Search Engine
Optimization Tips By Enrique De Argaez,
webmaster
The best way to attract users to
your site, and keep them coming back, is to populate your pages
with quality content that users are interested in. MSNBot,
GoogleBot, Slurp and other Web crawlers can help by making your
site available to a broader audience. Below, we've provided
recommendations that will help your website get effectively
indexed by the Web crawlers. We've also provided a list of items
and techniques that will harm your website indexing and ranking,
and should be avoided.
Tips on Technical Issues for SEO
1- Use only well-formed HTML code in your pages. Ensure that all
tags are closed, and that all links are functioning properly. If
your site contains broken links, the Bots may not be able to
index your site effectively, and users may not be able to reach
all of your pages. For information about correct HTML syntax,
see the HTML 4.01
Specification.
2 - If you move your page, use the appropriate HTTP redirection
code to indicate whether the move is permanent or temporary.
3 - Make sure all Bots are allowed to crawl your site, and check
your list of Web crawlers prohibited from indexing your site. See
the robots.txt guidelines.
4 - Use a robots.txt file or Robots Meta tags to control how the
Web crawlers index your site. Using a robots.txt file will tell
Web crawlers which files and folders on your site they are not
allowed to crawl. For more information, see the MSNBot FAQ.
5 - Whenever possible, use URLs that are simple and easy to
read.
Tips on Your Web site Content
1 - Limit all pages to a reasonable size. An HTML page with no
pictures should be under 150 KB.
2 - All Search Engines recommend discussing one topic per page.
Use links to take users to related topics.
3 - To ensure your pages are easy to link to from other sites,
keep your URLs simple and static. Complicated URLs, or URLs that
change often, are difficult to use as link destinations. A
persistent URL is easier for users to find and remember, and
makes it a more likely link destination from other sites.
Things and Techniques to Avoid in SEO
Most of the Web crawlers recognize the following items and
techniques as spam, and consider them inappropriate use of the
index. Use of these items and techniques may affect how your site
is ranked within the Search Engines, and may result in your web
site or page being penalized (removed from the Search Engines
index).
1 - Loading pages with irrelevant words in an attempt to
increase a page's keyword density. This includes stuffing ALT
tags that users are unlikely to view.
2 - Using hidden text or links. You should use only text and
links that are visible to users.
3 - Using techniques to artificially increase the number of
links to your page, such as link farms.
You can see from the above that SEO is not as hard as it is
seems. It only takes a little time to learn the basics, a few
tools, and a LOT of commun sense.
Following is a list of free tools that will help your SEO
work:
That's all for now. New articles will be added as we find more
content, so bookmark this page and come back frequently.
Take care,
Ricky
About the Author: Enrique De Argaez is the webmaster of the "Internet World Stats" website. Since
2000 he has been collecting Internet Usage Statistics, and
publishing the data for over 233 countries and regions of the
world for free use by the academia, the global business community
and the general public. For more information on Internet World
Usage, please visit: http://www.InternetWorldStats.com