Basics of Search Engines Optimization

Search Engine Optimization refers to the process of improving the volume of traffic to a website coming from search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, MSN or AOL. Google dominates the search engine industry, more than 72% as of Fall of 2008. If your site is past the 3rd or 4th page of a Google search of one of your keywords, chances are, no one is going to find your site through Google.

This is a basic tutorial of what SEO consists of…

Website Layout
When you start to create your website, make sure some necessary hooks and nooks are included. Make your pages so people can easily find what they are looking for. Always make pages for humans, not search engines. All of your website pages should be within 3 clicks from your homepage. Search engines can have a hard time indexing deep pages. Make sure your links are all valid. It is possible to lower your ranking if your site has too many broken links.

Content
Reduce the number of images as much as you can. Search engines cannot read text in an image or in a Java or Flash application. Use original content. Search engines will punish or even ban your website for using duplicate content found somewhere else on the web.

Meta Tags and Keywords
Meta Tags are information inserted into the "head" area of your web pages. Read more about Keywords and Meta Tags.

Back-linking
Back-links will increase traffic to your website. They are also said to be the only factor for the Google PageRank bar that ranks your site from 1 to 10. Just having back-links to your website is not enough, it is the quality of them.

Sitemaps
There are two types of sitemaps. One for humans and another for search engines. Make sure you have them both. Using your favorite search engine, search for XML type of sitemaps that are created with XML extension. Just place it in the root directory of your website. Click on Sitemap on the horizontal menu above and see how a sitemap for humans is generated.

Search Engine Submissions
You can submit your sitemap with XML extension just only once. A search engine will find your website by itself using its crawlers. Initially, you can submit to some major search engines.

The older your website, the better
Google likes aged domains. Google hates spam and the older a domain, the less chance of it being website that would spam the search engine. It takes time to get a higher page rank. So don't get frustrated and just hang in there. Keep improving your website and learn more and more about the SEO topic.