How to optimize the SEO ?

If you own a website and after registering it to some search engines, you have nothing more to do, except wait for the robots to crawl your web pages and after you can appear or not in the first list.

Internet is very huge and sometimes it is not easy to find what we want. If you are looking information about a famous actor, you will find a tons of millions of information but if you search about the last amazonian tribe, not so much.

Like an encyclopedia, each information is indexed and each time that someone put a query, the system searches the index for matching pages and return the most relevant results to him/her.

Each search engine has its own specificity of classification for example pagerank for google. In spite that you can´t control it, I mean control what you want to be displayed when someone do a search in google or in yahoo for example, there are few things you can make to improve the results.

Create a robots.txt and sitemap.txt or urllist.txt files and upload them using the webmaster tools. If you want, you can read my article How to create a sitemap or urllist and robots files ? where I explained their utility and how to create them.

Yahoo uses urllist.txt and Google, sitemap.txt. Additionally, you can upload your RSS feed if you have one by this way, the search engines will be able to look for the last update, consider it like a complementary information for your sitemap.txt or urllist.txt file. If you want, you can read How to create your own feed RSS ?.

If you have pictures on your website like me and you don’t mind to display them in the search results, in google, activate the advanced search picture function in tools section. And for each image, put a little description in the alt option. For example:

The use of meta tags allows you to control which pages you want the robots to index or not, it is more like the robots.txt file but it has its utility. The robots.txt file allows you to control entirely your website and the meta tag allows you to control single pages. So if there are a particular page that you don’t want the robot to crawl, put the following meta tag in the first <head> section of the article. For example:

The other useful meta tag is the keywords, you have to put single words which describe the best your content. For example:

This meta tag will help the crawling robots to index more efficiently your content.

The other thing you have to keep in mind is to use the deleted function. If you update frequently your website by adding new pages, deleting old pages, renewing actual pages... connect regularly to the webmaster tools and delete the non used url which are indexed. For example in yahoo, in the actions option, you can see the indexed pages and you can delete the ones which don’t exist anymore. By this way, when someone search something in internet, those urls will not display, if not when they click on the link, they will get the 404 page not found error.

Normally, to get the best ranking and to be displayed on the first page, google, yahoo... counsel webmasters to create unique and useful content - something that no one has but only you !!! There is no need to create something extraordinary, in fact if you put an original title for an usual content, it is enough to be pointed out. Below some more tips:

create relevant, eye-catching content. Visitors will arrive at your pages via various links, so make sure each page will grab their attention.
involve users. Can you add a comments section or blog to your website ? Building a community helps drive regular usage of your site. Getting your visitors involved helps boost visibility and user fidelity.
monitor your site. Use webmaster tools to see what queries are pushing visitors to your site, or to track ranking changes in search results in relation to larger site changes.
aim for high-quality, inbound links.
provide clear text links. Place text links appropriately on your site and make sure they include terms that describe the topic.

Except all those tips, there is one thing you can use to increase your traffic but you will need to pay for the service. It is to use adsense and/or marketing programs – for example google adsense and/or yahoo search marketing.

Depending of the budget you want to spend, you are going to define 1, 2, 3 or more keywords. Each time that someone will type those selected words in the search page, your website will always be displayed in 99% on the first page, either in the top or in the right side, inside the sponsor results frame. And you pay only when this person clicks on the link.

Why 99% ? Well there is always 1% that it can be displayed on the 2nd page, 3rd page... and that, it depends a lot of your keywords and what the person is looking for. Imagine someone is searching about “car” which is one of your keywords but it can also be the keywords of other thousands or millions of webmasters, on which pages do you think your website will be displayed ???