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Ok, there’s been a lot of questions by the SEO community on whether or not using your keywords in your website file names actually has an affect on Google search engine rankings. Does it help your ranking? Does it hurt the ranking? Does Google even pay attention to the keywords in the file names? And actually, I was confused and wondering about it myself. So, I decided to do some testing of my own, with one of my own websites, http://xpirtdesign.com and I’ll tell you some interesting facts that I’ve found with my own experience.
Test #1:
Here are the results of the test that I did for index.html (homepage) file:
I renamed index.html to another filename using my top 2 keyphrases and seperated each individual word using hyphens. (before renaming the file, I was nowhere to be found on Google, at least not in the top 100 sites).
Next, I submitted my XML sitemap to google and waited for Google to re-crawl and index my new URL (the new filename).
After a few days or so, Google did find my new URL and did re-index the filenames. However, I was still nowhere to be found within the top 100 sites using my target key phrases and keywords.
After about a month or so of waiting, still no improvement on my Google rankings. (keep in mind that my site is also completely optimized, as far as on-page optimization goes).
I’ve concluded that after about 2 months of waiting, renaming the index file to a keyword did not have any affect on my rankings. But keep reading on, this gets interesting…
Test #2
The next thing I wanted to find out is whether or not renaming my filenames on my other subpages (about us, contact, services, ect) would have any affect on my Google rankings.
Before renaming my filenames, my sub pages did actually show up in the top 100 sites in Google for my target key phrases, at least a couple of em did. SO, I did the same thing as I did with the index.html file, and renamed the filenames using my keywords and phrases using hyphens as a seperator.
I resubmitted my XML sitemap to Google, then waiting to be reindexed. Oh and by the way, you need to do a 301 redirect to make sure there are no 404 errors on the old URLs. A few days later, Google re-indexes my new URL filenames.
I waited about a week or so to recheck my rankings in Google… But this time, my MAIN PAGE (index.html) zooms up to the first page of Google (#8 spot with about 500,000 competitors), out of nowhere! Remember now, my main page wasnt even in the top 100, or 600 for that matter.
But what about my sub pages?
Well I immediately checked my sub pages for ranking, and let me tell you, out of about 10 keywords and keyphrases (all over 400,000 competitors for each keyphrase) I am either ranking on the 1st page, 2nd page, or within the top 40 sites!!! These are the sub pages that are ranking, as well as my mainpage.
Another thing that I want to add is this:
When searching in Google, you will notice that the keywords are highlighted in the URL file name as well as the Title tag and content of the page. If Google doesnt take the filenames into account for relevancy, then why would they highlight, or bold, the keywords and phrases that are within the actual filename? WHY??? Google is obviously taking filenames into consideration.
Test #3:
So how do I know that this is no coincidence?
Well, I went ahead and renamed the file names back to the original names to start with. Within a week or so, every single one of my sub pages, and main page disappeared. They pretty much dropped off into Google Space somewhere.
OK. Back to square one. I repeated my previous steps again (renaming the files using keywords and hyphens and resubmitted the new URLS to Google). In about another couple of weeks, my pages showed up again! They didnt show up in the EXACT same order as before, but they did come back to the first 2 pages, and a couple of rankings on the 3rd and 4th pages. And again, google is using a new cache of my site with the new filenames in the URL.
My conclusion to the testing:
Now, my site is only 3 months old or so. I have a pagerank 1 on the mainpage and 4 other pages (resources pages). I have about 400 backlinks so far. So YES, I have lots of work to do with link popularity and all that. But the point here is this: Using your target keywords in your filenames seperated by hyphens helps your site to be seen by Google as more relevant for your given keywords than a filename using no keywords. This, I believe, is a fact.
Also, keep in mind that my mainpage remained “index.html.” My mainpage is comming up on the 1st and 2nd pages of my target keyphrases with probably means that my subpages (using keywords in the filenames) are actually helping my mainpage increase in rank. My mainpage did not show up on the rankings before using the keywords, the mainpage showed up when my subpages used the keywords, the mainpage dissappeared when I removed the keywords, then reappeared when I re-added the keywords!
As far as hyphens and spam go:
On some pages I used 2 hyphens, some pages I used 4 or 5 hyphens. These factors did not affect anything, as far as I could see. Im pretty sure you dont want to use way too many hyphens, and you definately dont want to spam your keywords like crazy in the URL. Keep that in mind when renaming your files.
And, being only a PR1 on my site and a PR 0 on my subpages (not including my resources pages), I am ranking higher then many PR2, PR3, PR4, and PR5 sites that are targeting the same keywords. My site is much younger, and has much less backlinks.
Now don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that all you need to do is rename the file names to rank higher. Ive worked extensively in analyzing my competitors, keyword density, analysed title tags, content, backlinks, you name it. All of these practices need to be applied without question. I am only saying that using keywords in the filenames definately helps increase the relevancy of your page with the given keywords you are searching for, in terms of Google.
I hope this articles helps you guys with the confusion thats been going on, and I hope you just dont take my word for it. Test it yourself and make your own decisions, like I did.
Stay tuned for more articles comming soon. If you find any of my articles helpful or interesting, please dont hesitate to subscribe to the RSS, Digg my post, and leave some comments.
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Ok so I ran across some great looking CSS based sites. Some of them aren’t 100% pure CSS but they are still great sites to check out. I chose these because of their creativity, simplicity, and the ability to catch my eye. I hope you guys like them as well. If you want to be notifed when my next article comes along, just subscribe to my blog and feel free to leave comments. ENJOY!
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Xpirt Design’s Link Building Strategy 101: Low budget link building
In this article, I will be talking about my link building strategy that I’ve implemented to build Google page rank for my site. These are proven methods as of September 24th, 2008. I will not be talking about paid link exchanges because 1) It is against Google policy, 2) This article is for site owners that are on a tight budget.
I have a new website that I am trying to promote, like many of you, and we all know that Google and Yahoo relies heavily on other websites linking to your website in order to calculate page rank.
ANCHOR TEXT: Very important!
Before we go on, I want to explain the importance of your keyword in the anchor text of your links. The anchor text is the actual text that the view can see when click on a link. This text should have your target keyword or key phrase that you are attempting to optimize your site for. When submitting any link, you should always use keywords in the anchor text of that link. Some exceptions are DMOZ and any other directory or link exchange site that says otherwise. Also, it is important to mix up your anchor text by adding other words like “best” or “cheap” or whatever you choose. The reason is that Google has whats called a “link trap.” Google actually will penalize your site if it thinks that you are only optimizing for a certain keyword or key phrase. Mixing up the anchor text passes this “link trap” while still achieving the goals of optimizing for a certain key phrase.
There are many different ways to get more links to your site. I will showing you how to get good one-way links as well as good reciprocal link. Also, I will be explaining the best practices in link building so you don’t end up getting penalized by Google. But first, lets talk about submitting your site into the popular link directories.
Link Directories:
The most popular link directories are DMOZ.com and the Yahoo Directory. DMOZ is free but it takes forever for them to add your link (several months in most cases). Yahoo Directory is $300 bucks per year. You should definitely submit your site to DMOZ, but be careful with your site descriptions. They are very strict on their criteria. If you do have the money, the Yahoo Directory is a great candidate as well.
So how do you find more free link directories?
SEARCH for them! The problem with this is that you have no way of keeping track of the directories who added you or not (in an efficient way at least). Which brings me to my next point…
How can we keep track of which directories we’ve submitted to? What anchor text did we use for the directory? What date did we submit on? How can we check to see if our link was added?
Here is a website that has these tools to keep track of who, what, where, and when. http://www.onewaytextlink.com/
This is a great site to start with. Keep in mind that the FREE one-way links are of most importance to us right now. So go ahead, go through that whole list of free one way link directories and submit your link with your mixed up anchor texts.
Reciprocal Link Exchanges:
Another way to get quality links is reciprocal linking. A faster and more productive way in doing this is to sign up for a good link exchanging program like http://link2me.com. Its free and you can monitor which sites have added your link, the page rank of those sites, and so on..
There is a lot of controversy over reciprocal links however. Some people say these links don’t count, some people say they do count. One thing is for sure…Reciprocal links should only be exchanged with other sites that are relevant to your site. If I have a website design site, then I would want to exchange my link with another web design site. With that said, you should also watch out for sites that have been banned or penalized by Google. If you link to a site that has been banned or penalized, you will be penalized as well. The way to check this is to download the Google Toolbar and use the page rank option. This shows you the page rank of any site you go to. If the toolbar is all grey on the homepage of a site, it is because either the site is only a couple of weeks old, or the site has been banned. You can also check by going to Google Search and typing in “site:” and then the url of the site you are checking. If you are checking my site, you would type “site:xpirtdesign.com”
So, go to link2me.com and sign up for free. Start your link exchanging with relevant sites and start building those links.
Get links from your competitors’ link partners:
My favorite way to find link partners is to use my COMPETITORS link partners. There is a reason why your competitor ranks higher in the search engines. If you have already done the on-page SEO for your site, the next step is to find your competitors and do a link exchange with the sites that are currently linking to them!
Go to Google, get the URL of the competitors homepage. Type in Google Search “link:url” If you were to find the websites that are linking to me, you would type “link:xpirtdesign.com”
Go down the list of sites, write an email to eat site owner explaining that you are a fairly new site and you would like to participate in a link exchange. You should write your email in a way that would convince the site owner to exchange links with you. Personalize each email with their URL or name.
Try to focus on getting reciprocal links from your competitors link partners who have page rank on the actual link pages, or the page where they will be putting your link on. The more back linksyou have on pages with page rank, the higher rank you will get from Google in return.
Also when doing reciprocal links, you should have criteria as well.
Check for a “nofollow” attribute within the HTML coding either in their meta tags, or on the links themselves. You do not want to exchange links with sites that do not give you any page rank love. Avoid sites with the nofollow attributes.
Only trade links with other sites that are relevant to yours unless that other site has a good page rank on their link pages.
What are some things that you should do in order to get sites to agree to a link exchange?
-Get some page rank on your link pages.
-Do not use nofollow attributes on your reciprocal links or pages.
-Do not add more then 30 links to each link page.
Trade links with your competitors themselves:
Another great way to find good relevant links is to exchange links with your competitors themselves. Email them to see if they are interested, but I would use a different anchor text so they won’t be worried about helping their competitors. You can use a secondary key phrase that you are optimizing for to achieve this goal.
This concludes “Link Building Strategies 101 – Low Budget.” Please stay tuned for more great articles from Xpirt Design!
Do you not have the time or resources to start your link building campaign? Do you need professional search engine optimization services?
XPIRT DESIGN CAN HELP! We do search engine optimization, web design, and link building for a living. We can get your site that jump-start that it needs to start bringing in that traffic you deserve. Check out these links to find out more!
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This article is the 3rd in my SEO Tutorial series. Though many search engines disregard most meta tags, it is still important to make sure you include meta tags in all of your web pages. The reason is, meta tags are still used by some search engines and writing these tags properly will also determine how your search result will be displayed to the viewer. I believe the Title tag is the most important tag as far as SEO is concerned.
There are 3 tags that I will go over:
1) Title Tag
2) Description Tag
3) Keyword Tag
All of these tags should be inside your <head> tag.
A title html tag looks like this <title>Your Page Title</title>
The title tag is the tag that you will see at the top bar of your internet browser. Search engines use this tag to get a general idea of what your website will be about. So if you are trying to rank in a certain keyword, like, “Orange County Web Design,” then it’s very important to have your target keyword in your title tag. In fact, it should be the first set of words in your title tag. Some people like to use their company name, or “home page”, or “services”, and so on. Do not do that. Use your keyword phrase in your title tag unless you are an established business and people might probably search for your company name on the search engines.
When using keywords in a title tag, you shouldn’t use more then 70 characters. Also, if you have a # of keywords you are trying to optimize for, keep in mind that the less keywords in your tag, the more weight, or, relevance, that keyword will have. 1 or 2 keywords or keyword phrases are a good start for a title tag.
Also, your title tag should be the first thing that the search engine crawlers should read. Which means, you should place your title tag directly underneath your <head> tag. Dont keyword stuff your title tag either because search engines will penalize your rank in doing so.
Your Description Tag looks like this: <meta name=”description” content=”This is my webpage description…” />
Your description should explain what your webpage is about. You should also use your keyword or keyphrase in here, but in a way that is understandable to the reader. For example: <meta name=”description” content=”Affordable Website Design, Affordable Search Engine Optimization Company servicing businesses / individuals nationwide.” />
Notice how i didn’t use the word “and”, “or”, ect. You want to avoid those words in both your description and title tags. You want to also make sure that the words you use in your description tags also happen to be inside your content.
Keyword Tags look like this: <meta name=”keywords” content=”Affordable Website Design, Affordable Search Engine Optimization” />
When writing your keyword tags, just list each keyword once. Again, the less keywords you use, the more weight that keyword or keywords have. Thats pretty much it for keywords. Pretty simple eh?
As you can see, On page SEO (optimization done within your website coding and structure) basically revolves around your target keywords and keyphrases. Each page should be optimized uniquely. All your pages shouldn’t be targeting the same keywords.
The next tutorial will be about optimizing your actual content of the webpage, using heading tags, using bold, italics, underlines, and how to structure your design layout for SEO. Stay tuned and dont forget to subscribe to my RSS feed and feel free to leave comments if you find any of these articles useful. Also, i just added a digg widget in the navigation. Digg me =] .
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Googlebot determines the range of crawl rate values you’ll have available in Webmaster Tools. This is based on our understanding of your server’s capabilities. This range may vary from one site to another and across time based on several factors. Setting the crawl rate to a lower-than-default value may affect the coverage and freshness of your site in Google’s search results. However, setting it to higher value than the default won’t improve your coverage or ranking. If you do set a custom crawl rate, the new rate will be in effect for 90 days after which it resets to Google’s recommended value.
trying to learn the best dribbling technique.
