How do I Optimize my Website for Search Engine?

SEO, an abbreviation for Search Engine Optimization, is the practice of tweaking a website so that search engines will be able to better index and crawl through the website. There are numerous ways to optimize a website for the various search engines.

Research keywords that people would type to search for a site like yours

A small portion of search engine optimizing is researching the correct and effective keywords. Usually the longer search terms do better than the very general ones. For example, "news" will not be as effective as the "Beijing 2008 Olympics news and medal updates".

Create an informative, keyword-rich How do I optimize my website for search engines? and DESCRIPTION tag

One of the biggest factors that play with search engine optimization is the title tag. This is a big factor that the search engines see when indexing a site. Therefore, a site called "John Smith's Home Page" will not rank as well as "New Gadget Reviews and Gadget News Blog by John Smith". In the case of a search engine, when a user looks up the keyword "gadget reviews" there is an immensely higher possibility that the latter will come up way higher than the former. Titles should also be short and be less than 60 characters (including spaces). Also, create an informative description of your page using the description tag. Note that this description should also contain a few of the search terms you researched about.

Put those keywords ON your page

Although the How do I optimize my website for search engines? tag plays a big role, the search terms on the page plays a big role too. Almost all the time, a page that is keyword rich gets a great ranking with the search engines. Note though that you shouldn't overdo this. Search engines will get a general idea once you input a couple of related keywords. Overdoing might have a detrimental effect on your website.

Use technology that the majority of the search engines can crawl through

Some people will put a lot of funky features on their websites. This includes various CGI scripts, numerous frames, and even more dynamically created pages. Unfortunately, while the viewer may enjoy it, search engines do not like this as they don't know how to crawl through it. So if you had a site with a lot of frames, search engines will have an extremely difficult time crawling through your website. Although your page may be indexed, the spider may not be able to crawl through the various links within the frames.

Get related sites to link back to you

Search engines also place a lot of importance on "linkbacks". In the case of Google, backlinking is a big portion of a site's ranking on a search engine. However, note that the sites linking to your site should be sites that are relevant to yours. Probably a movie site might not benefit so much from a gardening website. Also, your links should not increase at such a rapid pace that the search engines might suspect you of conducting a wrong act. Legitimacy is a big thing with search engines.

Update your website

Search engines tend to like active and well updated websites. An idle website from 1999 might be aged, but it certainly won't get a good ranking on a search engine if it was last updated in 1999. Search engines are always looking for new information to index. Usually, web logs (blogs) are very successful with search engines because content can be built quite easily.

Use a sitemap or an index

Search engines love to see a sitemap because it allows them to navigate through the webpage very easily. A sitemap can be created with various free tools on the Internet. For example, with WordPress, there are a couple automatic sitemap creating plugins that will automatically update your sitemap every time the blog is updated.

Use the freely available webmaster tools

There are numerous webmaster tools that can also help you analyze your stats a bit better. This includes backlink trackers and keyword research tools. Using them to your utmost ability will help you find newer ways to optimize your website for the search engines.

Conclusion

There are hundreds of tools and techniques to optimize your website for search engines. Visiting information SEO blogs and various SEO related websites can also help. Consulting with SEO experts and visiting the numerous SEO forums can also help you learn new tips and stay up to date with the latest news in the SEO world. This is critical as while optimization is good (white hat SEO), search engines can change their policies, which could make one of your formerly legitimate tricks to now be considered as abusing (black hat SEO) the spiders.