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In my previous article I described the value of meta tags in driving organic rankings. In this article, I will review some other secondary on-page elements thatif used properlymay contribute to your site ranking more effectively in organic search results.

Its important to note that these on-page elements actually play a very important role in creating a great user experience. This is not by coincidence: Google rewards sites that are able to convey their sites content in a simple and concise manner.

Lets take a closer look at the individual elements you can use for both SEO and user experience benefits.

Header tags (H1, H2, etc)

Traditionally, header tags are used by copywriters to organize content within a page. These tags allow the author to break up content and make it more palatable for visitors scanning eyes. From an SEO perspective, header tags, often referred to as H1, H2, etc., further emphasize the topics conveyed in the META tags to the search engines. While still important, header tags used to be a bigger deal to search engines. These days, as reiterated recently by search reps at the recent SMX West conference, they are of relatively minor importance, though they still said it can make sense to use them as originally designed.

Header tags are represented in source code in the following format:

This is a header tag

They often appear in a slightly larger and boldfaced font than surrounding body text, acting as the subtitle of a given content area.

From an SEO standpoint, header tags rank in descending order of importance starting with the H1 tag as the most important, followed by the H2, H3 etc.

Boldfaced content

While less important than header tags, strategically bolding terms within your content can help emphasize the importance of terms to the search engines. Bolding content also assists in drawing attention to important terms and phrases while users scan your sites pages, promoting a better user experience when used properly.

This is important content that should be bolded!

Anchor text

Anchor text works in a slightly different manner than the elements previously discussed. While it is technically an “on-page” element, the SEO benefit is largely passed on to the page the anchor-text link points to (see Google Now Reporting Anchor Text Phrases for details of how Google uses this in its ranking algorithms).

For example, if I am selling “red widgets” on my generic widgets retail site, I may select and link an instance of the keyword phrase “red widgets” to my “/redwidgets.html” page. Let’s stop and think about the message we are conveying when doing this.

Essentially, we are telling the search engines or visitors that if they follow this link they can expect to find information on red widgets on the following page. Technically speaking, this text link is now considered a “vote” in the form of an internal link and should pass a portion of the parent page’s PageRank on to the receiving page.

Image alternative (alt) tags

The image alt-tag is yet another overlooked on-page SEO element that can assist in getting your site (or at least your images) properly indexed by Google. When appropriate, Google will use the alt-tag within its image search results if the search query matches your alt-tag.

An example of a well-executed and effective alt tag is as follows:

Notice how the image filename “EiffelTower.jpg” and the text contained in the alt-tag “The Eiffel Tower at night” are contextually similar.

While no single on-page element will determine your success or failure in organic rankings, using these key variables in a search-friendly manner can help get you closer to your goal of ranking supremacy. It’s important to note that while the search marketer’s goal is to gain user traction via search engines and ultimately convert those visitors, you cannot ignore the role that usability plays. All of the on-page elements discussed above make it easier for not only the search engines, but for users to find and understand the meaning of your content and site’s pages. So remember, organizing and presenting content with your user in mind will actually also help you in search engine rankings in the end.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

SEO header tags, meta tags, Search Engines, site's pages

In our previous tutorials we’ve discussed the foundations of SEO, and you’ve learned the latest SEO techniques. This week we’ll show you some of the best SEO tools you can use to enhance your SEO rankings.
Google Webmaster Tools
As we mentioned previously, if you haven’t used Google’s Webmaster Tools, that’s a great place to start. Webmaster Tools provides you with a number of resources that you really can’t afford to live without. The first thing you’ll need to do is to create a Google account (if you don’t already have one). Then you sign up for Webmaster Tools–which will require you to add a small bit of code to the header of your web pages (all the pages that you want Google to track). This allows Google to validate that you own the site in question, and facilitates the tracking of your pages.

Once you have your account, and have added the Google tracking code, you will be presented with the data accumulated from your site. The information that is provided includes:

Top search queries – Information about user search queries that have returned pages from your site.

Crawl errors – Issues Google encountered when crawling your site.

Links to your site – External links to your site

keywords – The most common keywords Google found when crawling your site. These should reflect the subject matter of your site.

sitemaps – Sitemaps are used to tell Google about pages on your site they might not otherwise discover.

Internal links – Pages linked to by other pages on your site.

Crawl stats – Googlebot activity in the last 90 days

HTML suggestions – When Googlebot crawls your site, it commonly finds some issues with your content. These issues won’t prevent your site from appearing in Google search results, but addressing them may help your site’s user experience and performance.

Malware details – If Google discovers any malware on your site, they will be displayed here.

Site performance – This page shows you performance statistics of your site. You can use this information to improve the speed of your site and create a faster experience for your users.

Fetch as Googlebot – With Fetch as Googlebot you can see exactly how a page appears to Google.

As you can see, Google Webmaster Tools provides a plethora of valuable information for web developers and website owners. By using these tools, you will be able to evaluate your site’s performance, the use of your keywords, links to your site, both internal and external, and locate any errors or missing pages on your site.

Google Analytics
While Google provides some excellent tools for SEO projects, another tool, Google Analytics, provides detailed stats about your website that can be used to further your SEO efforts.

To use Google Analytics (GA), once again you will need to have a Google account. Assuming you already do, you will need to sign up for GA via the Google MyAccount page. Once again, you will need to add some code to your site’s pages for tracking purposes. Once this has been validated by Google, your site will begin to accumulate data. GA can be a very valuable tool for SEO purposes–and like other Google tools, it’s free!

When you visit the Google Analytics page, you will be presented with the Dashboard, which presents you with a quick overview of your site’s recent statistics.

Among the stats presented are:

Visits – The number of visitors on your site within the last month.

Pageviews – The number of pageviews on your site within the last month.

Pages/Visit – Average Pageviews for all visitors.

Bounce Rate – Bounce Rate (the percentage of your visitors immediately leave) for all visitors.

Average Time on Site – The average time visitors remain on your site.

New Visits – The number of new visitors who have visited your site for the first time.

Visitor’s Overview – A graph showing the number of visitors to your site.

Map Overlay – A map showing where your visitors came from.

Traffic Sources Overview – A pie graph showing the percentage of visitors who came to your site from Search Engines, Direct Traffic, Referring Sites and Other.

Content Overview – A chart showing the top pages on your site, the number of pageviews they have received and the percentage that those pages make up in your overall stats.

You are able to drill down in each section mentioned above. For instance, if you want to see which articles or content in your site is performing the best, you can check out the Content section of GA, which will show you:
Top Content – The most requested content on your site.

Content by Title – Content on your site, listed by the title of the page.

Content Drilldown – A breakdown of the content on your site with statistics for the top 10 – 500 pages (you can select how many pages to show).

Top Landing Pages – The top pages that visitors land on when visiting your site.

Top Exit Pages – The top pages that visitors are on when they leave your site.

Google Analytics also has similar sections for Intelligence, Visitors, Traffic Sources and Goals, and includes Custom Reporting features which allow you to create your own, more specific reports, such as “How are my keywords performing in different countries?”

What Else Can Google Do?
Given that most visitors to your site will come to it via Google, it’s valuable and informative to learn all that you can about your site from Google. Another tool you can use to stay on top of the loop is Google Alerts. Google Alerts enables you to stay informed about any sites, news, blogs, etc. that use your site’s keywords. You can use any keyword, and set it up so that it emails you as it happens, once a day or once a week, if it locates the use of said keyword on any website. This can be useful to see how many other sites are using the keyword, how often it is mentioned in the news or blogs, and if Google is picking up the use of the keyword on your own site.
Class Conclusion
Now you know how to effectively work on your site’s Search Engine Optimization. You know how to determine the focus of your site, how to effectively select keywords, write a description, use keywords in your site’s content and titles, what to do to optimize your site for Google’s new Caffeine technology, and how to use Google tools to fine tune your SEO project. See you in the search engines!

Source: www.htmlgoodies.com

SEO site's content, site's keywords, site's pages, site's search engine

February 23, 2010 by Armando Roggio

An ecommerce venture, to be successful, needs marketing, design, development, accounting, and operational expertise.

Ecommerce merchants can outsource most of these services. But just because there are providers available, doesn’t mean that a merchant shouldn’t have some basic understanding of the concepts. This includes web development issues.

So I have put together a list of five important web design concepts that non-technical ecommerce merchants should understand. These concepts can have either a positive or negative effect on site performance and, therefore, site success.

Understand the Limits of HTML Tables

Tabular data is helpful, especially for comparing products or service plans on an ecommerce site. You can line up product attributes and give shoppers just the information required to make a good buying decision.

Positive examples of HTML tables on ecommerce sites abound. You could check out a laptop comparison table at Newegg or the recent virus threat table at MacAfee (remember software sales are ecommerce, too) as examples. Both of these tables improve the user experience and convey information quickly.

But the use of tables can be overdone, and ecommerce merchants should understand this. Some web designers and developers cheat and use HTML tables for page layout. For example, placing a headline in one table cell, an image in another table cell, and some copy in yet another. While this might not seem like a big deal, it can cause several problems.

Using HTML tables for layout confuses some search engine bots and hurts search engine optimization (SEO). Tables as layout break up natural content flow and reposition unrelated material together, making it harder for some spiders to properly index.

There are accessibility concerns too. Because layout tables can, and often do, separate related items. For example a table of products might have product images in one row, headlines in another, and links in a third, rather than associating image with headline with link. The table associates image with image with image.

Bloated code. Generally speaking using HTML tables for layout requires more markup, which can make your site’s pages slower to load and require you to invest more in web hosting depending on the size of your site.

Layout tables may make your site harder to upgrade and harder to transition to other platforms like mobile devices.

As a rule, ensure that the web designer you hire only uses HTML tables for tabular data. You’ll have to decide for yourself, if you think product category pages, for example the “Guys” page at Seventh Ink, is tabular data or not; but FYI, Seventh Ink is not using tables for layout.

Document Type Declaration (Delimiter, Definition) Directs Browsers

Another important web design concept is document type declaration (DTD). DTD, which is also referred to as document type delimiter or document type definition, serves to tell web browsers what sort of document they are dealing with and thus make it easier for those web browsers to properly render the associated web page.

Put another way, a DTD tells the browser what set of rulesXML, XHTML 1.0, HTML 5the page follows.

If the wrong DTD is chosen, or if your web designer ignores the very rules she decided to use, a web browser might not be sure how to act, and could render your page improperly, making your site look unprofessional or, worse, messing up some of the site function.

The key to this concept is making sure that your web designer validates the code. A validator, like the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Markup Validation Service can tell you if your site follows its own, declared rulebook. If it validates, great. If not, have your web designer fix it, or at least explain why not.

Web Standards and Browser Adoption Are Essential

The web has standards. It is not the wild west. The Internet would not be capable of ecommerce except for web standardization. In fact, the aforementioned DTDs are standards.

Essentially, web standards are an agreed-to set of behaviors so that I can write some bit of standard compliant code and expect that code to behave in a generally similar way regardless of whether I am using a PC or an Apple Mac; Internet Explorer or Firefox; or a laptop or mobile phone.

Without web standards, I would have to create a completely different web page for each browser and each platform. (Web designers actually used to do this in the early 1990s.)

Generally speaking, web standards work, but there are still some problems. For example, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) web browser is the least compliant browser that I am aware of. It doesn’t, for example, support event capture, rounded corners in CSS, standard margin and padding methods, and, until version 7, portable network graphic (PNG) alpha transparency. This means that your web designer or developer will have to do extra work in order to ensure that your site renders properly in IE.

I should note that no web browser is fully compliant, but usually the more compliant a browser is, the more capable it is. Check out this demonstration of a forthcoming scalable vector graphic (SVG) API. At the time of writing, the demonstration, which I realize is not exactly a practical application, only worked in relatively new versions of Google Chrome or Apple Safari. Once more browsers adopt this standard, developers will be able to introduce a lot of extra functionality into ecommerce websites.

As a merchant, the thing to remember is that you should check your site in at least three different browsersIE, Firefox, and Chrometo make sure that it is being rendered consistently.

Separate Content from Presentation

From a development standpoint, ecommerce web pages have three basic aspects: content, presentation, and rules.

Content describes the good stuff you put on your website, like product descriptions, how-to articles to help customers, or even product reviews.

Presentation describes how your content looks on the page or how it interacts with the shopper. For example, a background image, the border around a content section, or even an asynchronous JavaScript and XML function like the drag-and-drop shopping cart at Icon Dock.

Rulesor the model as it is often calledrepresent the logic behind the site; for example, calculating real time shipping rates, adding tax, or calculating discounts.

In good web design and development, content, presentation, and rules are separated, so that the site is easier to maintain. For example, it is clearly better to have all of my cascading stylesheets (CSS) in one or two external files rather than putting style (presentation) directly on each page.

If three months from now, I want to make a change to how the page looks, I can make that change in one external CSS file and I am done. If I had not separated my style, I would have to manually change every single page on the site.

Likewise, if I am using JavaScript to provide shoppers with some sort of interaction, it is better to store all of my JavaScript in one folder and then have each page refer to that JavaScript rather than placing the code directly on page.

Separating content and presentation in this fashion seems pretty intuitive, but there are still a lot of old-school web designers that don’t do it.

You want to verify that your site has stylesheet links and script references in the header. These will look something like these examples from Barnes & Noble:

And…

By contrast, you never want to see code that looks like this example, which I took from a real ecommerce site:

Content Management Systems Are Necessary

A content management system (CMS) is a kind of collaboration, version control, and storage software that is often implemented as a web application. Essentially, a CMS lets your business store contentproduct specifications, for examplein a database and then access that database in order to create dynamic web pages as they are needed.

Imagine that you have ten products. It would not be that hard to create ten HTML pagesone for each product. And if you needed to change something on one of those pages, it might not be too hard to open up that page and make the change. Of course, if the change was to site-wide navigation, you’d need to make ten changes, which could be a burden.

Now imagine that you have 100 products. How much harder would it be to manage 100 individual web pages.

What if you have 1,000 products? You get the idea.

A CMS solves this problem by storing content in a database and using page templates. When it needs to render a page for a shopper, it grabs the proper product specification from the database and places that specification into a template. The combine content and template are rendered and you have a dynamically created web page.

If you need to change product information, you only need to make a single change to the database, and if you need to change a template, you probably only have to make one change to a template file, regardless of how many total products you have.

For your ecommerce store, you will want to use a CMS. Some shopping carts, by the way, are also ecommerce CMSs. For example, Elastic Path, Magento, Volusion, Interspire, LemonStand, Shopify, and many others are very capable ecommerce CMSs. While other shopping carts, like Instinct’s WP e-Commerce, plug into other web CMSs.

Just find the solution that fits your business case, and note that there is virtually no business case for not using a CMS.

Summing Up

There are many good web design professionals. By understanding these five basic design concepts, ecommerce merchants can communicate better with these professionals, and understand the design issues involved with their own ecommerce sites.

Source: www.practicalecommerce.com

SEO capable ecommerce cmss, ecommerce web pages, site's pages, web designer