* Find it. Every page of your website has an address, or URL. When possible, keep the address short and clean–without equal signs, punctuation characters or underscores–and use detailed keywords that are relevant to the page. So example.com/buy-blue-hats-on-sale is better than example.com/cgi-bin/gen.pl?id=4&view=blue_hats_are_on_sale

* Flatten it. All pages need to link to one another–but you want to keep things as “flat” as possible, meaning that each page can be accessed with only one or two mouse clicks.

* Name it. You might overlook the title bar atop each browser window, but search engines don’t. Give each page a concise, unique, keyword-driven title. If you sell knit beanies, don’t title your page “Keep your head warm.”

* Explain it. In the description field, enter a few sentences about the content of that page. Think of it as the text in a catalog. What makes your blue beanies special? Are they alpaca wool?

* Map it. Your customers would really love to have a map to all the boxes in your store, called an XML site map. Don’t know XML from an X-Box? No worries. There are plenty of software programs that can do the job.

* Tag it. You’d be confused if this article didn’t have a headline, right? Without an h1 heading tag on each page of your website, search engine crawlers have trouble understanding content, too.

The Optimal Optimizer So you’ve decided you really don’t want to do your own SEO. Fine. Hire a consultant. But here are five questions to ask before you sign a contract–or a check.

1. “Do you have any references?” Get names, numbers and examples of past work. And actually check them.

2. “What results can I reasonably expect and how long will they take?” Demand a detailed game plan and don’t accept vague answers. Shut the door on anyone who promises the No. 1 spot for a certain keyword or claims to “know a guy at Google.” They’re lying.

3. “What is your experience in my industry?” You wouldn’t expect a barber to know how to fill a cavity. So why would you expect an SEO team that has worked only with nonprofit science foundations to understand your fashion boutique?

4. “What techniques will you use to achieve my goals?” Listen for warning signs of “black hat” tactics. As a trick question, find out if your potential “expert” spends a lot of time working with keyword meta tags. If so, you know this isn’t the right person for the job.

5. “How often will we communicate and by what means?” If you expect instant responses to 3 a.m. e-mails, make sure your consultant isn’t a monthly conference-call kind of guy.

1. Submitting a XML sitemap to search engines. The xml sitemap includes links to every page of your website. It is a file that you can submit to search engines to get your pages indexed. By submitting your xml sitemap, you will notify the search engines about your website and index every page of it. You can upload your sitemap to Google by creating a free Google Webmaster account.

2. Create a HTML sitemap page on your website. A HTML sitemap is very different from a xml sitemap file. A HTML sitemap is a page on your website that is visible to your visitors. It will list down all the links to every page of your site. This allows visitors to navigate your site easily and allow search engine spiders to follow the links and discover all pages.

3. Place HTML text links on your website. Search engine spiders follow HTML text links to discover other pages of your website. Therefore, you must ensure that you use HTML text links for simple navigation menu so that search engine spiders can follow. Also, you should hyperlink keywords within your content and point them to other pages of your site. This is a good way to tell search engines what pages are important.

4. Directory submission. Submit your website URL to a list of SEO-friendly directories. DMOZ, Yahoo Directory and BOTW are important directories that you must submit your website to. It is, however, not all directory submission is free. Some may require you to pay a small fee for your website submission.

5. Article marketing. Write articles and place your website URL in the Author Resource Box. Then submit your articles to a few popular article directories. Once your articles are approved and published, your URL will be live online and this allows search engine spiders to follow the link to discover your website.

6. Using social websites. Social media sites are generally indexed regularly by search engines. So by placing your website URL on social sites, search engines spiders can discover your URL very quickly and index your new website.

Before a website can rank high and get organic search engine traffic, it needs to be indexed first. Search engine spiders are looking for new websites and pages every day. By getting a link on sites that get indexed regularly, it will ensure that your new website get indexed quickly.

About the author
Cheow Yu Yuan is the co-founder of OOm, that specializes in SEO Singapore services.

It is also important to think in terms of how your target audience would search for products or services on the Internet. For instance, if you have a website promoting a golf club, then it would not make much sense for you to target keywords like “golf” or “golfing” because these keywords are extremely general and have tons of competitors. Also, since you are targeting only people who are looking out for a golf club, using a general keyword like “golf” will bring in a lot of irrelevant traffic. This is because visitors may be looking for anything related to golf, such as golf history, golf bags, golf ball, golf shoes and so on. Typically a person who is looking out for a golf club will type in “golf club” and related terms instead of the single term “golf.” So from this example it is evident that the best choice of keywords for you would be to use phrases like “golf club” instead of single and general keywords.

Check out your competition for ideas. Do a search on 3 search engines (yahoo – Google – MSN) and check review some of the sites. Only use keyword that relate to your site . You should develop a list of keyword phrases for the home page, later on and over time each page of your web sites could be optimized for the search engines.

As a matter of fact, from the beginning  it is impossible in every search engine to rank well in the natural results for such a singular keyword as “lamp”. In a nutshell, if you want to rank well in Google, you need to build inbound links or incoming links to your website with your targeted keywords in the links.
But, you don’t want to put all of your links together with one keyword phrase. One of Google’s red flags is when they notice a link to a particular website appearing more than 60% of the time with one specific keyword phrase.

Utilizing a variety of long-tail keywords will actually serve you better in the search-engine ranking puzzle, in more ways than one. After all, when I do a search for blogging tips, I don’t type in the search word “lamp”. I type in search phrases like: “desk lamp”, “low voltage halogen lamp“, or “

People searching the keyword “lamp” have yet to figure out that they are looking for specific kinds of  lamp. Once they do an initial search, they are going to type in more specific search terms to find what they actually want. So, once you start targeting a variety of long-tail keyword phrases, then you will start seeing more success in your search engine marketing efforts.

A complete solution on how to exchange links? in step by step method for beginners.

Use text links, avoid image links.

Anyhow, if you have used image links, then always make sure to put your keywords in the alt tags.

Put your prime keywords in text links and always insure to put a short descriptions of your website/page in minimum of 20-30 words or more if allowed.

In text links if you are not allowed to add descriptions then always try to put a short descriptions in title tag. E.g.:hover your mouse over the text Link Exchange Tips, No Tricks

Avoid repetition of keywords, repetition will lead to low rankings.

Always try to exchange links from related websites (e.g. if you have a football league website, then a link from other sports websites will be known as related website links)

Never, exchange links with unrelated websites/pages.

Always ensure that the website that you are exchanging links with, is well optimized and has a good content.

Never try to exchange links in quick sessions. Since search engines ignores or does not index those sites who gets bundles of links in quick time.

Give your link exchange works few hours every day, to ensure that you get limited but quality links.

Mainly for new websites, avoid exchanging bundles of links in quick sessions.

Avoid creating a link/links.html file, since search-engines do not index link/links.html files, often.

Always make a ‘resources’ (any appropriate name) folder and create an index.html file for that named folder and create appropriate html files for appropriate links going into them. (a sort of web-directory)

Never, never exchange links with pages bearing more than 50 back-links. Generally 25 is appropriate and should not be more than two clicks away from the index/main page.

Always ensure yourself that the page/website you are exchanging link is being indexed by the search engines or not.

Also ensure on your own that the page/website you are exchanging link with, is not being blocked by any scripts, or disallowed by robots.txt, or disallowed by using noindex, nofollow on html page.

Avoid linking to those tricky and false websites, and if possible inform already linked websites about the matter and ask them for link-exchange, if related to your websites.

Links from the main/index page of the related website is the most quality link that a website can get. But, never try to place more than 20 back-links in index/main page.

Exchanging links with your competitor’s back linking website/pages are also the quality links that a website can get.

Never post your website links to FFA, Guestbook, or other unrelated areas. Since search-engines completely ignores such links and may penalize your website.

Site bearing good Google page rank are appropriate for link-exchange. Generally 4+ Google page rank is great for link-exchange.

Exchanging links with old website is excellent.

Link exchanging with new websites, with decent Google ranking at first, but bears quality contents and is well optimized, is also an excellent option for exchanging-links, since new websites bears less outgoing links than the old websites.

While exchanging links for homepage of your website, also try to exchange links for sub-pages of it, for better ranking for that particular sub-page.

Personal verification of the linking partner’s website is recommended.

Check for total incoming and outgoing links for whole website or for particular sub-pages of your linking partner’s website and off course of your own before getting link exchanged.