Article
How to Rank high in Search Engines
by Darkman | posted December 18, 2006
(0 votes) | 1852 views
Some useful techniques to boost your search engine rankings.
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There are many important factors to be considered to get high Search Engine rankings. I have listed and explained a few below.
Meta Tags
When ever a search engine visits your site, it will fetch information from your META tags. These tags should be put between the <head> and </head> tags.
The three main meta tags are title, descriptions and keywords.
Dont fill the description with the description of your company. People will search for what you offer and not for who you are.
Meta tags are very easy to be created. You may write the tags your self or you can use a generator like AddMe for generating them.
Now there arises another question. Why can't i populate the keywords field with all possible english words ?
The answer is simple. If you do something like that the Search Engines wouldn't know what your site is all about. So you should use keywords relavant to your site. Over-populating your keywords field may gain you penalties from search engines.
Linking
Search engine cannot follow image links. They only read the text of your website. So, as far as possible use Text/CSS for menus.
Especially when you are trying to make some link-exchanges with other sites, ask them to link to your site using text and image or only text. Image links are useless and dont count to your ranking.
You can use This Tool to see how a search engine sees your website.
When your site is new and have less content, not many will link to your site. In that case, you would need to submit your site to many(really many !) free directories. I'll soon compile a list of Free Directories.
URLs
As far as possible, try to use Search Engine friendly URLs. Search Engine URLs are those which are less complicated.
check out the following two URLs
http://templora.com/index.php?board=2.0
http://templora.com/index.php/board,2.0.html
The first one is complicated. While the second one is simpler. It is considered as Search Engine friendly. Many Forum softwares and Content Management systems add the PHP Session ID to the urls.
It will look like http://templora.com/index.php?sesc=e5f508fc87976d1a030d228e64968404
This will not be liked by the Search Engines.
So we should think before we choose any forum or CMS.
SiteMaps
Sitemaps make it easy for Search engines to spider your website.
There are mainly two types of Sitemaps.
Google uses XML sitemaps while yahoo uses Text.
You can use This to generate your sitemap and you can add it to google by going to your webmasters account.(http://www.google.com/webmasters/)
Another type of sitemap that is becoming popular is ROR sitemap. You can generate your ROR sitemap at RORWEB
Submission
Just doing all these and sitting idle wont fetch you good ranks. You should submit your site to many Search Engines, Directories etc.
I recommened the following sites for Submitting to Search Engines.
Content
Doing all the above is like Decorating an empty house and inviting people to it. What will happen ? They wont be interested in it. Right ? The same is with Websites. You should also have great content that will attract real visitors to your site. When the traffic increases, you will gain good Alexa rankings. We will see about Alexa ranking in another Article.
And also, if you have less content or more content, you should not link to the same content many times in a page. This is against SEO.
Meta Tags
When ever a search engine visits your site, it will fetch information from your META tags. These tags should be put between the <head> and </head> tags.
The three main meta tags are title, descriptions and keywords.
Dont fill the description with the description of your company. People will search for what you offer and not for who you are.
Meta tags are very easy to be created. You may write the tags your self or you can use a generator like AddMe for generating them.
Now there arises another question. Why can't i populate the keywords field with all possible english words ?
The answer is simple. If you do something like that the Search Engines wouldn't know what your site is all about. So you should use keywords relavant to your site. Over-populating your keywords field may gain you penalties from search engines.
Linking
Search engine cannot follow image links. They only read the text of your website. So, as far as possible use Text/CSS for menus.
Especially when you are trying to make some link-exchanges with other sites, ask them to link to your site using text and image or only text. Image links are useless and dont count to your ranking.
You can use This Tool to see how a search engine sees your website.
When your site is new and have less content, not many will link to your site. In that case, you would need to submit your site to many(really many !) free directories. I'll soon compile a list of Free Directories.
URLs
As far as possible, try to use Search Engine friendly URLs. Search Engine URLs are those which are less complicated.
check out the following two URLs
http://templora.com/index.php?board=2.0
http://templora.com/index.php/board,2.0.html
The first one is complicated. While the second one is simpler. It is considered as Search Engine friendly. Many Forum softwares and Content Management systems add the PHP Session ID to the urls.
It will look like http://templora.com/index.php?sesc=e5f508fc87976d1a030d228e64968404
This will not be liked by the Search Engines.
So we should think before we choose any forum or CMS.
SiteMaps
Sitemaps make it easy for Search engines to spider your website.
There are mainly two types of Sitemaps.
- XML Sitemap
- Text Sitemap
Google uses XML sitemaps while yahoo uses Text.
You can use This to generate your sitemap and you can add it to google by going to your webmasters account.(http://www.google.com/webmasters/)
Another type of sitemap that is becoming popular is ROR sitemap. You can generate your ROR sitemap at RORWEB
Submission
Just doing all these and sitting idle wont fetch you good ranks. You should submit your site to many Search Engines, Directories etc.
I recommened the following sites for Submitting to Search Engines.
Content
Doing all the above is like Decorating an empty house and inviting people to it. What will happen ? They wont be interested in it. Right ? The same is with Websites. You should also have great content that will attract real visitors to your site. When the traffic increases, you will gain good Alexa rankings. We will see about Alexa ranking in another Article.
And also, if you have less content or more content, you should not link to the same content many times in a page. This is against SEO.
