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.

Monday, June 30, 2008

SEO Tip #5 - Custemized 404 page

We all know it when you click on a link and suddenly receive the message: "The page you were looking for doesn’t exist". There are many reasons to see this page: broken links, moved links and more. The question is how you as a website owner can make it "less painful".

The best thing to do is to customize your 404 page so it will be similar to the rest of your website, and the visitors know that they’re still on part of your site.
It will show your visitors that you thought it all through to make them feel better, even if they can't find what they were looking for.

So how it works?
You need to create a text file called .htaccess where all the HTTP server instruction will be. Copy and paste this to this file without the [] [ErrorDocument 404 /404page.html]You need to upload it to your .root together with the index/default file of your site.
Next step is just save a basic HTML page called '404page.html' with the words '404 error' in it.

Few suggestions what to put in your customize 404 page:
- Link back to the Homepage
- Google Adsense ads
- Special offers this month if you have.
- Search box
- Links to very important pages.
- Explanation of why this problem accrued

Friday, June 27, 2008

SEO Tip #4 - Factors for ranking in SERP

SE's use their crawlers or spiders to set a rank for a particular web page.
Here is a list of some of them, but remember (!) Google intend to change factors all the time. It's better if you always keep updated in Google's Webmaster Guidelines.

Content – SE in general and especially Google, try to bring the users the most updated content. Therefore, it is highly recommended to keep update your site regularly to show that the site is constantly updated. The usage of keywords in the body and title tag is highly important and helps increase traffic.

Internal Links – it's always important to use text links and not images, so the SE crawlers can reach your site's inner pages. Crawlers can't see images!
It's also acceptable to use 'breadcrumbs' technique which make all pages pointing to the homepage and make it stronger (Breadcrumbs - use the structure of: Home > Inner page > Sub Inner page) More pages pointing to a particular page make it stronger for the SE's.

External Links – The crawlers takes it very seriously. The ranking of your site will certainty be influenced by the quality and quantity of links pointing to your site.
Use anchor text with the correct keywords in the external Link for example,
Great SEO Blog