Guest Blog by Izzy Woods

How to Master Basic SEO Techniques

With more and more people and businesses owning their own website, it’s more difficult than ever to be heard above the online blare of everyone else. If you’re desperate to stand head and shoulders above the competition, then you’ll need to master the basics of SEO. Yep, that’s search engine optimization, folks – read on to discover what you need to do and how to do it…

• Big Up Your First Paragraph

By that we mean tell your readers what your article is all about. Get to the point. Lay it down on the line. Be obvious. It doesn’t matter – as long as you purely and simply tell your readers what the article is about then you’ve nailed it. Why? Because Google and all those other search engines assume that this first paragraph is a good place to pick up what your article is all about. So make sure you’ve got all your fundamental keywords in there – preferably in sentences one or two in fact.

• Optimize your Robots.txt

To help SEO your website, it’s best to make sure it’s optimized by robots.txt. This file controls what pages on your site get crawled by the search engine spiders.

• Put your Keywords in your Title

If you want to rank highly in search engines such as Google and Yahoo, you’ll need to put your keywords in your title. Keywords are the words that people search for in Google for instance – so the more popular the keywords you use, the more hits you’re likely to get. Remember that Google only indexes the first eight words in your title so keep your keywords in the first part of your title – best of all, try and keep your title to under eight words in length then you’ll never miss out.

• Use the ALT attribute

Search engines can’t read images, however they are capable of reading the attribute which is used to describe the image. Make sure you describe it properly and don’t just fill it up with disassociated keywords merely to try and improve your search engine ranking. Unfortunately, if you do this it’s highly likely Google will mark you down for bad behaviour. So, describe your image truthfully – and if you’ve got a relevant image you should still be able to label it with a relevant keyword.

• Quality is Everything when it comes to Links

Most people who have their own websites know it’s beneficial to link to other websites, however the quality of those websites is also of utmost importance and plays a key role in improving your rankings.
As much as possible try to link to websites that rank highly in search engines – even better if it’s the other way round and a high-ranking website links to your website in one of its articles.
Google’s spiders will also do their best to figure out if you’re linking to spam and malware-injecting websites. Although why you’d want to do that is beyond us. So play fair and do things properly. And, ultimately if you do play fair, the people who read your website will respect you even more.

• Anchor Text

If you’ve got links on your pages make sure you use the anchor text – the text inside the tags which actually links to the other pages. It’s important to do this and include a description of where the link will take the page viewer, because it tells the search engine crawlers where the link will take you. Try not to use phrases like ‘click here’ too much as it won’t be of any benefit to your website or the page you’re linking to either. Finally, make sure you don’t go over 55 characters in your anchor link. Anymore and you’ll start confusing those crawlers.

• Header Tags

Header tags can also be used to optimize your keywords, but remember, those search engine crawlers can only read basic HTML, so there’s no need to go all fancy on us!

Just posting this link as a test. Social Media Management and Web Design
Social Media Management and Web Design

First of all, have I mentioned that we at SpinWidgets LOVE WordPress? Recently I was asked by a client what content management system we used for their site and why we picked that one. Great question! Well let me just give you a list of the top 5 reasons we love to develop on this platform:

1. Open Source
2. Ease of use for end user
3. Thousands of cool add-ins
4. Infinitely customizable architecture
5. SEO – WordPress Has tremendous pick up on search engines

So some other folks use Joomla, Blogger, Drupal or even Dot Net Nuke. We however have faith that 303 Million WordPress users worldwide can’t be wrong, and each time we open a new WordPress project, we just find more things to love!

Hidden Falls is a tucked away California paradise located deep within the Redwood National Forest. And there are times in life when you really know that nature has a plan. Times when you feel like you are in the flow of what is happening, and moving like the water through the rapids of a waterfall. As surely as that water is spun and tossed around, it is nonetheless all going the same direction overall. That’s the feeling that we aim to achieve on every project.

Design like water… Long ago, one of my favorite teachers instilled a principal in me: “Mind Like Water,” which (if you’ll allow me) I’ll use as a comparison to the idea that I’m trying to convey here. Design like water means to design to achieve a balance that is neither too much or too little of the desired elements needed to comprise a finished product. Like water in a waterfall, the design must flow, have direction and maintain a resonant theme while still having an element of randomness and chaos.

At Spinwidgets, we say that our design is inspired by nature because that is what we judge each result by. How natural is it to navigate and read? How is the on page optimization geared to attract organic traffic to your site? What is your keyword strategy and how does that tie in to your linking strategy? Does organic mean that they didn’t use pesticides in the making of my seo? All but one of these are questions that if you haven’t already asked yourself, you should probably be scurrying to find out right now… really, if this is you just stop reading and Google it.

Our goal always centers around a design and an experience that reacts with the user like water. When you skip a stone across the water, the water reacts in equal fashion to the amount of force generated by the skipping stone by rippling across the surface. And when the stone is already descending towards Davey Jones Locker, those waves are already beginning to smooth to a surface that is calm and ready for anything.

I stumbled across Rated Awesome, liked it so much that I thought all of you that are part of twitter might like it too. It’s an irreverent look at a pretty sweet internet phenomenon, but I like it! Something about it reminds me of web design in Bakersfield… web design in California even… ok; website design and social media in general. Viral videos like this are life blood to the web. I’m always so excited to get a moment to peek my head out into the internet to see whats funny and interesting. Funny enough, I found a link to this on twitter. It had been tweeted along with a link to vampires vs Blade (unrelated, but also some of the funniest stuff I’ve seen in awhile.)

It seems like so long ago when I met twitters rep Bret at the Social Networking Conference in San Fran. At that time it was the first anyone had heard of twitter, and now look at the 100 million + users it has. Back then, PerfSpot was bigger than twitter! My how time flies. twitter went from just another idea to a site that draws more than 180 million unique visits a month. Interesting how a little idea turned into a service that handles more than 3 billion requests a day right?

There has been a really big call for a little deck that describes the stuff we do here at SpinWidgets. Aside from the good stuff to come in time as we get the chance to update on here, our graphic artist put this PDF presentation together to go over some of the high points with you. These are some of the ways we help you get more traffic! With all that is involved in standard seo practices, you owe it to yourself to get the Bakersfield search engine experts on your side!

Well you might have noticed that we updated the menu of services section of the site today. Lots more changes are coming soon in here, particularly in filling in all the content to describe what it is that we do. Hard part is… we are always doing it for clients, so the time we put aside to do these updates isn’t as much as we’d like. That’s a great thing, but we are really looking forward to the near future, when more of the process is described in detail for those of you wishing to really get a grip on what all of this means and why it is or isn’t important to what you want to do online.

First, we will cover the basic need for a site and also discuss the needs you have for your site. Do you need a site to generate and collect leads? Are you looking for a full eCommerce site or do you just sell a few items? Are you looking to do something dynamic involving one or more databases? While we could begin by discussing your various hardware requirements and the miriad of programming and designing options, for the purpose of this sites intentions moving forward the decision is most likely one you have already made, and you are ready to start laying out some broad strokes.

Ask anyone and they will tell you that the best start that any site can ever have is to get a solid seo strategy mapped out. SpinWidgets does the necessary keyword research before you begin and begin with your goal in mind. From that point on, it becomes a series of interesting new questions and answers that make up your seo marketing profile. SpinWidgets can help you with each step of this process and work with you to ensure that your goals are in mind and a plan is in place before the first h goes into the tml. Bottom line: Strong foundations make for Strong results.

Hey guys and gals, thanks for stopping by the shop today. The ninjas and hamsters have all been very busy grinding out the newest and most exciting edition of the SpinWidgets home page. We are going to take this step by step, and just post updates each day a little bit at a time so you can kind of get the idea of what goes in to making a site. Hopefully we can discuss some things here that you will find meaningful and that you can use to make your experience of the internet richer and more rewarding.

What you see here is a hand tailored WordPress installation. Also included in the goodies we got today is a fully compliant CSS3 and HTML based website with built in content management. Pretty sweet eh!? Next step will be to sort out the navigation a bit and transfer the data from the old version of the site. For the time being though, if you want to check out the old site a bit, click here to visit the old SpinWidgets Homepage.

Our newest and most exciting areas of growth are in Social Media Marketing, SEO, E-Commerce and iPhone Application Development so look here soon for a lot more info about how that all works, how we price jobs, what it is exactly that we do and so forth.