14 Rules To Abide By For Search Engine Traffic
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Deepak Dutta June 12, 2007
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If you are setting up a website, follow these simple rules to improve
search engine rankings of your site. You can also follow these
techniques if your website is not ranked high in search engines
for certain keywords. Concentrate on the home page of your site and
once you learn the techniques, you will be able to apply them to the
other pages of your site that will have multiple high ranking pages.
1. Find keywords (or key phrases) relevant to your website. Go to the
overture keyword selector tool (type key phrase overture inventory in
Google) and check the popularity of the keywords you want to use. Avoid
highly popular keywords. Highly popular keywords are very competitive
and the least popular keywords are search engine traffic starved.
Select a dozen keywords and key phrases from the middle of the list.
This is a very important exercise and you should spend at least a
couple of hours, if not more, researching different keywords. While you
are researching your keywords, check your competitors by doing a search
in a couple of popular search engines
like Google, Yahoo, etc., using those keywords. Keep a record of your
competitors' urls and other information because you don't want to waste
your time doing the same search again in the near future.
2. Use the keywords you selected into the meta tags of your home page. Meta tags are located in the head section of a web page.
Go to one of your competitor's website and select View and then Source
from your web browser's menu to view the html source of the web page.
You will see the meta elements.
The two important meta tags are keywords and description meta tags.
Don't leave them blank. You can list your keywords, separated by comma,
in the keywords meta tag. Construct a catchy description using your
keywords for the description meta tag.
3. Use the keywords in your title tag. The text you use in the title
tag appears in the title bar of the web browser. The title tag should
be less than 64 characters long. Again, the key is to use a meaningful
title using the keywords. Don't just make a laundry list of your
keywords for the title tag.
The title tag and your meta description may end up in many search engine listings. So, spend sometime to make these two elements interesting, meaningful, and relevant to your site.
4. Use the keywords in top heading (h1) tags of your page. Use one
keyword (or a key phrase) for each h1 tag. Use these h1 tags for the
headings of your contents.
5. In the home page content, use bold, using the strong html element, to highlight some of your keywords.
6. Italicize some of the keywords in your page.
7. Use the keywords in alt tags of images. You should always use the alt tag for all images.
8. Encourage others to use the keywords for text anchors when they link
back to your site. Better yet, publish your own short link text with
keyword anchors, bold and italicized key phrases and give it away for link exchanges.
9. If possible, use the keywords in your domain name. Try different arrangements of the keywords to come up with an available domain name that you can register.
10. If you are using php or asp or any other web programming language
for your dynamic website, make your url search engine friendly using
url rewrite techniques. Search the phrase url rewrite in Google to know
more about url rewrite.
11. Don't use frames in your web pages. Many search engines will not
crawl framed pages. For a search engine spider to crawl a page, you
need a clickable url. When you use a frame, the target url is not
clickable.
12. Avoid fancy Javascript menus. If you use a Javascript menu, provide
a html text menu with clickable links at the bottom of your web page.
Use include files for Javascripts.
13. Provide 301 redirections if you move your pages or domain after
they have been indexed by the search engines. Don't use meta refresh or
other Javascript tricks. Search for the phrase 'search engine friendly
301 redirect' in a search engine to get more information on this topic.
14. If you use flash in a page, provide a html version of the page and
hide the flash page from the search engine crawler using a robots.txt
page.
Keep in mind these simple rules every time you want to launch a
website. Spending a few days upfront in the preparation of your site
will pay off in the long run with better search engine rankings. |