Article Vault A - Z (Search Engine Friendly)


Make Your Website Search Engine Friendly

Every web publisher wants to attain top positions in the search engines to increase traffic. To attain a high ranking, your site has to be search engine friendly.

Search engine spiders index your web site. They only read the HTML code in your web pages. They don't read graphics, JavaScript code and other scripts and features.

Just a few simple changes to your web pages can give your site a huge search engine boost. Even better, it can bring in ongoing FREE targeted traffic.

It's important to create a search engine friendly site while at the same time keeping your site friendly to your visitors. You want to structure your pages for maximum search engine exposure without compromising the content or look of your site. After all, what good is traffic if your visitors won't read your pages?

Keyword-rich, theme-based web sites will give you both targeted traffic and good search engine ranking.

Here are 10 easy steps you can take to make sure your pages are search engine friendly and user-friendly.

1. Selecting a domain name. There is a lot of disagreement about whether search bots give importance to the keywords in your domain name. I suggest that you select a domain name that indicates what your site is about. Even if it doesn't matter to search engines, it's important that it tells your visitors what the topic of your site is.

2. Focus on one theme. Search engines love specialized content. If you have several topics, then you should create several web sites. The more you focus on one topic, the more your page will be optimized for search engines and the more relevant it will be to your visitors.

3. Create multiple content pages. Make a separate page for each important keyword and key phrase. If, for example, you want your site to come up for the key phrases web consulting, web design, and search engine optimization, make three separate pages. Create a web page for each major keyword. Don't create automated pages just to get search engine exposure. To keep visitors at your site, you have to give them good content. Keyword-rich articles are a good way to optimize your pages for search engines while providing useful content to your visitors.

4. Optimize each content page for ONE of your key phrases. Put your targeted key phrases in your content. Include them in your page title, description tag, ALT image tags, comment tags, and in internal and external links. When providing a title and description in the META tags, your listing may be displayed in the search engine listing as you provide it. Make your titles and descriptions informative and compelling to attract potential buyers to your site. Provide a benefit or solve a problem.

5. Put your keywords in your content. Search engines are looking at how often your keyword appears on a page. That's how they determine relevancy. Short pages provide a larger percentage of keywords and are better for search engine optimization. The keyword density of a Web page is important for search engine optimization. How often you should mention your keyword throughout the text is different for each search engine, but it varies between 3% and 5% of your text. In other words, use your keyword 3-5 times for every 100 words on your page.

6. Naming files and directories. Put important keywords in all file names and directories/folder names describing the content. For example, to promote ebook covers, I name my files ebook-covers.html, cd-covers.html, box-cover.html, etc.

7. Naming graphics. The search bots don't see your graphics but they can see the description of your graphics and navigation buttons in ALT tags (alternative text describing your images for visitors who browse your site with the images turned off). If your navigation links are images, I recommend that you provide text links in addition to the image links for search engine optimization.

8. Navigation. Have your main navigation links on your home page so search engines can follow your links and index your pages. This is just as important for your visitors as for the search engines.

9. Link your pages together. You can easily link to all your pages by creating a sitemap.

10. Directory structure. Put your important files in the first level. Subdirectories that lie deep are more difficult for search engines to scan. Creating a sitemap for large sites and providing a link to your sitemap on your home page is a good way to get all your important pages indexed.

Search engine optimization does not give you overnight results but over time it will give you steady, quality, targeted, free traffic.

Make it easy for search engines to index your site. Apply these simple tips, and you will be well on your way to having a search engine and user-friendly


The Benefits Of Submitting Your Website To Search Engine Friendly Directories

If you are serious about getting your website exposed to as many people as possible, then you should consider submitting your website to search engine friendly directories. You might be asking yourself, "what are these directories anyways?" Well, let me explain.

Search engine friendly directories are human edited directories that contain many different categories and sub-categories, and within these categories are websites filled with content related to that category. The benefit of all this is that the search engines love these directories because they are real content that people actually benefit from. These directories do not accept spam sites that are just out there to get you to click on ads or buy their products. Therefore, the search engines love these directories and spider them daily and follow the links throughout the site and then go to the sites contained within those categories and spider them also and add them to their search engine index.

You may be telling yourself, well my website is already indexed, what is the point of submitting it to these directories? Well, it is more relevant content related links pointing to your site. The more related links you have pointing to your site, the higher a search engine will value your site and will help you move up in the rankings for that particular keyword you are focusing on in your site. You also get the benefit of receiving traffic from people visiting these directories browsing for certain themed websites. Lots of people go to search engine friendly directories instead of searching for sites in a search engine due to the fact that the majority are human edited directories and they know they will arrive at a quality site full of content and resources and will most likely find what they are looking for.

So now that you have a better idea on what these directories are and the benefits of them...how do you submit to these directories and how do you find these directories? Well, I am going to list a few ways to go about finding these directories for you:

1. dmoz.org - You want to definitely try to get listed in this directory. It may take a long time to get listed, but if you do it will be well worth it.

2. dir.yahoo.com - Another must submit to directory, make sure you submit your website to this one also.

3. You can search for search engine friendly directories by going to a search engine and typing in the following phrase: "search engine friendly directories" and hitting search. This will bring up a vast amount of results for you to go through. Some will be actual directories and some will be forums and pages talking about directories that are worth submitting to or not.


You Must Use Search Engine Optimization Techniques (See my SEO Blog)

E-commerce is a cut throat business. You have to arm yourself with the proper know-how and the tools to make your site a cut above the rest. Each day, more and more sites are clambering to optimize their rankings in websites and if you lose your guard, you may just get trampled on and be left in the abyss filled with so many failed e-commerce sites.

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is a term widely used today by many e-commerce sites. For the past few years and the next ten years or so, search engines would be the most widely used internet tool to find the sites that they need to go to or the product or information they need.

Most people that use search engines use only the ten top search results in the first page. Making it to the first page, more so to the top three is a barometer of a sites success in SEO. You will get a higher ratio of probability in being clicked on when you rank high. The more traffic for your site, the more business you rake in.

But, it is essential to grab a hold of that spot or make your ranking even better. As I aforementioned, each day is a new day for all e-commerce sites to make them selves rank higher using search engine optimization. It is imperative to make your site better and better everyday.

So just what is search engine optimization and do you have to use it? The answer to why you have to use it is an easy one. You need SEO to be number one, or maybe at least make your site income generating.

With SEO you can get the benefit of generating a high traffic volume. Let's just say you get only a turn out of successful sales with 10 to 20 percent of your traffic. If you get a hundred hits or more a day, you get a good turn out of sales already. If you get only twenty to ten hits a day, you only get one or two if not any at all.

So once again, what is search engine optimization? Search engine optimization is utilizing tools and methods in making your site top ranking in the results of search engines. Getting yourself in the first page and better yet in the top half of the page will ensure that your site will generate public awareness of your site's existence and subsequently generate more traffic, traffic that could lead to potential income and business.

SEO requires a lot of work to be fully realized. There are many aspects you have to change in your site or add as well to get search engine optimization. These will include getting lots of information about the keyword phrases that are popular in regards to your sites niche or theme.

You may also need to rewrite your sites contents so that you could get the right keyword phrases in your site without making it too commercial but light and informative. There are certain rules and guidelines to be followed with making your site's content applicable and conducive to search engine optimization.

You will also need to collaborate with many other sites so that you could get link exchanges and page transfers. The more inbound and outbound traffics generated by sites among others are one of the components search engines uses to rank sites.

Try to search the internet for many useful help. Tips, guidelines and methods for search engine optimization are plenty to be found. Read many articles that can help you optimize your site in search engine results. The more knowledge and information you gather the better. This will all help you in getting those high rankings. This may require a little time and effort in your part but the benefits will be astounding.

If you can part with some money, there are many sites in the internet that can help you in search engine optimization. There are many sites that help in tracking keyword phrases that can help your site. There are also some content writers that have lots of experience in making good keyword laden content for your sites that have good quality.

Act now and see the benefits garner with search engine optimization. All of these will result to better traffic and more business for your site and company.