5 Proven Useful Search Engine Optimization Guidelines & Tips
1. Understand the Way Search Engine Crawl Your Website
“Crawler-based search engines are those that use automated software agents (called crawlers) that visit a Web site, read the information on the actual site, read the site’s meta tags and also follow the links that the site connects to performing indexing on all linked Web sites as well. The crawler returns all that information back to a central depository, where the data is indexed. The crawler will periodically return to the sites to check for any information that has changed. The frequency with which this happens is determined by the administrators of the search engine. “ – Webopedia
SEO is a long term website maintenance, we need to check the keyword density frequently and the structure of the website to ensure it’s “SEO optimized”. Luckily, there are a lot of tools that will make our life much more easier:
2. Use Search Engine Friendly URL
Do not miss this, it’s very important. URL is one of the ways to include your content keywords. “Even if you can’t get your keywords into your domain name, you can put them into your URLs. Search engines read the URLs and assign value to the text they find there.” – about.com
We can rewrite dynamic URL by using Mod Rewrite. The following websites teach show us how to do it:
3. Stick to One URL
We should stick to one url only. For example, you have to decide whether to use http://www.websitename.com or http://websitename.com. The main purpose is to gather all the traffic and point it to one destination.
I found this somewhere online, it forces website url to appear as http://websitename.com.
4. Less Flash and Javascript Generated Content
Yes, flash looks really awesome, but search engine will not able to crawl the content of flash. Of course, you can’t put hidden text or redirect search engine bots to somewhere else (you might get banned by Google). The only way to solve this is create an alternate version of the complete site in HTML so that search engines and non-Flash browsers can view it.
However, if you really want to know about how to optimize flash and seo, check out these website:
For Javascript generated website, it’s refering to AJAX based website. Since search engine spiders couldn’t read javascript, AJAX based website can have pretty bad ranking. I have an article to solve some of the AJAX problems such as back button, and static url for every pages – AJAX Driven Website with jQuery + PHP Tutorial. However, the best thing to do is not to overly use it.
5. Use robots.txt
When a search engine spider comes to your website, it search for a file called robots.txt. In robots.txt, it tells search engine which files can be indexed. The following robots.txt file will allow all search engine spiders to index all files of your Website.
- /* index all */
- User-agent: *
- Disallow:
- /* dont index any of the files */
- User-agent: *
- Disallow: /
- /* don’t index all files in this folder */
- User-agent: *
- Disallow: /admin
- /* only allow googlebot to index your website */
- User-agent: googlebot
- Disallow:
- /* you can also include your sitemap in robots.txt */
- /* I’m using this one */
- User-agent: *
- Disallow:
- Sitemap: http://www.websitename.com/sitemap.xml
If you want to know more about it check this website