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Web design, Programming, Development and SEO

Search Engine Optimization Tips – Google Webmaster Tools & Sitemaps

Friday, January 28th, 2011

In today’s age, users do not have the time or the patience to go through thousands of search results. More than 90% of Internet users do not browse beyond the top 15 sites. In such a scenario, visibility and search engine optimization are crucial if you want to pull in maximum visitor traffic to your site. In such a case, Google’s Webmaster tools help you do just that and much more!

Google provides one of the best Webmaster tools available online. These tools offer a free and an easy way to make your site more Google-friendly and search engine optimized. “Google Webmaster tools” have great scope to help you in efficiently handling all aspects of website management and making your site search engine friendly. To take an example, keyword suggestion tool helps you in identifying keywords relevant to your business. Another tool like site analytics software helps you track online visitors to your site. This tool can provide information about the channel through which these visitors find you, if they are turning into customers and also give data on prospective leads on your site.

Broadly, these tools provide updated information about any problems on your web pages; the number of pages contained in your index and a detailed compilation of every page on the Internet that links to your pages. Using this tool, you can identify the reason why your pages rank high or low for search words and phrases. Optimal use of Webmaster tools is the only way you can achieve



search engine optimization

and a sure shot technique to stay way ahead of competition.

Another valuable tool is Sitemaps. A Sitemap is a list of pages on your website. By creating and submitting a Sitemap, you provide Google information about your site, including URLs which Google’s normal crawling process may not be able to discover. The Sitemap tells Google about the important pages of your website and how often you change them. This tool helps Google crawl your pages smarter and enables you to see what is going on the minds of Google searchers. To take an example, you can see what queries and keywords people use when they find your site. You will know whether people find you for the keywords you have been targeting or not. This way you can optimize your content.

Google Sitemaps is a simple way in which you can enhance your coverage in the Google index. It’s a collaborative crawling system that allows you to communicate directly with Google. The Sitemaps protocol allows a web master to inform search engines about URLs on a website that are available for crawling. By submitting sitemaps to a search engine, a web master is assisting that engine’s crawlers to crawl more intelligently and do a better job. Having a Google Sitemap would let the biggest search engines have latest and up-to-date information. To build your sitemap online in four easy steps, check the link http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/.

Google Webmaster Tools and Sitemaps are an excellent way to take better control of your website management. You would no longer be passively submitting your site; but would also monitor and edit it. As explained earlier, with the help of these advanced tools, you can improve online traffic to your site, enhance your site’s functionality and grow your business opportunities.

Search Engine Optimization Rules – Discover The Most Vital Search Engine Optimization Rules

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009

Search engine optimization is such a huge subject it is difficult to distil it down to a few rules, but there are certainly some key factors which are simply essential, and without which none of the rest matters very much.  The following search engine optimization rules are almost a step by step guide to follow while you create your website.  It is important to have an understanding of these rules before you build your site, or you may well end up having to re-do much of it later.  Websites created without reference to these rules are likely to receive little or no visitors and websites without visitors are websites that generate no income.

Get Your Meta-Tags Right

Meta-tags are the unseen but vital pieces of text in the ‘head’ section of each of your web pages.  The title tag is by far the most important, and you have to put your primary keyword at the beginning of your title tag.  Repeat it again at the end or include a second keyword, but don’t stuff it.  The title tag is the wording which appears as the main heading in the list of search results when you do a search on Google or other search engine.  It tells the search engines and potential visitors what your site is about.

The description meta-tag is less vital than the title, but it is still important to get it right.  It is the brief description of your site that visitors will see beneath the title in search results, so repeat your keyword and write something that will encourage viewers to click on your site.

Content Is King

This means that there are no substitutes for a good quality website which offers useful information.  Search engines are looking for useful and interesting sites with original content, so rather than put your energies into trying to fiddle a shortcut to that, just give them what they want in the first place.  This is the only way to be sure you will be ranked well and continue to be ranked well in the long term.

Choose The Right Keywords

This is so important.  Your keywords will be used on your web pages and will tell the search engines what your pages are about.  If you choose keywords that no-one is searching for, you will get no visitors.  If you choose keywords that people are searching for, but which millions of other well established sites are also using, again you will get no visitors.

You can’t identify the best keywords by guessing, you need to use a tool that will tell you not just how many sites are competing for those words, but also how many searches are being done for those words.  The best tools will help generate lots of keywords that you could not have thought of yourself, and refine and organise your keywords to give you the terms likely to bring the highest volume of targeted traffic to your site.

Build Links To Your Website

One of the main criteria search engines use to judge a site’s importance is the number and quality of other sites which are linking to it.  This measure of importance is used to decide where your site will be shown in the search results.  The way Google works is to look for all the sites which are relevant to the term being searched for, and then present them to the viewer in order of importance.  So being seen as important is crucial in showing up high enough in the results to be found by potential visitors.

There are various ways to get inbound links to your site.  One of the most common ways to get links to your site is to exchange links with other websites.  Search engines seem to value more highly links from sites which have content closely related in subject to your own.  For that reason, the best sites to exchange with are those with the same kind of theme as yours.

For people in business this can sometimes throw up the problem of not wanting to deal with sites seen as direct competitors, but it should still be possible to find sites which are related to the general subject area without being in competition.  The best way to approach this is to add a link to the site you wish to exchange links with, then contact the webmaster to say you have linked and ask if they would be willing to link back.

Work at following these main search engine optimization rules and you will go a long way towards developing a site that will rank high enough in search results to be found by lots of visitors.