Let's make clear two important principles from the beginning:
A website is NOT a PRODUCT.
A website is a PROCESS.
What do you mean by "A website is NOT a PRODUCT" and "A website is a PROCESS"?
A website needs constant attention and modification.
If you do have a website that was built by your nephew 5 years ago, do not expect to see your website in the first page results of GOOGLE, MSN,or YAHOO.
If you are looking to get any ranking in search engines you do need to modify and upgrade your content and source codes.
What are my options to optimize my website?
Let an expert person or a SEO company do it for you
Do It Yourself Search Engine Optimization
Our Philosophy
There are many SEO companies that follow 3 steps recommendation for their clients:
Keyword Research
(How many times that term was searched on last month in overture)
Website Optimization.
Website Promotion.
We do have problems with this approach in SearchEngineProjects.com. We do believe you should NOT make a website just for sake of Search Engines.
If you want to do that Please DO NOT Contact Us!
Guess What?
It's all about connecting the right clients/customers to your products and services.
Search engines are merely tools to bring visitors to your site.
What is HTML?
HTML HTML - Hypertext Markup Language - The document format language used on the World Wide Web. Web browsers read HTML and display the page.
We are not teaching you HTML here. There are many good websites, books and classes for learning HTML, . Check the following sites:
WebMonkey.com
W3schools.com
However, I should talk about some important HTML tags when it comes to Search Engine Optimization. A typical website source code looks like the following:
- Informing the browser, this is the beginning of an HTML page.
- Informing the browser that is the introduction of an HTML page.
- Informing the browser that is the TITLE of an HTML page.
The number of characters for TITLE TAG should be 60 - 80 (Depends on Search Engines)
Why? Google chop the rest as dots ....
Note: The number of characters for KEYWORDS TAG should be 255 or less (Depends on Search Engines)
The number of characters should be 70 or less (Depend on Search Engines)
- Request Search Engines to read the website
Note: Many other Meta tags exist, but these are not covered here.
-Informing the browser that is the end of introduction of an HTML page.
- Inside you insert your contents, pictures, videos
- Informing the browser, here is the end of HTML page.
How do I use FTP?
FTP - File Transfer Protocol - is an application layer protocol that uses Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and telnet services to transfer bulk-data files between machines or hosts. In simple language, it means the way that you can connect to a host server where your website is up and running.
It is better to have FTP software to connect to your server. You also need to know your website user name and password (get them from your hosting company or webmaster) You can also use Windows XP built in FTP. There are many FTP Client programs, such as:
WS_FTP95 (Free)
Cute FTP
ftp://www.yourwebsite.com
(You should have User name and Password) Internet Explorer only
Tutorials on the use of several popular FTP Programs
OK! At this point, we assume you do know enough HTML and you have access to your websites pages and Hosting Server using FTP or other methods.
Why should I modify my website content?
Content is the KING. WOW! Yes! It does not matter if your websites show up in the top of Google, Yahoo, MSN or any other search engines. Unless your content is appropriate, user-friendly, and clear for visitors, you will not get the benefits and thus profit from your site. In today's market, even the e-commerce sites are constantly fixing and updating their content.
Grammatically correct
Sound right
Clear
Informative
You should consider being more informative by using your Keywords in your content. Be Careful! Do not overdo it to the point that your sentence is pointless and strange.
Example:
Let's you have a website related to Orange County, California. You see a sentence like:
You can find lots of interesting locations for entertainment in our county.
You can change it to:
You can find lots of interesting locations for entertainment in Orange County.
The use of Orange County Keyword gives a greater chance for your website to get better ranking for the keyword "“Orange County” in Search engines.
How should I design my website for Search Engines?
There is no magic rule for the design of a site for a search engine. However, there are many:
DESIGNS TO AVOID:
Do NOT USE a Full Flash entrance web page.
What is Flash?
Flash is a sudden intense burst of radiant energy and also name of Software made by Macromedia for website design.
Do NOT USE a Full Image entrance web page.
The Search Engine crawler cannot read images, so if you do have a website that is only images, do not expect to get “crawled” by a crawler.
Do NOT USE Frame in you website.
What is Frame?
Frame Documents: Frames divide a browser window into two or more document windows, each displaying a different document, or a different part of the same document. Frames in an HTML document can cause a web page to appear to be divided into multiple, scrollable regions. For each frame, you can assign a name, a source document locator, dimensions, border alignment and decorations, scroll and resize behaviors, loading and unloading behavior, file and topic maps, and style sheets.
(Copyright © World Wide Web Consortium)
So What? What is the problem with Frame?
The major problem of using frame in your website is the navigation of Spider within your website. In some extreme cases, frame makes it impossible for Search Engines Spiders (Robots) to read and relate the content of different frames to your domain.
DESIGNS TO HAVE:
Make a website for your audiences
If people come to your website, search engines will follow them. WOW!
Yes! If you do have an attractive, content driven and informative website that brings many visitors, then your website will be visited by many search engines in a proper time frame.
The problem is the old chicken or egg story! If you have many visitors for your website, so are you done? Not so Fast!
You still should make your site ready for a crawler.
Make your content easy to read
I have read somewhere that a website should be so easy that even Monkeys can use it. Please use simple English words that the average Joe understands.
Have smooth and easy navigation bar on your website
Make it clear and have easy navigation bar for your visitors. Do help them guess what to do next.
Make it happen! Rule of thumb you can use: a horizontal navigation bar can have up to 5-10 pages.
Use a Vertical Navigation bar if you do have more than 10 pages in your website.
Stay with a standard design, font type, size, pictures dimension
If you are using font Verdana size 10 for your main content section, make sure all the pages use the same type and size.
Try to check your programming code before publishing the website
Search Engines robots will ignore website with too many code errors. Rest assured you can find many websites that have HTML problems. There are lots of online tools and some are free, so you can check your HTML code.
Validate Your Markup
Make your website short and sweet
It is very important to check your site for dialup visitors. In today's cheap broadband, you might think it is not a big deal to have an overloaded website! Wrong! It your website does not load fast enough the crawler ignores it.
Make sure to have a sitemap in your website.
What is Site Map?
Sitemap is listing of all sections of a website. Usually, each listing is an active link, enabling a visitor to click on the link and move directly to a section from the site map.
Make sure you do have a link page.
What is Link Page?
A link page is a dedicated page for given links to other websites with RELATED content and subject matters that follow your business model.
This page creates three important functions:
1. Adding value for visitors by receiving appropriate and related information from other RELATED websites.
Improving in-bonding links through search engines.
Exchanging reciprocal links with other interesting and RELATED websites.
OK! You have done all the “to do and not to do list!”. Your website is ready! Is it really ready for Search Engines?
