By P.J. Swesey

You may have heard that Google and other search engines prefer that you use dashes or hyphens (-) instead of underlines or underscores (_) as word separators in your URLs. Google actually recommends that you use dashes or hyphens when creating search engine friendly or search engine optimized URLs instead of underscores. Here’s why.

Google sees underlines or underscores as an actual underline character, so a PHP programmer searching for “similar_text” would get results about the PHP function similar_text() instead of all search results for “similar text”. So the hyphens in SEF URLs tell Google that each word is a separate word, while underlines tell Google that your URL is one long word.

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By Rick Youngblood

SEO, or search engine optimization, is the most important element in building a successful website. Most people online have heard the term SEO and have some idea of what is involved yet it remains a mysterious process to many. One of the reasons SEO is so mysterious is that it can be a complicated endeavor and search engines are constantly changing the way they rank sites and the way the recognize the many tools of SEO.

At the forefront of the SEO check and balance system is the leading search engine Google. They have pretty much set the standard for technology in search engine algorithms that can track the relevancy of a website to its content and SEO efforts. Their ranking system remains one of the most popular methods of determining a web site’s quality because of their diligent efforts of weeding out the bad apples that have little to offer a consumer other than skilled manipulation and the ability to ‘play the system’ to their advantage.

Of course taking advantage of the system makes perfect sense from a business standpoint but from the search engine outlook of wanting to provide the best quality sites on their results for the viewer it can become difficult to differentiate the site that is good quality wise from the site that is good because it has a very manipulative operator at the helm.

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By Colm Byrne

It requires a lot of effort in designing and building a site, but it can be all in vain if you can’t attract enough traffic towards it. You put all your efforts in an attractive design of your website and the next step you do is to put it in front of the online world.

You can’t get success only by uploading your website on the www; the target is to attract well-qualified visitors towards your website, which can’t be done unless you put your site in the eyes of the search engines.

Today, all of the internet users use search engines to find the site relevant to their interest. For example, if a person is interested in finding information about on-going and up-coming cricket events, he/she can easily do so by typing in the keywords in Google, Yahoo or any other search engine. The search engine, as a result, will present a list of most relevant websites on the basis of their keyword. So, in short, to get more traffic towards your website, make it more optimized and put all efforts into keeping your website in the eye of the search engine. This traffic is, without any doubt, the life of a business. No e-business can run without adequate traffic.

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What triggers popularity with a search engine has always been elusive. You have to change how you market your website and even build it to make search engines rank it on their top page. For someone new on the scene, it can appear to be a daunting task. Here in this article we will look at the latest in SEO and SEM by starting with the site itself.

First thing is what not to do. Remember back when websites would have massive keyword lists at the bottom or top of the pages? These words were paragraphs long and didn’t make any sense at all! The human eye knew that it didn’t mean anything, but this text was designed for SEO and to trick the search engines. Sure, it worked for awhile, but now search engines are wise to our tricks. They know these paragraphs are designed only for SEO, which now will get you penalized.

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…and double the number of your pages indexed in Google! — By Geoff Hineman

Of the many techniques available to SEOs, perhaps the most hotly debated is the use of the nofollow tag for PageRank sculpting. While many SEOs support nofollow as a proven and verifiable way to help important pages rank higher, others approach it with hesitation, preferring instead to adjust their site architecture or their robots.txt file.

This report pulls back the curtain and takes a closer look at the mystery and even danger surrounding the different techniques available for using nofollow to sculpt your PageRank.

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