If anyone interested please let me know.

Can be very useful for creating a self-submission service…

At first a search in google.ie returned only a few related results, mostly bebo, digg and other social networking websites, but now Google return more than 9000 results.

As expected the SERPs are shifting every day and as I write this #1 spot is taken by taskdrop.com followed by mybluejumper.com and respectively bluejumperireland.com

BlueJumper.net took almost a week to appear in the results, starting on page 3, then moved up to page 4 the next day, and today the 05 Nov. 2008 14:30 page 2

Not bad for a new domain….

The competition seems very tight at the moment and only time could tell…

It’s a good learning process and it’s well worth a go… I, for one, am enjoying it…

Damien Mulley with some feedback from Cormac & Richard announced a new competition to find the “Greatest SEO of them all” available only for Irish individuals and Irish business, but read on because there are a few rules that can not be broken:

Criteria:

1. Entries open to all Irish individuals and Irish businesses.
2. Search is to be performed on www.google.ie without Pages From Ireland selected, with personalisation off and from an Irish IP address.
3. The domain to rank must be a new domain. Must not contain the keywords in the domain name at all and no ccTLD domains are to be used.
4. Only want the homepage to rank, not other non-useful pages.
5. 301 redirects are not permitted.
6. Keywords as gaeilge (Geansai Gorm) instead of English but copy can be in English

So lets find out who’s the best spammer on this…
As I said is just for fun so please don’t go over board…

More about this competition can be found here >>

… and to ad on this post, Blacknight (hosting provider) are now sponsoring the competition.

1. Website / Business profile (niche) »»

You might have the website / business profile already picked, but we would like to assume that you don’t so we can have somewhere to start with.

First is to ask yourself what are you selling, is it a product or a service?
What can you do to get this business kicking, online?
Is the business suitable for online audience?
Have you targeted any goals by having an online presence and what are them?
Is it going to be a local business, country specific or international?

………………………………………………………………………………………….. more »

2.   Acquiring a domain name »»

If you don’t already have a domain name, than is time to get one.
Make a list of few domain names that you would like to acquire, keeping the name as close as possible to your business / website profile.
Best domain names are 2-3 short words that together forms a single word (that describes at it’s best what the website is about), followed by the TLD (.com, .net, .ie, etc) [e.g. eire-webdesign.ie (eire = Ireland; web design)]
As per example above, you can make use of dashes (-) to separate your words, but Why? is explained below.

………………………………………………………………………………………….. more »

3.   Finding the best hosting provider for your website »»

Now that you’ve found & purchased the domain name/s, it’s time to shop around for a hosting package.
As mentioned previously, based on your target location, it’s best to find a hosting provider in that area.
Please note that some local hosting providers do have server outside the country your are targeting, so do not hesitate to ask, making sure that is exactly what you are looking for, or at least as closed as possible.

………………………………………………………………………………………….. more »

4.   Website Design (DIY or by a Professional Developer) »»

Getting a website designed it ain’t that tricky, and most website owners takes a shot at it, but getting it right is.
Website development has changed so much in the last 2-3 years that even a pro could be old news if he/she doesn’t keep up with the technology.
I remember when I designed my first website back in 2000. For me at that time was a great achievement, taking in consideration I never went to any web design courses. Black was in fashion, so my website had a black background.

………………………………………………………………………………………….. more »

5.   Keywords Research »»

You’ve already found some keywords when looking for a domain name, but what use they have when optimizing your website for search engines?

Keywords, are the words a user types into the search engines search box to find relevant websites to his/her query.
Two or more keywords are better know as key-phrases.
Keywords, held an important role into search engine optimization, helping you write good content related to your business/website profile.
………………………………………………………………………………………….. more »

6.   Getting the Page Title Right »»

 ”Page Title” – the most important tag when optimising for search engines, it’s the html tag found in between the <head>…. <title>Title Here</title> …</head> tag.
This tag is not visible on the page itself, but in the source code of the page. Can be also seen at the top of your browser window (blue bar for Internet Explorer) and at the bottom of the screen.

Why Page Title is so important?

………………………………………………………………………………………….. more »

7.   Meta Data (description, keywords, etc…) »»

Meta tags are part of the html source code of a page and can be found between the
<head>
…..
<meta name=”description” content=”content here” />
<meta name=”keywords” content=”keywords,here” />
…..
</head>

tags itself.

………………………………………………………………………………………….. more »

8.   Page Content »»

“Content is King” – You probably heard that a lot and it’s very true.

The more text you have on the page the better, but please note: Don’t start adding all kind of text on the page just to be there.
The content should be descriptive, written for users not search engines and should make a lot of sense.
The story, article, product or service description should have a flow in the right direction.
Take a look at an article in the today’s newspaper.

………………………………………………………………………………………….. more »

9.   Creating and Submitting Sitemaps »»

Sitemaps plays an important role when optimising your website for search engines as it helps them indexing your website (especially deep linked pages) and manage their crawl activities.
A sitemap is either an HTML page, XML or TEXT file that contains a list of all the pages available on your website or at least the most important pages (for large websites).

The HTML format sitemaps, are mostly used for visitors as a quick navigation point through the website, while a more advance way are XML (Google search engine) or TEXT file (YAHOO search engine).

………………………………………………………………………………………….. more »

10. On-Page Optimization (heading tags, body text, image alt tags, links title tags, etc) »»

Do you know what’s great about this part?
The fact that everything you need to do here is at your finger-tips as you own the website and all files that are located on your server.
This includes pages, pdf files, images, videos, word documents, etc…

The on-page elements include:
1. Page Title
2. Meta Tags
3. Headings Tags (h1 to h6)
4. Content (also known as Body Text)
5. Internal Linking
6. Outbound Links
7. Images alt tag
8. Link (href) title tag
9. Paragraphs ( text included between

….

HTML tag)
10. Bold, Italic and Underlined text

………………………………………………………………………………………….. more »

11. Internal Linking »»

In this section we will be talking and concentrating more on “Main Navigation Links“ and “In-Context Links“ elements.

Many website owners spend a lot of time trying to acquire inbound links from other websites, but ignores or forgets their own site where they have so much control over.

………………………………………………………………………………………….. more »

12. Outbound Links »»

Outbound links to quality and relevant sites can help your own performance in the search engines but take in consideration the following points:

1. Not too many links – don’t over do it
2. Make sure they are relevant to your topic

………………………………………………………………………………………….. more »

13. Off-Page Optimization (Link Building) »»

A search engine optimization campaign to be successful, you need to acquire a large amount of (preferable high-quality) keyword-rich links to your website, method that has a very strong influence in search engine ranking.

………………………………………………………………………………………….. more »

You might have the website / business profile already picked, but we would like to assume that you don’t so we can have somewhere to start with.

First, ask yourself what are you selling, is it a product or a service?
What can you do to get this business kicking, online?
Is the business suitable for online audience?
Have you targeted any goals by having an online presence and what are they?
Is it going to be a local business, country specific or international?

I mean, the questions are infinite and you might need to have an answer for all of them before taking any marketing steps and start throwing your money into advertisement that might not get you anything in return.

Having an answer for these questions, also helps in getting the right domain name, choosing your keywords / phrases that you are most likely to optimise your website for, searching and  finding the right hosting company that suit your website best.

Having your niche in mind, you can start discovering your competitors and learn from them. You’ll be surprised to find online business with the same profile that you’ve never heard of.

« Back to Search Engine Optimization – White Paper

If you don’t already have a domain name, then is time to get one.
Make a list of a few domain names that you would like to acquire, keeping the name as close as possible to your business / website profile.
The best domain names are 2-3 short words that together form a single word (that describes at it’s best what the website is about), followed by the TLD (.com, .net, .ie, etc) [e.g. eire-webdesign.ie (eire = Ireland; web design)]
As per example above, you can make use of dashes (-) to separate your words, but Why? it’s explained below.

Now that you have your domain names list ready, go to a trusted domain reseller website and start checking for availability. You might have a great domain name and chances are that it’s already taken, but don’t despair, the right one is just right the corner from you.
Try the same variant by separating the words with dashes (-) as you have seen in the example above, make use of numbers (4 = for, 2 = to, etc.), think of new phrases, but don’t make them too long, don’t use words that are hard to spell, avoid words with double letters (double LL, double MM, etc., unless you can purchase the domain with a single letter as well), try adding “online”, “free”, etc words to your domain list (e.g. freeadvice, onlinebitsnbobs, etc.), you get the point don’t you?…

NOTE: Don’t start shopping for domain names that are part of a trademark, as there is a high risk of loosing them (e.g. NIKE)

If you run out of options, you can always select your business name if you are a registered company. Some TLD’s requirements are to have a company registration number, before purchasing a domain (e.g. .ie for Ireland).

Talking about TLD’s, make sure you are selecting the best one for your website, as together with the location of your hosting IP, will have a high impact in your Search Engine Optimisation techniques.

For example, Google, one of the biggest and most used Search Engine, takes into consideration the location of your website IP address & TLD when delivering the results (SERPs) to a user query.
Having a .ie domain name, hosting your website with an Irish hosting company that have the servers located in Ireland (note the bold phrase? – and Yes it does matter), can help your website ranking for Irish related queries.
Saying that, Google Webmaster Tools, has an option to specify the GEO target of your website, but it hasn’t been proved to be 100% accurate yet (please correct me if I am wrong).

« Back to Search Engine Optimization – White Paper

Now that you’ve found & purchased the domain name/s, it’s time to shop around for a hosting package.
As mentioned previously, based on your target location, it’s best to find a hosting provider in that area.
Please note that some local hosting providers do have servers outside the country your are targeting, so do not hesitate to ask, making sure that is exactly what you are looking for, or at least as close as possible.

Hosting prices differ from company to company, but most of the time is not the price that matters, it’s the service you get with it.
You might be tempted to select a company that gives you so much for so little, but when you run into trouble or are looking for advice it’s actually then you realise you should have thought about it more.

Some of the requirements that we advise you to look out for are:

A. GEO Location of their servers
B. Connection Speed
C. Do they have modern servers?
D. Are they flexible?
E. Operating system (we highly recommend LINUX)
F. Are they reliable?

All this plus a lot more, matters when you need that extra bit that you are looking for.

« Back to Search Engine Optimization – White Paper

Getting a website designed is not that tricky, and most website owners take a shot at it, but the hard part is getting it right.
Website development has changed so much in the last 2-3 years that even a pro could be old news if he/she doesn’t keep up with the technology.
I remember when I designed my first website back in 2000. For me at that time it was a great achievement, taking in consideration that I never went to any web design courses. Black was in fashion, so my website had a black background.
Everything was done manually, in pure html (of course a lot of bad coding for me at that time), and every product had to have it’s own page done manually from scratch. Then I discovered “frames” (which now are mostly used to achieve other great features (AJAX) but highly not recommended for anything else), cutting the job in half.
Thank God I don’t have that website any-longer because I wouldn’t be able to sleep any-more.
Anyway, getting back to web design – It’s a job better left to the professionals that know what they are doing.
It’s not complicated to throw few images on the page, write some text, etc., but when you are looking to get better search engine rankings, all that throwing and writing doesn’t pay for it. The power of proper html tags helps a lot.
A spider visiting a website does not understand and see all that fancy style and catchy images, but pure text found inside the html tags.

Examples:
title tag – a piece of html code inserted in the <a href=’link’ title=’text here’>Link</a> tag to format a link that will take the user to a new page
alt tag – similar with the above but this time it goes inside the <img src=’img path’ alt=’text here’ /> image tag

These are the things that give you the short description when the mouse hovers over a link or image and helps search engines and users with screen readers to understand what it’s all about. They hold a strong position in search engine optimization and are just a few of the important things a good web developer knows.

« Back to Search Engine Optimization – White Paper

You’ve already found some good keywords when searching for a domain name, but what use do they have when optimizing your website for search engines?

Keywords, are the words or phrases a user types into the search engines search box to find relevant websites to his/her query.
Two or more keywords are better know as key-phrases.
Keywords, hold an important role in search engine optimization, helping you write good content related to your business/website profile.
There is no point in writing about “dogs“, while your website it’s all about “cats” is there?
For search engines to display your website into the SERPs, the search query must match these keywords inside your page content or having inbound links to your website with the keywords in the anchor text.
A good example for the second part is http://www.adobe.com/, which ranks #1 for “click here” phrase.
If you already have a website, a good place to start searching for key-phrases is the website statistics log files.

You’ll be surprised to see what users are typing into the search box, looking for your product/s and you’ll probably find words that you never thought of before.

If that’s not the case, another good place to research your keywords is “Google AdWords: Keyword Tool“.

Enter your keywords or phrase in the text-box provided, check the “Use synonyms” box, type-in the captcha verification code and press the “Get keyword ideas” button.
A few seconds later, Google Keyword Tool will display a long list of key-phrases that matches your criteria, alongside with “How Competitive” the search is and “Approximative Search Volume”

Make a list of what you think it’s suitable for your website. That should give you a good idea of what users are looking for and what you should include in your page content, keeping in mind keywords density.
When creating the content for your website, don’t start creating paragraphs that don’t make sense, and write for users not for search engines. The search engines algorithm is so sophisticated now a days, that it’s very easy to get your website penalised for keywords stuffing, and instead of achieving your goals, you’ll end-up at the bottom of the list or even worse, nowhere to be found.

« Back to Search Engine Optimization – White Paper

 ”Page Title” – the most important tag when optimising for search engines, is the html tag it’s found in between the <head>…. <title>Title Here</title> …</head> tag.
This tag is not visible on the page itself, but in the source code of the page. It can be also seen at the top of your browser window (blue bar for Internet Explorer) and at the bottom of the screen.

Why Page Title is so important?

a. The Page Title is used by the search engine as the anchor text to link to your website in the SERPs.
b. The Page Title describes at it’s best the page content itself.
c. In the SERPs, the Page Title makes your website stand-out from the crowd (it’s like shouting “click me… or read me…”) invoking the “Call to Action”
d. The Page Title it’s also used to submit your website to directories

Points to take into consideration when creating the Page Title:

1. The Page Title should be unique for every page
2. The Page Title shouldn’t be any longer than 75 characters (including spaces) as it gets truncated by the search engines (Google – 64 chrs, Yahoo – 120 chrs)
3. The Page Title keywords should also be found in the page body text (best enclosed as a h[1-2] html tags and normal text below [context])
4. The keywords used in the Page Title should also be found in the URL (converting spaces with a dash [-])
5. Avoid common words ( the, or, and, for, etc…) as much as possible and if you don’t have a choice try converting them to html characters (e.g. and = & ) as it will take less viable space. 
6. Synonyms of keywords in the title tag should also be found in the page body text
7. Website URL / Company Name (if any) should be last in your page title unless they are keywords rich and part of your top keywords in your list.
8. Every Word in the page title should start with a Capital letter – (it sounds like poor grammer, but it makes your link stand out in the SERPs)
9. The first keywords (2-3) in the page title should always be the most important keywords for that particular page
10. If you think your page is targeting more than 2 key-phrases (2-3 words each phrase), look into splitting the page - this will end up creating a better content rich page thus getting a stronger position in the SERPs.

« Back to Search Engine Optimization – White Paper

Meta tags are part of the html source code of a page and can be found between the
<head>
…..
<meta name=”description” content=”content here” />
<meta name=”keywords” content=”keywords,here” />
…..
</head>

tags itself.

They are not as important as it used to be due to abuse in the past by many website owners, but they can still make a difference.

Meta Description: Search Engines (especially Google), tends to ignore them at this time, but they are still making use of them for snippet compilation, also called “call to action“.
When displaying result, search engines tend to make use of this tag to describe the website profile, and is shown below the “Page Title” (also the link to your website) as a snippet.
If the meta description is not found on your page search engines will decides to show a snippet from the page content itself (a snippet of what is considered to be more relevant to the search query).

The downside of this is that the snippet might not have that “call to action” that you are going for.

Another use of this tag, is, when submitting your website to directories, as some of them will pick-up and use the meta description you have on that page as their directory listing description.

As the page title, meta description should be also unique across the website for each page. It’s like a short description of the product or service itself that all-in-all gives the user the exact idea what the page it’s all about.

The length of this tag should contain approx. 20-25 words and should not exceed more than 150-160 characters (including white spaces).

Meta Keywords: I have to say, this tag renders useless in Google search engine, but there are rumours that other search engines like Yahoo, MSN or Ask still counts them in, so better to have it in place then not to.
This tag should not contain no more than 30-35 words separated by comma [,] (e.g. house,home, etc.), use lower case for all keywords and pluralize all keywords id possible.
As the page title and meta description, meta keywords should be also unique across the website for each page.

« Back to Search Engine Optimization – White Paper

“Content is King” – You probably heard that a lot and it’s very true.

The more text you have on the page the better, but please note: Don’t start adding all kind of text on the page just to be there.
The content should be descriptive, and written for users not search engines and of course it should make a lot of sense.
The story, article, product or service description should have a flow in the right direction.
For instance take a look at an article in today’s newspaper.
Would it make any sense if the last paragraph was added just before the first one?

If you are looking at a particular product, would it make any sense to attach a description from another product to it?

I don’t think so…

As mentioned above, the content should be written for the user. Search Engines algorithms are so powerful, that they will be able to detect keyword stuffing, poor written content, which in turn could get your website to perform bad and even penalised.

If you can’t or you are even un-sure of what to write, look into hiring a copywriter. These people do that for a living and you’ll be surprised how well your product or service could be described.
Sometimes you’re thinking too hard and the words are just not coming to you. 
A  great way of writing something good, is to record yourself while talking to a customer trying to sell this particular product / service or just simply take notes.
Talking about something has been always easier, more to the point and  a lot more comfortable than trying to describe the same thing on paper.

Take for example a salesman – he’s so good at it that it will make you think twice why don’t you have his product already, but when you look at the same thing in a magazine or a lealflet, it doesn’t have the same power has it? 

« Back to Search Engine Optimization – White Paper

Sitemaps play an important role when optimising your website for search engines as it helps them indexing your website (especially deep linked pages) and manage their crawl activities.

A sitemap is either an HTML page, XML or TEXT file that contains a list of all the pages available on your website or at least the most important pages (for large websites).

The HTML format sitemaps, are mostly used for visitors as a quick navigation point through the website, while a more advanced way is XML (Google search engines) or TEXT file (YAHOO search engine).

XML sitemap

An XML sitemap can be created either manually or could be an automated system using “Sitemap Generators” which are widely available on the NET.

A standard XML sitemap should look like this (italic text is optional):

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
  <urlsetxmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″>
   <url>
    <loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>
   <lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>
    <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
    <priority>0.8</priority>
   </url>  
  </urlset>

The Sitemap must:

• Begin with an opening <urlset> tag and end with a closing </urlset> tag.
• Include a <url> entry for each URL as a parent XML tag.
• Include a <loc> child entry for each <url> parent tag.

XML tag definitions

The available XML tags are described below.always, hourly , daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, never

<urlset> – required
Encapsulates the file and references the current protocol standard.

<url> – required
Parent tag for each URL entry. The remaining tags are children of this tag.

<loc> – required
URL of the page. This URL must begin with the protocol (such as http) and end with a trailing slash, if your web server requires it. This value must be less than 2048 characters.

<lastmod> – optional
The date of last modification of the file. This date should be in W3C Datetime format. This format allows you to omit the time portion, if desired, and use YYYY-MM-DD.

<changefreq> – optional
How frequently the page is likely to change. This value provides general information to search engines and may not correlate exactly to how often they crawl the page.
Valid values are:

The value “always” should be used to describe documents that change each time they are accessed. The value “never” should be used to describe archived URLs.

Please note that the value of this tag is considered a hint and not a command. Even though search engine crawlers consider this information when making decisions, they may crawl pages marked “hourly” less frequently than that, and they may crawl pages marked “yearly” more frequently than that. It is also likely that crawlers will periodically crawl pages marked “never” so that they can handle unexpected changes to those pages.

<priority> – optional
The priority of this URL relative to other URLs on your site. Valid values range from 0.0 to 1.0. This value has no effect on your pages compared to pages on other sites, and only lets the search engines know which of your pages you deem most important so they can order the crawl of your pages in the way you would most like.

The default priority of a page is 0.5.

Please note that the priority you assign to a page has no influence on the position of your URLs in a search engine’s result pages. Search engines use this information when selecting between URLs on the same site, so you can use this tag to increase the likelihood that your more important pages are present in a search index.

Also, please note that assigning a high priority to all of the URLs on your site will not help you. Since the priority is relative, it is only used to select between URLs on your site; the priority of your pages will not be compared to the priority of pages on other sites.

Entity escaping

We require your Sitemap file to be UTF-8 encoded (you can generally do this when you save the file). As with all XML files, any data values (including URLs) must use entity escape codes for the characters listed in the table below.

Character Escape Code
Ampersand “&” –  ”&amp;”
Single Quote “‘” – “&apos;”
Double Quote ‘”‘ – “&quot;”
Greater Than “>” – “&gt;”
Less Than ”>” –  ”&lt;”

In addition, all URLs (including the URL of your Sitemap) must be encoded for readability by the web server on which they are located and URL-escaped.

More information on this can be found on Google website >>

TEXT SITEMAP

A text sitemap is simply a text file with a list of URLs, one on each line, and is supported by Yahoo! Site Explorer. Unlike XML sitemaps, it does not allow for metadata about each URL.

Here is some sample text sitemap code:

http://www.eireseo.ie/seo-tutorials/

http://www.eireseo.ie/seo-tutorials/2008/09/22/creating-and-submitting-sitemaps.html

http://www.eireseo.ie/seo-tutorials/2008/09/22/search-engine-optimization-white-paper.html

http://www.eireseo.ie/seo-tutorials/2008/09/22/page-content.html

http://www.eireseo.ie/seo-tutorials/2008/09/22/getting-the-page-title-right.html

http://www.eireseo.ie/seo-tutorials/2008/09/22/keywords-research.html

Referencing & Submitting your sitemap

Once verified and you are sure that the sitemap is properly formated you can either reference to it in your robots.txt file as below:

User-agent: *
Sitemap: http://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

which tells the crawler how to find your sitemap or by subitting your sitemap to search engines directly through:

Google Webmaster Tools: http://www.google.com/webmasters (you must have a Google account)
Yahoo! Site Explorer: https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com (you must have a Yahoo! account)

Once you have an account with the above search engines, you will be presented with a link and a code to verify your website (either by adding a Meta tag or uploading a file on the server).

« Back to Search Engine Optimization – White Paper

Do you know what’s so great about this part?
The fact that everything you need to do here is at your finger-tips as you own the website and all files that are located on your server.
This includes pages, pdf files, images, videos, word documents, etc…

The on-page elements include:
1. Page Title
2. Meta Tags
3. Headings Tags (h1 to h6)
4. Content (also known as Body Text)
5. Internal Linking
6. Outbound Links
7. Images alt tag
8. Link (href) title tag
9. Paragraphs ( text included between <p> …. </p> HTML tag)
10. Bold, Italic and Underlined text

plus a lot more.
Some of the points mentioned above, have been already covered, but for now we will look at the Body Text.

Heading Tags

Heading tags are HTML elements that can be found in the source code of a page as h1, h2, h3, h4, h5 & h6, and they are considered as the second most important SEO element, with H1 being the most important and H6 having the least value.

Many web developers give the H tags a go, but due to the fact that they look quite large in the browser, they move to other options.
That is a big NO, because heading tags, as most of the page layout and text, can be easily controlled from the CSS stylesheet.
A good example can be seen on this page, where the “Heading Tags” text above is enclosed between <h3>…</h3> tags and the style for it is:

h3 {font-size: 1.3em;}

plus some other CSS rules below to give it a background-color and control how it looks if it’s a link.

.entry h3{background-color:#CC0000; padding:2px;}
.entry h3 a:hover{color:#cc0000; background-color:#f5f5f5;}

The next question it’s probably how many of them can you use on the one page.
Our answer to that will be:
A. One H1 tag is enough and should include keywords found in the Page Title
B. One or Two H2 tags per page
and so on….
If you need to use more than that, why don’t you split the one page into two or more pages…

Image alt tag

The power of image alt tag is the fact that you can include a small amount of keywords (without stuffing) which in some way helps with search engine optimization.
The meaning of alt tags is to help users using screen-reader software to understand the content of the image itself and for users using browsers with images turned off.
They can be seen as a small text pop-up while holding the mouse arrow over the image, and should describe the image itself without over-doing it and keyword stuffing.
An example code for image alt tag:

<img src=”path to the image” alt=”image description” />

Link title tag

Same as above, but this time the title tag can be found in regular text or image links.
An example code for a regular text link:
<a href=”link to the page” title=”go to page short description”>Anchor Text</a>

Example code for image link:
<a href=”link to the page” title=”go to page short description”><img src=”path to the image” alt=”image description” /></a>

HTML validators are great for detecting the missing tags, and we have even designed something similar that can be found here: Page Validator

Paragraphs, Bold & Italic

The body text should be divided into small paragraphs by using the <p>…</p>tag and each paragraph and should have no more than 3-5 sentences, keeping the most important key-phrases as close to the top as possible.

Make use of the bold (<b>…</b>, <bold>…</bold> or <strong>…</strong>) and italics (<em>…</em> or <i>…</i>) style to highlight the keywords withing the body text, but don’t over do it.
This helps visitors and search engines to identify the important keywords inside the body text.

Another common and useful tag is the “underline” text (<u>…</u>), but not recommended as users expect this type of text to be a link to another page.

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In this section we will be talking and concentrating more on the ”Main Navigation Links“ and “In-Context Links“ elements.

Many website owners spend a lot of time trying to acquire inbound links from other websites, but ignore or forget their own site which they have so much control over.

A study carried out on how users read the content of a web page came to the conclusion that the pattern is a F shape- the reason main navigation links can always be found at the top of the page or on the left-hand side and, most important key-phrases / keywords should be located at the very beginning of the content.

Main Navigation Links

This is your chance to create keywords-rich navigation links, avoiding images and make use of real text.
There is no excuse for using images, as the same or similar effect (background color, etc.) can be easily achieved through the use of CSS style sheets giving you the opportunity to create keywords-rich anchor text for the website internal linking structure.

In-Context Links

… are key-phrases/keywords linked to related pages, products and articles within your site and can be found in the body text of your page.
Make use of them whenever possible but don’t over do it.

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Outbound links to quality and relevant sites can help your own performance in the search engines but take into consideration the following points:

1. Not too many links – don’t over do it
2. Make sure they are relevant to your topic
3. Use keyword-rich anchor text to make the link (helping both websites)
4. Link to high ranking sites for better effect (PR [PageRank] 6 or better)
5. Avoid linking to websites that could end-up as an exit for your users, but to sites that have quality information on your topic.

Giving your visitors quality outbound links could convert them into regular users and there is a chance of getting a link back to your own website from their own site.

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For a search engine optimization campaign to be successful, you need to acquire a large amount of (preferable high-quality) keyword-rich links to your website, this method  has a very strong influence in search engine ranking.

How many is too many?

We don’t know for sure, but if the website is running a competitive profile we would say get as many as you can.
Acquiring high-quality links is proven to be harder than you think, as the more relevant to your profile the website is, the stronger the link.
This is due to the fact that many website owners might not have direct access to modify pages or they might not be interested in link swapping or giving outbound links from their site/s.

Link building needs to be done slowly, over a long period of time while the pattern of the anchor text will vary as well. Too many, too fast and too similar in the anchor text, trigger red flags on the search engines side and can have a negative impact, so play it safe.

You can acquire two types of links as outlined below:

Deep Links
Are links from other websites pointing to internal pages on your site using keywords relevant to the page content itself.

Main Links
Are links from other websites pointing to your website Home Page using the primary keywords available in your keyword list.

Generally, you should make sure that the Main Links have the highest priority and percentage 80%-20%

How can you acquire links?

Links can be acquired by Reciprocal link exchange (2 or 3 way), Directory Submission (Free, Paid, Reciprocal), Search Engine Submission, Forums Participation, Article Submission, etc…

2 Way Reciprocal Link Exchange – You link to me my way and I link to you your way (easier said than done but that’s the way this works)

3 Way Reciprocal Link Exchange – As above but instead of giving / getting a link from the linked site, is done from a third site (this could go many ways but this is the simplest way I can put it for you)

Directory Submission- They don’t carry as much value as other linking types but they still count if done the right way and it’s time consuming. Some are Free, some charge a fee for this service or require you to give them a reciprocal link, so it’s up to you on this one as it could get expensive.

Search Engine Submission – submitting your website URL to search engines across the web for them to crawl. Some are Free and some charge a fee for this service so it’s up to you on this one as well.

Forums Participation – It’s a good idea to join forums related to your website niche in the fact that you can add a link to your website with your signature and you can get / give great advice from / to other members, but please note: do not be a drive-by user and do not dig out old posts as you will probably end-up getting banned and this is not what you are looking for….

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