Archive for May, 2008
« Previous EntriesMajor SEO Success Stories.
Saturday, May 31st, 2008There are many ways to get great rankings in the search engines, and many people think they’re a secret – but that’s just not true. Once, top 10 spots were very easy to obtain, but getting multiple top spots is now a thing of the past. Some people say that top 10 spots are very hard to get these days, but we have managed it on many occasions recently. Here are some of our success stories.
Every SEO company should strive to get your website listed in at least the top 20 – although there are no guarantees, they shouldn’t have much difficulty in achieving this if they use proper keyword placement. If a company can’t get you ranked within the top 20 on some of your keywords then it’s time to look for another SEO company.
SEO success relies on inside knowledge of search engine algorithms and ranking techniques. This, combined with testing websites before submission, will give you good results, as long as you keep it ethical.
SEO Success Stories from Clients.
R. Nishimoto (Desert Hot Sauce): "Search engine optimization took our company from a few sales a week to more than 60 sales per week. We could no longer run this business with only two people. I am convinced that without this we would still be back at a few sales or even be under by now. "
AL (DVI Video Walls): "We are pleased with our web presence, many new customers, I will tally the sales increase at year-end. I know that the web page has now paid for itself at least once! More later, we are very busy – a couple competitors are going out of business so we are getting many panic calls."
Jenny (Music Asylum): "Your search engine techniques have produced the best return on our advertising dollars which was even better than any promotion we have done in the past. I am talking about quantifiable results the company can attribute directly to our website. At first, I couldn't see how your search engine work would make any difference based on the poor results from our old website. I have to give you credit though you got our site found on top of the major engines resulting in many calls, e-mails and eventual sales. Thanks."
Chris (Legacy Golf): "We are very impressed with the short period of time that it took to get our website listed in the search engines, we hoped it would place high but never expect to be one of the top 3."
(3rd Rock Internet Services): "Our Internet services company would not have any business if it were not for the efforts made to increase sales, being listed in the top 20 of the search engines was a great accomplishment that we were hoping would come true and now it has."
Scott (XTS.NET): "The company was struggling before we had the site optimized and now we are able to stay in business and keep up with the demands of our clients."
Companies like these are finding it ever more important to be placed where they can be found on the web – if you think that search engine placement isn’t necessary then think again. With the Internet business marketplace continuing to grow, you’ll have more competition to deal with every day.
When customers can’t find a company, the business goes bankrupt. You need to get ahead of your competition, and stay ahead. Now is the time to prepare for the future, before it’s too late.
How to Profit From Drop Shipping
Friday, May 30th, 2008Smart Internet marketing involves smarter business strategies – and one such strategy is drop shipping. With drop shipping, you can save your time and put it to better use making you more money.
Drop shipping is an entrepreneur's dream, offering a host of benefits. To put it simply, drop shipping allows you to sell goods online at a price of your choice without keeping any inventory. When the customer purchases the goods and makes payment for them, you will place an order for the product though your supplier, a drop shipper. Your drop shipper then charges you a wholesale price for the product and ships the product directly to the customer. You get to keep the difference between wholesale and retail price.
Drop shipping offers many unique advantages to you:
1. You don't need to keep stock or inventory.
2. You don't need to bother with packing and shipping.
3. You can make money easily by just taking orders.
4. Your profit margin could increase.
Even though drop shipping can have many advantages, however, there are some things you need to consider:
1. Any product or service you intend to sell online must be in demand.
2. The product you choose must sell in high volumes: the fact that you could sell the profit cheaply and make a good margin doesn't mean anyone is buying. Research the market for any product line you're considering. Try to determine demand for the product, how much competition there is, and what they're charging.
3. Signing up with a well-known supplier offers you many benefits. For instance, you will probably find it easier to return unsatisfactory products. Some drop suppliers will even pay the return costs in these cases. As a promotion, some suppliers will even offer you products for free if you meet their targets.
4. Target one or two products at a time — don't be in a rush to sell lots of different ones. Maintaining a large drop shipping business is often difficult and can become unmanageable.
How do you set your drop shipping business? To get started, find a directory of legitimate drop shippers with excellent reputations. Make a list of drop shippers who are established in the business and have a proven track record. Next, take the top five from the list and look through their website for products and services. In most cases you will find that their catalogue is massive, with all sorts of things available. Above all else, you need to be sure that you can sell what you choose.
Once you've done your homework, make contact with the drop shipper, either by phone or by mail. Don't start prematurely telling them all about your project, though — you should start by asking for additional information on the terms and conditions. You will have read every clause and sub-clause thoroughly, taking care to understand the business model you're signing up to. Terms and conditions and service policies often vary with different drop shippers — look out for any hidden clauses that could cause you trouble in the future.
The next step is to select the best offers from the drop shippers and start negotiating for better commission rates. If you have a thriving web business with a lot of traffic, it's possible to make a case for a better commission rate. Once the terms and conditions are acceptable to both of you, you can add the products to your online store.
When you work with a drop shipper, you become a "merchant" or "trader". This usually means that you will need to register with the relevant authorities. To become a merchant you may have to register to file tax returns and get a valid license to sell your products. Such regulations vary from region to region, so you should check it out with your local authorities.
The biggest headache associated with drop shipping is product returns. Don't expect it to be anything like smooth sailing. You'll run into back orders, product returns or even refund demands, if products are defective. As the shipping isn't under your control, it's difficult to explain your customers what's going on when products are unavailable or delivered late. Your own terms and conditions, user policy and other such notices must be precise and explain everything in detail to the customers. Always aim to avoid legal hassles, but do be prepared to contest customers' claims.
Long Term SEO Maintenance Tips.
Thursday, May 29th, 2008Long-term SEO maintenance requires dedication to your website. There are people who think that they can throw up a web page and that people will find them, and good luck too them – but it won’t happen. Any website that wants to make money needs to get optimized, and stay that way. Running and SEO campaign once or twice isn’t enough in this market: you need to consider long-term maintenance of your SEO.
For long term SEO maintenance to be effective, you need to constantly monitor the search engines algorithms, which can change very frequently. You also need to keep track of your competitors’ optimizations and adapt your strategy accordingly.
Always consider your website as an investment – you’ve put time, money and effort into it. Your investment needs to be protected, and the way to do that is SEO maintenance. This makes sure that your website is ranked high enough to bring you the traffic you need, and keeps the sales coming.
We’ve compiled a list of tips to help you with your SEO maintenance. To keep good rankings, you need to pay attention to how your site is doing. A few things to remember are:
1. Check on your pages regularly and make sure they’re still listed. Your listings are the most important part of your SEO work. Whether the page is listed or not is vastly more important than what key words you have etc. After all, if you aren’t listed at all what good is it to optimize?
2. Monitor the listings every week or two to make sure your pages are displaying correctly and that there are no problems with your site. While your at it see whether you’ve risen, dropped, or remained constant as far as listings go. Odds are that you will not remain constant, if you do remain constant you should consider this a small success as you have probably risen above other pages that were formerly above you while others from below you have surpassed you.
3. Watch for trouble, and fix it quickly. Don’t think it will correct itself – it won't. Any missing pages should be checked out thoroughly. Chances are that the system has run into a problem, but if you don’t check it out you may very easily be wrong. Always correct any of your mistakes as your mistakes can be very costly if they are not dealt with in a timely fashion.
4. Resubmit your site if you make major changes, but not for anything smaller. The most important time to resubmit your site is if you have recently changed your titles. Titles are very important in SEO and can deliver you with a completely new set of quality key words.
5. Create monthly ranking reports on your site, to see if any changes need to be made.
6. Keep building your link popularity.
7. Keep submitting your site to the big directories, as spiders use these as a starting point.
8. Watch your competitors and the methods they use. If they start trying to cheat, report them straightaway – it gets them out of your way.
9. Set goals for yourself. Write out an SEO maintenance plan, and if things change then make sure to set new goals and stick with them.
10. Stay up to date on the latest SEO information.
11. Check your site’s performance – if you’re not monitoring your traffic, find a tool to do it now.
12. Maintain a solid plan for dealing with your site’s growth. Don’t panic if you see a blip.
This might seem like a lot of work for a small website or company, but you need to do it to help your website grow. If you don’t have growth, you have nothing. No business wants to stay where it is forever, and SEO is a good way to get more business and stay in the race.
Do you remember why you started a website to begin with? The chances are you wanted to make money. Your website is a business, and you need to run it like one. Don’t stress too much over the work involved: it’s only a few hours each week in total, and you can do it whenever you want.
Introduction to SEO.
Tuesday, May 27th, 2008Over the last few years, search engine optimization (SEO) has been needed and used more and more, although it has been around for much longer than most people think. With new development tools being used to create websites that are heavy on Java, Flash and images, it’s important to have something that the search engines can read. If the content can’t be read by search engines then they can’t index it, and if your site doesn’t get indexed then it won’t be found when people search for it on Google, Yahoo, MSN, or anywhere else. This article will outline what SEO is, how it works, and some unethical SEO methods that you should avoid.
What is SEO?
SEO is a way of analyzing your site and modifying it to allow search engines to read and index it more easily. SEO is all about maintaining and building websites that get ranked highly on the major search engines.
You see, when people use a search engine, they generally don’t look beyond the top 20 or so results. If you want to make any money from your website, you need to get ranked in the top 20 out of potentially hundreds of websites.
How Does SEO Work?
Search engines maintain a huge database containing information from individual websites. Most of the information search engines collect isn’t listed on their results pages, but it is taken into consideration when it comes to deciding those results’ rankings.
It is very important that you encourage the search engines to rank your website in a high position, and you can do this through the keywords that you use on your website, as well as when you submit it. If the keywords you use in your submission tool don’t match the ones on your site then you could harm your rankings – be sure to have all the keywords you want to use on the website itself before you submit it.
Most websites don’t focus on their topic well, and so keyword lists containing 50 or more phrases per page are recommended. By focusing some of the pages of your site on keywords, you will score higher with the search engines.
Free Search Engines.
The major search engines on the Internet are still free, and it’s not hard to take advantage of this free advertising – you can do it in as little as an hour.
There are several companies that provide free SEO tools, or you can pay a professional to take care of it for you. Looking around on the web will turn up all sorts of useful resources.
What is Unethical SEO?
Unethical search engine optimization techniques can be unlawful, unscrupulous, or just in bad taste. You’d be surprised how many people use these methods. A lot of what is now called unethical SEO used to be accepted, until people went overboard and it started to have a negative affect on the web as a whole.
Keyword stuffing is when your site consists of long lists of keywords and nothing else. Don't do it. There are ways to put keywords and phrases on your site without running the risk of getting banned.
You may have seen ‘invisible text’ if you’ve been selecting the text on a page and found words that are the same color as the background. This text is often lists of keywords put there in the hope of fooling search engine spiders while hiding the words from visitors. This is considered unethical, and you shouldn’t do it.
A doorway page is a page that isn’t designed for real people to see – it’s purely for the search engines and spiders, in an attempt to trick them into indexing the website in a higher position. This is a big no-no and should be avoided.
Even though unethical SEO is tempting, and does work, you shouldn’t do it – not only is it annoying to users, but it’s likely to get you banned from the search engines sooner or later. You sites’ search engine rankings just aren’t worth the risk. Use efficient SEO techniques to get your site ranked higher, and stay away from anything that even looks like unethical SEO.
SEO is a set of techniques used in order to attract visitors or prospective customers to your website, and the goal of a search engine is to provide high quality content to the users of the Internet. These two objectives are not in opposition, if you do SEO the way it should be done.
How to Price Shipping and Handling for Physical Goods
Tuesday, May 27th, 2008If you're running a business that sells physical goods and products, you will frequently need to dispatch your products all over the country – perhaps even all over the world. When you do this, you might pack the item yourself, or you might pay someone to do it. However you handle it, shipping and handling is an important aspect of your business, and the safety of the items you post rests partly on your shoulders, as badly packed items will often get damaged in transit.
Your shipping and handling charges are a determining factor in how competitive you will be in a niche market. Many established companies are well known for their efficiency in dispatching the product – customers trust them for their safe prompt delivery. Before you can emulate them, you need to come up with a fair pricing structure for shipping and handling as this is an additional cost paid by your customers. The costs of shipping in bulk are often cheaper than for a single item and you should consider giving your customers discounts for volume.
How do you calculate shipping and handling charges for your product? It's relatively easy, if you know the basics. There are two components in the price:
1) The handling cost which includes packing material, labor, storage and other related costs. While this cost is pretty easy to calculate and depends only on you, the most common mistake is to use the lowest price possible for packaging materials in the shipping calculation. The better way is to find an average cost for packaging materials and then source the cheapest. At least this way you still have some room to "sharpen your pencil" if your shipping quote is too high.
2) The shipping cost which is the charge for postage, freight or courier charges. These costs are not so straight forward and you need to research courier and freight charges to many destinations around the world. Bear in mind that not all shipping charges are fixed, and with a little effort you can easily negotiate an agreement with your shipping company.
Shipping and freight companies usually charge based on the weight and volume of items, the distance they are going to travel, and how quickly you want them to get there. Large volume or weight deliveries carry a premium price tag, while smaller and lighter ones cost less. If the destination is within your country, the shipping charges will be rather small compared to sending packages abroad. If you need urgent goods to be delivered quickly then you will need to pay higher 'priority' charges, whereas slow, 'non-priority' delivery costs much less.
When calculating shipping costs, don't calculate the cost of shipping to each country in the world, break it down into regions or by continent. If you are shipping small items like CD's use one shipping cost for local deliveries and cost for international deliveries. Find the most expensive shipping cost you are likely to incur and use that for all countries.
When your customer purchases a product, they will be charges the cost price for the product and the shipping and handling costs applicable for the delivery destination will be added at the checkout. A total is calculated and then charged to your customer at the end of the transaction.
You may want to consider offering customers a delivery priority for their shipment. For example:
Option 1. Standard shipping within 3 to 5 days (cheapest).
Option 2. Express 2-day shipping (average cost).
Option 3. Guaranteed Next Day 1-day shipping (most expensive).
Consider giving discounts on bulk orders. Customers will often insist on insurance for bulk orders and costly items and you should consider their request; not only does it makes them more comfortable, it saves you a big PR headache if the order goes missing. On all shipments include a clearly explained shipping, handling and return policy.
Always take care to prepare the proper documentation to suit the insurance, tax and customs regulations in force in your own country and in the destination country. If you are shipping to another country, make sure your product is not prohibited. If you sign up with a trustworthy shipping agent or courier most of the documentation will be handled by them, giving you peace of mind that your items will be delivered safely and quickly.
WordPress Birthday Party
Sunday, May 25th, 2008On Tuesday, May 27th, WordPress will turn 5 years old. We’ve come a long way from that original 0.7 release.
To celebrate we’re throwing a party in San Francisco at 111 Minna, starting at 9PM. You can get the full details and RSVP on Upcoming.org or on Facebook.
I hope you see some of you there, should [...]
Increase Traffic with AdWords
Sunday, May 25th, 2008Adwords is the component of Googles advertising programs that allows web masters or SEO professionals to advertise web sites via links from other web sites. Adwords is used in conjunction with adsense in such a way that your links are placed only on the most relevant web pages. You are given a good deal of traffic at a very reasonable price and the conversion rate from adwords is higher than that of any other pay per click advertising system on the web.
As I just mentioned, Google Adwords is a pay per click service. This means that you must pay Google a certain amount for each click that you receive via your adwords links. The best part about this is that you never have to pay unless your link is clicked so every payment that you make to Google was in exchange for a real, live potential customer.
When advertising with Adwords, it is crucial that your advertising links go to pages that have high conversion rates. You don’t want to send traffic to a page that doesn’t make money. If you have one page that absolutely blows the other pages out of the water in the way of conversion rates, setting up an adwords program that links to this site can give your profits a huge kick.
Once you have decided what pages you are going to link your ads to, you must decide what you are going to place in your ads. Google Adwords allows you to place a headline, two descriptions, a URL to display, and a destination URL. The best way to configure this is to put the title of your destination page into the title, use the two description lines to inform your visitors of what they are going to see, list your domain or root directory as the display URL, and use a high conversion page as the destination URL. This combination of information will provide your visitors with the best idea as to whether or not they are going to find something that they want to purchase on your site.
Remember that there may be a page with a high sales rate that doesn’t stand alone well if you send traffic directly to it. If you have pages that build up the products sold, these may be the places that your links are better spent. You may want to provide your visitors with a brief description or several pages of information regarding your product before sending them to the order page.
Google attempts to enforce its standards so that you do not pay for clicks that are made merely in an attempt to boost an adsense users profits. This is crucial because there are so many web masters out there who will continually click on the ads on their own pages in an attempt to boost their profits. These clicks do nothing for you as the web master probably doesn’t even look at the page before exiting it and clicking the links again.
Google’s anti-fraud system is a match for that of any advertising agency on the net. It is, however, possible that you will pay for an click here and there that is not honest. This is the risk involved in Google Adwords. It is so easy to think that you have come up with a powerful solution with no possible downside, but the possibility of fraud is always there when it comes to online pay per click ads.
The best way to combat fraudulent clicks is to keep close tabs on your statistics. If you are getting hundreds of visits from a particular web page each day and each of the visits is under twenty cents in length, there is more than a slight possibility that it is a fraudulent attempt to inflate that site’s adsense earnings. If you encounter such a practice, report it to Google immediately. This will save you and many other web masters a great deal of money. The fact that there are dishonest people in this world will not change, but the dishonesty of pay per click advertisement is diminishing and will, hopefully, continue to do so.
When using adwords, you will increase your traffic, but that isn’t the goal. The goal of advertising is to increase profits so if your profits do not increase when you begin to utilize adwords, you may want to reevaluate your usage of your ads. You may decide that you need to change the destination page or you may find that you want to display your ads on pages based in different countries. Whatever you decide, the fact is that if you plan carefully, adwords is bound to increase your sales opportunities.
How to make money with a niche website without selling anything
Saturday, May 24th, 2008You don't have to sell anything to make money from a niche website. You read that correctly, no e-book, software program, online service or physical product required… Just a website!
The search engine giant Google has developed a pay per click advertising system of their own which allows you to place their advertisements on your web pages. If a visitor to your web page clicks on one of these advertisements, you get paid a percentage of the pay per click value.
This system known as Google Adsense is a quick and easy way for webmasters to monetize their website's content pages and earn money from visitors to their website. What makes this system so powerful is that Google uses a special algorithm to determine the theme of each page and then only displays advertisements matching that theme.
The other side of the Google pay per click system is known as Google Adsense. Products owners who wish to promote their wares, open memberships in Google Adsense and create advertising campaigns based on keywords which are regularly searched for by people using the search engines. These advertisements appear in two different locations:
1) They appear on the Google search results page as "Sponsored Links" when the keywords searched for by the web surfer match those that the Adsense member included with their advertisement.
2) On any web page which has incorporated the Google Adsense code they appear as "Ads by Goooogle" when the theme of the web page matches the keywords the Adsense member used for their advertisement.
When one of these advertisements is clicked by a web surfer, the advertiser (Adwords member) is charged the amount they bid on the keyword and the webmaster (Adsense member) is credited with a percentage of the bid amount.
Due to the size of the internet and the shear number of people advertising with Google Adsense, there is a wide range of topics available for webmasters to capitalize on by creating websites based on those topics, but structured specifically to earn money through Google Adsense.
The golden rule for an "Adsense Site" is to limit the options any visitor has when they arrive at a web page to the following:
1) Click a Google Adsense Advertisement for more information.
2) Leave the website by clicking the back button or closing the browser.
3) Clicking to another page on the website which displays more Google Adsense ads. This last option must be made as difficult as possible by not displaying the website menu in any normal or anticipated position.
The key to getting people to click on an Adsense advertisement for more information and not clicking the back button is a bit of a tightrope act… Basically you have to provide just enough information to wet the visitor's appetite so they are eager to carry on searching, but not too little that they get annoyed because of a lack of information and the resulting feeling they've wasted their time.
From your point of view you don't want to spend all that time and effort building a website and getting a reasonable flow of visitors through it, and only earning a couple of cents when people click on your Google Advertisements.
Clearly you need to do a little research before hand and discover which topics and related keywords or phrases cost the most for an Adwords member to bid on. For example, anybody who wants to promote an internet marketing related product using Google Adwords had better be prepared to pay dearly for the more popular keywords.
The downside of building an "Adsense Site" on an expensive theme is there is so much competition for the popular keywords, that you will have to be a search engine optimization wizard to get the search engine rankings required to generate enough traffic to your website.
The key is to find keywords or phrases that people regularly search for but which do not have much competition from other websites on similar themes. You will not get much website traffic from these little known keywords, so you will need to uncover a lot more of them to make up the difference.
Once you have built your website and got the right balance between keyword value, popularity and competition, your website will earn a nice steady passive income from Google Adsense with very little additional effort on your part.
How to Track Keyword Response Rates.
Friday, May 23rd, 2008In today's market, it’s crucial for every marketer to track keyword response rates. It’s simply the only way of tracking advertising results and knowing which of your keywords are working for you.
In the online marketing world, it’s just as important to track your ad results. Knowing the exact response rate to your advertisement lets you to figure out how well it performed, which can help increase your profits and lower your costs.
Don’t be afraid to change a poorly responding advertisement to try to make it work better. Pay attention to headlines, ad copy, graphics and layout, and then be sure to re-test the ad. You might also find that where your sites are running is the problem – try alternative systems. By the same token, you should test your keywords to make sure that they will work the way you want them to. They’re very similar to advertisements in that they either work brilliantly or not at all.
Tracking your ad results allows you to be sure that your ad publisher has followed through on their end of the bargain, and the information you gather allows you to prepare better campaigns the next time. The best way to track online ad results is to measure click-through rates (the number of people who clicked on your advertisement). There are other measurements such as conversion ratio (the number of people who click through and buy), but measuring click-through is a fine way to get started. There are two methods of tracking click through rates mentioned below:
CGI Scripts.
You can download CGI scripts at plenty of websites, and you can place CGI scripts in your CGI directory if your web host supports it. Try to find a small but powerful CGI script that tracks clicks on your site – do it invisibly, so your visitors don’t know you’re tracking them. LinkinLite is one free CGI script you could try, as an example, or you could have one made specially for you. Getting a custom script can be great, as long as you don’t pay too much for it.
PHP and ASP Scripts
Some CGI scripts are better than others. Basically, CGI seems to be dieing slowly but surely. It is being replaced by ASP and PHP both of which have scripts available to perform these actions. PHP is emerging as the preferred language for server side scripting and is therefore the most accessible of the group. Depending on what your hosting service offers you should be able to find free tracking software simply by Googling for the software in the particular scripting language that you need. If you are unsure as to whether your hosting service allows a particular server-side scripting language, don’t hesitate to ask. Most of these providers want all of their services used otherwise they feel as though they have wasted time and/or money implementing the service.
Online Tracking Services.
Online tracking services count click-throughs using own servers. This is usually free, although most require you to upgrade to paid versions before they’ll let you do anything useful with the statistics. The upgrades are worth while, but you should try out the free version before upgrading to make sure that you are comfortable with the user interface. Once you’ve decided on a software to use, shop around. See if there is a similar interface on something cheaper. Your money can go really far on the internet, and if you’re lucky you can take advantage of special offers.
If you’re interested in a free online click-tracking service, try Hypertracker, Statmuncher, Adminder or Roibot. These services are all relatively straightforward. They are all pretty much equal in quality. The differences between these free services are more or less personal preference. But remember, a comfortable user interface goes a long ways. If you don’t like the look and feel of the program, you won’t enjoy using it and will eventually stop using it all together.
Banner ad click-through rates are usually between 0.5% and 5%, although for e-zines it can go as high as 10%. That’s about average compared to offline marketing methods, which average roughly 2%.
If you provide a service to a niche market, you are more likely to see higher click through rates. Professionals in the area of online marketing often settle for no less than a 7% click through rate. These rates can be done and should certainly be shot for.
Regardless of which tracking methods you use, you need to be tracking your keywords and advertising results somehow – it’s essential, and it takes you a step further in the SEO marketplace. Every set of statistics lets you get to know your site’s market position better and better, and gets you one step closer to where you want to be.
How to Tap Into the Power of HTML Elements.
Wednesday, May 21st, 2008In order to tap into the power of HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) elements, you first need to know what they are. In HTML, elements are bits of markup that tell a web browser to display or format parts of web pages. For example, <p> means paragraph, and <b> means bold – there are plenty more. These elements are used constantly when writing web pages. You should basically think of your HTML elements as the organizational and visual formatting of your HTML document.
By learning HTML, you can tap into the power of HTML elements and create a more interesting website as well as tipping off search engines as to what the most important information on your web page is. Many people starting out on the web just use ‘easy editors’ (also known as WYSIWYG for what you see is what you get) that show the page as it will appear, without ever looking at the code that the page is actually made from. This is fine if you intend to distribute and are only interested in the look of the page. Visually artistic people are often drawn to using WYSIWYG (pronounced wise-ee-wig) editors when creating their web pages because it allows them to see exactly what they are doing and frees them from the time consuming task of learning HTML.
The structure of HTML is based on logic, order, and syntax and is, therefore, relatively simple to use. To make a heading, you use the heading elements (<h1>, <h2>, <h3>, and so on up to <h6>). To start a new paragraph, you use a paragraph element (<p>). To format a list, you use a list element (start with <ul> then use <li>). In order to learn HTML it is a good idea to go to www.w3schools.com As XHTML is gaining more and more popularity among web masters (and search engines) it may be a good idea to learn that instead. XHTML is basically a more standardized version of HTML and it is worth learning. If you learn XHTML along with CSS, you will have be able to make extremely powerful web pages.
Once you understand that all you’re doing is providing these simple structures, you realize the understated power of HTML. You see, once your HTML structure is in place with the appropriate markup, you can add CSS (Cascaded Style Sheets) for visual presentation, using a graphics design program. Good elements provide meaning and structure to your content, making it simple to add whatever design you want afterwards.
That said, the most important HTML elements (also called tags) that you will run into are <title> and <h1> (through <h6>). Whatever you put between <title> and </title> is what appears in the blue margin at the top of the browser. This is also what search engines use as the link text to your site. Your title should be relatively descriptive and include as many key words as it can without becoming abrasive. Seven or eight words is generally a good length for the title of a web page.
Next are the <h1> tags. Generally, when you are trying to optimize a web page for the search engine you will use this as a subheading. Header tags (h1-h6) are all weighted by search engines as more important than regular text because the search engine assumes that you will only make text larger if it is important. This is a good rule to live by. If you place your subheading within a header tag you will probably get slightly better search results for the key words in this subheading. Remember that the difference between the way that a search engine sees an <h1> tag and an <h2> tag is minuscule so set your header numbers based on visual preference rather than search engine standards.
Another tag that is very important is the <a> tag (or anchor tag). This tag is used to link to other web pages and it is invaluable to your web page because search engines like to see relevant links on your web site. Make sure that you only link to relevant sites, and while your at it, try to get a return link so that your page rank increases.
Other tags such as <b> (bold) tags and <i> (italics) tags will also help out. You can put these around your key words or less important subheadings. These won’t do quite as much for you, but they will definitely help to some extent and should be utilized when practical.
The difference between your site and other sites of equal page rank and similar material will be how well you utilize HTML elements to exemplify your work. You can very easily modify your web site so that things stick out where they should. Solid knowledge of HTML is your best friend when you are performing SEO activities. Remember, “If you build it, they will come.”
Some Guidelines for Using HTML Elements.
While the BLOCKQUOTE element is intended for longer quotations and Q is intended for shorter quotations, the Q element causes all sorts of problems because it’s not very widely supported. You shouldn’t use it at the moment – hopefully next-generation browsers will support it.
The BR element is one of the more abused ones. If you understand how HTML works, you should realize that its use is rarely justified: use the P element for paragraphs instead of using the BR element to provide paragraph-like breaks.
Now that you’re armed with some simple information, you should consider learning more about HTML and how to use it. You used to need to learn HTML before you could create a web page, and that gave a lot of people the edge when it came to more advanced web design and development later on. If you want to catch up, you need to know what you’re doing on the technical side of things.