A Blog on Search Engine Optimization
March 21, 2013
March 15, 2013
What is Favicon ?
Favicons or ‘Favourite Icons’ are tiny 16×16 or 32×32 pixel square logos/ icons that appears to the left of the browser’s address bar. They can be static or animated. It is also known as page icon or url icon.
It can be displayed in the number of different places depending on the browser type. Browsers that support favicons may display them in the:
XML Sitemap instructs search engines about the page structure of your site. There are pages that may not be discoverable by search engines crawling process so building and submission of XML sitemap ensures that all site pages crawled and indexed by search engines. Also, new and updated pages get indexed more quickly.
A sitemap also ensures that the search engines can find pages it wouldn’t otherwise index. Flash pages, for example, are notoriously difficult to get indexed on search engines, with their content not easy to be found by spiders. By giving a sitemap you show the search engine where and what is contained on those pages.
The navigation system of a website is one of the fundamentals of professional and effective search engine optimization. You have to remember to have separate pages for different ideas; do not put multiple ideas all in one place. Proper navigation menu makes your site easy to browse and will contribute for a better user experience.
Properly planned website navigation & structure enable search engine spiders to properly crawl sites and index them and it also improves web usability.
With this, the following is recommended:
What is URL Rewriting?
URL Rewriting, also called URl manipulation is a process of altering the parameters of URL to make it more search engine friendly and easier for users to read and understand.
The URL manipulation redirects the request so the user does not have to remember, manually enter, or meticulously cut and paste a long, arcane character string.
For Example:
Example 1:
Whenever a site is created, number of pages like contact form, about, services.. also get created. Let’s say name given to those pages are:
http://www.yourdomain.com/page1.html
http://www.yourdomain.com/page2.html
http://www.yourdomain.com/page3.html
By above names, it is difficult to understand the information provided by these pages. With URL rewriting, you can redirect page 1 to http://www.yourdomain.com/aboutus.html, page2 to http://www.yourdomain.com/services.html and page3 to http://www.yourdomain.com/contactus.html. Now this will be more easy to understand by search engines.
The navigation system of a website is one of the fundamentals of professional and effective search engine optimization. You have to remember to have separate pages for different ideas; do not put multiple ideas all in one place. Proper navigation menu makes your site easy to browse and will contribute for a better user experience.
Properly planned website navigation & structure enable search engine spiders to properly crawl sites and index them and it also improves web usability.
With this, the following is recommended:
Choosing the most relevant keywords in your URLs can be an important part of your Search Engine Optimization strategy. This is because search engine crawlers will read the keywords that you have included in the URL to decide if the content is relevant to search terms. The location of the keywords in the URL can influence the performance of your site in the search engine rankings.
For example
Use http://www.superseo.com/seo-techniques/
instead of
http://www.superseo.com/?P=1232
Keywords in URLs give readers an idea on what the page is all about by merely looking at it. SEO experts agree that it is more search engine and user friendly than a URL having just a series of characters, symbols, numbers, etc.
When you submit a query to search engine such as Google, you get a very large list of websites which provide information related to your query but you ever wonder how this list get collected by search engines. To find information on the hundreds of millions of Web pages that exist, a search engine employs automated script/program that crawls through the web and collect data from websites and anything else on the internet. This automated script/ program is called Robot, spider or crawler.
Usually search engine try to search all pages from websites but some websites contain few pages which are not required to index by search engines. If you do not want to index any page or directory than it should be specified to search engines. This can be done by two ways:
1. Robot Meta Tag
2. Robots.txt file
Robot Meta Tag
HTML <META> tag tell robots not to index the content of a page, and/or not scan it for links to follow.
For example:
Canonical URL is the search engine friendly URL that you want the search engines to treat as authorative. In other words you can say it is the URL which you want visitors to view.
If your site has identical or vastly similar content that’s accessible through multiple URLs, specifying them will provide you more control over the URL returned in search results. It also helps to make sure that properties such as link popularity are consolidated to your preferred version.
It is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages.
For example, most people would consider these the same urls:
Every image you add must be optimized both for search engine spider and users. Search Engine spiders can only read text but not images. So you need to use some special tags for your images in order to give them some meaning. To do that you have to apply the following:
While surfing on net you may some time encounter Error 404. It can be in any of the following form:
404 Not Found error messages can appear in any browser and in any operating system. Most 404 Not Found errors display inside the Internet browser window just as other web pages do.
Cause of 404 Error Message
The Error 404 “Page not found” is the error page displayed whenever – someone asks for a page that’s simply not available on your site. The reason for this is that there may be a link on your site that was wrong or the page might have been recently removed from the site. As there is no web page to display, the web server sends a page that simply says “404 Page not found”.
