Top SEO Tips

When you have spent hours, weeks and perhaps months to develop your website, it is very frustrating that the page does not appear in search engines like Google. Lets go through Search Engine Optimization and how it can help you get a good position in Google and other search engines.

SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and is a name for all the activities you are doing to get visibility in search engines like Google and Yahoo. SEO can be anything from small changes to the Web site to complete the rebuilding of websites and advanced link strategies. The goal is the same, rank better in Google or any other search engine. This techniques is something that you should be doing when you create the website.

SEO Tips
When Google and other search engines are looking to index your web pages, they prefer that the website has been built up semantic. Creating semantic HTML is about using W3C predefined tags for items such as headings, paragraphs, lists and structured text. Doing so will Google and other search engines better understand what's in your content.

Robots Exclusion Standard, or "robots.txt" is a term you often hear in the SEO context. Robots.txt is a file that is located on the root of the site. It is not used by visitors but website owners who want to tell search engines how to index a page. Or rather what not to index. website owners can use a Robots Exclusion Standard file to specify how the content will be indexed by robots like Google and Yahoo. With a robots.txt file, you can limit what the search engine indexes, and make the indexing of your site more effective. Do not let the search engine index your RSS feed, your blog or the management section of your CMS - this will help not on the visibility of your website. Even if you do not want to limit your search engine, it is recommended to have a robots.txt file on your website. This is because the engine will always look for this file, if it not find the file it will be sent to your 404-page (Page not found). This will not affect your ranking, but can save you some 404 error messages in your stats.

Previous the search engines use meta tags to gather information on a website. And it was essentially the meta tags "description" and "keywords" that was used. Meta Keyword tag is not as important as the Meta Description tag, as they don't affect if the website will be found when searching for that keyword or not. Google for example do not emphasis on the "Keyword". A few search engines do, however, growing emphasis on those keywords so you can still add them, but they will not affect your position in the major search engines. Meta Tags were quickly abused and search engines have, therefore, in recent years not emphasized these meta tags to index. It is still important that the meta tags actually provided, and more than often it is actually your own meta-description that end up as the description on the Google website.

Google, Yahoo and other search engines search through your pages from several times a day to a couple of times a week. It would be practical to tell the search engines of all the pages your site consists of and when they were last updated. With a so-called sitemap or area map, you can do just that. A Site map provides an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for review. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is in relation to other URLs on the site) so that search engines can go through the site in a more intelligent manner. A site map is a complete "map" of your website that Google, Yahoo and other search engines can use to index your site. With an area map you'll probably get a faster and more accurate indexing than without. Most modern publishing tools has built support or modules that provide support for site maps. Do you have a smaller site, you can also create such a map by hand, following the protocol to the site maps. The easiest is still to let your CMS do the job of developing the site maps.

Finally, the content of the pages will always be the most important. With good and relevant content, the "customers" always come back, and maybe also linked to your page from your other pages.

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