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SEO and How to Tame It

By Amrit Hallan

SEO means Search Engine Optimization. Well, it doesn't mean you optimize the search engines -- it means you optimize your web pages in such a manner that the search engine robots find them the right candidates first, to crawl properly, and then, allot them a ranking as high as they deserve. "Deserve" is the keyword here.

Many people (and even the so-called professional search-engine optimizers) think that having the right keyword-density does the trick. So, many a time my clients demand: there should be 5-6% density of keywords in the content. This means that if there are 100 words on a page, 5-6 of them should be the keyword. For instance if I need to write optimized content for "blue jeans", the phrase "blue jeans" should appear 4-5 times on the page.

Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. I never refuse such work because I find it challenging. Although many of my clients don't realize it, I repeat the keywords in such a manner that they not at all seem like repetitions -- they seem like the natural part of the overall content and their repetition seems necessary to make sense. There is no sense in having an "optimized" page if your readers find it nonsensical. The trick is, to make both search engines and humans happy. How do you do that?

Like I mentioned above, your website should be search engine robot friendly. The robots should be able to traverse through the entire length and breath of your website without facing hurdles. There should be no broken tags and there should be no broken links. All the pages of your website should be inter-related, like a tree structure: there is one mane page and from then onwards begin various links. Let us go through some points that make your website an optimized website:

NO BROKEN LINKS

Broken links are like the dead ends. Suppose your website has more than 60 pages of outstanding content and the search engines would love to give you a high ranking but just after the third page, the robots encounter a broken link. A broken links means that link is there on the page, but there is no page the link links to. The robots immediately abandon that path. What a tragedy! Just one broken link and your entire website misses the ranking.

VALIDATED XHTML

I must confess here at the outset that my own website displays errors when I run it through the XHTML validator (you can use the validator at http://validator.w3.org) but there seems to be some problem with the WordPress (http://www.wordpress.org) software that I'm currently using. Although it is not possible to remove all the errors, you should encounter minimum errors when you run your website through the validator. Less errors ensures a smooth course for the search engine robot through the source code of your website.

ALL TAGS PRESENT

All the important tags such "description", "title", "keywords", etc. should be present. Your title and description usually show up in the search results that indicates that search engines use them to an extent to rank your website. Use ALT tags with all the images you use. They not only make your website more accessible, they also help you use your keywords and key phrases.

RELEVANT CONTENT

The content on your website should be relevant to what you are trying to promote. All search engines try to present relevant content to their searchers. If the search engine robots think that your content would be useful to the searcher, they display the page at a higher ranking. Suppose your website promotes Internet marketing tools. Then it should have lots of content focused around Internet marketing. Similarly if you design websites, it can immensely help you gain a good ranking if you have unique and relevant content regarding web designing and development.

UPDATED CONTENT

You should constantly update the content on your website. When you update your content regularly it tells the search engines that something is constantly happening at your website and it is an active website.

LINKS CARRYING KEYWORDS

Links that contain keywords relevant to your website can also help you optimize your website. The text within the links also helps your visitors as it tells them exactly where they are going to land once they click the link.

Actually there is no limit to what all you can do to optimize your website, but these are the main points.

Copyright © 2008 Amrit Hallan
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