All about SEO or SFO?

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All about SEO or SFO?


First let's start with definitions:

SEO: Search Engine Optimization, SFO: Search Friendly Optimization.

These two things are what most webmasters have trouble balancing. These things seem to always be on opposite ends. On one hand you have to make sure search engines can crawl your website without any problems. On the other you have to keep the site looking good to keep your visitors.

These are all based on what kind of site you plan on making. A corporate website selling shoes in the real world might focus on keeping the site looking good to visitors. And maybe pack it up with flash and all kinds of descriptive images. On the other side a site about online products, e-commerce, might cut back on the images and focus on seo. I will go into both of these just in case.

Let's start with seo. The first thing you need if you choose seo is to meta tags. Now there many meta tags generators out there for a quicker way to make them. But I suggest like me you make them yourself according to the search engines you want your site to better perform at. In short you have to study those search engines and find out how they get their content and what meta tags they require or may find usefull. Mine is based on google so check out the source of the blog and those are the tags that google uses.

Also a site that may help you out with your seo is: http://sitesubmit.ca/ they require you to be a member to use their tools but it's worth plus it's free. They have many seo tips and tools. In your reaserch of the search engine don't forget ranking. Find out what they base their search results on and how they decide which results show up first when a user queries. Like google uses google googlerank and overall page rank. But you may hav eto increase your content on a subject in order to increase your keyword density and such.

Second sfo. SFO is fairly easy to accomplish once you have the right info. Like many sites they host regular polls and surveys about what users like and their personnal opinions. It's an effective way of knowing your audience. Once you know most of your visitors like certain kinds of things you start providing them. Therefore pleasing your users and making a successful site. But never forget about the stalistics the users don't need to tell you. Like what browsers usually visit your site and what operatinf systems they use. And as many webmasters know firefox and internet exploer(leading browsers) have different rendering engines. So find out which most of your users use and customize your site to it. Also if the stalistics show that they have just about equal users use what we a splash page. To allow the user to show which version of the site they want to view. Two versions of your site may be hard to keep up but remember it's worth it. In one case one of my friends had to do four different versions. And keep them updated at the same time.

But also you may have to balance the two together if you want them both. Though it is hard it may be for the best.

Owner of All About Adsense! I write articles of my knowledge in my spare time.

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1) Title Tag When were talking about SEO Technique, the Title tag is one of the best and most powerful tags that you can use. Every page should have its own title tag, each tag should include the keyword that you are targeting, along with sub-keywords associated with the main keyword that you seek to drive traffic from.

2) ALT Tags These tags are most often ignored completely. Who would have thought that tags, that were meant to be for text browsers because the images didn't show in text browsers, would become part of a technique to raise the keyword density of a webpage. Your main keywords need to be included in some ALT tags- be careful, over-doing this could cause you to be banned and your PR could drop.

3) Link Popularity - Link popularity is the most powerful SEO tool, (arguably, of course). Typically a website must have a link to it, in order to be looked at by the spiders. This means that you should have at least 1-2 links going into your site from another website that has been visited by the spiders through search engines. Increasing Page Rank, depends on the number and quality of the sites that link into yours. Keywords should be in the links, along with sub-keywords. Keep the links short; this creates an easily readable keyword term for the search engines to recognize.

4) Keyword Density Research first Then decide on the keywords that you want to target. Dont over do it- you should use the keywords only once in the title tag, once in the heading tag, once in bold text, and then shoot for the density to be between 5% to 20% . Keywords should also be strategically located throughout your website. Place them in all locations. Several search engines will recognize bottom of the page or sidebar text/links and discount them, this is because many website designers will load certain sections with clutter.

5) Page Size - Try your best to keep your web page over 5k and under 15k in size. I just designed one that is close to 53k, this is mostly because of pictures and a flash file being used, rule of thumb. Look at Yahoo! And Google, These are some of the fastest loading pages, and most popular, people dont like to wait even if you have cool graphics and pictures. Your web page's speed is important: robots will be able to spider your web page faster and easier.

6) Theme Rich in content - Search engines are looking at themes rather than just the words or pictures. Content is King I know, you hear it a lot, but its true! Webpages should have content that's related to the targeted market. Link your visitors to other valuable and related content within your own site. The more pages the better. A good tool that I have found to show you linking info is: http://www.UpTimeBot.com You can preload upto 20 pages and then refersh them, it shows all the vital information, along with how many pages are indexed from each search engine.

7) Cross Linking within your Own Site You rely on other pages linking into yours in order to get indexed; the same is true for all the pages within your site. Any new content should be easily reachable through 1-3 pages of content. Linking back to your main home page, or a storefront will help you get indexed faster and achieve a higher Page Rank.

Scott Fish
President, http://www.TopSatelliteRadio.com
Personal Blog: http://www.ScottFish.BlogSpot.com

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From the perspective of a business owner, webmaster, or marketing manager, the change exhibited by the Internet is profoundly exciting, yet profoundly disturbing. The information (and misinformation and disinformation) it offers, the business benefits it promises, and the rules it is governed by change at such a rapid rate that its almost impossible to keep up.

These changes have led to a growing appreciation of the value of quality web copy. This appreciation has, in turn, led to an influx of opportunistic copywriters promoting themselves as website copywriters or SEO copywriters. Dont get me wrong, there are quite a few excellent SEO copywriters out there, and you should definitely shop around. The purpose of this article isnt to scare you; its to help you find the SEO copywriter wholl deliver honest service and excellent results.

So with that in mind, take a look at the following ten tips. These are the things you have a right to expect from anyone wearing a name badge that reads website copywriter, SEO copywriter, internet copywriter, or web copywriter (See also www.divinewrite.com/websitecopywriter.htm and www.divinewrite.com/makethemost.htm.)

1) An understanding of SEO

Obviously, your SEO copywriter must have a solid understanding of the essentials of Search Engine Optimization. They must know that ranking is essentially the result of a websites relevance (i.e. keywords) and importance (i.e. inbound links). There are a whole lot of other factors involved, but if your SEO copywriter doesnt understand these two basics, you should look elsewhere. If youd like to ensure your SEO copywriter knows a little more than just the basics, take a look at www.divinewrite.com/SEOCEO.htm, www.divinewrite.com/seocopy.htm, www.divinewrite.com/seotradesecrets.htm, www.divinewrite.com/webcopyenough.htm, and www.divinewrite.com/seoarticles.htm for some clues as to what you might like to ask in order to assess their knowledge.

2) Proven experience

The proof is, as they say, in the pudding. Its not enough that your SEO copywriter can talk the talk; they must also be able to walk the walk. Ask to see some examples of websites for which theyve obtained some good rankings. Note that it may be very difficult to find an SEO copywriter who has actually worked on both keywords and link generation, so if you find one who has, and they write well, snap em up! Theyll have a very broad and useful working knowledge of search engines.

3) An understanding of how many keywords to use

You dont want to fill every page up with every keyword youre targeting. This simply dilutes your sites relevance and reduces readability. Ask your SEO copywriter how many keywords they would recommend targeting on each page. Hopefully theyll suggest no more than 3, preferably 2. By targeting 2 keyword phrases per page, you can use them a lot without impacting readability.

4) Clear agreement on who will provide keywords

Someone needs to perform a keyword analysis in order to figure out what words you should be trying to rank highly for. Your SEO copywriter should be able to do this for you, but its quite often more cost-effective if someone a little closer to the business does it. Either way, make sure your agreement with your SEO copywriter makes it very clear who is performing this task. Dont assume the SEO copywriter is going to do it, because they may assume youre going to do it, and then youll blow your budget.

5) Keywords or keyword phrases

Expect your SEO copywriter to offer some advice regarding how specific you should be with your keywords. In most industries, the competition for keywords is so fierce that youll be forced to target very specific keywords in order to rank at least at the outset. For instance, if youre in IT, you probably wouldnt start out by targeting the keyword IT. The competition is immense (at the time of writing, there were approx 3,240,000,000 results for this search in Google.com) and the IT giants already dominate the search engines for this keyword. Instead, try using a more specific keyword phrase like IT infrastructure consulting new york (at the time of writing, there were only around 4,000,000 results for this search in Google.com). The other benefit to targeting more specific keyword phrases is that youll generate more relevant leads.

6) Agree on word count per page

Always make sure your SEO copywriter gives you an indication of the number of words they expect to write per web page. While its necessary to have a decent body of words on most of your web pages, you certainly shouldnt have too many. What too many is all depends on your industry, the objective of the page, and the needs of your audience. Its always a delicate balance, but its certainly possible to rank highly with only 100-200 words per page. So dont be fooled into paying for copy you dont need!

7) Density targets & measure

SEO of a web page is NOT guess-work. A good SEO copywriter will talk about density measures. This is a measure of the number of time the keyword phrase appears on the page. Its expressed as a percentage of the total word count of the page. So if your page has 200 words, and your keyword phrase appears 10 times, its density is 5%. As a rule of thumb, your SEO copywriter should be aiming for a density of approximately 5% for your primary keyword phrase and 3-5% for your secondary keyword phrase. If your density measures are much higher than this, readability will be reduced, and youll risk being perceived as spam by the search engines. Make sure your SEO copywriter understands keyword density, is prepared to state the target density for each keyword phrase, and is also happy to be measured by that standard (should you decide to measure).

8) Where to place keywords

The question of keyword placement has been the subject of much debate amongst SEO copywriters. While it is still unclear how much impact placement has, there is a general consensus that it has SOME impact. Be sure that your copywriter is aware of this impact. Popular opinion has it that keywords are more effective if they appear in headings, bolded text, links, and generally toward the beginning of the page.

9) Some comment on structure & links

Websites are generally better indexed by search engines if their spiders can traverse the entire site using text links. This means your SEO copywriter should be linking each page to every other page using text links. If your site is complex, this may be impractical, so your SEO copywriter will need to create a hierarchical structure for your site. First, they should break your subject material down into categories. Then for each category, they should write a summary page. These summary pages should be accessible from higher level pages via text links. They should also be accessible from each other. Each summary page should link using text links to a number of pages discussing the finer details of the category. And each detail page in a particular category should link to every other detail page in that category (once again, using text links). This way the spiders are able to travel from the top of your hierarchy to the bottom, and from left to right across any level.

10) Dont believe grand promises

SEO copywriters can play a significant role in increasing your search engine ranking. But they cant do it overnight. By optimizing your site for your target keyword phrases, an SEO copywriter is simply declaring the relevance of your site. If you engage an SEO copywriter to write helpful articles containing a byline with a link back to your site, you can then submit these articles for publication on the Internet, and this will steadily increase your ranking. But if an SEO copywriter tells you they can dramatically increase your ranking in a matter of hours or days, be wary. NOTE: Your SEO copywriter should be able to submit your articles to various submit sites on the Internet. These sites are closely watched by hundreds of thousands of publishers of e-newsletters and article pages from all around the world. High quality articles are quickly snapped up and published prolifically. And each time your article is published, youve got another link back to your site, thus increasing the importance of your site (to the search engines). If youd like to submit your own articles, your SEO copywriter should be able to sell you a list of 50 or more submit sites for as little as USD$99.

Conclusion

An SEO copywriter is a valuable addition to your marketing function. But you need to make sure you choose wisely. When you know what questions to ask, the battle is half won.

Happy hunting!

* Glenn Murray is an advertising copywriter and SEO copywriter and heads copywriting studio Divine Write. He can be contacted on Sydney +612 4334 6222 or at glenn@divinewrite.com. Visit http://www.divinewrite.com for further details or more FREE articles.

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