Creating sites that are spider-friendly

Spider-friendly navigation is how easily the search engines crawl into your site. It depends on the nature of different search engines whether they want to dig deep into your site and follow every link or ignore some of the pages of your website before indexing a whole page. It is not that the search engines deliberately ignore the indexing of some of the pages, but it is an error committed from the webmaster’s end while organizing and encoding the page content. To ensure that spiders index the whole thing - not just bits and pieces, it is important to make your pages easy for search engines to index. Following are the guidelines to create spider-friendly sites to ensure high SEO rankings:

• HTML errors on your page, particularly on the index page can prevent the spiders from spidering your whole site.
• Search engines can not spider sites that are dynamic in content. Though not all dynamically generated pages are a problem for the search engines. Only the pages with strange variables like “?”, “=” etc in the in their URLs cause many search engine spiders to "lock-up" and ignore these pages all together. These strange characters are an indication for the search engines that there could be an endless loop of possibilities existing for that page. If the search engines try to spider the page, it can cause a “spider trap" resulting in a huge load on the engine's server.
• A text based sitemap for all the site pages can be easily found by the search engine robots.
• Avoid using JavaScript links. But still if you want to use them move Javascript code to a separate file, or to the end of the HTML document after closing BODY or HTML tag. It will reduce HTML file size, and therefore the downloading time.
• Before submitting a site to the search engine it should be ensured that the site is complete and has no broken links.
• Use Keywords/phrases that best describe the target page and image file names. Avoid the repetition of keyword/phrases 5 or 6 times in one continuous row.
• To prevent spiders from crawling certain directories include .robots.txt
• Create a common navigational menu for all pages. If you are using flash navigation, always have text links as an addition to the flash presentation.
• Use meta tags in all places
• Use of hyphens in file-name
• Optimize your images and update your important pages regularly.
• Avoid automated submission of your sites to search engines.
• Ensure that your home page is not loaded enough so that it may load within 8-10 seconds on a 56k modem.

MetaTagging your website to higher rankings: A Myth or Reality

When we write an answer for a question in the exam, if we add a few examples to explain our answer or to make things clearer and more attractive for the examiner to get good grades, we do succeed in getting maybe a few grades more than others. But it doesn't mean that the actual answer can be rubbish, crap or not to the point. The examiner would still be more interested in the answer itself than examples that will be considered as additional information by the examiner. Similarly, Meta Tag, a hidden tag in the head of the html code, provides additional information about the html document. Just like examples to illustrate our answer in a question paper, meta tags too act as tools to help improve your standings in search engines that use them. But they must be used along with other marketing strategies to increase page rank. Using them alone and expecting higher rankings is like living in a fool's paradise. The major search engines, even today atleast, consider the title and body text as more important and relevant than meta tags. So instead of concentrating on the meta tags alone, it is highly recommended to consider spending more quality time in writing a good and relevant title as well as body content for the pages of your site. Meta tags may be used, but as a supplement and not the main marketing strategy. And if you are using meta tags in order to improve rankings in the search engines, it is important to concentrate on the description and keyword tags. As the name suggests, the description tag describes your website pages in the form of a keyphrase rich content. The keyword tag categorizes your website, so that the users can find your pages much more quickly and easily.
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Off Page Optimization Wins Over On Page Optimization

However, divided people may be in their views regarding the importance of off page and on page optimization, but the truth remains that off page optimization certainly has an extra edge over on page optimization as far as search engine rankings are concerned.

Although On Page Optimization techniques like title tag, header tag, alt image tag, meta tag, bolding, italicizing, underlining, etc., do play a significant role in SEO , but not so much as off page optimization techniques. Ultimately, what counts and matters on search engine optimization is the number of sites linking to your site.

Off Page Optimization comes really handy, when we talk of page rank (PR). When a result is displayed, PR has quite an important role to play. Let’s understand this in detail. Search for any keyword on Google. Before checking out the SERPs (search engine result pages), can you guess the nature of the sites showing up for that keyword ? I’m sure most of you must have nodded your head.

Well your guess would be a site that gives you links to various sites or categories, subcategories or perhaps various other subjects depending on the choice. But when you will actually see the results, you will be surprised to see the sites appearing on the engines for that keyword.

If you try to understand the logic or reason behind this, you will realize that it is the page rank for the site that is the deciding factor! The higher the page rank of the websites linking to your site, better is the position of your site in the search engines! Have you heard of that saying that if an ordinary person starts interacting with a known and popular figure, he too starts getting attention? This is exactly what’s happening in the case of off page optimization too. Some of the goodness and high page rank of the linking site rubs on your site too.
Google takes into account the quality of the link that a site has. So a bit more of effort goes into it. As they say, in today’s world, hard work is important, but smart work indispensable!

Off page optimization takes your site leaps ahead of your contemporaries, provided if it’s done with utmost care and precision. The repartees between ON & OFF optimization will go on and on. Nevertheless, both are important in SEO . It’s just that the level of importance is different and one (in this case off page optimization) is a little more important than the other.

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The Multiplier Effect in Web Marketing

If you have not heard of it before, let me explain the term "Multiplier Effect" to you as it plays a significant role in web marketing. Smart webmasters and SEO experts have been able to understand the importance of this effect to make millions from their websites. So why should you remain unaware or ignorant about it? The Multiplier Effect occurs when your marketing techniques either repeat themselves or become a part of other marketing techniques. In other words:

You see the workings of the Multiplier Effect when your marketing strategy is being used by others over and over again to reap benefits. For example, take the case of a free download of a DVD on something that you offer to people on your home page. The people who download it from your site then offer it to others from their sites and this process goes on.

The second case is when one marketing technique leads to benefits from other marketing techniques, like as happens in the case of link exchange program. Your linking to 50 sites makes your site get spidered by the search engines who find your link while indexing those sites where you placed your link. This increases your link popularity and eventually ranking in the search engines.As a result a loop develops and more people link to your site inspired by your higher rankings. So this further increases your ranking on the search engines as more people now link to you.

Writing Ezine Articles is one of the most effective of multiplier effects. All you have to do is write these articles, publish them in Ezines which in return will get you a lot of targeted traffic. Also posting your articles on other websites fetches free links to your website which translates into more traffic. The good news don't end here. Your link popularity and rankings will increase in search engines by writing thses articles and don't be surprised to find your articles emerging in Free E-Books (and that means yet more traffic!).

So Multiplier Effect can really affect your online business prospects and generate quite a huge amount of targeted traffic. You have to understand its mechanism and working in order to enjoy its benefits to the fullest.

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