Getting your sites up in Search Engines.

June 22, 2005, 7:23 pm

Promoting one’s website or web blog is a never-ending task. Most people would ask me how do I do it. It’s not a secret actually, as far as the common tricks are concerned, but a rigorous and consistent effort for SEO is something that must be considered regularly.

I will discuss some of the basic aspects of good search engine optimization techniques I have used and have found quite effective. Note however that these methods might not be the best solution for you but it could provide you with a good insight on how to go about it and maybe refine your own style as well.

1) Content is still king. The more content you have, the more phrases and key words there are for GoogleBot to crawl and index. This is very self-explanatory. Corollary to this is the use of English as the primary language in your texts. Well, if you’re using Tagalog or some other local dialect, chances are, you’d only get hits from people who search for these words and you’ll only get a handful of them.

2) Don’t forget the basic HTML standards. Make good use of the < TITLE > tags. I’ve seen a lot of sites (even corporate ones) that have “Untitled page” as their page titles. Others bother to put titles but they end up placing something like “Yugatech.com” alone and not adding any more descriptive phrases in it. Be more creative and be more descriptive. It would make a lot of difference if you had something like “Yugatech.com - personal portal and online folio of Abe Olandres”. Everyone knows that META tags don’t cut it anymore but hey, it still is a good practice if you do. The least you could do is place the description, keyword and author META tags.

3) A text is a text and an image is an image. We are often tempted to put all sorts of images in headings and titles just to make use of the coolest fonts you just installed yesterday. It’s no biggie but GoogleBot won’t be able to read that like us. If you are so tempted and really wanted to put an image instead of just plain text, don’t forget to fill up the < ALT > and be as descriptive as you can — that one GoogleBot can surely read.

4) Get linked. The more inbound links you have, the more important Google will think your site is, and the higher it will rank it. But they must also be relevant links, meaning, sites with similar theme, interest and content.

5) Update, update, update. Google will only crawl your site again and again if you have fresh content.

6) Make it public. Like any other internet user, if you password protect your content or you require login to areas of your site, then GoogleBot won’t be able to get in and crawl it as well. This is especially true with member sites like forums and the like.

7) Target your keywords. This means you have to be realistic about the keywords you choose to achieve higher page rank or search results for. If you want your site to show up in the first page for the keyword “web blogs“, then you’re up against millions and millions of other websites who are also vying for the same. Why not narrow it down to something like “pinoy web blog“? At least you only have a potential half a million or so competing for it. Case in point: search for these two key phrases in Google and you will see two of my websites on top of the list.

Study/monitor your site stats. And I am assuming here that you have one. Check your stats and see what key phrases and words are often searched for. Then, double check it with Google to see what page your site is positioned. Then, update your content and add more of them or much better place them to each other. If you have pinoy in one sentence and blog in another sentence, why not write “pinoy blog” the next sentence. The closer and the more often these words appear on your page, the higher the probability that it is more relevant to the search keys.

9. There is more to Google AdSense than just making bucks. Some of you may be aware of Google’s AdSense and it’s older brother, Google AdWords. The idea here is that, AdSense takes into consideration the quality and consistency of content on a certain page. The kind of ads that appear in it will ultimately dictate the keywords which are most relevant to that page.

Republished from ym old article in Pinoyblog.

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