By Donovan Baldwin

Search engine optimization is primarily about getting your website tuned up to optimum effectiveness as far as search engines are concerned. However, the intent is to get a good search engine placement so that more humans will be exposed to the “opportunity” to visit your website. If done properly, the steps you take to optimize your website for search engines can also often be used to optimize your site to get website traffíc. After all, it accomplishes little to get a good ranking by a search engine and yet be passed over by the human viewing the search engine results.

When a business owner decides to bring their business to the web, generally the last thing that they think about is search engine optimization. They assume that whomever they hire to do their web design will put up a site and then submit it to the search engines and the traffic will magically pour in. Unfortunately it takes more than that to drive search engine traffic to your site, and even more unfortunately most developers don’t program with SEO in mind, nor do they educate the client about the process involved in gaining traffic from search engines.

I now propose to go right out on a limb and say that design has very little to do with search engine optimisation. This is a sweeping generalisation, I admit, and one to which my designer friends will take instant umbrage. But it is true to all intents and purposes. Design can certainly assist in achieving good optimisation. By that I mean it will assist if it doesn’t hinder the process with acres of code that the robots need to wade through in order to find the potatoes and gravy. Or if the navigation throughout the site is logical and easy to achieve. Or if the pages are designed to load quickly.

By Michael Cordova

A landing page is a website page that is created for one purpose - to persuade the site visitor to convert into a customer by making a sale, completing a form (thereby becoming a qualified lead), signing up for a newsletter, etc.
We provide this landing page quick reference so you can pull it out every time you are creating a persuasive landing page. It is divided into 4 sections and is intended to be an all-inclusive tip sheet.

By Adriana Iordan (c) 2006

For a successful Search Engine Optimization strategy, take into consideration that search engines look at content and also at the structure of the markup. They emphasize the importance of text content, page titles, keywords rich text, meta descriptions and information architecture. A website where quality of content and code prevails will rank higher in the major search engines.
There are many Search Engine Optimization tactics, but try to find the best combination and don’t sacrifice the usability and performance of your website. Here is some basic information about improving your source code from an SEO perspective:

Like most of you guys, I too am always on the look-out for that leg up needed to give me that essential competitive edge to stay in the web design & development game. With that in mind, I thought I’d share with you what I’ve managed to learn about web design & development, SEO & SEM as well as web standards & accessibility in the hope that what I know is of use to someone else.

Words that walk the fine line

By Jon Rognerud

Abstract: The latest frontier in search engine technology is social search. Born out of the social networking boom, social search will attempt to humanize search results thereby providing users with consumer driven answers to their queries. Considering that 50% of queries go unanswered, social search could be the biggest breakthrough since page ranking.
As search giants, Google, Yahoo and MSN continue their fierce battle to become king of the search engines, internet marketers are faced with increasing challenges to dominate in the rankings. As algorithms and methodologies change, savvy entrepreneurs and Madison Avenue continue their heated battle for a coveted Top 10 spot in search engine rankings.

Making sure that your websites are fully crawlable is a key component for any search strategy, especially if you want your sites to rank well for multiple related keyword phrases or different products.

One of the ways that you can insure that a search engine spider crawls your site deeply is to provide it a road map of your site. This road map, called a “site map” is a very simple page (from a design standpoint) that only serves one purpose from a search engine optimizers point of view, to get those interior pages into a search engine’s index.

By Jim Hedger, StepForth News Editor,
StepForth Placement Inc.

One of the most frequently asked questiôns readers and clients ask, revolves around how websites can be best optimized to meet the algorithmic needs of each of the major 4 search engines, Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Though there have been wide sweeping changes in the organic search engine landscape over the past six months, the fundamental ways search engines operate remains the same.

On page factors - Is your website search engine friendly?

So you have a website but where is it on Google? Have you fallen foul of a penalty or have you overlooked one of the many common search engine optimisation pitfalls when designing your site?

Understanding what works for the search engines and what doesn’t when it comes to the content on your website can have a crucial impact on the relevance and/or page rank of your pages from a SEO perspective.

Here we highlight common mistakes that could affect your ranking on Google and other search engines.