If you have a brand new Web site, waiting for a spider to crawl it may be destructive to your plans. In addition, there's no guarantee that the spider will pick up your pages during a crawl. Here's where a regular submission may be of some use.

Remember, submission does not guarantee your listing and listing does not guarantee your ranking. But once you get listed, things fall more into your control because now you know the search engine knows about you and you can try to improve your rankings with the help of optimization, link popularity improvement, etc.

Site maps are often ignored by webmasters, as well as its value for both visitor-targeted and spider-targeted optimization is underestimated.

What is a site map? In most general terms, it's a page or pages that contain a list of and link to all the other documents on your site. Theoretically, it's designed to give your visitors a quick way to find what they are looking for on your site without browsing the entire content. Site map also aims at eliminating the need to link to every page of your site from your home page.

Robots

There are two ways you can restrict a spider from crawling all or part of your site. First is by placing the META Robots tag within the “head” section of your HTML file (making it effective only for the pages where the tag is inserted). The second is to write a special instruction file called "robots.txt" and put it in the root directory of your site.

Robots are useful in terms of SEO since it is understood that a search engine spider has a certain limit of pages within your domain to index. Whatever this limit might be, you don't want to waste your search engine reserve by allowing it to index the files which are not optimized or not meant to be seen by the search engines.

Let's first define "site archtecture". In terms of SEO / SEM, it refers to the entire framework that supports your website content and thus defines the way search engine spiders index it. Site architecture consists of the navigation structure of your Web site, the page layout and the structure of various elements on your page, your file and directory system, and the types of files you use.

Search engine rankings are impacted by site architecture as long as it defines which pages will and will not be indexed. To make the architecture SE compatible, you should, always have unique and relevant content (as we already know), use the design elements that are spider-compatible, and use a navigation and linking structure that encourages regular indexing by search engines.

CSS stands for "cascading style sheets". The World Wide Web Consortium, also referred to as W3C, defines CSS as follows:

"Style sheets describe how documents are presented on screens, in print, or perhaps how they are pronounced [...] By attaching style sheets to structured documents on the Web (e.g. HTML), authors and readers can influence the presentation of documents without sacrificing device-independence or adding new HTML tags."

"Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet mechanism that has been specifically developed to meet the needs of Web designers and users."

(http://www.w3.org/Style/)

Menus Contain Meaning

Site navigation information within menus can be a good clue to what a site is about. The rule of thumb is that you should avoid buzzwords and special terms in your navigation menu, unless you know for sure what you are doing and what audience you target.

When menus are keyword compatible, they're fairly clear and concise. Commonly, they utilize 2 to 10 graphic buttons leading to all the key pages on the site. When a search engine spider reads such a menu, it's able to quickly and easily figure out what your site is about and which pages are most important. As a rule, you put links to other pages of your site in the navigation menu. The search engine can analyze what the links to those pages say. They do that by reading what's within the text hyperlink or the alt text tag or they read the words around the hyperlink itself. They'll even include title tags and associate them with the link.

According to the World Wide Web Consortium, (http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/tables.html)

"The HTML table model allows authors to arrange data -- text, preformatted text, images, links, forms, form fields, other tables, etc. -- into rows and columns of cells"

The use of tables for web page layouts has been popular with web designers because of their ability to position text and images in specific cell locations on a page, similar to laying out a newspaper.

The META Description

Syntax:

<meta name="description" content="a short description of your site" />

The contents of the META description tag is what most search engines and directories will show under your title in the search result list. If you have not provided any META Description Tag to your web page, the search engines try to make one for you, often using the first few words of your web page or a text selection where the keyword phrases searched by the users appear. If the Search Engine makes up a description by picking up text from your page, the generated description my not do you web page justice.