SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, became a buzz word since few years. It became headache of the webmasters. “Is my website properly optimized for search engines?” “How can I index my site to popular search engines?” Some tries to use the ‘Black Hat’ way (don’t know how successful those approaches are)!!
I thought, as there is nothing to do right now, I may give some advice for free about this.
SEO means optimizing your website properly, so that popular search engines index your important pages. Its important because you have to catch the market. If people can’t find you out through search engines, how would they reach you?
OK, how to optimize your site? Its not that hard. You code your pages properly and keep your contents organized. Manage search bots using robots.txt and reffer/block from indexing some directories.
Some important things you have to do to reach to the top of search results is:
- Build the site for public, not for robots.
- Follow web standards. Test your HTML, CSS etc. from W3.ORG
- Provide unique contents to your web pages.
- Avoid invalid and hidden links.
- Avoid referral links which loop back to you.
- Use proper title, meta keywords and descriptions (though the importance of these is going down now a days).
- Don’t use irrelevant keywords/descriptions in meta tag.
- Avoid broken links.
- Avoid duplicate contents.
- Don’t make a page too huge.
- Use a sitemap and refer robots to that.
- Use alt and title for links and images.
Well, those are just some suggestions. You may build a much better website with your own creativity. You are not bound to follow those rules. You have the freedom to create your own rule. If that hits, we all will follow you!!
Number of hits to your web always is a important factor. This also motivates search engines. To increase your hits, add some Digg, Delicious, Stumbleupon links on your page. Submit your sites to the web galleries. Some web galleries:
- bestwebgallery.com
- brdcast.net
- coolsitecollection.com
- css-warfare.com
- There are a lot many. Visit here for a larger list.
Care to see the alexa rating of your site some times.
You may visit your site using Lynx sometime to see how it looks to search robots.
As the final note, you have the options to use ‘Black Hat'(!) ways to cheat search bots. I’m not going to explain those here. You may find references on the web. But my suggestion is not to use those. May be you got lucky for once, but if you are caught or blacklisted, your site may be dropped under thousands or even millions.
Some references to popular search engines’ guidelines:
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