Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Make your site search engine friendly

Optimizing your pages for the search engines is crucial for a good spidering from the search engine crawlers, and you should avoid the most common errors in which newbie webmaster incur, having their pages filtered for some reason and not showing in the SERPS.

This practice is called on-page SEO and it's the first important step for your success as web publisher.

First of all, remember that all the crawlers read text only pages, so putting your relevant keywords in images (i.e. logos) won't be any good.

These are the most common suggestions about on-page SEO:

1) Optimize your title and meta tags. Make sure that the title, Meta Tag description and keywords are present. They are your website's business card, so you must take care of them. Put relevant keywords only, that make sense together.

2) Use h tags in the correct hierarchy (h1, h2, h3 ..) and put there your relevant keywords.

3) Repeat your most important keywords at the end of the page, as the last words the crawler would see.

4) Stress your relevant keywords using the bold and italic html tags.

5) Write clever paragraphs about your topic, and do the proper in-site linking through your pages.

6) Check your keyword density, and make sure it does not exceed a 25% or you will get most likely banned from the search engines.

7) DO NOT use hidden text, and make sure that your text is all visible and that won't match your background color. This is frowned upon all the major search engines and their bots can detect that kind of cheat.

8) Do not abuse of image alt tags. You can put relevant keywords in tag although it is considered black hat SEO. Just use moderation and common sense.


9) Make sure that every page on your site is properly linked: Check all the links on your web page and fix the broken links because broken links can make difficult for search engine spiders to crawl your webpage. Building a sitemap and submitting it to Google sitemap is a good idea and it will be subject of a future article. We will also speak how to optimize your keywords using databases. Every page must have unique title and Meta tags; otherwise the search engine will take them as duplicate pages and won't consider it in the search.

10) For keyword suggestions, use nice tools like the one in Digital Point: Keyword Suggestion Tool or Google Keyword suggestion tool. If you want a professional tool to do it, then you should consider Word Tracker.

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