Sunday, December 16, 2007

Basic SEO Tips

People round the world target three major search engine Google, Yahoo and MSN. The main idea is to drive in maximum traffic through these Search Engines. But how do you actually get to rank on all the three.

The page should be properly structured along with quality content. By quality content I mean content which should be unique and should contain targeted keywords distributes according to the need of the page. But this does not mean that you should start spamming the page with keyword spamming.

The navigation of the page should be user friendly with no flashy images or javascript buttons. And even if they are used then it should be kept in mind that the noscript tag should be used for search engine bots to crawl the links.

The images should have proper Alt Attributes to explain the image and not just put in long list of keywords to fool the Search Engines. Remember that Search Engine are smarter.

Build quality links to you pages. This will help gain trust in the eyes of the Search Engines. Links build on the basis of quality content or editorial links stands out. Otherwise you deal with link farms and link building partners and get banned by Search Engines in the near future.

Make sure that your site is submitted to quality directories. By quality directories I mean quality and they are very few. Do not submit to directories that ask for a reciprocal link back. Also, make sure you learn the pros and cons before submitting to a particular category.

Now to sum up the main points that affect the Search Engines I have listed them down in point wise to make a better understanding.

On Page Optimization

Title Tag – Should be compact and should only contain targeted keywords. It is one of the main criteria’s so should be handles effectively. Do not try to spam the page title with lots of keywords or repetitive keywords. You should always try to limit your keywords in the title to less than three.

Meta Description – Another important tag that helps search engines to denote the content of the page.

Meta Keywords – This should actually contain the targeted keywords and the keywords used in the page. Should not be huge list of keywords or occurrence of keywords. Remember GOOGLE, google, GoOgLe all them gives the same result. Try it out at Google.

Heading Tag – It is equally important as rest of the tags. Should be considered as the heading of the content and should be generated down the order.

Image Alt Attribute – Provide this tag for each of the image used in the site. This should depict the content of the image.


Off Page Optimization

Link Building – As discussed by Matt Cuts. Editorial links are always preferred. But quality links gathered through unique content on the site is also favorable.

Anchor Text – Anchor Text is another very important factor. The anchor text should be very well chalked out according to the need of the optimization plan.

Page Targeting – It is always considered to be of utmost importance that you should try to target two to maximum three keywords per page. This way you can target most keywords to your site rather than targeting 10 keywords per page.

Enet Technologies provide Search Engine Optimization and Website Design Services

Thursday, December 6, 2007

Yahoo Search Supports X-Robots-Tags

Webmaster life got a little easier as Yahoo Search, in the midst of some updates to the engine, added page level exclusion tags to what it can handle.

When we first heard the news about X-Robots, we thought Chris Claremont might be writing a Sentinels as superheroes title for Marvel.

Our discussion of possible pencilers was cut short by the realization these were X-Robots-Tags, which webmasters can serve up to Yahoo's crawlers. These directives allow the site publisher improved control at the page level of how content become indexed when Yahoo's Slurp comes calling.

Sharad Verma posted samples of these on the Yahoo Search blog:

To take advantage of this feature, simply add the following page level tags to the X-Robots-Tag directive in the HTTP Header. Here are a few examples:

X-Robots-Tag: NOINDEX -- If you don't want to show the URL in the Yahoo! Search results.

Note: We'll still need to crawl the page to see and apply the tag, so if you don't wish to have the page crawled, use robots disallow on robots.txt.

X-Robots-Tag: NOARCHIVE -- If you don't want to display cache link in the search results page.

X-Robots-Tag: NOSNIPPET -- If you don't want to display summary in the search results page.

X-Robots-Tag: NOFOLLOW -- If you don't want Yahoo! to crawl links in the page.

A trip to conferences like SES Chicago or PubCon would not be complete if a search site wasn't doing some updating at the time. Here's what Yahoo has going on:

Along with this change, we'll be rolling out additional changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the next few days. We expect the update will be completed early next week, but you may see some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages in the index during this process.