Search Engine Optimization Tips and Advice

You picked your niche (see Website building basics), you found the perfect hosting provider (see Compare Web Hosting), read up on your selected topic, and created a nice website that you are very proud of.  Now what?  Nobody knows that it exists!  There is nothing more frustrating that spending a lot of time and energy on something that... well basically doesn't exist on the internet when you are done. 

    If you Google SEO tips you will find a lot of people who promise to make your website number one and bring you billions of visitors in a short amount of time.  The truth is, they might actually be able to do this for you.  This is going to COST YOU.   The fact is, the high price is justified.  Making a website rank high in search engines is tough work and take a lot of personal attention.  What is it that makes a website rank high in search engines?

• CONTENT - I  can't emphasize that enough.  If your website isn't useful and full of good information, you are going to have a hard time getting ranked and indexed. 

• BACKLINKS -  If someone thinks your site is good enough to link to you, search engines will give you the benefit of the doubt.  The higher rank the page has that links to you, the greater emphasis search engines will place on the link.  The more people who think your site is important the better!

• KEYWORDS -  Pick keywords that are relevant to your site.  Don't pick keywords that are highly competitive.  If you have a Real Estate website, don't try to rank for "Real Estate".  Once your site is established, you can try to rank for higher traffic keywords. 

• DESIGN -   A lot of website templates are image based, meaning that all of the pretty elements on the page are elements.  Unfortunately this usually includes text as well.  Keep the images to a minimum and the text to a maximum.  Replace any "welcome" images with "welcome" text.  There are a lot of tips for Designing your website, so check out our website building basics section. 

    Be sure that once you site is complete, that you create a robots.txt file and sitemap.xml file. 

     robotx.txt file  -  Create a text document named robots.txt.  In the file include:

                  user-agent: *    (this allows ALL spiders and bots to browse your site)

                  Disallow:           (this tells bots that they can scan all files in your directory)  or

                  Disallow: /private/      (this tells the bot to scan everything except this directory)

    sitemap.xml -  create a text file and save it as sitemap.xml - example below, replace with your information:

           the 0.8 represents the importance - 1.0 is most important.  Don't make them all the same importance or search engines will assume there is an error.  Be sure to create a URL entry for each page you want indexed. 

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