Tryangled Dev

* Is your Website taking a long time to load?
* Does it appear incorrectly on some browsers?
* Is it not displayed in some browsers?

If your answer is yes to any or all of these questions, then consider validating your site’s HTML code. HTML validation is the process of analyzing HTML code for its compliance with HTML standards and identifying code errors.

Benefits of HTML Validation

Wide Accessibility
Are your Web pages written for all the major browsers? There was a time when Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator were the only browsers available. Now there are many browsers competing each other for greater market share. Only the sites that are HTML standard-compliant will appear properly on all browsers.

Validating your HTML code with a HTML Validator tool will increase the accessibility of your site through all the major browsers. This, in turn, will increase the number of visitors to your site.

Faster Loading

HTML validation finds out the errors in the HTML code and enables you to correct those errors. This will make the page download faster. Pages with HTML errors will take longer time to load. We must remember that users have no time to waste or wait. If a page takes longer time to download, users turn away to some competitor’s site. Ultimately, you lose potential customers and revenue.

Search Engine Friendly

HTML validation identifies the errors in your pages that can act as stumbling blocks for search engine spiders. Rectifying these errors will help increase your site’s ranking on search engines. Some of the prominent ways in which HTML Validation helps in making you pages search engine friendly are:

* It finds out the HTML errors that cause a longer loading time. Generally, the search engines find it difficult to index pages that load slowly.
* It checks whether the META tags are written properly. Improper tags can confuse the spiders and they may not be able to spot the right keywords.
* It suggests changes, such as adding alt messages to images, which help increase the keyword density in your page and the search engine ranking.

HTML validation is an essential part of search engine optimization. Failing to validate your site’s HTML code may make your site slow to load, appear incorrectly on different browsers, and rank low on search engines. Therefore, it is better to validate HTML code before submitting a site to search engines.

The Google SandBox is a metaphorical term coined by SEOs and Webmasters, not associated with Google, to explain why most new Websites have very poor rankings in Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS). The existence of Google SandBox has not yet been clearly proved but there seem to have some changes to Google’s Algorithm sometime around March 2004 that denies top ranking for newly launched web sites. Of course, there are exceptions and many Web pages have made it to the top of the SERP in spite of the sandbox, but the sandbox seems to be an inevitable page rank dampening concept.

How It Works?

It seems of late Google has been withholding high ranking ability of newly launched websites for 2-4 months. The penalty is applicable to new sites only and doesn’t affect domains that are 4 or more months old and have good backlinks. The sandbox effect also doesn’t affect new pages on long standing websites.

After the newly launched websites prove their worthiness by developing good back links and spend some time on the web they are given a weight and eventually the sandbox effect goes away.

Starters in Search Engine Optimization, in their zest to increase their site’s SERP ranking, commit some mistakes, which drastically affect their Website’s position on search engines. The following is a list of 7 common mistakes, which you can use as a checklist while optimizing your Web pages.

Ignoring the Title Tag

This is one of the gravest, but most common, mistakes that may spell doom for your site’s SERP ranking. Most of the search engines consider the Title tag very important. Search engines generally display the content that you give in the Title tag. Therefore, have most important keywords in the Title tag. DO NOT leave the Title tag empty or have irrelevant words such as “Home page”, “Welcome to our site”, etc. in the Title tag.

Irrelevant Keywords

Some Webmasters use irrelevant, but much sought after, keywords to drive traffic to their site. Getting traffic in such a way will not help your business in anyway. After all, you optimize your Website to boost your business. Say for example, you have a Website where you sell Desktop Computers. To increase the traffic, you use the keyword “Britney Spears” throughout your content, META tags, and Title tag. People who search for “Britney Spears” reach your page. But, when they find that your Website has nothing to do with “Britney Spears”, they will move away from your site quickly. You don’t gain anything from that traffic. In fact, had you optimized your site for genuine keywords, you would have brought in possible customers.

Spamming

Spamming is an unethical practice of using the same keywords repeatedly in Title tag, META tags, and Body text. Some shrewd Webmasters use this technique to artificially increase their site’s ranking. However, search engines are shrewder enough to find out Spamming and they lower the ranks of those sites that use Spamming. Sometimes, search engines may ban your site for Spamming. Therefore, never spam your site with repeated keywords.

Invisible Text & Links

This is one of those old tricks used by Webmasters to cheat search engines. Webmasters stuff the Web page with keywords and links, which will be invisible to readers but will be visible to search engines. Nowadays, search engines have intelligence to find out this. If you use this trick, search engines may send your site into oblivion — into perpetual ban!

Links to and from Bad Sites

It is a known fact that links from external sites would increase the rank of the recipient Website. However, links from low ranking sites or banned sites will not add much value to your site. Therefore, ensure you link to and get links from top ranking sites. Linking to link farms or banned sites can be harmful to your pages SERP ranking.

Invalid HTML

Most new Webmasters commit the mistake of not checking their Website’s HTML code. When your Website has HTML errors, it will fare poorly on search engines, even if it has optimized content. When your site’s HTML code has errors, it will be slow to load, appear incorrectly on different browsers, and rank low on search engines. Therefore, validate the HTML code before submitting your site to search engines and directories.

Having too much Graphics in your page

Search engines view Websites much as a text browser would Large amount of graphics won’t help you get a better ranking. In addition, lots of graphics will make your pages slow to download, which will drive search engines and visitors away. For better ranking on search engines, have keyword-rich content instead of graphics.

An online business software package designed to make it easier for people in the same organisation to share documents and information.

The free ‘Team Edition’ software, scheduled to debut Thursday, represents Google’s latest attempt to attract more users to free applications, which poses a potential threat to rival Microsoft’s highly profitable Office programmes.

Step one – Know who you are targeting

As with any marketing campaign the first step in optimizing ANY web page is to know your target audience.  Is your site B2B (business to business) or B2C (business to consumer).  This is important because this not only affects the tone of your site, but also the keywords you chose.

Step two – Choosing the right keywords

You can start by using free tools like Yahoo!s keyword suggestion tool.  It gives you a good place to start picking keywords.
Start with a phrase you know your site is about (i.e. if you sell widgets, then simply put “widgets” in the search box).  The tool will then not only spit out other related words, but also the search volumes associated with each for the previous month.
A word of caution however:  Sometimes, depending on when you use the tool, the search volumes are from a couple months ago. So if your product is seasonal based, the numbers may actually be lower or higher than represented.

Step 3 – Write your pages

Now that you have your keywords its time to write, or re-write, your content to make them more appealing to the target audience, inserting the key phrases you’ve selected whenever possible.
Keep in mind that you don’t want to over do it.  Also now is a good time to ensure you have proper keyword density’s and page length.

I recommend pages that are 400-500 words long.  If they are a little longer or shorter that is fine, however if they are approaching 1000 words or more you should split them up, trying to hit that 400-500 word limit.
On this 400-500 word page you should have 2 or 3 occurrences of a key phrase, and you want to limit the key phrases used to 2 or 3.  In other words you could have between 4 and 9 occurrences of all your key phrases per page.  This should provide you with optimal keyword density.

Step 4 – Optimize your Pages

This can be done in conjunction with the writing.  In fact it should be done at then to save time.  I purposely made this a separate step so that I could outline the finer points of optimization.
Provided that you are following the guidelines found in step 3, your pages should already have good keyword density, now is the time to improve that optimization by adding optimized meta tags and if appropriate, some image alt tags.
First is to write the meta description tag.  While many engines will index thousands of characters in your description, I recommend no more than a couple hundred characters
The meta description should be a readable sentence or two with the same keywords that you wrote the page for. Also preferred but not mandatory is a meta keywords tag.  While none of the major engines use this tag, other smaller ones, and some specialty engines do use the meta keywords tag.

Step 5 – Write a compelling title tag

I purposely left this as a separate step from meta tags because this is the most important part of your optimization program.  Again, it can be done at the same time as the previous two steps, but it’s importance can not be over-emphasized.
This is because the title tag is the tag which is displayed in the SERP (Search Engine Results Page).  It is the link that people click on, and also the tag which is generally read by the visitor before they decide to visit.

Below are some tips on how to get good rankings in the major search engines. These days it is not easy to achieve high rankings and it will take a lot of work, patience and time.

1- Content is King

- Create Title tags with keywords. For example, if your site is www.tryangled.com and you sell Computer Parts and Accessories, instead of your title saying “tryangled”, it should say something like tryangled- Computer Parts and Accessories”

- Use a lot of text on your site. At minimum we would recommend 100 words. Search engines cannot read graphics. If your site is primarily graphic based, then it will have trouble getting good rankings.

- Create Meta Tags for your site. Meta Tags are code hidden in the background that tell search engines what your keywords and descriptions are. Almost all Web Design programs like DreamWeaver and Frontpage have an option to insert Keyword and Description Meta Tags. However, if you are hand coding with HTML then you can use our Meta Tags Generator to create Meta Tags.

- Use your most important keywords about 3-8 times per 100 words.

- You can use our Meta Tags and Keyword Analyzer to check your keyword Density and make sure your Meta Tags are in the correct format and length.

- Create a lot of pages of content on your site

- On each page of your site use relevant title tags that have keywords

- If you are using a shopping cart system or have a database driven site, make sure it is search engine friendly and configured to pull the item titles and puts them in your title tags and descriptions are pulled to be placed in your Meta Tags.

2-Link Popularity

- The more links there are to your site the better your rankings will be

- Start a link exchange campaign with similar sites in your industry. You can look for link partners or post requests in our Link Exchange Request Forum.

- The more relevant the page linking to you the better

- Download the Google Toolbar and check the PageRank of the sites that you would want to do link exchange with. Try to only link with sites having a link pages of PR 3 or more.

- Purchase banner ads or text links on other sites, but make sure not to use tracking code as that will not benefit your link popularity. You want the link to be a straight link to your domain.

- Include your keywords in the anchor text of the links. For example, if your site is www.tryangled.com and you sell Computer Parts and Accessories, instead of your title saying “tryangled”, it should say “tryangled - Computer Parts and Accessories”

- Check your Link Popularity using our Link Popularity Check Tool to keep up with your progress.

3-Internal Linking Structure

- Make sure that your most important pages are linked from all of your other pages.

- If you are using graphical, Java Script or Flash based navigation and link buttons, then create text links on the bottom of all your pages.

- Try to include keywords in your text links to your internal pages. This will tell the search engines what your pages are about.

4-Submission to Search Engines and Directories

- Do submit your site to major search engines manually or using a website submission service like ours. It will speed up the process of your site being discovered, specially if it is a new site and you do not have any links.

The majority of what you will do as an SEO/Content Developer, will be classified under the Prose Content category.

“Most elements that are used in the body of documents and applications are categorized as Prose Content.”

In this instance, Prose meaning “ordinary speech or writing without metrical structure.” Prose writing has a greater irregularity and variety of rhythm, is closer to the patterns of everyday speech and, does not treat a line as a formal unit. Basically it comes down to “semantics” and the “structure” of your HTML Elements.

Since the search engines use a wide variety of factors to determine site rankings, optimizing a page to rank high is a cumulative effort. You should use everything available to you that the engines might give some weight, and therefore you should certainly use meta tags (including the meta keyword tag), along with every other legitimate, acceptable technique available. At best, it may help boost your site a bit in those engines that still read them. At worst, it won’t hurt your rankings (unless you brazenly keyword stuff them). I still use these meta tags on clients’ Web sites, but don’t bother with them on my own sites.

Building the Perfect Page is a series of topics discussing the basics of web page development. Here are the primary areas that will be discussed…

Title Element

The page title element (some refer to it as the title tag which is incorrect) is one of the most important factors for ranking highly in the search engines.

Page title elements are normally 3-9 words (60-80 characters) maximum in length, no fluff, straight and to the point. This is what shows up in most search engine results as a link back to your page.

Make sure your Page Title Element (title tag) is relevant to the content on the page.

META Description Tag (Metadata)

The META description tag usually consists of 25 to 30 words or less using no more than 160 to 180 characters total (including spaces). The META description also shows up in many search engine results as a summary of your site.

Directories like Yahoo! and the ODP show the page title and description that you entered (and the editors modified) on their manual submission form.

Make sure your META Description Tag is relevant to the content on the page.

META Keywords Tag (Metadata)

For those search engines that are META enabled, the META keywords tag used to be one of the most important areas after the page title and page description. It has been abused by both marketers and consumers alike that there is very little weight given to the META keywords tag.

Don’t fret over your META keywords tag. Utilize keywords and keyword phrases from your title element, META description tag, heading tag and first one or two paragraphs of visible content. Try to limit it to 15 to 20 words if possible.

Make sure your META Keywords Tag is relevant to the content on your page.

Heading Tags

At least one heading tag <h1> should appear at the top of your page and be well written using prime keywords and keyword phrases.

You can use CSS to control the appearance of the heading tags. I prefer using external style sheets (file.css).

Make sure your Heading Tags are relevant to the content on the page.

Alt Attribute

Alt text is the line of text you see pop up (in Internet Explorer, see note below) when you place your cursor over an image. It also displays a text representation of the image when the user has images turned off in their browser (this is the intended behavior). It is highly recommended that you utilize this area as it is required under accessibility laws and, is indexed by the search engines.

Note: Internet Explorer (IE) will display alt text when you hover your cursor over an element that utilizes the alt attribute. This is incorrect behavior as the alt text is designed to be displayed when the user has their images turned off while browsing. Other browsers such as Opera and Mozilla will not display the alt text on hover.

The alt attribute should not to be stuffed with keywords or phrases. The alt text should mirror the content of the image. If it is a graphic header, then your alt attribute should mirror the text in the graphic header.

Alternative text values should not exceed 80 characters in length. If more than 70-80 characters are required one should use the longdesc attribute as an alternative to alt text.

Make sure your Alt Attribute is relevant to the content for that image.

Hyperlinked Text

This area is overlooked by many when promoting a web site to the search engines. Many web sites utilize graphic representations of links. These are visually appealing, but the text in the image cannot be indexed by the spiders.

I always recommend an additional text navigation bar (SSI - Server Side Includes or Front Page Includes) somewhere on the page, usually at the top, right, bottom or left hand side. Link text should be concise, use keywords and phrases, and follow the same structure as the graphic navigation.

META Tags or what are officially referred to as Metadata Elements, are found within the <head></head> section of your web pages. Meta tags are still relevant with some indexing search engines. You should utilize your meta tags in accordance with the W3C - World Wide Web Consortium Metadata Specifications.

The following is a partial list of metadata elements that may be used in the overall site structuring, organization, and search engine marketing strategy.

We’ve provided HTML Comments (look for this <!– Comment Here –>) in the source code to help you understand the metadata elements referenced in this series of topics.

1. Title Element - Page Titles
Every html document must have a Title Element in the head section. Some refer to the <title> element as a meta tag (title tag) when it is not.

<title>META Tags - Metadata Elements</title>

To see an example of where the title element is placed in the html, view the source code of this web page. Look at the very top of the page right after the opening <head> tag.

2. META Description Tag
Some search engines will index the META Description Tag found in the <head></head> section of your web pages. These indexing search engines may present the content of your meta description tag as the result of a search query.

<meta name=”description” content=”META Tags or what are officially referred to as Metadata Elements are found within the <head></head> section of your web pages. The following is a partial list of metadata elements that may be used in the overall site structuring, organization, and search engine marketing strategy.”>

3. META Keywords Tag
The META Keywords Tag is where you list keywords and keyword phrases that you’ve targeted for that specific page. There have been numerous discussions at various search engine marketing forums surrounding the use of the keywords tag and its effectiveness. The overall consensus is that the tag has little to no relevance with the major search engines today.

<meta name=”keywords” content=”metadata elements meta tags description tag keywords language link relationship title element”>

4. META Language Tag

In HTML elements, the language attribute or META Language Tag specifies the natural language. This document is mostly concerned with how to specify the primary language(s) (there could be more than one) and the base language (there is only one) in HTML documents.

<meta http-equiv=”content-language” content=”da”>

To see an example of how the meta language tag can be used, visit our Danish translated directory listings and view the source code…

/danmark/

5. META Link Relationship Tag
It is helpful for search results to reference the beginning of the collection of documents in addition to the page hit by the search. You may help search engines by using the link element with rel=”start” along with the title attribute. The META Link Relationship tag is part of the metadata that appears within the <head></head> section of your web pages.

<link rel=”start” href=”/meta-tags/” title=”META Tags - Metadata Elements”>

6. META Robots Tag
The Robots META Tag is meant to provide users who cannot upload or control the /robots.txt file at their websites, with a last chance to keep their content out of search engine indexes and services.

<meta name=”robots” content=”none”>

7. META Robots Tag for Googlebot
Googlebot obeys the noindex, nofollow, and noarchive META Robots Tags. If you place these tags in the head of your HTML/XHTML document, you can cause Google to not index, not follow, and/or not archive particular documents on your site.

<meta name=”googlebot” content=”noarchive, nofollow”>

8. META Robots Tag for MSNBot
MSNBot obeys the noindex and nofollow Robots META Tag. Placing these tags in the heading of your HTML document prevents MSNBot from indexing or following specific documents.

<meta name=”msnbot” content=”noindex, nofollow”>

9. META Tags Abuse and Misuse - Metadata Structuring and Standards
This is a search engine marketing article published by our System Admin (Edward Lewis) that discusses the use of HTML Comments Tags and proprietary metadata elements.

10. META Revisit-After Tag
The revisit-after META tag is not supported by any major search engines, it never was supported and probably never will be. It was developed for, and supported by, Vancouver Webpages and their local search engine searchBC.

<meta name=”revisit-after” content=”7 days”>

11. HTML Comments Tag
HTML comments are not metadata but, are typically found in the <head></head> section of web pages. HTML comments can be utilized anywhere within your documents HTML structure.

<!– HTML Comments (treated as HTML markup) –>

There has been a myth that has perpetuated oer the years where keywords and keyword phrases listed inside HTML comments tags would add a boost to the overall relevancy of the page. This is not true based on numerous tests we’ve performed during the years 2002, 2003 and 2004.

12. DC Dublin Core META Tags - DCMI Dublin Core Metadata Initiative
The Dublin Core metadata element set is a standard for cross domain information resource description.

<meta name=”DC.title” lang=”en” content=”DC Dublin Core META Tags - DCMI Dublin Core Metadata Initiative”>