To use a header tag simply put <h1> at the start of the heading and </h1> at the end of the heading.

Make sure you use the keyword you are trying to optimise your site for in the header and then directly after the header have a paragraph sentence using <p> paragraph goes in here </p> where you repeat the keyword twice within 200 words, prefrably once at the start and again nearer the end.

Example, based on trying to further optimize my site for “Blue Widgets”

<h1>Blue Widget are a must for all home users</h1>
<p> Blue Widgets where first introduced to out company back in 1966 since then ourcompany has over 1000% and we are now producing more than 250,000 Blue Widgets every day</P>

Apply this technique to your site and you will see an improvement in SERP’s

Well i wrote in my last post a couple of days ago about the different types of backlinks and how they will benefit you, but now here comes a few words of warning that may get you in to trouble with the big G (Google) in particular.

There is a lot of discussion about if backlinks can harm your site, i am of the belief that building backlinks too quickly can adversely affect your site, it may be something small where as the extra backlinks you are getting are just not counted or if you are going all out buying high PR backlinks or building 1,000 of backlinks using black hat method you could get your site penalised quite hard.

What could the result be? any number of things could happen to your site if you get links that are unnatural, Googles way of thinking is that a link should be natural and if you have good content on your site people will link to it naturally. therefore people going out buying paid links and using co-op programs may be in for a shock.

You could end up loosing all your sites PR (page rank), you may loose your search rankings and worst of all you may get you entire site black listed.

Think I’m joking? take a look at Googles link schemes page, and think twice before buying your next link.

Just remember good SERP’s take time, things will happen naturally and you cant cheat the big G.

1. A standard backlink using your url. Example http://www.bettermychange.org

And

2. An anchor text backlink. Example Search Engine Blog

The second is a much better way to improve your SERP’s (Search engine results pages) as the site that is linking back to you is telling search engines what type of site it is, it need to be written in html code and looks like this:

<a href=”http://www.bettermychance.org”>Search Engine Blog</a>

Its not always easy to get sites to link to you using anchor text, but a good place to start experimenting is forums that allows footer links, such as Digital Point. There we go, that was another backlink using anchor text. cool huh!

Google considers a backlink as a vote for your site, so the more backlinks or votes you get to your site the more popular your site will become.

The above is a very basic description, you may also want to read, Types of backlinks and Too many backlinks.

In part 2 now will cover dynamic meta tags, The main point of this contribution is the give each page of your store and products some unique meta content. (Title, Description and Keywords)

The reason for this is to improve your search engine position, and increase the amount of pages indexed, by creating dynamic meta tag for each product page, Google will see that each page a unique and not place the pages in the supplemental index thus also improving you search engine placement.

There are several oscommerce contributions that will do this, but the one i found that does this best is cDynamic Meta Tags.

It a very easy contribution to install, make sure you fully read the installation instructions and ALWAYS backup your store before do any modifications.

Once installed you can tweak the settings in /includes/languages/english/meta_tags.php

The best permalink structure i like to use is this:

/%postname%.html

This will rewrite the url as your post title and give the url the .html extention.

Reason i like this structure, Its a keyword rich URL that is SE’s friendly, Easy to index and good for SERP’s

There are several websites that specialise in automatic link exchange programs, the one i am going to discuss is called receive links.

The reason i prefer this one to other similar sites is because the links are permanent, link placement frequency is better and the paid upgrades are cheaper.

So how does the program work?

You have to go and sign up for a free receive links account, then add your site to your new account, then all you need to do is download 3 files that need to be added to your site and then add a piece of code to your sites footer or other similar file that is used sitewide. You can specify how many links you want to display up to a maximum of 5

You will then be given “points” based on a number of factors, PageRank, Number of pages cached by search engines, points are built up over time so don’t expect to see huge amounts of points straight away, but they do build up quickly.

Once you have your points you can then start to advertise your site/sites. you dont have to advertise the site you are placing ads on, so you can have one site for showing ads and another one or more than one site for promotion.

There are also other features like sending points to other accounts, so webmaster with large sites can rent points to other receive links users and make some $$

Once set up it runs on autopilot, just add new ad’s when needed and new site when you need more points.

Tip one:
Alt tags. Using keywords in alt tags is a good way to improve your search engine position.

Example if you are selling a range of different widgets, you could use alt tags keywords such as “blue widgets” “red widgets” “round Widgets” and so on.

To put an alt tag into an image look at the example code below:

<img src=”/images/bluewidgets.jpg” alt=”Blue Widgets” width=”600″ height=”500″ />

Now when someone puts their mouse over the image it will display the text, Blue Widgets, search engines will pick up on this and boost your SERPs a little.

Tip two:
Image names. Using keywords in the names of your images can also help your SERPs, rather than just calling them inage1.jpg and image2.jp call them something descriptive and relevant.

Lets look at that code again:

<img src=”/images/bluewidgets.jpg” alt=”Blue Widgets” width=”600″ height=”500″ />

A descriptive file name with a corresponding alt text will improve your SERPs especially if its a practice you apply to all the images on your site.

Try it out and let me know how you get on.