Within the last week, I have created 3 websites. I wanted them all to get indexed quickly, so I simply Digged, and bookmarked my pages on sites like delicious, furl, and stumbleupon, added a few tweets on my Twitter account, and I was indexed within hours.

Perhaps it’s well known now that you can index so quickly now with Web 2.0 properties, but I still see services that claim to get you indexed in Google within a few weeks. Don’t by into it, because you can get your website indexed quicker yourself with about 10 minutes work.

Popularity: 17% [?]

1. SEOQuake

SEOQuake is a toolbar addon for Firefox that displays useful information like: Google Pagerank, Amount of pages indexed in Google, Amount of Backlinks from the 3 major search engines, keyword density at the click of a button, delicious links, whois info with one click and other various gadgets. Additionally, the plugin can parse through search engine results and display Pagerank for each listing.

SEOQuake for Firefox

2. NoDofollow

NoDofollow highlights dofollow links so you can easily scan to see if dofollow links can be posted on the page or not.

NoDofollow Download

3. FoxyProxy

FoxyProxy automates the process of entering proxy information in Firefox. It can switch proxies based on your preferences automatically between websites.

FoxyProxy Download

4. iMacros

Allows you to automate tedious and repetitive tasks such as filling out forms.

iMacros Download

5. Firebug

Firebug is the ultimate tool for live html, css and JavaScript editing. It can also verify the sites and W3C HTML and CSS compatible.

Firebug Download

Popularity: 9% [?]

URL

Use your target keywords in the URL and make the name consistent with what is on the page and in the title. You can separate words with underscores or dashes.

Images

Use Alt Text

Search engines can’t read an image and an image without alt text. This is how Google image search finds their images. Additionally, your page becomes more inaccessible for hearing disabilities as there is no descriptive text of the image.

Limit the Amount of Images on the Page

Not everyone has high speed cable internet. Loading times are bogged down when the browser has to download a shit ton of images. Limit the amount of images used on your page and apply the next tip.

Limit the Size of Your Images

When editing photos in Photoshop, it’s tempting to slide the quality scale to “maximum”. Minimize the size of image by adjusting image quality when possible. This will help your page load faster and will keep users from pressing the back button.

Navigation

Make Banner Linkable

It’s habit to click on the banner or logo when you want to go to the homepage. It’s easy to find and will frustrate users when they have to click the back button a million times or scour the site for a “home” link.

Make Your Navigation Structure Intuitive and User-Friendly

Don’t use hard-to-use dhtml and JavaScript menus. The harder it is to navigate the site, the more likely the visitor is to leave or press the back button.

Links

Avoid JavaScript and Flash Links

Google is now able to read selectable text in Flash and follow JavaScript links on “onclick” events. Other search engines however, may not be able to do the same. Stick with what works and stick with html links when possible.

Avoid Multiple Anchor Texts

If you have more than one link to the same page on one page, make certain that you place a rel=”nofollow” tag in one of the links (preferably the one with the less valuable variation of the keyword. Having multiple links with varying anchor text will confuse search engine spiders and you will not get the SEO benefit of the anchor text link.

No-follow External Links and Unimportant Internal Links

More links coming in and the less links going out is best. Be a PageRank hog. Place a rel=”nofollow” tag to unimportant pages like “contact” or “privacy policy”. Do the same for external links if you want to keep your PageRank.

Content Structure

Having organized and easy-to-read content keeps users on your page longer. Long chunks of texts and poor font choices will send visitors away. Use these tips to ensure a pleasant read for your visitors.

Write in Small Paragraphs

Reading large chunks of text is difficult and will encourage users to immediately press the back button. Split your text into paragraphs and read up on correct paragraph structure. This organizes thoughts and your points better and provides a more enjoyable reading experience.

Use Header Tags to Divide and Highlight Important Content

Header tags could be considered the title of a chapter in a book. It is the headline that sums up that chunk of text you just wrote.

Use Standard Font Families

Choose not to make the fonts of your website an obscure font family. Choose standard serif fonts like Times New Roman or a sans serif like Arial. This ensures consistency of how your site is displayed across various computers and browsers.

Size Your Fonts Appropriately

Text that is too hard to read strains the eyes and you will eventually lose the focus of your reader, especially if you expect older visitors to your site. Make the fonts a standard size (between 11 and 13px) and easy to read against the background.

Avoid Flashy and Hard to Read Color Combinations

There’s nothing worse than trying to read purple text against a red background. This will immediately send the eyes into panic mode and your website bounce rate will skyrocket. Use high contrast fonts and background combinations like black against white. For darker sites, use a white text against dark backgrounds.

Adjust the Line Spacing to Make Your Text Easier to Read

Line spacing is the white space in between lines of text. Line spacing can be adjusted with the CSS property “line-height. For 12px text, choose a line-height of around 18px. A little bit of line spacing will define each line of text and make it easier to scan and continue reading the next line.

Meta Tags

The Robots Meta Tag

The robots tag tells search engine spiders how to treat your page; whether they can index it or follow the links on the page. The robots tag is employed like this:

<meta name=”robots” content=”index, follow”>

If you do not want your page indexed or any of the links crawled, then use the tag like this:

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, nofollow”>

The Description Meta Tag

The description meta tag is what will display in search engine results for searches on your page. It sums up what your page is about and provides a relevant and easy-to-read description of your page. Keep the length around a 150 characters.

The Keywords Meta Tag

The keywords tag no long carries weight with many search engines. However, it is important to add it anyways. Yahoo supposedly still reads keyword tags. I recommend using around 12-15 keywords in this tag.

Popularity: 39% [?]

Site Code

If your code looks messy to you, then chances are it looks messy to search engine spiders. The more code you have, the more crap search engine crawlers have to go through to get to your content.

Optimize Your Page Loading Times

Avoid Image-heavy design, and large chunks of code. Be efficient in your design and you will speed up your page’s loading time for both the search engine spider and visitor.

Move CSS and Javascript to External Files

This will help clean up your code and page loading times considerably. If you are using the same CSS and JavaScript code between pages, then you are increasing the load time of each one of your pages. The browser has to redownload the same code each time a page is loaded. Move your CSS and JavaScript to external files and the browser only has to download the code once.

Verify Your HTML and CSS

It’s important that your code is standardized and easy to read for all internet browsers. Verify your code using the the W3C Validator. This well ensure stability in how your page displays between different browsers.

Test Your Webpage on a Variety of Browsers

You can do this yourself or simply use an online browser compatibility tester like, http://browsershots.org/

Page Structure

Avoid pages with duplicate or overly-similar content. Google will penalize webpages for this or only index the older page. Be mindful when creating content to make each page as unique as possible and avoid copying text content from one page to another.
Wireframe your site to determine the placement of general elements like the header, navigation, content and ads. This will provide a basic structure for your website and leave you to only have to fill in the blanks.

Keywords

Before you even think about writing for your website, keyword research is in order. Determining keywords before writing for your website will be a guide to help you construct seo-friendly and relevant content that will further enhance rankings in the search engines.

Keyword Density and Repetition

Some say that there is an optimal keyword density (between 3-5%). Ignore this number. The key is to write your website’s content with your keywords in mind, but let the text flow and read natural. When you worry about the keyword density in your webpage, you end up stuffing keywords in areas that make your content seem like it was a chunk of text spewed from a broken robot.

Keyword Placement

Your target keywords should be in the Title, meta description tag, meta keywords tag, header tags, and of course the paragraphs! Keywords don’t have to be in all of these tags, but at least 2 or 3 keywords should be targeted in these areas.

Keywords and Text Formatting

Keywords are given more importance when placed in certain html formatting tags. By placing keywords in some of the tags below, you are telling the search engines that some text is more important that the rest, increasing page relevancy.

Header Tags

Links

Bold Text

Underlined Text

In the URL itself

Titles

The website title is the most important part of the webpage. It is the first most important factor meta search engines consider and can be considered the page’s “headline.”

Add a Descriptive Title of Your Webpage

Try not to choose something like “Welcome To The Website of Some Company.” Instead, create a unique title Tag Like “Some Company – Landscape and Gardening Services in Some City, CA”

Avoid Duplicate Title Tags

Each page should have its own unique title, relevant and descriptive of the page.

Limit the Character Count

Website titles should be kept under 80 characters including spaces.

Popularity: 100% [?]

Internal linking is one of the more overlooked aspects of on-page SEO. Much like how external links distribute PageRank over the internet, your internal links do the same within the site.

Generally when building an innerlinking structure, you want to add a rel=”nofollow” tag in links to pages like “contact” or “disclaimer”. These pages generally do not provide any SEO benefit and therefore do not deserve the link juice from almost every page in your site.

Once common mistake is to have duplicate anchor text. Say you have a link in your “about our products” in your navigation and a link to the same page with the anchor text, “about our glass products”, you will want to place a nofollow tag on the link with the anchor text “about our products” as it is less descriptive and won’t help build relevancy to the page. However, be careful as Google can detect highly targeted anchor text links like this from external websites. Specifically, beware of blog commenting with anchor text as the name of the comment author. Google will eventually see this as spammy and your website will be chilling in the sandbox for a good few months.

Popularity: 11% [?]

Sometimes you may want to make a background image to a div element linkable. One of the top web design mistakes is making the banner unlinkable. Mostly it is just a nuisance for your visitor. I ran into this dilemma and discovered a simple solution. Just make it linkable with Javascript. There is a method in css to do the same thing by resizing a link with no anchor text inside the div element. But that solution wasn’t going to work in my case.

Anyways, here’s the simple Javascript code.

onclick=”location.href=’http://www.yoursite.com’;” style=”cursor:pointer;”

Use it inside a div element, like this

<div id=”#element” onclick=”location.href=’http://www.example.com’;” style=”cursor:pointer;”>Stuff</div>

The downsides to this code is browsers with Javascript disabled will not have a linkable banner. The upside is that it is an unobtrusive way of making a background of the div element linkable. Images and text you place inside the div element can still be linked separately as if the div background were not linked with JavaScript.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Recently I came across a new tool called The LinkJuicer. It is an automated socialbookmarking/link building tool. You pay monthly for the service, but may be able to get a 30-trial. When you sign up, you create 10 accounts on various blog and social bookmarking sites. These sites will be used to bookmark others content, and there sites will be used to bookmark your content.

A few hours after creating my first campaign, I started getting links to my stories. Now here’s the most badass thing. About two days later, the links linking to my stories started getting links themselves. That’s the cherry on top of the cake for this service, multi-tiered linking. Makes the link building look much more natural and helps keep you under Big G’s radar.

The nice thing about this service is that you can throttle the amount of links built in a day to stay under Big G’s radar. Within a few hours, I started getting links back to one of my blogs. I am very impressed with the service and would recommend it to anyone.

Popularity: 29% [?]

Do you run an online service-based business? Do you find your visitors leaving your site after they reach your sales or signup page? I’ve found through personal experience that these simple tips increased sales by a decent margin.

Simplify Your Payment Process

Do you have lengthy payment forms? Do you use a checkout system that requires the user to sign up with a 3^rd party credit processing service?

By removing unnecessary forms and fields and hosting credit card processing on your server, you decrease the amount of information the visitor will have to enter, and eliminate the amount of pages the customer will have to go through to sign up. This will help optimize your exit and bounce rate and help your visitors from being discouraged by lengthy signup processes.

Offer More Payment Options

Not everyone has a credit card, and increasingly so with the bad economy. By offering more payment options such as money orders and PayPal you increase sales by reaching out to those who may not have a card.

Instill a Sense of Urgency in Your Copy

You may have a problem with your website if the copy is not compelling enough to suggest your customers sign up now, if ever. If you find your visitors leaving your signup or sales page, then review your sales copy.

Explain How Your Service Works and Explain What the Client Gets By Choosing Your Service

Some clients may be unsure of what the process entails and what they

can expect from your business when they contemplate making payment or not. You should instill confidence in the visitor by explaining in a simplistic manner how the process works and what they can expect from your company when they choose to pay for your service. The trick here is to differentiate your self from the competition. What makes your service unique compared to the countless competitors on the internet?

Offer a Promotion

Offering a promotion may provide the sense of urgency that other methods may not accomplish. This tactic is risky as competitors may perceive it as a weakness, but even the simplest of discounts such as a 10% should lead to more sales. This may be a tactic to use sparingly during a bad month.

Popularity: 5% [?]