Monday, October 26, 2009

Tips to make websites search engine friendly

By Rajesh Dhawan

Have you ever considered if your website is in the good books of search engines and it is in the exact framework as the search engines expect it to be?

So, you got a new site designed and launched. Now is the time to see if the site looks good from search engines' viewpoint. We are talking about the major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing.Without appropriate listing on these search engines, you are missing boat loads of organic search engine traffic.

A few of you may outsource to search engine companies to work on your SEO campaign. This may be logical given the fact that you do not have any professional acumen of SEO. However, a common sense approach will help you get more out of your site on search engines. The 5 steps given below are more of the common sense tips that can be followed to make your website look friendly to the search engines.

1. Ensure that your page title has the keywords that you are targeting. Most times you will see that the title of your web pages is set to 'Welcome' or 'Site Name' where the site name corresponds to your domain name. This should be the first thing that a business website owner needs to have fixed. And the best time to do so is when your designer is doing finishing of your website and can integrate the keywords on title.

Keep the title length below 65-70 characters and avoid a tendency to spam the search engines by adding as many keywords as you can think of. I will normally keep the title length under 70 and not add more than 3 keywords in the title tag. This gives maximum benefit out of the title tag.

3. Ensure that you have a good description of the page that is added in the Meta Tag Description. I would normally insert a couple of keywords in the description and coin my sentence around those keywords. Remember to ensure that description needs to be under 160 characters for complete impact. Anything above 160 is ignored.

You must signup to the Google Webmaster Tools because they allow your site to be validated. More than anything else, this will increase credibility of your website and you can track your positions and backlinks from within the Google Webmaster tools.

Next is the sitemap creation. Your website needs to have an XML sitemap created. Once the sitemap has been done on your site, you must allow the Google Webmaster Tool to visit this sitemap because a sitemap allows your content to be presented in an organized way and will allow easy indexation of site.

In summary, a small amount of time that you spend in organizing your website and making it friendly to the major search engines will go a long way to stable organic rankings.

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