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Fix and Clean Your Website

Welcome to my guide on how to fix and clean your website, especially for free search engine traffic. Here, I give a range of tips which webmasters can implement on their websites. This page assumes you already know a bit about HTML and how websites operate.

Make your website useful for your visitors. Have lots of text information and follow basic writing structure, i.e. introduction and body. Quality content is a website's greatest weapon.

Use proper HTML structure. Make sure your <title> tags are relevant and it is recommended you have <H1> tags. It can also be useful to use the meta description tag and the meta keywords tag, but these aren't as important as they used to be. For example, when you search a term in Google it doesn't display your description META tag, instead it displays a blob of text relevant to the search term.

Make sure you have good keywords on your pages which are relevant to your page. Think about how someone would find your page if they're searching on Google. To check whether one keyword combination is more popular than another (e.g. "how to create a website" compared to "creating a website") you can use Google's keyword tool. You should also place keywords in hyperlinks, e.g. "click here to learn how to clean and fix your website" instead of "click here to see the page".

Do not put too many links on your pages. This will simply be confusing to your visitors and it may deter search engine spiders. This is of course, unless the particular page is a links page. But nevertheless, links pages tend to be poorly rated in search engines.

Make use of robots.txt. They allow you to prevent the search engines spiders crawling your "search results" pages because it's of no interest to your visitors.

Don't use pictures to promote links and content. Search engines cannot read images. For example, if you have a small paragraph inside an image on your website, the information is completely useless.

Many webpage designers like to use fancy Flash effects and JavaScript. It's best to avoid these because normally there isn't any useful information on it, it slows down the loading time for visitors and search engines generally can't see it. Use simple text on your website with clean HTML. You should also avoid frames because search engines takes specific frame pages as individual pages. To see how a search engine crawler would see your site, you can download the Lynx text browser.

Every webpage in your website must be linked to by at least one text link. This makes sure that there are no "hanging" pages, which cannot be reached from your website's homepage.

Keep your website honest and do not do sneaky things. This is common sense. For example, do not register a website like www.gooogle.com, clearly expecting traffic from the misspelling of Google. Don't use "cloaking", which means showing a different version of the same page to the search engines and to your visitors.

Put a html sitemap on your website. This will allow visitors to easily navigate your site and be able to view all your pages instead of going around in a maze. Click here to read my guide on creating sitemaps. Click here to see GeniusProphecy's sitemap.

Make sure your webpages have simple URL paths. Dynamic pages with session IDs are a good example of what you should not do. For example, you want an address like http://www.geniusprophecy.com/traffic-tips.html instead of http://www.geniusprophecy.com/traffic-tips.html;jsessionid:2DFG5FDX5GDF5VD5FXV51 or http://www.geniusprophecy.com/traffic-tips.html?&DID=1WEFS2367D5F.

After you've implemented most of these tips, you can try submitting to the search engines. Click here to return to the traffic tips page to learn how.

Posted by Proabffmm on Sunday, February 17, 2008.

Fix and Clean Your Website

Fix and Clean Your Website