Do you want to get the traffic you deserve flooding into your website? Code optimisation is an essential component of the search engine optimisation process and if you aren’t technically minded then it can be difficult to get your head round. This guide is meant for beginners and more advanced webmasters alike.

A shallow knowledge of HTML coding is useful, however, it is not necessary. Optimising your code can be done by simply opening your html document in a text editor and changing different parts as shown below. Follow these steps carefully and your code will become 100% search engine optimized and ready for promotion and link-building campaigns.

The steps below assume you have chosen the keywords which you want to optimise the page code for. If you have not done that, go and do that now and return to this guide later.

HTML Code Optimisation
The optimisation of your HTML code for search engines is vital. It is the base of your SEO campaign. It must be optimised in a number of ways in order to improve the relevance of a chosen keyword. Follow the advice below as closely as possible. The closer the better and the higher your rank will be.

Remember: Keywords are the words people will use in search engines. Including a keyword in your site content (and optimising your site) will cause your site to be returned as a search result. You can choose to optimise your page for a keyword or a keyphrase (a number of related words, eg: ‘free red hats’). Using a keyphrase is more advantageous (as discussed later) but for simplicity, I will refer to keywords AND keyphrases as just keywords.

TIP: Try to optimise each page for just one keyword. This will stop each keyword competing against each other for weightings and you will rank higher for the chosen keyword.

The TITLE Tag
Location: just below the tag < head > tag

< title >Web Promotion, Affiliate Marketing, SEO,  for example

1. The title tag should not contain any of the words Google disregards. These are words like ‘and’, ‘not’, ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘about’ etc which are too common for Google to take any notice of. Using these words will dilute the importance that your keyword is given in your title (if you put it in your title). These words are known as ’stop’ words.

2. Include your keyword in the title of your page. Including other words in your title that are not your chosen keyword/s will be detrimental to your ranking. This is because it makes your keyword seem less relevant to the title of the page. This relevance is known as ‘weight’. The more weight your keyword has in a certain criteria the better.

3. Don’t include the name of your website in the title of your page: for example ‘Share The Wealth – affiliate marketing’. This is because it will dilute the prominence of your keyword (in this example ‘affiliate marketing’). It is tempting to include your site’s name as it may look better, however it is not that important as people don’t pay much attention to the title.

The Meta tags
Location: just below the title tag.

Meta data appears as follows:

< meta name="Description" content="Free articles and guides on affiliate marketing and SEO" >

< meta name="Keywords" content="Affiliate Marketing,SEO" >

1. This is where you specify your keywords:

Also, weight is given to how near your keyword is to the beginning of your keywords list. So you should try to have your most important keyword in the place of ‘keyword1′ in the above example.

1. The above line is where the description, shown in google results, is written. It goes after content=”. Do not worry about keyword weighting in here as search engines do not take this into consideration anymore.

The BODY of your HTML
Once you have written the content of your page, you can begin SEO on it. Complete the page ready for publishing and then apply the following rules to it to ensure its optimised 100% for the top search engines.

1. Your keyword should appear in bold at least once on your page. This will show the search engines that the word, your keyword, is important to the subject of your page and so must be relevant to the keyword search performed by the search engine user.

2. Your keyword should have a weight of 2% on your page. This is the ideal percentage as if it is too high a search engine may penalize your page for spamming. Spamming is a term used to describe the action of webmasters that trick search engine page ranking systems (SEPRS) into thinking they are relevant in order to get a high ranking. These pages will not usually be relevant at all and simply “cash in” selling advertising space with the high traffic they receive. Spamming is increasingly becoming a thing of the past as the search engine page ranking algorithms become more sophisticated. To work out the percentage weight your keyword has, visit www.live-keyword-analysis.com .

3. Use heading tags ( < h1 >heading etc) and put your keyword into the heading. Again the usual weighting rules exist. Have your keyword as close to the beginning of the heading and have as few other words in the heading as possible. Position this heading as close to the top of your page as you can for increased relevance.

4. Put your keyword in up to three of the alt attributes for images and include it in one of the first three alt image attributes in your code. Alt image attributes are the alt tags given to images in your code which can be seen if the image fails to load. These are great for hosting your keyword as users cannot usually see them. Don’t spam though, stick to three alt tags. Alt tags are used as follows:

5. Keep your page content between 100 and 1400 words. This is for a number of reasons, including the size of Google’s page cache (amount of data from a page Google stores). If you have too much content, you could try splitting the page into two separate pages and perhaps having a ‘page 2′ link at the bottom of the content.

6. Your keyword should appear at the beginning of your content and at the end (The first and last 50 words)

Code Optimisation Checklist

• No stop words in your title tag
• Keyword included in title
• Website name not included in title
• Keyword in meta keywords list
• Keyword placed as close to the beginning of the meta keywords list as possible
• Keyword appears in bold at least once in the content
• Keyword has a 2% weight
• Keyword is in the first heading tag and is at the top of the page content
• Keyword is in the first 50 words and last 50 words of the page
• Page content is between 100 and 1400 words
• Keyword is in one of the first three alt image attributes and is in three of them in total

Tips and Advice

• Try to optimise each page for just one keyword. This will stop each keyword competing against each other for weightings and prominence and you will rank higher for the chosen keyword.
• Not every page of your site will be able to be optimized for every criterion. Don’t worry; just try to hit each criteria as best you can. Sometimes you won’t be able to achieve a content size of above 100 words: on a contacts page for example. Issues like this are of little importance as not every page will have a particular need for perfect optimization, because surfers will find contact information from a link shown on the home page.
• Constantly check your competition. You may not feel it is possible to get onto the first page on Google for a certain keyword/phrase. Choose a less contested keyword.

By James Kinsley

The year 2006 saw the emergence of social media. If you are engaged in operating a website, you must realign your site to exploit the popular social media sites for increased traffic.

You should also introduce social media components to your site because web users are experiencing these new forms of interactions on more and more sites and they may have an expectation of the same from your site also.

If you want to attract repeat visitors and want them to stay longer, your focus this year should be on the social aspects of your site.

Social media uses technologies like RSS, blogging, podcasting, tagging, etc. and offers social networking (MySpace, Facebook), social video and picture sharing (YouTube, Flickr), and community-based content ranking (Digg, MiniClip) features.

The central theme of these sites is user generated content used for sharing among the end-users. The social aspects of these sites are to allow users to setup social communities, invite friends and share common interests.

You don’t have to change your site completely within a month or so to take advantage of these new technologies. Introduce small changes incrementally throughout the year and you will be on your way to meet these new challenges.

The first step is to declare who you are to the online community. People should be able to relate to you. Unless they know more about you, you will be just an unknown identity and most people don’t like to deal with unknowns. Create an About Us page and list your achievements and skills.

Create a MySpace page and link your bio in the About Us page to the MySpace page. Also provide a link back from the MySpace page to your website. Spend an hour every week to develop your online social network in MySpace. Invite a few of these new friends to write blog articles at your site about your products or services.

Install free blog software and start publishing at least one article in your blog. Provide an easy bookmarking feature to social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us. This is done by providing an action button for each article on your site. The action button takes users to the submission page of the bookmarking site.

Also, provide an action button for direct posting of blog articles to Digg. Digg is a popular news ranking site. A well dugg article will bring thousands of visitors to your site.

Provide a forum at your site for users to discuss your products and services. Don’t delete negative comments because they provide insights into the improvements needed to serve your visitors better. However, censor hate speeches and meaningless bantering. Register your forum at BoardTracker. BoardTracker is a forum search engine.

If you are offering products, allow users to review and rate your products. This will help you in inventory management because you may want to discontinue low rated products.

Provide RSS feeds for your new products, blogs, forum postings, etc. An RSS feed provides teasers of your contents. Users will use RSS readers to scan your teasers and visit your site for more information if the teasers draw their attention.

Publish all your feeds at Feedburner. Feedburner provides media distribution and audience engagement services for RSS feeds. They also provide an advertising network for your feeds. If you have quality content, you will be able to monetize your content using their services.

Create short how-to or new product videos and post these videos in social video sharing sites like YouTube and Google video. Provide a few start and end frames in these videos to introduce your site with your site url. Post these videos using catchy titles, teasing descriptions, and appropriate tags to make them discoverable.

Provide embedded links to your posted videos on your site. This will save your bandwidth and storage space because the videos reside on the video sharing sites.

Besides videos, use social photo sharing sites like Flickr to share pictures related to content on your site. Use the same title, description and tag techniques discussed earlier for social video sites.

Provide a Send to Friend feature for all products and services you offer. This feature is a link that sends the article, product description, etc. to a recipient via e-mail.

For starters, Yahoo provides a service called Action Buttons that adds links to your website for users to share, save, and blog about your website. The Yahoo action buttons use del.icio.us for social bookmarking and the Yahoo blog site for blogging. It also has a print feature.

Social media is not a fad. It is here to stay and bring in profound changes to web surfers’ experiences. It is the right time for implementing features that will make your site social media friendly. Also, using marketing techniques that utilize popular social media sites, you will be able to bring traffic to your site.

By Deepak Dutta

Transferring traffic and popularity to a new domain is a painstaking process that no one on the web appears to be immune to, or so Topix.net has realized. Topix.net is a leading news aggregation resource that has been in the news lately because they are planning to move their site from Topix.net to Topix.com after purchasing the .com for a cool million from a Canadian animation company.

The Wall Street Journal wrote this article explaining how damaging a seemingly simple process of switching from .net to .com could be for Topix LLC. The author goes on to explain such a switch is usually fraught with ranking drops while the major search engines notice and respond to the changeover. The fact that switching addresses will cause problems is not news in the SEO world; however, I thought Topix.net’s situation was a great opportunity to review what one might expect when switching domains.

Switching Shingles
Switching a domain is tantamount to changing physical locations and it should be treated just as seriously. The following are the steps to take and consider when switching domains:

1. You must install a site wide 301 (permanent redirect) on your old domain to forward all human traffic to the new domain and inform search engine spiders that your website has permanently moved to a new location. For information on how to implement a 301 redirect here is a great tutorial.

2. Google is the biggest player and likely the most significant driver of traffic to your website. Keeping that in mind you will want to notify Google of your switchover as soon as possible by registering the new website within Google Webmaster Central and then submitting a fresh XML sitemap. Google representatives are very clear the only way to minimize the impact of a domain changeover is to give Google’s automated system as much warning as possible to limit downtime.

3. Find the most significant inbound links that point to the old domain and selectively contact the site owners requesting a link update to the new domain. TIP: Discovering which sites to contact first can be done using a combination of top referrer statistics, and search engine backlink reports. I don’t recommend taking this step unless you find a few sites that stand out as massive traffic drivers as this process can be frustrating due to lack of response; after all, changing a backlink to your site is likely low on a webmaster’s priority list.

4. Send out a press release far and wide explaining the move to the new domain. Feature the domain prominently in the release to begin the task of re-branding.

5. All email addresses will need to be forwarded to their respective addresses on the new domain. Ensure that anyone emailing the old address is forwarded to the new one BUT they should also receive an automated notice to change their contact records to reflect the new email. Leave these email forwards active for a short time to catch the most important emails and then turn them off and delete the old address accounts to avoid encouraging spammers.

6. On the new domain don’t forget to implement a 301 redirect for the “non-www” traffic so they get forwarded to the preferred “www” version of the domain. For more information and background on this topic please visit the following tutorial “301 Redirect of Non-WWW to WWW URLs”.

7. If you expect a severe drop in traffic you can expect a drop in sales. In this regard you may want to ramp up or start pay per click marketing to minimize the damage to your bottom line.

How Long Does a Domain Transition Take?
Generally a popular website will experience the least amount of downtime because Google will take notice faster due to the many entry points (inbound links from news articles, etc.) this type of site usually has. It is also more to Google’s benefit to ensure that a credible and well-trafficked website is kept high in Google’s results to ensure users receive the best results possible. Using a popular website such as Topix.Net as an example, I would expect a 2-week to 1-month turn around at which time traffic would be back to approximately 85% of what it was.

Sites that are less popular will really need to do their homework and ensure they have informed Google in every way possible of the transition. The transition back to normal traffic for sites that carefully transition their website should be in the realm of 2 to 6 months.

“What If?” The Worst Case Scenario
What should you do if your traffic drops dramatically and after a few weeks or months it still has not measurably restored itself? Google actually recommends you post your issue on their online user support forum. Apparently Google engineers occasionally take pity and help out; maybe you will get lucky. I also recommend visiting the more authoritative search engine forums (such as Search Engine Watch, iHelpYou, etc.) and requesting help. There are a lot of incredibly talented SEOs on these forums that are happy to provide assistance.

WARNING!
If you must conduct a domain transition be sure to plan it during a historically slow time of year to minimize damages. For example, it would be a mistake for a B2C to switch domains before the Holiday Season rush.

In Conclusion
Do not switch your domain unless you have no other choice because no matter how popular your website is domain switchovers are far from enjoyable. After all, even losing a single week of significant traffic for a popular site could cost many thousands or even millions of dollars. On the flip side of the coin, less trafficked websites (i.e. Mom and Pop sites, small B2C websites, etc.) usually experience a longer wait time so they experience a different type of pain. Fortunately, you now know there are ways to mitigate the potential harm to your bottom line, just don’t forget to follow the rules and your switchover will be a lot more effective and ultimately less painful.

By Ross Dunn