Free! - Optimizing your Web Site for Search Engines

Introduction to Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

How can your website rank better than your competitors so it will be noticed by its target audience? This is where SEO comes in.  Search engine optimization is the process of increasing the amount of visitors to a web site by ranking high in the search results of a search engine.

Metatags

Metatags where originally very important in SEO as it used to be the main source for the description of your site in the search results. Although they are becoming less important in search engines like Google they are still important to other search engines like MSN and Yahoo! Take a look at the shortlist of tips:

1. Did I use a <Description> and <Keywords> metatags? The metatags that are still important are the <description> and <keywords> ones. Use the <Description> metatag to write the description of your site. Besides the fact that metatags still rock on MSN and Yahoo!, the <Description> metatag has one more advantage – it sometimes pops in the description of your site in search results.

The <Keywords> metatag also matters, though as all metatags it gets almost no attention from Google and some attention from MSN and Yahoo! Keep the metatag reasonably long – 10 to 20 keywords at most.

2. Did I use a <Language> metatag? If your site is language-specific, don't leave this tag empty. Search engines have more sophisticated ways of determining the language of a page than relying on the <language> metatag but they still consider it.

Content

1. Do I provide unique and up to date content? Having more content (relevant content, which is different from the content on other sites both in wording and topics) is a real boost for your site's rankings.

Frequent changes are favored. It is great when you constantly add new content but it is not so great when you only make small updates to existing content. Recent documents (or at least regularly updated ones) are also favored.

2. Is my page length correct? Generally long pages are not favored, or at least you can achieve better rankings if you have 3 short pages rather than 1 long page on a given topic, so split long pages into multiple smaller ones.

3. Is my site fully accessible? If the site (or separate pages) is inaccessible because of broken links, 404 errors, password-protected areas and other similar reasons, then the site simply can't be indexed.

4. Do I have a Sitemap? It is great to have a complete and up-to-date sitemap. Spiders love it, no matter if it is a plain old HTML sitemap or the special Google sitemap format.

5. How big is my site? Spiders love large sites, so generally it is the bigger, the better. However, big sites become user-unfriendly and difficult to navigate, so sometimes it makes sense to separate a big site into a couple of smaller ones. On the other hand, there are hardly sites that are penalized because they are 10,000+ pages, so don't split your size in pieces only because it is getting larger and larger.

6. Does my site have a consistent theme? It is not only keywords in URLs and on page that matter. The site theme is even more important for good ranking because when the site fits into one theme, this boosts the rankings of all its pages that are related to this theme.

7. Do I have a good file structure? File location is important and files that are located in the root directory or near it tend to rank better than files that are buried 5 or more levels below.

What not to do

The following search engine optimization techniques are often called spamming, and should be avoided at all costs:

• automatically generated doorway pages;
• cloaking and false redirects;
• keyword stuffing;
• hidden text or hidden links;
• pages loaded with irrelevant words;
• duplicated content on multiple pages;
• misspelling of well-known web sites;
• unrelated and centralized link farms;
• other methods that try to trick search engines.

These and other similar techniques, while sometimes effective in generating an increase in traffic to your site, quickly fail.

Imagine putting a "Detour" sign in the street in front of your place of business, forcing traffic into your parking lot. Yes, your parking lot is full, but how many of those people actually wanted to be there? How many of those people will want to shop there after witnessing such a trick? How long will it take the local police to remove the sign?

The same thing happens to web sites that use such nefarious techniques. People are brought to a site where they had no intention of going. Do you think they will stay to shop? When the operators of a search engine discover these types of tricks, they will often remove the site from their index entirely.