Search Engine Optimization Basic Tips

I write this note for those who want to know basic about Search engine optimization and want his site get indexed and listed in the major search engines. Here i discuss the most importance areas to get any website properly indexed by the search engines. The areas that we need to going through are the

1.Title Tag
2.Meta (Description and Keywords) Tags 
3.Body text: a brief description of what you should write in the body text of your main (index) page.

This is just a very brief description, but it will nonetheless be very useful to the novice web designer to get a better understanding of the basics on how to get your website indexed and listed at the major search engines.
Below you can see  HTML code of a basic website. After This code I will give a brief description of each code tag you see.

<HTML>
<HEAD>
<title>Enter your Title here</title>
<meta name="keywords" content="Enter your key words here">
<meta name="description" content="Enter your description here">
</HEAD>
<BODY>
Enter your page's body text here
</BODY>
</HTML>

<title> Tag :
The first thing you need to do is identify the keyword phrases that are relevant to your company, products and services. When you have decided on your "keyword phrases" you need to put them in your page's <title> tag. 
The title tag is definitely the most important tag in the header section of your web page. The title tag is displayed in the blue bar at the top of your browser window (SEO - Basic search engine tips - How to get indexed and listed at search engines). The title tag is a one-liner describing your business, and it includes the most important keywords. The search engines place a lot of relevance on the words contained 
within the title tag, so be sure to include your targeted keyword phrases.
The title tag should not exceed 60 characters.

<META> Tags :
META tags are basically composed of the
description 
<meta name="description" content="Enter your description here">
 and keyword 
<meta name="keywords" content="Enter your key words here"> tags.

Description:
The description tag is used to describe your web page / business. Some search engines will use this 
information to summarize your website in their search listings. It's again of utmost importance that you also include your keyword phrases in the description tag.

* The description tag should provide a 25-30 word description of your website.
Keywords:
 The keyword tag should of course include the "keyword phrases" that you are targeting in order of 
importance. Start with the most important and then proceed to less important but still relevant keywords. 
Do not include keywords that are not relevant to the theme of your site.
*  Do not repeat any word more than 3 times within the keyword tag.

<Body> Tag :
In the body tag section of your website, you should describe and explain the nature of your business, products, scope of the website, etc. You should generally include around 500-600 words in this area. Make 
sure to repeat your "keyword phrases" a few times so that search engines will consider these to be very 
important and relevant to your website. For nearly all search engines content is still king, and having lots of quality content will help you to increase your ranking with the major search engines.
After completing your site you have one last job to do. That is :
* Submission to Search engines
* and Submission to Directories.

SUBMITTING TO THE SEARCH ENGINES :
Once your web page is fully optimized, it is time to submit it to the major search engines. Although there are hundreds of search engines on the Internet such as Google, MSN, Yahoo, USFreeAds, OPN, BusinessSeek, Searchwarp, Searchsight, National Directory, Quango, Homerweb, HiddenStreet, killerInfo, SearchIt, AdlandPro and many more., only a handful are truly important.

I know there must be a question arise in evry novice person how can i and where can I add my site url ? 
Don’t worry Here I give you top three search engines add url link.
Google (Add URL)
Yahoo! (Add URL)
BING(msn of old) (Add URL) 

It's recommended that you submit your website to the search engines manually instead of using any automated submission tool, because some search engines regard those as spam, and won't list your site. Keep in mind that it can take months before you get listed, so be patient.

SUBMITTING TO DIRECTORIES :
Search engines need a starting point. That's why human edited directories are important to be listed in. 

There are couple of major web directories at this moment:
       DMOZ - Free listings.
       The Yahoo directory  - Free listings for non-commercial sites. 

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How to do Keyword Research ?

Keyword research is one of the vitally important aspect of your search engine optimization campaign. If you target wrong keyword, the search engines and your customers may never find you and also you don’t get a good rank Without good rank you cannot do good business by your website. To do that you need to spend much time to select keyword. Here i try to give you some advice and usefull keyword research tools link. Hope this will help you.
The initial idea of keyword research can be daunting. Trying to come up with the perfect combination of words to drive customers to your site, rev up your conversion rate and allow the engines to see you as an expert would easily give anyone a tension headache.

The trick is to start slowly.

The first step in this process is to create a list of potential keywords. Brainstorm all the words you think a customer would type into their search box when trying to find you. This includes thinking of phrases that are broad and targeted, buying and research-oriented, and single and multi-word. What is your site hoping to do or promote? Come up with enough words to cover all the services your site offers. Avoid overly generic terms like 'shoes' or 'clothes'. These words are incredibly difficult to rank for and won't drive qualified traffic to your site. Focus on words that are relevant, but not overly used.

If you need help brainstorming ideas, ask friends, colleagues or past customers for help. Sometimes they are able to see your site differently than the way you yourself see it. Also, don't be afraid to take a peek at your competitor's Meta Keyword tag. What words are they targeting? How can you expand on their keyword list to make yours better? It's okay to get a little sneaky here. All's fair in love and search engine rankings.

After selecting keywords your next step is to determine the activity for each of your proposed keywords. You want to narrow your list to only include highly attainable, sought-after phrases that will bring the most qualified traffic to your site.

In the early days of SEO, measuring the "popularity" of your search terms was done by performing a search for that phrase in one of the various engines and seeing how many results it turned up. As you can imagine, this was a tedious and ineffective method of keyword research. Luckily, times have changes and we now have tools to do the hard part for us.
By inputting your proposed keywords into a keyword research tool, you can quickly learn how many users are conducting searches for that term every day, how many of those searches actually converted, and other important analytical information. It may also tune you in to words you had previously forgotten or synonyms you weren't aware of.

There are lots of great tools out there to help you determine how much activity your keywords are receiving. Here's a few of my personal favorites:

Google AdWords Keyword Tool : Google's keyword PPC tool doesn't provide actual search numbers for keywords. Instead, it displays a colored bar, giving users only an approximation. Still, it may be useful.

Check Traffic tool : This tool will produce an estimate of daily search activity for a specific keyword phrase on the internet across the major search engines. This is only an estimate, and on a daily basis your mileage may vary.

Wordtracker :  Wordtracker's leading-edge research tool gives you the keywords you need to rise above your competitors in search engine rankings. Even better, we also show you how keyword research can help you discover untapped market niches, get inspiration for new products, & create compelling content that distinguishes your site from the pack.

Trellian Keyword Discovery tool :  Keyword Discovery compiles keyword search statistics from all the major search engines world wide, to create the most powerful Keyword Research tool.

http://www.keywordspy.com :  FREE SEO & PPC Keyword Research software tool, that unveil your competitors’ most profitable Ad copies & keywords. Learn from time-tested Ad campaigns.


Apogee-web-consulting :  FREE  KEYWORD  RESEARCH TOOL
After tested your keywords it's time to narrow down the field and decide which terms will make it into your coveted final keyword list.

I recommend creating a spreadsheet or some other visual that will allow you to easily see each word's conversion rate, search volume and competition rate (as given to you by the tools mentioned above). These three figures will allow you to calculate how viable that term is for your site and will be a great aid as you try and narrow down your focus.

The first step in narrowing down your list is to go through and highlight the terms that most closely target the subject and theme of your web site. These are the terms you want to hold on to. Kill all words that are not relevant to your site or that you don't have sufficient content to support (unless you're willing to write some). You can't optimize for words that you don't have content for.

Create a mix of both broad and targeted keywords. You'll need both to rank well. Broad terms are important because they describe what your web site does; however, they won't increase the level of qualified traffic coming into your site.

After made up your highly focused keywords, now what do you do with them? You prepare them for launch! Chances are, if you did your keyword research right, at least some of the words on your list already appear in your site content, but some of them may not. Start thinking about how many pages you'll need to create to support these new words, and how and where your keyword phrases will be used. I typically recommend only going after three or four related keywords per page (five if you can balance them properly). Any more than that and you run the risk of diluting your page to the point where you rank for nothing. Make sure to naturally work the keywords into your content and avoid over-repetition that may be interpreted as spamming. Your content should never sound forced.

Your on-page content isn't the only place where you can insert keywords. Keywords should also be used in several other elements on your site:
•    Title Tag 
•    Meta Description Tags 
•    Meta Keywords Tag 
•    Headings 
•    Alt text 
•    Anchor Text/ Navigational Links

You've spent a lot of time molding your keywords; make sure you use them in all the appropriate fields to get the maximum benefit.
Congratulations. Your initial keyword research process is behind you. You've created your list, checked it twice, made friends with the keyword research tools and are now off to go plan your attack. You're done, right?

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what is robots.txt ? and how to Create robots.txt" file !

Introduction to "robots.txt" :
There is a hidden, relentless force that permeates the web and its billions of web pages and files, unbeknownst to the majority of us sentient beings. I'm talking about search engine crawlers and robots here. Every day hundreds of them go out and scour the web, whether it's Google trying to index the entire web, or a spam bot collecting any email address it could find for less than honorable intentions. As site owners, what little control we have over what robots are allowed to do when they visit our sites exist in a magical little file called "robots.txt."

"Robots.txt" is a regular text file that through its name, has special meaning to the majority of "honorable" robots on the web. By defining a few rules in this text file, you can instruct robots to not crawl and index certain files, directories within your site, or at all. For example, you may not want Google to crawl the /images directory of your site, as it's both meaningless to you and a waste of your site's bandwidth. "Robots.txt" lets you tell Google just that.
Creating your "robots.txt" file :
So lets get moving. Create a regular text file called "robots.txt", and make sure it's named exactly that. This file must be uploaded to the root accessible directory of your site, not a subdirectory (ie: http://www.mysite.com but NOT http://www.mysite.com/stuff/). It is only by following the above two rules will search engines interpret the instructions contained in the file. Deviate from this, and "robots.txt" becomes nothing more than a regular text file, like Cinderella after midnight.
Now that you know what to name your text file and where to upload it, you need to learn what to actually put in it to send commands off to search engines that follow this protocol (formally the "Robots Exclusion Protocol"). The format is simple enough for most intents and purposes: a USERAGENT line to identify the crawler in question followed by one or more DISALLOW: lines to disallow it from crawling certain parts of your site.

1) Here's a basic "robots.txt":

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

With the above declared, all robots (indicated by "*") are instructed to not index any of your pages (indicated by "/"). Most likely not what you want, but you get the idea.

2) Lets get a little more discriminatory now. While every webmaster loves Google, you may not want Google's Image bot crawling your site's images and making them searchable online, if just to save bandwidth. The below declaration will do the trick:
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /

3) The following disallows all search engines and robots from crawling select directories and pages:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /cgi-bin/

Disallow: /privatedir/

Disallow: /tutorials/blank.htm

4) You can conditionally target multiple robots in "robots.txt." Take a look at the below:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

User-agent: Googlebot

Disallow: /cgi-bin/

Disallow: /privatedir/

This is interesting- here we declare that crawlers in general should not crawl any parts of our site, EXCEPT for Google, which is allowed to crawl the entire site apart from /cgi-bin/ and /privatedir/. So the rules of specificity apply, not inheritance.

5) There is a way to use Disallow: to essentially turn it into "Allow all", and that is by not entering a value after the semicolon(:):
                                      User-agent: *
                                      Disallow: /
                                      User-agent: ia_archiver
                                      Disallow:
Here I'm saying all crawlers should be prohibited from crawling our site, except for Alexa, which is allowed.

6) Finally, some crawlers now support an additional field called "Allow:", most notably, Google. As its name implies, "Allow:" lets you explicitly dictate what files/folders can be crawled. However, this field is currently not part of the "robots.txt" protocol, so my recommendation is to use it only if absolutely needed, as it might confuse some less intelligent crawlers.

Per Google's FAQs for webmasters, the below is the preferred way to disallow all crawlers from your site EXCEPT Google:
                               User-agent: *
                               Disallow: /
                               User-agent: Googlebot
                               Allow: /

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