How to further optimize your Picaholic Site for search engines
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of getting your website visible to major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN to vastly improve your ranking.
Picaholic is built completely around the fact that SEO is one of the most important parts of your site. We constantly update our SEO processors to ensure staying current with search engine theories.
Types Of SEO
Off-page SEO
The aspect of a website is not located on the site itself, rather elsewhere on the web (e.g. a hyperlink that is pointing to your site from a different website). Links can also influence the ranking of your website. More precisely this aspect is the incoming links from other websites. It is much more difficult to control the off-page factors, than the on-page SEO.
On-page SEO
Optimization of a website’s content, text, tags, links and other elements. The better you optimise your content the better your search engine ranking will be.
On-page SEO Basics
Quality Content
This is the most basic part of search engine optimization. You must write descriptions that are reflective of your content.
Do not try the black hat tactic of stuffing keywords into your description. If you read through the description and it sounds like you’ve used a word too many times than you probably have.
Do not rip the content from a competitor’s site. This is a common mistake that site owners make. The odds are that the search engines have already indexed the competitor site. In this case you will not have unique content and instead is merely duplicate with a different domain. Do yourself a favor and write unique content that is different from someone else’s.
Keywords
A common mistake site owners make is to choose a long list of general keywords they believe their potential customers will be searching on. The most important task is to determine whether you are choosing keywords that people actually want to find. If no one is searching your targeted keywords, it won’t matter how highly the site is ranked in the search engines.
There are several useful tools on the market that can help identify the right keywords. This is actually the first part of any keyword strategy – and a step that is often overlooked.
Keyword Selector Tool
http://www.slowseo.com/tools/keyword-selector-tool.php
This is a free and very simple tool to use. Enter a keyword and press search. The site will generate a list of related keywords. Whilst it is great idea to add the top searchable keywords, it is sometimes better to target the ‘niche’. You will find that a niche market still represents thousands of potential clients.
Figure 1.1 Keyword Selector Tool
Keywords in URL
One of the first things a search engines index is your URL. So your URL represents an important tool for SEO. Be warned that you cannot stuff a bunch of keywords into the URL and expect it to have the desired effect. Limit the number of keywords in the URL to 1 or 2 and certainly ensure that the URL length is not too long. How long is too long? If you can’t read the URL without scrolling to the side it is WAY too long.
Picaholic gives you the ability to enter your own URL.
Figure 1.2 URL Title
In the example above, the TITLE will appear as the menu, but the NAME will appear in the URL.
For example: http://www.yourdomain.com/about-john-smith-interior-design
Figure 1.3 File Descriptions
When you upload images, videos and other files it is important that you name the files with keywords.
You will notice that each item on Picaholic has a ‘Quick Link” Url. You can use this link to send your clients directly to a specific page or image within your site.
Figure 1.4 Quicklink Tab
Off-page SEO Basics
Off-page SEO refers to any activity, which is not physically located on your site. The most common form of Off-page SEO is link exchange and Paid advertising such as banners and AdWords.
Link exchange
Is a linking program where a site exchanges links with a high ranking site (typically with something in common, such as both being Interior design sites) as a way to improve visibility in the search engines and increase page rank.
Every link to your site increases the chances that a search engine will find your site and index the pages. Also, each link counts toward your overall “Page Rank” which may influence search result placement (at least for Google). Be careful and don’t link to less than ideal sites (link farms, etc) or receive links for them since engines will actually penalize YOU.
AdWords
Google’s advertising system, which serves text ads related to search terms.
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
In a nutshell, if you are prepared to spend the time to optimize your content, (describe each page and each item eg images) than our system has no problems in handling this info and search engines finding you.
Most of our clients are now number 1.
Tags: flash seo, flash templates, flash website, keyword tool, keywords, link exchange, meta data, search engine optimization, technology