StarDir Web Directory

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO), or search engine marketing is the process of increasing the traffic to a given web site coming from search engines. This term is equivalent to building search engine rankings. Search engine optimization might require significant investment, experience and hard working. It is however, possible to achieve very good search angine ranking by only following some simple but often overlooked rules of a thumb. The purpose of this article is to explain how to make the search engine optimization process painless and enjoyable and to give basic and advanced tips how to optimize your website according to the present understanding of the SEO.

Basics and first steps

Submit your site to the major search engines!

After your web site has been built and launched online, the first things to do is to submit your URL to the major search engines - Google Yahoo and MSN Live. This is absolutely free and can be carried out buy a person who has access to the public_html directory because you will be required to add a file or a meta-tag verification key. Submitting your website to the search engines will ensure that they will add you to the queue of their bots and very soon your site will be crawled for content. The respective submission pages are:

Google URL submit
YAHOO siteexplorer Submit URL to yahoo search engine
Submit your site to Live Search

The must do's!

Articles and article exchanges Among the most important steps in getting a high page rank are articles or the textual - clean content of your website. An important parameter that determines the rank of a page is the clean text / code ratio. Articles and especially articles original articles - i.e. having original content as much as this is possible at present time can sky rocket your page rank. New articles are important as they provoke the crawler and the indexing programs. Shortly - original articles and new articles is what adds to your page rank. Pages excesively containing ad-sense units, java script and other advertisements at the expense of original content and text will fail the text-to-code ratio and get a low index. You may subject anything that you would like to or hire people to write articles for you, but to avoid becoming the laughing stock, it is best to publish articles relevant to the subject of your web site.

XML sitemap is an xml formatted file contains all important links within your site which you wish to be indexed by the search engines! The XML-sitemap can be made manually according to W3C recommendations (W3C CSS validator). However for big sites this is a laborious process which must be automated - best by a web crawler. If you are unable to make your sitemap you can get a professionals to prepare one for you e.g.XML-sitemap generator.. There are free sitemap generators but they often generate a sitemap of your first page and do not map deep links and sub-pages.

StarXML-sitemap generator

StarDir offers a free sitemap generator (the StarXML-sitemap generator) using a python script to craw the webpage and harvest the important links of the page for you. The code is free and you can use it under the GNU General Public License conditions. You can request it here Python StarXML-sitemap generator

Directory submission

Directory submission was and still is, an important factor in building your search engine page rank. Directory inclusion warrants a permanent, in most cases, back link to your web page. Additionally many directories allow you to submit articles, which will give you another back link. Of course, some directories have a negative effect. A simple rule to determine a quality directory is:

The page rank of the directory;
The quality of the site which the directory lists;
lay out - a great number of directories are using standard layout and software;

Forums posting

Though forum posting has its value in bringing traffic and increasing the backlinks to your site, it has less value than the directory submission or articles exchange. I any case it is a good, white hat way, to SEO your web site. Add your website to your signature and very soon you will see the number of backlings to your site to grow substantially. Stay alert, however, the the life span of that links can be as short as a week, depending on the archiving habits of the particular forums.

Freebies

If you are a coder or a reasonable programmer, the best way to increase the inbound traffic to your site is to give free software, especially, useful code snippets and functions. A great example is phpBB forum software.

More Tips which are often overlooked

Deep linking, which means - not only that external pages link to your website, but that they link to sub- and su-pages of your site. Make sure you have links coming in to as many pages as possible. Links to your page means that its content is worth noticing by visitors and also by the web crawlers.
Use bold font, but with measure. Use the <b> </b> tags for keywords on each page. Do NOT use them too often; Once or twice is enough.
Ezines and Newsletters. Publish articles to ezine publishers that archive their content. The links stay alive often for many years in their archives.
Menu bar and imagesif you are using images (i.e. buttons) for site navigation, we would recomend you to add a tet link as well and to place it before the image link.
Links titlesDo not omit titles for your links. Firstly this makes it easier for the visitors surfing about your site. and secondly, it helps the search engines and the browsers too.
Anchor testDo not repeat your URL anchor text - alter it here and there so that it won't repeat and yet lead to the same destination.
Multiple domainsIn case you have several subjects which are worth their own website - go ahead. Hosting providers now can host unlimitted domains. The main profit is that search engines usually list only one page of domain for a given search, but having more domains you can have more.. Additionally, directories usually accept only home pages, and in this way you can warrant more directory listings.
Site MapEvery site needs a site map - this facilitates extremely the crawling process. The web spider will be able to access any page of your site via the shortest path. This is not the XML sitemap. This is just a neat and easy to browse navigation of your site for use mainly by humans.

Black Hat - White Hat

In Search Engine optimization, Black hat also called spamdexing refers to the an action trying to redirect the target pages of a search query in a fashion which is in conflict with the search engine policy. However, soon or later this will result in demotion of the site under question. So it always pays back if you do it the right way and show a bit of a patience - then your position will be stable you won't end up black listed.