Custom Website Design

This is a guest post written by David Brown.

What do nearly all high ranking websites have in common? As a search engine marketing consultant, I am confronted with the task of evaluating the inbound links of thousands of websites each month. In doing so, I have come to the realization that top ranking websites continue to pay for links despite Google’s public disapproval. Google’s minimalistic efforts to combat paid link building force ethical search engine marketing companies to buy links in order to compete. If done poorly, paid linkers run the risk of having short-lived benefits and potentially harmful consequences. The following tips will help you identify paid links that have positive and long-lasting results on search engine optimization efforts.

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In recent weeks I’ve come across three SEO tools that I’ve found to be very useful. Here is a look at each of these (free) tools.

Rank Checker

Aaron Wall of SEO Book recently released a powerful new Firefox add-on called Rank Checker. If you’re working on moving your site up in the SERPs, you’ll obviously want to know where you stand and to be actively tracking your progress.

As a Firefox add-on this tool is both free and very convenient to use. With Rank Checker you can input the URL that you want to track and a list of keywords that you are targeting (or just researching). You’ll then be able to choose which search engines to check (including all of the international versions of Google). The tool will then go out and get the data and bring it back to you in one convenient place.

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Search Engine Optimization is an ongoing process that cannot truly be accomplished by designing a website in a particular way, although a designer can cripple a site’s chances with a poor foundation. Building a search engine-friendly website should be the task of the designer, but there can be some gray areas.

First of all, what makes a website search engine-friendly? Things like optimized page titles, clean coding, proper use of header tags, alt tags, the location in the code of primary content, and anchor text are just some of the elements involved. Equally important, the designer should avoid using elements in the design that harm the site’s ability to be crawled. For a more in-depth look at the construction of search engine-friendly websites, see How to Create Search Engine-Friendly Websites.

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Search Engine Optimization is a common concern/priority when building a new website. However, it sometimes receives little attention after the site has been up and running for a while. For website owners and bloggers alike, it can be worthwhile to do a routine check-up on the SEO health of your site periodically. Here are 10 things you can do to help identify potential improvements that can lead to higher rankings and more search engine traffic.

1. Find and Fix Dead Links

Finding dead links on a website can be time-consuming and annoying if you try to do it manually. Dead-Links.com is a free online tool that will crawl your website and search for dead links. Once you know where the dead links are, you can easily correct them.

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If you’re new to search engine marketing you may be confused by the contradicting information that you see online. If you’ve attempted to optimize and market a website you’ve probably learned from experience who is providing valid advice and who is pushy hype. Although this is by no means a complete look at the subject, […]

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Last month I posted an article with some pointers for new blogs that are trying to generate traffic from search engines. In that post I covered some of the methods that have helped me to quickly increase the traffic that comes from search engines, specifically Google. Since another month has passed, I wanted to give […]

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This week I am happy to be participating in a five-day series of posts about growing your blog. This post is the 1st and each of the next 4 days there will be posts by other bloggers on their own blogs. Each of the bloggers involved in this project has been experiencing growth and all […]

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Part of having a successful website or blog is targeting the right keywords and phrases. This sounds like it would be an easy task, but with endless possible combinations of words and phrases it can be quite difficult to find keywords that will generate traffic from search engines without putting you in competition with too […]

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Google is by far the most frequently used search engine, so naturally ranking well in Google is important. However, ranking well and maximizing your traffic requires getting and keeping your pages out of the supplemental index.
What is Google’s Supplemental Index?
Google’s goal as a search engine is to provide the user (searcher) with the most relevant […]

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Of the major blogging platforms, WordPress has the most resources available to its community. WordPress users have access to thousands of themes, plugins, articles and tutorials that make it the most customizable and flexible option for bloggers. Because there are so many resources out there it is sometimes hard to know what is available […]

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