Applying seo onto your website.
by Frank Luna.
Most people will only click the ten top search results in the first page. Therefore, it is essential to get a high ranking to make your web site a profitable one. Each day brings new challenges for online businesses to make themselves rank higher using Search Engine Optimization.
Basically, Search Engine Optimization is the implementation of tools and methods to making your site top ranking in the results of search engines. Getting your site in the first page will ensure more traffic, which could lead to potential profit and business. SEO requires consistent work in order to be accomplished.
There are many aspects in your site that need updates. Either added or omitted. This will include getting information about related keywords and phrases that are popular in regard to your theme site. This gathered information will then be used to be placed into your pages and meta tags.
The following, are just a few of the tasks you must perform, when applying SEO onto your site.
Here, you will include the title of your site. A short and concise description of your site. The keywords and phrases related to your site contents and other more general information regarding the target audience, publisher name, type of document, etc.
Keywords and phrases:
Responsible usage of keywords and phrases throughout the contents displayed on your documents. Filling up your site with keywords can do more harm than good. So, you should not use more than three or four major descriptive keywords within a content of 100 words.
Navigation links:
Appropriate navigation links will give your clients a more satisfactory experience. Not to mention that a broken link will hurt your ranking with search engines as the web crawlers will not be able to follow.
Usage of Headings:
Ignored by many web site owners, it has been proven that the usage of heading tags i.e <h1> heading A </h1>, <h2> heading B </h2>, <h3> heading C </h3>, etc, will drastically improve your ranking with search engines.
Usage of alt and title tags:
By adding alt and title tags into your images and links respectively, you will gain more exposure using descriptive keywords.
For instance:
img src="images.gif" ALT="related keywords"/
a href=your-domain TITLE="related keywords"/
Link exchange:
Considered by most webmasters to be the key to improve your ranking, is the exchanging of quality inbound and outbound links with other related web sites.Traffic generated by sites, among others, are one of the elements that search engines use to rank sites. To get those web sites linking to yours, require a bit of research.
You need to find out who is the owner or webmaster of that particular site you are interested in. Then, you will have to send him/her a link exchange request e-mail, stating the reason of your interest. Make sure that you place a link to their site onto your page before sending the e-mail, as this more often than not will get a positive feedback. One way to check the links that point to your site is by using the free link popularity check software of Axandra.
XML site maps:
There is no way to guarantee that a website will be shown at the top ranking of search results for an extended period of time. However, updated and responsible SEO sitemap techniques can be used to place a web site high up in the search position.
Excluding pages from getting indexed:
You may have pages or directories on your website that you do not want to have them indexed. In that case, you can exclude them using this method:
Robots.txt:
This is a file that uses a simple syntax to exclude specific types of users. In this case search engine spiders. This file will tell the spiders which pages should not be indexed. You can either exclude specific search engine spiders or all spiders. To exclude all search engine spiders from all directories on your web server, the default syntax is as follows:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
The following examples specify some search engine spiders and directories you may not want them to be spidered.
Google:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /page.html
MSN:
User-agent:MSNbot
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Dissalow: /images/
Disallow: /special-page.htm
Note: Make sure you name the file "robots.txt" and place it in the root directory of your web server, where your home page is. Other known spiders are:
Slurp (Yahoo)
Scooter
ia_archiver
InfoSeek
Sidewinder
Lycos_Spider_(T-Rex)
Gulliver
Teoma
webcrawler/3.0
Lycra
Copyright © Frank Luna
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at http://www.zubaga.com
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