In today’s modern era where even remote villages in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan have broadband connections and are not deprived of internet anymore, we have moved further than having websites for Companies or government departments , or even community websites. Websites have grown in such vast numbers where even personnel websites, Hobby sites, clubs and social websites. Along with the numbers Competition has grown immensely and Search engines are now becoming the modern Directories. Often google, yahoo or MSN are the first websites we visit when we are in front of a PC. And our OneSource for getting information on a subject.
No of Visitors to the websites and the Ad revenues are directly proportional to the Value of the website, Therefore Search Engine optimization has become the website owner’s new weapon to fight for Visitors. SEO is a way to highlight you content and get the right targeted visitors to you website. Here are 5 Tips to start off with. This is intended for small website owners who have just start with Search Engine Optimization for their websites.
1. Research Keywords : First thing to do is find keywords. Consider keywords as those words which you thing describes your website. Think of words which are unique to your website. You could use DigitalPoint, WordTracker, Google Keyword Tool, WebConfs and Overture to find relevant words. Also make a list of you competitors and their keywords. Its good if at least one of the primary keywords you have selected is a part of the domain name.
2. Meaning Full Page Titles and Meta Tags: Make sure that relevant title tags are set for all pages. Setting meta tags, help to properly index your pages with relevant keywords in crawler based search engines. One good resource on how to set metatags is this article at SearchEngineWatch.
3. Effective URL Rewrites or FileNames: Often most websites nowadays are driven by Dynamic Data and URLs are really important there. Many times URLs look like http://mysite.com/ShowCategory.php?CategoryID=4 &ArticleID=27 to point to the Article on Travelling to Detroit and the Category TravelUSA. If the same looked like http://mysite.com/TravelUSA/TravellingtoDetroit.php, they would be more meaningful and highly search engine friendly. To do this you would need to use a URLRewrite method, Use a Add-in if you are using a CMS like joomla or if you are having static pages with pages like 1.php,12.html,etc. Just rename to more meaning full names. (Do not create Dead Links , Make sure old URLs work to, Incase someone has bookmarked them), Some links explaining the same are 1, 2, 3
4. Sitemaps: Make sitemaps for your site, This would be a single page linking to all other pages in the site. Also create a robots.txt file for your website. Sitemap.xml for google and submit the same in the google webmaster tool.
5. Backlink , Backlink and Backlink : Add you website to all search engines you can find, Add to all Directory’s and Mainly Self Propagate your side. Simple ways to get you site linked is to register yourself to sites with the URL , Advertise you site in blogpost that relate to you, Write articles and publish on Free News Release Sites and on Free articles release sites (like enzine).
I hope these 5 Tips will help you and get you started on the SEO front. There more and Search Engine Optimization is ever evolving and more and more new techniques will surface over time and so will search engines evolve to make present techniques (like meta tags) irrelevant.
