Quite often I am faced with questions like, “Why doesn’t my site or blog come up in search engine result?” or “What are the search engines looking for in any particular site?”
While I have all along been mentioning about important tips that you may follow to optimize your site, it is also essential that you optimize your site only in such a way, that it is search engine friendly. In simpler terms, there are a few basic necessary standards every search engine looks for in any site. Unless your site or blog can match up to those standards, it cannot be qualified as being search engine friendly. To provide you a better understanding of my point, I have enlisted a few points that you necessarily need to consider, in order to rank high for the search engines.
- The very first consideration is to validate your HTML code. Validation essentially means checking the HTML code for errors if any. Though, HTML validation does not account for making your site or blog search engine friendly, it definitely plays a key role in deciding which all portions of your site or blog are to be indexed. So, you see, HTML validation indirectly affects the way your site or blog is being indexed.
- For those of you who are unaware of this fact, search engine software is capable of only reading text. Although some of you may not completely agree with me on this as there are search engines like Google that do index videos and images, let me tell you, that in spite of their developed softwares, they are not sophisticated enough to extract all the embedded information from a video or image. For that, you necessarily need to specify content for all such non-text elements. This you can specify in the alt tag of an HTML code. Include descriptions for any videos or flash files that you may have included.
- Be very careful about duplicate content on your site or blog. I have come across several sites where multiple URLs all open up to the same page. The problem with this sort of content duplication is that, it becomes difficult for the search engines to decide exactly which pages are of more importance, since every alternate page opens up to the same content. Thus, essentially check that your article may be reached via only a single route and not through multiple URLs.
- I have seen several sites who are in the constant habit of using hidden text on their sites. This they do in an attempt to have as many useful keywords as possible on any particular page in order to influence the various search engines. However, I strongly suggest you to keep away from such malpractices as they are not going to reap you any long term benefits.
With the above mentioned points I cannot guarantee you the topmost page rank, but, can definitely assure you a ranking among the first top search pages.
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