SEO Tip

Hi,

For a change I won't be submitting any source code in this post :), rather discuss a very favorite topic of mine, SEO. Search engine optimization is a very vast and a mystical thing. No one can teach you SEO, you need to find your own strategies. But there are always few basic basics, which I will be highlighting in this POST.
(All the points are in reference to Google search engine)

First why we need SEO?
Search engine optimization simply means building a website which can be found by various search engine, such that your website name shows up when a search is performed. If your website shows up in search results then your chances of bringing viewers to your site increases. Its a way to increase traffic to your site. And as we all know traffic is all we need for a websites success ;)

How do we put our website in search engines database?
Well this might not be such a difficult question to answer. Few basic steps you may take are:

1. Submit your URL to Google through http://www.google.co.in/addurl.html
2. Sitemaps:

Create a webmaster account for your website. For this you need to have a Gmail account. Login to that account and go to https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ and add your website. But the job is not done yet, now you need to create sitemap xml files for the various pages in your website, upload it to your server and submit the URL for that file in the webmaster tools. After you have done that, Google will start scanning those URL's and index them.

Check out my earlier post for creating sitemaps or you can also refer to sitemaps.org for the format of the sitemap XML's.
You can also create the sitemaps for your website, using www.xml-sitemaps.com
3. Creating Facebook page, wiki page, aboutus.org page etc of your site. These websites have an excellent indexing in search engine, making a profile in those website may also boost your traffic

4. You can participate in various blogs or forums which have similar content to that of your website, and share your website URL/s among the community users. This will help in indexing as well as bring traffic from external sites to your websites.

Apart from the above you can have you can also take strategic approach for indexing your webpages. Search engines like Google send spiders to crawl pages in the web. Your website might also get such a visit. In such case you can always keep your homework done before your web page is crawled. Generally the spider crawls only the home page of your website and pages which have links in the home page.

Now what you can do is to create a special file, popularly known as sitemaps, which will contain a list of literally all the URL's in your website, which may be static or dynamic, listed in one single file. This page is just meant to create a list of all the URL's in your website. Now put a link to that page in your home page of the website. May be at the footer or header, wherever you prefer. Now when your home page is crawled, the sitemap link will get scanned and the links inside the sitemap page.

We know that sitemap page contains all the URL's in the website, so all those URL's will be read by the spider, and thus get indexed in the search engine in due course of time. Now indexing page is just half job done, now you need to make sure that the pages show up when the user is searching something. This is when page rank come into play.

That's all for now folks, stay tuned for my post related to page ranks and how to improve it.