Alaska’s Best SEO

Have you ever wondered how search engine friendly your site is? I think that most people consider it, but assume that the spiders look at sites like we do…which is very incorrect.

Search Engine Spiders (or Web Crawlers) literally “read” your website. They do not see pictures, flash, etc.

If you have access to a UNIX/Linux shell, then you can use Lynx (a text only browser), which does not support JavaScripts, and will display only text and regular “a href” tags. It’s a great way to see how a spider sees your site.

The vast majority, however, will need a tool to do this such as a spider simulator. There are several out there, many free and each different in how they simulate the spider – this is mainly to the fact that there are so many different spiders with their own engine methods. Here are some we recommend, each with it’s own benefits:

• SEO Tools – Search Engine Spider Simulator Tool: Best of the lot, breakes each section into viewable chunks to allow for real analysis
• Submit Express Meta Tag Analyzer: Besides simulating bots it also provides meta tag analysis
• Webmaster Toolkit Search Engine Spider Simulator: Simply strips out the HTML tags from the page you specify

So what does it mean in real terms?  If your site work without graphics or JavaScript, then you have a search engine friendly site and can expect good rankings.

If after simulating that this is not the case, it may be a good idea to head back to the drawing board and rethink your website.

We at Apex Logic, pride ourselves in doing the right thing. So much so that when we make mistakes we need to be honest in that we made a mistake and in doing right in correcting it.

It came to our attention in an e-mail that many of our articles are cut and pasted from others works. There are some changes (mostly cosmetic) but this does not change the fact that they are other’s work and deserve credit.

While there is a need to have regular content there is never a need to steal content. There are enough regular content providers (even in the SEO world) to preclude this.

We have removed the articles and will take better steps to either give credit or simply just write them ourselves.

My thinking is that if we’re too busy to write…then as Martha Stewart says “It’s a good thing”

Thanks David for bringing this to our attention.

Here is a simple SEO Checklist you can use to get started in enhancing your site’s visibility.

Basic SEO Checklist:

• Determine what specific key words you want to target with search engines. You can use a tool such as Wordtracker to see what search words are popular, and optimize your site for them. Make sure the key words you choose are relevant.
• Clean up your URLs. Don’t use capital letters, spaces, or special characters. Separate each word with a “-” dash.
• Redirect the non-www version of your site (many hosts allow for you to browse to http:// and http://www). When you enter mygreatdomain.com into the browser, it should redirect you to www.mygreatdomain.com using a SEO friendly 301 redirection.
• Make sure you don’t link to “index.htm” or “index.php”. Instead, link to “/”. If you know of or find specific links from other sites, ask them to do the same.
• Good relevant content. SEO will be much harder if you don’t have plenty of content, so spend more time writing!
• Add both an HTML sitemap (containing a link to every page on your site) as well as an XML sitemap. Use this tool for your site (free if your site is less than 500 pages).
• Remove frames from your site.
• Ensure the title and meta (description and keywords) are different on every page of the site.
• Remove any flash or image based navigation. If using CSS styled text for navigation is not possible, then add a text based footer navigation on every page.
• Optimize your images. Ensure all have alt tags and are placed near text that is relevant to the image.

There are lots more things one can do beyond the basics, but with these simple items…you’ll be headed in teh right direction.