Entries Tagged as “SEO”
Are acronyms hurting your SEO rank?
Anyone that knows me, understands that I am not a big fan of acronyms. I think they breakdown the lines of communication, and confuse people quickly. Earlier this week I attended a marketing luncheon with a topic on SEO, where I became acutely aware of this issue and wanted to write about it. I don't claim to know much about SEO, so you experts out there can set me straight if I am missing the point.
Basically the presentation sounded like this: "keywords in your name, keywords in your url, keywords in your username, keywords in categories, keywords in your tweets, keywords, keywords, keywords." Sounds reasonable right? Well it does until I started noticing all these acronyms appearing in the presentation materials, in the conversation, on the web, etc.
All this got me to thinking. Why spend all this time creating a keyword rich business name, username, url, etc., if your going to refer to them with acronyms? The same is true for valuable keywords or trigger words within the content of your site as well. Using acronyms seem like missed opportunities to add valuable keyword content to your website.
A perfect example of this would be the title of my blog post. "Are acronyms hurting your SEO rank?" If I was an SEO expert, I just missed an excellent opportunity to gain "search engine optimization" as three additional keywords. The problem with using acronyms are that people looking for your content may not be familiar with your specific acronyms and therefore search for the longer more verbose phrase or only part of the phrase.
Acronyms are a big part of our language—for better to for worse—we are stuck with them. We should think carefully about the usage of acronyms within our page content. Properly defining an acronym the first time it's used on the page with the <acronym> tag is the first thing I would recommend.
However I would be remiss if I didn't caution against the overuse of the <acronym> tag. I still believe that once a term has been defined on the page it does not need to be defined again. Optimizing for a search engine is one thing, but user experience should be your top priority. Unless of course your customers are search engines and not people.
→ Respond NowTags: Opinions & Rants · SEO
Friendly URL's for Mango Blog with ISAPI_Rewrite 3.0
If you have visited my site visual28.com in the last few days you might have noticed a lot of errors. I hope that is all behind me now. Please let me know if you do encounter any errors that I have not fixed. The cause of all this chaos was due to a lethal combination of ISAPI_Rewrite and IISPassword. Both programs were overwriting the .htaccess file and causing major headaches.
Even though I wanted to pull my hair out, I was able to correct the problem and learn a great deal about ISAPI_Rewrite in the process. Previously, I had a cobbled together system that did not work correctly for all pages. With some help of Adam Tuttle of fusiongrokker.com I was able to get my url rewrite rules all fixed up. Turns out, I had the rules correct but the order that the rules are in makes a difference in how urls are rewritten.
If your interested in using ISAPI_Rewrite to make your urls friendly to both humans and search engines. Here is what I was able to put together.
→ Respond NowTags: Mango Blog · SEO
Basic SEO Tips
I am not an SEO expert but I know a thing or two about good practices. In talking with some young and upcoming web designers this past week at a user group meeting they asked about SEO and what they could do to help their site rank higher. When I started explaining the basics many of them dropped their jaws at how simple it is to overlook the obvious. I thought this would be a great opportunity to point out some basic SEO tips that web designers at any level can do to make their sites rank higher in search engine results.
Use a descriptive title tag. Every page title should explain what the given page is about in 65 characters or less. The homepage, should start with the sites name followed by additional description to explain what users can find on your site. Pages below the homepage should explain what the content is about first. If you still want the sites name visible include it after the page description. For more on this see point 6 in Jakob Neilsen's article "Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design" as he explains it very clearly.
Use the meta description tag. Although many search engines place a low priority on your meta tags, one tag still remains useful. The meta description tag. Craft a well written but short description telling what your site is about. This is used by search engines in search results listings. This too should be very short and to the point.
Keywords in link text. When users and search engines scan your page they are looking for useful trigger words or keywords. When you create a link on your page avoid using the default "Click Here" phrase and instead link text that is relative to the page you are referring.
Markup Order is important. It's no secret that some major search engines will only index your page to a certain point. Placing your content before your sidebar in the markup order will ensure that more of your important information is indexed.
Use proper alt text. Search spiders do not see images so using a good description of your image in the alt text to tell the search engine whet your image is about.
Include a sitemap. In my previous post "Top 20 Most Valuable Websites" I linked to XML-Sitemaps. You can use their service to generate a proper sitemap to upload to your site. Most of the big search engines use this sitemap if it's available to see all the content on your site quickly.
Outside sites with related Information
- http://www.webdesignerwall.com – SEO Guide for Designers
- http://stylizedweb.com – Learn SEO Basics
- http://seo2.0.onreact.com – 10 Coding Guidelines for Perfect Findability
- http://www.tommylogic.com – 301 Redirect
With some basic enhancements to your site not only will you make your site search engine friendly, but you will also make it more useful to your visitors in the process. It's a win-win situation.
→ Respond NowTags: General · SEO
