Sumit's Blog

Search engines are the primary source for any internet users to find a web site. Therefore, Web sites with good listing on search engines are more likely to get increased traffic than the ones without.Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is about how to get your web pages accessible by search engines and how to improve your ranking on search engines. It is a process of increasing your number of visitors by achieving a high position within search results when relevant keywords are searched for.

SEO has been around for more than 10 years but still a lot of web sites fail to take advantage of it. Here, I will provide some quick guide on popular tricks used by most of the web developers to optimise their sites.

1. Choose appropriate Keywords: Choosing the right keyword is one of the important ways that you can optimise your site. Keywords and phrases picked up carefully may produce better result in search engine. Therefore, it is vitally important that you choose keywords that best represent your web site. For example it is better to have English Leather Shoes, Women’s high heel shoes, Man’s sports shoes rather than Shoes, Women’s Shoes, Men’s Shoes. Try to avoid using generic ones since it is going to be extremely difficult to optimize for them.

There are various places that you can put keywords in your html document.

1.1 Keywords in TITLE tag:

<Title>English Leather Shoes, Women’s high heel Shoe’s </title>

1.2 Keywords in META tag:

<meta name= “description” content = “Web Design, CSS Tutorials,

J Query tutorials, PHP tutorials, JavaScript and Ajax, REST, SOAP,

OOP PHP and many more./”>

<meta name = “keywords” content = “ css, web, jquery, web development, security, JavaScript lightbox, JavaScript thickbox, shopping cart”/>

1.3 Keywords in Alt tag: Alt tags are mostly used to describe pictures on the web page. Search engines don’t understand the content of the pictures. So, use the Alt tag to describe the pictures on your web page.

Example: <img src= “boat.gif “ alt = “small boat”/

1.4 Keywords in the links: Make your links as clear as possible. For example instead read more use read more on SEO.

Example: http://yourarticle.com/readmore.php> Read More on SEO

1.5 Keywords in Header tags: Header tags are not used much these days.The size of the text is defined using CSS these days. But search engines look for these header tags. It allows search engines to see the information hierarchy of the page. So, it’s a good practice to include header tags in your html document rather than define it elsewhere.

2.0 Avoid Duplicate Content :

Search engines like Google and Yahoo are very strict about duplicate content. Google, I believe penalises you for having duplicate content. Footer contents can be repeated without penalties but make sure you don’t make your footer content big to qualify as an article.

3.0 Create a Site Map:

Site Maps are the great way to be found by the Search engine. Site maps lets search engine know about the existence of the page. It ensures all pages linked throughout a site will be crawled and indexed by the search engine.SEO experts recommend an HTML site map for the user and an XML site for th search bots.

4.0 Avoid Frames:

Let’s not get into technical reasons for why frames are bad.Just avoid using them. Both from a design perspective and a SEO perspective frames are a pain in the neck. IT causes confusion to your users and stops web spiders from crawling through your site.

5.0 Do not use flash based Navigation:

Web Bots cannot crawl through flash based content. So, avoid using flash navigation. I ‘m not aware of how flash designers work on SEO but as far as I know flash contents are not crawled by Web bots and it is recommended not to have a flash based navigation system. So, avoid if you can.

6.0 Reduce Code Bloat:

I cannot generalise but I still see some web deverlopers doing this. It is not a good idea to include your stylesheet and javascript within the html document. Your content should always be seperated from your layout. Having CSS and Javascript within your HTML unnecessarily makes your code bloated and wastes search engines time to access your page. Search engine simply do not need to know how your page looks like.

The following piece of code shows Javascript and CSS defined externally:

7.0 Check for broken links:

I’m sure all of us have seen 404 errors on web pages. Error 404 means that the client was able to locate the server but the page was not found. If the page linking to the 404 error remains on this list for too long or has too many links to 404 errors, in all likelihood this would have a negative effect on the “Quality Score” of that page.

8.0 Get linked by popular Sites:

Having popular sites linked to your site is a great way to increase traffic. In fact each click to your site is considered a vote to your site by the linking site. This is however a long process. So, you just have to be patient and find out ways that you can do it. Normally, if I want to increase traffic on my personal site, I would write articles on popular sites and request a link back to my personal site.

9.0 Submit your site to search engine:

After you have all the above, it’s about time you submit your site to the search engine. You can start off with popular search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN and move your other commercial vendors. But do a thorough research on where you are submitting your website. Make sure you do not submit it to ones who submit your links to link farms. This might get you penalised.

10 Use Tools To Analyse:

There are numerous tools that you can use to analyse your site. Google Analytics, Word Tracker, Microsoft Keyword Forecast. SEOBook Keyword Density Analyser etc are tools that you can use.

I might write a separate blog on SEO tools.

11. Avoid Using Black Hat Techniques:

Black Hat techniques mean optimising your site on search engine in an unethical way. Sooner or later, most probably sooner than you think you will get caught and get permanently kicked out with no chance of getting listed again. DON’T DO IT…

Conclusion:

Following all the steps above doesn’t guarantee you a good ranking on search engine. Do not expect changes to occur overnight. In fact, no one can guarantee a top spot onany search engine. Getting higher ranking on search engine is a continuous effort that takes time to obtain positive results.

In this article i have only covered few issues about what SEO is and how it is achieved. There are plenty of resources that you find on the internet. Starting off with the WikiPedia won’t be a bad idea.