= Search engine optimization What is seo? Seo is all about helping the search engines to crawl your site better and give them the best of your site. This requires a lot of things to be done. We will try to post some of the valuable search engine optimization information here. Blogs and websites get success by achieving a huge traffic. So how do we actually get traffic? For this there are many factors to it. We will try to put up some of the factors here: 1) google page rank, higher the page rank the better it is. Page rank starts from 0 and goes to 10. page rank 4-6 should be considered decent. Google pagerank is found in the google toolbar. Though it is not all that accurate, so perhaps checking the pr from data centers are a better idea. 2) Backlinks are important, but geting backlinka involves a lot of work. 3) Unique content and fresh content. If you get backlinks and fresh content, google page rank will go up, so let’s talk about the backlinks first. These are a few methods to get backlinks, 1) Article submission : it is one of the easiest ways to get backlinks. Just write a quality article, and submit it to as many article submission websites as you can. And add your website’s link in the article. This is how you get easy and free backlinks. Remember to check the page rank, as higher page rank article submission sites, are the best to get some quality backlinks. Remember this is contextual links, so this traffic is absolutely targeted, so it is adviced to write articles of the same category as the link in it. 2) Directory submission : I don’t recommend the free directories, as there are too many links. If you go for the free directories, then don't submit all in one day, do it slowly so that the search engines don't detect a lot of links at once! Too many links are link farms and it can get your site blacklisted by google and other search engines. Try the paid directories, must be pr3+ else it is pretty much waste of time. Some of my favorites are alive, aviva, v7n, gii etc! 3) Link exchange : this is another free method, but don’t do this too much. Find high pagerank websites, that are of the same category of your website. Then do link exchange with them. Do this with caution, and remember not to have more than 5% of your incomming links from link exchange, else it will hurt the rankings. 4) Buy links : well, one of the most easiest ways of getting quality backlink is buying links. You need to be careful to buy link, try getting links from pr4+ sites and get it from the home page. This is the best way, as you get quality one sided links. But then matt's recent blogs are a bit against it, so perhaps doing this safely will be a lot better. Don't put paid links or sponsored links in your sites. Do not actively sell or buy links. You must optimize your keywords also. So for that, whenever you buy links or do link exchange, use your most important keyword to hiperlink your URL. This way your keywords importance in the search engines will increase. This is known as anchor text optimization. It is the best Seo technique. Meta tags are very important, keep proper Meta tags in the head of your web site, following Meta tags much be present in your pages if you want to get higher rank and better traffic from the search engines: 1) keywords = must be around 120-150 characters long. 50% of your keywords and key phrases must be on your web site’s content, else it will be considered as keyword spamming. This is not the most important meta tags, these days search engines are more or less ignoring the keywords, so am repeating, that please don’t put up keywords that are not part of your page’s content. 2) Description: this is a very important Meta tags, when the site’s don’t have much contents, the meta description is used by the search engines to determine what type of site it is. This one must be around 150-175 characters, not more than that. 3) Title : this is the most important Meta tag. Title is the main reason why a site dose good in search engines and why a site dose not. A title tag must not be more than 50-60 characters. Try not putting up anything other than text in the title’s field. Also it is very important to put up your most important keyword in the title. Avoid special symbols, and if you want to put two keywords or key phrases in the title use this symbol “ | †between them. These little things make huge difference for your search engine rankings and search engine traffic. Seo is all about helping the search engines, not finding way to cheat it. Try making nice websites, so that you visitors like them, and come back whenever they want more information. Then next point is unique content and fresh content. These are two things that are very much necessary to make a successful site. You need quality unique content, and then you need to add these contents everyday. You can bring search engines crawlers by a lot of methods, but then only if you have quality unique content then your site will have better position in the search engines. High page rank and lot’s more depends on the content. So start writing and write, as often you want. Perhaps this is one of the major reasons that blogs works better than most websites. If you are on the blogger try the feeds. Feeds are one of the best way to bring more people to read your content. The rss and xml feeds are pretty common these days. Blogger feeds are atom.xml and it works great. Use feedburner.com to get the most out of your feeds. Just get a free account there, add your site's feed in the feed burner, after that make some add to "my google" and "my yahoo" buttons, that's it! just add those buttons on your site, easy! Social networking is one of the best ways to drive a huge traffic to your websites or blogs, but then it dosenot really help to much from the seo point of view, as the nofollow tags are available with the link on those sites. But then am getting over a few thousand hits from the social network sites, so it is worth a try, most of all, it is all free! del.icio.us, stumbleupon, digg, furl etc are a few of these! A quick link building tips : Start giving comments on blogs, there are some of the famous blogs with huge pr, and traffic, though the nofollow tags might be there, but then it is still good to go for a try. Just add a link with the comment! Forum signatures are a nice way to make traffic, good for backlinks. Try blog posts, reviews and contextual links! I will try to put up more points later, for beginers this could be a nice guide! cheers!
I'd rather suggest the Search Engine Optimization FAQ over at www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=182915 or Chris Beasley's SEO Guide at websitepublisher.net/seo-guide myself, but that's just me.