Search Engine Optimization and Submission Tips

Bringing visitors to your site from the main Search engines is more of a process than one event. The first step is to make sure your webpages are'Search Engine friendly'. This process is also called 'Search Engine Optimization(SEO). You can begin by checking your keywords and making certain you have the appropriate balance in the main body of your webpage, and that these keywords are in your title as well. The title may be the most important area of your site to put your primary keywords or keyword phrases. Be sure that you do not try to target more than a few keywords or keyword phrases.

Meta tags, which are the invisible tags at the top of your html code, are of less importance nowadays. But you should probably include your keywords there nonetheless, as the tags are still used by some search engines when 'spidering' your site for inclusion in their database. When making your Alt tags for your images, be careful not to place too many keywords there as the search engines appear to be getting wise to this practice. This is often called "keyword stuffing and it is a shady or "black hat" seo practice. In severe cases it could possibly lead to your website being banned from the search index. Not a good thing. It is vitally important to have your site properly optimized before they are submitted to the primary search engines. Many individuals optimize each specific page for a different search engine, but I suggest that you focus on the biggest Search indexes like Google and Yahoo (which should not be confused with the Yahoo Directory, an entirely different entity although a part of the same portal). Some major Search Engines such as Lycos appear to be fading in relevence rather quickly so try to focus primarily on the big players for the time being. After the Title tag the next most important component of your site for putting keywords is in the body, the main part people see. As a general rule of thumb, you should have around six to seven hundred words in the body of your home page. A search engine optimization method that works well is to analyze the web pages that currently have a high ranking for your targeted keyword. Then find the ratio of keywords are in the document and then be sure your page has a similiar ratio. A good place to find more information in this regard is searchenginewatch.com.

When designing html pages, be sparing with java scripting and particularly flash, because certain search engine have difficulty reading it properly. Google even advises this in it's webmaster guidelines: "If fancy features such as [...] Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.". Whether the Search Engines recognize flash pages or not, you might decide not to use Flash regardless since many of your visitors may use slow connection and they will not necessarily be thrilled about waiting for your animated company logo to load. They may even be a tad upset about it. And then there are those who have yet to install a flash player. But If you are truly bent on using it then at try to at least provide links to other pages which have enouph text and keywords that the search engines can readily find.

On that note, also be wary of images when making your site map. If your site navigation employs image links, add text links so that search engines can find your pages. Another thing to be wary of in your site design is frames. Generally speaking, I advise agains them since the possible negative results seem to outweight the benefits. After you have optimized your html pages, the next step is to submit them. You can submit your web url by going to the "Add URL" pages of each search engine you want to be added to. It is probably best to do this yourself because each search index has it's own instructions. You can find detailed information about this at searchengineguide.com. In many instances you can simply submit the homepage (index.html) and the rest of the website will be spidered thereafter. Web directories such DMOZ, Yahoo, Joe Ant and Web World Index will ask for a description and possibly some other data, while many search engines (like Google or Alexa) only ask for your URL or a URL plus email contact info. If you do not have time to submit your site yourself, there are a number free automated submission sites which can help, although they may not be as effective. Addme and Submitit are popular. If you go to Google or Yahoo just type "free url submission" and a variety of these sites will come up in the search results.

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Ryan Joseph is a writer/researcher. More info at http://www.home-business-match.com/

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