Basic Web Site Tuning
Let's See Some Fact : Some of you must have wondering why we are so curious of getting your site listed on Google. It is simply because Google is the world largest and most popular search engines (54.7% of the total global usage share) and Google gained nearly four million unique audience members in a month - read detail report at onestat.com and nua.com . Further more Google's search result is widely used by other search engines too like Yahoo, AOL, Netscape, AskJeeves, Infospace, Excite, Dogpile, WebCrawler, Metacrawler and many others. This simply means that if your site is listed by Google and assuming that it is highly ranked, then you can expect your site ranking in other search engines will also be relatively high.
Now What ? After seeing the power of Google, now let's pay serious respect to it's guideline on site submission. Read it carefully, follow to it strictly or you are out side the door. Because this is not search engine ranking service, we are not going to discuss about how to optimize your web page content, how to find the most popular keywords, how to increase link popularity and so on in order to achieve high position on Google or any other search engines. We will touch on just the basic things to do before submitting to any search engines to prevent reject.
Basic Site Tuning : This is nothing new and nothing secret. You can even do it yourself (a little html knowledge is required) or your web designer had done it for you. Basic Site Tuning is to make minor adjustment to the web page so that it is readable by search spider and appears more presentable. These are a few basic things to carry out :
Web Page Title.
Web Page Meta Description.
Web Page Alt tags.
Broken links on your page.
HTML coding mistake.
Spelling mistake.
Page Title : Page title is an important part in submission and yet people tends to submit a page titled "ABCXYZ Company". Page with the company name doesn't tell user nor search engines anything about the page content. A good page title will be the short summary of the product/services described in the page content with some important keywords included. Make it not more than 60 characters. If you have an especially important keyword that customers would use to find you, make sure it appears in the title. DO NOT add promotional language in title, it is just a waste of time and effort to raise your search ranking.
Page Description : By default, page description will be the description that appears on search listing in most of the search engines. It should include as many important keywords as found in the page title as possible and try to make it within 25 words in one sentence or two. One full stop or comma will be counted as one word. Again DO NOT use promotional language like "the best , the world no.1...". Keywords selection will not be done here. It will be covered in Web Site Optimization.
Alt Tags : According to W3C standard for html web page, every image should have an Alt tag to describe what it is. Forget about W3C, this is also a good practice in the sense that before the image being displayed in the web browser (large image loads slower), the text contains in these Alt tags will be shown first to user describing what it is. In case where the image file not found, at least user know what you are trying to publish here. For search engines purpose, some search engines will still recognize the Alt text and read the text contain in the Alt tag as keyword. This will increase your keywords density in your page.
Broken Links : Broken links are bad hyperlinks with destination not found. When user click on it, "Page not found" will be displayed. Search engines hate broken links the most and once found, you will be removed or cannot be listed at all. Do not publish yet if your site is still under construction.
HTML coding : A standard html coding will ensure readability by all the search spiders. A typical mistake made by most people is the use of valign="center" instead of "middle" in the <TD> tag when centering text vertically. Readability in different web browsers or in various version of web browsers will not be checked in this Basic Site Tuning. It will be covered in Web Site Optimization.
Spelling Mistake : Spelling mistakes will make your web site looks not professional and not standard. Search engines today do not want to include a non-professional web site which will spoilt their image and waste their resources.