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SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION BASICS: Part I
Posted On May 25, 2007 by Raja Kishore Reddy filed under
Do not think that all your efforts have been worthless? I will say that to think so would be wrong!
You may have designed a terrific website with good stuff and tons of features. However, the website is not able to record a sizeable number of hits. Do not think that all your efforts have been worthless? I will say that to think so would be wrong!
I am going to discuss a way to get traffic through a simple tune-up of your website pages using Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
Before moving on to SEO, we have to first optimize our web pages. An essential prerequisite before proceeding further is a little bit of knowledge about HTML.
Introduction
The term ‘Search Engine’ can be defined as “A computer program that retrieves documents or files or data from a database or from a computer network (especially from the internet)”.
Once your website is ready for the online audience, you would like to deploy it for the Internet. However, before doing this, we have to optimize the web pages for better Search Engine ranking.
A higher search engine ranking is the dream of many a website owners. However, they do not realize that if done correctly, optimization of their sites for the search engine can also see it optimized for the online audience.
Ultimately, people will find your website, thereby increasing your sales and hits generation.
Let’s Start
So you have a website but do not know how to get the same listed in various search engines. You should try to understand how the html tags work for various search engines to index your web page.
Welcome the most important tag that resides on every page in your website, i.e. the <TITLE> …........... </TITLE> tag. Nowadays, search engines are placing much emphasis on putting your site’s title on that tag. You can also add three most important key words here, pertaining to your web content and what your web site does. For example:
<Title> Zakhas.com Indian Portal for Online Entertainment | Discussion Board | Shopping Portal </Title>
Make sure that you are not using “and” instead of “|” because various search engines will ignore “AND, OR” etc.
Meta of a Page
The <META> tag lives between the <HEAD></HEAD> of a document and content information about the document rather than living in the <BODY> of the document and being a part of the actual content.
Note: Here, Meta means Meta Data which means “Data about data”, particularly those used for data interchange. For example:
If we developed a web page, we can add Meta information about our page description, which technology it belongs to and which language it uses and so on.
The <Meta> element is an empty element and so does not have a closing tag, rather <Meta> element carries information within attributes, so we need a forward slash “/” character at the end of the element.
Page Description
The second most important attribute that a search engine looks for is the page description. It should be pertinent with respect to your page content and <TITLE> tag. For example:
<META name = “description” content=” Zakhas.com is an Indian best source for shopping and gifting online discussion portal with a tons of fun” />
The <META> element can take up to eight attributes, four of which are universal attributes – dir, lang, zml:lang and Title. The other four, however, are specific to <META> element.
1. schema
2. name
3. content
4. http-equiv
The name and content attribute tend to be used together as do the http-equiv and content attributes. The value of “name” attribute can be anything; no restrictions are published in any standard. For example:
<Meta name=”Developer” content=”Sashikanta” />
<Meta name=”Owner” content=”Pallavi” />
Note: Generally, the description should around 200 characters long, although search engines like google.com will display only 100 characters on a search result.
Key Words
The next important attribute is the key words for a particular page, which will help you while searching for terms. For example:
<META name = “keywords” content=” Online shopping, gifting portal, zakhas forum, discussion board” lang=”en-us” />
Note: You can also change the language of your keywords by respectively changing the lang=”--|-- attributes”
Robots
Robots (mechanisms that can move automatically, especially from search engines) are useful for our website. When they spy through our website, we can guide the crawler to look for what we want or even ignore something.
For this purpose, we can put some Meta information inline into our Meta tags or we can put a separate robots.txt file in our web root directory for indexing our total website. For example:
Case 1: I want my home page to be indexed in a search engine. So, I can use:
<Meta name=”robots” content=”index, follow” />
Case 2: Suppose I do not want my registration page to be indexed. Using the below given Meta information I can achieve my objective.
<Meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, nofollow” />
Some commonly used values have been listed in table 1.
VALUES |
| MEANING |
| All | : | Index all pages * |
| None | : | Index no pages * |
| Index | : | Index this page |
| Noindex | : | Do not Index this page |
| Follow | : | Follow links from this page |
| Nofollow | : | Do not follow links from this page. |
* is generally used in robots.txt files to allow for indexing of all pages and so on. This resides in the web root folder. You can view any website’s robots.txt file, if they are using one, as follows: http://www.any-domain-name.com/robots.txt.
Robots.txt File
To create a robots.txt file, you have to follow these steps:
- Open a text editor, e.g. notepad.
- Save this document in your web root directory as robots.txt or you can upload it later on to your online web server’s web root directory.
- The scheme of robots.txt file contains two primary elements:
- user-agent line (to target search engine robots, you can use the wildcard “*”).
- disallow line (Specified for particular files/folder).
4. For quicker processing, I prefer to use the wildcard “*” on the user-agent. This means that it allows all search engines robots and spiders. And Disallow to “/”.
The most common format is:
#Robots.txt for http://www.zakhas.com/
User-agent:*
Disallow:/
Example:
If you want to welcome all search engine crawlers, use the user-agent with a “*” (and to disallow all crawlers to not index some system and resources raw folders/files, which are not useful to online audience).
#Robots.txt for http://www.zakhas.com/
User-agent:*
Disallow:/JavaScripts
Disallow:/register.asp
Disallow:/DocsAndResources
Optimize Cache
Optimize your cache setting, because the web server log files should be maintained for precision. “A caching device is any piece/s of hardware or software designed to store temporary copies of a file, most often to improve delivery performance”. There are two types of caching devices that create problems for web server log files: client side and server side.
We can optimize the page cache for ruined precision by obeying a simple bunch of codes for different technologies.
To Bust the cache, we can place the following tags in our document header section.
For Technology HTML
<Head>
<Meta Http-Equiv=”cache-control” Content=”no-cache” />
<Meta Http-Equiv=”pragma” Content=”no-cache” />
<Meta Http-Equiv=”expires” Content=”CURRENT-DATE-AND-TIME
” />
</Head>
For Technology ASP
<%
Response.Buffer = false
Response.Expires = 1
Response.ExpiresAbsolute =Now()-2
Response.AddHeader “pragma”, “no-cache”
Response.AddHeader “cache-control”,”no-cache”
Response.cachecontrol=”no-cache”
%>
For Technology PHP
<? Php header(“Expires:0”); header(“Last-modified:”.gmdate(“D,dmy H:i:s”).”GMT”);header(“cache-control:no-cache”);header(“pragma:no-cache”);?>
Note: You can get more information about cache at http://www.w3.org”)
Author Name
You can set the author name of the web as given below:
<Meta http-equiv=”author” content=”Sashikanta Nayak” />
Character Encoding
You can specify the character encoding used in a document with <META> tags whose http-equiv attribute has a value of content-type. For example:
<META http-equiv=”content-type” content=”ISO-8859-1” />
Specifying Rating
Internet content rating association (ICRA) provides a content rating label. It is made up of four parts:
- An ICRA identifiers
- ICRA label
- The RSACi identifiers (Old name)
- The RSACi rating
You can create a label from http://www.icra.org/
Now we have done a lot. In the next section, we will move on to deploying web pages into various search engines, with some considerations and tricks.