Search-Engine Optimization
A Tutorial
by the
Freelance Writers and Editors at the Writerspost.com|
You've designed the world's best mousetrap, but nobody's beating a path to your Internet door. What did you do wrong? When it comes to web sites, Google and other top search engines don't list the best pages for any particular search term; instead, they list the best-optimized pages. In order to get your web site found, you'll need to spend nearly as much time optimizing your page as you did building it in the first place. Here's our step-by-step guide to the art of SEO -- search-engine optimization. |
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Search-Engine Basics There are thousands of search engines on the Internet, but practically speaking, they all fall into one of two categories:
To get yourself listed in a directory site you'll need an optimized page -- and then you'll have to do a little extra work. At the end of this document we'll explain exactly how to get yourself listed in the directory sites. We'll start, though, with tips for getting good search results from the crawler sites. Meta Tags The easiest -- and probably most important -- tool for getting top search-engine placement is the meta tag. Meta tags are hidden commands that give extra information to search engines. At a minimum, you'll want tags that describe the title, contents and keywords in your document. You may want to use additional tags to provide copyright, author, abstract, language, and other data about your document. Putting a meta tag into your web page is simple. Here's how: First, build a meta tag. The basic format for a meta tag is: <meta name="TAGNAME" content="YOURCONTENT"> In the TAGNAME field, you may insert any of the following tag names. Place the appropriate content in the YOURCONTENT field. Capitalization is optional:
When you've built your tag, it's time to insert it into the document. Your web page is divided into two sections: the header and the body. The meta tags are the second thing to appear in your header section, under the <TITLE> tag. The usual order for meta tags is: Description, Keywords, other tags. Frame instructions, scripts and any other header information will follow the meta tags. This link from the Internet Content Rating Association will generate meta tags for your document. Reciprocal Links In short, exchanging links with similar web sites, or encouraging people with similar web sites to link to your page, boosts your search-engine placement. The more similar the linked page (and the higher the placement of that linked page), the better your listing. What will harm you, though, is getting linked by pages called link exchanges, where the sole purpose is to fool a search engine into upgrading your placement. It doesn't work. In fact, it may hurt. The search engines are onto this game, and the best engines blacklist link-exchange players. Focus your efforts instead on getting linked by quality sites on a related subject, and you'll do well. Write and edit your page carefully. Typos and grammatical errors will mark you as unprofessional, and will discourage reciprocal links. Quality Content "Under construction" pages are a red flag to search engines. They shout "Not serious! Not professional! Not useful!" They might even cause your entire site to be excluded until the next re-crawl. So here's a tip: Don't submit your pages until they contain at least a couple of paragraphs of useful content. While linked pages are under construction, leave them unlinked. You should also avoid turning your main page into a "link farm." While it's ok to bury a link farm in your sub-pages -- if you must -- you're better off if even your link farms contain useful information. Make every page worth visiting, and you'll find yourself soaring to the top of every good search engine. One more note about content: Search engines love frequent upgrades. If you add content every day, you may lose your mind, but you'll get plenty of hits. Frequency of Submission There is, actually, an optimal number of times you should submit your page to the search engines in any given period. Unfortunately, nobody agrees on what that number is. What they do agree on, though, is that every day is much too frequent -- it looks like spamming -- and every year is too infrequent -- it looks like neglect. The general consensus is that about once a month is the optimal frequency with which you should submit your web page to the search engines. But if you don't get around to it for two or three months at a time, don't lose any sleep. You might be stumbling, accidentally, over the new optimal number! Submitting to Directories On the GoSubmit home page you'll find links to the most popular directories, along with links to instruction pages for submitting. The keys to submitting successfully to the directory sites are:
There you have it: The keys to optimal search-engine optimization. Now go forth and submit! Copyright 2006, The Writerspost.com Writing and Editing Services |