Headings – The World Wide Web Consortium recommends using heading tags to structure an HTML document. through gives natural stopping and starting points in a web page, but also alerts a visitor to the various sections of the page. Many search engines do take these headings into account as being important in the context of the page. However, this has been abused in the past, and I don’t believe search engines give headings as much weight as they used to. Still, organizing your pages into sections is a good idea for both structural, navigational, and organization purposes, both for the site visitor and the search engines. Website Usability and SEO - Clean Design and Usability Clean Design A clean and uncluttered design is usually a win-win situation for both your visitors and the search engines. The simplest and most cleanly coded websites are usually the ones that are visited and crawled the most, since many people know that they will find what they are looking for and where to find it; they usually are repeat visitors as well. Search engines also like to crawl sites that are not heavy on their resources. Anytime a search engine has to wade through a website in order to find the content, it taxes the search bot’s resources, and may make it spider the site less often. Cleanly coded and compliant HTML makes for easier development for the next web designer to make changes to content. Being able to find your way around someone else’s code is important to new inductees having to look at a page for the first time. Being able to find their way around makes it easier for proofreading, editing, updating content, and fixing site issues that may prevent spidering or ranking well. Your first step should be considering what you already have to work with. Try to go through the site with fresh eyes. If the site was designed a few years ago, it may have been state of the art at the time, but now looks like it's fallen behind the times. In truth, it has; visitors may be looking for something more exciting (or at least more interesting) and Google surely wants to see something other than what it saw five years ago! Extra tags - It’s also my belief that the tag will soon be deprecated, with the popularity and more browsers conforming to CSS standards. Other tags like and and others are already being replaced with other tags, but in a text to code ratio analysis, all those HTML tags will affect these ratios considerably. Keeping them to a minimum is in your best interest. For example, instead of a tag for a table cell looking like this: It should be more like this: 18.Redesigning a Site for SEO: an Overview Many SEOs use a check list when they need to redesign a web site. That helps tremendously, but some aspects of SEO and site redesign defy such a mechanical approach, especially when you’re working with a client. Sometimes it helps to step back and consider the whole picture, as an artist would step back to look at a painting. There are many situations where using an HTML editor, like FrontPage, will add in those extra tags if you make changes at a later time, whereas other editors like DreamWeaver will group them together for you. Consolidating these tags are not only more search engine friendly, but it enables you to create cleaner code for easier updating later. Scripts – I talked earlier about using JavaScript links or links embedded in a Frames layout being difficult for search engines to follow. But also, all that code in the section and throughout the body of your web page can make crawling more resource intensive for a search engine. It may look incredible, but if search engines don’t want to crawl and index the page, it doesn’t help people find your pages. Plus, all that code clutters up your pages. It’s better for you to offload your code to an external file if at all possible, like with JavaScript or CSS styles. Another way some webmasters deceive the search engines is by cloaking. Here the spider is fed a page that can boost the website ranking, while the visitor is directed to some other site. Search engines have become intelligent enough to identify such tricks. A problem arises when some sites, which are cloaked for valid reasons, are being penalized. Keep yourself away from cloaking or else your website may lose popularity. Just as you work to build traffic and increase the ranking, you also need to work to maintain your website. Only then can you soar high in online business. CSS - CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, is a very search engine friendly language, because many times CSS is put into external files, since search engines seem to disregard the CSS styling anyways. There really is no reason to keep CSS styles within the section of your web page when you can easily reference the external style sheet in the page, and keeping your code tidy and your text to code ratios more in tact. Webmasters also apply the method of keyword stuffing to boost the site ranking. To avoid such artificial boosting, search engines have set a limit to keyword density. If the density is higher than the limit, the site is penalized. Therefore, never overuse the keywords in your site. 31.The SEO Industry Survey Results In February of 2008, 3000+ search marketers answered 52 questions about themselves, their work and the search industry via a survey on SEOmoz. The following data and analysis comes from SEOmoz staff members Nick Gerner, Rebecca Kelley, Jeff Pollard and Rand Fishkin. Also, many good sites are penalized by mistake. Suppose the text color and background color is found to be same. The site is penalized even if the text is highlighted with some other color. The best way to avoid being penalized is to keep the text color and background color different. Introduction It's no longer fair to call search marketing an industry in infancy. The profession and the communities surrounding it have reached a point of maturity, where penetration rates about SEO and what SEOs do have reached a great number of those influenced and interested in search engine traffic. With the industry reaching a tipping point of sorts, we at SEOmoz felt compelled to examine the numbers and produce what is almost certainly the most comprehensive public report on search marketing, particularly the organic SEO side, to date. Another illegal way webmasters try to fool search engines is by placing hidden text. The keywords are placed in such a way that they are not visible to the human eye. That is often achieved by keeping the color of the text the same as the background. This trick is also identified by spiderbots and such sites are penalized. Below, you'll find graphs, charts, and data analysis on more than 50 questions, posed to more than 3000 total respondents over a period of approximately 7 days in early February, 2008. Responses represent participation from nearly every major country on Earth and every type of search marketer in the business. With such a depth and breadth of responses, we think you'll find the responses incredibly engaging, thought-provoking, and valuable. It's always great to learn more about the industry in which we all participate on a daily basis. When light green is shown on the scale, the site isn’t penalized. You can link to such sites, but keep checking them regularly to make sure they are not penalized. When the scale shows green, the site is of good quality and you can link to it. A few quick words of warning before you dive in, though. This survey was conducted online and duplicate responses were not filtered or controlled (though filling out the survey did take upwards of 20 minutes, making it unlikely that many responses came from the same individual). The survey also did not attempt to control for any particular biasing, so there is certainly over-representation by those more likely to read SEOmoz, those more likely to take surveys, and those more likely to have found information about the survey itself (via email to SEOmoz members and posts on sites like SearchEngineLand and SERoundtable or others). So how do you recognize that a particular website is a bad neighborhood? Google has a solution. You can download the Google toolbar. When you open a particular web page, the Google toolbar shows the page rank of that website on a sliding green scale. When the scale is completely grey, the site is likely to be penalized. Hence, it is best to avoid linking to such sites. -- Rand Fishkin, CEO & Co-Founder of SEOmoz BTW - For feedback or questions about the SEO Survey, please visit this blog post. Biggest Takeaways The data presented here is pretty rich (there's about 50MB of responses!), so it's a little hard to boil down just a few takeaways. Perhaps the single biggest deduction is that digging through this data could be very valuable for you, whether you're trying to push an SEO related tool, you represent a search engine (one of the big guys or one of the newer search engine startups), or you are an SEO yourself and are interested in learning more about the industry and your peers (and competition). We've only provided a high-level analysis here, and for the most part we're hoping to point you towards interesting starting points. Link building of course adds to the search engine ranking. Top ranking can be achieved by link popularity, but you need to be careful when choosing the sites you wish to link to. You can get a good website ranking when you link to quality websites. Due to increased optimization, some sites have been exclusively designed for enhancing link popularity. Such sites are recognized by the search engines as "bad neighborhoods" and some penalties are imposed. Even though you won’t be penalized when a bad neighborhood links to you, you’ll have to pay a penalty when people see the bad link and stop visiting your site. Keep checking the active links on your website to make sure there are no links to bad neighborhoods. However, here are some of the especially interesting points that stand out, with a little something for everyone: •The vast majority of respondents from SEM agencies use tools to aid their marketing efforts. •Marketers are still unsure about things like the potential of negative effects from registering with Webmaster Central, or the use of nofollow. •From the 2,060 people responding, we see at least $73 million is spent on PPC a month. That's more than $35,000 per respondent per month. This assumes all our respondents are from different companies. Discussion of Selected Results Sometimes, it happens that even the good websites get labeled as scams. Even after you apply all the legitimate methods of optimization, your website is still at risk of being identified as a scam. This can be avoided by taking the proper precautions. Below we discuss some of the results we've pulled from our data. However, as mentioned above, there's roughly 50MB of responses from 3000+ survey takers, across over 50 different questions. That makes 2,500 possible two-way correlations, with somewhere in the neighborhood of 19.6 billion data points. We took a look at several questions we had, and tried to find some outliers and come up with plausible explanations. One thing we didn't do is compute error bars or in other ways measure the statistical power of our results. Optimizing a Web Site`s SEO Ranking - Protecting Your Search Engine Rankings Protecting Your Search Engine Rankings Search engine ranking is extremely important in online business and has caused a number of webmasters to use illegitimate methods to gain popularity. However, search engines have identified these techniques and such sites have been banned from the search engine index.