Hightide Web Resources Articles, News, and Reviews

Geeks.com is in the middle of an End of the Month Sale that’s pretty amazing. Big Deals…Huge Savings….all to the tune of up to 85 percent off in a lot of cases.

The Compaq Presario SR2170NX tower system (to the left), for example, is regularly $349.99, but it’s marked down to $299.99. Even with my math skills, I know that’s $50 saved, and I didn’t even have to use my fingers.

From the Website:
This Compaq Presario SR2170NX tower system is powered by an Intel Pentium 4 3.0 GHz processor and 1 GB of RAM. Its 160 GB hard drive provides ample storage space for music, photos, critical data and other files. Plus, Microsoft Windows Vista Home Basic comes pre-installed.

Access CD and DVD media and burn CDs and DVDs with the DVD±RW Lightscribe drive. There’s plenty of room for expansion with three PCI slots, one PCI Express x16 slot and two DIMM sockets. A keyboard and mouse are included so just add a monitor to start computing!

This is just one of the big sales going on, so be sure to visit Geeks.com before all the penny-pinching geeks in the world buy everything.

They’re just so that way.

by Lauren Hobson

Most small businesses know that a good link building strategy is essential to a web site’s success in the search engines. If you want your site to show up on the first few pages of search results, you really need other credible web sites to “vote” for you by linking to your web site. Up until recently, it was common for web sites to exchange reciprocal links in order to help each other build inbound links to their web sites. But while this used to be a useful strategy, the rules have recently changed and now you must learn how to play the new link-building game!

Be Picky About Reciprocal Links Reciprocal links can sometimes be helpful, but only in very specific instances. In order to be useful, the incoming link (from the other web site) should be on a page that has a higher page rank than the page on your web site containing the link that goes back to them. Plus, the text of the link on the other web site should match one or more of the keywords on your site. If you can get reciprocal links that meet these criteria, then they may be helpful to you in the search engines. Also remember to steer clear of inbound links from link farms, free-for-all sites, and paid links since these are almost always penalized by the search engines.

It’s Not a Democracy The idea of a reciprocal link counting as a “vote” for your web site may be appealing, but there’s also a downside. Each link on your site that goes out to another web site essentially deducts a vote from your site as well. Reciprocal links can be a no-gain situation for you, and could end up hurting your site overall in the eyes of the search engines.

Voting Against Yourself One of the new link-building rules that may surprise you is that one-way outbound links on your site may be a bad idea from a search engine’s point of view. For instance, if you have a “Helpful Links” or “Resources” page on your site that contains one-way outbound links to other sites, you are probably losing lots of ground in the search engines. To avoid these “negative votes” for your site, be sure your outbound links are coded with the NOFOLLOW attribute so the search engines know these outbound links should not be deducted from your web site’s score.

Link Content is Key In order for your links to really be powerful, there must be a relationship between what you say about your web site, and what other people on the web say about your web site. How does a search engine determine this? It’s all in the link text. The text of each inbound link to your site must match the keywords used on your web site, or else the search engines may simply ignore that inbound link.

For example, if you want to rank for the keyword “travel” but the inbound links to your site contain just the name of your company, then there’s no way the search engines will know that these inbound links have anything to do with travel.

Send Your Site to De-Tox Ranking well in the search engines can be a moving target, so it’s important to do everything you can to protect your site. Always try to build inbound links that contain your relevant keywords in the link text, and get rid of the reciprocal links on your site that are not working for you. Also be careful when coding your one-way outbound links so that you aren’t unintentionally “deducting votes” from your own web site. These simple steps can help you build effective inbound links, while avoiding those that may have recently become bad news for your web site’s search engine rankings.

About the Author:
Lauren Hobson is the Editor of Biz Talk Newsletter and the Five Sparrows Marketing Blog from Five Sparrows, LLC. Read the most recent Five Sparrows articles on small business websites and marketing or subscribe at www.fivesparrows.com/biztalk. Copyright 2007

by Robert Griggs

There are many aspects in regards to search engine optimisation. There are on-page procedures such as optimising meta tags, titles, page copy, urls, alt tags and the like. We also know that another important aspect is off-page seo whereby a lot of time and effort is put in in order to obtain quality inbound links to your site. This normally takes the shape of directory submission, article writing and submission, competition analysis, social media marketing and blogging to name a few.

These are all crucial elements of search engine optimisation and are a major part of any seo specialists daily chors.

One element of SEO that can be easily overlooked is the building of a web site that is not only “user friendly” but also “search friendly”. By “search friendly” we mean that the search engines can crawl and spider your site unimpeded which will enable it to extract all of your content and in turn index it within the search engines database. After all, what use is getting thousands of inbound one way links to your site, if your site is not user or search friendly?

There are a number of things worth considering when building a user and search engine friendly web site. They are:-

1. Use as much text as possible in the form of HTML - Search engines love plain text. They are not able to read images, video files, audio files or flash, so try to not use too much of these in your site design.

Another thing to consider is that some sites make users log in in order to view certain content or use a form to find content. Both of these are bad. Spiders/crawlers do not know how to log in to your site or fill out a form in order to find your content. So if you want your content to be indexed by the search engines, stay away from this. If you MUST do this, try to produce a snippet of the content to entice users to log in. That way the spider at least has something to chew on.

2. Make your urls understandable - This means creating urls such as www.mysite.com/how-to-bring-up-your-children.html and NOT www.mysite.com/children/article-09876R-YTUR-4tr.html As you can see the first url is not only “user friendly” but is also “search engine friendly” meaning that the search engines read more meaning and relevance into this url than the second one. Dont forget also that if you were to copy the second url into an email, your signature or post on a blog etc it wouldnt be totally clear where the link was going. This cannot be said for the first url.

3. Structure your site well - This means making your site as flat as possible. Instead of structuring your site in way that means a user has to click 10 times before reaching their target make the content a maximum of 4 clicks away or less.

4. Design your site for users NOT search engines - As much as possible treat the search engines as if they were human beings manually scouring your site for content to index. If it is easy for humans to find what they are looking for on your site, logic says that the spiders will also find what they are looking for and index it. The more “speadbumps” you put in the way of spiders, the slower your site will be crawled and indexed(if at all).

5. Content is king - One of my favorite expressions which is so true. Great content has many benefits, after all, its what we are all after, even the search engines. The search engines job is to find “relevant” search data. When the search engine starts dishing out “irrelevant” results, thats the time when it is going to become out of favour with web users who will move onto another engine.

Having great site content has many benefits such as if your content is good and original, people will want to link to it and your site, so its a good way of building natural links which is something that google likes. If you write good genuine creative content on your topic you will start to become an authority in your chosen field meaning more links and brand/site awareness.

The more content you have the more opportunity you will have of inserting your keywords making it look as natural as possible to the search engines. Although keyword density is no longer a major factor with search engines, it is something that needs to be done.

Well, thats the end of this article with some tips on making your site not only “user friendly” but just as importantly “search friendly”. It is something that can be easily overlooked especially as gaining backlinks is viewed as THE most important SEO practice at the moment.

Overlook it at your peril!!

Until next time…

About the Author:
Rob Griggs is an SEO specialist based in Spain. For further information on his web design and seo services, please visit his search engine optimisation spain web site.