Keyword Placement in HTML

After discovering your all important keywords possibly using tools like these to help, you should immediately take advantage of them every way you can on your page. Search engine spiders search code as well as content, and it's important to keep that in mind while creating your site. This is why it's important that you research your keywords in the creation process of your page. Here are some of the most important areas:

1. 
   <title> tag:

   <title>Web Animation and Design - Georgian College</title>

2. 
   Heading tags (<h1>, <h2>, <h3>):

   <h1>Georgian College brings education to life</h1>

3. 
   <strong> and <em>:

   <p><strong>Georgian College</strong>
   brings education to life</p>

4. 
   Link Labels:

   <a href="http://georgianc.on.ca/"> Gerogian College
   - Your College, Your Future</a>

5. 
   File Names (images, external css files, etc.):

   photoshop_tut.pdf

6. 
   Alt Attributes:

   <img src="orange_habiscus.jpg" alt="The most beautiful flower
   brought from the gardens in Ottawa />

7. 
   Table Elements (<th>, <caption>, <summary>)
   


8. 
   <acronym> and <abbr>
   


9. 
   The first line of the first paragraph on the page
   


10. 
    Meta description tag
    


11. 
    URL of your pages

Of course it's important to scatter keywords in the content of your page as well, but the more keywords you can fit onto your page naturally, the better your page rank will be later on.

Technorati - is anybody home?

Technorati.com sounds like a great place - in theory. You claim your blog as your own, and you get access to a wealth of helpful tools that will help you be found. Easy access to your site means more people coming in. The site makes it out like you'll be rolling in viewers in no time.
Thing is, what happens if it doesn't work?

My site I'd attempted to "claim" on technorati. What happened? An error message:
"The URL you provided is invalid. Please check the URL and try again."

Invalid. What? How?
I'd tried different combinations to see what the problem could be, and they were all rejected. Considering that this site is up and running (which you can see since you're here and all) I'm pretty sure it's quite valid. I'd looked the problem up. Turns out that the problem isn't unique, and that there are loads of other people like me out there, and all within the past half a year. That makes this quite the new problem. I would email someone at technorati to see what's up, or ask for help in their forums, but apparently that does nothing for anyone else. It seems as if this site was someone's pet project as it's services are free, and they're finally bored of it. And now loads of people are left hanging.

For me, this isn't a big loss. There are other ways I can advertise my blog and I'm quite willing to do these things, but for the owners of technorati they might want to do something and soon, because they're losing people by the boatloads. That site used to be a necessity if you had a blog. Now? Well, what good is a service you can't even use?

UPDATE: Got through! My blog now exists. Huzzah! Still doesn't excuse the problems they've been having, but it's a step in the right direction.

On the topic of "interesting content", be careful what you write

It is really important to make sure your content is interesting to help with findability. Research and make sure it's correct, relevant to the topic at hand, and that it has something to give to the user. And maybe legal would be nice, too.

I came across this article on a Microsoft site of all places about 32 cool things you never knew you your technology could do. One of the things listed was to take Apple's OSX and install it on a netbook, which if you read Apple's agreement, kind of goes against it. Actually, the article also talks about bootlegging to get the os to install, which is kinda illegal. Apple has a history of being really angry with people who use their os like that. So, this article being an interesting topic of conversation would draw many people to it, and it being on a Microsoft site, the gulible people would think it trustworthy. I predict the article will not remain online for long... at least not in the form it's in now. It's already drawing a lot of press to it, and not all of it is good either.

Important lesson: think about what you write.

Building a Findable Blog - Content Sharing is your Friend!

Going around the web, you can see that many blogs offer a way to share content. When it comes to findability, users sharing with other users is the easiest way to get your site out there.
Of course, you have to think about writing good, useful and interesting content for this to happen because nobody wants to share what they don't like.

In order to create content that people find worth sharing, first and foremost, stay on topic. Your user has come to your blog for a reason and probably doesn't want to read something irrelevant. If you trail off track, make sure you come back. Stick to the ways of writing for the web, write in short relevant bursts, and maybe give the user something to offer. Users LOVE when free stuff is involved. Try creating a template, writing a piece of code, making a game and sharing it with everyone.

On the bottom of your posts, make it easy for users to share. Remind them that you're worth sharing with the world by leaving links to del.icio.us, digg, twitter, facebook or any other sharing tool you can think of. If they know what it is, they will use it. Get out there as many ways as you can by making everything available.

Building a Findable Blog - RSS and your Blog

RSS streamlines communication between publishers and readers. Since RSS has had a popularity surge, webmasters have been experimenting and using RSS feeds to deliver content in new and innovative ways. An RSS feed is one of the easier ways to get people to return to your blog. There are so many people out there who do not want to constantly load up a website or search through it, so having something they can subscribe to just makes it that much easier. It is important to convert as many people as possible to subscribers.

To start with, having an icon which is visual enough that it will be noticed right away. Make it stand out. It doesn't have to be incredibly different from your theme. There are many different icons available, or you could create your own.

Using services like FeedBurner for your RSS feed helps as well. Insert your feed link, and the will optimize it for a variety of formats. The entries are tracked so you can see how many people are joining, can have advertisements to earn you money, and earn you advertising through the Pingback service.

Building a Findable Blog - Improving Findability

Findability is one of the most important things when it comes to blogs. With blogging for the web, if you're not found, then you might as well stop writing unless you're writing for yourself. With being found, the higher up you are on search engines like Google, the better you are. Fortunately things like keywords, linking, and archiving by topic can really help with that when done properly.

Most blogs are set up to be alerted if they are linked to. If you link to their related articles of interest, they automatically link to you in the comment showing who linked and where. If you take a look at the comments section of this article on Tutorial Blog for example, you will see an example of trackbacks on the bottom. The more links you get, the more people come. The more people, the higher your stats, and the better you do.

Keywords help by reaping in search referrals. As you write, the more often a word appears, the more you may appear to be an "expert" of sorts for that topic. When people search for certain keywords, if it appears more on your site, you'll have a better chance of being found easier as you'll appear higher up in the ranks. When you archive your posts by topic, you increase your keywords as well as help people get around easier, making it a multi-purpose technique for organization. Any way you can fit a relevant word onto a site, whether it be by an image tag or organization technique, it all helps. For help in coming up with keywords, one could always refer to different keyword tools, or research what the relevant market is looking for.

Free keyword tools

Keywords are very important when it comes to SEO. The more you seem to know, the more likely you are to be found. Write content that contains intelligent content with relevant keywords, and you're on your way to success! But if you don't know how to find those keywords, there are tools to help you. Some of them may seem to do the same thing, but they offer different features or give different answers, so play around with them.
Here are some of those tools:

Free Keyword Suggestion Tools

Keyword Suggestion Tool for Google

Keyword Density Tool

Search Engine Optimizer - Keyword Density Tool

SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool

Heading tags and how to handle them

When it comes to SEO, an important thing to keep in mind is your heading tags.
You know it actually does something other than give your heading a placeholder.
You could use anything to make a heading look different from anything else, which brings about the purpose of these useful tags.

In search engines, a robot is on the hunt for keywords and headings are a very good place to get them. But how does a search engine know what a heading is if one only uses or some other form of emphasis, using CSS styling to make it different? It doesn't!
Which is the reason why it's so important to use those heading tags instead of any other tag when you want to emphasize what a heading is. The search engine robots are looking for those tags in order to understand what your page is about and to gather important keywords for indexing. Headings are great places for keywords. Take advantage of them. For a useful resource as to how to organize your headings so that the more important things appear first, check out this link at CSS-Tricks.com.

The lightblub of discovery has turned on

I've come to a discovery.

This is a rather obvious one as far as the web goes, so brace yourselves.

For the longest time I've been struggling to figure out the difference between Web Standards and Web Content. That completely shows in the first post I wrote where everything is somewhat mushed together and nobody really understands what I'm talking about specifically. But see, at the time I was thinking that they were one in the same, and such as it was, totally became confused on which was which. How? Well, I didn't really understand that Web Standards was about the actual main languages that we use to create a page. I thought about the concepts in how I understood the words, and never really read much about the individual concepts until this semester. A little light reading has cured me from such thinking.

Even how I think now isn't completely clear. I have so much more to learn, and I'm so fascinated by the idea that the web is controlled by such intricate things such as languages, and their optimization depends on things such as how much a word is used on a page. I wish to discuss what I learn more as I keep learning them, so after I read about a subject in more detail, I'll write about it here to share what I've discovered.

So, forgive me for being such a newbie. I believe we've all been at this point at one time or another.

Roadmap to Web Success

For anyone wanting to know the basics of having a successful website, WebAssist has a series of free PDF's online called the Roadmap Series: Your Guide to Web Success.
Very interesting read. Contains topics from SEO basics, to site planning, web hosting and more. Check it out!

Inbound Marketing

An interesting video on combining social media, blogs and SEO to help you be found on the web.

What are web standards?

An interesting video on web standards and why you should care.