2010–05–05 How–Could... Basic SEO Tips to Get You Started

SEO is all about making your website smile at Search Engines. Let us see few basic tips that could give you a great edge. Yes you could start saying, “You know my website receiving lot of hits, these days!!” Although these tips are not super techniques in expert’s point of view, still holds good for the starter.

We will discuss about

• Sitemap
• Keyword formatting
• Meta, Title tags
• Flash Content

Let us start with building up a site map. Yes the old web design way still holds good. Make the site map page in such a way it have links to all the web pages in your site. If you are stitching a really big website, then it is better to have important links alone as part of this page. Now we will look into the story behind. The smart spiders of search engine will feel happy to find the whole lot of links from one single page. After all it is ease of work for the spider and big relief for us as no page will be missed out.

Here is one of the technique that we started using from our school days still seems to do the magic. We used to underline keywords, write them in big letters in our answer sheet and teacher would concentrate on those words, feels like we know the subject and then shower marks. Search engines too get impressed for keywords with tags. So start tagging keywords of your pages with bold, underline, italic formatting. Do you think over doing itwill help? Nope.

Now it is time to think about META tags such as keyword tags and description tags. Although many search engines don’t depend on Meta tags these days, yahoo and MSN search bots still understand them.

Concentrate on the page titles included as part of title tag. They are most important ones that search engines peek-in.

Be aware that search engines don’t understand the flash content, so say no to complete flash website. Having Flash animation sparingly (for eg., as part of header) seems to produce best SEO results.

Understand that optimization is a continuous process and it does not have any end, once you started keep improving every day. Frequent update also impresses the search bots.