CelebrityOn.comroad to become a web celebrity

Today’s internet is a highly competitive place and to reach your target audience you need to rely heavily on the search engines. You might have a blog or a website, but to have a successful website you need to have audiences or traffic. Search engine provides the free traffic and probably the most useful and targeted traffic. You can always buy traffic to your website, but you need a good volume of search engine traffic to grow your audience. If you have a nice website and unique contents then you should learn how to increase your traffic from search engines. There are several search engines on the internet who indexes your sites and when someone searches for something on those search engines, those search engines tries to deliver the best content on the net to the user. So, if you have a good search engine friendly site and if your site ranked higher on those search engines, then the user would find your website in top of the search list and they might visit your site. If the user finds good content on your site they will visit multiple times and your traffic will grow eventually. The more and more people find your website on the search engines the more traffic you will get. The most important part of search engine traffic is that it is absolutely free and probably the most important traffic for your website. Search traffics are basically searching for something on the internet and if they find useful content on your website they would like to visit you more and in this way your traffic would increase. So, if you want your website to be successful you need to learn how to optimize your website to the search engines so that they would rank your website higher. This search engine optimization technique is widely known as SEO techniques.

As I said there are several search engines on the internet that would index your websites. The most widely known are google, yahoo, bing (formerly live.com), altavista, etc. Google is a giant in the search engine market and they are the most important one, and then come others like yahoo, or bing. There are several simple ways by which you can make your website more search engine friendly. There are many ways to optimize search engine traffics, but in this article I will talk about 10 simple SEO techniques that everyone should use on their blog or website. You might get some search engine traffic even if you do not use any SEO techniques, but to get more you need to learn how to optimize them.

1. Title Tags: Title tags are basically the page titles that would appear at the top of the pages and within the “<title></title>” tags for the search engines. Title tag is one of the most important factors in search engine optimizations. These tags are used by the search engines to rank your website. These tags also appear on the search engine results as the clickable links, so this is very important. In your website each page must have a unique title tag. These tags should be short with few keywords and also these tags should tell the user what the content of the page is about. You should use some specific keywords in your title tags and make it compact and user friendly without putting a full 100 words sentence. You must have a different title tag for each and every page of your website. If you do not have title tags in your website search engines might try to randomly put some words in it, so always add a unique title tag to your pages. Also you should not confuse about the ‘title’ of your article with the <title> tag. Your <title> tag should be same as the ‘title’ of your article, but they might not be done automatically. I have seen several websites with different ‘titles’ for different contents but their <title> tags are similar. You need to be cautious about these things. Everything depends on what type of website you have. If you have a simple html website then you have to add the title tags manually, or if you have a php-based website then you need to add functions to add title tags automatically, or if you have a wordpress blog then these things can be done automatically or by using some plugins. Each case is different, and you have to work out things to add <title> tags with your specific website.

2. Meta Tags: Among the <meta> tags the most important are description and keywords tags. These tags might not help your website to rank better especially the keywords tag, but they are still useful to some search engines and you should add them to your website. Again similar to the <title> tag description and keywords tags should be different for every page of your website. Description tags are important for another aspect that these tags will appear in the search results as non-clickable characters. Description tags should represent a short description of the page and what it is about. Also the description tags should be between 150 letters as most of the search engines does not show beyond 150 letters. You should add description tags otherwise the search engines might put some random words from the content as descriptions in the search results. Keywords tag is not very useful, still some of the search engines use them so you can add them if you wish. These should be few keywords from your content and as always add some unique keywords for every page and not the same tags for every one of them. Also do not overkill the pages by adding many keywords, but 4-8 should be sufficient.

3. H1 Tags: H1 tags are represented by the “<h1></h1>” codes. It is very difficult to say whether search engines used them to rank your website. Some say they are useful for your rankings when some say they are not. In any case these tags are very useful and highlight the content of your pages. Try to use the H1 tags in your titles and on the top of the content. Do not use more than one H1 tag in one page, but you can use multiple H2 or other similar tags in one page.  Use your primary keywords in the H1 tags to highlight it. Make a very specific title with your keywords on the H1 tag to make it very useful to your readers and might even be to the search engines. Always try to use the H1 tags on the top of your pages so that search engine spiders access them earlier. Heading tags are very useful if you use them wisely. Even though there is no specific proof that these tags helps to rank your website higher in the search engine results you should use them – as you never know they might be useful for you.

4. Doctype: I have seen many websites that does not have a doctype. You should add a proper doctype to your website. ‘!DOCTYPE’ is a top level tag and it should appear on the top of your pages. It tells the browsers how to interpret your pages. Though the internet browsers do not require you to have a doctype, but you should always add a doctype to your pages. First find out what type of doctype you will use by visiting here. Once you have selected a specific !DOCTYPE (HTML or XHTML – strict, transitional, loose, or others) add that very top of your pages. Then visit the markup validation service to validate your pages. If the service shows errors when validating your pages then try to improve your website by their recommended actions. Once the validation service does not show any error then your website is fully compliant to that specific doctype. Adding a doctype and validating your website helps the search engine spiders to access your pages more easily and frequently. The validation service would also help you to recognize the wrong codes in your website and make your site clean to the browsers.

5. SEO URL: Before I go into what SEO URL is first check out these two links – (a) http://www.arcadevine.com/Arcade.php?play=iritgameGC and (b) http://www.arcadeset.com/play-irritating-game.html. Now tell me which link is easier to remember? Everybody would say that the link (b) is easier to remember. The first link (a) is a dynamic URL while the link (b) is a static URL. As we find the static link is easier to remember, similarly search engine spider able to access the static links better than the any dynamic links. Dynamic links could be more complex than the above example, it could be something like this ‘http://www.arcadevine.com/Arcade.php?cat=8&limit=20&show=10&page=3&arcade=1′. It would be very difficult to rank your website if your website page links are something like the above. Always try to use search engine friendly URLs or the static URLs with few keywords similarly as the link (b) above. Search engines would rank your website higher if you have static URLs and not very complex dynamic URLs. You can change the dynamic URLs to static URLs using the ‘mod rewrite’ – I’ll explain this to you in another article as it is beyond the scope of the present article. Anyway, as I said try to use SEO URLs to rank higher in the search engine results, use few keywords in your URLs, and also try to use dashes in place of underscores. Though the modern search engines able to recognize the underscores and they do not affect your rankings, you should use dashes as they also look user-friendly. Another thing you should consider is that the case-sensitiveness of URLs. Unlike the domain name URL is case sensitive, but most of the user does not recognize that. So try to use the lower case in all of your URL structures, otherwise it could create confusion to your user and even your search engine rankings.

6. Links: To reach the top of the search engine results and also to index your pages quickly you need to have a lot of links pointing to your website pages. Building links is not always easy, and you might need a lot of time to build links all over the internet. The best way to get links is by publishing unique contents that your user would find very useful. If your readers find something useful in your website they would write about you or post your links to others, in this way your links would increase over the internet. Also post about your website in different forums, directories, and exchange links with other website. If the search engines find more and more links to your pages then your website might rank higher in the search engine results. But do not spam other websites or forums with your links or try to sell links as these methods are not ethical and search engines might ban your website for that. Try to exchange links with similar niche websites in ethical ways to grow your links. Also try to build links slowly over time without building thousands of links in a very short time. That would look like spam to the search engines and they might not rank your website higher. Another useful thing is to use specific anchor texts while building links. Choose few keywords and use them as anchor texts while posting links – that would help you to rank higher for those specific keywords. Do not concentrate on a single keyword, but choose few and concentrate on them. Try to use those keywords which are searched by the others on the internet. Though it is very difficult to rank higher for some highly popular keywords and you need a lot of links to rank higher. Try to choose some keywords that are not very competitive and also the search volume is higher, then concentrate on them. Never try to use any unethical ways to build your links or spam your links all over the internet – that would not help you in any way. Use the old ways to publish wonderful contents on your website and your links would grow over time.

7. Sitemap: If you have a website, then you must have a sitemap for your website. When a search engine spider visits your website it might not find out all the pages in your website and it might take few months or more to index all the pages in your website. To help the process easier to the spiders you should add a sitemap to your website that contains all the links to your pages, so that the search engine spiders find out all the pages in your website that are otherwise difficult to find. You can create your website sitemap manually or you can use some programs to create your sitemap. If you have a large website with a lot of pages then you should try to use a program to build your sitemap. There are several sitemap creation programs available on the internet that you can use to create your sitemaps. XML-Sitemaps is one of the popular ones that I use to create my sitemaps. Submit sitemaps to the search engines and they would index your website quickly.

8. Image Tags: Search engines do not understand or recognize the images on your website. So to make your images useful for the search engines use the image ‘alt’ tag <img alt=”image-description”>. Add alt tags to all the images and add specific keywords that describe that image, and it would help the search engines to index your images properly. It might not have much effect on your search engine rankings but would surely help to validate your pages properly and make your website clean.

9. JavaScript/Flash: A website with a lot of cool flash animations or javascript codes might look awesome, but they might not help you to rank higher in search engine results. As like the images search engine spiders do not understand flash or javascripts. Therefore, try to minimize the use of those things in your website. They might look cool to your visitors but would not help you to rank higher. So use them only for user experience not for search engines.

10. Add/Update: The last and the most important tip is that you should write and update your website regularly with unique contents. Always write unique contents as the search engine spiders love them and would be indexed quickly. Never post copied articles in your website as the spiders would look them as duplicate posts and you would not get ranked for those. Always try to write something which is useful to your readers. Do not forget to update your website with new contents regularly and as frequently as you can. If you do not post new contents regularly, the search engines would not give more weights to your website and would visit infrequently. Therefore try to write at least one unique article each week if not every day.

These are the very basic and the most important SEO tips that you should consider and try to implement in your website. There are many more advanced SEO techniques available that we can discuss in another article later. I hope you enjoyed this article and would try to use them in your website. That’s it for today folks, see you again!