Are you puzzled about the ranking of your website on Google, MSN and Yahoo?
There is no real secret about how to optimize your website for search engines.
Here are some common questions:
- How do I optimize my site on search engines?
- What do you mean by "A website is NOT a PRODUCT" and "A website is a PROCESS"?
- What are my options to optimize my website?
- What is HTML?
- How do I use FTP?
- Why should I modify my website content?
- How should I design my website for Search engines?
- How do search engines work?
- Example of Robots.txt
- How do I add my site to Google?
- How do I add my site to MSN?
- How do I add my site to Yahoo?
- 5 reasons to Track website Traffic
- How to choose right Keywords for the website?
1- How do I optimize my site for search engines?
Let's make it clear two important principals from the beginning:
- A website is NOT a PRODUCT.
- A website is a PROCESS.
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2- What do you mean by "A website is NOT a PRODUCT" and "A website is a PROCESS"?
A website needs constant attention and modification.
If you do have a website that have been built by your nephew 5 years ago, do not expect to see your website in the first page results of GOOGLE, MSN, YAHOO.
If you are looking to get any ranking in search engines you do need to modify and upgrade your content and source codes.
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3- What are my options to optimize my website?
- Let an expert person or a SEO company do it for you
- Do It Yourself Search Engine Optimization
Our Philosophy?
There are many SEO companies that follow 3 steps recommendation for their clients:
- Keyword Research
(How many times that term was searched on last month in overture)
- website Optimization.
- website Promotion.
We do have problems with this approach in SearchEngineProjects.com. We do believe you should NOT make a website just for sake of Search Engines.
If you want to do that Please DO NOT Contact Us!
Guess What?
It's all about connecting the right clients/customers to your products and services.
Search engines are only tools to bring visitors to your site.
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Make a website based on your business model!
Not your competitors´ website!
- Your website content is the most important concept.
- Build an easy Navigation Tool Bar.
- Do not promise what you can not do in your website!
- Make a website for Monkeys.
- Make sure you use terms that are easy to understand unless you have specific users type with specific needs such as training websites.
- No Music, No dancing object on the home page, except you are running radio website or animation website or personal website.
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If you want to optimize your site for Search Engines, you need to learn the following:
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4- What is HTML?
HTML - (Hypertext Markup Language) The document format language used on the World Wide Web. Web browsers read HTML and display the page.
We are not teaching you HTML here. There are many good websites, books and classes for learning HTML, check the following sites:
However I should talk about some important HTML tags when it comes to Search Engine Optimization:
A typical website source code looks like the following:
<html>- Informing the browser, this is the beginning of an HTML page.
<head>- Informing the browser that is the introduction of an HTML page.
<title> Search Engines read and display the content inside this tag in their search results. </title>- Informing the browser that is the TITLE of an HTML page.
The number of characters for TITLE TAG should be 60 - 80 (Depends on Search Engines)
Why? Google chop the rest as dots ....
<meta name="Keywords" content="Insert RELEVANT keywords from contents of your website inside this tag ">
Note: The number of characters for KEYWORDS TAG should be 255 or less (Depend on Search Engines)
<meta name="description" content="Write a short and meaningful description about website">
The number of characters should be 70 or less (Depend on Search Engines)
<meta name="robots" content="index,follow">- Request Search Engines to read the website
Note: There are many other Meta tags exist that are not getting explained here.
</head>-Informing the browser that is the end of introduction of an HTML page.
<body>- Inside you insert your contents, pictures, videos </body>
</html>- Informing the browser, here is the end of HTML page.
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5- How do I use FTP?
FTP - (File Transfer Protocol) is an application layer protocol that uses Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and telnet services to transfer bulk-data files between machines or hosts.
In simple language, it means the way that you can connect to hosting server where your website is up and running.
It is better to have FTP software to connect to your server. You also need to know your website user name and password (get them from your hosting company or webmaster)
You can also use Windows XP built in FTP. There are many FTP Client programs, here are some::
OK! At this point We assume you do know enough HTML and have access to your websites pages and Hosting Server using FTP or other methods.
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6- Why should I modify my website content?
Content is the KING. WOW! Yes! It does not matter if your websites show up in the top of Google, Yahoo, MSN or any other search engines if your content is not appropriate, user-friendly and clear for visitors, you will not get the benefits and thus profit from your site. In today market, even the e-commerce sites are constantly fixing and updating their content.
- Grammatically correct
- Sound right
- Clear
- Informative
You should consider to be more informative by using your Keywords in your content. Be Careful! Do not over do it to the point that your sentence be pointless and funny.
Example:
Assume you do have a website related to Orange County California. You see a sentence like:
You can find lots of interesting locations for entertainment in our county.
You can change it to:
You can find lots of interesting locations for entertainment in Orange County.
The use of Orange County Keyword gives more chance to your website to get better ranking for keyword “orange county” in Search engines.
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7- How should I design my website for Search engines?
There is no magic rule for design of a site for search engine. However there are lots of:
DESIGNS TO AVOID:
- Do NOT USE a Full Flash entrance web page.
What is Flash?
Flash is a sudden intense burst of radiant energy and also name of Software made by Macromedia for website design.
- Do NOT USE a Full Image entrance web page.
The Search engine crawler can not read images so if you do have website that is only images do not expect to get crawled by crawler.
- Do NOT USE Frame in you website.
What is Frame?
Frame Documents
"Frames divide a browser window into two or more document windows, each displaying a different document, or a different part of the same document. Frames in an HTML document can cause a web page to appear to be divided into multiple, scrollable regions. For each frame, you can assign a name, a source document locator, dimensions, border alignment and decorations, scroll and resize behaviors, loading and unloading behavior, file and topic maps, and style sheets."
(Copyright © World Wide Web Consortium)
So What? What is the problem with Frame?
The major problem of using frame in your website is that navigation of Spider within your website. In some extreme cases frame makes it impossible for Search Engines Spiders (Robots) to read and relate the content of different frames and related all to your domain.
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DESIGNS TO HAVE:
- Make a website for your audiences
If people come to your website search engines will follow them. WOW!
Yes! If you do have an attractive, content driven and informative website that brings many visitors then your website will be visited by many search engines in proper time frame.
The problem is the old chicken or egg story! If you have many visitors for your website so you are done! Not so Fast!
You still should make your site ready for crawler.
- Make your content easy to read
I have read somewhere that a website should be so easy that even Monkeys! Can use it. Please use simple English word that average Joe understands.
- Have smooth and easy navigation bar on your website
Make it clear and have easy navigation bar for your visitors. Do let them guess what to do next.
Make it happen! Rule of thumb you can use horizontal navigation bar if you do have up to 5-10 pages.
Use a Vertical Navigation bar if you do have more than 10 pages in your website.
- Stay with a standard design, font type, size, pictures dimension
If you are using font Verdana size 10 for your main content section, make sure all the pages use the same type and size.
- Try to check your programming code before publish the website
Search Engines robots will ignore website with lots code errors.I assure you can find many websites that have HTML problems. There are lots of online tool and some are free that you can check your HTML code.
Validate Your Markup
- Make your website short and sweet
It was very important to check your site for dialup visitors in today cheap broadband it seems not big deal to have heavy website! Wrong! It your website does not load fast enough the crawler let it go.
- Make sure to have a sitemap in your website.
What is Site Map?
Site Map is listing of all sections of a website. Usually, each listing is an active link, enabling a visitor to click on the link and move directly to a section from the site map.
- Make sure you do have a link page.
What is Link Page?
A link page is a dedicated page for given links to other websites with RELATED content and subject matters that follow your business model.
This page creates three important functions:
- Adding value for visitors by receiving appropriate and related information from other RELATED website.
- Improving in-bonding links through search engines.
- Exchange reciprocal links with other interesting and RELATED website.
OK! You have done all the ”to do and not to do list!“. Your website is ready! Is it really ready for Search engines?
Lets know about:
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8- How do search engines work?
Wow! Is this a million dollar question? Not Really!
Different search engines have different methodologies to read, process and repot the results.
The majority of search engines are conducting the following:
- Read Data from website (Spider, Crawler).
- Storing Information
- Check Relevancy
- Reporting the search results
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Read Data from website:
Search Engines are using a software called “Spider” , “Bot” or “Crawler”.
What is Spider, Bot or Crawler?
Spider: a robotic browser like program that reads, follow links and index web pages.
Different search engines have different names for their Spiders. The following are some of important Spiders (bots) names for search engines:
- Google - Googlebot
- MSN - MSNBot
- Yahoo - Slurp
There are more than 280 spiders out with different names. Their names will not be discussed here.
How does Spider, Bot or Crawler work?
Spider job is reading website or actually requests from web server specific pages and following Link tree (links-in and Links-out of website).
Spiders have another important task which is crawling.
What is Crawling in Search Engines?
Crawling is the process of following links by the spider in a website.
Search engines' spiders are not visiting your website 24/7. Spiders usually visiting same website in different time cycle, so if you publish your website do not assume your website will be crawled right away.
Many websites do not get crawled by spiders for one or some of the following reasons:
- Website is not properly connected through multiple links to other websites(No out-bond links).
- Website has been launched after search engines' crawl cycle have been completed.
- Website is not properly designed for search engines to be able to crawl
- Website is not working or it has one or some of following problems such as:
- Broken Links - Page Not Found
- Page is Not Followed
- URLs restricted by robots.txt
- Slow Server-URLs timed out
- HTTP errors
- URL unreachable
After your website visited by search engines' spider and crawled, the information will be residing in Index Server of the search engines.
OK! The magic starts here!
Storing Information:
The data that has been collected by search engines is not searchable at this level.
The crawled data should be inverted form bulk of data to refine information.
The process of converting crawled data using mathematical model is out scope of this page.
Search Engines create a list of single word that is called “Posting List”. The process of find two keywords together “Big+Apple” and number of the times that appears on different pages called “Intersecting A Posting List.”
Example:
If you type “Big Apple” in a search engine box, the search engine is looking at the following scenarios:
- Big
- Apple
- Big + anything else
- Apple anything else
- Big+Apple+ anything else
- Big+Apple
Note: Not all search engines follow the same format.
The main section of a successful search result is relevancy.
What is the relevancy in search engine?
Relevancy is when as search engine relate appropriate search query to its index search result and represent search result based on the quality of websites content in respect to others.
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Check Relevancy:
At this level the index information is searchable. Checking Relevancy is basically is mathematical Boolean logic that goes and checks the processed information from index server and keyword search in the Search engines.
That is birth place of PageRanking on Google.
There are many factors in PageRanking Number on Google however the two main concepts of PageRanking are:
- How many links come to a web page?
- The quality of the sites that linked back to page.
Reporting the Search Result:
This is the section when visitors see the result of their search queries in the search engines result page.
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9- Examples of Robots.txt:
The following allows all robots to visit all files because the wildcard “*” specifies all robots.
User-agent: *
Disallow:
This one keeps all robots out.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
The next one bars all robots from the cgi-bin and images directories:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /images/
This one bans Roverdog from all files on the server:
User-agent: Roverdog
Disallow: /
This one bans keeps googlebot from getting at the cheese.htm file:
User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: cheese.htm
For more complex examples, try retrieving some of the robots.txt files from the big sites like CNN, or Looksmart.
These automated software, regardless their names, are the seekers of content on the Internet, and from within individual web pages.
These tools are key parts in how the search engines operate.
some of the famous ones are:
- Google call it googlebot.com
- Yahoo's Web Crawler
- MSNBot is the MSN Search Web crawler
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10- How do I add my site to Google?
First, where did the name Google come from?
“Googol” is the mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100 zeros. The term was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner, and was popularized in the book, “Mathematics and the Imagination” by Kasner and James Newman.
Google's play on the term reflects the company´s mission to organize the immense amount of information available on the web.
Google is a public and profitable company focused on search services. Google operates websites at many international domains, with the most trafficked being www.google.com.
Google is widely recognized as the “world´s best search engine” because it is fast, accurate and easy to use. The company also serves corporate clients, including advertisers, content publishers, and site managers with cost-effective advertising and a wide range of revenue generating search services.
Google´s breakthrough technology and continued innovation serve the company´s mission of "organizing the world´s information and making it universally accessible and useful.”
File types searched include:
- HyperText Markup Language (html)
- Adobe Portable Document Format (pdf)
- Adobe PostScript (ps)
- Lotus 1-2-3 (wk1, wk2, wk3, wk4, wk5, wki, wks, wku)
- Lotus WordPro (lwp)
- MacWrite (mw)
- Microsoft Excel (xls)
- Microsoft PowerPoint (ppt)
- Microsoft Word (doc)
- Microsoft Works (wks, wps, wdb)
- Microsoft Write (wri)
- Rich Text Format (rtf)
- Shockwave Flash (swf)
- Text (ans, txt)
- Usenet messages: 1 billion
You can add your URL to Google for FREE
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11- How do I add my site to MSN?
MSN (or Microsoft Network) is an Internet service provider and web portal (initially meant to be a parallel net to the Internet) created by Microsoft on August 24, 1995, coinciding with the release of Windows 95.
The MSN moniker has since been extended to Microsoft's Hotmail webmail service and the MSN Messenger instant messaging client, as well as other Microsoft-branded websites.
Submit your site to MSN Search for FREE
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12- How do I add my site to Yahoo?
When Yahoo! was founded in 1994 by Stanford Ph.D. students, David Filo and Jerry Yang, it began as their hobby and has evolved into a global brand that has changed the way people communicate with each other, find and access information, and make purchases.
Today, Yahoo! Inc. is the Internet's leading global consumer and business services company, offering a comprehensive network of essential services for Web users around the globe as well as businesses of all sizes. As the first online navigational guide to the Web, Yahoo! (www.yahoo.com) is the leader in traffic, advertising, household, and business user reach. Yahoo! is also the most recognized and valuable Internet brand globally, reaching over 345 million unique users in 25 countries and 13 languages.
Suggest your site for inclusion in Yahoo Search For Free!
(requires registration)
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13- Five reasons to track website traffic
There are more reasons why you should monitor your website traffic. Monte Enbysk, a leading editor for the Microsoft.com network, explains in more detail at:
5 reasons to Track website Traffic
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14- How to choose right Keywords for the website?
You should have a few brainstorming sessions with your team to find right keywords that you like.
Make sure you have an understanding about keywords popularity.
What is keywords popularity?
Keywords Popularity is list of keywords or keyphrases used by people when they were searching on search engines.
Try to think like your target audience.
What would they search for when looking for the page you are optimizing?
It is very easy to fall in the trap of coming up with a short list of what YOU would search for, but what about everyone else? They will not necessarily use the same keywords as you. You should try to come up with as many keyword phrases as you can think of that relate to the page you are optimizing. Try asking a few friends and family what they would search for when searching for a site like yours.
Check out your competition for ideas. Do a search using keywords that you already know you want to target and click through on the top sites that come up. Once on the site view the source HTML code and view the keywords they have in their meta tags - this should give you many more ideas! Make sure to only use keywords that relate to YOUR site or page. To view the HTML code simply clicks the 'View' at the top of your web browser then select 'Source', or 'Page Source'.
How do you find your key words popularity:
Try:
Google Keyword Tool
Keyword Suggestions for Overture
To get listed correctly in the search engines each page of your site that you want listed needs to be optimized to the best of your ability.
Since the keywords that you decide to target will be used throughout the optimization process choosing the right keywords is essential.
If you choose the wrong keywords you will not be found in the search engines. If you are not found in the search engines how will anyone find your site?
Since the keywords you choose to optimize your pages with are so important, we have put together some tips to help you make sure that you make the right choices. You should utilize these tips when selecting keywords for each page that you plan to submit to the search engines.
Think “specific keyword phrases” not “keywords”. Why?
Due to the extreme amount of competition for general terms in the search engines, if your keyword phrases are too general it is very unlikely you will rank well in the search engines.
You stand a far better chance to rank well for specific phrases where there is less competition. The resulting traffic, since it is more highly targeted, should also be much higher quality too!
Here's an example for a site selling shoes:
Much Too General
- shoes
- men's shoes
- women's shoes
Much Better!
- imported italian shoes
- men's leather penny loafers
- women's aerobic sneakers
You should develop a list of keyword phrases, following the tips on this page, for each page that you optimize for the search engines.
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