Search engine optimization is one of the factors that drive a website owner crazy, especially if you are a beginner. As most of us know, SEO is not something that begins and ends on the day your website is alive, but is a process. You need some time and effort to learn what the search engines are doing.
And the bitter part is, not all the search engines are the same and even the same search engine is not the same all the time. Search engines always keep updating their algorithms. Few of the several hundred criteria that the search engines use are the following:
Link context
Topical links
Title tags
Site popularity
Anchor text
Site language
Keywords
Site maturity, and more importantly,
Content
Okay, now coming to the point, what can you do and cannot do for SEO?
You can do the following:
1. Submit your website manually to search engines. This way, you can get indexed sooner than waiting for the search engines to automatically pick you up.
2. Include legitimate and relevant reciprocal links in your site from others.
3. Make sure your website contains meta tags, content, graphics and keywords that can help you improve your site’s search engine ranking.
4. Keyword advertising, reciprocal linking and marketing campaigns are some of the venues that can increase search engine traffic.
You can be liberal in using keywords for your website. But make sure they are used in the correct context of your site’s topic and content. More importantly, being liberal doesn’t that you can be un-focused. You have to make sure that you really target a focused niche/topic and be liberal with keywords around that niche.
This helps search engines to identify your website’s purpose and hence helps your site to be better ranked for relevant keywords.
You cannot do the following:
1. Using hidden keywords - you can never trick search engines because this is one of the most common things that the search engines are looking for, so that your site can be banned!
2. Artificially generating traffic to your website - so that it looks more popular than it actually is.
3. Artificially generating links to your site from irrelevant or unrelated sites. Most search engines have in-built algorithm to catch this very act.
4. Submitting your site repeatedly to search engines thinking that you are forcing the search engines to increase your site’s ranking; you are most likely to be banned. Either submit it once or wait at least 6 weeks before submitting it again.
5. If your website is a kind of one that is regularly updated, submitting it once is enough, since spiders can crawl and look for updated content. Pinging with Ping-O-matic or Technorati is also a good idea.
Takeaway
Do not expect to be ranked on the top in a search list as soon as your website is alive. Even though you exist in the web, it takes some time to achieve the status that you expect. Work hard on the content and use search engine optimization wisely.
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Article by JaneSheeba
+Jane is the founder of Problogging Success. She is an expert blogger, consultant, freelance writer and blog designer. Don't forget to get your hands on two FREE Ebooks she offers.
Jane has written 264 awesome posts for Problogging Success.
{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
I don't think that these tricks of search engine optimization works faster. These tricks need a time. Most of the search engine sites are update their algoritham in a specific period of time so it is hard to get more and more traffic to your site.
Trying to self educate myself in SEO, thanks for the tips. I have a long road ahead but am on track!
Glad that it was useful to you alli.
Jane.
nice write up!! short but concise and realistic. i am following your blog hence forth
rohan recently posted..Canonical URL SEO
Search engines are also taking keyword stuffing and manipulation very seriously, the algorithm is tough to manipulate only because we dont know exactly what it is at any given point in time
rohan recently posted..Canonical URL SEO
You are right about the search engines Rohan. Yet you still leave me wondered why you left two separate comments on a single post!
Glad that you like my blog.
Jane.
It takes a lot of hard work and patience to be on search engine top results.
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There is a lot more you can do than just submit your website’s sitemap to the search engine with the meta tags and all that. You can do a lot of SEO on your own without the help of a specialist. Just look online for help on how to get your website ranked using keywords and social media.
Is there an easy program that compiles the site map for you and prepares it to be sent to the search engines?
Hey Traci,
The Google XML Sitemaps is a free wordpress plugin which does the job for you.
Jane.
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Nice Post Jane!
I followed all your tricks but i forgot to use XML Sitemap! let me add it too
Thank you.
Hello Jane, I think SEO is the topic which will never fade up with time. Because search engines changes their algorithms time to time. So experienced bloggers like you try to catch that changes via different experiments on their blog. That’s why I like to visit your blog. In this post you have given short and to the point advice on seo. Overall your blog is very interesting which serves good and fresh stuff in simple language. Thanks.
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