One of the main reasons a Web page doesn't rank well in Search Engines is because the developer of the page or portal has not concentrated on Search Engine optimization or SEO. Many web developers all round the globe do not focus on making the site Search engine friendly, when they plan to start. What they plan is how the functionality goes in the site and they just start the coding of it. At the end when they are done with all the difficulties and have the site uploaded they find that it does not rank well in Search engines and now they have to concentrate on making the site more Search engine friendly. It’s never too late to start but when they see the amount of code in front of them they don’t feel like doing it or if they do it they just increase the keyword density by methods which are not that effective. Search engine optimization can be difficult and confusing. Knowing this I decided to put together some tips I realized over the years. This does not cover everything you need to know about optimizing your web pages for the search engines because SEO is a continuous process which just cannot be said as do 1. 2. 3. …. And you will be on top of Search engine. Following are the list of some of Search engine optimization tips you should follow Search engine spiders "view" information just as non-visual browsers would display the information. So for the sake of increasing the keyword density don’t apply unethical ways like hidden text or something of that type. The spiders can not only detect them but also ban you for using such a kind of act. Don’t repeat words more than three times in the title, Meta keywords or Meta description. Make sure the content in 'P' tags makes sense to the content in the 'H' tags they follow. Use 'ALT' tags on your images, and label your links. Use structural markup, not presentational. if something is a heading, use proper H1/H2/H3/etc, not <font size="+2"> Move as much of your presentation as possible to the CSS, making your HTML lighter and rising the content to HTML markup ratio. Now the question comes is what should be the keyword to HTML ratio. It has been suggested that Keyword density must be kept above 5%. Choose good titles for your pages, which include some of the keywords you're keen on being listed under. Make the title sound like English and not Just lines of keywords and keywords in it. Choose a different title for each page if possible. Expand acronyms/abbreviations with ACRONYM and ABBR tags. By doing so, you also add the expanded term to your document, which the search engines can then pick up and index accordingly. Add titles to your links which describes the content of link HTML: <A href="contact.html" title="Contact Me about special offers!">Contact</A> This will help with both accessibility and search engines. Don't waste it with something like "Click here!” which is a waste of tag for making it search engine friendly. Put this as the top <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd"> and make a small modification to each line that comes up when you parse the page at http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=your url Name the folders or sub domains with keywords if applicable. Do not try playing with URL’s to make it keyword rich. Use something like www.example.com/keyword1 if it makes sense. And try to avoid www.example.com/keyword1-keyword2-keyword3/ or www.example.com/keyword1/keyword2/keyword3 Because the users of your website do not like to remember long URLs and you are creating the sites for users and not for Search engines only. Build a sitemap and link to it from footers of all pages in the site. Search Engines always give stress to the word sitemap/Site Map Include a section for "links". Use the page or pages for exchanging links with websites in the same business. Put links on this page and subsequent pages to their home page and ask them to add your home page link to their links page(s). Having good uptime and everything working is very important. Use a Runtime error checking system for databases and dispatch a mail to your inbox whenever there is an error. This helps you to visualize the errors like database down or server down. Also if possible connect your Mailbox to your Mobile device because that helps you attend the errors immediately and track what’s going on. The best policy is not to try "tricking" search engines; for example, don't attempt to get traffic by using a more competitive keyword when you are no where connected with that word. This may for sometime help you get traffic but not customers and you may end up paying for high bandwidth. Lastly the Formula of PR PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn)) Where PR(A) is the PageRank of Page A (the one we want to work out). D is a dampening factor. Nominally this is set to 0.85 PR(T1) is the PageRank of a site pointing to Page A C(T1) is the number of links off that page PR(Tn)/C(Tn) means we do that for each page pointing to Page A Source: The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, http://www-db.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html This article is written by Shabbir Bhimani and is posted at www.go4expert.com If you want to put this article on your site you need to include the above line.
Good summary of SEO. As far as SEO for Google is concerned, this is one of better articles I read recently. It's a good article; I highly recommend.
Nice article Shabbir, But you forgot to mention one important point - "Running Adsense on Sites". The tips you have enlisted in your article are just the preliminary steps which will just help to land somewhere in the vast ocean of the sites in the search engines, especially Google. But, if you wish to rank well, rank somewhere near the top rankings in the SERPS, you need to run adsense on your site. Doesn't matter what is the content on your site, just copy content from somewhere and make your own site and add the adsense script to your pages and earn profits, and see how quickly you reach to the top. This is not my personal opinion, but the practical fact being experienced in the search industry. The search engines have totally transformed the definition of "Search Engine Optimization" and scope of "Web Marketing". It will be really smart if we webmaster in the wake of time learn to adapt to the new definitions defined by the search engines themselves. It has been experienced that S.E have been supporting the “Spam” in the SERPs to add up their revenues. Adsense and Adwords are the Google's Revenue Sources. Hope we could advice such articles for somebody at Google to make them realize what havoc are they creating in our lives.
Thats not a part of SEO Did you read that WMW. The myths like this are most of the time originating from that place. Thats totally not true. Can you show some concrete proof of what you are speaking.
Great read shabbir. In fact lots of developers tend to go more on graphics, flash, visual representation etc rather than complying to html/xhtml standards. Yes, crawlers love clean coded pages
Yes thats the main reason lots of quality web site does not get natural traffic but need to focus too much on ads to give them traffic.
hi, your article is very nice. So, do you have source code of google or yahoo about search algorithm?
All algo does not fall into any one category and why not have your separate thread for each of your query?
maybe not directly experiment. . .lets its a process that follows TOS and should be followed accordingly.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a process of improving the volume and quality of traffic of a website on search engines. There are two types of SEO namely On-Page Optimization which deals with the proper use of title tags, meta tags, alt-tags, h1/h2 tags, and keywords while Off-Page Optimization deals with building links.
Its cloaking and not clocking and Cloaking is a black hat search engine optimization (SEO) technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different to that presented to the user's browser.
Great job Shabbir! I really appreciate you in-depth knowledge of SEO and the article is really very informative.
