The new rules for 2009- Basic "SEO Rules" to follow when you launch a new website.
Unique content will rule definitely
* Web 2.0 is not a trend anymore since almost all new sites support web 2.0 paradigm.
* Blogging and microblogging will get more attention
*Video and conversational social marketing i.e., forums and social communities will be among the most effective ways to keep your content visible inside major search engine result pages. Therefore, if you want to create a niche among your competitors, your presence must be solid and well spread across diverse media outlets.
Marketing tactics/techniques to adopt in 2009
* Identify your most valuable customers and determine what attracts them. Once you begin to focus more effort on quality visitors, you will discover that certain keywords and key phrases drive high conversions/visits. Increase your bids for those keywords and optimize your ad copy and landing pages to generate even more conversions. Be sure to look at all the terms people enter into the search box. Search engines will provide the searchers a new set of results based on his history of searching and browsing habits. Google will look into IP Address, use geo-targeting and remember which websites one frequently visits.
* Your web analytics tool can easily identify your top five visiting countries, visiting states, visiting cities and so on. By knowing where most of your visits are coming from, you can optimize your campaigns to those territories.
* A simple change/update of the listing's description can improve the CTR phenomenally.
The challenge is not to pay so much attention to ranking, rather pay attention to traffic, conversions and keep building good content.
Google rules:
"A domain name should always have an extension that matches the country it targets. For example using a .com extension for a site targeting the INDIAN market, would be a wrong choice. In such a case the domain extension should be .in or .co.in. Webmasters violating these rules, will never rank high in the Google search engine for the country they are targeting". The entrepreneur continues:
"If a webmasters target is the INDIA, then he/she should never use a .co.uk extension.
* A 100 percent commercial website should never end in .org.
The country displayed in the so called Whois information (this is the public information on any domain) should always match the country that is targeted by the site owner.
It should always be possible for entrepreneurs to modify their own Whois. information in an online domain account.
* For businesses the domain name registration period should be at least two years, otherwise a website will not be taken seriously by Google".
At least 50 percent of web site owners are violating one or more of the above rules. "It's really frustrating to see so many webmasters spending money, time and energy on optimising their sites for Google, while actually they will never have a chance at all to rank high in the search giant for the desired keywords and many of them even don't know it !" "It's all because they made a capital domain name mistake at the very first beginning of their online adventure".
* #1 Never Re-Use Your same Title Tag On Every Page of new website.
Many a times your website designer doesn't even realize this is being done. Your creative team is more concerned with the visual presentation than to worry about something they consider more of a minor 'nuisance".
Most of the time, your website has been created from a template, which ensures that everything looks the same -design wise- from one page to another. This is perfect to get the site off the ground and out there. Most WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editors work this way as well, templates allow for easy production of web pages.
The drawback to this from an SEO perspective is that the Title and Meta tags are all repeated. To get your website off on the right foot, change each page's title tag to reflect what the page is all about. You'll be surprised at the good this can do for each of your web site's pages.
* #2 Keyword Research
It would be wise to do at least a little keyword research before your launch your website. Understanding how your audience searches is the most beneficial thing you can do for your website. Doing even the slightest amount of research can clue you into small idiosyncrasies that could be "gold mines" in disguise.
Keyword research can also let you know how to target the content on your page, how to word each page's title tag and whether people really are searching on your business name. It's well worth the time spent to discover exactly what you need to target to have a successful website.
* #3 Don't Use Keywords In Images
Your designer might yell at you, question your judgment, or complain that it will ruin the aesthetics of the design, but let me put it to you this way; "What good is a great design if no one can find it?"
If your keywords are embedded in images, the search engines have no clue that keyword is related to your page. They cannot "see" your images. So if the term "camel rides" is important to your business, make sure it's actual text somewhere within your content, not part of an image.
* #4 Check Your Robots.txt File
Check, double check and go back and recheck that Robots.txt file. Make sure it's in the root folder of your domain. Ensure all the folders and files you want to be found by the search engines are allowed. Any development folders, javascript folders, css folders or private folders, you do not want to end up in a search engine results should be disallowed.
For the proper syntax of how to configure a Robots.txt file, check out: Robotstxt.org.
* #5 Provide An HTML Version of Your Sitemap
Providing an HTML Version that lists the links to the pages of your site can guide the search engine spiders to all of the pages of your site. If your navigation is currently in flash or javascript, this is a great alternative way of making sure the spiders find the site's pages. Make sure that your link to your sitemap is a simple "a href" tag, not a link formed with javascript or flash as the spiders will not be able to follow that type of link.
The five simple rules can launch your website off on the right foot. Keep in mind that these are just simple steps, there's a lot more that goes into optimization of a website. This list is just meant as a guide to start you off, and these should assist you in your efforts until you have a full search marketing strategy mapped out for your website.
Tags: 5 simple seo steps, keywords in images, new website launch tips, robots file, seo steps, seo tips, title tags
Author is CEO of An ISO 9001-2000 certified Web Hosting company Delhi,Mumbai offering domain names,web spaces and engaged in search engine optimisation and submission with confirmed ranking. Anand saini is a successful SEO expert, author and specialists in search engine marketing. Highly respected as a source of search engine optimization advice, Anand has had articles published around the world.. Visit his website http://www.webcraft.in to read more articles on SEO. Know about lot of free tools to help link building, get back links, boost traffic and ranking of your website. Permission to reprint this article is granted if the article is reproduced in its entirety, without modification, including the bio information. Please include a hyper link to http://www.webcraft.in
