SEO

There are a few issues that can affect your relevance and therefore, your results in the SERPs . Clean design practices and great content will only take your site so far. Search Engine’s look at various factors such as content, popularity and history. What all these factors mean is that your site needs to be knowledgeable about its content; be known for it and has to have been around long enough to inspire confidence. Besides getting these 3 factors right, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) comes into play to make sure you’re not misrepresenting yourself to search engines. This basically means you need to make sure search engines can find all your pages and that, from an html point of view, you’re presenting your self the same way you’re presenting your self visually to a visitor.
Content you have to create your self. This is one of the more important aspects of your website and probably the hardest to accomplish. There is talent to creating good content and, sometimes, outside help is required for an effective one. You can make a decision on either to write it yourself or acquire the help of a professional, and that’s wholly dependent on your industry or niche market. One idea you’ll need to understand right away is that content is a lot more than just words.

Popularity is measured through links. Often you’ll hear that links come automatically if you put great content on your site, but don’t be fooled by that. It takes marketing to increase popularity. Content on its own doesn’t guarantee you anything. You can’t market a bad thing, so good content is more a requirement than the solution.

History is something that Search Engines are using a lot for various reasons, but just think about it like a potential customer looks at your company. The longer you exist, the trustworthier your business is, the more stable your business is, the trustworthier you are, etc. History is something that comes with time; you can’t make your history be more than it is. All you can make sure of is that your history is good.Aside from those very important factors there are a few things you can do to improve the “search-ability” of your site by the spider bots.1. Use Sitemaps (or equivalent file for the different major Search Engines) and make sure that there is a link on the home page.2. Place a robots.txt file on your site.3. Make sure that all design files (CSS stylesheets, JavaScripts, etc.) are not embedded at the top of the page but use external files instead. Test your site to see what spiders see and judge how accessible your site is.4. Your title, description, Meta tags and keywords are kept within the guidelines of the major Search Engines.5. Customize each page on your site with targeted title, description and keywords for every page.6. Use relevant design aspects such as headings, bolded text, hot links, etc. within page content.Add a Sitemap.
Why? It’s the easiest and fastest way to ensure that the SE’s are aware of ALL of the pages of a site in their indexes. Resubmit whenever new adds or delete pages or content. This tells the SE’s that site is updating with fresh content.
How to Submit Your Site Map to Google, Yahoo! and MSN

Google’s Robots.txt FAQ.
How do I use a robots.txt file to control access to my site?

Why use external JavaScripts?
HTML Tip: Reduce The Size Of Your HEADRead Like A Spider
Look at how your page displays in a text browser. The Delorie.com Web site offers a free online Lynx simulator that shows you how your page will display in one version of Lynx. You can immediately tell if the spider has to wade through a lot of navigation information, ad links, and other information before it ever gets to the real page content. Look at the simulation, then consider reading it aloud. That gives you an idea of how your Web page might sound to someone using a screen reader. It’s one quick way to check the overall accessibility of your page.

Write a great Meta description.
Pay attention to the character limit as specified by the three major search engines. Keep your most targeted keywords and phrases at the beginning of the description. When it comes to Meta descriptions, most often, less is more. The shorter it is, the more focused and targeted it’ll be.
SEOmoz | Making the Most of Meta Description Tags

Use unique titles and descriptions in every page.
This will allow focusing and targeting each and every product and category. It’s key in optimizing for find-ability.

Reverse-engineer the search process.
Think about it like a person looking for strawberry flavored cotton candy. What are they going to type in to find what they want? “cotton”, “cotton candy”, “sweet confections” or “pink cotton candy”. In terms of relevance to the most likely search phrase, a great page title would be “strawberry cotton candy” and there’s your page title.
Look at your description in the same way. Give them what they want to know before they click.Headings and other on-page factors.
These are all simple things you can use to make a significant impact on how well you rank. You’ll need to optimize them for each page.
In product pages, the <h1> heading should be the name of the product, or the manufacturer’s make, model or part number, if that’s how it’s most likely to be found in a web search query. Category pages can simply use the category name itself. Again, focus is key.Last but not least, always remember to design your site with the human factor in mind! The benefits of a good rank or top position will mean nothing if you loose that potential customer due to poor design or cumbersome navigation. Your customers will thank you for it!

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Improve your site’s relevance and results with Search Engines

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