Source: Google.com

When designing a website, you should optimise the site for your chosen keywords. This is crucial in order to do battle in the search engine field. But which are the best words to choose? Don’t go into battle un-armed! Do your research first - it’s no use thinking you have a niche market and base your web page on a keyword or key phrase which no-one searches for! In the words of Google, "see what the world is searching for". Google have made available an interesting free tool called "Google Trends", where you can compare interest in keywords in different countries and regions. Google say that this new tool is still in an early stage of development, and may contain inaccuracies, but it still makes very interesting comparisons which you should consider when choosing keywords.

You may compare up to 5 different keywords or phrases, separated by a comma, and see how often they have been searched for. The results are shown in a graph with a different colour for each keyword phrase. This is the overview - you should then view the bar graphs for individual countries/regions. You will see that what may be a popular keyword in one country is far less popular in another region. You can choose to see the results from all countries or one specific country, by using the drop down boxes in the upper right corner of the Google Trends results page. You can also choose to view results for a specific month or year from 2004 by using the other drop down box. The results graph enables you to view the search trends for your keywords, i.e. is the trend increasing or decreasing? If it is decreasing significantly, do you really want to choose that keyword? You can also see at a glance any seasonal changes to the popularity of keywords, such as those increasing over the Christmas period.

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By: Brandon Cornett | Source: isedb.com

By increasing your website’s usability, you’re making the reader’s job easier. This can dramatically improve your conversion rates. But that’s not the only thing usability contributes to your site. Most usability improvements also improve search engine visibility by making it easier for search engine spiders to crawl through the site.

In other words, usability equals visibility. So here are seven ways to make your website more usable for people and more visible to search engines.

1. Limit the use of Flash.

Client-side plugins like Flash tend to reduce both usability and visibility, albeit for different reasons. When used carelessly, Flash can frustrate users and send them packing. Overuse of Flash also reduces search engine visibility, because search engines can’t decipher your Flash movies. Actually, Google can index Flash files and offer a text representation of them, but you won’t like the way it looks!

I’m not saying "All Flash is bad." I’m saying that many of the Flash implementations I see reduce both usability and visibility. If you’re going to use Flash (and you care about SEO), contain your Flash within its own space, and offer textual content in addition to the Flash movie. For examples, check out Adobe.com, WebTrends.com or ClickTracks.com.

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By: Titus Hoskins | Source: sitepronews.com

Images, graphics and thumbnails play an important role in the overall look and feel of your website. They can greatly improve the usefulness of your site; making it more user-friendly and easier to navigate. More importantly, the visual images on your site can be optimized to improve your search engine rankings.

Despite their importance, many webmasters ignore images or graphics when it comes to optimizing their web pages. Don’t make the same mistake.

There are some simple rules to follow when using SEO with your onsite graphics. Here are a few tips:

First, you must know exactly what an ‘Alt Image Tag’ is in order to optimize for the search engines. You must also realize search engine robots can’t see your images, they can only read text - the text in your Alt Image Tags. So you have to construct your Alt Image Tags with this factor in mind and feed these robots with your popular keywords. Search engine robots usually spider popular sites every day or so.

What is an Alt Image Tag?

Every image, graphic or thumbnail on your site will have html code similar to this:

<img src="http://www.YourDomain.com/images/logo.jpg" Alt="Your
Keyword Image" width="600" height="200">

Your Alt Image Tag will be:

alt="Your Keyword Image"

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