» Questions + Answers - Vancouver Design Development Hosting Marketing

Search engine optimization is the practice of guiding the development or redevelopment of a website so that it will naturally attract visitors by winning top ranking on the major search engines for selected search terms and phrases.

The title tag is HTML code which is inserted into the header of your web page and specifies the title of your web page. It is one of the most important tags of your entire web page as it performs numerous functions. The title tag is what typically will be displayed by search engines and serves as an indicator to search engines what the nature of the web page's content is expected to be. However, there is only so much space a title tag can hold, so it's important to choose appropriate, keyword-rich titles for your web pages.

Meta tags are snippets of HTML code which are inserted into the header on a web page, after the title tag. They take a variety of forms and serve a variety of purposes. However, in the context of search engine optimization, when people refer to meta tags, they're usually referring to the meta description and keyword tags.

Meta description tags are header tags used to provide a brief description or page overview for search engine and directories to use when ranking and displaying websites. The meta description tag also influences the likelihood that a person will actually click on the search engine results page and visit your site. It is typically the default description used by popular search engines. Meta description tags should certainly not be ignored.

The meta keywords tag is supposed to be a brief and concise list of the most important themes or topics of your page. Unfortunately, early on in web marketing history, this tag quickly became abused and fell into obscurity. Nevertheless, some directories still make use of the meta keywords tag to auto-populate their submission form fields. We tend to incorporate the tag into our strategies, and it's seemingly benefited us, even if only to make submissions to directories easier.

Image alt tags are intended to be text descriptions for your images. They let search engines know what purpose an image has. It is best to use your descriptive keywords in your alt tags, while at the same time, making sure that it accurately describes your image.

Link popularity is determined by the number and quality of websites which have linked to your website. There are several benefits from generating links for your website and increasing your link popularity. Links to your site give Web users ways to find your site while visiting other sites. Links to your site give search engines trails to follow to find and index or re-index your website's content. Links essentially become votes for your site in search engine ranking algorithms, but not all votes are created equal.

In the search engine world, spam is defined as the manipulation of a web page to give it an artificial boost in the search engine rankings. Generally, spam is what the search engines stipulate it to be; it is defined by the search engines themselves. Each of the major search engines provides specific guidelines describing what webmasters should and should not do to their web pages in order to achieve a better search engine ranking, although this hasn't always been the case.

Doorway pages are web pages designed and built specifically to draw search engine visitors to your website. They are standalone pages designed only to act as doorways to your site. Doorway pages are a bad idea for several reasons, though many SEO firms use them routinely. The fact is doorway pages don't do a very good job of generating traffic, even when they are created by "experts." Many users simply hit their back buttons when presented with a doorway page. Still, many SEO firms count those first visits and report them to their clients as successes.

One of the key factors is the word 'content'. The more of it you have, the easier it will be to target your niche markets. Your business may offer a wide range of services or a number of product lines; commodities or resources. Regardless, your products or services may be sorted - i.e.: product categories, areas of expertise, etc. Begin by sorting your content accordingly. Once you have your content categorized, be sure to flesh out product descriptions or service overviews. A good guideline is three to five sentences a paragraph with at bare minimum of three paragraphs. Be sure to include a good balance of keywords and keyphrases in your content It's also a good idea to research what competitors are and aren't doing to get a sense of what their strengths and weaknesses are, and determine what's working for them.

Traffic is important to the success of your website. It's important to get listed on as many high traffic sites as possible. Some services say you should only submit to the top 10 or 12 search engines and directories. We beg to differ. While those top 10 or 12 may account for a considerable amount of traffic to your website, it will help your site even more to be listed in other search engines, directories and other related sites. A handful of search engines now use incoming links to your website as a factor in ranking your website for particular keywords or keyphrases. By getting your site listed in more places, this gradually increases your position on these search engines.

We do our best to ensure you are not subjected to spam as best as we can. To this end, all submissions are completed using a separate, temporary email address to prevent any unnecessary spam.

A spider is a piece of software that follows links throughout the Internet, grabbing content from sites and adding it to search engine databases. Spiders follow links from one page to another and from one site to another. This is why links to your site are crucial. Getting links to your website from other websites will give the search engine spiders more opportunities to find and re-index your site. The more times they find links to your site, the more they stop by and index your website. This has been true since the first spiders launched over two decades ago. Recently there has been an incredible amount of attention paid to links. Google confessed, the number and quality of links to your website will directly impact rankings in search results.

Hidden text is text content which your visitors cannot see, but which is still readable by the search engines. The original idea was to load a web page with keywords and keyphrases which would under normal circumstances be unsightly to visitors but would improve the page's rankings in the search engine results. You would then need to hide the text by either matching the text colour with the background colour, or loading hidden fields, or a number of other ways. However, hidden text is now easily identified as search spam by each of the major search engines, and is frowned upon by reputable web marketing professionals.

Nearly every company has a website these days. Having supplemental profile pages on social media and social networking sites will boost your website's ratings with search engines, making it easier to find than it would have been otherwise. Name brand recognition is another major reason why companies should consider adopting social media. People who like and/or follow the company on a social media site will in turn recommend the company and its products or services to their friends. A business has to connect with its customers in order to keep them coming back. Social media is one of the best ways to connect with first time customers. Social media's ability to engage clients in a relaxed, friendly way is one of its greatest strengths.