d33 Posted May 29, 2004 Share Posted May 29, 2004 (edited) 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. how to find it ? ok no probs there is great tool by Overture (http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/) but i will 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 Search Engines Lycos and Teoma. for example if you want to optimize for the keyword "tech news" then just search fot that keyword in any of the tools i specified... it shall show you keywords related to that and no of searches.. so pick the keywords which are related to your site. for example when you search for tech news u will see results like this : 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. after that keep the keywords which are searched most on the top. ok i have done everything now what ? ok now u 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 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 ok now lets 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...no one reads it.. now let me explain everything step by step <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 put around 15-20 keywords max not more than that and dont repeat keywords or dont put keywords like this tech news,info tech news,latest tech news and like that...i hope you got what i meant... :) <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. our decription tag could 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 one 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 ok now lets move on to body part of the page now this is very important part, include all top 3 keywords here, i will suggest just 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................. and best thing will be include main keywords in <h#> tags <h1><h2> etc.. and yes start with <h1> and then move to <h2> <h3> etc.. i know <h1> tag will be too big but CSS can help you there, define small font size in css for H1,H2,... tags ok now when done with page copy now u need to provide title and alt tags for images and links also use some keywords in the tags but dont add all the keywords and if not nccessary then dont use keywords in it basically it should explain what is image all about thats it... remember add Top keyword atleast 4 times in the body and other 2 keywords thrice and twice respectively. ok now we move on to footer part this is very important part for Search Engine optimization, 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.. ok thats it done ? NO 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. Robots.txt - what's that now ? well 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, i know its kind of diffucult to follow all the standards but you shall 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/ ok all done now need to check your site with this script, its called SEO Doctor : http://www.instantposition.com/seo_doctor.cfm it shall show you the report of your site with solution. ok now i corrected the errors and all now 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, coz 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 ok submitted the sites ? but still i cant see my site on top? why ? 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 by google or not.. use this tool called Google Monitor, it can be downloaded for free from : http://www.cleverstat.com/google-monitor.htm I think i shall stop now..this is already been so long.. finally i am sorry for spelling and grammatical mistakes :) Regards Deep Edited November 28, 2004 by d33 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Storm Posted May 29, 2004 Share Posted May 29, 2004 Nice Guide :D Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lnmnky Posted May 29, 2004 Share Posted May 29, 2004 Very good. It's good that you've steared people away from unethical methods. Perhaps you should order them in importance. Or emphasise the most important parts, like valid html, semantic mark up, good title. Keywords are generally less important than they used to be. You haven't mentioned, that things like javascript built menus, flash, image maps, will need to have special attention paid to them. Nice guide, keep em coming. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
d33 Posted May 29, 2004 Author Share Posted May 29, 2004 Very good. It's good that you've steared people away from unethical methods. Perhaps you should order them in importance. Or emphasise the most important parts, like valid html, semantic mark up, good title. Keywords are generally less important than they used to be. You haven't mentioned, that things like javascript built menus, flash, image maps, will need to have special attention paid to them. Nice guide, keep em coming. hi, great that you people liked it.. i didnt add flash buttons and JS menu coz i dont think there is any harm in using those kind of things but in limit..like no point in using flash all over the site or using js menu for everything.. you can use JS menu if there is any need to use..no harm in it.. yes it might effect a bit for SEO but sometimes users are more important than Search Engines so if you have many sub catagories in one category then no harm in using JS menu but if there is nothing like that then normal links are preferable.. and about image maps, well if you have alt tags in the images with proper keywords (not all keywords stuffed) then there shouldnt be any problem i supopse.. (but you shall provide those links in text format also somewhere..may be footer) about odering things according to the importance actually i have started from top to bottom i.e from header to footer than things which are to be done after site is done.. meta keywords yes now a days its not very important but still it's not dead, its always prefered to use keyowords in titles as well as in meta keywords.. :) anyways thanks for suggestions :) regards Deep Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
assiah Posted May 29, 2004 Share Posted May 29, 2004 I have some more information. It?s a bad idea to submit your site to the searchengines themselves, since they will give you a lower rank when you submit. What you really need to do is - to add your link to other sites, and let the Search engines find your link by themselves. The next thing is that the sites your link is added must have relevancy to the contents of your own page. I.e the above example with Technical News. You go search on google.com for your keywords and whenever you get the chance - get your sites link on the "competions" site. And of course there is the final thing which has been said since the beginning of the internet: Quality Content! That is what you need - because that is what your potential users are looking for - and hey - if they find it on your site - they?ll be happy, and might even recommend you to a couple of friends, and they will RETURN! Not just think "Bull****" and never come back. But yeah. When you start out with a new website - it?ll take time and work to get that content, and you?ll probably think a thousand times "this is hopeless" - but keep going, eventually you?ll make it - and the searchengines will also give you a good ranking for that work, because of your users. Trying to cheat the searchengines will just eventually get you banned - as they improve their AI all the time along with the algoritms. Honersty will pay off in the long run ;-) Also Submit your site to www.dmoz.org and be very carefull with that registration. Btw. Dont use javascript as a menu - use TEXTLINKS in a template... that will rock your world, and the searcheng;)es ;) Sincerely Martin Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Elmo Posted May 29, 2004 Share Posted May 29, 2004 very cool guide (Y) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
d33 Posted May 29, 2004 Author Share Posted May 29, 2004 I have some more information.It?s a bad idea to submit your site to the searchengines themselves, since they will give you a lower rank when you submit. What you really need to do is - to add your link to other sites, and let the Search engines find your link by themselves. Hi martin, i wont agree with you here.. searching sites manuallyDOESNT NOT> lower your page rank. it has got nothing to do with the page rank.. and i suggest submitting the site manually is the best way (rather than using any software to submit the sites) Deep Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kitchenutensils Posted May 30, 2004 Share Posted May 30, 2004 it does, because each site's ranking determines how important each link is. basically, you put a link on a tech-site there will be a thousand other links to the tech-site and the link from the tech site to you will be much more important Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
plainold Posted May 30, 2004 Share Posted May 30, 2004 tnx man, this is cool Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
d33 Posted May 30, 2004 Author Share Posted May 30, 2004 it does, because each site's ranking determines how important each link is. basically, you put a link on a tech-site there will be a thousand other links to the tech-site and the link from the tech site to you will be much more important 101% sure adding page manually doesn't affect PR (Page Rank) This page might help : http://www.google.com/webmasters/facts.html Deep Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pink Floyd Veteran Posted June 1, 2004 Veteran Share Posted June 1, 2004 very nice guide thanks (Y) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Adnan248999 Posted June 12, 2004 Share Posted June 12, 2004 Incredible guide thanx a million :) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
contra Posted June 12, 2004 Share Posted June 12, 2004 <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"> lets keep them xhtml compliant <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" /> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
d33 Posted June 17, 2004 Author Share Posted June 17, 2004 lets keep them xhtml compliant <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" /> yup i too prefer XTML but the problem is most of the people are comfortable with HTML so better to write HTML instead of XTML but if you can use XTML then nothing like that..its just too prefect...everything in quotes and by proper standards..just love it :) Deep Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gareth Posted June 18, 2004 Share Posted June 18, 2004 Nice guide buddy :) The only thing that I would add, if I may, is that these tips are great for most search engines bar google, and possibly Yahoo. They use the page rank technology and the only real way that you can get a good rank is by linking to lots of sites of top quality, well thats the basis of it without going into much detail ;) For more I suggest you check out this awesome resource made by google :D http://www.google.com/webmasters/ Best of luck! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dhal Posted July 5, 2004 Share Posted July 5, 2004 Very clear and concise guide there, thanks for posting it. 101% sure adding page manually doesn't affect PR (Page Rank) I'd also have to agree with this, the act of simply submitting a site manually shouldn't effect page rank. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wasabi Posted September 30, 2004 Share Posted September 30, 2004 Thank you very much for this thread im new to websites and this will proove extremly useful ;) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheDogsBed Posted October 29, 2004 Share Posted October 29, 2004 (edited) Sorry to be the negative one here but there is too much myth, conjecture and half-truth here. First thing you need to do is find the keywords you want to optimize for.how to find it ? after that keep the keywords which are searched most on the top. Verdict: Half-truth. It is a common misconception to always try for the top key-phrases. Far greater success might be had in seeking out the lower ranked terms. Imagine the top key-phrase of "House paints" which might have 50,000 searches but have over 3 million people competing for it. Your chances are slim at best. However, down the bottom of the list may be "household decorating" which only has 1000 searches but only 40,000 sites competing. Which one are you going to be most successful with? 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 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 Verdict: Dangerous and Possibly False. I'm curious where you got the notion that more than three commas might be considered spam. Please show your source for this information. Especially as, in your example, you advocate duplicating the word "news" three times in the title. (Something that is far more likely to be considered as spam.) To the best of my knowledge periods and commas are filtered out as redundant. (While I'm not 100% certain of that, I'm 100% certain that using more than three commas is certainly not considered spam.) <META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"> Verdict: Totally irrelevant to search engines. <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 put around 15-20 keywords max not more than that and dont repeat keywords or dont put keywords like this tech news,info tech news,latest tech news and like that...i hope you got what i meant... :) Verdict Pointless and redundant. Show me more than two major search engines which still use the keywords tag. I haven't used it in more than three years with no ill-effect. And why 15 to 20 words? Again, I'd like to see your source for this. remember add Top keyword atleast 4 times in the body and other 2 keywords thrice and twice respectively. Verdict: Misleading and false. You have absolutely no way of defining a minimum or maximun numver of times per page.(Barring apps like WebPosition Gold, etc) For a start it depends on the number of total words on the page, as well as other factors, including the tags, and the density of other pages in the rankings you want to compete for. If you have six-hundred words of body text then chances are that your four words will be a drop in a very large ocean. ok now we move on to footer partthis is very important part for Search Engine optimization, 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.. Verdict: Totally misleading. Why the footer? You say that as thought the foot of the page has some mystical property as seen by the spiders. That simply isn't the case. coz search engines start scanning the page from bottom. Verdict: Beyond belief. Where did you dig that up from? Go to any search engine simulator and you will see exactly how a page is read. It most certainly isn't started at the bottom, I can promise you that.ok now i corrected the errors and all now start submitting the site : Verdict: Totally pointless. Again, I haven't submitted a single site in years and I've designed many sites in that time, believe me. All you need is one link from any website that is already spidered. Hell, just adding a link to your site in your Neowin signature will assure that you are spidered when the spider next hits that link when spidering Neowin. And before anyone shouts about me not being qualified to have the first clue of what I'm talking about, drop me a PM and I'll explain why I think you'll find that to not be the case. :) There is already far too much misinformation regarding search engine optimisation on the web. Thankfully, the above, for the most part, is simply wrong as opposed to dangerous and wrong. For accurate information, I would strongly suggest either of the two sources below: www.searchenginewatch.com (Danny Sullivan - Arguably the master of SEO.) www.highrankings.com (Advocates content-based SEO as opposed to the more cloak and dagger methods available.) Edited October 29, 2004 by SniperX Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
d33 Posted November 28, 2004 Author Share Posted November 28, 2004 (edited) Hi SniperX, Half-truth. It is a common misconception to always try for the top key-phrases. Far greater success might be had in seeking out the lower ranked terms. Imagine the top key-phrase of "House paints" which might have 50,000 searches but have over 3 million people competing for it. Your chances are slim at best. However, down the bottom of the list may be "household decorating" which only has 1000 searches but only 40,000 sites competing. Which one are you going to be most successful with? I agree that the keyword might have 50,000 searches or may be more but this doesnt mean that you just should not optimize your site for that... It might take real long time may be years but you can optimize for very competitive words...if you make real good link building and proper use of keywords on the page then you can definitly get on top.... to be frank when i started optimizing our company site was almost invisible in the search engines...i started optiming for the keywords related to our b'ness which had search counts from 50 to 10,000+ I optimized for all relayed keywords and in the begining it did not come in top for keywords with high search counts because of no proper link bulding and might be few mistakes in optimization and now i am in top 10 for the keywords which have more than 10,000 search counts... so the point is...let the keyword have more searches you shall optimize for it as well as the keywords with low serarches (if they are related to your b'ness) Verdict: Dangerous and Possibly False. I'm curious where you got the notion that more than three commas might be considered spam. Please show your source for this information. Especially as, in your example, you advocate duplicating the word "news" three times in the title. (Something that is far more likely to be considered as spam.) To the best of my knowledge periods and commas are filtered out as redundant. (While I'm not 100% certain of that, I'm 100% certain that using more than three commas is certainly not considered spam.) well if you see the the date of tutorial..you will see how old it is..at that time it was advisable not to have more than 3-4 commas in the title (it was there on bcentral.com also) and 2nd thing about spaming with keywords in title tag... well google wont do anything if you have news for 3-4+ times in the title but it is not advisable to have same keyword (the one which you are optimizing your site for) many times in title.. for example if you want to optimize for Gifts to india then "Send Gifts to India - Anniversry gifts, birthday gifts and wedding gifts to india" would be good but if it not advisable to have title like "Send gifts to india, gifts to india, anniversiry gifts to india, birthday gifts to india" 2nd title will not take you on top position but 1st can help a lot... <META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">......Totally irrelevant to search engines. Yup i agree search engines ignore them but i prefer following proper standards..so i always add character set in the meta tags... Verdict Pointless and redundant. Show me more than two major search engines which still use the keywords tag. I haven't used it in more than three years with no ill-effect. And why 15 to 20 words? Again, I'd like to see your source for this. Search engines powered by Inktomi (Yahoo, Current MSN, Altavista etc..) Teoma is the 2nd example.. You may check http://searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/ar...7891#keysupport for proof :) or you may want to check this also.. http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/rank...ranking-02.html ......Use a "keyword" meta-tag to list key words for the document. Use a distinct list of keywords that relate to the specific page on your site instead of using one broad set of keywords for every page......... Verdict: Misleading and false. You have absolutely no way of defining a minimum or maximun numver of times per page.(Barring apps like WebPosition Gold, etc) For a start it depends on the number of total words on the page, as well as other factors, including the tags, and the density of other pages in the rankings you want to compete for. If you have six-hundred words of body text then chances are that your four words will be a drop in a very large ocean. Well i wont say that it is totally false and misleading... simple example would be... search for any term in any search engine.. click on cached link and see how many times the word you have searched is appeared in the page... (as a whole keyword and as broken) Verdict: Totally misleading. Why the footer? You say that as thought the foot of the page has some mystical property as seen by the spiders. That simply isn't the case. you found it misleading coz you don't know about it :) Footer links are always helpful for search engines... Google had this info in their web master guidelines before but now i cannot find it but few links in google answers page might help you.... http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=297915 http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=28627 Verdict: Beyond belief. Where did you dig that up from? Go to any search engine simulator and you will see exactly how a page is read. It most certainly isn't started at the bottom, I can promise you that. Well i corrected that :) Verdict: Totally pointless. Again, I haven't submitted a single site in years and I've designed many sites in that time, believe me. All you need is one link from any website that is already spidered. Hell, just adding a link to your site in your Neowin signature will assure that you are spidered when the spider next hits that link when spidering Neowin. Well again you are saying it pointless coz you dont know about it... Link is also very important but proper HTML is also needed... you may want to check this page for proof :) http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html ....# Make sure that your TITLE and ALT tags are descriptive and accurate. # Check for broken links and correct HTML......... adding link to your sig in neowin will not ensure that google will come to your site.. the complete sentense would be... just adding a link to your site in your Neowin signature will assure that you are spidered when the spider next hits that link when spidering that page on Neowin... google will come to neowin to scan pages... your page is on some x post which is out of reach of google because of too many query strings or no proper map to that link then google will not scan then page but link on home page of neowin or any site with good PR is gonna definitly help... There is already far too much misinformation regarding search engine optimisation on the web. Thankfully, the above, for the most part, is simply wrong as opposed to dangerous and wrong I hope i have cleard the things :) and things i have mentioned are certainly not wrong and not written by any kid who just want to write anything without any experience take care Deep Edited November 28, 2004 by d33 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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