A basic search engine optimization tutorial

[1) robots.txt]

1) robots.txt

Create a file named robots.txt in the document root of your site (eg. http://site.com/robots.txt ) You can create this file with notepad, and the only thing that you should put there is this line :

Code:

User-agent: *

More about this you can find here


2) keywords

Put keyword phrases in your content, and mark them with the <strong> tag

Code:

<strong>keyword phrase</strong>

3) Meta tags

There is a plenty of meta tags that you can use with your site, but the most common, and the most used by the search engines are the robots and the description meta tags. The robots meta tag indicates the rules for the spiders, just like robots.txt does.
The description indicates the description for the web page, and Google will show it when the page will show up on its results page. Use different descriptions for each page. Another common meta tag is the keywords meta tag, which I am not going to explain as it has no use in these days.

Here is an example:

Code:

<META NAME="Description" content="This is the description of this page">
<META NAME="robots" content="all,index, follow">

4) Domain name

The domain name of a website is a very good keyword to the search engines. So if your company is called Star and you are selling fish use a domain like starfish.com
Even the name of the html pages are keywords for the search engines so you can add there some keywords that indicates your site's theme eg. contact+fish+star.html


5) Link Poppularity

This is the best search engine optimization factor. Because links are like votes to a site, search engines give a big boost to sites that have lots of them. So you may find webmasters that have a site with relative topic to yours, and ask them to trade links. There is something that you may watch here. Google is not counting reciprocal links, so a better way is the three way linking. That means that you link to the site A that links to the site B that links to your site. There are also some automated link managers, but I do not trust them and I have never had any good experience with them so I would not reccomend any of them.

6) Number of pages in the site

This is a very very serious thing. Because as every SEO pro sais content is a king and as many as your pages are so the search engine traffic increases. But do not use mirror pages or pages with very simillar content, because they will not be indexed by the search engines and you can even get banned from them.

7) Header tags

Allways use 1-2 header tags. One H1 and one H2 will be best, but don't use the same content inside them

That's all for now. I will add more stuff here when I can, and I am waiting for your comments.

Some great tips there! didnt know that the <strong> tag contributed Thanks Nikolas!

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You are welcome my friend

Is there a limit to how many meta tags you should use? Ive never really worked out what number is a good number?

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Is there a limit to how many meta tags you should use? Ive never really worked out what number is a good number?

You can use as many meta tags as you want. There is no way that this could harm your rankings, but the most search engines will ignore the most of them. If you want to load your site with many meta tags try the metas of my site, it can propably help you.

I remembered reading somewhere that spiders from some search engines will actually ignore the commands robots.txt file, and access files or directories that you have specified to be left out. Is this true?

I remembered reading somewhere that spiders from some search engines will actually ignore the commands robots.txt file, and access files or directories that you have specified to be left out. Is this true?

I don't think that this is true, at least for the major search engines

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