Google Adsense Tutorial - Part 9

Search Engine Optimization
In the previous chapter, I talked about a number of different ways that you can increase your traffic. Probably the most important method though is to get a high ranking on search engines. That’s free traffic. Again, there are all sorts of books and experts who can help you improve your SEO and win a top spot at a site. I have had experience with a number of strategies that could help you improve your ranking. I’d like to share them with you now.
Robot.txt
The first thing you need to know about indexing your site at search engines is that you control which pages are indexed and which are excluded. You do that with a file called robots.txt.
Robots.txt contains nothing more than a record of which robots should index which pages.
Without going into too much detail, there are two conventions used in a
robots.txt file:
User-agent: [Defines which robots the site is addressing.]
Disallow: [Allows you to list the sites or robots you want to
exclude.]
In general, you’re probably going to use “User-agent: *” to make sure that you’re addressing the robots of every search engine and you’ll probably want include all of your pages (although you might want to exclude your directories: “Disallow: /cgi-bin/”). Robots.txt just allows you to control which robots index which pages. It’s important to have in your directory but it won’t really increase your search engine rankings. Titles, URL’s and links are much more important.

Titles And URL’s
I mentioned back that Metatags just aren’t what they used to be. I also said that it’s important that your titles and URLs contain the most important keywords for each of your pages in order to keep the ads relevant. But those titles and URLs don’t just influence your ads; they also affect your search engine rankings. A page about toy cars called cars.html might have a low ranking when someone looks for information about cars. Change the name to toy_cars.html and you should get a much higher ranking when someone looks for “toy cars”. The more relevant your URL is and the easier it is to read, the better. www.domain.com/page is always an improvement than http://domain.com/page.php?newsid=1234583373. One of the first places you should look when you want to improve your rankings then is your titles and URLs.

Links
The more links you have, the better. And the better the sites that list those links the more they’ll be worth. It’s one thing to swap links and ask for links but it is worth aiming to put
your links on sites that look good and have high rankings. In fact, being listed on a poor site can bring your ranking down.
One of the best places to place links to improve your search engine rankings is on forums. Add a comment and include your URL in your signature. Google’s spiders love forums and review them every week. And because these sites tend have quite high ranking, those posts will do wonders for your listings

Create Gateways
Usually, your links will lead directly to your home page. That’s where you see your site as starting and that’s where you want them to enter. But if the content the user wants to see is on one of the internal pages, there’s no reason for them to have to click around to find it. Fill that page with keywords that relate to the content on that page and it will have its own search engine ranking — and well-targeted ads. So if you have a site about cats and one of your pages was about cat food, it would make sense to put plenty of cat food keywords on the page. That
would get you cat food ads and a high ranking on search engines when someone does a search for “cat food” rather than just people who wanted to know about “cats.”

Automatic Submissions
Submitting your site to all of the search engines from Google and Yahoo! right down to the smallest ones, and optimizing each of your pages for high ranking can be a drag. You also have to keep submitting the site on a regular basis and constantly check your position if you want to keep it. The search engines are always re-indexing and reorganizing. A site that can be in the top spot one week can be a couple of pages over a week later. (Good news if you’re low down, not so good if you’ve spent hours changing your pages to climb the rankings.) That’s why many webmasters simply outsource their SEO so that they can concentrate on content. There are lots of companies that do this. Search Engine Blaster for example, lets you choose from over 600,000 engines but there are plenty of others. Personally, I think that’s a bit of a waste of time. Only Google, Yahoo and MSN are important, in that order.