Thursday, May 20, 2010

How To Use Domain Names, URLs for Mastering SEO

Knowing the basic techniques for Search Engine Optimization is important, however, there is so much more than the obvious and direct. That's why it's important to hire a professional SEO Consultant, as there is much more to SEO than many people think. It's important that you optimize your entire website, down to the URL and domain name, as well as the smallest details in order to get the highest rating and most traffic.


Of course a website that is not accessible or has pages that are not accessible will not get a very good ranking. A website can become inaccessible if it has broken links or has areas that have password protection, or any number of other issues that can cause this problem. This makes the website impossible to index by web crawlers. Along with inaccessibility comes downtime. This is when the hosting of your website isn't reliable and is often down. As web crawlers come to your website once every one or two months, and visit when the website is down, then it cannot be indexed and your rank will either drop or website disappear altogether. An unreliable provider will have no less than 2-3% downtime.


A sitemap is a page that simply shows the structure of your entire website. It includes a link to each webpage as well as any outside links. It's well organized to make it easier for searchers to quickly find what they need. Another reason that a website would be necessary is because web crawlers love them, they help them with the indexing and flowing through the different pages of your website, hence, improving your ranking. By having a large website you can also attract more information. The bigger the website the more the web crawlers like it. However, it's not always the same with the searchers. Some large websites are very difficult to navigate through and you can easily get lost and disoriented in the website. Sometimes it's better to break one very large website into a couple of smaller websites. You just have to weigh out the importance of keeping searchers interest when they finally reach your website and the importance of being higher on the ranking. Plus, you can always compensate the ranking with something else.


Many rankings are based on the age of a website. This is basically due to the belief that if a website has been around for a longer time, it is trusted and more reliable. An old website has more of a chance to stay online much longer due to its track record, while a newer website may close quickly, depending on who is running it. It's just not as reliable. Another way to keep the attention of web crawlers is through a theme. It's a great way to improve your ranking. By having a whole website with the same theme all of the web pages will get a boost in rank.


Domain names also play a major role in a website. Keep in mind that it's much better to have a separate domain name rather than a sub domain. If your website has a sub domain, register a separate one. This will make it easier for web crawlers to find and index your website. The type of domain name is also important as there are different levels. The best of course to have is the .edu, .org, or .gov domain names. They attract the most attention. Next are the .com and .net, and lastly the .ws, .biz. and .info among others.


The way you structure your websites URL also make a difference in the ranking of a website. By using hyphens in between words in the URL the website becomes more readable. This is important both in the domain name as well as the rest of the URL. Having a readable website mans higher rankings. The length of the URL plays a role as well. It's not as important however, having too long of a URL looks suspicious and may be written off as spam. A good rule of thumb is no more than 10 words total. Approximately no more than 3-4 words for the domain and 6-7 words for the rest of the URL in order to keep it within reason.


Dynamic URL's are basically when a page is only a template, which brings up different type of information depending on what the searcher clicked or wrote within the webpage. It's basically database driven and runs a script. These are not really good because the URL itself is really long, it's especially bad if it's over 100 characters. It's best to have a Static URL which is basically a simple webpage, the contents stay the same, and therefore the URL is always the same. There are tools that you can use to rewrite a dynamic URL to be more appealing to both humans and web crawlers.


A session ID is created to track visitors in a website. It is given to everyone that goes into the website. However, one cannot be given to a web crawler, making the website impossible to index. So, if plan on getting your website ranked, do not add session ID's to them. Another way to avoid getting a low ranking if any at all is by not putting roots.txt bans. These bans are used to ban bots for certain parts of a website. These bots include spam bots that search for emails as well as other bots that can harm your website as well as gather personal information. However, unfortunately it also protects your website from web crawlers that are also considered bots. This means that parts of your website won't get indexed, this becomes an issue because if a part of a website is banned for a web crawler it visits the website less and less.


Redirects are web pages that when you click on the link you are automatically redirected to another website or webpage. There are several issues with this, one being that it's possible that the redirect page doesn't work, however, the biggest problem is that it looks like cloaking, which is a black hat technique. This can get your ranking lowered and possibly removed off of the search engine.


Unless you are well educated in the building of websites and how they work it's not best to take Search Engine Optimization into your own hands, instead hire an SEO Consultant. There are many things that you need to think about when making your website and many of them involve technical aspects that are difficult for someone untrained in this field. Review the different points of your website to determine which needs to be changed if necessary.

This is an article written by Aya Wilkinson.If you wish to know more about her activity as SEO Company feel free to contact Aya Wilkinson. She has handsome exposure on operations and management of the SEO Professionals

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