Correct HTML code is vital for SEO
You have a website, have made great efforts to get it designed, and you are now ready to do business. But what’s this? You are not getting any visitors!
When you type the relevant keywords, your site is not among the top results shown in your browser. This happens many a times because of invalid HTML code that has been used in your site. Many webmasters ignore the importance of valid HTML code and the site owners pay the price later on.
HTML is a language that has its own vocabulary, grammar and syntax. Every webpage is written in the HTML code. The language keeps on evolving all the time, and it is easy to make mistakes when writing the HTML code of a web page. There are rules governing writing in HTML, and these rules must be adhered to, when writing a web page. Search engines place a great importance to properly written web pages, and if they find mistakes in any web page, they tend to skip it and move forward.
So, despite the fact that you use SEO content on your site, if the HTML code of your site is not valid, all your efforts go in vain, and your desire for a higher ranking in the search engines become zero. Search engine spider conforms to valid HTML code only. It can index your site only if there are no errors in the HTML coding of your web page. If it finds mistakes in the HTML code of your site, they will lose interest in your site and stop searching your site. If there are only minor errors, search engines can overlook them and find your site, there have been instances when a single bracket missing in the HTML code of a web page has caused it to be missed by the search engines altogether.
Fortunately, there are means and ways to check the validity of the HTML code of your web page. There are services on the web that allow you to check if the HTML code on your web page is valid and OK. The HTML validator that is the choice of the SEO community is the W3C HTML validator. It is software that checks the webpage if it conforms to the HTML codes.
Just enter the URL of your web page in this software and it will tell if there are any mistakes in the HTML code. Valid HTML code is a must for your site and it makes sense to run it through this validator.
The things to avoid when using SEO
SEO is the buzz word on the net and people use it without thinking about what to do and what not. There are many misconceptions, myths and rumors that are doing the rounds and so, it is best to understand what the things are that one must avoid at all costs when using SEO so that the chances of the failure of the site do not surface.
Lack of keywords or phrases
I get a chance to review many websites every now and then and I am disappointed to see that they lack in search friendly content. Websites contain so many graphics but sadly, they are overlooked by the search engines. It is the keywords and the phrases that the search engines are interested in. Any site that wants to be searched highly by the engines must have at least 200 words that are popular, in its main page. There are many opinions about this, but generally speaking, this number is sufficient for the search engines. The keyword must also be included in the name of the URL to increase its chances of it being searched by the engines.
Insufficient Links
A site that has more incoming links from other sites has a better chance of being searched than those who do not have links. This is very important step that is somehow overlooked by those who want to market their websites. Incoming links that are relevant to the content of the site have a great value addition and greatly help in improving the ranking of a site.
Insufficient research of keywords
Research of keyword is an important aspect that needs to be done to improve the ranking of the site, and secondly, this information needs to be updated as the trends keep on changing.
Optimization can wait
Search optimization is good, but if you do not pay attention to the proper designing of the website, you may lose out on the visitors that come to your site as you have used SEO.
Do not expect paid advertising to do it for you al the time
Most websites fall in the trap of paid advertising, which is good, to some extent to drive traffic to your site, but over reliance on it can damage your business. If SEO is bringing you results, budget on paid advertising gets reduced greatly.
Signing with too many search engines
More than 90% of the traffic on the net is controlled by a handful of search engines. So it is foolish to submit your site to hundreds of search engines.
How to do PR work for your articles
The demand for good content can never go down and its importance can never be underestimated. If you are an article writer and the quality of your articles is good, you need to market them effectively on the net. You need to get them indexed in the search engines so that the ranking of your article is improved and you get maximum exposure on the net. Some of the important tips before you venture out to do the PR work for your articles are enumerated below.
Inserting popular keywords in your articles is one trick that has never failed to do the trick. These keywords should be spread in the entire article, especially the heading, subheading, and the body of the article. These keywords are of great help when any one types these words and your article comes up in the top results. These keywords should also be used in the name of your website.
Link your own URL in the article. This is the most important step and should never be missed. Whether you use it in bylines or in the main body of the article doesn’t matter, but the inclusion of the URL is a must. This helps you to get links from other websites.
If it is the rank that you are interested in, you might do the PR by using PR Web. PR Web sends press releases to all the important search engines like Google news and Yahoo news. The press releases by PR Web are optimized so that they are included in major search engines. So if you want the article to be indexed and found easily, do not for get to use the PR Web services. Once it has been done, search engines automatically find your article and index your article.
There are other services on the net such as www.thephantomwriters.com and www.marketingsource.com which are good for the distribution of your article on the web. There are thousands of websites looking for good quality articles and you need to find out those that are best for your requirements. You have to see that the sites on which your article is posted have high ranks so that your articles get maximum exposure. Just do a search for article submission or article directory, and Google will come up with results that will help you in choosing the websites for submission of your article.
If you want to tell publishers about your article, there are announcement sites which do this. You can use http://topica.com/lists/freeezinecontent,http://groups.yahoo.com/group/article_announce/, and many other such sites.