69 Professional Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Don't even think of tricking the search engines
Don't use text in the color of your web page background and don't stuff obscure
HTML tags with your keywords. Search engines don't like to be tricked. If you try to
trick search engines, it's likely that your website won't be listed.Google and other major search engines have extra departments that deal with web
spam. They will find the spam elements on your website sooner or later.It is better to design your web pages so that they are beneficial for all: web surfers
(who find what they're looking for), search engines (which get better results) and you
(who gets the customers).- Don't use redirects
If the web page you submit contains a redirection to another website, most search
engines will skip your website completely. Do not submit a web page that redirect to
another page. Many webmasters tried to cheat search engines with redirection pages
in the past.The search engines companies discovered that and they decided to totally skip web
pages with redirections. Submit the actual web page that contains the content of your
site.- Make sure that you allow search engine robots to index your site
Imagine you're an Internet marketing service company and you keep trying very hard
to get top rankings in the search engines for your customer. Even after several weeks,
the customer's website hasn't been listed in any search engine.Then you see that your customer blocked the search engine spiders by not properly
configuring the robots.txt file. Details about the robots.txt file can be found here.- Make sure that search engine spiders can access your website
Search engine spiders don't have the functionality of full-fledged Web browsers such
as Microsoft Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome or Opera.In fact, search engine robot programs look at your Web pages like a text browser
does. They like text, text, and more text. They ignore information contained in
graphic images but they can read <IMG ALT> text descriptions.