SEO.

Now, optimize those keywords by building on them. Pick up more traffic by integrating such phrases as “authentic Holland tulip bulbs,” “biggest blossoms tulip bulbs,” “black tulip bulbs,” “how to plant tulip bulbs,” and “how do I find good tulip bulbs.”

Besides displaying your products for sale, consider building short (200 – 300 word) content pages answering queries, then also feature products on those pages. Have easy links to the rest of your site, and make an attractive landing page. Link to your related pages.

As with all SEO, you’ll need to do continual revisions and updates to stay ahead of the search game, but using long tailed keywords to help capture those millions of unique searches that may drive more hits to your site.

As we all know, Google is committed to retaining that top billing, and they have responded to Bing and created some innovations of their own. Bottom line for both search engines is more relevant results for their users, and that means that SEO – search engine optimization — is even more important than ever.

While details will be coming forward for the next many months, many bloggers and some other sites have noticed a drop in their SERP rankings with Caffeine and Bing. This doesn’t need to happen, however.

In fact, smaller websites actually have a better chance of raising their rankings, if they use carefully targeted SEO.

Relevant Content
Good content becomes even more important than it has been in the past. If your site can match more precisely what the user wants to find, then you have a better chance of a high ranking.

Be specific in your content pages, and they will have a better chance of rising to the top. Carefully choose your keywords; if anything, specific keywords have become more important.

Be sure to include long tail keywords that get specific about your offerings: red mardi gras beads for parties instead of mardi gras beads or party beads. Think about brands, too: Canon digital cameras instead of digital cameras.

The titles of your pages are important. Each page should have a unique title specifically matched to the content you’re featuring. And you don’t want to ignore the Meta descriptions, even though they still don’t figure into the SEO searches. But if your page lands high up on that SERP, then you want to have an engaging, accurate and catchy Meta description to encourage the click.

The bottom line – although it will take more months to really see how Caffeine and Bing are going to respond, SEO continues to be highly important to web design. Money spent on SEO is money well invested, with the new search engines as much as the old.

Just remember that every other business and individual is also feeling the pinch. They want to find the right items to fill their needs without wasting money or time on irrelevant or non-vital products or services.

In order to survive and even thrive in this economy, a business needs to become essential to its customers. Small businesses have the advantage of being able to change course quickly to adapt to changing circumstances, where large businesses may take a long period of time to implement any reasonable change. So are there ways your business needs to adjust?

Examine the services and products that you offer. Can they be adjusted or improved to appeal to those on a tight budget? Can you offer an introductory value service to let people see what you have to offer? Do you cater to a specific niche or to a well-off audience? In that case, you may not feel the same pinch that other businesses do.

No matter what product or service you offer, you’ll need to get the word out to potential customers. Wise marketing is one important key to differentiating yourself from the crowd. While other businesses are pulling back from marketing efforts, you can step in to fill that gap.

Use SEO – search engine optimization – online advertising for a relatively inexpensive, organic marketing method, giving you value for your dollar and introducing potential customers to your products and services. SEO marketing through techniques such as article placement, directories, social networking links, and refreshing your website with fresh, SEO copy will raise your placement on SERPs – Search Engine Return Pages – and send more customers to your website.

Once customers reach your website, be sure you provide excellent, persuasive reasons for them to use your product or service. Let them see why they need what you have to offer, and you’ll find the way to thrive despite the tough economy.

Piwik is a PHP-MySql based program. In order to get started, you have to first download this software from their website and get it installed on your own web server. It just takes as less as 5 minutes to set things up and get going. At the end of the set up process, the software generates a javascript code. You just need to copy and paste this code onto the web pages that you would want to track. There is also a plugin that would automate this process for you! Simple?

Okay, you would still probably argue that Google analytics is the most popular amongst all and that Piwik is just no big deal. However, let me mention here that alternative open source web analytics solutions have their own advantages:

The software is installed on your own server and your sensitive corporate data prevented from being exposed to third party websites
Provides a more professional look and feel, does not have to connect to a third party site for analytics
More manageable and maintainable

Piwik is one such software that not only promises, but also delivers. Being an excellent alternative to Google analytics, Piwik is unique and stands out the rest. Here is a list of features that would make you pick Piwik:

If you are a developer, you can build your own plugins with Piwik! It allows you to add and remove features. Yes, Piwik’s features are coded inside plugins!
You can publish your data in a number of formats including the most popular ones: xml, json, php, csv, etc.
The user interface of Piwik is fully customizable. Creating a report in Piwik is as easy as dragging and dropping widgets into their respective placeholders.
Easily embed graphs and charts in your website dashboard or blog
The graphs are interactive and you can view brief stats just by rolling your mouse over them!

Piwik may be a new kid on the block, but is gaining instant popularity. The official blog is updated on a regular basis and the Piwik team is trying hard to come up with more new exciting features.

I would pick Piwik for now. At 1.9 MB, what more can I ask for? You have any questions?

There are a number of strategies through which one can optimize their own website. Of these, the one that is worth mentioning is the “Cloud”. Many of you might have this question in your mind as to, “what is a cloud?” and “what does a cloud has to do in SEO?” Well, let me throw some light on this. Clouds can be of many types, such as, profile clouds, link clouds, content clouds and so on. However, the most commonly, or rather the only form of cloud used or discussed in the SEO works is the tag cloud. When you are looking in some website page, you must have come across a section headed “Tags”. Under this head you will see a bunch of words, placed one after another, some appearing small in size, whereas, some big and bold. The difference in the size is dependent on the number of times each word or tag has been associated with an item. This whole section is called ‘word cloud’ or sometimes called ‘tag cloud’. In general, the tag cloud helps a visitor to have an idea about the well-liked tags that are present in that particular site. The individual word or tag is actually linked to a page where you will get contents related to the tag you clicked.

This has been a very useful tool for search engine optimization and is gaining widespread acceptance by websites who want to optimize their keywords for search engines. Actually, the whole idea behind a tag cloud is to help you “visualize” content that is most relevant to a websites based on certain keywords or the keywords you searched for.

However, I am sure, you might have come across a funny situation where you have seen a website having certain keywords in its tag cloud in the boldest forms and yet it does not contain any content related to that keyword! For those of you, who have not, watch out!

The most popular search engine spiders cannot read JavaScript or images, just as they read and process plain text. However since having a tag cloud requires some logistic optimizations on keyword history, such clouds are represented by either using JavaScript code or images. This accounts for a cloud that contains misleading tags. The answer to this problem is simple; pictures alone DO NOT best define your website. No, they are not at all friendly to search engines. They may be professional enough to attract the solitary attention of a friendly customer but they are like alien material for crawlers and spiders!

The best practice is to make good use of the “alt” and “title” tags for your images. This will allow the web spiders to crawl your web page in the most efficient manner and mine information from the content of your website. Identify your perception of the tag cloud; for example, which keywords should be bolder, and then compare it with the actual results. Modify or edit the “alt” or “title” tags accordingly.

If you spend some time on this, you will soon come up with satisfying results. Yes, “Tag” is the new SEO language that is creating waves, why shouldn’t you capitalize?

There are a number of misconceptions in selecting the right and relevant keywords, which, if not checked, can ruin the entire optimization process. Among the various misconceptions, the most common one is that bigger keywords are better. However, this is not true always. Suppose you are a life coach and you are trying to optimize your personal life-coaching website. Therefore, in this case, you can use “life coach” as the appropriate keyword for the site, which is small yet carries a lot of meaning to it.

Keywords should be very specific and should flawlessly relate to the products or the services that are being offered. One can even use keywords in phrases, but the phrases should be in small meaningful sentence format. Moreover, keywords should be such that have high frequency demands and low competition. High keyword frequency can also be defined as those, which are entered in the search bar while searching in any search engine and can draw high traffic. On the other hand, low keyword competition indicates lower number of websites using the same keywords to draw visitors.

Apart from these facts about getting the right keywords, let me share some basic tips that would definitely help you to select the perfect set of keywords for your website. The foremost thing is that you will have to learn to think like a nonprofessional. You might have a thorough knowledge about your industry, but this might not be the case with everyone around. So, while framing the keywords, try to use those words or phrases that a nonprofessional would use who knows nothing about this industry. At the same time, you need to think in an expert’s point of view as well! The product or the service you are offering might need the use of some specific keywords, which the layman would definitely not know. Therefore, it is better to have a balanced perception of both.

So, whenever you are optimizing your website, always remember to pay extra heed to keyword selection, as you certainly know by now, that it is a very important part of this whole optimization process. If you use some rational steps, keeping in mind some basic facts, success might take some time to come. However once it is there, it’s going to be a long lasting one for sure.

Attention and Economy may be two diverse terms but in the modern times is naturally amalgamating, with one becoming highly interdependent on the other. Let us consider an example to show you exactly how attention affects economy.

While searching for the latest book reviews or releases, how often do you navigate away from a page that does not contain the review of a book that you have been looking for? The chances are high. The fact is, with so many websites and blogs being continuously updated with information on your favorite genre(s), you do not bother to stick to a page and search for information that is not there in the first glance! It takes seconds before you decide to look for your information on a different website or a web page and navigate away from the present one if you are not satisfied with its content. In the process, have you noticed the crisis of attention?

If you observe closely, you will find that this attention deficit not only affects us, but also the organizations keen to reach out to you with their products or services. The moment you are navigating away from a page presuming that the information provided in it is not relevant, you are hurting their economics. Search engines, online retailers, blogs, and news sites are coughing up an overabundance of information for the end users or the consumers every passing hour. This can lead to a loose-loose situation where eventually, a consumer leaves a website, un-happy and a retailer looses business. The irony is, a consumer wants to spend money for a commodity, but does not have the correct retailer reaching out to him.

The entire idea behind attention economy is to create a virtual marketplace where consumers are presented with streamlined content that makes them feel happy and satisfied, in lieu of their attention. More specifically, consumers are made to consume advertisements however, in exchange of certain personalized services. For example, personalized searches, news, alerts and buying recommendations, to name a few.

You might have noticed the “sponsored links” in the Google search pages. You get to use the search feature of Google for free; however, you are being presented with some relevant advertisements based on your search keyword on the search results page. This is an excellent example that demonstrates attention economy in action.

One of the important aspects of attention economy relates to the fact that the consumer can exercise the power of his or her choice. Therefore, the consumer gets to decide where to devote their attention. Websites are also capitalizing on the “online surfing habits” of the consumer, thereby optimizing the way in which information may be sorted and presented.

One might probably argue with the usage of the word “Economy” here. Attention economy is different form its conventional counterpart in the way in which barter is established. The latter has a more explicit or direct form where goods and services may be bought or sold. However, in the former, there is no immediate buying or selling of commodity. The focus is more towards creating deterministic opportunities to sell.

Whenever you submit your search query to a search engine looking for relevant results or information, the strings of data that comprise your search query is matched against keywords that are referenced by a website or by a particular web page. Conventionally, such information is already mined by search bots in advance. More or less, conventional search engines technically function as mentioned and dynamically generate your desired page comprising of your search results.

With advanced forms of Artificial Intelligence (AI) concepts being seamlessly integrated in programs that power search engines, the present scenario is evolving or rather, has already evolved. Whenever you initiate a search, every data associated with your search query is stored in the search engine’s database. This data is then referenced and cross referenced further with related searches that have been performed by you, or by other individuals. The search engines index this information and intelligently arrange them in order of maximum relevance, all on the account of the search history available. Some search engines may even use a history of searches to create knowledge bases in order to improve the efficiency of the AI based search engine.

Yes, I am talking about the basic principles of personalized search. Against a particular search keyword, the search results that might be relevant to you might be not be for another individual! Personalized search is all about delivering information that only you can relate to as an individual.

Here is an example:

Chord-One word, many meanings! Yes, if I am a music freak, then probably half the number of times I would use this word to indicate a particular scale. However, I would interpret this word more as a line intersecting a circle had I been inclined more towards Geometry. Personalized search helps in rendering a word from its general sense to a more specific sense, to its intended audience. But how do search engines achieve this intelligence?

Though the entire process is quite complex and non-deterministic, it may seem simple if viewed from a distance. While you are searching for information, what these search engines would typically do is dynamically monitor your search habits and capture them over time. This data would now be used to train the AI based search engine where it would acquire knowledge related to your search habits and preferences. As the search engine acquires more knowledge, its classification power increases. You would notice a considerable increase of relevance in your search results.

I guess you now understand the concept loud and clear. Did you know that you could use these features to increase sales for your business? I am talking about SEO in an era of personalized search. Well, I would be glad to talk about it, but on my next post.