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By Lior Levin

When it comes to search engine optimization (SEO) there is no substitute for good content interesting stuff people want to read and share via a link. To the search engines finding this content is their top priority and, for the most part, they do a decent job at it.

However, this doesnt mean that webmasters can forget about SEO. It is critical to not just write good content, but to make sure that it is as easily found as possible by the search engines and that the correct keywords are given weight.

With that in mind, here are five SEO tips every webmaster needs to be aware of and using, otherwise they are putting themselves at a very severe disadvantage.

1. Use Bold and Header Text Wisely

Make sure to include your desired keywords in passages that are bold or within header tags. Though you shouldnt do this for every instance of a keyword, putting the text in a stronger font once or twice is a direct indication to the search engines which phrases and keywords you find are the most important in the article. That, in turn, will cause the search engines to give them greater weight.

Though you have to be careful not to abuse this technique, careful use of bold and header text can help target your post and help your content rank higher for relevant keywords.

2. Link Often Externally and Internally

Though the search engines do frown upon excessive linking within a single page, most sites make the mistake of not linking often enough.

Including a few outbound links per post is not just a good way to give and get link love, but also shows that that post is legitimate and is a good central source for information

At least as important, however, is to always include at least one or two links to other posts youve written. Not only does this help the search engines find, index and weigh those posts, but it also turns those links to inbound ones when and if the post is picked up by other sites.

3. Include Images and Tag Them Well

Images not only help a post stand out visually, making it much more compelling for visitors who primarily see the site in their RSS reader, but its also great for SEO as image searches are a compelling way for new visitors to find your site.

However, to help ensure that your images are indexed correctly, be sure to edit your ALT descriptions and captions to make it clear to the search engines what the photo is about.

Also, you may wish to include the word image or picture when building your tags as many image searches include those terms, making it something that you may wish to target.

4. Fix Canonical URL Issues

Search engines only want to link to each page once so when a page with the same content appears multiple times in the index they begin to downgrade all but one of the results and, sometimes, penalize entire sites.

One of the most common ways this can happen is through a canonical URL issue that causes www.domain.com and domain.com to both appear in the index, even though they are the same page.

You can easily fix this by editing your htaccess file to redirect one to the other or you can select your preference using Google Webmaster Tools.

5. Set Up a Sitemap

A sitemap is basically a roadmap of your site designed for the search engines to easily crawl and find all of the pages on the site. Search engines like these because it is much easier for them to find the relevant links (easier than crawling your HTML site) and it helps them find pages they might have missed during a regular crawl.

WordPress users will find a slew of plugins to add sitemaps to their site and there are applications and offline tools for other webmasters. Once youve created a sitemap and uploaded it, you can list it in your Google Webmaster Tools account and get verification when Google has parsed it and how many links they indexed from it.

Final Thoughts

To be clear, none of these tips will take a bad site and raise them to the top of the results. In the end, nothing beats quality content and inbound links.

However, these tips can help a quality site get noticed quicker and get ranked a bit higher for more relevant keywords, thus helping them attract more readers and, hopefully, earn more revenue.

These are small changes that will likely only have a small impact. But in the competitive world of SEO, a small advantage may be what separates the first result on page one from the site languishing on page 2.

Author Information

Lior Levin who works for a live support tool company and is a consultant for Storemed.

References

Jonathan Walker: How To Fix Common Canonicalization Issues

Resources

Google Webmaster Tools

WordPress Plugin Directory

SEO engines, good content, Search Engines, webmaster

In todays world, if you want your business to grow and become successful then advertising it online is essential. SEO, PPC, SMO etc. are some of the forms of internet marketing or online marketing which are used now-a-days for the promotion of products and services online by different businesses. The primary function of these versatile marketing tools is to provide visibility to your site on wide web world. In this article we will discuss these modes of marketing in detail in order to understand how they help in providing a distinctive presence to our website over the internet.

SEO
SEO is a method which is used to achieve high rankings for a website on major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN. SEO uses several techniques in order to improve the ranking of the website on search engines such as

Keywords: WebPages should have highly specific keywords. It has been that users frequently search the web pages which contain good content and are communicative and item-specific.

Linking: Linking is one of the main factors which determine the ranking of a website. If you get some quality links to your website then it can boost your rankings on the search engines.

Content: Writing quality content can help in attracting lots of links back to your site. It is because good content attracts a lot of people which helps in increasing the traffic on website. Further, if your content is good people would like to share it around on the Internet in turn helps in getting links to your site.

PPC

Another method of advertising which is widely used by a large number of people in order to market their products or services over the internet is pay per click orPPC. InPPC, advertisers pay for the each click to their sites from search engines. One of the hallmarks ofPPC is that with it you get top ranking in your site in less time thanSEO.

SMO
Social media optimization orSMO is the process of generating traffic on a website by connecting it with social networking websites through RSS feeds, blogging and forums. Though social media optimization can be used in varied ways but the primary focus of this method is brand promotion.

There are manySEO companies in India which also providePPC, SMO and various others services. By availing to the services provided by theseSEO companies you can market your product worldwide within the budget you have allocated for the adverting purposes.

Advent Effects, an Seo Company India offering Website Designing and Development, Online marketing Company, Search engine optimization cost, Offshore Website Design Solutions to its clients in India and abroad.

SEO good content, ranking, search engine, social media optimization

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) is a system used by Google and other major search engines (Update: read here, thanks for the Tweets, guys) The contents of a webpage are crawled by a search engine and the most common words and phrases are collated and identified as the keywords for the page. LSI looks for synonyms related to the title of your page. For example, if the title of your page was Classic Cars, the search engine would expect to find words relating to that subject in the content of the page as well, i.e. collectors, automobile, Bentley, Austin and car auctions.

Do Not UnderestimateContent

SEO strategy has always denoted that great importance is placed on the page title and words encased in heading tags, especially the H1 tag. Words and phrases within the content that are bolded or italicized are also given a greater importance. But you should be aware of the use of LSI, as it can affect what keywords your website is ranked for.

But if your page contains synonyms, the search engine recognizes that your page is actually about the subject title and will place greater importance on the page. You may well already use good keyword techniques and add a few secondary keywords into your content, but the rest of the content should also be littered with synonyms to convince search engine spiders.

A Response toKeyword-Stuffing

Latent Semantic Indexing came as a direct reaction to people trying to cheat search engines by cramming Meta keyword tags full of hundreds of keywords, Meta description full of more keywords, and page content full of nothing more than random keywords and no subject-related material or worthwhile content.

Search engines, like Google, appreciate good content, and encouraging people to add good content that helps keep the high-ranked listings relevant. Although producing good content will not guarantee you first page rankings, it could improve your quality score.

When LSI is NotRelevant

LSI will not affect a squeeze page that has no intention of achieving a search engine rank anyway, due to its minimalistic content. But for site owners or bloggers hoping to get on the search engines good side, pay attention to LSI.

Latent Semantic Indexing is a good thing. It keeps content relevant and rich and benefits not only visitors, but website owners that produce quality material.

How to BefriendLSI

Latent Semantic Indexing is not rocket science, it is simple common sense. Here are some simple guidelines:

If your page title is Learn to Play Tennis, make sure your article is about tennis.

Do not overuse your keywords in the content. It could look like keyword stuffing and the search engines may red flag you.

Never use Article Spinning Software it spits out unreadable garble.

If you outsource your content, choose a quality source.

Check Google Webmaster Tools and see what keywords your pages are ranking for.

Latent Semantic Indexing is not a trick. You should bear it in mind when adding content to a web page, but do not get paranoid about it. The chances are if you provide quality, relevant content you will never have to worry about falling foul of and LSI checks.

SEO good content, Latent Semantic Indexing, page, Search Engines