Zeniagetting your site indexed: Basics
November 23rd 2006 07:03
As I would often catch myself say, SEO is an art however there are hard and fast rules on optimizing your site to the top.
In this article, we will only talk about the very basic on search engine optimization beginning on your site’s HTML code to search engine submissions.. For those SEO newbies, this article can aid you in understanding on how your site gets indexed and how it’s listed by search engines.
The very basic of optimizing a site is to begin on the it’s code. The most ideal program to use is HTML, bots can easily read the code compared to JAVA and Flash wherein spiders are incomprehensible of. This is an example of a basic HTML format.
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Enter your title here<TITLE/>
<META NAME=”KEYWORDS” CONTENT= “Enter keywords here”>
<META NAME=”DESCRIPTION’ CONTENT= “enter your description here”
</HEAD>
<BODY>
Enter the content (text) of your body here
</BODY>
</HTML>
Let us try to delve in deeper on what each tag means and how we can use this for optimization.
1.The <TITLE> tag
The title tag is the most important tag in your header and is displayed in the blue bar on top of your window’s browser. Make sure your keywords are located there since Search Engines give heavier weight and higher relevance on keywords on title tags. The title tag should be a one liner statement describing the webpage. You must also take note that the number of characters you have on a title tag must not exceed the total characters of 60.
2. <Meta …>Tags
Most search Engines now a days, especially google, don’t use meta tags as a criteria to levy out the relevance of your site. However adding them in your codes will neither destroy your site’s layout nor permanently destroy your chances of being indexed.
There are two kinds of Meta Tags and those are the meta description and meta keywords. Meta Description is used to describe your webpage or the business. Some search engines use the information contained in this tag as a summary of your website in their search lisitngs. Again, dont ignore the opportunity of adding your keywords here. The Meta keywords should include the keywords you are targeting in the order of importance. You start with the most important down to the not-so important ones however must be relevant to your site in general.
*The Description tag should only contain at most 25 words and you shouldn’t repeat any keywords in your keywords tag, or else you will be guilty of keyword spamming.
3. <BODY>Tag
The body tag is considered the meat of your site. In here you write what you need to write about your website or for that webpage alone. Make sure you repeat keywords in your body to be able to rank and gain the needed relevance. Your keyword density should not be more than 8%.
Though you use this section as a given opportunity for stuffing lots and lots of keywords, you should always bear in mind that your site should be coherent both for the search engines and humans as well; plus not risking getting penalized for keyword spamming.
4. Submit your site to search engines
Hard fact is even if you dont do this step, spiders will still crawl your site and sooner or later your site will be indexed, but how soon is that? Much more like later. So take matter in your own hands, once you have your site uploaded and ready for more optimization. Take this step and start submitting your site to search engines. Although there are a lot of search engines all over the internet, only a handful are really important. Plus, it would be so tedious submitting your url to every search engines ( since there are about 500 million plus search engines) known and unknown, might as well wait if that’s the case.
Submit your URL to these Top 3 sites and you’re on your way to the yellow brick road of optimization success.
* Google
* Yahoo
* MSN
Submit your site manually rather than automatically since Search engines might regard you as spam once you are using the later. Keep in mind that getting indexed might take months and harvesting the golden results of optimization will take even longer. So in this business, patience is indeed a virtue.
5. Submitting to directories
Search engines had to start somewhere that is why it is also important to get listed on a human edited directories. Plus it helps in getting your site the visibility it needs.
There 3 major web directories
* DMOZ - free listing
* Yahoo! Directory - free listing for non-business sites
* Looksmart - free listing for non-commercial sites
Over the internet there are a lot of web directories, if you don’t want to pay to be listed on one, surely over the 700 million plus web directories some are bound to be free.
SEO efforts are usually on a long term basis, reeling them in takes time. If you would like to pursue a career in SEO, hammer into yourself the virtue of patience and fish results on the right time using the right things.
In this article, we will only talk about the very basic on search engine optimization beginning on your site’s HTML code to search engine submissions.. For those SEO newbies, this article can aid you in understanding on how your site gets indexed and how it’s listed by search engines.
The very basic of optimizing a site is to begin on the it’s code. The most ideal program to use is HTML, bots can easily read the code compared to JAVA and Flash wherein spiders are incomprehensible of. This is an example of a basic HTML format.
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Enter your title here<TITLE/>
<META NAME=”KEYWORDS” CONTENT= “Enter keywords here”>
<META NAME=”DESCRIPTION’ CONTENT= “enter your description here”
</HEAD>
<BODY>
Enter the content (text) of your body here
</BODY>
</HTML>
Let us try to delve in deeper on what each tag means and how we can use this for optimization.
1.The <TITLE> tag
The title tag is the most important tag in your header and is displayed in the blue bar on top of your window’s browser. Make sure your keywords are located there since Search Engines give heavier weight and higher relevance on keywords on title tags. The title tag should be a one liner statement describing the webpage. You must also take note that the number of characters you have on a title tag must not exceed the total characters of 60.
2. <Meta …>Tags
Most search Engines now a days, especially google, don’t use meta tags as a criteria to levy out the relevance of your site. However adding them in your codes will neither destroy your site’s layout nor permanently destroy your chances of being indexed.
There are two kinds of Meta Tags and those are the meta description and meta keywords. Meta Description is used to describe your webpage or the business. Some search engines use the information contained in this tag as a summary of your website in their search lisitngs. Again, dont ignore the opportunity of adding your keywords here. The Meta keywords should include the keywords you are targeting in the order of importance. You start with the most important down to the not-so important ones however must be relevant to your site in general.
*The Description tag should only contain at most 25 words and you shouldn’t repeat any keywords in your keywords tag, or else you will be guilty of keyword spamming.
3. <BODY>Tag
The body tag is considered the meat of your site. In here you write what you need to write about your website or for that webpage alone. Make sure you repeat keywords in your body to be able to rank and gain the needed relevance. Your keyword density should not be more than 8%.
Though you use this section as a given opportunity for stuffing lots and lots of keywords, you should always bear in mind that your site should be coherent both for the search engines and humans as well; plus not risking getting penalized for keyword spamming.
4. Submit your site to search engines
Hard fact is even if you dont do this step, spiders will still crawl your site and sooner or later your site will be indexed, but how soon is that? Much more like later. So take matter in your own hands, once you have your site uploaded and ready for more optimization. Take this step and start submitting your site to search engines. Although there are a lot of search engines all over the internet, only a handful are really important. Plus, it would be so tedious submitting your url to every search engines ( since there are about 500 million plus search engines) known and unknown, might as well wait if that’s the case.
Submit your URL to these Top 3 sites and you’re on your way to the yellow brick road of optimization success.
* Yahoo
* MSN
Submit your site manually rather than automatically since Search engines might regard you as spam once you are using the later. Keep in mind that getting indexed might take months and harvesting the golden results of optimization will take even longer. So in this business, patience is indeed a virtue.
5. Submitting to directories
Search engines had to start somewhere that is why it is also important to get listed on a human edited directories. Plus it helps in getting your site the visibility it needs.
There 3 major web directories
* DMOZ - free listing
* Yahoo! Directory - free listing for non-business sites
* Looksmart - free listing for non-commercial sites
Over the internet there are a lot of web directories, if you don’t want to pay to be listed on one, surely over the 700 million plus web directories some are bound to be free.
SEO efforts are usually on a long term basis, reeling them in takes time. If you would like to pursue a career in SEO, hammer into yourself the virtue of patience and fish results on the right time using the right things.
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Comment by Eric
Mal Gadget
This might be a bit of an understatement.
Without patience in the SEO world you're a lost cause.
GREAT post!
Comment by Zenia
Search Engine Optimization
Comment by Eric
Mal Gadget