If you think of your website as a map, navigation labels name the streets, features, shopping districts, and even major buildings like libraries and community centers. Does that description sound too expansive for something so humble? Maybe you need to rethink your definition of navigation labels.

As Shari Thurow explains on Search Engine Land, most people think of the text placed on a navigation button as a navigation label. Keep in mind, however, that most site visitors and searchers use multiple cues to orient themselves, and to make sure they ended up where they intended to go. Thurow's list of navigation labels includes the common definition I described, plus titles; headings and subheadings; breadcrumbs; embedded text links (in context); and URLs.

What is the point of expanding this definition? It gets you thinking about all of these different page elements at the same time. If you can see what they have in common, and think of them as belonging to the same group, you'll give them a more consistent structure.

Consistency helps anyone trying to navigate anywhere; it creates and fulfills expectations, and enables visitors to predict what they'll find when they click through or read something just by looking at the navigation label. Or as Thurow puts it, “When navigation labels contain keywords and are used consistently throughout a website, they effectively communicate aboutness of both page and site content, as well as provide a clear information scent to content that is not available on the web page.”

So now you understand how treating these very important page elements as aids to navigation can make your human visitors happy. They can also make the search engines happy. When spiders crawl your web pages, if they see a consistent structure to your navigation labels, with a predictable usage of keywords, you've made it easier for them to figure out your site's relevant topics. To put it bluntly, using navigation labels correctly can help your site's SEO.

The key point, however, is to use navigation labels correctly. This goes beyond simply putting keywords in your URLs. Fortunately, there are a number of prevailing conventions on the Internet for structuring your navigation labels.

You've probably noticed that nearly every business website online includes certain kinds of pages, such as an About Us page. The usual URL for such a page resembles the form http://www.yoursite.com/about.html. Likewise, a page that shows visitors how to contact the business might use the URL http://www.yoursite.com/contact.html.

Nesting your pages can also be pretty straightforward. Say you include press releases on your site. You could set up a category page for press releases: http://www.yoursite.com/press-releases.html. Under that category, you might list a URL like http://www.yoursite.com/press-releases/2009/ABC-releases-whereami-app/, which links to a press release published in 2009 that details your company's release of an application that always tells the user exactly where they are.

As Thurow explains, “URL naming conventions should at least be partially based on how people locate, discover, and label desired content.” This can be difficult if you're using a CMS that doesn't let you rewrite or customize your URLs easily. In fact, I'd suggest you avoid those; if you don't, you'll be stuck making awful, expensive workarounds.

Sometimes building a workaround, or a better URL, is necessary. As you've probably noticed from my description, good websites feature a hierarchical structure. Take the fictitious press release URL, for example. It indicates that on www.yoursite.com, there is a category page named “Press Releases” with a subcategory page for the year 2009, on which there is a press release about the company releasing a new application. That's not as bad as some URLs, but it's already getting a little long.

Now take a look at an example Thurow gives, that one might find on a real estate web site: http://www.domain.com/vacation-rentals/usa/states/new-york/cities/new-york-city/neighborhoods/chelsea/chelsea-apartment-1525474.html. It's easy enough to break that down if you're a human searcher. The content concerns vacation rentals in the United States, in the state and city of New York, in the Chelsea neighborhood – and it specifically covers apartments in that area. But it's 132 characters long! What human is going to remember that? And what spider is going to crawl through all those levels to find that page?

Thurow suggests a different URL structure: http://www.domain.com/vacation-rentals/ny/chelsea-1525474.html. This is much shorter, easier to remember, and better for both your human visitors and the search engines. It keeps your most important keywords, which also helps your site's SEO. The only problem is that it does not reflect the site's primary hierarchical structure – but in some cases, where doing so would lead to particularly long URLs, this may not be avoidable. “URL names do not have to be long and unwieldy in order for both searchers and search engines to comprehend them,” Thurow notes.

Sometimes, with a big site, you simply need to balance issues of length, navigation, and keywords. Take this recent URL from Microsoft's website: http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2011/may11/05-10WebcastMA.mspx. It tells you that it's from their section aimed at the press; that it's a press release; the year and date; and, to some extent, what it concerns (in this case, a webcast relating to Microsoft's acquisition of Skype).

Does the lack of certain keywords in the URL mean Microsoft's SEO will suffer? Not likely. The item's actual headline reads “Microsoft to Host Financial Community Webcast to Recap Skype Acquisition.” This is another reason you should consider all of your navigation labels at the same time; doing so lets you strike a balance, so if you need to pull back on keywords in one, you can supply them in another.

Now that you've seen how navigation labels can work, you may look at your website with new eyes. Move slowly; if your website is performing well, you don't want to make changes that might have a negative effect on your standing in the SERPs. But if it's already difficult to manage, you may need to build a structure that's easier to navigate, easier to maintain, and easier to rank.

http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Search-Engine-Optimization-Help/How-Navigation-Labels-Improve-SEO/1/

Google has so many great tools you can use for choosing keywords that it seems almost impossible to know about all of them. Recently, I learned about one called Wonder Wheel. It's intended to give a searcher more options to consider, but it can be used for other purposes as well.

To use Google Wonder Wheel, start by putting a fairly general search term into the Google search engine, and hit “search.” In addition to the search results, you'll see a column on the left hand side. Click on “Search Tools” or “More search tools,” depending on how often you use search tools. You'll see one that says “Wonder wheel.” That's the one we want. Click on that, and watch a bit of magic.

For purposes of example, we'll start with a search on “square foot gardening.” Clicking on Wonder Wheel after doing that search divides the main search result area in half. On the right side, you'll see a column of search results not too dissimilar to the list that took up most of the screen before. But you'll notice a big change on the left.

What happened? Wonder Wheel took “square foot gardening” and put it in the middle of a shaded circle. Spokes radiate out from this circle like rays out from a sun. Each spoke leads to a related key phrase. This particular search yields eight spokes:

Container gardening
Lasagna gardening
Square foot gardening forum
Square foot gardening spacing
Intensive gardening
Square foot gardening vermiculite
Square foot gardening tomatoes
Square foot gardening layout

Each of these terms is related to the search phrase “square foot gardening.” I've just gotten interested in square foot gardening myself, so I recognize some of these terms. But if I were starting a blog on my square foot gardening adventures (or misadventures, depending on how next season turns out), I might not have thought to describe it as “container gardening” or “intensive gardening.” And I know I never would have thought of “lasagna gardening”!

In fact, the term “lasagna gardening” is a little too interesting to leave alone, so let's investigate it a little further. Every term on the Wonder Wheel can be clicked. Clicking “lasagna gardening” creates another wheel. The original wheel with “square foot gardening” at the center glides below it, while remaining connected to the new wheel. The old wheel takes on a lighter color, but you can still click on every keyword in it.

And what do we have in the new keyword wheel – excuse me, Wonder wheel? Well, “lasagna gardening” sits at the center, and eight new keywords encircle it in the same way eight key phrases encircled “square foot gardening” earlier. I can click on every single one of them. There are only two major differences (aside from the new keywords) from when the original wheel dominated the left hand side of screen. First, there's a line connecting the new wheel to the old wheel. And second, as you would expect, the right hand column, which lists the search results, has changed to list results for “lasagna gardening.”

And here's a nice touch to satisfy my curiosity: the very first result includes a one-sentence definition for the phrase “lasagna gardening,” so I'm no longer in the dark about what it is. Now I know how it relates to “square foot gardening,” and can fit that bit of knowledge into the larger picture of what I know about the more general subject.

I can go even deeper if I want. Clicking on “lasagna gardening plants” gives me a third Wonder wheel. The first one, with “square foot gardening” in the center, remains visible only as a circle – though interestingly, it shows up as part of a keyword in the new circle: “square foot gardening plants.” And once again, the search results on the right hand side change. If I want to go back to my original Wonder wheel, I need only click that circle on the bottom, and I'm right back where I started.

For just a few minutes of effort, I discovered about two dozen key phrases that are related to “square foot gardening.” A number of these are terms I might not have come up with on my own. Many of them don't even contain the phrase “square foot gardening,” but clearly deal with related, relevant topics. I'm sure you can see how this tool can help you come up with new keywords to aim for on your own or your clients' websites. Good luck!

http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Website-Promotion-Help/Go-For-Quality-in-Your-Social-Profile/

How specifying a canonical can help in solving your duplicate content Issues

We are going to talk about www vs. non-www,

An example of this duplicate content from a domain that should know better http://validator.w3.org http://validator.w3.org/index.html is the same page

This is just to give you an example of what this is about.

If you don’t see anything wrong with this you need to read this artical

Sever side fixes

Canonical Issues & Duplicate Content

What’s happening here is the search engine bots are seeing duplicate content because the URL http://www.domain.com

And the http://www.domain.com/index.html pages are usually same content in almost all websites but technically all of these URLS are different address and could be different pages. Just adding to the confusion the http://domain.com and the http://domain.com/index.html also should return the same page. So the search engine has to decide which is the best page to return, by picking what it believes is the best URL when there are several choices and which webpage page is the duplicate content.

To make matters even worse when you have other sites linking to your domain with more then one of these URLs it is splitting your page rank.

Search engines can not just disregard any of the URLS as some domains do have different content on them. Some people believe this can be sorted out in Google’s webmasters tools, which is not really true at the time of writing this Google webmasters tools it asks you how you would like your URLS to be displayed in the SERP with the www, Or without that’s all, not how it should index your URLs into their database

It’s hard to believe the number of sites this affects

To fix this on an apache web server you need a .htaccess file you can edit on your server just copy the text below to the top of your .htaccess file and replace the yourdomain with your own and change the .com if necessary

RewriteEngine on

Options +FollowSymlinks

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain

RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index\.html\ HTTP/

RewriteRule ^index\.html$ http://www.yourdomain.com/ [R=301,L]

And that’s it all the search engine bots and in coming links will be redirected to http://www.yourdomain.com domain address in so removing any duplicate content issues and boosting your page rank by redirecting all incoming links to your http://www.yourdomain.com domain address.

Google has come out with a Meta tag fix which is:

GOOGLE DANCE : -
The name "Google Dance" is often used to describe the index update of the Google search engine. Google's index update occurs on average once per month. It can be identified by significant movement in search results and especially by Google's cache of all indexed pages reflecting the status of Google's last spidering. But the update does not proceed as a switch from one index to another at one point in time. In fact, it takes several days to complete the index update. During this period, the old and the new index alternate on www.google.com. At an early stage, the results from the new index occur sporadically. But later on, they appear more frequently. Google dances.

Technical Background on Google

The Google search engine pulls its results from more than 10,000 servers which are simple Linux PCs that are used by Google for reasons of cost. Naturally, an index update cannot be proceeded on all those servers at the same time. One server after the other has to be updated with the new index.

Many webmasters think that, during the Google Dance, Google is in some way able to control if a server with the new index or a server with an old index responds to a search query. But, since Google's index is inverse, this would be very complicated. As we will show below, there is no such control within the system. In fact, the reason for the Google Dance is Google's way of using the Domain Name System (DNS).

Google Dance and DNS

Not only Google's index is spread over more than 10,000 servers, but also these servers are, as of now, placed in eight different data centers. These data centers are mainly located in the US (i.e. Santa Clara, California and Herndon, Virginia), indeed, in June 2002 Google's first European data center in Zurich, Switzerland went online. Very likely, there are more data centers to come, which will perhaps be spread over the whole world. However, in January and April 2003 Google has put two data centers on stream which are again located in the US.

In order to direct traffic to all these data centers, Google could thoeretically record all queries centrally and then send them to the data centers. But this would obviously be inefficient. In fact, each data center has its own IP address (numerical address on the internet) and the way these IP addresses are accessed is managed by the Domain Name System.

Basically, the DNS works like this: On the Internet, data transfers always take place in-between IP addresses. The information about which domain resolves to which IP address is provided by the name servers of the DNS. When a user enters a domain into his browser, a locally configured name server gets him the IP address for that domain by contacting the name server which is responsible for that domain. (The DNS is structured hierarchically. Illustrating the whole process would go beyond the scope of this paper.) The IP address is then cached by the name server, so that it is not necessary to contact the responsible name server each time a connection is built up to a domain.

The records for a domain at the responsible name server constitute for how long the record may be cached by a caching name server. This is the Time To Live (TTL) of a domain. As soon as the TTL expires, the caching name server has to fetch the record for a domain again from the responsible name server. Quite often, the TTL is set to one or more days. In contrast, the Time To Live of the domain www.google.com is only five minutes. So, a name server may only cache Google's IP address for five minutes and has then to look up the IP address again.

Each time, Google's name server is contacted, it sends back the IP address of only one data center. In this way, Google queries are always directed to different data centers by changing DNS records. On the one hand, the DNS records may be based on the load of the single data centers. In this way, Google would conduct a simple form of load balancing by its use of the DNS. On the other hand, the geographical location of a caching name server may influence how often it receives the single data centers' IP addresses. So, the distance for data transmissions can be reduced. In order to show the DNS records of the domain www.google.com, we present them here by the example of one caching name server.

How data centers, DNS and Google Dance are related, is easily answered. During the Google Dance, the data centers do not receive the new index at the same time. In fact, the new index is transferred to one data center after the other. When a user queries Google during the Google Dance, he may get the results from a data center which still has the old index at one point im time and from a data center which has the new index a few minutes later. From the users perspective, the index update took place within some minutes. But of course, this procedure may reverse, so that Google switches seemingly between the old and the new index.

The Google Dance Test Domains www2 & www3

The beginning of a Google Dance can always be watched at the test domains www2.google.com and www3.google.com. Those domains normally have stable DNS records which make the domains resolve to only one (often the same) IP address. Before the Google Dance begins, at least one of the test domains is assigned the IP address of the data center that receives the new index first.

Building up a completely new index once per month can cause quite some trouble. After all, Google has to spider some billion documents an then to process many TeraBytes of data. Therefore, testing the new index is inevitable. Of course, the folks at Google don't need the test domains themselves. Most certainly, they have many options to check a new index internally, but they do not have a lot of time to conduct the tests.

So, the reason for having www2 and www3 is rather to show the new index to webmasters which are interested in their upcoming rankings. Many of these webmasters discuss the new index at the Google forums out on the web. These discussions can be observed by Google employees. At that time, the general public cannot see the new index yet, because the DNS records for www.google.com normally do not point to the IP address of the data center that is updated first when the update begins.

As soon as Google's test community of forums members does not find any severe malfunctions caused by the new index, Google's DNS records are ready to make www.google.com resolve the the data center that is updated first. This is the time when the Google Dance begins. But if severe malfunctions become obvious during this test phase, there is still the possibility to cancel the update at the other data centers. The domain www.google.com would not resolve to the data center which has the flawed index and the general public could not take any notice about it. In this case, the index could be rebuilt or the web could be spidered again.

So, the search results which are to be seen on www2.google.com and www3.google.com will always appear on www.google.com later on, as long as there is a regular index update. However, there may be minor fluctuations. On the one hand, the index at one data center never absolutely equals the index at another data center. We can easily check this by watching the number of results for the same query at the data center domains listed above, which often differ from each other. On the other hand, it is often assumed that the iterative PageRank calculation is not finished yet, when the Google Dance begins so that preliminary values exert influence on rankings at that point in time.

source : - http://www.google-dance-tool.com/what_is_google_dance.html

It is necessary for you to highlight certain parts of your website that you want your readers to look at. There are several tags in html which allows you to do so. For instance – the header tags [h1] [h2] [h3], Bold [strong], Italic [em] etc. The text inside your header tags (e.g. [h1]) is given very high importance by the search engine. Usually you can use them to define the page/post titles or the important sections of your website.

Header Elements:

Header 1: Header 1 should be used to define the most important section of your page. Usually Header 1 is used for Site’s title or header text.
Header 2 & 3: Header 2 and 3 can be used for Page/Post titles or important sections of your pages. Separating your content with headers is a good practice as it makes your site more readable and easy to navigate.

Text Styles:

Bold: You can bold (e.g. [strong]) certain words which are of high importance. Sometimes it’s good to bold your keywords where appropriate. However overdoing this may get you penalized.
Italic: You can use the [em] tag to emphasize certain words which will appear in italic.
Quote: This is very useful when you are quoting from someone.

Way, way back when that wall was still upright search engine algorithms were so dumb they couldn’t work out what a page was about just from the content. So some bright spark had the ingenious idea to create a set of tags (meta tags) that inferred information about a pages content to the search engines.

Great idea, except there was nothing to stop a webmaster stuffing or spamming their Meta Tags with irrelevant, but very high traffic keywords and keyword phrases. Which of course they did with enthusiasm, you would find adult sites using words like Disney and Pokemon in their Keywords Meta Tag for the traffic!!

Today the vast majority of meta tags are worthless and those that are still considered by search engines aren’t worth that much. For example Google confers no benefit from any meta tags, so if you expect a high Google ranking from perfectly optimised keywords in your meta tags, don’t hold your breath.
Which Meta Tags Should You Use?

For Google adding the Description Meta Tag won’t result in a boost in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), but the description might be used for the description for your SERP listings in Google. So though you won’t get a ranking boost, if your write an interesting Description Meta Tag and Google uses it (not guaranteed), you might get a higher click through rate compared to a random snippet of text from your pages. All other meta tags (including the Keywords Meta Tag) are either completely ignored or won’t result in a SERPs boost.

Yahoo says they use the Keyword Meta Tag when it ranks a page. So it makes sense to add one for Yahoo and any other minor search engines that still use. Also there are directories and other websites that automatically take this information to create a listing to your site. Don’t fret over it though, add the main phrase for that page to the Keywords Meta Tag and user friendly description of the page to the Description Meta Tag and forget about it.
Example Meta Tags

Below you will find an example set of meta tags. This is for a page you want fully indexed in all search engines.

*/








*/
The DOCTYPE-
*/
*/
Is the DOCTYPE, it’s not a meta tag and it’s not essential you add this to a page for good search engine placement, but if you want a page to validate in a HTML validator (i.e. http://validator.w3.org/) you’ll need to add the right one.
The TITLE-


Again this isn’t a meta tag, but it’s sometimes referred to as a meta tag by those who don’t fully understand meta tags. The title element is very, very important to a pages optimisation, which is why we have an entire page dedicated to Title Optimization. The title should include the most important phrase for that page and possibly one or two highly relevant keywords to create related phrases. The one above helps several important phrases including Meta Tags Optimization, Meta Tags, Meta Tags Tutorial, SEO Tutorial, SEO Meta Tags etc…. Don’t go over the top with adding lots of keywords, keep it short and sweet so each word gets a reasonable boost and don’t forget potential visitors (they have to read it).
The DESCRIPTION META TAG-


As covered earlier in Google the contents of the description meta tag will not have an impact on the pages search engine rankings, but may be used as the description in the search results. So be descriptive, think about what a potential visitor might click on not keyword stuffing.
The KEYWORDS META TAG-


Of no value to Google and probably little value to other major search engines. Easiest way to fill this meta tag is by pasting the same contents as the TITLE minus anything you added for visitors to read. In the example above we removed “SEO Tutorial – ” because that is there for visitors who read the TITLE element as part of a search engine listing.
The Character Set and links external files-



Not meta tags and will have no impact on a pages search engine placement, the Character set is used by browsers so the right set of characters are used to display your page. Don’t add one and the browser will use its default (it will guess), this might mean your page doesn’t look right to a visitor. External style sheets (CSS files) and external javascript (JS files) are referenced here. Again no impact on SEO, but if you can push some javascript or markup off your page you should. It saves bandwidth and means your pages load faster.
Robots Meta Tag

There are dozens of other meta tags, but hardly any of them are any use to us for improving search engine ranking. The most important one you may need sometime is the Robots Meta Tag which looks like this-



It can be used to prevent (but not encourage) search engine spiders access to individual web pages. We pasted the above piece of code from a page from a Lingerie Shop. The page is part of the shopping basket and we don’t want visitors to enter the site via these pages (the site wouldn’t work correctly). By including the above search engine spiders won’t index or follow links from this page. Be aware that bad spiders ~(ones that harvest email addresses etc… won’t adhere to this tag, so don’t expect to much from it). The robots meta tag can be mimicked via a robots.txt file which we’ll deal with on another SEO Tutorial page.

Here’s what you can put in the robots meta tag-

Index the page and follow all links from it. If this is what you want don’t use the robot meta tag at all since by default search engine spiders do this anyway.

Don’t index (cache) this page, but do follow the links. Some webmasters who are using black hat SEO techniques use this to try to hide their shady techniques (i.e. cloaking)!

Index this page, but don’t follow the links.

Don’t index the page and don’t follow the links. Use this on pages you don’t want the search engines to have anything to do with.

more details : - http://www.scrubtheweb.com/abs/builder.html

The TITLE element (not Title Tag as many call it, but will be using the phrase “title tag” in this SEO article for SEO reasons) of your web page (found within the HEAD) is very important, probably the most important part of a page (especially for placement in Google and Yahoo) and should ideally be SEO optimized for a small number of keywords or key phrases (preferably just the one main phrase for that page).

The exact number of keywords, keyword density** and keyword proximity is dependent on a number of SEO factors including the difficulty of the keyword phrases, the PageRank (PR) of the page, if you have control of the backlinks and anchor text to that page (so you can change the anchor text of the links) and the age of sites backlinks (older backlinks means it’s easier for that site to rank well).

** There is no SEO evidence adding a keyword two or more times to a title element will increase the SEO benefit for that keyword. For this reason it is advisable to only add a keyword once unless it makes sense from a user or keyword proximity perspective: for example for keyword proximity reasons a title like “SEO Tutorial – SEO Title Optimization” is better than “SEO Tutorial – Title Optimization” IF your main SERP is “SEO Title Optimization”.

As a general rule of thumb when it comes to the title tags less is better than more as it concentrates the SEO benefit of the title over less keywords.

Example – This web page SEO Services is optimized primarily for the phrase SEO Services and a few related SEO terms including SEO Quote, SEO Expert, SEO Consultant and various phrases including the keyword SEO.

We could of stuffed the TITLE element with all of these keyword phrases i.e. -



Or even a list of phrases like this as the title tag-



Instead we Optimized the Title as-



We decided to use the short title element because this concentrates SEO benefit from the title element to that single two word phrase. Since Search Engines like Google rate the contents of the title tag as important you ideally want THE most important phrase for that page on its own.

There are exceptions to this loose rule, if you have a very small web site and lots of keyword phrases you wish to target, you have little choice, but to double or even triple up your titles keywords.

Also if you have high PR pages (i.e. PR6) and are having no problems keeping the main phrase for those pages, you could experiment by adding further highly relevant search phrases to the title tag. Take care not to over do it, what you do today may not show full effect for several months. For example if you added an extra phrase and 4 weeks later your main SERPs had not dropped, so you add another phrase, you might not see the negative effects of the first change for a couple more months. You may find 3 or 4 months after the first change loosing the pages main previously stable SERP!

When making changes to a successful page err on the side of caution, SEO is a very long term process and requires a lot of patience. If you are taking a risk (like adding more phrases to a title element) give the page at least 2 months and preferably 3 before deciding if it was successful or not. If a recent change results in a major drop in SERPs seriously consider reverting to the original page, but be aware what you see today might be the result of what you did 3 months ago or could be a coincidence, the search engine may of changed it’s algorithm (check the forums for reports of big changes) or some links to your site have been removed or changed.
Visitor Needs vs. Search Engine Optimization

As with all aspects of web site design don’t forget your visitors needs, some keyword phrases aren’t descriptive enough to use alone as a title tag, what you put in the title element is the text searches will see when they see a listing for your page in a Search Engines Results Pages (SERPs). If it doesn’t appeal to your potential visitors they will not click through to your sites listing! This is precisely why the title tag of this page is SEO Tutorial – Title Optimization and not just Title Optimization. The former (SEO Tutorial – Title Optimization) tells a potential visitor this page is part of an SEO Tutorial, the latter (Title Optimization) does not.
Quick SEO Tip – note above how rather than writing “The former tells a potential visitor this page is part of a Tutorial, the latter does not.” we added the important keywords “SEO Tutorial – Title Optimization”, “SEO” and “Title Optimization”. Being long winded is a prerequisite to good SEO copywriting!

In conclusion what you put between the element is very important so try to get it right.


source : - http://www.seo-gold.com/seo-tutorial/title-optimization