How popular is your art paintings site in social media? I’ll go into that a little more in the linking section. For now, note how many incoming links you have from Technorati and Del.icio.us. Content That Works Apart from having a focus, your content must be sufficiently interesting. Just as Technocrati (mouthful) is more interesting than Blogspot to pronounce, an article that says "Ugly oil painting website Sell!" is more entertaining to readers than "How to Build Trust in Your Web Site." Even if both have exactly the same content, I dare say the "Ugly" article will get more hits over the long term. How visible is your domain name? You can count the results at Google for a search for your domain. That shows your URL’s visibility, and it’s a completely different check than your incoming link count. Creating a buzz with your content can bring more traffic your way, as people comment on your article and air their views on forums and blogs all over the net, sometimes adding links back to your content. You can create a buzz with unique and relevant listings too; these will be propagated the same way, in forums and blogs, as different people link to it in an effort to answer questions that are posted on blogs and forums on which they are members. Technical Matters Picking up the thread from where I left off, we’re going to revisit the technical aspects of optimization. This time we’re going to focus on the technical aspects that relate to linking. For instance, how many links point to the full URL of the web site? How many point to the full URL of various pages on the web site? Remember too that internal links count; how many internal pages point to your home page? For search engines to remain in business, they need content. To get content they need web sites (that means you). If you have a web site and you are optimizing for a particular key word, then you must have that key word in your web copy. If it means you rewrite your entire web copy to have a key word density of 10-14 percent, by all means rewrite. It is impossible to properly optimize for a subject and not have the subject anywhere on your site. Beware of focusing too much on your web site and what it does to the detriment the searcher and what s/he needs. Your key words should be properly used and should not be inserted in as many places as you believe you can get away with. Continuing the quick review, Gary divided his checklist into four separate areas: meta tags and on-page optimization; technical issues; linking; and other issues. The first area dealt mainly with where you should put your key words; I covered it in detail in the previous article. The second area, which I began to discuss last time, deals with certain items that are easy to check for and easy to fix. I’ll be covering linking and others issues this time around as well. So without further ado, let’s dive back into the details. Organic optimization thrives on content; it therefore demands more creativity and more relevancy than any other method. The content must portray the site as an expert in that particular industry. There are many travel companies having oil painting website on web offering online travel deals and holiday offers. Every art paintings site has its own unique range of products, services & travel solutions and likes to be in top popularization placements with their offers. It must always adapt to fit its target. If you find out that your content is not achieving what it is supposed to, then it has to change (note the word organic, meaning living, biotic, adaptable). Rewriting your entire site's content is an option if your site does not currently fulfill your content needs. Constant Refreshing If you want, you can check out the thread where this list was introduced. You’ll also find others commenting on what he covers, and his replies to those comments. Feel free to add your own comments to the thread. Where possible, I’ve tried to include Gary’s comments and observations in both of these articles. If you want to be sure of rising in the SERPs, refresh your content weekly, MSN, Yahoo and even Google reward constant refreshing with higher rankings. So not only will you be offering your users more value, you will also be rewarded by the search engines for helping them do their jobs better. MSN especially awards higher rankings to web sites that are updated regularly. 23.Links and Other Details: Completing Your optimization Checklist By: Terri Wells Last week, I began discussing a list of items you should check when you are performing optimization on a web site. I don’t doubt that those of you new to the field (as well as some veterans!) welcomed the list as a way to avoid losing track of all the details that go into any good site optimization. Apart From Content Apart from content, other things that affect your web site's organic optimization campaign include linking, navigation, and information architecture. We will delve into the other aspects so that we can use them all to promote our sites. Does it work? Well, Maximum Tadpole used this strategy for his client, and Google search referrals went from an average of three per day to 164 per day in one month. That’s a nice increase. Your results may vary, of course, but it’s good to have a plan. Organic optimization is Worth the painting - Navigation Navigation helps your web site's usability. Usability improves your searcher's browsing experience. A good browsing experience makes the user comfortable with coming back to your site. To know the kind of navigation that keeps a user comfortable, you have to think like a user. The lay out of your navigation is not supposed to be written in stone, it should be comfortable and make it easy for the user to get around your site. So, after you have gone through all of these steps, now what do you do? You take the information you got from Google Analytics about your traffic, analyze it and assess what you need to do. Go through the various steps listed here as necessary. It’s worth noting that this strategy might not be the optimal one for your site, but it should at least give you an outline for thinking about what your site needs and how to tackle its optimization. A site with poor navigation results in poor interactivity, and if you lose your interactive features, you become no different from a static brochure or a catalog. Easy-to-use navigational tools make visiting your art paintings site an interesting experience (assuming you have great content). Also, your links should be replicated as many times as possible, to ensure that the user does not have to unduly strain him/herself to find a link. Watch and Take Notes The final stage is so important – and unexpected – that I’m going to quote Maximum Tadpole again: “You won’t believe me, but don’t do anything but look at traffic for a month. Check rankings every day and most importantly, the subjects that people are finding your site with. Use those to decide if you should create entirely new pages to target JUST those words or to write content targeting those subjects. As you move into top positions for the easier words, go after the hard ones.” That may perhaps sound strange; wouldn’t it make more sense to change the existing content by using the terms for which more people are searching rather than adding more pages? Not necessarily; it depends on what they’re searching for, and why they’re searching for it. As an example, Maximum Tadpole noticed 300 searches over one week on his site for a piece of equipment used in eye surgery. He’d mentioned it once in an article that actually had little to do with the equipment. A little more investigating revealed that people were searching Google for the equipment, finding his site, then searching his site for it. Obviously, this was an unfulfilled need just begging for help. So he dedicated an entire page of his site to that piece of equipment. It is now one of the best pages on his site. The content must be organized before the design and programming is brought into place. Dumping loads of information on a web site designer who has zero interest in how the information is arranged, and who simply puts all the information in general segments for his own comfort's sake, will definitely defeat your optimization strategy. What I am saying is that the web designer should be the last person to be brought into a project which has popularization optimization as its primary aim. The information should be grouped and organized into categories, then the web designer simply builds the site around said information. If you have a site that lends itself well to using social networks to help promote, by all means do so. Here on optimization Chat, you’ll find a number of articles that explain how to use this web 2.0 method of building interest in your site. What is the worst that could happen in optimization? Would your web site survive if Google was no longer the number one search engine? What if all the search engines changed their algorithms? If you do not constantly evolve and constantly grow, then you are guaranteed to be on the next list of web sites ruined by the changing tides of optimization. Most web sites want to offer their visitors something of value. If you can show a site owner how a link to your site would help its users, you stand a good chance of getting a link from that site. You shouldn’t actually request a link so much as focus on the value your site offers so the site owner will think of linking to you himself. Maximum Tadpole said he has seen a favorable response rate of five to ten percent with a simple email that reads like so: “I have created a web site for nursing students called mysite, which could be very valuable to your graduating nurses. It is a free site with job opportunity listings and career advice for nurses. If you find time, please visit our site, and consider linking to it from your site, as it would certainly be a resource for your students. Any feedback would be much appreciated! Thanks for your time and have a nice day!” You must reinvent yourself. You will need to use constantly changing technology to keep your web site on the cutting edge and avoid looking like you just came off Noah's Ark. Organic optimization must be truly adaptive, able to change to accommodate changing needs. Start Linking Once you’ve completed the on page optimization, it’s time to start the off-page optimization of your web site. That means building links. You don’t want to go the route of doing reciprocal link trades or link farms. What you really want to do is think back to the very first steps you took to optimize the site. What value does the site offer? Who would find it most valuable? Where do these people “hang out” online, and how can you get them to come to you? Sites that were built with millions of dollars of venture capital went belly up with the first dot-com bust, simply because they refused to change when faced with new challenges. The list of such sites goes on indefinitely; I won't bore us by reciting them here. But let me say that the churn rate for failed oil painting website has increased. At this point you’re ready to do your on page optimization. Using your key words, place unique targeted title tags on each page. This is the title element. If you’re having a hard time coming up with a title for the page, Maximum Tadpole suggests a way to think about it: “If each page of your site is a book, what would you title it? Make sure your title matches the content of the page.” He also suggests trying to keep your title tag under five words. It’s very important to make sure that your title matches the content of your pages; if it doesn’t, change either the title or the content until they match. As for other tags, you’ll want to use Meta and key word tags for your home page, but the jury’s out as to whether those are valuable for any other pages on your site. But there are other details you’ll want to tend to – doing a 301 redirect to send non-www pages to the www versions. You should also optimize every internal link on your site with relevant text, including alt tags for images. Maximum Tadpole gives an example of having a site focused on soccer with a soccer ball logo in the upper left hand corner that takes visitors to the home page when they click on it. Rather than “home” as your alt text, you might consider making it “soccer.” You can probably come up with something even better, perhaps “soccer home.”
Toperfect Art All rights reserved