Five Ways to Increase Targeted Website Traffic

Website visitors do not arrive magically… they follow recommendations from others, such as links, display ads, or even offline word of mouth. As 2007 turns into 2008, here are 5 easy ways to substantially increase the amount of traffic coming to your site.

Jason, Chris. ChrisJason.com (2007). Articles>Web Design>Search Engine Optimization

Findability/SEO Cheat Sheet: Quick Guide to Web Standards SEO

A findability strategy cheat sheet that will guide you through all of the stuff you should be doing when creating new websites or even redesign existing ones.

Walter, Aarron. AarronWalter.com (2008). Articles>Web Design>Usability>Search Engine Optimization

Free Search Engine Tools and Services  

You can communicate information about your site to search engines and see your site from their perspective using some free services and utilities from Yahoo! and Google.

Walter, Aarron. Building Findable Websites (2008). Articles>Web Design>Search>Search Engine Optimization

Places to Promote Your Site  

You’ve built a great site-now get the word out! There are plenty of places where you can promote your site for free.

Walter, Aarron. Building Findable Websites (2008). Articles>Web Design>Search Engine Optimization

Black Hat SEO Techniques to Avoid  

Desperation, ignorance, and a moral compass that doesn’t point due north often get perfectly logical, good people and companies in trouble with search engines. Because being listed high in search results is such a desirable goal to attain, many people search for shortcuts to the front of the line—which can land them in serious trouble.

Walter, Aarron. Building Findable Websites (2008). Articles>Web Design>Search Engine Optimization

SEO (Search Engine Optimization): Why It Works Best With Quality Writing

Attracting the attention of Google and other search engines is crucial for bringing visitors to your website. To achieve this effectively, search engine optimised copy should run parallel with good website construction.

Ward, Merlin. Webcredible (2008). Articles>Web Design>Writing>Search Engine Optimization

Accessibility as Part of The Search Engine Marketing Strategy

In traditional marketing you're looking to define your targeted audience for your business or organisation. In Internet marketing things work in the same way. Unfortunately, with the growing popularity of the Internet in the past years and with the growing number of people building sites, a certain part of the online audience has been overlooked.

Big Mouth Media (2004). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Search Engine Optimization

Secret Benefits of Accessibility Part 2: Better Search Ranking

One of the main benefits of Web accessibility is that a Website that's more accessible to people is also usually more accessible to search engines. The more accessible your site is to search engines, the more confidently they can guess what the site's about, giving your site a better chance at the top spot in the search engine rankings.

Moss, Trenton. SitePoint (2004). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Search Engine Optimization

Metadata: Seven Tips for Writing Better Keywords

The shift in how search engines treat keywords is significant. They tend to ignore the keyword metatag and rather look for keywords in the actual page content. This means that you need to figure out your keywords before you write any content. Then, you include them throughout your content, particularly in headings and summaries.

McGovern, Gerry. New Thinking (2004). Articles>Web Design>Metadata>Search Engine Optimization

Be a White Hat SEO for Your Intranet: It's Good for Accessibility

The SEOs with white hats conduct legitimate optimising of web pages to make the site come up appropriately in the Search Engine Results Pages (also called SERPs). The back hat SEOs implement tricks to appear high in the results pages even if the web site is not necessarily relevant. The range of tricks is astonishing. But most of the techniques used by white hat SEOs were similar if not identical to the guidelines given by accessibility experts.

NetStrategy-JMC (2006). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Search Engine Optimization

Optimize Your AdWords Campaigns

Both AdWords and YSM are much more complicated beasts than the old banner networks ever were, and coming to grips with them can be a bit of a headache.

Oxer, Jonathan. Internet Vision Technologies (2008). Articles>Web Design>Marketing>Search Engine Optimization

Right to Reply: SEO's Glory Days Are Not Over

In a recent article on Netimperative, Mike Grehan examined if the traditional role of SEO was becoming outdated, given the rise of social media. In this article, Eliza Dashwood, Director of Sales and Marketing, Ambergreen Internet Marketing offers a counter-point to Mike’s argument.

Dashwood, Eliza. NetImperative (2009). Articles>Web Design>Search Engine Optimization>Search

Common Sense SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Checklist

I don’t “really” know anything about SEO. What I do know is the folks at Google and other big search engines are just human beings like us who have created and constantly tweak the search algorithms. Their goal is to give us what we want when searching, the best possible websites relevant to what we are searching for. So let’s set aside all the fancy technical stuff and just use some good ol’ common sense.

Coyier, Chris. CSS Tricks (2009). Articles>Web Design>Search Engine Optimization

Google's Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide  

Welcome to Google's Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide. This document first began as an effort to help teams within Google, but we thought it'd be just as useful to webmasters that are new to the topic of search engine optimization and wish to improve their sites' interaction with both users and search engines. Although this guide won't tell you any secrets that'll automatically rank your site first for queries in Google (sorry!), following the best practices outlined below will make it easier for search engines to both crawl and index your content.

Google (2008). Articles>Web Design>Search Engine Optimization

Ten Remarkably Effective Strategies for Driving Traffic

In the last six months, we've been lucky enough to help quite a few companies and websites drive significant traffic to their sites. Many of these campaigns have been constructed around the goal of building search engine rankings, as this is our primary business, but we've also found that our ability has given us great power in the fields of brand-awareness and marketing overall. Thus, the following ten processes are primarily about building traffic and through it, attention.

SEOmoz (2006). Articles>Web Design>Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Ranking Factors

This document represents the collective wisdom of 37 leaders in the world of organic search engine optimization. Together, they have voted on the various factors that are estimated to comprise Google's ranking algorithm (the method by which the search engine orders results). The result is a resource of incredible value - although not every one of the estimated 200+ ranking elements are included, it is my opinion that 90-95% of the knowledge required about Google's algorithm is contained below.

SEOmoz (2008). Articles>Web Design>Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization Through Accessibility: How Designing Accessible Websites Leads to Automatic SEO

This presentation describes how creating an accessible website takes care of its (organic) search engine optimization to a very appreciable extent taking reference from the WCAG 2.0 working draft and the Google webmaster guidelines.This presentation was created and presented by Abhay Rautela to the Sapient creative community at the New Delhi office in February 2007.

Rautela, Abhay. Cone Trees (2007). Presentations>Web Design>Accessibility>Search Engine Optimization

Indexing the Web—It’s Not Just Google’s Business

Web databases do much more than passively store information. Part of their power comes from indexing records efficiently. An index serves as a map, identifying the precise location of a small piece of data in a much larger pile. For example, when I search for “web development,” Google identifies two hundred million results and displays the first ten—in a quarter of a second. But Google isn’t loading every one of those pages and scanning their contents when I perform my search: they’ve analyzed the pages ahead of time and matched my search terms against an index that only references the original content.

Mullican, Lyle. List Apart, A (2009). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Search Engine Optimization

Your Website is a Satellite. Contextual Search is the Sun

The internet is more like the heliocentric model championed by Galileo, with search as the sun. It is an ever-growing collection of distribution channels, each with their own audience, revolving around an increasingly contextual search experience. It’s time to expand your perspective to account for this. But, like Galileo, you may have a hard time with the authorities as you start to act on this understanding.

Tipping Point Labs (2009). Articles>Web Design>Search>Search Engine Optimization

The Illusion of SEO vs. the Reality of Great Content

SEO techniques will increase your search rankings and SEM will get you traffic on the top search engines. But a boatload of quality content will also accomplish these things and prepare you for the more contextual future of search.

Tipping Point Labs (2009). Articles>Web Design>Content Management>Search Engine Optimization

Is Your Key Content Drowning in News?

Many web editors spend a lot of their time writing news stories for the company web site. However, traffic analysis frequently reveals that this content is not very popular - and that users may in fact miss the key content they come to find (product data, addresses etc.) because it's practically drowning in news stories.

Furu, Nina. Content Strategy (2005). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Search Engine Optimization

How To Get Better Search Engine Rankings

If your company web site is currently not ranking well at search engines, you are missing out on a vital source of web traffic. Here are some tips for improving your search engine rankings yourself (without hiring a search engine optimization company).

Content Strategy (2007). Articles>Web Design>Search Engine Optimization

The Web Developer's SEO Cheat Sheet

The ten essential categories for good optimization are: important HTML tags, search engine indexing limits, title tag syntax, common canonical issues, 301 redirects on Apache, search engine robot user agents, common robot traps to avoid, robot meta tags syntax, robots.txt syntax and site map syntax.

Dover, Danny. SEOmoz (2008). Articles>Web Design>Search Engine Optimization