Monday, July 28, 2008

SEO Tip #10 - Google Sitemp

Google sitemap is Google's way to know your site better. This is an xml file that can be created without any knowledge in xml and can be generate easily with any sitemap generator, I use to http://www.xml-sitemaps. Most of the services are free of charge.
The site map will help the spiders to crawl to your entire site's page and by that to index all pages. This sitemap protocol was developed in response to the increasing size, complexity and pages multiplicity of websites.
Each sitemap include four parameters for each page:
URL of a page, changing frequency (daily, weekly, always etc), Last modification
And Priority.More Details here

Thursday, July 24, 2008

SEO Tip #9 - Create a Blog

Since one of the most important factors in getting high ranking in Search Engines is having a unique, fresh and relevant content in your site, posting Blogs can be a helpful way to get substantial traffic.
You can add new post easily using one of the Blogs positing sites that also have a search box that can help the users find your Blog easily.
From your Blog you can link to the relevant pages in your main sites, and by that creating one way link to your site.
Certain points are to be taken care of while posting blogs like regular updates, continuous new postings, posts on topics of interest etc.
Great place to begin is Blogger[dot]com.

Wednesday, July 9, 2008

SEO Tip #8 - Dynamic vs. Static Pages

There are many kinds of content pages types. They are all can be divided to two; Dynamic web pages and static web pages.
Dynamic pages can be coded in ASP, PHP etc and static pages are normally HTML or Xhtml which is the most easily crawled by the major web search engines.
Dynamic web pages became very popular online since the updating and writing them is much less time consuming then the static ones. But the main problem is that dynamic pages create Dynamic URL's which are automated by the system, database or script. This URL's normally include signs like /?* etc which can be problematic to the SE crawlers. Dynamic pages normally been used in forums, blogs, online shopping sites and other sites that need to update content frequently

Static domain will reflect the location of the page in the server. For example if you open a folder called articles, and inside you put the article 'sample.html' you will get the URL: www.yourdomain.com/articles/sample.html VS. Dynamic URL which will look like www.yourdomain.com/articles/sample.php?threadid=12345&sort=date

Static pages are much more SE friendly and normally ranked better in SERP, because its easier for the crawlers to crawl them. Most of the time crawlers will ignore everything that is written in the address bar after a certain number of variables e.g (> & =)

Other forms of files cannot be read by crawlers: flash files (.swf) Java applets, Executable Files (.exe) windows media player files and images (.gif, .jpg. png)

Read more here
Dynamic Urls vs Static Urls

Monday, July 7, 2008

SEO Tip #7 - Robots.txt File

robots.txt file, is an instruction file for the SE Crawlers.

To create robots.txt file, open a notepad or any other text editor and save it as robots.txt - lower case only! Upload the file to the root directory. (www.yourdomain.com/robots.txt)

There are only 2 rules you can assign to the SE crawlers:
User-agent: define specific search engine robot
Disallow: the pages you want to block

User-agent:
If you want your robots.txt file will be for all SE spiders just type:

User-agent: *

asterisks means all search engines.


Disallow:
Use this to tell the crawlers/spiders where they are not allow to crawl.
it looks like that:
Disallow: /file.html [Don't visit the file file.html]
Disallow: /abc/ [Don't visit any file under the folder abc]
Disallow: [leave blank - spiders allowed to crawl to all pages
Disallow: / [spiders disallowed to crawl to all pages

Best place to read more about robot.txt file
is Here

Saturday, July 5, 2008

SEO Tip #6 - Use Google Analytics

Sign up for free to Google Analytics. This great tool will help you analyze your site's visitors.
You will find there information about where your visitors come from and how they interact with your site.
When signing up you will have to copy a code for GA site and paste in before the [/body] tag and upload the page. You will find all the instructions in the site itself. Nothing complicated. 24 hours after you upload the page with the code you will start to see the first results regarding your site; How many visitors, how long did they stay in your site, where are they coming from what keywords they use and so much more!

This too will help track visitors and increase the traffic.