Creating a website that appears high in Google page rankings is important to get the highest number of visitors. This is called search engine optimization.
Keywords:
The key is to choose keywords that are appropriate to your site in your site description. We use meta tags, alt tags and others to try and put the website higher on the rankings than everybody else. 'Tech News' for a technology news site is not the best keyword, even if it is accurate. The reason being that many different subjects can also use that same keyword, such as 'Bio Tech News', 'Science Tech News', 'Info Tech News' and so on. The key factor to remember in Google rankings is to be unique. If the content is plentiful and unique, you'll appear higher.
Meta tags should be in every html page of every website:
<META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"> <META name="keywords" content="keywords1,keywords2,keywords3"> <META name="description" content="description of the site"> <META name="robots" Content="Index,Follow">
The first tag above says that the content of the page is HTML, and uses the International convention of 'iso-8859-1'.
The next line includes meta keywords. For example: . Use about 10 to 15 keywords, not too many. Don't repeat the same word either:
"tech news", "information technology" is better than:
"tech news", "latest tech news", "info tech news".
It's valuable real estate, so don't waste it.
The third line is the meta description. It should include a brief sentence about your site and what people can expect to find. such as" "A great place to find info tech news, reviews, videos and software". Don't use more than 255 characters and do not use more than 3 commas (,).
The fourth line is used by the search engine robots. You can use the following:
"index,follow" This will tell the robot to index the page AND follow the links.
"noindex,follow" This will tell the robot to NOT index the page but DO follow the links.
"index,nofollow" This will tell the robot to DO index the page but NOT follow the links
"noindex,nofollow" This will tell the robot to NOT index the page AND not to follow the links
"all" This is the same as "index,follow"
"none" This is the same as "noindex,nofollow"
The Domain name:
The domain name should (if possible) use the site keywords. frogheaven.com is better than smallgreenthing.com. If this is not possible, try to use a subdomain, such as : frogs.smallgreenthing.com
The Body and content:
Next is setting up the body of your website. Using the keywords put them into your tags where possible, such as
Example: <a href="/home/frognews.php"><h2>Latest Frog News>/h2><img src="/home/frog.jpg"
alt="The largest frog ever seen" title="World's Largest Frog" /></a>
In the footer, you can use the site keywords as your links. Remember to be accurate and specific.
Seach engines use filtered words, which are basically words that don't count. Is, A, I, No, Or, You and The are some examples of words that are typically ignored. individual letters and random letters are sometimes ignored, such as a, p, and zm.
Marketing:
Spam is a great way to a) get your website quick results in the short terms b) have your site blacklisted by other sites and search engines rather quickly. The key is to get your site name, url and keywords out into the world without being a pain in someones backside. Here's how. Create a link to us page, include some images and the code to these images so users can put them in their websites. Example:
<a href="http://www.example.com/"> <img src="http://www.example.com/frog.gif" alt="Frog News and Reviews - Example Site Name" /> </a>In this code we see the site url, the site name, an image name using a keywords, a very short description, and the site name again in text form.
If you can get your links on the top sites, your site will eventually grow. On busy forums, try to see if they use Google ads, then place your ads on this site. Sometimes your advert which includes your site info can be cached on Google's servers and in search results.
Banner swapping was once popular, but is not so anymore. If there are similar sites to yours about that are not a threat as far as competition, see if they would include section to link to your site and others.
Seach Engine Ranking criteria:
Every search engine has it's own criteria and formula to weighing up which sites appear high on he search engine list. This sum should give you a basic idea of how a search engine may work out where you place on search engine rankings:
Keywords and Phrase Placement points + Link popularity and relevancy points + Other misc, points - spam points = Total Score
The site that has the higher score appears on the top of the list. Just like a webmaster is competing against other sites to get a higher score, search engines are also competing against other search engines to get better results, and better market share. this means that search engines are always tweaking the criteria needed.
Other Important Information on SEO:
Older websites get better results. The longer a domain and site is registered, the more it appears to be serious about providing information to visitors in the long term.
Some larger sites may not be cached if they are too big. Anything over 100Kb might be too large for google to store, unless the content is deemed exception, or important enough.
Sites that are updated regularly generally perform better. The more articles and products you add to your site, the higher your rankings as the search engine robots will visit more often.
Directories like Yahoo, DMOZ, and About are a god place to add your site. Google will place you higher if these sites have you in their directories.
Sites like Digg and Facebook are a good way to promote your site. If your articles have an area to link your content, you'll be seen favorably in the eyes of search engines.
Analytics:
Google and other companies have resources available for site analysis. This works by placing code into your site that records information about visitors, such as where they came from, what browser they are looking at, and what content visitors are looking for. It will tell you what search terms was typed into Google or Yahoo, how many people used these terms, and how long they stayed on your site. Using this information to your advantage will help with SEO.
What NOT to do:
There once was many ways to cheat search engines into giving you higher results. Here are a list of old techniques that do not work anymore, and will actually give poorer results.
Repeating Keywords. Using the same keyword over and over again, such as cabin, cabins, log cabin, log cabins, lake side cabin, cabins, cabins cabin, cabins,
Some designers use spacer images to arrange the content. Don't add a lot tags to spacer images, only use them on actual content.
Tiny text is where developers put really small text in certain areas of the site using the keywords. Search engines have the opinion that if it's too small to read, why put it there?
Hidden text and links on sites should be avoided, such as making links appear the same color as a background, or in areas not visible to the site viewers.
Misleading changes to sites are frowned upon. If you frequently change a pages title the bot thinks you are try to convince it that you are a new site.
Page swapping is where you get the content from a number one result and use their site markup on yours to get a high result. Then changing the content toy ours to give your content the same high result. It doesn't work as the bots prefer the older sites and unique content.
Duplicating pages is where you have a well preforming page and duplicate it to get better results. Your results will actually drop if you do this.
Mirrored sites is similar to duplicating pages, but it is a whole site that has been copied to another domain. Again, search engines don't like this as they look for unique content.
Cloaking a site so that Google sees one page but the visitor gets another is bad, this happens with malicious websites with drive by downloads that infect computers so you wont get good results.
Squatting is where you get a domain that was once popular and has expired, or getting a similar sounding domain name such as gooogle.com (with an extra 'o'). Google will not likely show your results. An example is with the game 'Fallout: New Vegas'. Someone registered the domain name just after the game was announced. Search engine robots do not like this.
Remember:
These of course won't get you the top position every time as all the larger sites use SEO tricks. It will get you on the way to higher search engine rankings over extended periods of time.
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