You might be wondering the reasons your web site is not getting much Internet traffic. After all your web site took lots of financial and human resources, but unfortunately like so many web sites, it is quite unknown and as a result it does not get enough Internet traffic to make it financially viable.

Did you know that about 80 percent of all web site traffic originates from search engines? Yes, it is true! Listing near the top page of search engines and obtaining the attention of your target audience should be a main priority for any web site Internet promotion.

And the good news about this is that improving a web site position in search engine pages may be done for free. How? Using search engine optimization (SEO) techniques.

There are many ways to promote a web site. Some promotions are paid and some are free. Among the free ones, the search engine optimization techniques enable web sites to become search engine friendly. In other words, it makes website pages to accept the search engine crawler in a friendly way. These techniques will be some of the steps one will have to use to obtain a better position in search engine's pages, when searching for specific keywords, related to services or products offered by a web site.

Search engine optimization steps for a web page:

Title:

The html Title tag is a very important element and must include the most important keywords or phrases, which best represent the products or services offered by the web page. It should not contain more than 60 characters.

Keywords:

The html meta Keyword tag should have all the keyword phrases which best represents the products or services offered by the web page. Avoid repeating keywords and bad use of capital letters. It should not contain more than 250 characters.

Description:

The html meta Description tag is a description of the web page, which will be displayed by the search engine. Make sure it contains keywords phrases. Avoid repeating keywords and bad use of capital letters. It should not contain more than 200 characters.

Keywords in Headings:

Keywords in Headings tags (h1) will be interpreted by search engines as being an important keyword relevant to the web page, and it should be looked for and indexed by the search engines.

Web page text:

It is a good practice to include informative text one every page, using natural language and appropriate keywords. It should contain more than 200 words. Informative text should be placed in the html Body section of the web page.

Keywords in Alt Tags:

Every html picture "img" tag should contain an ALT tag with an appropriate description. Keywords should always be used when appropriate.

Keywords in Anchor Tags:

Every html hypertext link "a href " should contain a TITLE tag with an appropriate description. Keywords should always be used when appropriate.

Robots.txt file:

Make sure there is a robots.txt file in you web site directory. This is a text file created by the webmaster, which will guide the search engine´s crawler when indexing a web site.

There are some cases in which one might not want to have some web pages indexed. With the use of robots.txt, one will have control over which pages will be indexed and made available to the search engines.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /data/

HTML code validation:

Search engine's crawlers become more efficient when indexing web pages with no html errors. Beware that some html errors can make search engine crawlers to give up indexing web pages. So it is recommended for those web pages to be indexed, there should be no html errors.

Links:

Links are very important to search engines. The quality of links and whether it is reciprocal or not, are important factors in evaluating the importance of a web page. Links from web sites with higher page ranks are a plus.

Registering with Directories and Search Engines:

It is very important the registration of a website with directories and search engine web sites. It is a way of telling the world that your web site exists. Avoid using automatic search engine/directory registration.

Search engine optimization has become a very important set of procedures which helps web sites to become more relevant to search engines. To obtain an increase in Internet traffic will take some time. It probably will take some kind of additional promotion too. But anybody in need of higher Internet traffic, free search engine optimization might be considered his first option.

By: Roberto Sedycias
IT Consultant

Author Bio
This article can also be accessed in Portuguese language from the News Article section of page PoloMercantil
Roberto Sedycias works as IT consultant for PoloMercantil.

Labels: html, keywords, robots.txt, seo

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If you have a website you really need to have a robots.txt file. It gives search engine spiders specific commands and it is easy to use and easy to maintain. Here is an easy guide to a robots.txt file in five minutes.

There are times when you don’t want a search engine to index a page or a folder on your website. Maybe you have some information you just don’t want to have show up in google. This may include your statistics page, a page of notes, or a dynamic page. And, importantly, if you use google adsense and the search tool that displays search results on your website google mandates you exclude this page from search engines. Which means they mandate you having a robots.txt file.

A robots.txt file is a simple document named robots.txt and saved in the root folder of your website. Search engines see this and follow any commands it contains. Create a simple text document using any word processor program like notepad and put these two lines it:

User-agent: *

Disallow:

The first line tells all spiders to listen up because the following command is for you. The second line means do not index any of the following pages. And it is here you put the url of any pages you don’t want spidered. So if you wanted the spiders to skip your private page it looks like this:

Disallow:/privatepage.htm

If you want the spiders to skip a whole folder you put the url of that folder with a slash like this:

Disallow:/privatefolder/

Simply place this text file in the root folder of your website and you are done. In the future you can add and remove commands easily.

The robots.txt file is a very easy file to write and maintain and it is a very powerful tool that will help you interact successfully with search engines. This disallow command is the simplest and most used command but there are also many other commands you can use and if you have a website it is well worth your time to have a robots.txt file and even to research it a bit further.

by: Will Kalif

For more interesting insights into being a creative webmaster and making your website work for you visit the authors site at: The Creative Webmaster – Forging the Iron of Creativity on the Anvil of a Website

Labels: index, robots.txt, search engines, seo

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