Search Engine Optimization Tutorial

After you have built a website and optimized it by tuning its meta tags to the best, it is the time to get it submitted to major search engines and directories. So, that your site gets indexed by the search engines and the directories. There are lot of confusions in submission to search engines and web directories. Here, I would try to clear this confusion. A close study of search engines and web directory will sure help to solve this confusion.

search engines

When you submit your website to a search engine, it reads your site meta tags, looks their relationship with the contents, indexes you website and assigns a rank to your site according to the algorithm it follows. Here, you should understand that by submitting your site to a search engine does not mean that you will start getting high traffics just after its submission. This simply means that now the search engine knows about your site and its pages and would place you in its SERP (Search Engine Result Pages) according to your rank in its index.

You must have read very often about the offers for submitting your site to thousands of search engines for a fee, no matter small or big. No doubt that there are really thousand of search engines on the web but most searches are routed through a few major search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, alltheweb etc. If you submit to these search engines alone, it is really enough to get noticed in the search engine world. I am giving their site submission URLs and little info about their strategies.

Google

http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl.
They ask you to submit your top level page and have pretty easy to understand instructions for submission. Google updates its index normally once a month.

Yahoo

http://submit.search.yahoo.com/.
They have two options free and paid. Free listing takes about 30 to 45 days. However paid listing assures a quick listing of your site.

MSN

http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx.
MSN in routine picks new websites having good inbound links. So if you have good inbound links, your site will be picked for listing in MSN even if you don't submit your site to them.

AOL

You can not submit to AOL directly but if your site is indexed by Google, AOL will most likely include your site in its index too.

Web Directories

Web directories are different with respect to search engines. A search engine uses its algorithm to index and rank a website through its regular crawling process whereas a web directory is defined into several categories and subcategories where it contains the websites submitted. In this way a web directory is considered an expert index of sites. Here you select a category and subcategory for your site and submit your site to it. Visitors come to brows a specific category in a directory as per their interest. This ensures that your presence in a specific category will attract a targeted visitor. Most of the search engines use these directories to update their data. This also increases your chance of getting high rank with search engines.

These directories can be classified into free directories and paid directories. Normally, free directories take comparatively more time to list the submitted sites. Whereas the paid directories list the submitted sites instantly. Some good free directories are DMOZ, Yahoo!, World Wide Index, AbiLogic, Gimpsy, JoeAnt. However, good paid directories can be named as Arielis, BOTW, BlueFind, Microsoft bCentral, and GoGuides.

Before submitting your site review your site thoroughly and make sure that your site has no broken or dead links. Write a suitable description of your site to put into the description field of submission form. Search thoroughly the categories and subcategories before selecting the category for your site. They normally offer you to suggest one if you don't find a suitable one.

No doubt, submitting your site to major search engines and good rank directories help increasing the traffic and good placement in SERP (Search Engine Result Pages). Submission to good directories is something which ensures this goal.

A great way to get your website popularized is by avoiding mistakes that are not search engine friendly. An SEO process should be initiated on a site taking some points into consideration. I would like to share some tips with you guys about how you can allure search engines to get your site up in the search results. Read this article and find the kith and kins of search engine optimization world.

Here are some of the mistakes that are usually ignored while carrying on the SEO process.

Don’t do it yourself or don’t let any SEO Company to submit your url in thousands of search engines and directories. That is rather a waste of time and money altogether. These sites are usually link farms and do get penalized by google.

People waste time submitting site url’s to search engines. The crawler will index your site sooner then you might think. The only effort to be made is gathering some quality links that crawler can follow to reach your site. If your site is capable enough, it will be indexed in no time.

Good back links are the key players in getting your site up in the SERPs. Avoid back links from link farms. It takes a good amount of time and effort to gather good links but that is the only way to see your site rising in SERPs.Its optimal in any search engine optimization process to get not more than 500 back links for a site as tons of links can look suspicious to search engines and could result in penalty.

As far as visitors are concerned, if you want good traffic on your site make it an interactive tool. Give your visitors a regular feedback to their enquiries and keep them updated with the new offers and products that have been launched.

The best option is to get your site listed in volunteer-edited sites like Wikipedia.Such sites can place your site as a reference for visitors in their articles. If your sites are potential enough they can be suggested to the visitors for more information in such sites.

Google admires fair SEO and PPC practices. Optimize your site in a way that can lead crawlers to keep your site indexed and highly ranked in search engines.

Every search engine uses it's own, very specific algorithm to index the websites. All major search engines keep updating their search algorithms quite frequently to give their searchers the best searching experience. Your website's place in the search result pages depends on it's calculation from the algorithm it follows. These algorithms are not changing everyday but are evolving into more intelligent and accurate. Yet, the major focus is on the Meta tags of the site.

These Meta tags are not visible when someone browses your web page but the search engines read these Meta tags alone and decide the place of a web page on its search result pages. It does so by finding the relevance of the Meta tags within them and with its contents. The most important Meta tags are the title, description and keywords. The first thing a search engine looks for is to find a relevance in these meta tags by looking at the keywords used in them and secondly it looks the relevance of the keywords used in these meta tags with the contents of the page.

The Title Tag

The title is the most important Meta tag of your website. This is the first thing shown on a web page and this is visible to both your visitor and most importantly to the search engine. That's why it has to be given the utmost importance while search engine optimization is the consideration.

It is always depicted on the left top bar of in the browser window. This tag should include the most relevant keyword about your business. If the most relevant keywords are used in here, your web site will sure get a boost in a search.

Most websites use their company name in the title which in fact, is not something desirable. Because, nobody usually searches for a company name unless it is very well known or some giant multinational.

The perfect title tags should be something between 10-70 characters. It is not so that one can not put a longer title but the search engine would ignore the longer part of the title.

The Title tag should be written for the visitors (people searching for your business or services) first and the search engines second. This should be such as to motivate a click and obviously to favor the search engine indexing too.

Different title tags should be assigned to each page of your website containing its own keywords that relate to that specific page.

Description tag

The description tag should be written in such way that it speaks about the website contents in just one or two sentences.
It should be short and clear that your visitors get a close idea about your site by reading this in a short time.

The description tag should be 100 to 200 characters long. The Meta description tag also has a great role in the SEO of your page. This tag displays the information at a search engine result page (SERP) after a search is performed by a user. So, this should be such as this puts the concise summary of your page. Most search engines truncate longer Description. Remember this while writing this tag.

Same as above every page should have a different description tag in accordance with the contents it holds. This tag has quite some effect on the ranking of your site in Search Engine results. The Search Engine will read your description tag and will check if the keywords or search terms match your title tag and content of your web site. My suggestion is to take the first sentence or two of the contents from your web page and use that for the Meta description content.

Include the most relevant sentences matching with the page contents in description tag instead of stuffing the tag with more keywords. Remember that the Meta Description Tag of a web page must not look just a bunch of keywords, but should contain an informative and concise summary of your web page.

Keywords Tag

The most heavily sought technique in Search Engine Optimization process is Keyword optimization. But at the same time if keywords are too often repeated, chances are that the site gets marked out as ""spam"". However, if your target keyword are not included enough, its ranking will not be optimized. So, with present algorithms which are really smart and intelligent include only those relevant keywords you want to target and make sure that these are included in the contents too.

Use variations of a keyword like watch, watches, wrist watch etc. They are slightly changed keywords and yet don't render any feeling to the search engine for their being repeated in the tag.

Geographical information (name of the country, city or place) may be used in the keywords. Sometimes it plays a great role when a search is made for a location based business. Or, even brand names, model name of a product can be used in this tag. That also helps when a search is made for a specific product model or brand.

Search engines give different weights to the keywords according to their positions in HTML tags used in the content. For example if a keyword is used in this tag which is present in Heading Tag also has more weight particularly when the same is in H1 tag.

Write your Alt tags of the images and the text links being used in the page such that it includes at least one keyword from the keyword tag. But, remember the same should look just relevant with the image or the hyper link for which it has been written.

The content should have included all of your keywords. The aggregate keyword density (all the keywords used in keyword tag) should be between 20% to 30% but not less than 5% to the best optimized results. However, Density for a single keyword should not be less than 2% and higher than 6%. The best is about 5% with the major keywords and 2% with subsequent keywords.

The Meta tags should be fine tuned with the contents and a good relevance is brought about between themselves with a perfect balance between the target audience and the search engines.

These Meta tags have been used really very un-carefully by the spammers, if we commit to use them methodically with the due respect, I hope, we should be able to create ever increasing web traffic on our sites.