The Way to Successful Internet Entrepreneurship (7): Five Steps to Optimize Site Basics

Author：Eve Cole Update Time：2010-05-12 15:17:42

1. Understand search engine optimization

When it comes to search engine optimization (SEO), we have to mention search engine marketing (SEM). SEM is a marketing method that promotes websites through search engines, and search engine optimization is one of them. One, other methods include search engine bidding ranking ads, etc. Since SEO is achieved through technical means, there is no need to pay for promotion, so it is more practical for individual webmasters. The focus of this chapter is to explain how SEO is implemented.

1. What is search engine optimization?

Search engine optimization of a website is to target the retrieval methods and characteristics of various search engines, by modifying the website code or adding connections, etc., to make the website conform to the preferences of search engines, thereby improving the ranking of the website in search engines, or improving the ranking of the website. The number of pages included in search engines. The ultimate goal of SEO is to bring users to the website.

Search engine optimization is currently the fastest and most effective way to promote your website. Because users arrive at your website by searching for keywords, the website will often meet the needs of the viewer. This type of users is called the target group in website planning.

Because of this, SEO has been welcomed by webmasters. Because it not only brings viewers, but also high-value target visitors. And because search engines have become the entrance to the current Internet, most websites, and even most of the traffic of various portal websites, come through search engines.

For individual webmasters, SEO has become an indispensable skill. Because its implementation cost is very low: you only need to learn relevant technologies, and do not need to invest a lot of money to promote the website. So at present, almost every forum community related to webmasters is full of SEO-related content.

However, SEO cannot only consider the ranking of the website. At present, many webmasters often only "align" with SEO after building a website. In the process of website construction, it is more important to consider users. SEO is more about making the website based on user experience, with the purpose of providing better services to users, rather than just optimizing the website for rankings.

2. What is “Black Hat SEO”

Black hat and white hat are two kinds of SEO terms. Since SEO can bring huge traffic, a large number of practitioners use "black hat" optimization methods to improve website rankings, that is, using cheating and other disgraceful means. Website optimization, including a large number of spam links, bridge pages, keyword stuffing, etc., can be called black hat SEO. For example, using software programs to crawl a large number of search results from other search engines, making them into web pages and publishing them, and then placing advertisements on the web pages to earn income is black hat SEO. This method was very "effective" many years ago, but now Search engines have already changed their algorithms, and the effects of similar methods have become minimal. Moreover, search engines have been improving their algorithms to "fight" against black hat SEO.

White hat SEO is the opposite. Using the correct method to conduct SEO for the website and optimizing the website according to user experience can be called white hat SEO. Both of these methods can bring about the effect of improving website rankings. Black hat SEO is often more effective and more harmful. It may even lead to the consequence of being “K-dropped” by search engines.

Tips:

Being deleted by a search engine is a joke often used among individual webmasters. Being deleted by a search engine means that all the indexed content of the website has been deleted during the search. It is also usually used to delete the accounts of various alliances and other accounts. context.

3. Common cheating methods used by black hat SEO

The ranking of a website is largely determined by the quantity and quality of links to the website. The usual way of connecting is to exchange friendly links with websites of the same type. However, many SEOs will not use this low-efficiency and slow-result method. Instead, when browsing other websites, they will leave a message while leaving the URL; when posting comments in forums, they will add the link to the website in their signature... …

Although these methods are good, many black hat SEOs will use software mass messaging to obtain connections. For example, use mass messaging software to comment on thousands of blogs and guestbooks, and at the same time leave the website address you want to optimize. This method not only results in a lot of spam messages, but also makes the bloggers who have left messages unbearable.

Another way to cheat through blogs is to use blog group building software to create a large number of blogs on various BSP websites, and then publish articles with links to your own website addresses, using such links to improve website rankings.

In addition, another method commonly used by black hat SEO is to obtain a large number of website connections through a "link factory". A link factory is a system composed of a large number of cross-links to web pages. After a site joins such a link system, it can obtain links from all sites in the system, and in exchange, the site must also be connected to other sites in the "factory".

4. How to implement “white hat SEO”

Compared with black hat, the advantage of white hat SEO method is that it can maintain long-term rankings and will not have any negative impact on the website. Some regular websites that want to grow bigger use white hat SEO method to improve the website. Optimize.

This optimization method is more friendly to search engines, such as by improving the quality of the website to connect with excellent websites in the industry. Or let users find the website useful, and let users spontaneously connect to the website in blogs, forums, etc.

In the actual SEO operation process, there are other commonly used methods, such as "connection bait", which is to use clever methods to get more external connections to the website. There are several methods of connection bait commonly used in SEO:

Provide practical tools: such as writing a small software that automatically queries the number of included web pages, so that many webmasters will be happy to use it and recommend the software on their own websites or blogs. In this way, a large number of unilateral import links can be obtained . Unilateral connections carry a higher weight in search engines than friendly connections.

Tips:

What is website authority?

Website weight is the importance that search engines attach to a website. It is the rating of a website. In layman's terms, it is the score given to this website. Search engines assign a certain degree of authority to each website and the web pages contained in the website. This authority is an evaluation of the website or web page. The weights of various search engines are expressed in different ways. For example, Google uses the PageRank value, Sogou uses Sogou Rank to express it, and Baidu has no specific parameters and can only be expressed by the update speed of a certain website and the number of inclusions. judge.

Write high-quality articles: Many independent bloggers will use this method of writing industry articles to gain numerous external connections. The most obvious ones are some introductory and practical texts in the industry. Such articles generally receive a large number of reprints or references, and the website can often obtain a large number of links.

In addition to the optimization measures mentioned above, there are many ways to implement SEO. Starting from the next section, we will introduce in detail how to optimize the website.

2. Five steps for basic site optimization

If you want your website to "not fall behind others", you must optimize it from the inside out. Let’s start the optimization practice of the website.

1. Submit your website to search engines

Almost all search engine websites provide the function of submitting a website. In order for them to index the website, the URL needs to be submitted first. Generally speaking, the website will be indexed by most search engines within one month after the URL is submitted. Common search engine submission addresses are shown in the following table:

Search engine website login address

Google http://www.google.com/intl/zh-CN/add_url.html

Baidu http://www.baidu.com/search/url_submit.html

Yahoohttps://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit

Chinese Yahoo http://search.help.cn.yahoo.com/h4_4.html

TOMhttp://search.tom.com/tools/weblog/log.php

Sogou http://db.sohu.com/regurl/regform.asp?Step=REGFORM&class

MSNhttp://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx

Zhongsou http://d.zhongsou.com/NetSearch/pageurlrecord/frontpageurl.jsp

Commonly used search engine submission addresses

Of course, there are many search engines on the Internet, but we don’t need to submit to each one. For example, if the website is mainly for Chinese netizens, there is no need to submit it in English search. In addition, there are also classified directory websites on the Internet, such as dmoz.org, etc. It is very beneficial for the website to join this type of classified website, but its joining requirements are also relatively high, and it requires manual editing and review. Of course, if it is a domestic website, adding a URL navigation website with high traffic is also a way.

2. Basic optimization of the website

If you want your website to achieve a good ranking in search engines, it is very necessary to properly optimize your web pages. There are already many professionals engaged in SEO. But for personal websites, you can simply optimize the website in the following ways.

Use static web pages whenever possible. The use of static web pages not only helps improve visitors' browsing speed and reduces the load on the server, but also has a good effect on search engine inclusion. Nowadays, the general CMS content management system supports directly generating static web page files. If the website building program does not support the generation of static web pages, you can use some pseudo-static methods, such as Discuz! Forum, which can achieve the pseudo-static effect of the URL.

Tips:

The difference between static and dynamic web pages

Web pages in HTML format are often called "static web pages", and early websites were generally made from static web pages. Its characteristic is that each web page has a fixed URL, and is suffixed in common forms such as htm, html, shtml, etc. It is a file actually saved on the server. Dynamic web pages correspond to static web pages. Their suffixes are not in the form of htm, html, shtml, xml, etc., but in the form of asp, jsp, php, perl, cgi, etc.

Dynamic web page addresses generally have an iconic symbol "?" Web page content is called from the database in real time, and although search engines can crawl dynamic content, it is obviously more difficult for static web pages. Because it is generally impossible for search engines to access all web pages from the database of a website; or due to technical considerations, search spiders do not crawl the content after the "?" When promoting, certain technical processing is required to adapt to the requirements of search engines.

3. Improve the Meta content of the web page

Meta is an auxiliary tag in the head area of the HTML language, used to simulate the response header message of the HTTP protocol in the HTML document. Search engines generally use robots to automatically find Meta values to classify web pages. There are two attributes: name and http-equiv. The name attribute is mainly used to describe web pages, corresponding to content (web page content), so that search engine robots can find and classify them.

For website SEO, the most important thing is that Meta content belongs to description (description of the site on search engines) and keywords (categorization keywords), so Meta values should be added to each web page to facilitate search engines. index. The more important ones are the following two Meta values, which must be added to the web page.

Meta also has many expression functions, such as adding various information such as designer and copyright to the web page. We can use a Meta tag generator to easily generate Meta tags (the tool can be found by searching for the keyword "Meta tag generator").

Figure 1 Web page Meta generator

4. Increase external links to improve website rankings

Website links can be divided into internal links and external links. The exchange of friendly links with other sites mentioned earlier is a way to increase external links. Of course, there are many ways to increase external links, such as promoting in other website forums (of course it cannot be spam advertising); improving the external links of the website is often a faster SEO method. But it sounds simple, but it is not easy to find a large number of high-quality links.

Put your website address in the forum signature and provide useful information, such as answering other people's questions. Many visitors will click on the link in your signature. Although search engines now give very low weight to links in forums and blogs, they can still add up to a lot.

Write more valuable articles, not only publish them on your own website, but also publish them on websites of the same type. You can add some copyright information to the articles and indicate the source. Increasing internal links is also a good idea. We can reference another article in the website in one article. The more such links, the easier it is for the site to be indexed by search engines. Use the bad link check tool to check whether there are bad links or dead links on the site. In addition, when exchanging friendly links, you also need to pay attention to the basic situation of the other party's website, and be careful not to exchange links with websites that have cheated or been punished by search engines.

Tips:

Try not to join sites like "link factories". These websites generally use "self-service friendly links, smart friendly links" as promotions. Although adding similar links is beneficial to the optimization of the website to a certain extent, the rapid increase in SEO external links in a short period may be regarded as cheating by search engines. deal with.

5. Create website content index files

The website index Sitemap file is a map-like file. This XML format document lists the titles and addresses of all articles in the website content, which facilitates search engines to quickly include the website content. http://www.xml-sitemaps.com is a website that generates sitemap files online. You only need to fill in the website address, update frequency, modification time and other information to generate a complete sitemap file.

When the file is completed, it can be submitted to Google's administrator tools website (address: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools ).

Figure 2 Online creation of website map

6. Find and predict hot words

In normal times, we should pay more attention to the current hot words on the Internet, and produce and publish relevant special content in a timely manner. For example, you can add relevant practical information before some festivals. Take the keyword "Mother's Day" as an example.

If you want to check the search volume of a word in search engines, you can go to Baidu Index ( http://index.baidu.com ) to check. In addition, Google Search has also launched a similar type of Google Trends query (address: http://www. google.cn/trends ). With the help of these tools, we can easily see the popularity of a word and optimize the website in a targeted manner.

Figure 3 Keyword search volume in Baidu Index

Please pay attention to other chapters of Chapter 7:

3. Use SEO Companion to optimize your website

4. SEO quick catchers record the number of included web pages in detail

5. Online SEO tools work together to optimize the website