The Small Screen SEO!
First of all, What is SEO? SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and is the art of making your pages efficient for search engine robots in order to get your site listed in the top of their results, preferably on the first page and within the top 10. We can easily achieve this if we know how the search
engine is reading our sites, so we can further tweak our pages and make it to the top.
There have been several SEO techniques but this one is a Brand New, unique method, I prefer call "The Small Screen SEO". We will be using our mobile phone handset connected with GPRS to do this, if you don't have a mobile phone you can use opera which has the capability to browse WAP sites, now the theory is that since mobile phones have very limited capabilities in terms of screen size and content support, the most important content will be given preference over all others,and since we will be using our favorite search engine, Google to do it; the "Most important" thing will be decided by our very own Google. So you just have to launch Google's mobile search page at:
http://www.google.com/xhtml either from your mobile phone or the Opera web browser, and enter the search term or your website address and keep browsing to discover the insides of your website and how Google perceives it. The Google acts as a WAP proxy to visit your own site, you can then optimize different aspects of your website to get higher rankings in search engines.
Using Free Content to Keep Visitors Interested!
If you don't want people to loose interest in your website quickly then you will have to spend some time focusing on your content. Unless you offer a service(such as web design or webhosting ect...) your audience will demand that there be new content updated every day for them or they will stop returning to your website. The truth is that to offer your visitors an abundance of great material is actually very easy and best yet it is free. Your site will double in value and usability when you start updating your content each day. Trust me when I say "your visitors will thank you for it".
By searching online you can easily find a wide range of websites that offer free information you can include on your website. The best yet is that the topics range from A-Z, so you never have to worry about not being able to find content for your website. Another great resource that you can find out there are free ecourses as well as free ebooks. The great thing is that you can use these free ecourses/ebooks(make sure to email each site to gain permission just to be safe) as an incentive to visitors to use your website. This will not only increase your websites content base but will give a real value to your website as it will become a known source of useful information.
As you add free content to your website keep in mind who will view it and who will use it. Make sure to cover a broad range of subjects but also direct the content according to what your website is about. Try to make your content as meaningful as you can and you will have visitors coming back each day to view what is new on your website. Best yet they will start to tell their friends and their friends will tell their friends ect.... Before you know it, by adding free content sections to your site you will have more and more people visiting your website. It is simple as that. We have all done it before where we've found a useful website and emailed the link to our friend. Why did we email the link you might ask? We've emailed the link because we found the content on the website to be useful/worth while. You can have people doing the same with your website.
Just remember to watch the content you put on your site and to make sure it is of use to your visitors. Your content will truly determined if your visitors are being entertained/interested and if they will come back for more.
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Anthony Jewell has over 6 Years experience in the Web & Graphics World. You can visit my business and join in conversation at Logo2D.com - Logo2D.com Forum
©Copyright 2005 Logo2D.com : Feel free to use this article freely but please keep in the copyright
How To Rank Your Articles Higher in Search Engines
All of us, the authors, know that to enhance our sites' listings in search engines we need to do certain things and some of them are :
(a) get fresh content on our sites on regular basis
(b) get backlinks from high PR (page-rank) sites
Get Fresh Content:
Inserting RSS Feeds on related subjects is a great way to create automatic fresh content in a website. However, we can also put our own published articles in a section, say, 'My Articles'. Many authors aim to write at least one article every week. So, every week whenever search engine robots come to our sites, they can get fresh content.
Get Back-links
Back-links are considered an important factor in search engine placements. When we submit our articles in article directories, we get a link back from those sites. Mostly all article directories have good PR (page rank). The benefit of submitting articles in article directories is that not only is there a fair chance of getting our articles published, but also our articles get published in many other web sites with our resource boxes. So, when different sites link to our site from a related page (the page where our articles are published), there are chances that search engines would look at our sites respectfully and rank us well. So, submitting articles to article directories is a good choice. We get link back from a page, which talks about related subjects.
Actually, upto this part, I have not talked about anything special. Authors write free articles knowing these features.
But, how many of our articles are positioned high in the search engines? If not, what could be the reason?
Outbound Links
The another important factor of ranking high in search engines is 'Outbound Links'. Search engines consider this factor equally important as back-links. As back-links from related sites are important, outbound links to related sites are equally important. In fact, that's one of the main reasons why mostly all article directories have high PR. Because, in every article directory, there is a huge amount of outbound links. And each outbound link is sent out to a related site from a page where the subject is being discussed!
Sometimes we exchange links with related sites and both the parties put those link in a seperate pages. That 'links page' contains only links and links -- no content! So, how would search engines consider them as valid outbound links?
How can authors like me factor this element in our sites?
Not many of us would want to link out to sites which are of our competetors. But wait, article writers can do this wisely.
As I have discussed above, authors should publish their own articles in their own sites, before submitting them to article directories. There is a reason for this. When multiple sites publish our articles, the search engine finds duplicate content in large number of sites. Therefore, search engines list on top the site from where it got the article first. So, if we publish our own articles first on our sites, it is possible that our own sites would be listed on the top of all other sites that published our articles.
After submitting the articles to article directories, we should keep track of when our articles are published in those directories. Most of the directories inform us when when our articles get published. We must visit those sites and get the URLs of our articles.
Let us put the links of those pages in article pages of our sites. If we put, "These article is also published by :" with a list of links of the sites where those particular articles are published, we cleverly send out links to pages where our subject is discussed. This will definitely help us creating authenticated outbound links and rank well in search engines without hampering our businesses.
