Here are seven tips that will improve your website’s search engine rankings:

1. Create accurate, descriptive page titles (title tag).
2. Use the page description meta tag and have different (unique) descriptions for each page on your site.
3. Make sure your site is easy to navigate.
4. Have good content and don’t overload your copy with keywords — you should be creating web content for your site visitors not for search engines.
5. Make your URLs easy to understand — use relevant words and try for easy to remember filenames.
6. Use alt tags to describe your images.
7. Try to build inbound links back to your site, but make sure they are quality links (more about that shortly).

I could go on and on, but I don’t need to — in depth information on SEO best practices can be found at Google’s Webmaster Central, where you can find SEO tips and a PDF titled “Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide.” Bing also has a set of Webmaster’s Tools and best practices for SEO.

Just remember that SEO is not something you do once and then abandon. You have to work at it, and pay attention to what works, abandoning what doesn’t.

Now about those inbound links …

Getting a lot of inbound links to your website can help it rise in organic search rankings, but Google wants those to be legitimate links. For instance, if you have an online book store and book publishers and reviewers are linking to it, those would be legitimate links and would increase your site’s visibility. But inbound links to your book selling site that originate from link farms are not legitimate. You know those web pages, the ones you stumble across that are nothing but a list of links? Those are link farms. And you know those emails you get, where people ask you to trade links (“I’ll link to your site and you link to mine?”) — they’re not legitimate links in Google’s eyes, either. They call that “black hat” optimization, and Google hates it.

To find out what happens when you practice “black hat” SEO techniques and get caught by Google, read The Dirty Little Secrets of Search, an article that tells the story of how Google responded when J.C. Penney was caught using paid links to increase its organic search rankings. It’s a long article, but worth the read (thousands of others must agree as — at the time of this post’s writing — it was the most popular emailed article on the NY Times website).

“If you own or manage a website, you are responsible for that website’s security. Compromised websites can infect visitors with badware, and are commonly blacklisted by search engines, web browsers, and security vendors. Many legitimate websites are the targets of malicious hacking attacks, during which code linking directly to badware is inserted onto an otherwise innocent, but poorly secured, website.” (StopBadware.org)

On a regular basis, all website owners/administrators should check their sites for badware by using these tools:

• Google’s Safebrowsing Diagnostic Tool: To test your site, use the following URL, but replace “example.com” with the name of your site:
  • http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=example.com
  • If I wanted to check my site, I would enter: http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=rmfcommunications.com

• Check to see if your site is listed in the Badwear Website Clearinghouse at StopBadware.org.
• View your domain’s site report at McAfee SiteAdvisor.

Hopefully, your website will pass these diagnostic tests. However, if you do find badware, you’ll need to remove it. You can find tips for doing this at StopBadware and BadwareBusters.

WordPress users can find tips on keeping WordPress installations secure at “Hardening WordPress.”

Once you’ve removed the badware from your site, you should request a review of your website from the services that have issued warnings: Google, StopBadware, and/or SiteAdvisor. If you don’t, visitors to your website may see the following warning: “This site may hurt your computer.”

1. Copyscape: use Copyscape to search for copies of your web content. If you discover someone is using your work and passing it off as their own, dive into Copyscape’s list of resources and suggestions for what to do if you discover you’ve been plagiarized. Place a Copyscape banner on your website pages. This does not protect your work, but it does discourage would-be thieves.
2. Place a copyright notice at the end of each blog posting: “Copyright [year] [your name]. All Rights Reserved.” Look at the end of this posting, and you’ll see my copyright.
3. The folks at WordPress suggest using a more-detailed copyright notice on your blog, stating what uses you will and won’t allow. I’ve placed this copyright in my sidebar. If you do not want excerpts of your work used, you can modify the notice to remove that language. This article also includes some other great ideas for protecting your work and gives suggestions on what to do if your work has been stolen.
4. There are good suggestions in an article at Freelance Switch, including a novel use of Google Alerts: “… choose one or more phrases that are relatively unique to your work, place them in quotes and set up a Google Alert to notify you automatically when a match is found.”
5. Use watermarks on your images. Other suggestions can be found in this posting from Web Resources Depot.

While there are no guarantees that your work won’t be stolen, taking some, or all, of these steps should help. And should the worst occur, you can follow these steps to recover your website property.

Copyright 2010 Regina Fried. All Rights Reserved.

Photo: Kreg Steppe

What’s a Google Alert?

“Google Alerts are emails automatically sent to you when there are new Google results for your search terms. You can also choose to have your alerts delivered via feed to the feedreader of your choice. Google currently offers alerts with results from News, Web, Blogs, Video and Groups.”

If you’ve set up a Google Alert for your company name and someone publishes a news article or blog post mentioning your business, you’ll receive an email containing a link to the article or post. It’s pretty cool!

I’ve created two Google Alerts: one for my business and one for my name. The latter alert provides some laughs from time-to-time as I’ve gotten emails with links to cooking blogs containing phrases such as: “Regina fried the zucchini before adding it to the tomato sauce.”

It’s very easy to create a Google Alert: go here and enter the search terms you’re interested in (company name or your name) and choose a “comprehensive” alert so that Google will search “news, web, blogs, videos, and groups” for your terms. Tell Google how to deliver the alert (email or feed) and choose how often you’d like to receive it. That’s it.

Don’t limit your alerts to information about you or your business. You can also use Google Alerts to keep track of news in your industry or stay informed on what your competitors are doing.

Google has an excellent help page to guide you should you have any questions. If you still need help, leave a comment, and I’ll respond.

What if you didn’t find anything? Or your name was buried on page 12 of the search results?

Well, then … if you haven’t already done so, now is the time to join social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter and create your online “brand.” Because as noted in a recent NY Times article, “Not being online today is akin to not existing.” While it may be hard to think of yourself as a brand, it’s necessary. As stated in the same article: “If you don’t brand yourself, Google will brand you.”

Another reason to use these sites is that they allow you to monitor what is being said about you and your business. One expert quoted in the Dallas Business Journal advises that “Communications are taking place right now on Twitter, Facebook, and all the other social networking services behind your back … It’s going on, whether you ignore it or not. The wisest course of action is to be informed about what’s being said about you in public forums.” Domino’s Pizza learned this lesson just this week.

Although there are many social networking sites, three of the most popular are LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Here’s a brief overview of each:

• LinkedIn: If you’re new to social networking, I would advise you to start with LinkedIn, a professional networking site. You can create a profile (see mine here) and use it to network with other professionals in your field, get the word out about your expertise, look for work, or reconnect with colleagues.

• Facebook: You may think of Facebook as a site for high school and college students only, but that perception is wrong. In fact, Facebook has seen more growth lately in “older” users — people using it to stay in touch with family and reconnect with old colleagues and school friends. Businesses can have Facebook pages, too. So if you’d like to have a personal page that is restricted to friends and family and another page for your business — one visible to the world at large — you can do that.

• Twitter: Here’s how they explain it on the Twitter home page — “Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?”

You use Twitter to send short messages (140 characters or less) to people who are “following” you (meaning they have signed up to receive your updates) — your clients, family members, friends. Yes, many of the messages (called “tweets”) are mundane. And it’s possible that you can’t imagine what you could possibly tweet about that would be of any interest to your clients. If so, don’t start tweeting — yet.  But set up the account, then search for colleagues and/or competitors — or for companies whose business models you admire — and watch what they do with Twitter. If you have a blog or a website, you can link it to your tweets so that visitors to your site can see what you’re doing. And the next time you’re at a conference or a meeting and something happens that you want to instantly inform your clients/customers about, you can tweet about it. Because if it’s interesting, others will be tweeting about it, too.

So … what are you waiting for? Jump in! If you’d like help getting your feet wet, contact me. I am currently working with a client to create profiles for her on these sites (as well as several others) so that she has a consistent and updated brand — one that is tied into her blog and website.  I can do the same for you.