Introduction
This article is intended to provide an end-to-end SEO (Search Engine Optimization) guide. This is a series of articles that will provide tips and techniques of SEO. You could find the remaining parts of this article from my articles page. To find the most up to date guide, please check SEO Guide.
Link Building
Search engines rank websites based on inbound links coming from reputable and heavy traffic websites. Search engines consider a technical website "more relevant" if it has inbound links coming from microsoft.com or ibm.com. Do the following to create quality inbound links:
- Submit articles to relevant websites, post blog entries and write to forums containing inbound links.
- Create "quality" inbound links containing keywords. <a href="http://digitalworld.com/digital-camera.aspx">More about Digital Camera</a> is more relevant to an online digital camera website as compared to<a href="http://digitalworld.com/dc.aspx">Click Link</a> because the fomer contains the keyword "Digital Camera".
- Link building not only increases your website ranking but also brings more traffic from other sites.
Link Exchange
Search engines give higher ranking to websites that are popular. Contact web masters of reputable websites and discuss with them how you could link their products and services on your website. In return, ask them to place your website link on their site. Do not overdo link exchange with irrelevant websites, as search engines punish it by removing your website from the index. It is good idea to conduct a Link Campaign.
Website Group
Search engines gives higher ranking to relevant websites. Google describes relevancy as:
"Relevancy is determined by over 200 factors, one of which is the PageRank for a given page. PageRank is the measure of the importance of a page based on the incoming links from other pages. In simple terms, each link to a page on your site from another site adds to your site's PageRank.".
One way of increasing PageRank is to do as follows:
- Create a group of related websites and link them to the main website. A website selling holiday packages could have a main website that sells vacation packages for all regions and individual websites for Florida, Dubai, Spain and Europe packages.
- You should create 10-12 free websites and 2-5 paid websites to get better PageRank.
- Again do not overdo website grouping so that it becomes Link Farm, a mal-practice, that search engines punish by removing your website from the index.
Following are some of the places where you could create free websites. Do your own research for free websites without popups and ads:
Who is Linked to your Website?
Go to Yahoo or Google and search link:yourURL to find which website has links to your site. You could also use Yahoo Site Explorer to do the same.
SEO & Hosting Company
Hosting company has no effect on SEO. It has no effect, even if you change from one hosting company to another. Search engines rank websites on domain name, URLs, content, inbound links and keywords. However, consider the following while choosing a hosting company:
- Search engines prefer a site hosted in USA to one in UK for USA related keywords like California.
- Hosting companies that are black listed by search engines for spamming and artificial link building will lower website ranking.
- For dedicated hosting, check if your IP is earlier used by some blacklisted site.
- Website uptime affects ranking. Research quality of services for the hosting company.
- When you switch the hosting company, downtime has an effect on ranking. Plan to keep downtime low.
Site Submission
Submit website to various search engines and only once. Some submission URLs are given below:
Sitemap Submission
Submit a Sitemap to Google using Google Webmaster Tools. Google uses your sitemap to learn about the structure of your site and to increase coverage of webpages. You could generate XML sitemap using www.xml-sitemaps.com.
To find the most up to date guide, please check SEO Guide.
History
- 10th April, 2009: Initial post
