SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION BASICS: Part II

If you have correctly followed the primary steps for SEO described in the previous article – i.e. a meaningful title, meta, etc. – you can then proceed on to the next step, which is submitting your website to search engines. There are various search engines with as many kinds of spiders/crawlers with strong algorithms. As such, it is not recommended to even attempt to cheat them. For example, “Googlebot” is capable of identifying key words, hidden in your web page, that have the same font color as the web page. Once such a website is discovered, the search engine will list the website as banned or spam. In such cases, the websites are called as “Deep web” (sites not indexed by search engines).

Generally, there are three types of submission: Manual, Automatic and Semiautomatic submission.

1.      Manual submission: Submitting your web pages manually to search engines is preferable. For example: you can submit you web pages to Google from http://www.google.com/addurl. (Note: There are many different URLs for submitting your RSS or Atom Feed web pages, known as dynamic sites).

2.      Automatic submission: Automatic submission is also known as tool-based submission that allows for approaching a bulk of search engines through a single click. However, this is not recommended. And the reason is, if you over-submit your website then it may harm indexing. Some tools may give you super performance, which may lead to a ban on your website while indexing. There are some tools that are good for SEO, e.g. Web CEO (Free), IBP, SEO Elite, etc. Before going on to use these tools, it is recommended to read their manual before submitting.

3.      Semiautomatic submission: Various search engines and directories do not approve of automatic submission, as there may be some additional information that you have to provide at the time of submission.

 

Guidelines before Submission

Research key words:

Key word research is a crucial part to ascertain your site’s usability. Your site’s key words and titles should be similar to your page content and links. You have to analyze the most frequently searched key words on websites similar to yours. You can get some of the most popular search terms by visiting www.alexa.com, www.webtracker.com or from various free services sites.

Why is key word research essential?

Because you might target the key word “Sell Pearls” because that’s your website’s primary business. However, it is possible that people will search for “Sell Pearls” instead of “buy pearls”. This is one way of optimizing your key words.

Page content and file size:
It is recommended that you put at least 200 words of unique content on your web page. And keep your page size to a maximum of 100 kilobytes.

It is also not recommended, for best usability, to put lots of text and make your site so heavy that it becomes difficult to scroll down the page. In such cases, visitors will undoubtedly click elsewhere to find the details they are looking for.

Use of CSS for the layout:
Various search engines may be inclined towards CSS-based layouts instead of general table-based HTML layouts. The benefit of CSS formatting is clean code, flexibility of important content placement and grater content density. Using CSS for Layout is highly preferred to enhance usability.

Use H1 tags:
Search engines give importance to web pages having tags like <H1>, <H2>… Put <H1> tag on top of your page and <H2>, <H3>…. You can also control the style of the H1 tags using CSS.

Use text formatting:
To emphasize key words, add bold, italic, underline attributes on your most targeted key words.

ALT attribute:
Use ALT in your <img> tags. In you images and image hyperlink or image map, using <alt =”Quality Pearls Gifts”> will help you a lot.

For example:
<img src=”Zakhas.gif” width=”128” height=”80” border=”0” alt=”Zakhas.com’s Logo” >
 

Top Left to Bottom Right:
The crawling structure of a search engine is from top left to bottom right. So it is better to put heading on the top with <h1> tag and on the left side all your links with <h2> or <h3>. At the bottom should be a list of all the links.

By doing this, the search engine will first read the top left-hand row/column and then read the body of the web page. It then goes on to read the 2nd left-hand row/column, which contains our navigational links and so on… Refer figure.

Some Quick Checkouts:
Never over-submit your site to search engines.
Never add hidden elements with links, such as on spacer images or text that is similar to the background color.
Never participate in reciprocal link exchanges, which is not related to your site category.
Always use manual site submission to search engines.
Always keep your page clean and green. Update your site regularly.
Always ensure that you do not remove your main key words, which the search engines have already indexed. Otherwise, your list rank will decrease.
Also, participate in Free Open Directory Submission, like DMOZ.org, etc.

Maintenance

Check your sever uptime:
Make sure your server (Web server) is running 24/7. You may lose your top position if your server gets down even for a couple of hours. Monitor your server regularly using some online free monitoring software.

Watch daily changes:
Your website may re-index quickly within 48 hours. To avoid loss in such scenarios, you have to watch yourself while you update your site. For example: If I removed the key word “Zakhas” from every web page during my last update, this could bring down my site’s ranking.

Measure the traffic on your site:
Every day you have to watch your log file and site stat, you have to inspect how many users are hitting your site, how many are unique visitors, how many pages they visited, from which location they came from, etc. From such measurements, you can track your site’s performance and key words they used to find your website.

Rank Check:
Check your page rank and site rank weekly. www.alexa.com is a website where you can view your site statistic with rank status. For page ranking, you can also use google.com’s toolbar for Page Rank.

Note: Google has publicly stated that they will be penalizing anyone who repeatedly uses automated reporting software to check their ranking on the engine.

(Note: Page Rank and Site Rank are different. Site rank is the position of the website on the Internet. Now, Yahoo.com is in the No. 1 position, according to www.alexa.com. Page Rank is where Search engines show you the rating of the pages, i.e. quality of the page content and uniqueness. Suppose a search engine (specially Google) gets two pages with the same page ranking and the value of the page content is the same from the database; then it will check the server quality and worthiness of the server.)

Your Competitors:
Always keep in touch with your competitors’ website for any dramatic changes they may have made to their content. View their pages source, Meta, etc. A change in the content of their Meta tag is usually the first sign that your competitors are trying to out do you.

About your content
Keep a monthly checklist that will help you keep your website content up-to-date. Check all your reciprocal links; if you are exchanging, make sure that they are up to date. Always check your dead links every month (you can also use free tools like Xenu's Link Sleuth or W3C link checker).

Meta Check
Make sure that the new pages you uploaded have the correct title, key words and description included. Many users forget these things over a period of time.

Backward Links
Check your backward link for every month. The higher quality links that point to your website can affect your search engine position. Use Google toolbar.

Conclusion
These are some of the basic things that a website owner and web master should perform. You can say this article may not be valid after few months, because nowadays search engines like google.com change their algorithms for better and pure search performance.
 

The author works as a software engineer with eTechnoverb Pvt. Ltd. He is available at: sashikanta@yahoo.com.