Everyone wants their websites to be search engine optimized, or SEO-friendly. However, there are some common errors that people make when they’re doing SEO work on their site, and these errors can actually cost them that highly coveted top ten ranking that everyone wants. Here are some things to avoid when doing SEO work on your website.Remember the ALT tags! Almost every image on your website (not including the background and any images that serve as buttons and the like) needs to have ALT text. This is the text that shows up if the image doesn’t load. More importantly, however, it’s the text that tells search engines what the image is since the programs can’t actually see the picture. A good ALT tag will include two or three of your keywords, and it’s a great place to stick in extra keywords that the viewer will (hopefully, unless your image is missing) never see.Don’t use the same

There are those in our industry who will tell you that PageRank is dead. I’ve been reading a lot lately about how we are supposed to ignore the green bar in our browser but you know what? I disagree and I’m going to tell you why.For those who don’t know, PageRank is Google’s way of determining a website’s worth based on the number of incoming links it has. In other words, Google counts the number of links pointing to a site as votes, generally speaking the more votes a site has the more it is likely worth to Google.While this is a simplistic view of PageRank and it has indeed gotten much more complex than this, in essence this is what PageRank is. So why would many think it’s not worth anything?Because at one time, Google’s ranking algorithms were based in large part on the PageRank calculations. Too soon, however, webmasters realized that in order to

For those of you not yet aware, Google is currently updating the PageRank they are displaying in their toolbar. Each update causes a stir among the SEO community and webmasters trying to get their websites to the top of the Google Rankings.What Is PageRank? Without getting into too much detail, PageRank is essentially a score out of ten as to the “value” of your site in comparison to other websites on the Internet. It is based on two primary factors; the number of links you have pointing to your website and the value of the links pointing to your website. The value is calculated based on the PageRank of the page linking to you and debatably the relevancy of the page linking to you (there is no hard evidence to back up the relevancy factor in regards to PageRank that I have seen however it definitely is a factor in your overall ranking).If you are interested

What is Google Pagerank exactly?I get asked this question alot of times by my clients. I am still amazed sometimes at the ignorance of website owners. And, since I own a hosting company, I deal with website owners on a daily basis. I think it’s time to set the record straight on the whole PageRank topic.Why Google?If you own a website, and make your living off it, then the Search Engines are the all seeing, all knowing gods of your universe. And Google will be the chief cook and bottle washer in this equation. Some useless, but interesting facts about Google:Google processes about 20 Petabytes of data per day. (A petabyte (derived from the SI prefix peta- ) is a unit of information or computer storage equal to one quadrillion bytes, or 1000 terabytes. IE – 20 Billion Gigabytes of data per DAY…)At last count (March 2006) they handled about 91 Million searches/dayIf you do a

 By: Jonathan HaryantoBacklinks have become one of the most important aspects of Search Engine Optimization. Backlinks, also known as “Inbound Links,” refer to the links that are placed on other websites and that are directed towards your website. They are what tells the search engines that you have a site of interest to others who have linked to it, thus raise your ranking on the search engines.Backlinks are important to climb the page ranking in the search engines. What other websites say about you is critical for search engine credibility. If you can control what the links say and where they link to in your site then you can influence the search engine results. Therefore, your marketing campaign for your sites has to include the effort of obtaining link popularity.While building backlinks, you need to aim for quality instead of quantity. Search engines give more credit to a link from a site related to yours than

Social bookmarking is the best way to boost traffic for a site. Social bookmarking is a powerful tool in promoting a website. The ideas that social bookmarking is built on are working their way into other applications; the practice of tagging information is being extended to other types of resources, such as multimedia files and e-mail. Social bookmarking is saving us a lot of time and energy that we’d usually spend scanning our RSS feeds or (the shock and horror of it all) actually visiting sites daily to find out what’s hot in the industry we work in along with our other interests. Not learning about social bookmarking is nothing short of surrendering to a changing online world.Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet with the help of metadata. Bookmarking is good for two things: Building more inbound links to your blog