Today, search engines play a very important role in getting traffic for a website. Even big sites like Amazon and ebay are trying to improve their search engine placement by working on their internal site structure and pages.

A case in point that shows how important search engine rankings are for bigger sites is ebay. WayBackmachine shows that the title of Ebay’s front page in Jan 2001 was “eBay - Your Personal Trading Community”. Compare this with today’s title that incorporates their primary keywords - “eBay - New & used electronics, cars, apparel, collectibles, sporting goods & more at low prices”.

Further, the ebay product pages are now all without querystrings (i.e. - all the pages have their URL rewritten thus enhancing spideribility).

There are a few very simple things that can be done to improve your search engine placement -

1 - Make sure you have unique titles on every page. The title should be crisp but should contain your keyword.

2 - Have a short meta description in place. Again this concise description should contain your keyword.

3 - Its best to use text links to link all your pages. If you have a flash or JavaScript navigation panel, try to link those pages using text links that can be placed at the bottom of your page.

4 - Write unique content. Spiders like to see unique content that offers information about your products and services.

5 - Upload pages close to the root directory. A simple site structure with pages close to the root (www.domain.com/directory/, www.domain.com/directory2/) enhances chances of getting spidered quickly.

6 - Get links from similar sites and link to sites that will offer value to your users

7 - Submit to DMoz and other major directories

Though just doing the above will not help you get search engine placements for really competitive keywords, they are steps essential for every site and would give you a good advantage over other sites right from the day your site is launched.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 7th, 2006 at 6:52 pm and is filed under Search Engine Optimization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.