SEO - General Guidelines

SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimizing and refers to a set of good practices that teach you how to improve your website so that it would be easily tracked, indexed and ranked by search engines. Getting your site indexed by Google and other major search engines will help you attract visitors and increase traffic. SEO is an exciting and ongoing process that involves not only an initial optimized website, but also permanent maintenance and evaluating search results on a regular basis. With the ever-changing Internet technology, SEO experts sometimes have contrasting opinions on what makes a good website. However, there are some general guidelines most of them agree on. Design & Content • You should build your web pages for human beings and not for search engines. A clean design and a strong content will ultimately drive search engine spiders to your site. • Make a clear hierarchy and provide text links to each page. • Don't put to many links on a single page (maximum 100). • You should include a site map to help users navigate easily through your website. • Make sure you have clear TITLE tags, no HTML errors and all the links work. • You should use text instead of images to display important elements, as search engine crawlers may not recognize a text inside an image. • While keeping your content useful and clear, do use keywords that you know users would type to get to your page. Technical Issues • Most search engine crawlers see your website similar to the way a text browser sees it. Consequently, you should use a text browser, such as Lynx, to check your website. If you can't see the whole page because of JavaScript, session IDs, DHTML or Flash features, search engine spiders will probably have trouble with crawling your website. • Check with your web host to see if the server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This header tells Google whether the website content has changed since its last visit. • While it is advised session IDs to track visitors' path through the website, you shouldn't do this for search bots. • The robots.txt file on your web server tells spiders which directories can be crawled and which cannot. Make sure it's updated and it doesn't somehow block search engine crawlers. Website Promotion • After you've built your website and put it online, try to get high PageRank sites link to it. • Submit your website to major search engines (Google, Yahoo/Altavista, MSN) to get it indexed, along with a site map that will tell them the site structure. • Submit your website to relevant directories, such as Yahoo and Open Directory Project. • Get involved in community based websites, blogs and forums and build a strong reputation. Whether you choose to implement these techniques yourself or go to a SEO expert, no one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google and other search engines. Search engines change their crawling algorithms often and competitor websites appear all the time. However, following these basic SEO guidelines will improve your chances of increasing your website traffic and is a better practice than looking for a way to cheat on search engines in order to get your pages indexed. Copyright © 2006 Andreas Obermueller

Getting Indexed in Google – Quick and Easy

Google is the dominant search engine on the net, controlling more traffic than Yahoo and MSN combined. This means you need to get your entire site into Google as fast as possible.

Getting Indexed in Google – Quick and Easy

Millions upon millions of dollars have been made by sites getting ranked highly in Google. Of course, these sites are optimized to get the rankings. While optimization is critical, it is also vital that you get all the pages of your site indexed in Google.

The good news is it is fairly easy to get Google to suck up the pages of your site. There are a couple of different ways, but you need to do one thing before worrying about getting indexed.

Site maps are rarely clicked on by most visitors to a site, but they are critical nonetheless. A site map isn’t vital because it helps a visitor get around the site. It is vital because it helps the search engine indexing robots find all the pages on the site. In this case, you want to create a site map for your site to make sure the “Googlebot” finds all the pages you have labored to put up. Google actually has an xml site maps tool, but I prefer to actually make sitemaps since I want Yahoo and MSN to index the site as well.

Once you have a site map, the easiest way to get the attention of Google is to create a free blog. Go to Blogger.com and open a free account. Just follow the three or four simple steps and you will be ready to go. Once the account is open, create your first blog entry. Type anything you want, but make sure to include a link to your home page and your site map in the entry. Hit the enter button and you are on your way. Why? Google owns blogger.com, so it regularly canvases the blogs and links. Within a week or two, your site should start appearing in Google.

A second way to get indexed in Google is to write an article. Create one on a subject relevant to your site. Make it about 400 words long or about a page in length. Open an account with an article directory. The account should be assigned immediately after opening the account. Login and go to your member profile. Add the domain to your site in the appropriate box and save it. Then submit your article. Make sure to include an author byline where indicated and include a link to your site. The Google indexing robot will crawl the site at least once a week, find your links and follow them to your site. Within a few weeks, you should see your site indexed in Google.

You can also add your domain directly to Google, but this is really a waste of your time. So many people do it on a daily basis that it may take three months for Google to get to your site.

You can use any of the above techniques to get the attention of the Google indexing bot. Regardless of how you do it, keep in mind it will take a few weeks for your site to appear. There are millions of sites on the web, so the robot has a lot of ground to cover.