Friday, August 14, 2009

Search Engine Optimization and website customization

Browsing through Yahoo! Once I came to know that people highly search for Search engine optimization , better PageRank in Google etc. In fact I too was one of them , I would like to state some common tips I came across for increasing page rank and better listing in Search Engines.

Linking

It`s where your site`s existense is , if you make a page and tell a friend or 2 nothing happens no one will know about your site.
Get links to your site from wherever possible, if you have 5 links to your site not only people will come to you from 5 locations , you are making it known to search engines as it crawls to your site 5 different locations and you`re indirectly increasing your google pagerank too.

PR distribution can be blocked by adding rel=”nofollow” in the url tag.

Sitemap

Using sitemap is a great way to get listed in search engines fast.Be it xml based sitemap for search engines like google or the common sitemap for easy navigation. If a visitor is lost, he can easily find out the way to his article if you use a sitemap. It`s like the “You Are Here” boards at parks.
Usually website`s using flash as their menus and links should use this, as this is the only alternative to get linked for search engine bots. But make sure to make the sitemap short, as search engines may not crawl the high size files i.e just few links gets crawled.
If you’re still concerned about your page file size, maybe you should look into converting your website code to XHTML/CSS, which has been known to reduce file sizes by up to 60%.

Rich Content

The more the content, more will be the people coming to your site .
Suppose a person searches for keyword “Hosting” and one of your site`s page have the word “Hosting” then your site page gets listed in the search. Now if you update content of your site according to the need of the users obviously your page will get more hits, this is called keyword optimization. Getting hits indirectly means more people browse through ads, so you make more money because.
Offer as much as you can to your visitors, this is the only way you can make your visitor revisit your blog or website. If your site is a mobile information portal, give the user some free Ringtones and mobile software and make a promise to add more later .

Google PageRank

Better Pagerank means better Hits,

  • Although People go mad for pagerank, You will never know what your true PR is. The toolbar PR is highly inaccurate and is not updated for months , you get different pagerank on different PR checking websites for the same URL .
  • PR is not related to how high your site will rank. Rather, a higher PR will cause Googlebot to dig deeper when deep crawling your site. it is good to have high PR but you don`t have to run for it.
  • The best way for a page to achieve high PR is to get linked from high pagerank websites and forums. Spamming on forum helps a lot ;)
  • Layout ?
  • I`ve seen people leave a page just because it does feel good on our eyes, not everyone looks for content, some may be browsing just for fun but still you can`t afford to miss them. Some visiters even have a feeling that only people with good content can come up with a cool site . And I do suggest you to have a fun, games page or something with light content on you site.

    PHP and Google
    Google hate`s php ?
    Can`t say … but google does not list php files of every site . That is If you have a url ending with blah.php?topic=1&view=23 then google will only list the one blah.php file . SO you need to make it a HTML page or user mod rewrite in CMS.

  • Mod Rewrite is something that is done to make .php extention files show as .html extention before it is shown to user . It is popular among CMS like PHPnuke, Drupal , Mambo etc. It can be done for our own PHP pages too, all we have to do is edit .htaccess file to make it that way.

Hosting & Domains
Always choose host based on its reliability, good customer service and good uptime. Check if it has enough speed and no downtime. Downtime can lead your site to heavy loss as it might be the time a customer comes or the search engine crawls. You can monitor your site from uptime checkers like uppanel etc.
When you buy domains buy something related to what your going to buy like it`s a bit odd when you have your name in domain and have a hosting site.

Heading

For an professional look you need your webpage content to be seperated, while writing an article use tag for headings. Search engine spiders identifies this as an topic of the given article.
Not only that it is good for search engine`s , users will find the pages easy to navigate through. If you find the tag a bit odd for your design , then use CSS to change the look . Search engine spiders don`t take CSS while crawling, So you can fake it to look like the default.

Keywords
Keywords are very essential no matter what your website relates to. One can say that it`s all matter of keywords that brings visitors to a website. Usually it`s hard to say what keyword a user might search , but still you guess a bit . There is a Keyword Selector Tool from Overture which tells the highest search realted to the keyword, this tool helps a lot in making a SE friendly website.
Another is from Google : Google AdWords Keyword Tool helps you make out possible keywords for your site , it`s actually same as overtures from Yahoo

Precautions

  • Never Link to a page which is banned from search engine`s
  • Don`t host your pages on a unreliable host. Hence try to get history of a web host before buying space . Check if your host is not banned.
  • Never link to a site which host warez, copyrighted materials ,anything that is against the law or which have chance to get banned. Incomming links from them can`t do any harm though.
  • Check for errors in metatags like description
  • Have a robots.txt file.
  • Few More Tips :

  • Make your navigation visible and consistent.
  • Use small number of fonts, say 2 to 3 .
  • Pictures capture a lot of peoples attention , but mind the images to be low size, It lowers Bandwidth consumption for small sites.
  • A layout of your site should easily catch notice, if you are not sure about it try browsing some popular forums and sites.
  • Every one has thier own Idea of neat layout, try to get in the minds of majority. Polls sometimes do help.
  • Make it a pleasurable experience for the visitor , so that he may come back . It will increase traffic and positive feedback.
  • Never Leave a visitor , always have a link to your main page and to some of your good services.
  • Spelling mistakes: It is something very important that is usually ignored . Visitors may get impression of a site being casual than professional, even if they don`t mind, Search Engines do and they do lot !
  • Advertisments can make you maoney , but the money depends on visitors. usually the people get annoyed at high Ads, put your Ads wisely to integrate into the layout . It should be in such a way that people should get attracted to .
  • On Completion of your Website, check it on different popular Web Browsers and Screen Resolutions

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