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You make a website, you write valuable information, you try to sell innovative products, the few friends you forced to visit your site love it, but you are still stuck wondering why no one is visiting your website.
Over 90% of the traffic one would get to their website is through search engines. So if you are selling caps, don’t expect people to randomly guess your 'cap' website and buy from you. More often than not, they would search for terms like 'buy caps' 'caps' and would go to the websites listed as results for these terms. Now do you understand the importance of ranking high for your keywords (in this case 'cap' or 'buy caps'). good. Lets move on.All search engines use what they call robots or crawlers to get information from your website. The information varies and how they rank is a closely guarded secrets. What’s not a secret is that, they visit your website, see the keywords, see the various links, calculate the relevance. Navigate your entire website and leave. Now if its not your first priority, then it should be, its that search engine robots should be treated like kings at your house. Do whatever it takes to please them. So follow a few simple tricks to make a crawler feel like a king. Inline frames is quite often a strict no-no. Its annoying for a user to navigate or store the link, its more annoying for a search engine robot. And what does an annoyed guest do at your house? He gets up and leaves right? That’s exactly what the robots will do if they get bugged, they leave and don’t index your entire website. So avoid using frames. If you have to, read that as HAVE to use a frame then mention all the frame urls etc in a well defined sitemap and link it from the home page. This might not mean the robots aren’t bugged, it just means you have offered them ice cream if they stay in your house a little longer. Ice Cream always helps. You have seen all those capcha images while opening accounts right? You know that is to distinguish a human from a machine/bot. Well thats where this next point comes in. Search engine technology of the current day is not sophisticated enough to scan images for text. Precisely for that reason, avoid any important information on images/flash etc. Imagine this, you make a webpage with the header Ice Cream Recipe. You have an image of a huge ice cream in which the world’s best ice cream recipe is mentioned. People would have killed for that recipe. You wonder why people can’t come to your website? Its cause all a search engine would see is the text 'ice cream recipe' with an image. And since there is no 'valuable[readable]' content, you would be lucky if the website gets indexed. So keep important things out of images or flash objects. On the contrary. Would you want your email id to get harvested by these crawlers? No right? So put them in an image so that only a human reader can see it. Wouldn't you love to give a hint to the robot/crawler what the page is all about? That’s where the meta-tags come into play. Use clearly defined meta tags. So that the search engine robots would know what exactly there is in the page and since you are making their job easier, they might want to come back to check up on you soon. For an example, imagine you are making the world famous ice cream recipe site, giving the header 'ice cream recipe' and writing the recipe might be all you need to do in your opinion right? Wrong! how would the crawler know your recipe is world famous if you dont tell it that it is. Use meta tags like ice cream recipe world famous recipes rare recipes etc to help the clueless crawler. If you are hiring someone based on their resume and they misspell many words, would you hire them? Same way, don’t use wrong html tags as they tend to get wrong more often than not. Rely on Cascading style sheets, which are easy to use and faster to load. Plus you help reduce lot of redundant work on your website.
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