Search Engine Optimization, Starting Guidelines

After finishing your designs, you are now ready to submit your site to directories, and then optimization starts. You would want to see your site listed in major search engines and be on top if possible. But this can only happen if you follow proper guidelines before you submit your site for inclusion.

Is My Site Ready for Submission?

Before submitting your site, you should pay close attention to the quality guidelines which outlines some of the illicit practices that may lead to site being removed entirely on major search engines otherwise penalized. You would not want that, would you?

Basic Guidelines

• Make your site clear in hierarchy and text links. Meaning, every page of your site must be reachable from at least one text link.
• Make a sitemap page for your users with links that points to the important pages of your site.
• Make a useful, content-rich site. Provide your visitors fresh and meaningful content, something that will make them come back or link to your site.
• Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site includes those words within it.
• Use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. Search engine crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images.
• Check your site with broken links and correct html. You can try navigating your own site by clicking every link you have to make sure everything is working perfectly.
• Make sure that your TITLE tags and ALT attributes on your images are descriptive and accurate.
• Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).
• Make pages intended for users and not for search engines.

When you think you have followed these guidelines, you can now submit your site to major search engines and directories. After that, optimization starts. And that’s what we are going to discuss in my next article.