If your website doesn’t possess a very good placement in the rankings then it may be hard, if not impossible, to find.

Considering that the majority of searchers simply click on the first couple of results, you want to make certain that your web site is ranked highly enough so that people can easily discover it on the very first page of search engine results.

Although no search engine optimization firm can guarantee a high rankings for your site forever, often times hiring a web marketing business will pay off many times over. For those of you performing your SEO yourself or those of you that would like to help ensure your marketing firm is doing the things that really matter, here are some tips for raising the search engine rankings of your website.

Optimize your web site for your target audience, not the search engines. Think of exactly what impression your web site gives your users—you’ll create a significantly better site the search engines will love.

Produce compelling content for pages of your site based on your chosen keyword phrases. Pick out a couple keyword phrases that apply towards the certain page you’re writing and work those phrases into the copy.

Incorporate your keyword phrases into each page’s unique title tag. Title tags are given significant weight with search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. The title tag is the text shown in the engines search results, so it’s crucial that it be alluring, not just crammed with keywords and phrases.

Make certain your website is link-worthy. Search engines like Google and Yahoo judge a site’s popularity by the number of links pointing to it. Generate great content people will wish to hyperlink to. It’s a must for your link building efforts to offer things worth linking to.

Don’t be hitched to any one keyword or phrase. Optimize for all of the relevant key phrases. If you can rank high for a good percentage of them, they’re going to add up to a lot more than just that one particular keyword phrase that you think is the big money one.

Keeping these five tips in mind when optimizing your website and you’ll be on your way to getting much better rankings and a lot of organic (free) traffic.

Post from: Denver SEO - Local Search Expert

5 Tips To Raise Your Rankings

To attract people like me (avid Internet user) to your business it is imperative that you have your local information on your site, otherwise I might not to be able to find you.

Many small business owners have no idea how simple SEO is for local search. To help you out I’ve listed the three main things that you must have on your website to help attract more visitors to your business.

Page Title

The page title, also called a  title tag, is without a doubt the most powerful SEO tweak that you can do to your website. If it’s relevant and conducive to your site’s over all theme, including your geographical information in the page title is the #1 thing that will help you with your search engine placement.

Body Content

The body content, the main text area of a page,  is another place to put your local information. Make sure to not only include your keywords but also the city or state where you are located.

Footer

The footer of your website is the easiest place to add the city, state, zip code and telephone of your business. The search engines really love this area when it comes to identify geographical data and  it’s very helpful to the user looking for you. Make sure that this information is on the bottom of every page of your website.

These SEO tips are the simplest of them all to do and if your website designer tells you these are really hard or expensive to change, get a new website designer.

Post from: Denver SEO - Local Search Expert

Simple SEO For Local Search

I understand if you’re an experienced SEO and you’re fully aware of the robots.txt file. More than likely it’s nothing new to you. But I don’t really blog for experienced SEO’s, rather I write with the everyday webmaster in mind. With that said I do see experienced SEO’s trying to control the bots  through the meta tag so maybe I’m writing for you as well.

For the other 98% of you, I’m sure you maybe wondering what a robots.txt file is?

For sake of disclosure some of the information below was pulled from my hand written notes that I took while I was a Stomper member.

The robots.txt file was designed to inform bots from the search engines how to behave on your site. It tells them what information they can have access to and what information they can’t.

The first part of a robots.txt file consists of  User-agent which specifies the robot.

User-agent: Googlebot

You may also use the wildcard character ‘*’ to specify all robots.

User-agent: *

You can find user agent names in your own server logs by checking for requests to robots.txt. Most off the major search engines have names for their spiders.

Here is a small list:

Googlebot
Yahoo! Slurp
MSNBot
Netcraft
Ask

The second part of a robots.txt file consists of Disallow. These lines can specify files and/or directories. For example, if you want to instruct spiders to not download contact.php, you would enter:

Disallow: contact.php

You can also specify directories:

Disallow: /cgi-bin

This will block spiders from your cgi-bin directory.

Disallow: /wp-admin/

This will block spiders from your Wordpress admin directory.

Common Questions about the Robots.txt File

Q: Where do I place the robots.txt file?

A: The file should be placed in the root directory of your server. In other words, in the same place as your index.htm file for your home page is located.

Q: What are some things that I would want to exclude from the robots?

A: Here are a few things I would exclude:

• Any folder that is “off limits” to public eye are not password protected
• Images
• CGI-BIN

Creating your robots.txt file is not complicated. It can be made using notepad or some other text editor. It’s super easy to make and will take less than five minutes if you follow these simple steps:

1. Copy and paste the robots.txt file from my site at  http://www.denverseoguy.com/robots.txt
2. View to your web server folder and write down the folders you want to exclude
3. Open the robots.txt in notepad
4. Modify the Disallow lines in the my robots.txt to reflect your folders
5. Save the file and upload to your server
6. Validate the file
7. If you need to make changes, do so and then repeat steps 4-6

Note:  There is a rite and a wrong way to control the bots. Many times you may see the snippet of code  below in the meta tags of the page itself. This is the wrong way:

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow”>

I see this a lot on sites that are giving search optimization advice. Now if your experienced in optimization then you should know that most reputable search engines overlook the meta tags right?

For instruction on how to validate your robots.txt file you can go to Google Webmaster/Site owner Help

If you aren’t sure whether you can do this, please feel free to give me a shout and I’ll help you over the bumps.

Good luck!

Post from: Denver SEO - Local Search Expert

Robots.txt File and SEO