1. Simplifying your URL.
To keep your URL as simple as possible, try to exclude characters such as question marks and ampersands. Search engines generally use spiders to locate searchable pages on web sites but they do not index URLs with excessive use of symbols.
Some public search engines and most site and intranet search engines will index dynamic URLs but others will not. Because it is difficult to link to these pages, they will be penalized by engines that use link analysis to improve relevance ranking, such as Google's PageRank algorithm.
2. Using keywords well.
Keywords play a big part in indicating to search engines the relevance of your site when using specific search terms. If the relevant key terms do not appear within the text on your site, it is less likely that your site will be matched to the correct category.
Make sure that your text reads correctly instead of trying to pack it with as many search terms as possible. Otherwise you will end up with content that does not make a lot of sense.
A general rule of thumb to ensure that most key terms are covered is to have at least 250 words of continuous text on each page.
3. Avoid hiding your keywords.
Have you ever seen a site that has hundreds of keywords repeated at the bottom of the page?
Sometimes these words are the same color as the background so you only notice them if you highlight a section of the page and they show up as reversed white on black text. This is an attempt to rank well in the different search engines for the keywords listed there.
Search engines were used to be fooled by this. But now they penalize big time and it can even get you blacklisted. Avoid hiding your keywords in your web site content and prevent including white text on a white background.
4. Avoid cloaking.
Cloaking is a technique designed to deliver different web pages under different circumstances.
For instance, search engine spiders may pick up a heavily optimized page for a certain keyword.
However, when a visitor goes to the page using the same keyword, an altogether different page is delivered in an attempt to send them somewhere else.
If you are caught cloaking web pages, your web site may be permanently banned from search engines. Forget doorway pages too, which are pages specially optimized for one search engine. Although doorway pages can be effective for sites with content that is overlooked by search engines, they are generally frowned upon.
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Copyright 2005 Florie Lyn Masarate
About The Author
Florie Lyn Masarate got the flair for reading and writing when she got her first subscription of the school newsletter in kindergarten. She had her first article published on that same newsletter in the third grade.
