February 5, 2008
It is difficult to optimize your website for every one of the search engines at the same time since the crawling and ranking algorithm differs in the different search engine spiders. For example, the algorithm Google uses to rank a website varies from MSN or Yahoo. If you concentrate on following basic things then you will be about 80% done optimizing your site for search engine traffic.
Below are several tips I find helpful when developing a search engine friendly website. If you are looking for a list of top web hosting and domain registration sites click here. At HomeBizMadeSimple I personally use on of the top sites listed there.
If possible, you should try to add keywords in your post URLs. This will bring search engine traffic for your site. The website's URL length should be kept short; up to 4 words in a domain name and up to 8 words in post slug is recommended. Keep in mind to include the keywords that you added in the URL in the website's content naturally.
The <title> tag is one of the most important aspects of Search Engine Optimization [SEO]. The post title is shown in search engine result pages. Therefore, it is important to have a good <title> tag around 8 words length containing some of your core keywords included.
If you are submitting your website site to different web directories for listing, you should give different anchor text for each submission. Also for manual reciprocal link exchanges, you want to have different anchor text and deeper post links instead of index page. When getting links, you want to try to get links to your website from other content relates websites.
Include the keywords naturally in post content. You should try to use main keywords in headers <H1>, <H2> tags. Keywords should always be relevant to your webpage.
When designing your website and adding images, you should fill the <alt> tag of your images with the proper keywords. Search engines will use this <alt> tag instead of the image description.
When a website has links from other content-relevant sites these sites are voting for you and you will get points toward a higher ranking with the search engines. You want to stay away from bad neighbors, or at least do not link from you to bad neighbor sites. You should also stay away from link spamming and try to get some .edu and .gov links.
Do not link to more than 100 links from same page. If you do this, this page may be considered a link farm with the search engines. Too many outgoing links will not give you any benefit to ranking in a search engine. You should keep your outgoing links limited and possibly link to relevant sites only.
When designing your website you should use <description> and <keywords> Meta tags. Meta tags generally do not have that much importance now - days but Yahoo and MSN still consider Meta tags when indexing and ranking your web pages. You should consider including post description in <description> meta tag. Some times this description will come as search result description on search result pages. Use the <keywords> meta tag to include keywords, around 15-20 keywords will be sufficient. Do not use keywords that are not in your post content.
Wordpress blogs have drawback of duplicate contents. Content is said to duplicate when same content is accessible from two different urls. Concentrate on unique content. Fresh content is also important for fast ranking as search engine crawlers love fresh content. Use robots Noindex meta tag and robots.txt file for avoiding duplicate contents. Use post excerpt on index, archives and category pages.
Navigation should be simple. When designing your website you should avoid using java scripts and flash movies on a home page. Interlinking all your web pages is also helpful. Keep most of the pages accessible from home page. Do not use frames in site design. It will be difficult for crawlers to crawl your site. Do not use images to linking.