Basic SEO techniques for new websites

Have you ever wondered about the websites that are shown when you google some key word or a phrase? If you start a similar website is it possible to show it at the first page? Answer to all these questions is simple; Search Engine Optimization.

Online media and internet has grown up massively that it really takes cutting edge SEO for your website to be at first page of a search engine results. I would say optimizing a website for search engines is an art. This art, when blended with creativity can make wonders. Certainly SEO is not a rocket science. However, if you follow simple guidelines be assured and ready to see your website climbing up the ladder.

There are some basic tips that one should follow while doing an SEO.

Unique Content:

Don’t write for search engines but for visitors. Google also loves that content that is exclusively written for visitors that provides information and also makes your visitor to remember your site and come back.

Meta/Alt/Title Tags:

Though Google has reduced importance of <meta> tags, other search engines like Bing, Ask.com, live and yahoo still gives meta tags its due importance. So don’t forget to configure nice and clean meta tags. If you are new to web development then you can use some of the auto meta tag generators available free over the web.

Alt tags are used only for images or thumbnails. Most of the times we insert some meaningful image to the article and forget to write alt attribute for it. By doing this you are missing some good amount of traffic that could be generated from Google Images. All attributes are simple word alternative to the image. Google always indexes images with reference to <Alt> attributes. So Remember; always add an alt attribute to the image.

<Title> tags convey title of a website. In addition to writing website title in these tags you can also add keywords those are specific to your site context. If you are not aware of what keywords to use, try some of those key word generator tools available online. It’s good practice to add meaningful keyword in the title tag itself. However, do not over stuff these tags with excess of keywords. Remember, we are optimizing not degrading.

Domain Age:

Search engines give exceptional importance to age of the domain. With this search engines like Google try to differentiate the spamming website from a true serious website.

Configure Robot files:

Make sure you have a robot.txt file configured on your website. Robot.txt file is considered as heart of your website because this file guides the spiders of a search engine to crawl and index content on the website. It can also restrict spiders from reporting certain section of your website to Google.

Writing Robot.txt file is very easy. It has following syntax:

Useragent: *

Disallow: *

Configuring file this way will restrict spiders from all search engines from indexing your website. If you wish not to index certain section of your website such as /temp or /cgi, you can easily do so by adding following code to this file.

Useragent: *

Disallow: /temp

Site Map:

Site map basically updates a search engine about every possible URL on your website. Sometimes due to certain technical problem, certain URLs are not indexed in search engines. Submitting a site map is a best way to update a search engine about it. You can set frequency at which this site map should be re-submitted to search engine.

Social Bookmarking:

Social bookmarking enjoys the position of cherry on a cake. You have followed all above mentioned steps and done with basic SEO. This is the time when you should start social bookmarking the content on your website. You can do so by simply adding a plug-in. However, there are tons of bookmarking sites so you should be choosy about where content should be syndicated. Digg.com, twitter, facebook, stumble upon & technorati are examples of some of the most popular bookmarking sites.

Some Tricks for High Rankings in Search Engines:

There are a few tricks that you can follow to get high SERP via some other websites. What I am trying to convey is, when you are sure that the content you are writing is of high quality, it isn’t a bad idea to give out some share of organic traffic to someone else. For e.g. Social bookmarking sites like Digg.com does have good PR, high traffic rank & reputation. So why not to use it?

Whenever someone puts a term to search in Google, its algorithm does some of the following things:

1) Search for a website with high PR/Grade having this search term
2) Search for a website with relatively low PR/Grade, but high keyword density for specified search term
3) Decide which result to display from the above mentioned two options

As Digg.com satisfies option 1, Google will try to search the mentioned term on Digg.com. Once Google finds a keyword on Digg.com, it simply displays it in result. Thereby you get a high SERP through Digg.com. So what if you have to share your organic traffic with Digg.com. It surely makes sense. Isn’t it?

So even if your site is relatively new & doesn’t have high SERP, you can still get a good chunk of organic traffic as well SREP and you can be sure about your climbing up the ladder.