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Search Engine Optimization
Since search engines, most importantly Google, Yahoo! and MSN are the greatest source of information for the most people on Internet, it's very vital to get listed on them. SEO, Search Engine Optimization concentrates on solving this problem. To make this article more clear, I'll show you a list what SEO methods it actually contains.
1) Page Head Part in SEO and other source code based manipulation.
2) Designing Website for Search Engines
3) Inbound and Reciprocal Links
4) Submitting Your Website to Search Engines
5) Submitting Your Website to Directories
How Search Engines Work?
Every search engines has their own unique way to sort and search websites. This algorithm is the most precious thing they own.
Some search engines read different things from a web page. One reads and puts weight on the head part of a page, another likes analyzing the relevance through many factors but please note that there are so many differences between search engines and so they do their things different ways.
Search engines find their way to websites with computer controlled web browsers, also known as spiders or crawlers. They have different kinds of functions that keep search engines as up-to-date as possible.
What Comes First In SEOBefore I even start telling about any of those SEO techniques below, I'll reveal the steps to rising your position with Google PageRank. See the importancy of step 1 and 3.
Quality content (and other SEO) > Initial Traffic > Inbound links > PageRank up > More traffic
That's the formula. Create good content for your website and do some other search engine optimization. This leads you to getting traffic and popularity which makes people link to your website (inbound links).
Many search engines look at the inbound links and their quality. This way they mostly determine the rank of the site.
Now let's proceed to the common SEO techniques.
Page Head Part in Search Engine Optimization
It is one of the important spots of the source code to fix. It is mainly used to attract search engines. To avoid too much confusing explanation, I'll show an example of the most used and useful head tags.
- TITLE: This is extremely important tag. You should take care planning your title well since this is shown first when engines list your page and search engines actually learn from titles.
Let's take a common mistake which is title "About", what does that tell to anything? NOTHING, make the titles as descriptive as possible. Example of a title I think is quite good:
<title>Dog Food Nation - Cooking Puppy Meat Meals</title>
- META DESCRIPTION: This is a short and keyword rich description of the page. Unfortunately Google doesn't use this, it generates its own description. You can still add this since other search engines are possibly using it. Use words from the meta keywords and title.
<meta name="description" content="This is a description" />
META KEYWORDS:This tag contains some keywords describing the page. Separate them with commas. Once again, this is in smaller part nowadays in most search engines but there is no harm of using it unless you use one keyword ten times out there (don't do it).
How many keywords you should add, that should be up to ten because search engines at least Google doesn't read any more than ten of these.
<meta name="keywords" content="this is, keywords, list," />
The meta tags are possibly helping you to improve your search engine rating, but there is no total guarantee. They might bring you some points in this game but I must say they have lost alot of their usefulness past years and they really aren't a must. If you feel so, you are free to create them, just to be sure.
Search Engines See the Headlines TooHeadlines are important notifiers for the search engines. They simple tell search engines what the text is about under the headlines.
Try thinking through the eyes of a search engine. They see it all in HTML and other text. They see a headline tag with text "Car Repairing Tips", this explains search engine pretty well what's up ahead.
Heading parts are excellent places to insert your keywords. Avoid "playing" and twisting with words like they do in paper prints, search engines can't understand that. An example of playing with words could be "Get Your Wagon Fixed"
Bold text and sub-headings act as booster to the search engine optimization too. Ok, not only those but also italic, underlined and other special treated text promote the effect.
Designing Website for Search Engines
1) First thing to say is that don't create at least fully dynamic website. With dynamic I mean flash menus, PHP systems etc., those are generally something search engines are not able to read so well.
2) Another point you should know that search engines don't like frames with navigation bars in them. They may confuse them, besides nowadays frames are kind of old fashioned thing.
3) Enrich your websites with relevant keywords of your topic, not to say that you should add invisible text spamming your relevant keywords because that's not permitted but natural presentation of keywords can get more attention with search engines.
4) Create a sitemap. Not for people but also for search engines they acts as a map to create a whole picture of the website, a great trip for search engines. At last man and the machine understand each other!
5) Page and folder names. Which one of these looks better and more descriptive, free-dog-food-tutorial.html or sec1page3tutorsite.html? I really hope you chose the first one. Another useful thing for human and the machine, they both read folder and page names.
6) Text link titles are also read by search engines. This is practically the same thing as in step four. Make your links descriptive about the destination where they lead.
Another thing considering links is their title, they add more chances to stuff keywords in the code, take a look at this example:
<a href="http://www.mysite.com" title="More SEO Details">SEO Details</a>
7) Image links are not so good but usable. Despite fancy image links on a website, they are not so useful for search engines. Generally only logos, products, photos and such should have a link in them. Alt tag can save those in this trouble, it's the text shown in case the image cannot be loaded but is also read by search engines.
<img src="/images/logo.gif" alt="Dog Food Nation website">
Inbound and Reciprocal Links
As I may have said and I will be saying in the future, links are very important because search engines are looking for sites with many links to them. Basically this means that if you are heavily linked your are going to rank up in the eyes of the search engines. This thing has its dark side too. If you get mostly by poor quality websites or otherwise bad relevancy having websites linked to you, the search engines can drop your value of relevancy.
Some ways to get inbound links:
- Publishing a blog linking to you
- Commenting to Forums and Blogs
- Free classified advertising
- Online press releases
- Pay for them
One way is to ask other webmasters to put your link to their sites and vice versa, this is called reciprocal linking. There are more ways to get linked, one of them is right below.
What Is an Online Press Release?
I wouldn't dare to create a separate article about this so I'll be brief here. Like there are article directories so there are press release directories. These services charge for displaying press releases on their websites and distribution.
Press releases work very well to boost your traffic. Popular websites for distributing press releases include:
Submitting Your Site to Search Engines
Search engines don't necessarily have to crawl around your website to make it known. You can use a submission tool included by many search engines. There are some automated (and even free) web pages to do this but there aren't so many of grand search engines that you couldn't do it yourself besides you can see if there are any errors and be sure that you actually submitted what you wanted. Please note before submitting you should have all other source code based optimizing ready.
Submit only the certain key pages, the nodes of your website because the process won't get any faster if you submitted the whole site. One of the excellent pages is the sitemap.
The best part is that you don't actually have to submit your site to every single little search engine out there. The crawler programs of the other search engines will be doing the job once you got yourself listed in couple places.
Here are the links for the three major search engines:
Don't Get Scammed by Search Engine Submitters
I don't recommend this but if you want to pay to get someone submitting your website around the search engines or even buy a software for that, be aware of bad quality or even scamming website submit services. Don't be surprised if you are not progressing any bit in a month if you chose a wrong service provider.
I must say again that you don't need to submit your website to all 10,000 search engines while Google, Yahoo! and MSN are dominating the business and if you get top listed on them, you get probably top listed to any of them.
Submitting Your Website to the Great Directories
Internet directories are huge websites containing categorized links to other websites. You should be submitting your website to these because search engines are also analyzing how many sources are linking to you and once they see even some linkings even if they were in the directories, your ranking may go up especially if the directory is one of the best ones.
One of the most recognized directories is DMOZ (Open Directory Project), ran by volunteer power and it's also free. Another great one is Yahoo! Directory Listings but if your site gets commercial in their eyes, it costs about 300$ per year. You can find a large listing of these directories at Strongest Links and sorted by their 'reputation'.
Some notes:
- Do the submission just once. The listing can happen in around couple months with Yahoo! and from few days to year with DMOZ. Other sites can be around these times too, unfortunately there is no way to speed up the process.
- If the site doesn't come in about month or two, you can first check out your site and see if there are any flaws like typos, ugly design etc.
- If you think your website is OK, check if you submitted the site to the correct category and the description is appropriate.
- Last thing to do is contacting them and asking what's wrong. Luckily they will respond and do something about it.
- Do not keep spamming your site to the directory because that means you get ignored.
The Ultimate Secret of Successful Website
I can ensure this is the best of them all. Without this you simply cannot succeed. Sincerely, you really don't need to spend a month optimizing and adjusting the web page if you do this part well.
Write quality content. Write alot of quality content text. More superior your content is compared to others, the better you will do. Create unique content, create new ideas and opinions that turn the heads of the visitors,
OVERDELIVER it all. Don't get stuck to all the things other people say, criticize them. This is the genuine and best formula of success, nothing else. Period.