Basic Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization means making your webpages work better with search engines and achieve decent rankings in search egines. Since, search engines are a major resource for getting visitors for your site, therefore decent ranking means more visitors.
Either, you have made a website or you are in the process of making it, there are some measures you can take and include in your design that can make your site search engine friendly and help you achieve those decent rankings.
Lets see some of the things you can do to make your website score good with search engines.
Choose a related domain-name
Now a days search engines do not index your website on the basis of your domain name but having a domain name with search specific keywords in it is a plus point.
Try to choose a domain name that contains the key idea of your website, which you think that users will be typing in to search for the material related to your website. For example, if you are making a website that has information on games than try to include the word "games" in your domain name.
How Search Engines find you site
A search-engine find a website over the internet through inbound or incomming links to that website. This goes like it: A search engine finds a page that has links in it, it follows the link and goes to the page the link points to while indexing the page. Then it looks on this page and if it finds links, it follows the link again and index this page. This process goes on and on untill there are no more links to follow.
When you make a new website, nobody knows about it so its natural that nobody will link to your site i.e you site will have no inbound links and no search engine will find it. So what can you do in this situation? Lets read on.
Submit your site to search-engines and directories
As said above, search engines cannot find a new website, so what you sholud do is submit your website manually to a search engine and most importantly to a web directory.
Remember you can tell search engine about your website by submiting your site but you cannot achieve good rankings without inbound links( links that point to your site). So, your prime focus is to get as many links pointing to your site as you can.
Submit your site to search engines:
Submit your site to directories.
- OpenDirectory (used by Google)
- Yahoo Directory (free for personal websites but has fees for revenue making sites)
Submit your sites to Forums/Social Networking Sites
This is also a good way of getting inbound links to your site. You can discuss your website with others on forums and on various social networking sites to promote your site and increase your search engine rankings.
Content gives you links
Remeber, people search internet to find information and answers. If your website gives them the information they are looking for and the answers to the questions they have, they will tell others about your site and will link to your site. The more people link to your site the better rankings you will get with the search engines. Please see writing content for some tips on content writing.
Put your keywords in right areas
Search engines give more importance and weightage to certain areas of your site while crawling and indexing your site. You should try to put right keywords in these areas so that the search engine will list your site better and get you more traffic. These areas are;
- Titles
Try choosing better and related titles for you individual webpages.
- Meta tags
Meta elements provide information about your webpage. This information can be used by search engines to assign a description to your page.
The meta tags is placed in the head section of the html document. The most used attributs are keywords and discription. For example;
<meta name="description" content="write your description/>
<meta name="keywords" content ="write your keywords"/> - Headings
Put your main text and keywords in heading in your webpage.
- Bold text
Make important words bold. This helps with search engines and makes your text much readable also.
- File name(url) of you pages
Select the file name of your individual pages carefully and related to the content they contain. The address to a page, when loaded in a browser should give a good guess of its contents.
For example, A name like search-engine-optimization.html is better than seo.html or se1.html.
Related :
Writing Content
Getting visitors
Speeding up your web pages
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