Preparing Your Website For Search Engine Robots
http://www.dotdna.com/publish/articles/39/1/Preparing-Your-Website-For-Search-Engine-Robots/Preparing-Websites-For-Search-Engine-Robots.html
Maryam Piracha
Working background in the fields of Information Technology and Computer Science. I've worked as a web developer and programmer in the relevant areas of e-commerce, C, Java, PHP, C, ASP, JSP, C. I have also dealt with SEO, Computer Security, multimedia and graphics as well as database development. Currently a Technology Analyst for DotDNA. By Maryam Piracha
Published on 11/27/2006
While overstuffing a page's meta tags used to be enough a few years ago, today's search engines all but ignore these tags. So now's the time to unlearn everything you've learnt about preparing your website for search engines.
If you follow our list of prepared guidelines, it will be a stepping stone to the newer search engine optimisation technologies...
If you follow our list of prepared guidelines, it will be a stepping stone to the newer search engine optimisation technologies...
Preparing Websites For Search Engine Robots
While overstuffing a page's meta tags used to be enough a few years ago, today's search engines all but ignore these tags. So now's the time to unlearn everything you've learn about preparing your website for search engines.
If you follow our list of prepared guidelines, it will be a stepping stone to the newer search engine optimisation technologies.
Prepare your website for human visitors by ensuring that all is as it should be by a consistent test run of your website before going live. This means testing the site not as it appears on your system, but on different monitors and different screen resolutions. Ensure that no tag exists without its ending tag; though browsers are built to bypass several HTML syntactical errors, search engines will skip entire blocks of text and code should any error occur.
Ensure relevant text is at the top of the page since search engines can't read graphical or pictorial representation and forums of text, such as rollover buttons. Ensuring that the text is as close as it can be to the beginning of the page means the search engine will index your website according to terms it finds.
Build up a repertoire of referral links. This is not only key to any preparation program, but an important part of marketing and promotion. The more sites that refer to yours, the higher your ranking and placement goes. This is especially the case with Google.
Get yourself listed in directories such as the Open Directory or Yahoo!'s directory, which isn't free but grants huge turnarounds in search engine placement and generating traffic.
Submit your site to all major search engines and ensure that you do this yourself and not through third party services offering the service for a small fee. Submitting your website's link to Google, Yahoo!, Ask and MSN means you've covered the websites hat account for over 90% of all search engine traffic, for free. However, not oly does this service these websites, but Yahoo! also owns Altavista and supplies results to Hotbot.com, two moderately popular engines meaning if you're listed on Yahoo!, you're also listed on affiliated websites. This holds true for Google, Ask and MSN as well.
Look for freebies like Microsoft's LinkExchange banner exchange service which provides free (yes, free and yes, Microsoft) promotion by incorporating networked banner advertising. Not wanting to lag behind the competition (see below), it includes a page counter and other marketing services to help you in your survey.
Google's Adsense is another excellent means of boosting search traffic by linking with their advertising campaigns (Firefox, AdWords, etc) and even offers an incentive ($1 for each successful download). Merged with Google Analytics, it provides you with an indepth look at who's coming to your website, what keywords bring traffic, which locations (cities, states, countries) are pulling in the most visitors, how many of them are returning visitors and many other helpful utilities.
With tools like these, it is becoming increasingly easier to prepare your website for search robots and help generate buzz and traffic your way.
If you follow our list of prepared guidelines, it will be a stepping stone to the newer search engine optimisation technologies.
Prepare your website for human visitors by ensuring that all is as it should be by a consistent test run of your website before going live. This means testing the site not as it appears on your system, but on different monitors and different screen resolutions. Ensure that no tag exists without its ending tag; though browsers are built to bypass several HTML syntactical errors, search engines will skip entire blocks of text and code should any error occur.
Ensure relevant text is at the top of the page since search engines can't read graphical or pictorial representation and forums of text, such as rollover buttons. Ensuring that the text is as close as it can be to the beginning of the page means the search engine will index your website according to terms it finds.
Build up a repertoire of referral links. This is not only key to any preparation program, but an important part of marketing and promotion. The more sites that refer to yours, the higher your ranking and placement goes. This is especially the case with Google.
Get yourself listed in directories such as the Open Directory or Yahoo!'s directory, which isn't free but grants huge turnarounds in search engine placement and generating traffic.
Submit your site to all major search engines and ensure that you do this yourself and not through third party services offering the service for a small fee. Submitting your website's link to Google, Yahoo!, Ask and MSN means you've covered the websites hat account for over 90% of all search engine traffic, for free. However, not oly does this service these websites, but Yahoo! also owns Altavista and supplies results to Hotbot.com, two moderately popular engines meaning if you're listed on Yahoo!, you're also listed on affiliated websites. This holds true for Google, Ask and MSN as well.
Look for freebies like Microsoft's LinkExchange banner exchange service which provides free (yes, free and yes, Microsoft) promotion by incorporating networked banner advertising. Not wanting to lag behind the competition (see below), it includes a page counter and other marketing services to help you in your survey.
Google's Adsense is another excellent means of boosting search traffic by linking with their advertising campaigns (Firefox, AdWords, etc) and even offers an incentive ($1 for each successful download). Merged with Google Analytics, it provides you with an indepth look at who's coming to your website, what keywords bring traffic, which locations (cities, states, countries) are pulling in the most visitors, how many of them are returning visitors and many other helpful utilities.
With tools like these, it is becoming increasingly easier to prepare your website for search robots and help generate buzz and traffic your way.