Website Promotion Tips

Search engine optimization has been around for quite some time now. But for the past one or two years SEO techniques have been categorized as ‘white hat’ or ‘black hat’ SEO. As in any other industry, people have put in considerable energy and effort into devising techniques that the search engines have not caught onto yet and follow every little algorithm shift with a vengeance to come up with SEO that is generally believed to be effective (in the short run) but unethical. Black hat SEO yields short term results, in the sense that, it ultimately leads to the site being banned by search engines.

White hat SEO on the other hand, is what every self respecting 'ethical' SEO firms offer to their clients, by way of organic or inorganic SEO. White hat SEO also known as, Ethical SEO, seeks to make websites valuable to human visitors so they can link to them. Hence, the aim here is have content and design which humans can read and find useful and project to the search engines that the site is relevant to the particular search query. Named after good guys in cowboy movies, white hat SEO techniques include:

Play tag with the HTML on your webpage. Put some thought into the context of your page and who you would like visiting it. Then think of a suitable title you would give to your page, of up to 40 characters. Cover relevant keywords and/or give a short heading for the content on the page fitting the context. Place it in the <title> tag on your page.

For the <description> tag, prepare a descriptive account of the content on your page. Try and incorporate the objective of creating the page. Ideally it should be around 50 characters and should be strategically sprinkled with the relevant keywords.

Content on your web page and site should be legible and relevant. Creating machine churned, machine readable jargon (black hat SEO) sets human users off. Create a keyword strategy and undertake an analysis to understand the keywords searched for regarding the content on your site. You can use tools such as Wordtracker or Google Adwords. Legibly place these keywords in your content by way of meaningful sentences and NOT keyword stuffed nonsense. One of the cleanest, meanest ways of sure fire SEO success is to fill your web pages with compelling copy that people will actually want to read and pass on as useful information.

Creating compelling content and appealing design gives you the advantage of increased traffic to your site, better search engine placement AND link popularity. The more relevant sites linking to yours, the better image the search engines will have of your web site. Make sure the sites linking to you are also relevant and of good quality.

Table less design drastically improve web accessibility in the face of PDAs, mobile phones, and disability norms. DO away with embedded tables and spacer images and create smaller, compact web pages significantly reducing download time and saving bandwidth. Also, table less designs are easier to crawl and index for search engines.

Create a compelling experience for your visitors, or be ready to face the wrath of the back button. Search engines also judge the popularity of a web page by the number of people who stay on at the page or navigate to other pages of the website as opposed to people who land on a page and hit the back button to carry on searching. Don't scare of visitors with zombie error messages. Customize your 404 or 500 error messages and speak to your visitor, genuinely apologizing for the inconvenience caused to them. These are also standard HTML pages. It is advisable to create a directory on your site, name it 'errors' or the like and create a page for each error message. You can include funny messages, pictures, even forms and sitemaps in these custom error pages.

All in all using these white hat SEO techniques you are assured sure fire, if slow, results, without the fear of looking over your shoulder and fearing that Google and the search engine fraternity have caught up with you.