SEO Blog - SEO for Php Link Directory and Webmasters

In the latest search engine report, Yahoo counts for about 22.1% of the market share and thus, it is certainly a market webmaster should not ignore. While optimizing your site for Google, if you can have your site ranked well on Yahoo as well, it will be a big boon to your bottom line. Again, you will see that the following elements are commonly mentioned when it is related to SEO does not matter what search engines we talk about. What you need to pay attention to is the details in each of the factor:

Title tag: Make your title short, probably no more than 5/6 words.  (for google, you may want it to be more descriptive)

Meta description: Use about 2 sentences and describe what your site is about. Include your key phrases at least once in your sentence, but should be no more than 3 times

Meta keywords: This may not be useful if you optimize your site for Google. However, meta keywords still matters for Yahoo.  However, do not repeat any certain words more than 3 times.  Based on my experience, 3-5 keywords is optimal for Yahoo

Keywords in URL: No more explanation needed here. Make your URL SEO friendly.

Prominence: Use heading 1 and heading 2 on your page. In your paragraph, make your keywords bold or italic so that it stands out from other parts. In this way, you are telling the search engine that these certain keywords are more important.

alt text: Use alt text for your images. On one side, it helps the visitors if they block the image. On the other side, you are optimizing your image and there is a chance that the image from your sire may get ranked if someone searches the images

Site Explorer: Create an account on Yahoo and submit a sitemap to Yahoo just like what you would do for Google, this would help Yahoo better index your site.  You can also use Yahoo ping service to notify Yahoo whenever your web page is updated.

Released yesterday, the long-waited google presentation finally goes live even though it is still a beta. It is available in your Google Doc. You can find it when you click on the news tab. There are a number of features included in this beta version:

• You can create and keep the presentation online, which can be accessed any time with a computer. It is much easier to access and manage than a presentation kept in your hard drive.
• You can send a email invitation to your co-workers for them to view, edit and manage.
• Edit together online and in real time
• Chat with other viewers for suggestions and comments
• Import existing presentation for quick start

Once you have your website ready, the first thing you want to do is to submit to search engines like Google and Yahoo and pray that your site can quickly be updated by them. However, if you submit your site using the regular google submission form, it can still takes weeks until Google visits your site. There are certainly ways you can have your site quickly indexed by Google.
1. Get a link from an existing and authoritative site

If you can obtain a backlink from an existing site (the older the domain, the better it is) and the site is an authority in Google’s eye, then you can expect your site get indexed by Google wihtin 48 hours. Well, an easy way to get such a link is to join a forum and make some posts with your signature attached. Just be careful do not spam the forum. You should reply to thread with the intention of helping other members solving problems.
2. Create an external blog

Google loves blog with updated topics. Do not create a blog under your own domain since your domain is not trusted yet. Create a blog with blogger.com and write a couple of blog posts with links back to yoru site. Again, you can expect your site get indexed by Google within 48 hours.  (I created this blog for my SEO friendly directory. It is not for quick index purpose though)

3. Get as many links as possible
If somehow you can not get a link from a site with high pagerank and you are not in favor of developing a blog, then what you can do is to focus on the quantity of the links. Get as many links from existing websites as possible. For example, you can submit your site to directories, implement reciprocal or 3-way link exchanges. But we do suggest you focus on the previous two strategies, this strategy should be the last thing to consider since Google has been devaluing these link strategies.

Well, I am sure this is not a good news for directories owners and personally, I am not happy with it either. Google just started manually penalizing web directoreis by removing the sites from search results. Some big names such as Alive, Aviva, Big Web Links, Directory Dump are all affected and when you search for their trade mark names, they are completed out of the search results.  It is still not clear whether Google will devalue the directory listings.

I am just glad that since my SEO Friendly Directory is still new, Google probably won’t notice it. But certainly I have to be careful. What I need to do is to add more quality content to my visitors who are mainly seeking for techniques and new strategies of search engine optimization.

Blog is a great way to share your experience and insights with other Internet users. For a person, you share your viewpoints, your life experience with others. For a business, blog is a great way to introduce what is “cool” about your business. Whenever your business offers coupons, discounts and have promotions, announce it on your blog. People who subscribed to your blog via RSS feeds will get notified immediately. In terms of SEO, blog is a great way to refresh your content and if you content is great, there is a good chance that you will get some “nature links”. This is why I created the SEO blog in my directory. Here, I’d like to talk about some good blogging practices for SEO:

• Update your blog regularly and keep it fresh
• Make sure the topics of your blog are properly categorized so that your topics are grouped into meaningful phrases on the homepage such as “SEO Resources, Directory News & Reviews”
• Fully utilize other services such as Feedburner, Technorati and other popular social bookmarking services.
• Submit your blog to blog directories.
• Make sure each individual blog post has proper title and a SEO friendly URL.

The 301 and 302 codes are the HTTP status codes used for redirection. These codes indicate that another request must be made in order to fulfill the HTTP request — the content is located elsewhere. When a web page replies with either of these codes, it does not return any HTML content, but includes an additional Location: HTTP header that indicates another URL where the content is found.

301

The 301 status code indicates that a resource has been permanently moved to the new location specified by the Location: header that follows. It indicates that the old URL is obsolete and should replace any references to the old URL with the indicated URL.

When loading the page in a web browser, the response will be automatically redirected to the new location specified by the Location header. After the redirection, the back button in your browser won’t reference the initially requested page, as a result of the old page being permanently redirected.

The 301 status code also indicates to search engines that link equity from the previous URL should be credited to the new one. In theory, the new page will inherit the rankings of the original page. In practice, however, it may take some time for this to occur. It would be wise not to frivolously change URLs regardless, if this is a concern.

302

The 302 status code is a bit ambiguous in meaning. It indicates that a resource is “temporarily” moved. The old URL is not obsolete at all, and clients will not cache the result unless indicated explicitly by a Cache-Control or Expires header. To confuse things even further, 302 is also used for some paid advertising links, but that is not the usage discussed here. The big problem with the 302 status code is that its meaning for search engines depends on its context. In practice, it is worth dividing them into internal temporary redirects, that is, from a page on domain A to another page on domain A, and external temporary redirects, from a page on domain A to a page on domain B. Browsers always abide by the definitions for interpreting a 302 redirect — both internal and external.
However, today, most search engines only use it for an internal 302. For an internal 302 redirect, then, search engines will not cache the result of the redirect, and continue to list domain A in the SERPs. This is consistent with the definition. External 302 redirects are more of a problem. Matt Cutts of Google states that more than 99% of the time, Google will list the result with the destination result, that is, domain B, instead of domain A. This is against the standard, and Google behaves like this to mitigate a vulnerability called “302 hijacking.”