Website optimization refers to the way that a site is placed within a particular search engine. Those sites that have been optimized often enjoy top search engine placement spots. Those sites that are not optimized tend to become forgotten and rejected. How can this be? You see, those sites that don’t include any SEO optimization tools are never picked up by search engines. This means that those sites are hardly ever seen by the public. Why? Well, think about the way that you search the internet.

If you are like most people, you probably only pay attention to those top spots too.
What are the top spots? When you search for a particular keyword, the sites that pop up first are considered within the “top spots.” Most people only pay attention to these sites, and hardly anyone will bother to search beyond them. Of course, this also means that numerous websites are all vying for that top spot. So, in order to remain in the running, you have to find a way to stay within that top position – not a simple task. The best way to go about sticking to the top positions is to hire a marketing company that uses various website optimization techniques.

Internet marketing companies constantly keep their clients on the top of the heap through various methods. These methods change frequently, though the basic idea remains the same: grab and keep the attention of search engines. If this can be attained, then a site will likely gain lots of new and repeat traffic. Is your site optimized? If not, you are probably missing out on a lot of business. Your site can easily gain the attention of the average internet user if those search engines deem your site important. Invest in a great marketing company, and you’ll see what a difference website optimization makes.

Think about the way that you search for something (anything) online. You enter a word or two into a search engine box, you wait a few minutes, and then various sites from around the world are pulled up right in front of you. Now, here comes the crucial part – what links do you click on first? If you are like most people, you probably click on the first few links – this is optimization. You see, those sites that are listed within the top five spots have been optimized and analyzed, so that they get into a top spot (and stay there). Do top spots really matter?

Well, that depends – do you really want a lot of customers? If you do, then it is within your best interest to make sure that your site lands in one of those top five positions. How can you do this? With a lot of skill and some help from some internet marketing experts. As with any other kind of marketing firm, internet marketers know how to advertise your site. The only difference is that instead of billboards, these professionals use search engine placement. Through optimization, internet marketers can make sure that your site finds the top of those search engines, and (more important) stays within the top five slots.

So, now the question remains: is your site optimized? Try our Free SEOiQ Test and quickly diagnose your on-page and off-page SEO problems in minutes. You’ll find that there’s a lot about the internet that you don’t know, and you’ll also learn why internet marketers are great at what they do. If you want to drive traffic to your site, you need to hang the largest virtual billboard that you can find which includes hiring the best internet marketing team that you can find. You wouldn’t trust anyone else to run the business that you know so well, so why trust just anyone to optimize your site for you? Look for marketers that really know how to get your site to the top.

Improve your rankings today – try the free SEOiQ Test today!

The navigation menu can have simple or complex structures depending on the number of pages in a website. A website can also contain a simple navigation menu that simply leads to an: About Us, Services, portfolio, and contact us pages (for instance). A more complex navigation menu will consist of sub-menus and sub-sub-menus (tags, link clouds etc…).

Image A: Simple Navigation Menu

Image B: Complex Navigation Menu

One of the important things to remember is that the more pages within a website, the more important (and crucial) the role of the navigation menu becomes.

So how can you create an efficient, easy to use navigational menu? You can create it by using SSI or Server Side Includes. SSI is basically a set of ‘directives’ or instructions, which are included within a HTML document and are mostly used for executing particular commands. These commands can include anything from inserting an image, to inserting text, or highlighting a particular part of the web page content etc. These directives are as a rule processed on the server side (and hence the name!) and hence it is able to merge into the HTML file without any difficulty.

Here are some easy steps for creating a navigational menu using SSI:

Step 1: You need to create the HTML file for navigation menu first. Most common is the simple horizontal menu file that has the following:
Home | About Us | Products | Services | Contact Us

You can use Dreamweaver or FrontPage as the HTML Editor to create the file and save it using a .shtml extension e.g. mainnavi.shtml

Step 2: Now you need to insert the navigation menu file or the mainnavi.shtml file into the main HTML file (index page HTML file). In fact, you will need to insert the mainnavi.shtml file into all the pages you have created, which are:
Home | About Us | Products | Services | Contact Us

You can see the SSI directive at: http://BizSuccessOnline.com/SSI_CodeSnippet and copy it from here to paste it just above your SSI directive. One of the important things that you need to remember is that you can’t use an absolute path using a SSI directive. Once this is taken care of, all you have to do is upload the file on your server and you are ready to roll!

You can visit our SEOiQ Testing Center and check the various features that will help you to optimize your navigational menu and your website. You can even sign up for a 14-day free trial program – what a bargain!

The sitemap is, arguably, one of the most underestimated SEO tips for new and existing webmasters – with major importance. And, just as the name implies, a “Sitemap” is a single page that explains the structure of your website for search engine spiders/robots.  The main function of a sitemap is to guide the search engine spider through all of your sites content, simply and using a easy to decipher XML format. This enables the maximum amount of pages/data crawled – without getting lost in the maze of pages code, javascript etc.  One important thing to note is after creating a sitemap is to always update it – an outdated sitemap is not worth much .

So, who does this help? My site is already in the Google and Yahoo index?
Well, it helps you. Period. If you update your sitemap just as regularly as you update your website, you will find that search engines will ‘fall in love with your website’ while visitors will be swarming it for more juicy and latest information/services or products. Simply said, sitemaps are a very easy yet effective way of communication your fresh content with search engines. Just as you tell the search robots which parts of your site to include or exclude in robots.txt, a sitemap will naturally guide the search robots to  he particular pages (you say are important) to a visitor.

Now that we have established the importance of sitemaps, you need to know some other things related to it for SEO purposes. A conventional sitemap holds no water as far as Google is concerned. You may get lucky with Yahoo! and MSN as they consider the standard HTML format for sitemaps. Google on the other hand used XML format which is completely different from the standard HTML format that most sites have for visitors belonging to the human race! Well, Google simply has to do things differently.

So, you need to have two sitemaps – one for the Googlebot and one for human visitors. Also, Google has stated that it doesn’t consider two sitemaps as duplicate content and therefore, you will not be penalized for this SEO practice! Besides the obvious two benefits – one being easier navigation and increased visibility through search engines, sitemaps also act as the messengers of latest news/changes made on your website. They tell search engine robots about the changes made on your site and help them index the pages faster as compared to when your web site doesn’t have sitemaps.

One of the best benefits of utilizing sitemaps for SEO purposes is that when you submit a sitemap to a search engine, your reliance on external links becomes very less. And, you offer the search engine robots another way to find your site for indexing.

Once you have added a sitemap on your site and submitted it to SEs as well, you can use the SEOiQ Testing Center on our website, that allows you to compare your site’s PageRank, Backlinks, total pages indexed, Compete Rank, Alexa Rank, and Technorati Rank to know how it fares against your closest competitors and to see where you stand in the industry.

For more information on how to use the Sitemaps for search engine optimization purposes and to use the SEOiQ Testing Center features, take advantage of our 14-day free trial by signing up now!

Below is a sample of the citation in a video:

As you can see above, the captions have a Headline and Desctiprion area – remember this is your opportunity to tell the search engines what your about, so do it right! I see many times opportunity in niche markets, where literally 90% of the sites in the top 10 are poorly optimized. Check it out when you have time yourself, you will see what I mean. The reality is that video search optimization is still in the infancy stage, although it is growing rapidly. As the availability of broadband increases, it will increase the use of videos as well – so this isn’t going away, it is just beginning.

One of the primary reasons why video SEO has not been successful so far is because search engines don’t have the ability to look inside a video (yet!) and read the streaming images or media to identify and analyze the content (relevancy!). This is why most search engines must rely on several page factors as well as on the metadata that has been inserted within the video file. Search engines will also rely on anchor text as well as inbound links for determining the content or purpose of the video. Now we come back to the basic question: how do you optimize your videos?

You can choose all of the 3 or any of the three scenarios for optimization of your video. Of course, if you integrate all the three it will maximize the chances of driving targeted traffic. Here are the 3 scenarios:

1. Video specific search engines: In this scenario, you will be hosting a video on your website. A video search engine will crawl on your site to index the video. One of the popular video search engines is Truveo. These search engines will offer different optimization opportunities like:

• Accommodating titles: They can accommodate with ease titles, descriptions, summary and even specific keywords or tags.

2. Video Specific websites: There are several video specific websites that accept MRSS feeds. So basically, you will have to submit a RSS feed or an MRSS feed at a third party website. Some of the websites who will accept such files include Blinkx and Yahoo Video. You will have to enter titles, keywords, description, categories, thumbnails, and a transcript to enhance optimization.

3. Other Sites for video upload: There are several third party websites or video search engines that will allow you to upload your video on their website. Some of sites that will allow you to upload video include AOL Video, YouTube, and Yahoo Video. You will need to provide metadata and include keywords, title, and description. You will then need to link it back to any related content on your website.

Some of the other optimization tips for videos include:

• Compelling content: If your video doesn’t have compelling content then you will not be able to get targeted traffic.
• Ensure that your video is able to reinforce the brand image.
• Include caption language (or transcript in your metadata because this will help video search engines.
• Use standard format for video like .avi, .mov, or .wmv.

Still confused? Sign up for SEOintelligence, and optimize your video pages easily with a 14 day trial.