There is nothing worse than having a beautiful web site with excellent written content, though you still lose traffic or you even keep potential visitors away, while your site cannot be found.
Before you begin optimizing your pages for Search Engines, consider that the following search engine optimization techniques are SPAM!
* automatically generated doorway pages;
* cloaking and false redirects;
* keyword stuffing;
* hidden text or hidden links;
* pages loaded with irrelevant words;
* duplicated content on multiple pages;
* misspelling of well-known web sites;
* unrelated and centralized link farms;
* other methods that try to trick search engines.
If you use one of the above techniques, you might get short term results, but it’s most likely that your site will be banned from search engines, and therefore you will put your business at severe risk.
If site is less then six months old stop reading now. Site is too new to be worrying about getting all of your pages indexed. Be patient. It takes time to crawl through your whole website and add pages to the index. If pages are search engine friendly then you have nothing to worry about.
If your site is six months old or older need to check website to make sure all of pages can be found and indexed. Have:
1) Made a human sitemap?
2) Made a Google or Yahoo sitemap?
3) Used search engine friendly URLs?
4) Used search engine friendly navigation?
An additional note: get incoming links. These are important for the search engines’ algorithms and may play an important part in how deep the search engines will crawl website.
Do it by hand. It will not take long to do and will ensure that you are successful in submitting each form with the correct information. There is a constant debate about how search engines feel about automated submission software. Since there is a reasonable chance these are frowned upon by the search engines, and since you can do anything they can do on your own, you might as well avoid them.
This is another common myth that is untrue. The only time a domain extension can affect your ranking is if the search is based by country. The country-specific TLDs (e.g. .co.uk) will have priority over non-country specific TLDs (e.g. .com or .net).
One observation many make is that .coms tend to rank higher then other domain extensions. They assume it is because .coms are given preferential treatment. This is a poor assumption. .coms seem to rank higher then other extensions because they are by for more popular then any other domain extension (there are more .coms than .net, .org, .biz, .edu, .gov, and .info combined) so they naturally have a greater chance of ranking higher vs other domain extensions through sheer quantity alone. .coms also tend to be older sites so they have had a chance to establish themselves whereas newer domain extensions have not. They have also used this time to acquire more backlinks which is an important factor in search engine algorithms.
It is also commonly believed that .gov and .edu sites are given preferential treatment from search engines. This is also untrue. Web pages on .edu and .gov domains tend to rank well because they contain quality content and many webmasters will link to their content as a result. Both of these are key elements in SEO. But the fact that they are .edu or .gov domains does not benefit them directly in the SERPs.
“Fighting for a #1 position often unwittingly wins you other prizes along the way.” Though your assumptions we’re equally correct, my actual intention for this was in reference to longtail keywords. If you’re shooting for the #1 most popular keyword, you often pick up less significant longtail keyword searches along the way (if your content is diverse and of quality.)
Also, as far as forum signatures and blog posting, I still believe this is a valid way of driving traffic as well as increasing exposure to fellow relevant webmasters, but this is only so if you contribute quality info. When SEO’s spam with poor quality information purely to advertise, they’re likely to be deleted. Also, most of these areas are set up to not allow link juice to pass from your link. Therefore, it’s only worth the traffic, and that only comes from good content.
Before you begin optimizing your pages for Search Engines, consider that the following search engine optimization techniques are SPAM!