Webmaster tips for creating search engine friendly sites


	It is much easier for us to work with webmasters who understand some fundamental rules for creating search engine friendly sites. Each rule broken penalizes the site's capability of achieving a high ranking. some rules are more serious than others. If you stick to the rules, you are mothan half way through the challenge to achieve high rankings.


	Special Report


	Thems the Rules !

Paramount Rule: The search engines primary objective are to “spider” as many pages as possible in a 24 hour period. If search engines are an important aspect of your online marketing, your home or “index” page must help them facilitate this process without any tricks or secrets.

1) A Maximum of four (4) keywords or keyword terms can be optimized on any given page - preferably no more than 2 and if possible only 1.

2) The main URL (www.yourname.com) must be free of all gimmicks. No flash, frames, exotic java, gif text or headlines. It also must contain hyperlinks that navigate to all the pages you want indexed by the SE’s within 2 “clicks” . Interior pages of your site that are composed of frames will probably not be indexed well.

3) If your links are embedded in JavaScript, most of the search engines will not recognize and index those pages. If you're serious about getting a good position on the main engines, either put your links in simple html or make alternative links at the bottom of your page just for the search engines.

4) Your <title> is very important. It must contain your keywords. Consider that on some SE’s your <title> will become the heading for your listing.

5) Meta Refresh and Meta Robots Tags

Check your code for the following tags between the <head> and </head>.

This tag redirects to another page. If you have this tag in your code, the indexer will usually completely ignore your website altogether.

This tag specifically directs robots to ignore that webpage. If you have it in your code, remove it immediately. You can use it on pages you want NO search engines to index. Contrarily, by adding the tag

you invite spyders to index your page.

6) Include META keywords or keyword terms seperated by commas. Each subsequent keyword has diminished “weight”. Do not include keywords that are not repeated in your visible text. In fact, each keyword should strive to comprise 5% of the total text.

7) Include META description. Two succinct keyword filled sentences that best describe what you are offering on the page. Consider that on some SE’s your META description will be the text displayed after your heading which will be taken from your title tag for the listing.

8) If you have comments within your code and they are not formatted according to the html specifications, indexers will not properly parse the tags on your page, ignoring many important tags.

Example of properly formatted comment:

Examples of bad comments:

<!- This HTML comment is badly formed. ->

<! This HTML comment is badly formed. >

<!--This is badly formed--!>

9) The visible text on the page should begin as close to the beginning of the body tag of the page as is feasible. Optimal length of text should be no less than 350 words and no more than 700. Keywords should be used often but should not exceed four-five times in the visible html text.. Your primary keyword or keyword term should be included in the first couple of sentences of visible text. Subsequent keywords should be used *less* than the primary in descending order. Consider that on some SE’s your first few lines of visible html text will be used by the SE’s as the text displayed after your heading for the listing.

10) All images should have ALT tags applied that include your keywords

11) Some search engines completely ignor websites that have invalid html tag sequences. Also, when

you open an html tag, see to it that you close it too. For eg.

<font> requires that you have </font>, <table> requires a </table>.

Your browser may display it well, but if you want the page to be indexed, check your code and put it in order. The only commonly used tag you need not close is <br>

12) Not all search engine indexers visit your website from your index page. If you haven't linked each of your pages with all your other pages, you stand the risk of having engines indexing only one or two of your pages. Just add text links at the bottom of your pages to all your other pages.

Follow these rules if the spider type search engines are an important aspect of your lead generating or business building strategies. Use the same rules thought process when filling out the info for your site on the growing array of directory type search portals. Now, most spider SE’s also have a directory to satisfy the two popular forms of searching. Consider that directories tend to list alphabetically.

Things you Should Not Do !

Hidden Text/Tiny Text - Placing same color characters on the same color background causes them to be hidden. This technique was popular for a while, but search engines quickly caught on and began banning sites for it.

Overuse of images - with almost not a shred of html text on the site. That is the worst case scenario of course, but you should keep pages under 64k (max) total graphics and text. Anything else, your losing your search engine food, and the load time is driving away users before the page ever loads.

Java Blues - Notice that not a single major search engine or large commercial site on the Internet uses Java. Why? It is too slow loading on most peoples systems.

Animated gifs - Nothing drives users away, never to return, like flashing text, or abuse of animated gifs can. That scrolling banner text ranks right up their too.

Banner Exchanges - banner link exchange is the great modern Internet myth of our time. The facts are simple - banner exchanges cost you repeat visitors in the short run, the medium run, and the long run. Its like putting a DO NOT ENTER sign with a big skull and crossbones on your front door. This may be the reason why your hit rate slowly fades away. It is one thing if you are getting paid for it - it is another entirely if you are giving it away.

Spamdexing - The submission of pages that are intended to rank artificially high by various unethical techniques. These caninclude submitting hundreds of slightly different pages designed to rank high, small invisible text, or word scrambled pages. Most of these techniques are flagged by search engines as spam.

Repeated use of META keywords - is going to cause a search engine to ignore or decrease the weight for that keyword. And if you use a single word as a keyword, and later repeat it in your keyword string, then you may also be penalized. The string "Web, Web Design, Web" would be considered spamming. Also, keywords like 'word, words, wording, worded' may cause indexing to fail.

Check back often ! We are contantly adding to this list as the search engines evolve. Use this list as a checklist if search engines are important to your online effort !


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