SEO or search engine optimization, Every webmaster knows about this and struggles to make his website as search engine friendly as possible. But how many actually know what seo is all about? And how many follow this correctly?

THE BASICS

As we all know at least 70% of a website’s visitors are from search engine like GOOGLE, YAHOO! etc. So it is understood that your website must be search engine friendly enough to actually make Google understand what is there in your site. This is Search engine optimization.

To achieve this you have to see to it that the following are up to the mark :

1 Page title

2 Meta tags (description, keywords )

3 Page content

4. Page file name

5. Page URL ( only in dynamic sites )

IN DEPTH

PAGE TITLE: Unlike contrary beliefs this is the most important part of good search engine friendly pages. A search engine’s crawl bot will scan this tag too. Thus even the title adds as a content type identifier. In naming you page title it is best to avoid characters like ./#@ etc as they confuse the search engine and honestly no one searches for those. Besides they may look good to people/users but they are gibberish to crawl bots. The title must always be as precise as possible. For example if there is a sign up page then the best title would be ‘Sign Up’ and maybe followed by the site name or services name rather than Site name - Sign Up.

In case you are using a dynamic site and you have coding knowledge try as much as possible to make this dynamic.

META TAGS: By far the most widely used and abused part of the search engine optimizing tricks. These tags along with the title tag are the preliminary scanned/crawled tags. The most important meta tag is the description and keywords tag. The description tag is generally a paragraph ( about 20-40 words ) describing the content of the page or the site or the site’s services. Try to keep the descriptions short rich with keywords ( related only ) and as descriptive of the content as possible. The keywords tag is the MOST abused tag. Most fill this part with unrelated keywords write up to 1000 of keywords. Search engine companies have found ways to detect such fraudsters and they will not hesitate to ban you. Use this only to fill it with limited keyword ( about 50 is really good ). To fill this keyword tag try using some keyword generator etc and fill it. For example for web hosting company these would be good set of keywords : web hosting, web-hosting, website hosting, shared web hosting, shared hosting, cPanel hosting etc. As in keywords tag multiple keywords are allowed feel free to add as many as you want separated by ‘,’.

PAGE CONTENT: This is the actual content people view. Try to fill in as many “keyword” as possible in your sentences as the crawl bot compares this with keywords from the meta tag. Where ever possible avoid images which have content as they are not search enine friendly. If you have to use images then use the title tag describing the image content. This is something a lot of first time site designers forget or fail to do.

PAGE FILENAME: Try to name the file describing the content. i.e. In case you have a page to register then name the page name as register.php/register.html rather than p2243.php etc. This does not help a great deal but it could add a slight edge if there are 2 sites with same content.

PAGE URL: This applies to mainly dynamic sites and not to static sites. Try having clean url’s. Clean urls come of this format : http://sitename.com/article/article name.html. The same url which is not search engine friendly will look like : http://sitename.com/article.php?arti_name=abc. Clean url’s are important and give your site a complete crawl as many search engines will not crawl url’s having ? in it. So as much as possible avoid it and use clean url.

Summary

I hope this article cleared doubts and helped you optimize your site for search engines.

If any doubts feel free to contact us.

- By webbloged.com.