In the wake of pay-to-be-included search engines popping up right and left, one often wonders, “What’s the use of spending so much time on optimizing various pages for various search engines when what you actually have to do is, pay for the indexing?
Few people realize that paying for inclusion hardly affects the ranking, especially in serious search indexes like Yahoo! If you pay them, they review your page within a decent time frame, and if the site is unsuitable for inclusion, they let you know, and advise you to carry out various changes.
Yes, there are some bid-for-ranking type commercial search engines who rank your page according to the money you pay, but my personal logic tells me that soon they’ll have to change their strategy because, money is no substitute for quality. A search engine is not a yellow page. Eventually, they’ll have to grant higher ranking to better sites.
Given below are some steps that can help you optimize your pages. They are very generic in nature, and might not be the ultimate panacea for your optimization woes, but they can certainly give you a start in the right direction.
== 1 ==
Before sitting down to write the first line of code for your web site, keep in mind what’s the purpose of your web site, and then develop the content and graphics according to that. Many search directories, in order to obtain credibility, use human evaluators before the site is included. So make sure you can convince the evaluator that your site actually does what it is deemed to do.
== 2 ==
Make sure your
-==-
is the first tag in the
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section. Most of the directories and engines like to index the site according to the title. Generally your title should be the name of your company, but you can use a RELEVANT catch line. Take care that it should sound realistic, and mustn’t just contain words that you want to be looked for. For instance, the title of my web site is “Web Designing and Internet Marketing”, which makes sense and is a proper phrase.
== 3 ==
Keep your main navigation bar either at the top, or on the right hand side. This is not mandatory, as most people prefer it on the left hand side. The thing is, when the search engine is parsing your page and exercising its weird algorithms on it, it generally starts reading from top to bottom, and the left hand text sometimes confuses it. I stress though, it is not a hard and fast rule.
== 4 ==
It has been said 1000s of times before, but I’m saying it again, define your Meta tags carefully. I mean keywords and description. Although these days they are not the backbone of search optimization, they still matter a lot, especially to the old and widely used search engines. There are many sites (even free) that help you make out which Meta tags would suit your web site. One of them is: http://www.keywordwizard.com. Another one I accidentally found while writing this article was, http://www.siteannounce.com. Since each search engine has its own way of indexing the pages in the database, commercial Meta tag generator services send robot enquiries to various search engines and find out which Meta tags are more palatable to which search engine.
== 5 ==
Avoid FLASH and frames if you take search engine optimization seriously. Search engine don’t even touch with a barge pole the sites made using the above-mentioned techniques. I have no personal animosity against them, but search engines simply don’t like them – too bad.
In case you can’t avoid getting framed, there is a
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tag that you can use. This tag is generally for those viewers who are incapable of seeing frames through their browsers.
== 6 ==
What you write in the first one-two paragraphs of your page makes a lot of difference. It’s like “first impression is the long lasting impression.” Use as many relevant words as possible, without sounding nonsensical, within the first 250-300 words that you write on your page. These are the words that you generally write as content that talks about your service or product. If you can’t write, hire somebody. Believe me, it DOES matter in the long run, and its neglect can cost you your entire business.
== 7 ==
If you have extra time at your hand, you can design different pages for different search engines, with same content. For instance, some engines like commas between search words and phrases within the “keywords” Meta tag, and some don’t. So you can make pages accordingly and then submit them accordingly.
== 8 ==
Don’t try to trick the search engines. Many people try to use same- color-as-background text to increase the keywords density on the page. This is silly, and the search engines puke the page out. Another contentious approach is the doorway pages. Some gurus advise to use them, and some advise to avoid them. I’m not a search optimization guru, but my common sense tells me not to use them.
== 9 ==
Cleverly use
-==-
tags and
-==-
tags, and try to incorporate relevant words into them. But don’t Spam.
== 10 ==
Last (at least in this article) but not the least; swap links with other web sites. The more web sites link back to your site, the higher ranking you get in the search engines.
== 11 ==
If you can help it, do not use dynamically generated content, at least not on the primary page that you want the search engines to rank. Dynamic pages are the ones that are generated on the fly using some database like MySQL, SQL or ACCESS.
These are the basic steps you can take that can get you the entry into the search engine ranks. They are not foolproof, as search engine optimization is an individualistic, and a long-term plan, and cannot be presented within an all-purpose package. Like fingerprints, every web page has its own optimization requirements. But still, these are some basic, elementary steps, and you can build up your optimization strategy around them.
Amrit Hallan is a freelance copywriter,
and a website content writer. He also dabbles
with PHP and HTML. For more tips and tricks in
PHP, JavaScripting, XML, CSS designing and
HTML, visit his blog at
http://www.aboutwebdesigning.com
