There are many theories, facts and fiction bandied about the internet in articles, blogs and spam mail relating to Page Rank. It is every website owner’s goal to reach the top of the mountain. The more visibility of a website, the greater the exposure which should lead to higher traffic.
There is a sleuth of professionals that peddle their books, services or tools promising to provide top ten exposure on popular search engines like Google, Yahoo, Msn and others.. Some promise virtually immediate success. Others offer long term contracts to continually tweak and customize their services for maximum benefit. Many of these offerings, but not all, can be considered a complete waste of time. If something sounds too good to be true, it is too good to be true!
Be warned, do not attempt to use deceptive or manipulative techniques to gain higher ranking. Techniques used to circumvent the general guidelines of good web design are definitely ill advised. Major search engines such as Google will actually ban certain sites from their index if they deem certain websites are attempting to cheat the system.
There are definitely a number of things that you can do to make a website search engine friendly. In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages. It is definitely more prestigious and productive to have a number of sites with relevant information and high page rank link to your site.
Link exchange programs are usually ineffective and often a detriment to the overall goal of gaining more respect from the search engines. If your site sells shoes, it would not be advisable to exchange link with an online poker site. Conversely, it would be favorable to get links to your site posted by shoe manufacturers. If you use a link exchange program, you must be very selective with your link partners.
Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server. This file tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled. It is very important to properly configure your robots.txt file. If you have sensitive content that should not be shared with search engines, you must tell the search engine robots not to search such folders. You should test whether your pages will be indexed using your robots.txt configuration. This can be accomplished using Google’s own webmaster tools at http://www.google.com/webmasters/.
Database driven websites are of infinite value because of their flexibility. However you should make sure that your content can be exported to flat files that can be easily indexed by search engines. You cannot assume that a search engine spider will select options like a human user to traverse a website.
One of the best practices is to make sure that your TITLE tags clearly reflect the content of your page. Do not make your title tags attractive to search engines but lack any cohesion with your content. Fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash may prevent search engine spiders from crawling your entire site. Be careful not to create bottlenecks by leave broken links in your content.
Some search engines have clear rules against the use of hidden text, clever redirects, cloaking, irrelevant keywords or duplicate content. Do not attempt to add something to your site that is intended solely to increase your ranking. It may lead to some short term results but could get you banished.
A thoughtfully designed website with a proper hierarchy, a good site map and links to sub-sections from the main page will be favorably indexed. The best way to maintain and increase website credibility is ethical design and management. You could save yourself hundreds or thousands of dollars by sticking to the rules of the game. There are no major shortcuts that have not been plugged by search engine algorithm updates.
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