bekirergisi.com

Here it comes! This is my first post in my blog. I haven't really done anything on this website since last year. It was totally in Turkish. Now It is both in English and Turkish. So it is like double work for me. Or we should say double fun :-)

I will be experimenting search engine optimization techniques on this website. I will share my findings with the visitors of this website. I have been in internet business since the early internet-boom days until today and I would like to share what I have learned with you.

There is a thing called Google which dominates the search engine business. You have to be nice to Google and give it what it likes. Otherwise your internet traffic will always be slow. Then, there are Yahoo! and MSN and other less-used search engines. Google, Yahoo and MSN are the top players of this search engine business.

Google's patented Page Rank algorithm has revolutionized for people the ways of finding information, services and products on internet. There are so many paramaters that Google uses while it is ranking your web pages. It is not only how relevant the search criteria to the content of your website but it is also how many links you have to your website from other websites on internet.

One of the most important thing to know is that Google and other search engines love texts. You should have lots of text that is relevant to the purpose of your website. People love information. You should give them trust by telling them how much you know about the product or service you are offering. The higher ranking you have, the higher spots you will have in the search results.

You should avoid building full Flash websites, since search robots can not read all of the texts inside Flash objects. You should have a balance between artistry and functionality.

The pictures you are using on your website should have names and descriptions that are relevant to the content of your site. Videos, too, should have relevant names and descriptions. Google has started injecting the image and video results into its web search results, so you should be smart about your images and videos.

I will continue this in my next post.

I am back with my new post! This is exciting! Ok. Where were we? Yes we were talking about search engine optimization and we were talking about how much google, yahoo, msn and other important search engines such as askJeeves love text. You know what? Let me make a list of what Google likes on a website. Let us see the ways of making a Google robot (a little piece of code that crawls your website. I will talk about Google's crawling schedules, and algorithm soon. That is important too!) happy!

You can Improve Your Google Rankings by following these steps (I will talk about all of these steps one by one. For now, take a look at the list and see if you have anything missing):
• Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
• Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.
• Create a useful, information-rich site and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
• Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
• Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images.
• Make sure that your TITLE and ALT tags are descriptive and accurate.
• Check for broken links and correct HTML.
• If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a '?' character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them small.
• Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).
• Content: Google searches the content on your site to return relevant search results. Be sure to include relevant keywords in the text of all your pages. Also, try to keep them near the top of your pages - Google may not crawl all the way down your page.
• Domain Name: Having your keywords in your domain name may boost your ranking. Google seems to favor sites with keywords in their domain.

Those are few basics to Google rankings. Integrate some of these suggestions into your web page, wait for Google to update in next few weeks to see the difference in your rankings.. Verify what works and what doesn't and constantly improve your site based on what you ascertain.

I will explain all of these items in my Google Ranking Optimization List very soon. Get ready! See you next time!