Webthris Blog

Search Engine Optimization for Webmasters

Friday, June 19th, 2009 | Information Technology, Tips, Website

A quick tip write up for Webmasters who want to do Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). I’ve been in the search engine optimization industry for quite sometime. My passion for it started in 2003 when I tried getting www.webthris.com to be listed on top of search engines, namely www.google.com and www.yahoo.com, with certain selected keywords.

There are alot of website out there who teach in detail how the SEO process is conducted, you may search for them as well. I can teach the basics here, but frankly, Search Engine Optimisation is a long process and must be continuously done.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO Tips)

1) TItle Tags and Meta Tags

The first thing that Google bot or robot reads (these are sort of scripts that are created to read your website) are the title and meta tags that exist on your website. Do check your source code the the <tlte> and <meta> tags. Both of these must contain the specific keyword that you are interested in.

Meta tags must be included in terms of the keywords, and description and must always be different on each page of your website. You may use Google Webmaster to monitor as well as check for any meta tag mistake.

2) Headings

Next is to make sure the usage of Heading tags <H>. This is important because google and yahoo bots tend to give extra points for them. Use Heading tags for your keywords.

3) Content

To be successfully listed on the top rankings in the search engines, the words on your web pages should never be an afterthougth but a major investment in your search engine optimization campaign.

A well optimised title and a good heading certainly will boost search engine ranking but it will turn ineffective unless the page also contains some keyword-rich body text. Content is what the search engine really want to index. If logistics allowed them they would look at nothing else on a page except content. Adequate description content allows search engine spiders to extract obvious targeted keywords and phrases. Below are the key component areas for each page on the site where we need to include target ket phrase in proper proportion.

• TITLE and META-description tags.
• Headings.
• First paragraph of textual content within the body of the main page of the site.
• Hyperlinked keywords and the TITLE tag of the respective target page.
• alt-text for images.

4) Hyperlink Optimization

Search engine spiders or bots consider hyperlinks as one of the important elements while indexing a web site. You should divide the pages properly and use hyperlinks to link to them. The TITLE attribute should also be used. The content placed within the TITLE attribute will be presented to the end user as a small description window when they place their cursor over the hyperlink. A good technique for search engine to index your web site.

5) Alt-text for images

If you’re using Images on your website, make sure that they are not too huge in size so that it will load fast. Website that take a long time to load will discourage search engine spiders and also readers. The alt-text is the text that hides behind the images and since the search engine spiders are not able to “see” any information that is held within an image, the alt-text provides a way for the search engines to tell what each image on the site signify.

6) Link Popularity

All major crawler-based search engine (such as google) uses link analysis as part of their ranking algotirhm. It is because it’s very difficult for everyone to “fake” good links and spam search engines by manipulating the keywords and content on their web pages.

Back linking is the most important factor for a better ranking on Google and many other search engines. Your link popularity rating is a combination of the following:

• The number of sites linking to you.
• The words that are used to describe your site in the links.
• The relevance of those sites as they relate to your subject matter.
• The link popularity of the sites that link to you.
• The search engine rankings of the sites that link to you.

7) Website Architecture and Link Structure Analysis

To allow the search engines to easily get around your web site and index every page, you should ideally have a text based navigation structure. Drop down menus, image maps, and frameset menus are difficult and in some cases impossible for the search engine spiders to follow.

Below are a list that you’ll need to consider to make your website userfriendly to search engines:

•  You must use hyperlinks menus (text based) and not only image, flash and javascript menu. This will decrease page load time as well as increase optimisation for search engines.
• Include a site map to your users that point to the important part of your web page.
• If you’re targetting a certain region for your website to be recognised in search engines, it is a good idea to include your city, state and phone details at the top of all pages as readable text.
• The files or pages in your server, should be closer to the root file as possible. For example, a file at www.webthris.com/something.htm, would get better ranking than a files located at www.webthris.com/here/something.htm.
• Never use a Javascript menu, javascript will chase away the search engine crawlers.

Webmasters, do these changes to your website immediately and you’ll see changes in the ranking. It could take anywhere from a day to 3 months for you to see some changes. Do select your favourable keywords and monitor them manually, or you could use online softwares such as Google Analysis or Google Webmaster to help you keep track of these keywords.

Happy SEO-ing.

Tags: google, search engine, search engine optimisation, search engine optimisation ranking, search engine optimization, search engine optimization tips, seo, seo ranking, seo tips, yahoo

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