2009
06.28
How/where to place your keywords
When the bots/crawlers, whether they be google’s or msn’s, crawl your website they look for the keywords in places where a human reader might expect them. That means that placement in relevant areas, and tailored to an actual reader is key to good results.
If you’re writing an essay or paper, the title will often tell the reader what the article is about right off the bat. This is similar with the crawlers in that what you say in your <title> tags is weighted more heavily than inside the <body> tags. Actually, keep that analogy in mind. Think of your website as an anthology or a collection of pieces of literature(i.e. a book of poems for example). You have your website’s url which is important in that it is like the name of your anthology. Now if your anthology’s name was “Poems I Like” versus “The Collected Works of Dr. Seuss”, which do you think would be more specific?. The latter of course, but don’t freak out if your website url doesn’t have some of the keywords you’re trying to attract. It definitely helps though. I read an interesting article over at Them.pro (I’ll link at the end) about Google vs. Bing when it comes to having keywords in your URL. According to their test it does seem that Bing gives more weight to having a keyword in your URL. If your website was about pokemon… when you’re starting off it might be a good idea to have “pokemon” in your url. You don’t have to have that perfect URL with all the right words… but it helps.
Now of course take this with a grain of salt… This website is ranked number 1 on google for “optimizing bing” … however with Bing… even with both keywords in the url, it’s nowhere to be seen. There are many more factors to look into.
Moving on … we discussed keywords in <title> tags… Those are like your book’s titles. What would be the next relevant source of info for finding out the structure of a book? It would probably be chapter names. We can think of these as the <h1>, <h2>, etc headers.
According to the Bing Webmasters, the other two relevant places for keywords would be within the “meta tags” and in outgoing links within the <a> tags.
I think you’re tired of the analogy… and I don’t even want to try and stretch it that far to incorporate those two in. Hopefully you get the idea though.
Summary of Important Keyword Locations
- Keywords in URL
- Keywords in Page titles <title>
- Keywords in Body header <h1>, <h2> tags
- Keywords in Meta Tags
- Keywords in Outgoing links <a> tags
Things to note… Don’t bother stuffing your tags or these areas with keywords if it has nothing to do with your article. This is going to help you in the long run if you focus on the content… which is of course king.
Link to Google vs. Bing URL comparison
2009
06.24
Heya,
So hopefully you know what SEO is since you’re reading this page…. but…..
SEO = Search Engine Optimization
People are advertising SEO all over the place. You can either learn it yourself, or pay someone to do it for you. Either way, be prepared to invest plenty of time and or money. SEO is the way in which you structure your site and it’s content to better position your site in the results of search engines for specific keywords. By optimizing and improving your ranking within search engines you will be placed closer to the top of search results.
Search engines base these rankings upon several factors. When a search engine indexes or “scans” your website for what’s inside it looks for content, relevant keywords, incoming links to your site, outgoing links, site size, site age, and a myriad more factors that many webmasters discuss in late night forums. Now, it is important to note that each of these factors have different weights for the different search engines. It seems that Bing places more importance in how long a site has been around as compared to google. That’s for a later post though. Content that’s relevant and fresh is pretty much always good. I’ve seen sites that get tons of hits but have stale and or useless content. I’ve also seen sites with well written and insightful articles… cough cough… that get very little traffic. Now these may be just starting off, or they don’t know how to properly optimize their site to get more “organic” or natural traffic from the search engines. It really depends on what your site’s overall goals are and how you want to approach them.
I’ve done work on websites before… but never a blog. So this will be a kind of case study for me as well. I’ll post my findings as I learn more… and hopefully any readers who come along can gleam something off of this. Or feel free to share of course…
2009
06.21
First off you might want to submit your site to Bing. Bing’s webcrawlers will typically do it automatically. But if you don’t see any results for your URL when searching under Bing you might want to add it manually.
This also applies to subfolders in your site that you want indexed, as bing will not always index them.
You can use this link to submit sites manually. (Links will open in a new window)
Next off would be signing into Microsoft Webmaster Center. If you don’t already have an ID, sign up for one as this is where you’ll be able to see all of your stats and data.
Once inside you have the option of submitting your site once it’s ready. There are two ways that Bing validates the site or makes sure that you are the owner.
You can either add a <meta> tag into the <head> tag of your default page with the code provided in it, or upload a provided xml file to your root. If you have easy root access uploading is quick and easy.
