As you should know, keywords play an important role in the world of SEO! Search engine bots crawl your site taking the keyword(s) (along with a million and one other factors) to determine where to place your site in their rankings. You should keep this in mind when naming the pages on your website.

Taking just a few minutes to make your current and/or new pages SEO friendly can really help your efforts in ranking well on any search engine.

Single keyword file name

Easy enough, if you have an “About” page, which currently shows up in the url as www.yourdomain.com/index-4.htm, you should think about changing the url to www.yourdomain.com/About.htm. Okay! … so an about us page is not going to be the main page you are trying to rank well for a specific keyword, but try to remember which keywords you want another page to rank well for. So if your looking to rank well for football and you have a page with fresh, unique football content, then you should think about naming the page just that! (www.yourdomain.com/football.htm)

Mulitple words in a file name (what not to do)

Some times your page needs to use more than one keyword. No problem! There are however a couple things to know when using multiple keywords in a url. Some website owners will use capital letters to separate their multiple keywords. This is not recommended because Google will view the keywords as one large word. It will not decipher the large bunch of text into separate words. Other website owners will use and underscore to separate their keywords, this again is not a good idea! Google does not see the underscore as a space so it will take the keywords and underscore(s) at face value. So unless you are trying to rank #1 for “keyword_keyword_keyword”, you should not use this method. This may leave some wondering how then are you suppose to name files with multiple keywords?

How are you suppose to name files with multiple keywords?

The best method for creating page names with multiple keywords is to use the hyphen. Google will view the hyphen as an actual space. So if you save a page as I-Love-SEO.htm, Google will actually see the page name as “I Love SEO”.

What to remember:

www.yourdomain.com/keyword.htm
Google will see “keyword”

www.yourdomain.com/keyword-keyword-keyword.htm
Google will see “keyword keyword keyword”

www.yourdomain.com/keyword_keyword_keyword.htm
Google will see “keyword_keyword_keyword”

www.yourdomain.com/KeywordKeywordKeyword.htm
Google will see “KeywordKeywordKeyword”

Many webmasters and SEO professionals will complain that keywords aren’t that important anymore, but it is a fact that your site will NEVER rank for a keyword that isn’t present on your site! So remember to use keywords anywhere you can on your site even in the page names.

When it comes to website indexing, search engines look for certain criteria. Once a webmaster learns what a specific search engine is looking for, it is easy for them to manipulate the bots. This is greatly frowned upon by the search engines.

In the SEO industry, the tactics used to deceive the search engine bots are referred to ask “Black Hat” techniques. Once a search engine catches on to the site using such techniques, they may either reduce the ranking of the website or eliminate it from their database altogether. Sites using Black Hat techniques are usually less user friendly since they are designed to cater to the wants and needs of the search engines.

Examples of Black Hat techniques would be:

1. Stuffing keywords: using a long list of keywords in text instead of fresh, relevant content.

2. Doorway pages: this is basically a page that doesn’t exist. Consumers will never see this page as it was designed strictly for search engine bots.

3. Invisible text: inculding text on a page that is the same color as the background. Again, consumers will not see this text. It is only there for the bots to find.

While you want to do everything you can to maximize traffic to your site, just remember to keep it clean. You don’t want to use any tactics which manipulate search engines bots in a way that might get you blacklisted from their search engine database. Just remember if you have to ask if it is an illegal tactic, then it is best to leave it alone.

The initial step in any SEO campaign is to perform a great deal of research
on your domains keyword(s). Keywords are the pieces of text placed inside
the Google/Yahoo search bar. These keywords are the terms users feel will
give them the most accurate results in their search for any given product or
piece of information. This means that each individual could feel that their
search term is more efficient than someone else’s. It is for this reason
that research is vital for any successful SEO campaign.

Where to begin your keyword research?

Here are a couple options for you to use when embarking on your keyword
search.

1) View your competitors site to try and decide which terms they are
focusing on.

2) Use a keyword tool

When comparing your competitors, you should take a look at the top 5-10
competitor sites in your industry and build a list of keywords you would
like to target. You can also try to determine the keyword density of their
page content, links, meta tags, and titles. Google will not only look for
keywords, but it will score each site on the actual density of that keyword.

A great keyword tool can come in handy to deliver terms that you and your
competitor may not have thought of but that are still bringing in search
queries. A keyword tool can actually provide you with a break down of not
only related keywords, but it can provide up to date information on the
number of searches any given terms is receiving per month, both locally and
globally.

Here are a couple keyword tools to get your started:

Google Keyword Tool
SEO Book

Search engines, such as Google and Yahoo!, use software containing robots or “crawlers” to look through the internet searching for up to date information. These bots use algorithmic searches to find website and create copies of each page they visit for search engines to later process. Search engines use the information gathered by the crawlers to index the websites on the World Wide Web.

Depending on the information found by the bots, search engines rank these websites in their own databases. Each search engine has their own criteria for indexing websites and they utilize the bots to find which sites best fit what they feel is most important. Some search engines think that fresh content is most important when deciding rankings while others focus more on things such as links and key words.

Once a webmaster figures out what a certain search engine’s bots are looking for, it makes it easier for them to make changes to their site in order to get a higher ranking. The SEO industry has had an issue with webmasters manipulating their pages to be more appealing to the bots and it has lead to some websites being completely banned from some search engine databases.

Website indexing has become a major priority to most webmasters when it comes to Search Engine Optimization. Obviously, it is huge to have your site ranked at the top of any major search engine and will almost always guarantee an increase in traffic and flow.

Today I wanted to share an Austin, Texas site that is promoting their iphone app. The application is called GoWalla and it is a creative way for people to track their destinations. The site itself allows users to interact and view others who have visited the same locations. The application also allows users to create their own points of interest as well as earn reward points for visiting designated areas.

The site is very clean with a fresh new age look. The color scheme makes it very warm and inviting.