SEO Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Is domain.com and sub.domain.com the same?

Sub domains are just sub folders of your main domain (domain.com) but are in fact treated as separate entities with the search engines. Using sub domains can offer a diverse offering of goods and services while controlling everything from a single domain. If you want to use sub domains, you have to find a web hosting provider that will allow you to add sub domains. I must be noted that to use sub domains, do not use duplicate content. It must be unique and different from your main domain.

What is Black Hat SEO and what is White Hat SEO?

Black Hat is tricks that some webmasters use to artificially boost their rankings in the search engines. Such tricks are things like hidden text, using hundreds of keywords, and methods of cloaking. At one time, these tricks used to fool the search engines but today search engines such as Google will penalize you for employing them.

Take a look at Google’s Webmaster guidelines:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769

White Hat SEO is only ethical techniques. This is where web designers play nice and will follow the search engine guidelines to optimize their websites. At BJAC Interactive, we only use White Hat Techniques. We will make sure that your WebPages are indexed and well structured. We will also use make sure that descriptive page titles with keyword rich inbound links.

My Website shows up in the search engines but not for the keyword?

Special techniques are used to place your website well in the search engines for specific keywords. It’s not just a matter of using the keywords in the Meta tags but many other factors that will influence your website to a specific keyword. Consult us for a free no obligation quote here.

What about Meta Tags, do the search engines still use them?

This has been a debate in the SEO community and how much weight search engines place on Meta tags. Our advice is to always include the Meta tags, but not to abuse things like the keyword Meta tags with lots of keywords and keywords that don’t have any relevance to the page.

People use Google the most (have you ever heard of just Googling It!)
How do I rank well in Google?

As the most important recommendation, it would be to fill your website up with unique, useful and informative content with lots of pages. Not just a blatant sales pitch on the latest money making venture. It should be of useful value to any one viewing it. This is most valued in the eyes of search engines. It is also very time consuming and costing to create and to maintain. Even though there are about 150 different things that Google looks at technically, here are a few things you can do to improve your ranking:

1. The HTML <Title> tags should all be unique, use the keywords that people search with and should be relevant to the page.
2. The HTML <H1> tags should also use keyword that people search on, be unique and be relevant to the page.
3. For page content, should be between 300 to 500 words and should have 5 to 6 occurrences of two – word keywords on the search phrase that you want to be ranked for. The page should also have a range of synonyms related to the theme of the page and clearly indicate the meaning of the page to the search engine.
4. Although Meta tag descriptions are not used much for ranking, they are placed up the search rank and a description should encourage a user to click.
5. The link structure of your site such as the menus and other links should not have any broken links.
6. You should have as many one-way links from other sites as much as possible. This can’t be free-for-all websites or link-farms, but related non competitive websites.
7. Ideally, you should try to get links from government websites or educational ones. It gives your site more authority.
8. You should avoid recipice linking although if you do have to do recipical linking, the site you like to must be relevant to your target audience.

Just by using the steps above will give a significant increase over the previous rankings.