Thread: Impressing Search Engines

I have found an article that will benefit everyone on here:

Synopsis:

To be very sure that your site gets a good position from various search engines, you go for certain things which instead disturbs engine and affect ranking adversely therefore, instead of telling you all those great things to do, here are few tips about things you SHOULD NOT do.

Impressing search engines is a difficult task. You put all your efforts to get a high rank, repeat submissions, use Meta Keywords, submit all the pages to the search engine but still your site is not there or it is not at a position you have thought of. By this time you start thinking where have you gone wrong. To be very sure that your site gets a good position from various search engines, you go for certain things which instead disturbs engine and affect ranking adversely therefore, instead of telling you all those great things to do, here are few tips about things you SHOULD NOT do.

Spam: Your site will be penalized if you attempt to ?Spam? the engines in order to improve its position. One common technique is ?stacking? or ?stuffing? words on a page. This is where a word is repeated many times in a row. If the search engines spot a spamming technique, they may downgrade page?s ranking or may exclude it from listings altogether.

Repeat Submission: The search engines do not like repeated submission of pages so it won?t help in better ranking of page rather it may affect ranking adversely. Also, don?t submit each and every page but look for submitting alternative pages so that if search engine has trouble reaching one of the pages, you have covered yourself by giving it another page from where it can begin crawling your site. It may take a month or two months for your ?non-submitted? pages to appear in a search engine (depends on the search engines method of crawling), so have patience.

Over populating your Meta keywords: Don?t have list of words that could make up a dictionary stuffed into your Meta keyword tag. Doing this dilutes the strength of the really important words and you won?t rank well for anything. If you need to rank well for many keywords, optimize a few different pages. Keep the number of Meta keywords down to around 6 words or so. Do keep in mind that they are NOT a guarantee that your sites will appear. Adding some Meta tag code is not a magic bullet that cures your site of dismal rankings.

Tiny Text: Have you ever wondered about some crazy little writing on some sites? The search engines are aware of this ?little? game, and now if your font size is less then 2 in your html, you will have problems ranking with the engines. Keep the text readable or don?t put it there at all.

Same color text and background: You make the text the same color as the background so that no one can read it. It may have worked years ago? but not now. Many search engines either refuse to index this text or will not index any page containing invisible text. Try using high contrast colors to ensure you are not penalized.

Frames: Some search engines spider will not go into your frames, no clues for why they don?t, therefore, there must be a noframes page that gets shown if the person showing up at your site doesn?t have a frames enabled browser; the spider will look here. So have a link of every page on your site in the noframes section.

100% CGI/Database Driven sites: The search engines are smart, but not smart to follow CGI/Database that have ??? marks in them to delineate the script name and the parameters. If every link on your home page is a CGI/database call, the spider will not follow them to plumb the depths of your site. Consider developing some static pages so that search engine can crawl them.

Submitting too many pages: There is absolutely no need to submit every page on your site to an engine. In fact they don?t like it and your site ranking may suffer for this. They have built spiders and robots to do this so that you don?t have to do it manually. Submit your home URL and only pages you think are key pages (keep it below 5). If you have a page that changes significantly, resubmit it by hand because it will get updated in the engines faster than waiting for a spider to re-visit.

100% Flash Sites: Flash is cool. You can do great things with flash for presentation, but the search engines aren?t interested in watching movies. They can?t grab any of the information they need out of the flash movies to decide how to place your site. So you must have a front page or doorway pages that have all the normal content for the search engine to use.

Meta Refresh Tag: Some programmers like to create target pages that automatically take visitors to different pages within a web site. The Meta refresh tag ?<meta http-equiv=?refresh? content=?2;url=www.rajesh.com>? is one typical way of doing this. Preceding example will refresh the page in 2 second. If you need to do it make sure that the refresh is for more than 15 seconds otherwise some search engines will refuse to index the pages.

Irrelevant Content: Changing your strategic keywords, page titles and adding Meta tags will not have any effect on search engines ranking if they have nothing to do with the page contents. If you use graphics for page contents, they might look pretty but you must keep in mind that search engine cannot read them at all.

These all things may avoid annoying the search engine Gods so that your site gets a good ranking.
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It's sort of my development server so it isn't on all the time but the address was an example...

visit it anyway, it might work lol.

One of the best things I did recently on my PayPerShop site was split larger pages into many pages.

In our news section we used to have one page for each category with the most recent entry at the top (blog style).

A few months ago, I adjusted the format and created a new page for each new item. I used forward and back buttons so you could still scroll from the most recent item to the oldest.

Our search engine traffic has steadily increased ever since. I guess this is something to do with the fact that each page is now tightly focussed on one topic. It also means I can ensure the TITLE and HEADER tags match the content closely.

I guess this also mimics the blog style as blogs create an individual page for each post as well as having a page with all the entries in.

Also had a positive impact on Adsense earnings.

A bit of serendipity usually helps as well.

We created a US-specific page with links to the government sites that discuss tax witholding laws. We have links for every state.

In less than six months it's gone from nowhere to being the most visited page on our website. Pretty impressive when you consider it is one page among 7000+

Short Version of Above: Content is king.

LOL - That's why I wrote the short version at the bottom.