Getting Started with Search Engine Optimization – Part 4
In case you missed, here are previous parts:
- Getting Started with Search Engine Optimization – Part 1
- Getting Started with Search Engine Optimization – Part 2
- Getting Started with Search Engine Optimization – Part 3
Keep In Mind
Titles, keywords, descriptions, and other elements of the site should be relevant for what you are writing about. Skipping these areas will only hurt you in the long-term, as the spiders will have to search through your entire content, rather than being able to emphasize the keywords/descriptions that are more valuable and specific.
Use a Robots.txt File
Note: This tip only applies to those who are able to upload or update files located on their blog’s server.
The robots.txt file can help you tell the search engine what to index and what not to. For example, you don’t always want all your tags or archive pages being indexed, as it could result in duplicate content – which is bad when you want a single page displayed in results.
Some sites don’t block or restrict access to any content, while others restrict nearly everything except the location of the content, so it all depends on what content you want indexed. Having less indexed may be better if you focus on creating high-quality content, but having more content indexed will mean more images and tags/categories will be indexed.
404 Pages and Sitemaps
404 pages result from a visitor stumbling upon a page or URL that no longer exists. You want this page to be informative and offer some information that will guide he or she onto another page on your website or inform them of what went wrong. Leaving a 404 page blank will only hurt you, as search engines may index a blank page rather than de-index the page as a result of having a 404/redirected page.
Sitemaps essentially help with navigation and can help the search engines determine where all your content falls within your entire site. In basic form, readers can use them to better find specific pieces of content on your site.
Conclusion
Time consuming? Yes. Useful and beneficial? Yes. That’s search engine optimization. You have to realize that blogs are already somewhat optimized compared to the traditional website, but you still have to perform basic steps to ensure that search engines are indexing the correct content and not avoiding your best, most popular content.
This series post scraped just the surface of what is a vast subject. A large part of it is learning what is good and bad practice, what works and what doesn’t. Results don’t come overnight, so you have to be patient, and the results will eventually come.
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Nice tips for SEO… Robots.txt concept is relatively new to me. But I feel it can help a lot as you explained in a very easy manner. Great post..
Hi,
I have a sitemap and it displays my categories, archived month, pages and my last 25 posts. Is that ok or do I need to display more posts?
I think you need to display some more.
I agree with you Pradeep. The more comprehensive the sitemap, the better. The search engine spiders are only too happy to follow what you point them at, and other stuff might take forever to get indexed.
Keeping the googlebots out of unneccessary stuff really does have great merit, while the big SEO boys will talk about “sculpting” your PageRank through the correct use of this and the no-follow attribute.
You are having a good chain post on SEO but this post has just some information but i agree they are quite important ones.
And one thing i see is that you are working more or say focusing in Keywords for your post; which i think is the best part of the SEO.
Yes, placing keywords are very very important in SEO… But the keywords should be in limit. Its not like we are creating an article and its flooded with keywords.
I think there is a missing hyperlink from the third article to this one….
Excellent SEO techniques for long term benefit. Sitemaps really are very important for rapid crawling of your web pages.
Many people ignore 404 pages but it actually works wonder if you are able to tweak alittle and monetizing from it.
thanks for the tips, I strongly recommend to block crawler to crawl few pages which are not important from rankings point of view. this will help you to distribute page rank for important pages.
SEO is the best way to get your website popular
Now the most of Theme are using 404 pages so you don’t need worry on 404 pages.
@Nhc1987: I looking you are join Infolinks, I think it keep your blog to spam links.
Hello Michael,
I have a question that is somewhat different from SEO. In my website I have around 500 subscribers. But these days whenever I am posting a new article, that feedburner email gets delivered in the Gmail’s spam folder. I marked it as “Not Spam” and the next time again it came in spam. I just dont understand what to do. I feel even my subscribers will be getting the feedburner emails in their spam which might reduce my traffic.
Any suggestions?
I think it may be because most of the subscribers marked our content as spam and this may have affected the over all google mail. But why dont you check it with any other new google mail to make it sure if the same case happens ??
and i hope Michael will assist you if it has some special reasons or so.
Thanks for the reply Pradeep,
Actually I have figured out the issue. The problem is that I have changed my Feedburner Email title everytime whenever I add a new post in my website. So Gmail isnt marking feedburner emails as spam.. Problem solved
O, ya
This is great post about site map, 404 pages & robots.txt file. I think your post are awesome on this topic.
SEO means results on long term. Few people has the patience for it.
Yes, SEO really requires tremendous amount of hard work. Some say its a child’s play. But its not. You have to so much of work to get your blog/website listed on the first page for your keywords..Even I had been working about 15 hours a day for my website promotion but finally I have started seeing the results and that too great results. Hard work definitely pays provided you are really willing to do.
Cool tips for SEO… Robots is new to me. Best part is you explained in a very easy manner. Great post..keep up the goodwork
Very nice post on SEO work basic. Its really helpful for the people who are doing this kind of work.
Using robots.txt effectively holds very important in SEO.
But why dont you check it with any other new google mail to make it sure if the same case happens ??
and i hope Michael will assist you if it has some special reasons or so.
A lot of nice tips. I hadnt even thought about updating the 404 page blank stuff. Good work.
Another good Search Engine Optimization tip, that applies only to google is geo-targeting your website. This can be done by signing up for google webmasters tools and choosing your target country. Google automaticly targets your website by the domain extension (domain.tr will rank higher in google.co.tr than in google.com). If you are using a domain name that has an extension like .au than it will be automaticly geo-targeted to google.com.cu, and you’ll rank higeher there.
Ya that’s a very good trick. I wrote an article few days back that How you can target different countries users on Google Srch Results by just keeping few easy points in mind like domain ext and backlinks etc.
this is a good test on SEO type of tutorial, keep on trying will keep you on the success route in a day.
hmm, must try robot.txt and 404 pages…