The Techno Times

To bring traffic to your website you may spend lot of money on online advertising and offline advertising but the amount of traffic which search engines can send to you is not comparable to any online or offline campaign. Search Engines such as google, yahoo and msn are getting better and more reliable for users to make searches and land on the pages or information which they have been looking for.

Understand that search engines are very powerful, As a webmaster, web designer or owner of the website you should look into search engine optimization as a key to get plenty of free traffic to your site. So how does one make it possible? You can make it possible if you can understand how the search engine works and how does it rank web pages in the search results.

A search engine is another of those regular visitors to your site, but this visitor inspects your site on many grounds and ranks them accordingly, hence making pages which are search engine friendly makes more sense.

How do I make my site search engine friendly?

Making a site search engine friendly is an on going process and you have to predict the behavior of the search engine with every web page you create. Following are few pointers which should help you to rank better in search engines like google and yahoo.

• Text Rich Pages: One should look into creating pages which are text rich as search engines read “text only”. The same will help the search engine to know what exactly the page is about. For Example an article on “Dog Food”
• Limited Images: Limit the use of images as search engines cannot read/see images, avoid use of images in menus and links, and use text instead. This helps the search engine to know what the link is about.
• Friendly URL: Skeptical but it has been found that search engine do not follow urls with character breaks such are ?, &, =. This is because these are used to start a session for a user and search engines ignore those. So if you site design is something like index.php?id=10&sid=20 then you should look into using mod-rewrite and change the url to something more readable <site>.com/category/magic/bricks.html
• Internal Linking: Do link your pages internally on the website, the pages which have better internal linking rank better in the search results as more weight is given to these pages.
• External Linking: “Links from other sites” - External Linking helps to gain better search ranking as these pages let the search engine know that your page is of quality. The keyword which has been used in the “External Link” plays a vital role in the search results.
• Page Title: Put your key words and phrases in the page title and remove repeating keywords. Page titling is an essential aspect of search engine optimization. So instead of having a page title as page1, untitled, first page or something else, you can make it more meaningful and readable. For Eg: “Buy Rolex Watches”
• Keep it simple: Keep the site layout simple and neat, avoid nested tables and develop quality content for users.