How to make a Search Engine Robot Friendly Site?

There are so many things that you can do to make your site search engine friendly so that Robots of search engines can easily crawl your site pages and index them properly. Here are some basic and simple rules for making your site SE friendly.

• Make all pages of your site reachable from the main (home) page in not more than three clicks.
• Create a “SiteMap” page that has links of all the pages within your site, which you want search engines to index.
• Consider having about 250 – 300 words of content in a page. If you make a page too long, search engine will just ignore them. Generally, most search engines don’t index more than 100 KB of text on a page.
• Avoid making image links or writing key phrases or content in image or flash objects.
• Make sure you don’t have any broken links. Also, make sure there are no common mistakes.
• If possible, don’t use script navigation. Also minimize the use of scripts because search engines cannot read scripts.
• If you dynamically display content of pages extracting from database, try not to pass too many parameters through the querystring. Search engines are not smart enough to understand all the passed variables.
• You can use the file “robots.txt” to describe how you want search engine robots to behave within your site.
• Make sure your site is up all the time with out any server crash.
• Attain as many quality inbound links as possible. This will ensure your site to be indexed quickly and also the higher page rank.

Getting Your Website Indexed in Google

You do a search for something in Google and Google displays millions of different pages, which are stored in servers all around the world. Do you know how Google does the actual search and how it displays so many sites in its result pages? Do you know how Google actually finds those pages? In fact, this is what indexing is called. Before a site appears in search result, search engine must index it. Once a search engine indexes a site, the search engine robot analyses it with relevant information and saves it in search engine database and thus it can deliver that information in its result page when searched for certain key phrases that are used present in that site pages. If a site is not indexed, search engine can not display that site in its result pages regardless of how relevant the page or site is.

Most of the sites do get indexed by search engines including Google. It is just that some do get indexed early while others take some time. There are certain factors that determine how a site is going to be indexed. Actually, there are basically two ways to allow search engines to find a new site.

The first way is by manually submitting an address of the site using a submission form of related search engine. This is generally called site suggestion. You can suggest a site or inform about the site to search engine by providing the site url and some description. Then the suggested site will be on queue for indexing. Other pages of the sites are interlinked with the main homepage so the search engine robot or crawler will automatically find those pages and index them as well.

Another way is to let the search engine robot find the site on its own. You just have to make one other site that is already indexed link to yours. This means, if you just make sure of at least one inbound link to your site from an indexed site, the search engine robot will index your site as well when its crawler crawls the next time. This is probably the better or the desired way of indexing rather than directly suggesting a site. This method can also be quicker than manually suggesting.

Email Marketing – A Good way to increase your site popularity

Just today in my hotmail inbox, I received 8 new emails that were from somebody I never communicated with. Couple of those messages interested me and I opened and read them. However for all the rest, I selected and hit “Delete” right from the inbox without even opening. For the ones I read, I remember signing for their Opt-in list once in the past. If you are sending such emails, do you know whether people read your emails or delete them without reading?

If you are planning to make your site popular, email marketing can definitely make a big difference and traffic to you site can sky-rocket in a very short period of time. However, you have to adapt the right way of email marketing.

Depending upon the way you do your email marketing, you can either make or break your business. This I think is very true. If you just scam people who are not interested in your service or products and your site, you just will earn bad credits for your business. You might even get black listed by ISPs or get into legal issues. The better alternative, in fact the fruitful way of running your email campaigns is by adapting a method called “Double Opt-In” (signing up people for one of your programs and sending them email with their sign-up confirmation and welcome message as part of the sign-up process). This way, you will only be collecting list of people who are really interested in your type of business and upon only targeting to them, you can have better conversion. If you have a good and clear privacy policy and an easy way for people to unsubscribe, your email program will rock! Always remember, a good quality service is the key ingredient for running a good business.

"target=_blank" - Good or Bad?

There must be mixed fillings and perceptions for the practice of linking out of your site in a new window. On one hand, it is good for the original site because their site window will still be opened even if users leave on to the link you provide. This is surely a nice way to retain your visitors within your site. However, does this kind of practice hurt your page rank or will search engines penalize for using such kind of practice of opening links in a new window? You don’t have to worry because they don’t care. Search Engines including Google don’t really care what you have in “target”. Their crawlers just ignore what’s inside the “target”. However, they do follow the link. So, you are pretty safe from SEO point of view for using “target=_blank” or whatever or using other methods to open links in a new window.

This doesn’t mean, you should standardize this way of opening links in a new window. In fact, I think you should only open new windows if you really need to. Otherwise, just don’t. From the user standpoint, it usually is annoying except for some reasons.

Humor About Different Types of Marketing

A friend of mine got this as an email forward and he forwarded it to me...

A Professor at one of the IIM's (INDIA) was explaining marketing concepts to the Students:

1. You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to her and say: "I am very rich. Marry me!" - That's Direct Marketing
2. You're at a party with a bunch of friends and see a gorgeous girl. One of your friends goes up to her and pointing at you says: "He's very rich. Marry him." - That's Advertising
3. You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to her and get her telephone number. The next day, you call and say: "Hi, I'm very rich. Marry me." - That's Telemarketing
4. You're at a party and see gorgeous girl. You get up and straighten your tie, you walk up to her and pour her a drink, you open the door (of the car) for her, pick up her bag after she drops it, offer her ride and then say: "By the way, I'm rich. Will you marry me?" - That's Public Relations
5. You're at a party and see gorgeous girl. She walks up to you and says:" You are very rich! Can you marry me?" - That's Brand Recognition
6. You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to her and say: "I am very rich. Marry me!" She gives you a nice hard slap on your face. - That's Customer Feedback
7. You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to her and say: "I am very rich. Marry me!" And she introduces you to her husband. - That's demand and supply gap
8. You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to her and before you say anything, another person comes and tells her: "I'm rich. Will you marry me?" and she goes with him - That's competition eating into your market share
9. You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to her and before you say: "I'm rich, Marry me!" your wife arrives. - That's restriction for entering new markets.

Things to consider when creating a site

There are certain things that you and your developer must consider while developing a new site. Based on my experience, here are some points I think should not be ignored:

1. Make it load fast
   The site should load fast enough. I have heard that people don’t wait more than 15-25 seconds on a page if they don’t find anything that interests them. If your page doesn’t even load within this time frame, what good is it for you even if your site looks incredibly elegant and contains wonderful content? Therefore, you should make sure that it doesn’t take much time to load your site page. To insure this, make sure your site is going to be hosted in a good and fast server. Don’t use too much of big graphics, applets, animation or flash movies. Rule of thumb should be minimizing the use of things that are not really needed.
   
   
2. Target the Market
   You should know about the audience of your site. Will they be teenagers? Will they be business executives? Or will they be IT experts? Once you know about your audience, you can offer and cater better service and your audience will also prefer your site over others. For instance, if your audience is mostly teenagers and your site is full of entertaining and flashy stuffs, and has informal looks, your site will perform well.
   
   
3. Focus
   Make sure your site is focused on its objective and on the product or services. You can surely do up-selling and cross-selling for different products or services as they can be essential for your business but do it deviously. If you have to offer many different kinds of products, categorize them and display them in different pages.
   
   
4. Build Trust
   Will you buy a product if you think the product is not going to work after 24 hours? Will you buy from someone who you think is a fraud? I won’t. I am sure you won’t either. No one will if there is no trust. Therefore, it is extremely important to build trust first before convincing your visitors to purchase from your site or use your service. Make sure you clearly write out your privacy policy about visitors and your site users, your contact information including your email address, mailing address and phone number.
   
   
5. Easy and Secure Payment Method
   The various options you offer for payment method, the more ways people can purchase from your site. You can really make your client’s and customer’s life simple if you adapt easy and many payment options. Set up merchant account and start Credit Card payment processing. In addition, set up for e-checks. Accept Bank Drafts, money orders and regular checks and provide your address to send it to. In addition, make your payment processing pages secured by installing SSL.
   
   
6. Easy Navigation and Consistent Look and Feel
   Make your site easier to navigate for users. It doesn’t worth it if the site is too complex and confusing. If you maintain inconsistent look and feel for different pages within your site, it may be confusing to users and they might leave from your site without knowing your site is valuable for them. A good navigation structure will let users find what they want very easily and quickly and thus can convert them into your happy customers more effectively.
   
   
7. Search Engines Indexing
   More than 80% of your new site traffic comes to your site from major search engines like Google, MSN, Yahoo and so on. Therefore, you can really tap into your intended market if your site pages are well indexed in all search engines and if the placement is good in Search Engine Result Pages. Therefore, spend some time doing research in effectively creating meta-tags for keywords and descriptions. In addition, make sure to create a Sitemap page. All these extra concerns help in indexing your site to all major search engines.
   
   
8. Content
   Content of your website is the major factor in driving traffic to your site and converting that traffic to customers. A good content in your website positively impresses all major search engines, thus your site can be better ranked in SERPs. In addition, a good content makes your site users understand well about your products and services and compels them to purchase. Therefore, your focus in developing a new website should be for creating a good and persuasive content.

Why linking is important?

Linking is important for any website to succeed. It generally helps in two ways:

1. Linking creates path to your website from other sites in the internet. As people follow links to get from one page to another in the net, there is a great chance that people will get to your site if a link to your site is present in the page that they are viewing. This way, the more links there are on other sites, the more your site will be visited.
   
   
2. Linking adds value to your site and thus makes a good impression for Search Engines. If a search engine finds more links for a site from other sites, it perceives that the site must be more interesting and has valuable content in it. Therefore, it prioritizes the site by increasing its ‘Page Rank’ and providing a good placement in SERP (Search Engine Result Page).