Articles: Impressing Search Engines |
Impressing search engines is a difficult
task. You put all your efforts to get
a high rank, repeat submissions, use Meta
Keywords, submit all the pages to the
search engine but still your site is not
there or it is not at a position you have
thought of. By this time you start thinking
where have you gone wrong. To be very
sure that your site gets a good position
from various search engines, you go for
certain things which instead disturbs
engine and affect ranking adversely therefore,
instead of telling you all those great
things to do, here are few tips about
things you SHOULD NOT do.
- Spam: Your site will be penalized
if you attempt to "Spam"
the engines in order to improve its
position. One common technique is
"stacking" or "stuffing"
words on a page. This is where a word
is repeated many times in a row. If
the search engines spot a spamming
technique, they may downgrade page's
ranking or may exclude it from listings
altogether.
- Repeat Submission: The search
engines do not like repeated submission
of pages so it won't help in better
ranking of page rather it may affect
ranking adversely. Also, don't submit
each and every page but look for submitting
alternative pages so that if search
engine has trouble reaching one of
the pages, you have covered yourself
by giving it another page from where
it can begin crawling your site. It
may take a month or two months for
your "non-submitted" pages
to appear in a search engine (depends
on the search engines method of crawling),
so have patience.
- Over populating your Meta keywords:
Don't have list of words that could
make up a dictionary stuffed into
your Meta keyword tag. Doing this
dilutes the strength of the really
important words and you won't rank
well for anything. If you need to
rank well for many keywords, optimize
a few different pages. Keep the number
of Meta keywords down to around 6
words or so. Do keep in mind that
they are NOT a guarantee that your
sites will appear. Adding some Meta
tag code is not a magic bullet that
cures your site of dismal rankings.
- Tiny Text: Have you ever wondered
about some crazy little writing on
some sites? The search engines are
aware of this "little" game,
and now if your font size is less
then 2 in your html, you will have
problems ranking with the engines.
Keep the text readable or don't put
it there at all.
- Same color text and background:
You make the text the same color as
the background so that no one can
read it. It may have worked years
ago
but not now. Many search
engines either refuse to index this
text or will not index any page containing
invisible text. Try using high contrast
colors to ensure you are not penalized.
- Frames: Some search engines
spider will not go into your frames,
no clues for why they don't, therefore,
there must be a noframes page that
gets shown if the person showing up
at your site doesn't have a frames
enabled browser; the spider will look
here. So have a link of every page
on your site in the noframes section.
- 100% CGI/Database Driven sites:
The search engines are smart, but
not smart to follow CGI/Database that
have "?" marks in them to
delineate the script name and the
parameters. If every link on your
home page is a CGI/database call,
the spider will not follow them to
plumb the depths of your site. Consider
developing some static pages so that
search engine can crawl them.
- Submitting too many pages:
There is absolutely no need to submit
every page on your site to an engine.
In fact they don't like it and your
site ranking may suffer for this.
They have built spiders and robots
to do this so that you don't have
to do it manually. Submit your home
URL and only pages you think are key
pages (keep it below 5). If you have
a page that changes significantly,
resubmit it by hand because it will
get updated in the engines faster
than waiting for a spider to re-visit.
- 100% Flash Sites: Flash is
cool. You can do great things with
flash for presentation, but the search
engines aren't interested in watching
movies. They can't grab any of the
information they need out of the flash
movies to decide how to place your
site. So you must have a front page
or doorway pages that have all the
normal content for the search engine
to use.
- Meta Refresh Tag: Some programmers
like to create target pages that automatically
take visitors to different pages within
a web site. The Meta refresh tag "<meta
http-equiv="refresh" content="2;url=www.rajesh.com>"
is one typical way of doing this.
Preceding example will refresh the
page in 2 second. If you need to do
it make sure that the refresh is for
more than 15 seconds otherwise some
search engines will refuse to index
the pages.
- Irrelevant Content: Changing
your strategic keywords, page titles
and adding Meta tags will not have
any effect on search engines ranking
if they have nothing to do with the
page contents. If you use graphics
for page contents, they might look
pretty but you must keep in mind that
search engine cannot read them at
all.
These all things may avoid annoying the
search engine Gods so that your site gets
a good ranking.
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