Most bloggers / online businessmen love to be indexed by search engine, but most of them do not know yet how to make their site more search engine friendly. This article will explain some free but effective methods of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) that give impressive results. I have proven these methods myself, and Google always index my newest page no more than 10 minutes after it's published. The strongest part of this article is its complete collection of meta tags for search engine. Would you like to know more?
Search Engines serve a very vital part in internet daily communication activity. We cannot imagine how we would look for something without start looking from their indexes. For business websites, their position in search results contribute significantly in their traffic, and also their survival. That's why almost every site in the web need SEO.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an attempt to make a website more search engine friendly. So the site will be easier to be indexed by all search engines. The basic enhancement consists of three steps: search engine submission, meta tags modification, and optimizing robots.txt.
Search engine submission is providing a certain URL to certain search engine provider formally, in order to be included into the list of sites which will be indexed by its crawler soon. URL stands for Universal Resource Locator, an address of certain site which is used in web communication, such as http://www.example.com . Crawler is search engines' tool in indexing the entire web, which function to constantly add information to its index, providing faster and more complete results when users need their service. An un-submittted site will eventually be indexed by crawler robots too, but their enlistment in the index may take much longer, as it is not the priority of the crawlers to index.
Probably these crawling bots will only do it in their spare time ;D
Meta Tags modification is every attempt to improve a site's meta data solidity, so when a crawler visit the site, it can recognize it easier. Meta data is referred as data of the data.
Confused by the definition? Don't think too much about it and you will be just fine :D Meta tags functions like an ID card of the website. It's like when you meet your old friend and he shows you his ID card, it's easier for you to recognize him, right? If he doesn't show his ID, may be you can still recognize him too, by looking at his face, clothes, voice, behavior, etc, but of course it will take more time, depending on your brain's bandwidth. Showing the card is absolutely much faster. That's how they work.
If you don't get it, please try to upgrade your brain into a better one first, Intel Core2Duo E2160 will do :D
When you want to enhance your site meta tags, you can do it yourself
manually , if you have enough knowledge to do that. Or you can use
meta tag generator tool to create the tags, then you add them to your site. Some of these kind of tool can be used for free. Another option is you can pay
SEO experts to do it for you. Here's what we need to know about them: meta tags must be placed between and
<head > and
< /head > . If your page is a HTML one, your meta tags don't need to be closed. If your page is an XML/XHTML you MUST always close the meta tags with appropriate closing tags, otherwise, your page will not function as it should. Look at this example:
open meta tag: < META bla bla bla> closed meta tag:< META bla bla bla / > I know this is ridiculous, but when I added meta tags to this site, I didn't know how to close them. I looked for it on a thick book about web programming but I didn't find the answer. Then I spent about 30 minutes to surf all over the web looking for its proper closing tags, which I finally found in W3's website. So if you don't know how to close meta tags yet, look at my example and find the difference between open and closed meta tag, and don't forget it. If you already an expert in XML programming, just forget what I've said.
And may be you are reading the wrong article, why don't you try self development section? :D OK back to topic, so if you want to add meta tags manually, here is my
Mega Maximum Meta Tags For SEO :
< meta name="description" content="your site's description. 2-3 sentences are better" /> < meta name="keywords" content="your keywords, separated by commas" /> < meta name="distribution" content="global" /> < meta name="revisit" content="1 day" /> < meta name="revisit-after" content="1 day" /> < meta name="resource-type" content="document" /> < meta name="audience" content="all" /> < meta name="rating" content="general" /> < meta name="robots" content="all" /> < meta name="robots" content="index, follow" /> < meta name="author" content="your name/company" /> < meta name="language" content="en" /> I used this two methods of search engine optimizations above only, since I could not edit robot.txt of Blogspot. This two methods works
very impressive . Before, Google needed about three weeks to put my other site on their index. Since I had been using this two methods, Google only needed one day to put it on their list of search results. I was surprised myself. I edited the meta tags and submitted it to search engines just yesterday. But when I checked by trying to search my site using Google Search this morning, it was already there. It was just one day, and I even only used free tools, I did not need to pay at all. However I do not know how this could be so much faster than my prediction yet, so I cannot guarantee that the same effect will work on you.
Well at least you can try it for free :D
Optimizing robots.txt is done by editing certain parameters inside your site's robots.txt file. Robots.txt is a .txt file which is located inside your site's folder and function to modify any crawler's action which attempt to index your site. The file can allow or disallow certain parts of the folder to be indexed by which crawlers. Mostly these files were made to protect the security of the site's files and folder, disabling it from being accessed publicly. However you cannot edit your robots.txt unless you host your own site. Using hosted service like blogger.com will limit your access to it. You can see it, but you can't edit it. To see your robots.txt from a browser just write
http://www.yoursite.com/robots.txt on you browser's address bar and hit enter. And one more thing, flying words says there's no robots.txt inside our Blogger's blog folder, what we see is actually only a script response, I heard it in Google Webmaster Forum. Fact or fiction? Back to earth, for example, this is what I've found inside my site's robot.txt :
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google "
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google " specifies the name of the crawler-bot on which the settings will be applied for, which is Mediapartners-Google, Google's crawler bot.
"
Disallow: " means there's nothing disallowed to be indexed.
"
User-agent: * " means the next setting will be applied to all incoming crawler except Google's.
"
Disallow: /search " means the visiting crawlers will be kept away from indexing your site's internal search facility's search queries, as indexing those are useless and making your site infinitely larger. For example if I search for "
www.google.com " using internal search tool of the website
"www.example.com " .The resulting query will be
"www.example.com/search?g=www.google.com " . Indexing these queries is just wasting time and useless.
I will not talk more on robots.txt since I cannot edit mine (so sad), I will update it later :'[
For this site, I used
submitexpress.com . They provide some free tools, such as free search engine submission, meta tags generator, meta tags analyzer, link popularity check, keyword suggestion tool, keyword traffic estimator, SEO dictionary, page rank checker, page snooper, and broken link checker. They also provide many other paid service. I used their free search engine submission, meta tags generator, and meta tags analyzer. Their price and service quality comparison is awesome! Free! All they ask in return for their free service was putting their link inside my site, and as a respect for them, I did. I also give them a small bonus of simple review here. Where? You are reading it, in case you ask. So if you need these kind of service, feel free to visit them.
What are you waiting for?? They are free :D
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Update Dec 30, 2008 ) Earlier today, I experienced something very exciting about SEO. I made my
reference page on this site. And about 13 minutes later, I check that page by searching for it using Google, the search engine giant. I actually did not expect to see the new page as it was just been made. But I was so surprised that the new page was already there, I did not predict it to be that quickly. That was really fast for me, since I only did free SEO. I did not change anything on my site except submitting my sitemap to
Google Webmasters Tools the day before. My sitemap's link was in the robots.txt of my site, other Blogspot users should find theirs easily. I knew that submitting a sitemap can improve our visibility, but I never knew that it was that fast! Awesome! I should have done it earlier! Feel free to try.
So if you want your site to be a little bit more shiny on the web, you know what to do now. Submit your URL to search engines, enhance your meta tags, set your robots.txt configuration, and you're on the move. Of course you can use your SEO custom tool and trick, if you have one. And if you need my recommendation on SEO service, you know where it is.
However don't try to use dirty tricks like SEO spamming etc, because search engines will punish you hard :D
Note : I use [] here instead of <> because these meta tags examples won't show up if I use <>. They think they are real tags and urbanize themselves into code realm, though I made them only for examples. Still, I don't know how to explain it to them yet :D
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Update Dec 26 2008 ) I actually can use entities to show the character <> and at the same time avoiding them to be interpreted by browsers as tag characters, but Blogger automatically transform them into non entity character (<>) every time I swap from "write" to "edit html", really annoying. May be I'll do it later when I have a lot of time to waste. If you don't know what is an entity, ask me and I will explain it to you.
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Update Jan 8 2008 ) I have find out that Blogger do not support old entities / entity numbers like "<" for "<".
RyanJB told me that using new entities / entiti names will not cause any problem. So now I've fix this post with appropriate tags character.
