Following these simple tips will definitely boost your traffic and search engine rankings for free. 1. Make sure your site is not under construction, incomplete, with little or no unique content. 2. When your site is ready, submit it to Google, Yahoo, MSN and ASK.com. Consider also submitting to other search engine but most of them are powered by these four leading search engines. Submit also your site to reputable high PR web directories, open directories, yellow pages and social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us, furl, etc. 3. Submit your sitemap to Google, Yahoo, MSN and ASK.com (sitemap for search engines usually in XML format) 4. Offer sitemap to your site visitors for easy page navigation. (sitemap for visitors in HTML format) 5. Create unique and rich content sites. Avoid duplicate content. Do not create multiple pages, sub-domains, domains, mirror sites or sites with different domain names but same content. 6. Check your keywords and make sure they are relevant and actually are contained in your site. Avoid keywords stuffing. 7. Use text instead of images in your content, links and important subjects. 8. Make your TITLE and ALT tags descriptive, simple and keyword rich. Avoid irrelevant and repeated keywords. 9. Title tag should be 60-80 characters maximum length. 10. Meta tag description should be 160-180 characters including spaces. (about 25-30 words) 11. Meta Tag keywords must be 15-20 words maximum. 12. Optimize Pages with Headings (H1, H2, H3..) containing your site's primary keywords. 13. Validate your CSS and HTML. Check for errors and broken links. 14. If your site contains dynamic pages(i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), make sure you use SEO friendly URLs. Search engines' spiders having difficulty indexing dynamic pages. 15. Maximum links per page must be fewer than 100. Avoid the risk of being flagged as link farm by search engines. 16. Use Lynx as text browser to check your site. (http://lynx.isc.org/) 17. Allow search bots (good ones) to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site. 18. Check your web server/host if it supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. It tells search engines whether your content has changed since last crawled your site. It will save you bandwidth, resources and avoid server overload. 19. Use Robots.txt file to manage and control search engine spiders in indexing your site. You can allow and disallow spiders and choose directories you want to be crawled and indexed. But with bad bots or spam bots you need to modify your HTACCESS file to properly and effectively manage bots or spiders. Visit http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/faq.html to learn more about Robots.txt file. 20. Do not attempt to present different content to search engines than what you show to your site visitors. 21. Avoid dirty tricks and exploiting loop holes to improve search engines ranking. 22. Avoid links to bad neighborhood such as web spammers, link farms, phishing, hacker, crack, gambling, porn and scam sites. Linking to them will greatly affects your search engine rankings. 23. Do not attempt to join in link schemes, excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging and link exchange web rings. 24. Do not use unauthorized programs or online tools to submit your site, check page rankings and other automated queries. Avoid the risk of being flagged as spam. 25. Do not use hidden text and links. Show to search engines what you show to your vistors. It will greatly affect your site's reputation. 26. Do not attempt to create pages that contains phishing, scam, viruses, trojans, backdoors, spyware, adware and other malicious programs. 27. Make your site useful and informative. 28. Improve your link building. Link to high PR websites. Quality of relevant links are far more important than quantity. Links will greatly improve your site's visibility, popularity and rankings. Search engines consider links as votes to your site. 29. Check your page link structure. Every page should be reachable by a single static text link. 30. Be extra careful in purchasing SEO services. Some uses illegal and questionable ways to improve rankings. 31. Do not buy or sell links. 32. Do not create sites that contains purely affiliate links and no valuable content that are useful to the users. I hope these tips will add more popularity and visibility to your site. Enjoy! About the Author: Edwin Reyes is a Web Developer and the Webmaster of Findmesoftware.com, a Philippine based website that provides free software downloads, tools, reviews, online tips, blogging resources, tutorials and Free SEO Tools and Software Download.
This is all a bit basic - nothing that hasn't been discussed here several hundred times. And most people don't submit to search engines, they find a well-placed backlink is a much quicker way to get indexed.
i know they are basic but i thought they were quite useful and important...at least for newbies....any even though backlinks is a great way to get index...submitting to search engines takes few minutes only.
Isn't this from the entireweb.com newsletter? Besides that there isn't anything really significant but the article is a good refresher though.
it is and you can see the credits at the bottom...i am not saying that i wrote it...just sharing it with you guys.
someone just gave me a negative rep...thanks for being supportive. I just wanted to share something i found on the internet....i don't see anyone how it may have been offending...if you think it is too basic then just move on to another thread and let some newbies read it but don't give some one a negative rep with the comment "dick head".
Cheers man, Thanks for the tips. It's great to have a nice list as a refresher and I'm sure it will help some new people! Shaner
This is the most SEO tip! You need unique content, useful content, informative content, original content, but also sometimes it's best to mix humor and drama and emotion into your articles. Adds a bit of flair to an otherwise drab article... that's what I find anyways
valid CSS or W3C validation is not important for SEO. i have seen plenty of sites ranked high that didnt pass validation btw, i got a red rep from this thread. i think there is a loser on the loose who likes giving out 1 point red rep at the cost of -1. all my greens are about to turn red
Thanks! It is nice to have all of these tips in summary all in one place. Kind of like a todo list when you start optimizing a new site.
Thanks for posting hiomics. It's good for a newbie like me Questions for any of the people more knowledgeable than me. 25. Do not use hidden text and links. Show to search engines what you show to your vistors. It will greatly affect your site's reputation. I use the gilder/levin method of image replacement. This uses an h1 in the top masthead with text that a screen reader, search engine or someone with images or css turned off will see. Inside the h1, it uses a span that fits over top of the h1 and has a background image that covers the h1 text. This is supposed to be a legitimate accessibility technique where regular users see the more appealing graphic version and other users see the text. Will the search engines think I'm spamming if the h1 text content is very similar to the title tag? 23. Do not attempt to join in link schemes, excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging and link exchange web rings. I am gathering together a list of 50 different lawyers from 50 different states to all link to each others' site. Would the search engines consider these to be quality sites or a spamming scam? They are all actual legitimate sites of legitimate lawyers. Any thoughts? Thanks in advance
Aren't most sites always under construction? Anyway... I've read where people say when starting a new site to create just one page first, submit to one or two dirs, and point some links out to relevant sites for the first month. Then later create more pages and do the same and so on. So what that tip you posted is saying is that we should create the entire site content and all before doing SEO?
I think what it means is that don't create a useless site and then try to optimize it....try to finish it first...get the best out of you in terms of quality of the content and then optimize it.