The Art Of Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines
Article by Mr.Javo
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:
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!