SEO : Get top ranking in Google

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Search Engine Optimization

Get top ranking in Google, AltaVista, Excite, Northern light etc. Try the power of Search Engine Optimization at www.seo-rank.com

Tip 1 :
Find the keywords which people are using to access your site from the search engines. Improve the ranking of your web site in the search engines by increasing keyword frequency, weight and prominence. Submit a page to all the major search engines. To get a top ranking, emulate the frequency, weight and prominence of the top ranking pages for your target keywords.

Single word keywords tend to be hyper-competative. Most people are now searching for 2 or 3 word phrases rather than for single words. Form a list of phrases that one might have searched for finding your site as your keywords. Try to think of keywords which apply to the geographic area that your product or service is designed to serve. eg - travel to India.

To get a top ranking for a keyword, create keyword rich pages. Select precisely the right keywords to target for your site.

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SEO Tips

Meta Description tag be keyword rich as well as attractive to humans, as it is used by many search engines to provide a short description of the page that is listed in the search results. Search engines don't recognize the Meta Description tag. Some search engines will often simply take the first few lines of text in the body of your page and display that as the description.Hence, you must ensure that the first few lines of text in your page are attractive to human beings.

Ensure that as many sentences as possible in the page contain your target keyword once. Search engines may penalize your page for spamming if they find that you have randomly repeated the keyword throughout the page. Keyword is placed in every sentence should actually make grammatical sense and should not be boring to visitors due to over use.

Make sure that your paragraphs are not too long. Try to name your files with keywords.eg - traveltoindia.html

Place a picture at the top of the page and include the keyword you are targeting using ALT tag. Start the heading with the keyword you are targeting.

For more Search Engine Optimization tips http://www.seo-rank.com/tips.htm

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Creating a robots.txt file

Use Robots.txt files instead of Robots meta tags, as some search engine robots do not recognize the tag.

If you like to create different pages for different search engines, each page optimized for one keyword and for one search engine. Create the robots.txt file using Notepad and upload it to the root directory of your domain.

Basic syntax of the robots.txt file:

User-Agent: [Spider Name]
Disallow: [File Name]

Google's spider is Googlebot, AltaVista's spider is Scooter, Excite's spider is called ArchitextSpider, Northern Light's spider is called Gulliver, HotBot's spider is called Slurp.

For instance, to tell AltaVista's spider, Scooter, not to spider the file named myfile1.html residing in the root directory of the server, you would write

User-Agent: Scooter
Disallow: /tourism-in-india-go.html

Here the file tourism-in-india-go.html is designed for Google's spider and it should not be read by AltaVista's spider. If a search engine may spider files which are not meant for it, in which case it can penalize your site for spamming. So take care if you are planing robots.txt file to optimize your site for various search engines specifically.

Software to help you create a robots.txt file visit, http://www.rietta.com/robogen/

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Link popularity

Link popularity, i.e. the number of sites which are linking to your site. More the number of links to your site, higher will be its ranking. Reciprocal linking is the exchange of links with individual sites, and is certainly an accepted technique for improving your site's link popularity.

Cross link all your sites and important pages within each site. This will maximize the PageRank of all your pages within each web site. To find the link popularity of mysite.com in Google, you would type link:mysite.com at Google search box.

An effective method of increasing the link popularity of your site is to post messages in Message Boards and Discussion forums. At the end of every message that you post, you can sign off by mentioning your name and the URL of your web site. Use signature in email messages containing the URL for your website.

To improve the link popularity of your site, set up new websites and have these new sites link to your main site. Also ensure that all the pages that you create for these new sites contain unique content. AltaVista refuse to spider sites which are present in the free web hosts.

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Writing articles and submitting it to following popular sites with your URL link. Also publish the article in your site as a separate web page.

http://www.ideamarketers.com
http://www.marketing-seek.com/articles/submit.shtml

Write ezines and publish it in http://www.ezinearticles.com/add_url.html. Give the ezine free for download with a link to your site. Archive your ezines in your web site too. Related links will be more valuable than links from unrelated sites. Quality of the links will determine your ranking.

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Get your site registered by Yahoo Directory.

AOL, Netscape & Lycos all take their results from the Open Directory. Google gives a lot of importance to sites being listed in the Open Directory. In addition to this, getting registered by the Open Directory will also help you to improve the link popularity of your site.

Before you submit your site, go through your entire site and ensure that there are no missing graphics, no links leading to empty or non-existent pages and no "Under construction" symbols. Also, check for typos and grammatical errors. Furthermore, your site must provide good content. If your site simply contains links to various affiliate programs, you will find it difficult to get through.

Factors influencing your rankings in AOL, Netscape and Lycos are :

i) Choose the correct keywords for your site. Presence of the keyword in the Title and Description of your site's listing in the Open Directory. Your description should be a single sentence which conveys what your site is all about (maxi 15 words).

ii) Prominence of the keyword in the Title and the Description - closeness of the keyword to the beginning of the Title and Description.

iii) Presence of the keyword in the URL.

iv) Presence of the keyword in the Category name. Select the most appropriate category for your site, having your keywords.

Click on the "add URL" link at the top. Type in the address of your site in the first text box, the official name of your site in the next text box, the description that you have earlier developed in the third text box and your email address in the fourth text box.

If the official name of your site contains the keywords, you will get a high ranking for those keywords.

In description avoid using ALL CAPS or exclamation marks. Write the description in the third person. Don't say "We offer free hosting services", say "Offers free hosting services". Check your description for typos and grammatical mistakes. End your description with a period (.).

Type in your domain name in Open Directory's search box and see whether your site comes up in the results (comes within a week).

Getting multiple listings (in different categories) in the Open Directory will help to get high ranking.

[swoosh343]

Will like to give this a try, and see the counters in my website increase exponentially!!!
Thanks for the tip!

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To become an Open Directory Project Editor

When you do not manage to get your site listed in the Open Directory, the only solution is to become the editor of the category to which you want to submit your site.

First, go to desired category of the Open Directory and to a lower level (regional) category which does contain a - "become an editor" - link at the top of the screen. Fill the form with your experience and interest in the subject, also mention no business affiliation of the category.

The Open Directory now asks you for 2 or 3 sites which you would have added to the category had you been an editor of the category. The best way to do this is open a browser window and do a Yahoo search to find few related sites. Enter the URL, Title and Description of the first site, do the same for all the three sites and click on the Submit button.

Normaly within 2 weeks, you will get an email saying that you have been accepted as an editor. Log in as an editor and read the Directory Guidelines. Now you can edit the details of your category sites according to the Directory Guidelines.

Check for unreviewed sites in your category, and add the sites which are applicable for the category and delete the remaining sites which are not applicable. Title and the Description that have been used are appropriate for the Open Directory. If they are not, edit them so that they meet the Open Directory guidelines. After some active editing in the present category, apply for the editor of the category which is applicable for your site.

If you feel that a particular site that is listed in the category does not belong to the category, post a message in the Editor Forum and ask the other editors of the Open Directory as to whether the site belongs to the category. If they say that the site does not belong to the category, delete it.

When you apply to become an editor of the desired category, the Open Directory will evaluate the quality of your editing in the category which you already edit, and will see whether your editing meets all the guidelines.

Once you have gone through all the sites in the desired category, scroll down to the bottom of the category and click on the "edit" link. When you are asked to explain why you want to apply to the category, mention the number of unreviewed sites which are present in the category. Also, mention the fact that the Title and the Description for some of the sites are inappropriate for the Open Directory. Give few examples of such sites. If that category does not already have an editor, mention that fact too.

Once you have become an editor of your site's category, submit it with right Title and Description obeying the Directory guidelines. Review it and add it to the category. Don't give the site any special importance, as it draws attention of higher level editors.

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Submitting your site to Yahoo!

Help Index at http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/url
Familiarize yourself with these instructions because they mean every word of what they say.

If your site is of a commercial nature (i.e. it is selling something), you need to mention the physical address of your business either in the home page of your site or in a separate Contact Us page which is linked prominently from the home page. Along with the physical address, you should also mention a phone number, email address and a fax number (Optional).

Type in the domain name of your site in Yahoo!'s search box, and see whether your site comes up in the Web Sites section. Note that for your site to be listed in Yahoo!, it has to come up in the Web Sites section. If it is listed in the Web Pages section but not in the Web Sites section, it means that your site is listed in Google, not Yahoo!.

Click Popularity : Develop an excellent website with great content which satisfies your visitor's needs so that they stay longer in your site and an attractive description of your site.

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See the world's top 500 sites

[shivaprem]

superb information.

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Search Engine Positioning techniques

1. Choose right keywords, that bring in targeted traffic to your site.

2. To get a high ranking for those keywords in the Meta Keywords tag, you need to put the keywords in the actual body content of your site.

3. Avoid repeating the same keyword too many times in the Body tag and in their Meta Keywords tags of the site.

4. Create one page which is optimized for one keyword for all the search engines.

5. For improving your rankings, you need to replace the graphics by keyword rich text for the search engine spiders.

6. Use the NOFRAMES tag in case your site uses frames. Add a lot of keyword rich text to the NOFRAMES tag.

7. People generally use page cloaking for two reasons - i) in order to hide the source code of their search engine optimized pages from their competitors and ii) in order to prevent human visitors from having to see a page which looks good to the search engines but does not necessarily look good to humans. Never use Page cloaking in your site.

8. Avoid automatic Submission Tools for submitting your site to search engines. Do it manually. Avoid submitting too many pages per day to search engines. Submit one page per day.

9. Avoid devoting too much time to search engine positioning. Spend some time every day for this.

10. Hidden text is text with the same color as the background color of your page. Suppose you have a page with a white background and a table in that page with a black background. Further suppose that you have added some white text in that table. This text will, in fact, be visible to your human visitors, i.e. this shouldn't be called hidden text. However, the search engines can interpret this to be hidden text because they may often ignore the fact that the background of the table is black. Hence, in order to ensure that your site is not penalized because of this, you should go through all the pages in your site and see whether you have inadvertently made any such mistake.

11. If the URL of a page does include a ? mark, many search engines will ignore the URL.

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Search Engine Ranking Terms

Alt Tag : The alternative text that the browser displays when the surfer does not want to or cannot see the pictures present in a web page. Using alt tags containing keywords can improve the search engine ranking of the page for those keywords.

Directory : A site containing links to other sites which are organized into various categories. Examples of directories are Yahoo!, Open Directory, LookSmart, NBCi etc.

JavaScript : A scripting language commonly used in web pages. Most search engines are unable to index these scripts properly. Move Javascript code to a separate file, or the end of the HTML document after your closing BODY or HTML tag.

Keyword : A word or phrase that you type in when you are searching for information in the search engines.

Link Popularity : The number of sites which link to a particular site. Many search engines use link popularity as a factor in determining the search engine ranking of a web site.

Search Engine : A software that searches for information and returns sites which provide that information.

Search Engine Placement : The practice of trying to ensure that a web site obtains a high rank in the search engines. Also called search engine positioning, search engine optimization etc.

In order to see how your site looks under different browsers, go to http://www.anybrowser.com/siteviewer.html

[spoons]

Very interesting thread and I assume that it all refers to web pages rather than forums?

We have trouble with our forum - I am not allowed to mention it because I have not completed the 5 posts and 5 days rule. We think that searching for 'scottish war memorials' should put it at number one because it is certainly the largest source of posts, information and photos on the subject. Alta vista and yahoo both have it reasonably well up the listings but google has us on page 15 last time I looked! Web pages that link to us are considerably higher up the list so my question is this. I suspect that google puts forums significantly lower than web pages (we certainly have more than a hundred links to our forum), can anyone confirm that google gives proportionately lower listings to forums? If so, is there anything we can do about it?

\Spoons

[solutric]

Great tips, i will use this tips to promote my website.

Thanks for the tips...!!