Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Web Design and Content : Get Top Ranking in Major Search Engines - READ IT!

[openXS]

The tutorial is all about getting your site listed on top in Search Engines i.e Search Engine Optimization

First thing you need to do is find the keywords you want to optimize for.

There is great tool by Overture (http://inventory.overture.com/d/sear...ry/suggestion/)

But I would suggest using this free tool called GoodKeywords (http://www.goodkeywords.com/products/gkw/)

This one does the same job as Overture does but it also supports other Search Engines (Lycos and Teoma etc..)

For example if you want to optimize for the keyword "tech news", just search for the keyword in any of the tools specified above... It would show you keywords related to that and not of the searches..

Pick the keywords which are related to your site.

For example when you search for "Tech News" you'll see the following results:

Count Search Term
11770 tech news
351 itt news tech
191 high tech news
60 news tech texas
49 computer tech news
42 bio news tech
34 in itt news tech
30 news tech virginia
29 asia news tech
25 hi tech news
25 sci tech news

Now see what other terms are related to your keyword technology news/

Do couple of searches like that and note down around 15-20 keywords.
Then, keep the keywords which are searched most on the top.

Now you need Title Tag for the page.
Title tag should include top 3 keywords, like for "tech news" it can be like :

"Latest Tech News, Information Technology News and Other computer raleted news here."

Remember that characters should not be more than 95 and should not have more than 3 "," commas - some search engines might cosider more than 3 commas as spam

Now move on to Meta Tags

You need following Meta Tags in web page

  
<META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<META name="keywords" content="keyword1,keyword2,keyword3">
<META name="description" content="brief description about the site">
<META name="robots" Content="Index,Follow">

No need to have other meta tags like abstract, re-visit and all, most people dont read it.

Now...

<META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">

This tag is tells content type is html and character set used it iso-8859-1 there are other character sets also but this is the one mosty used..

<META name="keywords" content="keyword1,keyword2,keyword3">

This one should have all your keywords inside starting from keyword with most counts...

keyword tag for our example would be something like :

<META name="keywords" content="tech news,technology news, computer technology news,information technology,software news">

Remember to put around 15-20 keywords max not more than that. Dont repeat keywords or dont put keywords like, "tech news", "info tech news", "latest tech news" and so on...

<META name="description" content="brief description about the site">

Provide short decription about your site and include all the keywords mentioned in the title tag.

Decription tag should be:

<META name="description" content="One Stop for Latest Tech News, Information Technology News, Computer Related and Software news.">

It can be upto 255 characters and avoid using more than 3 "," commas

<META name="robots" Content="Index,Follow">

This is used for search robots..following explanation will help you :

index,follow = index the page as well as follow the links
noindex,follow = dont index the page but follow the links 
index,nofollow = index the page but dont follow the links
noindex,nofollow = dont index page, dont follow the links
all = same as index,follow
none = same as noindex,nofollow

Now move on to body part of the page

Include all top 3 keywords here,
I would suggest to break the keyword and use it...

For example

YourSiteName.com one stop for all kind of Latest Tech News and Computer Related information and reviews.................

Include main keywords in <h#> tags <h1><h2> etc..
and start with <h1> and then move to <h2> <h3> etc..

<h1> tag will be too big but CSS can help you there, define small font size in css for H1,H2,... tags

When done with page copy, then you need to provide title and alt tags for images and links.

Use some keywords in the tags but dont add all the keywords and if not neccessary then dont use keywords in it, basically it should explain what is image all about.

Remember to add Top keyword atleast 4 times in the body and other 2 keywords thrice and twice respectively.

Now move on to Footer Part
Try to include top keywords here and see the effect, use site keywords as links i.e.

<a href="news.php">Tech News</a> <a href="software-news.php">Software News</a> etc..

Now finally, you need to read some more stuff..may be you can all it as bottom lines...

Site Map - This is page where you need to put all the links present in your site, this is will help Search Engines to find the links easily and also provide link for site map in footer, as search engines start scanning the page from bottom.

Robots.txt - This file contains address of directories which should not be scanned by search engines.. more info can be found here : http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/exclusion.html search engines line google, yahoo ask for robots.txt file.

Valid HTML - Your code should have valid html and doc type, Its kind of diffucult to follow all the standards but you can atleast open and close all the tags properly, you can check your page's html online here : http://validator.w3.org/ or you can use this free software called HTML Tidy : http://tidy.sourceforge.net/

All done now, you just need to check your site with this script, its called SEO Doctor : http://www.instantposition.com/seo_doctor.cfm

It'll show you the report of your site with solution.

Now, correct the errors and start submitting the site :

Start with google : http://google.com/addurl.html
then yahoo : http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request
then move to altavista,alltheweb and other search engies..

Also submit your site to direcories like http://dmoz.org , http://jayde.com etc...
Dmoz is must, as google, yahoo and may more search engines uses same directory

And remember, dont try to SPAM with keywords in these directories, dmoz is handled by Human Editors

Submitted the sites, but still i cant see my site on top?

Wait for sometime may be a month or so but keep an eye on your search term, use http://GoogleAlert.com - this will show whenever google updates for your keywords, it will mail you the new results.

And also check whether your site is listed on google..
use this tool called Google Monitor, it can be downloaded for free from : http://www.cleverstat.com/google-monitor.htm

ALL DONE !!

Reply with a thanks if its useful at all! :p

Please note the source of this tutorial is at:
http://www.betaresource.net/forums/i...showtopic=1264

[nzbm]

Nice work. Saves reading and interpreting various search engines FAQ's!!

[JayC]

Some good advice, but I'd make a few counterpoints and a few different suggestions:

Originally posted by openXS
Then, keep the keywords which are searched most on the top.

That's half the picture. You also have to evaluate the competitiveness of the keywords. For example, while it's searched quite often, few people here will have any chance of decent rankings for "web hosting." The trick for most sites is to find niche terms that will be effective for you: that are searched reasonably often, and for which you can reasonably expect to compete.

Title tag should include top 3 keywords,

The more key phrases you include in any element, or target on any page, the more you dillute your effectiveness for any of them. In most cases, targeting three phrases is too many.

<META name="keywords" content="keyword1,keyword2,keyword3">

The contents of the meta keywords tag are ignored by Google, and probably ignored by Yahoo -- or at best valued so little that they're hardly worth thinking about.

The meta description isn't used in ranking by major search engines, but in some cases (for example, a search by domain name at Google) will displayed on the results pages.

Remember to add Top keyword atleast 4 times in the body and other 2 keywords thrice and twice respectively.

Really? What if you have 20 words of text? What if you have 400 words? My best general advice is to use your targeted keyword phrases as often as you can while still keeping the text reading naturallyfor human visitors. Keyword density in body text isn't really high on the list of optimization elements today.

And don't forget about about headings, emphasized text, etc. And don't forget that these days you need terms related to your targeted phrases, not just those specific phrases themselves. A lot has changed in the past six months.

Robots.txt

Since you've already explained the use of the robots meta tag, it should be pointed out that you don't need both of these. Use either a robots.txt file (usually the best approach, if only because you can block spidering of files other than html files -- these days search engines will index .pdf files, images, etc.) or the meta tag in each html file (the only file type for which you can use the robots meta tag).

then move to altavista,alltheweb and other search engies..

AltaVista and AllTheWeb are now owned by Yahoo and use the same index. You can't submit to them.

[Charlottezweb]

Originally posted by JayC
The contents of the meta keywords tag are ignored by Google, and probably ignored by Yahoo -- or at best valued so little that they're hardly worth thinking about.

The meta description isn't used in ranking by major search engines, but in some cases (for example, a search by domain name at Google) will displayed on the results pages.

Do you have reliable documentation supporting these points? I'm interested in reading more on that.

Regards,
-Jason

[gilbert]

Originally posted by Charlottezweb
Do you have reliable documentation supporting these points? I'm interested in reading more on that.

Regards,
-Jason

hes posted everything i ever was able to figure out so hopefully that puts away the take-and-run SEOs for a while

[Marque]

Umm, all search engines stopped using keywords in 2002. Meta Keywords are worthless and there are plans for them being depricated in the next version of xhtml.

Dont believe me? check it..
http://searchenginewatch.com/serepor...le.php/2165061

[Charlottezweb]

I'm just asking for some links to do some further reading on this...I'm not saying anything about the validity.

Regards,
Jason

[JayC]

Originally posted by Charlottezweb
Do you have reliable documentation supporting these points

It's pretty easy to test that meta keywords aren't indexed. Just find a page that has a word or term in meta keywords that doesn't exist on the page, and do a search for that term. The page won't be returned.

For example, the index page at your site, charlottesweb.com, has the word "charlottesweb" in the meta keywords. So...

http://www.google.com/search?q=site%...+charlottesweb

A site search at charlottezweb.com returns no pages containing "charlottesweb." On the other hand, find a term that is in the body text:

http://www.google.com/search?q=site%...+on+the+web%22

A site search then finds the index page on which that term appears. So does a regular Google search of the web (which I didn't use for the meta keyword test because that term does appear on a number of other pages so it's harder to see that the page does not appear among the many results).

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Lo...+on+the+web%22

That may leave open the question of whether a word that exists in both the body text and the meta tag gets a "boost." That can best be tested by experimenting with your own pages -- or take the word of any of the many working SEO professionals who will tell you the same thing (hey, I realize I don't have the clout in the industry that these guys do ). Danny Sullivan wrote about the "death" of the keywords meta tag in October 2002. Brett Tabke of webmasterworld doesn't use them (view source to check) on his site, which dominates results for all kinds of queries.

Technical documents from Google imply the same. Read The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine." You'll see the unlikelihood that, if the meta contents as demonstrated above do not get indexed with other content, they're being stored anywhere at all -- it wouldn't work with Google's architecture.

Or search for documents by Monika Henzinger, Google's technical director until recently. You'll find a lot of in-depth stuff about how Google and other search engines work... and find out a lot about sampling, the set problem, fungibility, the difference between query-dependent ranking and query-independent ranking, and probably most relevant here, term vector models. Get immersed in that stuff and no doubt you'll soon even forget that there is such a thing as a meta keywords tag.

[Charlottezweb]

Perfect -- exactly the sort of post I was looking for. Thanks for your time and effort on it.

Regards,
Jason

[Veign]

Another tool that all may find useful is Google Rankings

Not sure how accurate some of the results may be, but if there is a major problem with the site I'm sure someone will point it out...

[JayC]

Originally posted by Veign
Not sure how accurate some of the results may be, but if there is a major problem with the site I'm sure someone will point it out...

It's easy to test how accurate it is, by trying the query directly at Google. And it was off on two of the three queries I test by two and three positions.

Other than that, it doesn't really add a lot of utility beyond just doing the search at Google, since you're still doing one query at a time. You can just use Google and count how far down you are, and you can set the results page (in advanced search) to return 100 results, just like you can at that site.

If you don't want to count to find what position you're in, do your query at google.com/ie instead of just google.com, and add
'num=100' to the url in order to get 100 sites returned per page. It's a little harder that way, though, to identify your site since you're only seeing the page titles (of course if you have your company or domain name in the title that's not a problem).

So the linked site is easier, but since it's not 100% accurate personally I wouldn't use it.

I have this bookmarked: http://www.google.com/ie?num=100&hl=...dow=1&safe=off

[Gen-T]

Originally posted by openXS

Valid HTML - Your code should have valid html and doc type, Its kind of diffucult to follow all the standards but you can atleast open and close all the tags properly, you can check your page's html online here : http://validator.w3.org/ or you can use this free software called HTML Tidy : http://tidy.sourceforge.net/

Also you can/should use >> http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/

For the most part it's the same as the w3 validator, with a few exceptions....

------------------------------------------------
"The WDG HTML Validator is similar in many ways to the W3C HTML Validation Service. Most of the previous differences between the two validators have disappeared with recent development of the W3C validator. The errors reported are the same in virtually all cases. However, some minor differences may arise:

The WDG HTML Validator gives warnings for valid but dangerous HTML: unclosed start-tags (e.g., <p><img src=foo alt=bar</p>), unclosed end-tags (e.g., <p><em>foo</em</p>), empty start and end-tags (e.g., <p>foo</>), and net-enabling start-tags (e.g., <img alt=foo src=bar/baz>). Other validators do not give such warnings.

The WDG HTML Validator gives warnings for undefined references such as “ and ™. The W3C HTML Validation Service reports such undefined references as errors for XML documents but remains quiet for HTML documents.

Unlike other validators, the WDG HTML Validator uses a special SGML declaration when the document refers to a custom DTD. The result is that many custom DTDs, especially those built from the HTML 4.0 Transitional DTD, work correctly with the WDG HTML Validator but not other validators.

The two validators differ significantly from other checking tools such as Weblint and CSE 3310 HTML Validator. (Despite its name, the latter is not a true "validator.") The two online validators check documents against a document type definition--a published, machine-readable document that facilitates an objective check of syntax against HTML standards. On the other hand, lints are subjective; they provide a more cursory syntax check while adding stylistic checks, such as warning about poorly supported features. Lints are useful tools, but they are not substitutes for HTML validation."

source: http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/valida...fferences.html
------------------------------------------------

[JayC]

Not to argue against validation or using valid html (or xhtml, or xml, or whatever), but there's no evidence that any major search engine penalizes the use of "invalid" code. You can find many highly ranked sites in competitive areas that won't validate properly (not to mention plenty of high-profile sites run by well-known corporations).

The value to SEO in validation, though, is that there are errors that could cause problems with spidering or ranking, or getting all of your content indexed: faling to close the header area, perhaps, or putting elements there that should be in the body (or vice versa), improper table nesting, etc. Most of those errors can be caught by a validator and fixed before they cause search engine problems.

But a lot of validation problems will have no effect on search engines at all.

[Gen-T]

Yes, that's very true Jay, and some would say very unfortunate.

Important to remember though, there are benefits from using valid code (for both the site AND users) that reach beyond SEO.

[JayC]

Originally posted by Gen-T
YImportant to remember though, there are benefits from using valid code (for both the site AND users) that reach beyond SEO.

Absolutely. That's why I said I wasn't arguing against validation or valid code, but since this thread is about getting search engine rankings I also didn't want the connection between those two to be overstated or misunderstood.

Just part of my campaign against SEO-related misinformation.