SEO FAQ 1

How is the best way to write the title?

The title is most probably the single most important place to put your keyword.

Have the word in the beginning of the title and also in the end. Try to vary it in different forms as well.

If you want to brand your company name you should keep that name in the end.

Try to follow this and at the same time make it look natural and appealing for the visitors. Remember that this is what is most visible in the SERPs for the visitor.

What is the best way to write the URL's?

In regards to Google it has been stated by two of their staffs involved in the SEO community (GoogleGuy and Matt Cutts) that the dashes (-) are better than underscores (_) when writing the URLs. This has also been confirmed by my own tests on the matter.

In regards to Yahoo, MSN and other search engines I actually don't know but I think it varies.

Which factors are considered unethical or black hat SEO?

Page cloaking is a BIG one, which basically consists of using server side scripts to determine whether the visitor is a search engine or a human and serving up different pages depending. The script would serve up a keyword rich, totally souped up page to search robots, while giving humans an entirely different page.

Linkfarms are considered black hat. Linkfarms are basically sites which consist of masses of links, for the purpose of getting rankings in search engines and turning a profit (usually off of affiliate program advertisements on the website).

Duplicate content can keep a page from getting indexed, and some people have even reported trouble with entire websites being duplicated by unethical webmasters, causing problems with their rankings.

Spamming keywords, in meta tags, title tags, or in your page's content is a black hat SEO trick that used to work well back in the 90's. It's long since been basically exterminated as a useful trick.

Linking to "bad neighborhoods", or sites that have been banned from search engines for using the above tricks, while not particularly black hat is definitely unhealthy for your own sites rankings.

How should good navigation look like?

Good Navigation can be broken down to one word - "Breadcrumbs"

If you remember the fairy tail "Hanzel and Gretel" you will recall that when the children were kidnapped, they dropped breadcrumbs so that their rescuers would be able to find them. In our situation, imagine its your site that has been kidnapped and the Search Engines are your "rescuer".

An example of Breadcrumbs would be the following

*Home-->Sublevel1-->Sublevel2

This type of navigation allows the Search Engines to find all of your pages in the most efficient and thorough way. It also aids "Deep Crawls" which are crucial to dynamic sites which may have 100,000 or more pages. Not only should you use this style of navigation behind the scenes but displaying the Breadcrumbs somewhere on the site will help both the Search Engines and visitors alike. A perfect example of this is www.dmoz.org

The second part of navigation is the "site map". This is a page which contains a link to every one of your pages. To be fully optimized, the links should have a descriptive anchor text to further help the page you are lining to. In addition your site map should always be within one click of the index page as this will help the Search Engines find it quickly.

Using these two methods of navigation will ensure your site gets fully indexed and will add to your users experience

Types of Links
The major type of navigation to avoid or to at least compensate for is Javascript pulldown menus. Because Search Engine bots will not follow these, it is important to compensate by having text links somewhere else on the page. These can be in the footer or worked in elsewhere in the content. In fact, Javascript as a navigation in general has been shown to hinder indexing. There are a few alternative ways to code your javascript however if you always code a backup plan, you will enjoy easy indexing without the worry

A very important point to remember is that always link to your main pages from your home page and if possible from other pages as well.
If you have a link from your home page to another page of yours then you are telling the search engine that this page is also important and needs to be indexed soon. Same goes for pages linked from many pages within the website . A good practice is to add a link to sitemap from your home page . The sitemap contains link to all other pages and helps in faster indexing.
Additionally all your pages should also have a link to the home page so people can return to home page in case they find lost .
This also adds weight to your home page from a search engine's point of view.
The text in the link should describe the page as closely as possible and if using image links you must add ALT tags in the image .
If you really need to have a javascript navigation then you should also add text links at the bottom of the page

What should my domain name look like?

This is a dilema that webmasters have faced more and more as there are fewer prime domains to choose from. There is a difference between the optimal domain name and the one you have to settle for. In general, if you are picking a domain for SEO purposes, it should contain the keywords you are targeting. Many will say because there is an extra bonus in the SERPs for this (File that under Theory, Assumption, or Speculation), but the true power is in the SEO power that your natural links will garner. When people link to you on their own, they may use the name of your website. Most of the times they will get it from your URL. If your keywords are there, they will then be in the anchor text used.

As far as the other factors of the domain, unless you are after a local market (ie. UK and therefore .co.uk), always go for the .com . This is trusted in general by newbies who may hesitate at a .net (Hard to believe but true)

The last important factor is the use of "-"'s. Avoid them if possible but if you have to, use them conservatively. More then 2 may be viewed as Spam so don't cross that threshold.

If you aren't choosing your domain for SEO reasons, pick something unique. After all, who heard of www.google.com 7 years ago?

What is PageRank and how does it work?

One big way in which search engines are granting importance to web pages are based on how many other sites are linking to it.

PageRank is a system implemented by Google that measures web page's importance with only taking into account the links and links related factors. The other big search engines (Yahoo, MSN) probably have a similar system but without an official measurement.

The basics are that each web page is giving votes to the links on that page and the power of the vote is determined by the number of links pointing to the page that gives the vote.

The votes are divided among the links on the page so the lesser number of links, the more share of the vote is given to each link.

Internal links are given a higher share than external.

The scale is between 0-10 but in fact it has many decimals which we cannot see.

0-3 is the most common, 4 is obtained by getting an amount of links and 5 takes some work to get. Only a short list of sites on the internet has PageRank 10.

What are some recommended ways to get more links to my site?

The best way to get more links to your site is through hard work.

In order to find sites that are relevant to yours and allow you to post a link on, you can perform the following searches:

Replace the keyword with the phrase you are targeting.

keyword "add url"
keyword "add site"
keyword "submit site"
keyword "submit url"

If you perform these searches for various keywords you will find plenty of sites that will allow you to post your link on and that are related as well.

You may also submit to directories. This is a long and hard process but it is an easy and free way to get some incoming links to your site

2. Another way that I just discovered is the following query on Google:

intitle:add+url OR intitle:submit+your+site OR intitle:add+your+site "your keyword"

That will list sites in which you probably could add sites related to yours.

3. Another proven successful way is to write an article about a subject you know. When you finish the article you write a short bio about yourself in the end with a link to your site and then you submit it to article submission sites. You can find lists of such sites on various places with up to 100 places you can submit your article. If you are lucky many will accept your article and publish it on their site and each one will have a link back to you.

If you provided a high quality article and are lucky it is likely that your article will get published on authority pages and your page with the article will have some PageRank as well.

The trick here is to write something good and useful and also to submit it to many places.

It is an excellent form of marketing, not only with the backlinks you get but also from the readers who reads your name and bio.