clipped from www.wowebook.comThe Art Of Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines
Every time we want to create a website, we think about the sources of traffic. In my case, the most of my traffic comes from other sites, such as blogs and social media networks. In the case of search engines, I have noticed that I received many visits through the keyword "canonical url" due to a post that I wrote many time ago.
No matter what, the fact is that getting indexed and raking high on search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, MSN and others, is a must if you want to get tons of traffic through them.
As you may know, this is very related with the Meta Tags you use, something that I have explained in other post but I will retook in this post.
Submitting your website on Search Engines
The only way you will make money with your website is attracting visitors to it! Understanding by website a blog, forum, social media or anything else. You won't magically get money with your website if people don't see what you are offering. Of course you can attract visitors with PPC, paid advertising or blog reviews, but in this post we will deal with search engines.
There are 4 main search engines that you should submit your website on:
- Google: http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl
- Yahoo!: http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html
- MSN: http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx?FORM=WSDD2
- dmoz: http://www.dmoz.org/add.html
I will tell you the truth, the only search engine which you should submit your site on is dmoz. If you use the form to apply for the other 3 ones you will be wasting your time. Why? Because everybody submits its websites through that forms and there are big lists of websites waiting months to be indexed. There are other way to get indexed by those search engines without using its forms.
For example, getting backlinks from websites that are already indexed can help you a lot, because all these search engines are constantly sending their spiders to scan every website they have indexed. So when they scan a website which is not listed in their databases, they have a mechanism that put you in automatically. So if you think to launch a new blog for example, try to get some backlinks from sites related with yours and this way, you will get indexed very fast. When I launch this blog, I applied the technique that I'm sharing with you know and I get indexed in less than 24 hours.
Build a Search Engine-Friendly site
The main difference of ranking among the millions of websites listed by search engines is because ones are more friendly than others to search engines. What do I mean by? Everything in your website has an impact on your ranking. Websites with many images and few text are terrible for SEO, how they pretend to be analyzed by search engines? I know they have complex algorithms but it's not so advanced! In the other hand, websites with less dynamic structures and more rich text are easily indexed by search engines, websites with headers, the footers, xml feeds, alt tags on images, titles on their links and that kind of things.
Keep in mind that search engines cannot red the following information:
- Multimedia files like Flash or words within images.
- Content in frames.
- Content on dynamic pages.
The last point has changed a little with the passing of time, because if you think about the case of the blogs, unless you force them to create a static page, your content will be created on dynamic pages. Nevertheless, using static or dynamic pages your content will be read and recognized by search engines without problems.
In the case of images and links, remember to add an alt tag and a title, search engines register that kind of things when they send their spiders, also know as crawlers or robots.
Optimizing your website for Google
As we know, Google is constantly changing its algorithm to determine the rank of a website, and reason of that is simple. Among other reasons, they do this basically to prevent big sites from dominating results permanently. So as you can imagine, optimizing your website for Google could be a hard task because they are shaking the things constantly.
Google bases its algorithm starting from keywords. So I recommend you to check my preview post Finding Good Keywords For Your Website in order to know more about this topic. The fact is that PageRank equation is a big mystery, no one knows with exactitude which are the components which help you to have a higher rank, but there are some hints which appear to have an extra value on the formula:
- Inbound Links from related sites with high PR.
- Inbound Links from blogs.
- Inbound Links from .edu, .gov or .org.
- Outbound Links to high-ranked relevant websites.
- The size and quantity of information on your site.
- A Google Sitemap. You can generate one for Wordpress by using this plugin, or by visiting this site.
- Updated content.
- Visible Title and Alt Tags.
- Using keywords on your Heading tags, bold and italicized words.
- Site traffic.
Optimizing your website for other search engines, such as Yahoo! or MSN
As you could see in the preview part of the post, Google focuses its attention mainly on inbound links, or links that point back to your site. In the case of Yahoo!, MSN or other search engines, they seem to emphasize on Meta Tags.
Meta Tags appear at the beginning of the source code of your website, in the <head> section. They provide information about your site to the browser and search engines, and the most important of them are:
- The Title
- Page Description
- Keywords
The Title can be set by using the HTML code <title> and it sets the title of your website, being this the text which the browser will display when someone visits your site.
The Page Description can be set by using the HTML code <meta name="description" content="Your site description here" /> and basically this is the text that search engines will show when someone find your site through they.
By the way, the second one is the result showed by Yahoo! and It seems that it's not updated…
The Keywords tag can be set by using the HTML code <meta name="keywords" content="keyword1, keyword2, keyword 3…" /> and it lists the relevant terms for a website. Remember that it is really important to set only relevant keywords or you could get slapped by search engines! Also, I recommend you the following things in order to optimize your website for any search engine:
- Try to keep your keyword list under 20 elements. I know it could be hard, in fact I'm using like 40 now, but once you see which keywords are converting are which not, you should eliminate them from the list.
- Long Tail Keywords or keyword phrases are more useful that a single word. Basically this is because the competition and the macro-view, the more specific you are with your keywords the higher will be your rank.
- Do not include articles or prepositions ( a, an, the, on, from, by…). They are not necessary.
- Use lowercase in your keywords. If you capitalize them, capitalization will be required for match.
- Plural words include the singular ones when they are in the same root. For example, the keyword roots includes root, but companies does not include company.
- Phrases include the same words without spaces, i.e. make money online includes makemoneyonline but not vice versa.
Remember that when you use phrases, search engines try to match your keywords with the search manipulating your keyword, i.e. inverting it, mixing it…
What about dmoz?
This is The Open Directory Project from directory.mozilla.org, and it is a multilingual open content directory of World Wide Web links owned by Netscape that is constructed and maintained by a community of volunteer editors. It uses a hierarchical ontology scheme for organizing site listings. Listings on a similar topic are grouped into categories, which can then include smaller categories.
It also feeds its results to Google, AOL and other directories of the web, spreading your website through many sites if you are listed there.
Once your submitted your site to dmoz it will be study. They don't accept all the sites, you need to cover some requirements and possibly you will be rejected at the first time. Just remember to add your URL in the right category, this is a really important factor which helps you to get in, because if you are a little away from your path, you will be rejected automatically.
To Conclude
It is vital for a website to be indexed by search engines in order to get targeted traffic and attract new readers or customers. I encourage you to check my other post related with keywords and SEO in order to complement the extensive information provided in this post. I hope you like the tips! if you have any special thing that you want to share feel free to leave a comment!
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