FILE NAMES FOR SEO

This is another are in which opinions are varied as to the effect of file
names on search engine ranking. But it’s good protocol to name your
files – webpages, mp3s, images, videos etc with useful, relevant
names, and since it definitely won’t hurt your rankings, I say ‘why
not?’. Without being spammy, you can choose wisely when naming
your files to make them relevant. If you have MP3s, don’t just name
them “track one” or something generic like that. Include the name of
your band, genre and track title for example, and remember to use
hyphens to separate your words
eg. “Blue-snake-rock-girls-are-cool.mp3”

Search engines like content that is updated regularly. If your site gets
stale, your ranking will drop because it becomes less relevant. Not
every kind of site lends itself well to updated content which is where a
blog can come in handy. A blog, by its nature can be any kind of
content and is frequently updated. If you are a band you can utilize a
blog even when you don’t have an album out because you can let your
fans know about what you are up to. Are you in the studio recording?
Post pics of your sessions or let them know what songs you are
working on. Share rough cuts of tracks – ask for feedback. Give your
fans the feeling they are getting some personal insight into your life as
an artist. This kind of regularly updated content not only helps develop
your relationship with your fans, keeping them engaged and coming
back to your site frequently, but it also looks good to the search
engines.
Also keep in mind that the more pages your site has, the better it
looks to search engines. So it’s important to keep adding pages on a

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Know Your Network For Seo

Imagine going to battle without an understanding of the terrain, roads, buildings,
weather, or even your own fighting force’s tactics and capabilities. This is the situation
faced by many information security professionals when they initially attempt to monitor
their network environment. Knowing your network is akin to understanding your
military capabilities, strengths, and weaknesses when preparing for an enemy attack.
In information security, the enemy will change tactics continually, but you have a
“home field advantage” because the battleground is your network. History proves that
blindly charging into or defending the unknown will almost certainly end in defeat.
One of the best ways to express this concept comes from Richard Bejtlich, information
security professional and author of The Tao of Network Security Monitoring. In a January
2007 post on his blog,* Bejtlich describes the “Self-Defeating Network” as having
the following characteristics:

• Unknown
• Unmonitored
• Uncontrolled
• Unmanned
• Trusted

Although you may not have control of or influence over these characteristics, you must
make every effort to Know Your Network! Doing so will help you succeed in most of
your security-related endeavors. In this chapter, we will explore two primary methods
of learning about a network: network taxonomy and network telemetry.

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How To Increase Traffic to Your Website

• Review sites are the most cost-effective form of social marketing for small, local businesses.
• Make sure your listings on review sites include plenty of relevant keywords so that people can find
you in search results.
• Respond to negative reviews, but always remain calm and try to resolve the issue.
• Unlock your business page at Yelp.
• Post stickers and badges on your websites and physical locations to encourage more reviews.

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Considerations for Multi-Lingual Sites

Creating SEO-optimized content for a multi-lingual web site presents a whole new challenge for
SEO. Needing a multi-lingual site is a good problem to have. It usually means that you have customers
in multiple countries. However, it also means you have to double or triple your SEO efforts.
The good news is that optimizing your foreign-language web site is very much the same as optimizing
your English one. You just do it in a different language. Here are some guidelines that should
serve as reminders of what you should plan to do during the SEO process:
Translate keywords into the new language. In some cases, you won’t be able to translate
your keywords into a matching word in another language. In that case, you’ll need
to choose new keywords.

Translate existing web content. Again, translations can sometimes be squirrelly. Unless
you’re an expert in the language to which you’re translating, hire someone to do it for you.
A bad translation could cost you more in lost traffic than the services of a good translator.
Apply all of the same SEO rules to your foreign content that you’ve learned for your
English content. Just because the language is different doesn’t mean that the search
engine or the search engine crawler is any different.

Include the proper links both to and from your English site to your foreign-language
site, but also include the appropriate links to English on the foreign-language site.
Make language options clearly available on your web site. If these options are not clearly
marked, your foreign visitors could miss them, and then you’ll lose visitors before they’re
fully engaged in your site.

SEO is really no different in any other language than it is in English. The biggest concern when
translating your site to another language is the actual translation. The SEO efforts are essentially
the same, but getting the language wrong could cost you just as much as not having a foreignlanguage
site at all.

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Seoo Traffic Sources

On this page, you can see a summary of your inbound traffic. This includes direct traffic,
search engine traffic, and referring sites traffic. The top part of the page shows this type
of information.

The bottom part of the page is divided into two tables. The table on the lower left shows
a summary of your main sources of traffic. The table on the lower right shows the
pertinent keywords bringing the traffic.

The submenu options under the Traffic Sources main menu item include pages that
show segregated views of traffic. If you are using Google AdWords, you will see the
options relevant to AdWords paid ad traffic. Other SEM networks can have tagging
included in the

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OFF-PAGE OPTIMIZATION

This refers to ways to improve your site’s ranking that involve 3rd party
sites, not just your own.
BACKLINKS
Backlinks are simply links from other websites back to your own site.
Backlinking can be an entire marketing strategy in itself and I
recommend that you consistently work on this aspect. The idea is that
in addition to the content of your site, search engines look at who you
are associated with – which, and how many sites are linking to you. If
sites they deem to be high quality are linking to you, this makes your
site look better in their eyes. If low-quality or ‘spammy’ sites are
linking to you, it will have an adverse effect.
So, as with all popularity contests, it’s all about the company you
keep.
Swapping links with blogs and other sites can be a good way to get
backlinks and increase traffic. However, you want to be selective about
your links and choose only relevant sites to link with. Don’t associate
yourself with a site that has a lot of ‘spammy’ links in their link
directory, or that does not have good, regularly updated content. This
is the equivalent of being guilty by association.
You can strategize by Googling the keywords you are targeting and
trying to get the top ranked sites to link to you. If your site is brand
new it might be a struggle to get major sites to link to you because the
big dogs may have nothing much to gain by linking to you, rankingwise,
but if you are providing great content they may want to link to
you as a good resource for their visitors. I would recommend at first
targeting sites within your own ‘social circle’ or just above it until you
increase your own ranking, then you can start to reach out to bigger
sites with more confidence.

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Build Inbound Links with Online Promotion

Now that your website is keyword-optimized, it is time to build up your inbound
links. Promoting your site to build more inbound links than your competitors, especially
from high PageRank sites, is the most important way to increase your search
engine rankings. Here are some techniques you can use to boost your inbound links
to build up the buzz and rise above the noise:
• Use XML news feeds such as RSS and Atom to automatically syndicate your content
to other sites.
• Register your feeds at news aggregators.
• Interview luminaries.
• Write articles on your most important topics for other sites, and have your bio
link back to your website.
• Create useful tools.
• Publicize new content with press releases.
• Get listed in the major directories in the appropriate category:
— http://dir.yahoo.com
— http://www.business.com
— http://www.dmoz.org
— http://botw.org
• Get listed in industry directories and resource pages (e.g., the WorkForce.com
Vendor Directory for HR software providers at http://www.workforce.com/global/
2007/vendormain07.htm).
• Get links from industry websites and discussion forums (write articles, send
press releases, post to forums, and use your link in signature files).
• Use “high-end”link

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Web page optimization streamlines

Your pages to download and display faster. As
your website performance improves, your bailout rates and bandwidth bills will go
down while your conversion rates and profits will rise. In this chapter, you learned
how to minimize HTTP requests, optimize graphics and multimedia, substitute
server-side for client-side sniffing, and load JavaScript wisely.

To reduce the overhead of multiple objects that causes the majority of web page
delay, minimize the number of objects referenced within your web pages. Also, put
all of your images, still and motion, on a strict file size diet. Minimize the size of the
head of your HTML, and layer your markup to display useful content quickly and
maximize your potential search engine rankings. Finally, move your CSS to the top
and your scripts to the bottom of your pages to enable progressive display.

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Top Search Engine Ranking Factors

PageRank is not the only factor that Google uses to rank search results. Google uses
more than 200 “signals”to calculate the rank of a page.a According to a survey of SEO
experts, the top 10 most important factors include the following:
• Keyword use in title tag
• Anchor text of inbound link
• Global link popularity of site
• Age of site
• Link popularity within the site’s internal link structure
• Topical relevance of inbound links to site
• Link popularity of site in topical community
• Keyword use in body text
• Global link popularity of linking site
• Topical relationship of linking page
The top factors that negatively affect a search engine spider’s ability to crawl a page or
harm its rankings are as follows:
• Server often inaccessible to bots
• Content very similar to or duplicate of existing content in the index
• External links to low-quality/spam sites
• Duplicate title/meta tags on many pages
• Overuse of targeted keywords (indicative of stuffing/spamming)
• Participation in link schemes or actively selling links
• Very slow server response times
• Inbound links from spam sites
• Low levels of visitors to the site

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SEO Testing

SEO is both an art and a science. As with any scientific discipline, it requires rigorous testing
of hypotheses. The results need to be reproducible, and you have to take an experimental
approach so as not to modify too many variables at once. Otherwise, you will not be able to
tell which changes were responsible for the results.

And although you can glean a tremendous amount of knowledge of SEO best practices, latest
trends, and tactics from SEO blogs, forums, and e-books, it is hard to separate the wheat from
the chaff and to know with any degree of certainty that an SEO-related claim will hold true.
That’s where the testing of your SEO comes in: proving what works and what doesn’t.
Unlike multivariate testing for optimizing conversion rates, where many experiments can be
run in parallel, SEO testing requires a serial approach. Everything must filter through the
search engines before the impact can be gauged.

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