Search Engine Optimization Tips

Driving traffic to your website from the major Search Indexes of the internet is more of a process than a single event. The first thing you need to do is to get your pages ready for the Search Engines. This process is also known as 'Search Engine Optimization, or SEO.

You should start by checking your keywords and making certain you have the right balance in the body of your page, and that these keywords are in your title tags also. As a matter of fact, title tag might be the most important section of your html to insert your primary keywords or keyword phrases. Be sure that you do not try to target more than 2 or 3 keywords or phrases. The Meta tags (the invisible tags at the top of the source code) have declined in relevance in recent years. However, you should have your keywords there anyway, as the tags are still used by some search indexes. When making your Alt tags for your images, be careful not to stuff too many keywords there as the Engines, or at least some of them, seem to be getting wise to this tactic and may penalize you for it. This practice is sometimes called "keyword stuffing and it is a shady or "black hat" SEO practice. n severe cases it could even lead to your website being blacklisted. You don't want that. It is crucial to have your site properly optimized before they are submitted to the main search engines. Many often optimize each separate page for a different search engine, but I would advise against that tactic. I instead recommend that you focus on the largest Search indexes like Google and Yahoo (which should not be confused with the Yahoo Directory, an entirely different entity although a part of the same portal). Some major Search Engines such as AltaVista seem to be fading in importance fast so it may not be that important to optimize any pages for them. Just focus on the big boys for now.

After the Title tag the next single most important component of your site for putting keywords is in the body of your website. You may merely want the visitor to go to the home page or a specific page. In this instance, you will want to write the text in a way that the visitor is drawn to the page that you are targeting. Broadly speaking, you should have about six hundred words in the body of your home page. A search engine optimization method that works well is to analyze the web pages that currently have a high ranking for your targeted keyword. Then find the ratio of keywords are in the document and then be sure your page has a similar ratio. Getting the correct keyword ratio is important because some search engines will penalize your web site if it uses the same keyword too much to get a high rank for that keyword. And of course you can do not want to use them too infrequently either.

When you are building your web pages, be extra careful with java script and especially with flash, as some search engine robots have trouble with it. In fact, Google advises in it's webmaster guidelines: "If fancy features such as [...] Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.". Although the AllTheWeb Search Engine has been able to recognizing Flash files since around September of 2002, that engine is still not able to recognize text in the Flash movies. Whether the Search Engines recognize these flash pages or not, you may decide not to use Flash on your site anyway since many of your visitors might use slow connection and they will not enjoy waiting around only to see your company logo animated. They might even be upset about it, as a matter of fact. And then there are individuals who have not installed a flash player before. However, If you are hell-bent on using this technology then at least provide links to alternate pages that have adequate text and keywords that the search engines can index. After you have optimized your webpages, it is time to submit them. You can submit your site simply by going to the "Add URL" pages of each engine you want to submit to. It is best to do this manually since each search index has it's own instructions. In most cases you can just submit the homepage and the rest of the site will be spidered accordingly. Web directories such DMOZ and GOGUIDES.org generally require a description and other data, while most search engines (like Google or Alexa) only require a URL or a URL and an e-mail address. Still others allow you to imput your own keywords and anchor tags. If you do not have the time to manually submit, there are some free automated submission sites around the web, although they may not be quite as reliable, as some directories or engines may have blocked them over time to stop spammers who sometimes use these services. Addme and Submitit are popular. If you go to your favorite search engines and type in "free url submission" a number of sites will pop up. While Google and Yahoo lead the pack in terms of large Search Engines, Msn should not be overlooked.

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