6 SEO Tips and Tricks

I have seen people think about SEO(Search Engine Optimization) when they are done with the website. Here, I’d like to share with all of you some of the good practices which one should keep in mind before building a website. Following the below items will definitely make a difference to your site’s performance in major search engines :

1. Content: Add good and descriptive content to your website. Not only good content but unique content is important too. You should write content that has information different than what is provided by other websites or web pages. Also you should add content on regular basis, this increases the ranking of the website. If you are using images to explain something in your website, don't forgot to 'alt' sub-element of 'image' element. In the 'alt' sub-element you can explain the content of your image.

2. Title: Next very important aspect of SEO is the title tag, that displays the text in the title bar of the browser window. This is highly rated by search engines as being the indicative of the page's content.

3. Meta tags: These are used to define keywords for search engine to use in their indexing. We can use two meta tags which can be used to describe the content of your website. They are "description" and "keywords". Fo this you can take a look at any popular site and can know how to use these tags to describe your content.

4. URL: Ideally the keyword or the search term should be the part of the URL. Url describes which page of you site is being accessed. Prefer using hyphen(-) instead of underscore ( _ ) in the URL. Following example will tell you how the search engine will interpret the words in each of the URLs:
kshipra-pandey.html would be interpreted as kshipra pandey.html
kshipra_pandey.html would be interpreted as kshiprapandey.html

Always prefer avoiding file extensions in URLs entirely(eg: .php , .aspx, .jsp, etc) as it exposes the implementation part of the site into the URL . So prefer to RESTful URLs. Using RESTful URLs will let you pass parameters without adding parameters in the URL. For example: normal URL >> www.website.com?uid=xxxxx&email=xxxxx@xxx.xxx and rest URL would be "www.website.com/xxxxx/xxxxx@xxx.xxx" and your URL handler component would actually grab uid & email and pass them to your controller.

5. Site maps: In the early days of the web, Sitemaps were a page on your site that helps the visitor to understand where are all the pages, it was usually in the form of graphical flow chart. Now a new method is being used i.e. submiting a Sitemap XML file to the search engines which helps search engines in understanding how to index all the pages and how to crawl, including the frequency that they change. You don’t want to have to do this manually as every time a new page is added it has to be updated automatically, so go for the automated tools that will update it and submit the update.

Now I will tell you after creating site map, what else you need to do:

Whenever search bot comes to your website, it first looks at the robots text file at the root of your website. This file tells robots where your site map XML is and which pages/directories it doesn't need to crawl. You can create a robots.txt file using Google webmasters tools.

So here I summarise the steps after you have created site map.

1) update your robots.txt file. Add this line to your robots.txt: Site map: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

2) Submit your site map to the popular search engines. You can submit your site map to Google, yahoo and Bing.
More info at Sitemap.org .

6. Inbound Links: You need to encourage as many inbound links to your site as possible since they are factored into most search engine’s ranking algorithms as essentially counting as votes for the autoritativeness of your site. You really need to focus on getting other sites to link to your landing pages with the right link text.

All these steps should make a considerable difference in the performance of your search engine results. Keep checking your website's performance in Google webmasters tools.