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After the Part I of this series, here’s a Part II on how to make a SEO friendly site from scratch. I am sure if you apply all these tips properly and regularly, you can quite easily achieve outstanding results. This part deals more with the off site optimization than on site optimization. If you want to know more about optimization in details check my article here.

STEP 1: Creating a sitemap for your site

A sitemap is basically a collection of all links of your site together which is submitted to Search Engines so that they can index it in their database and later show your results in searches. So basically it’s like an index of a book. There are many tools available online to create a free sitemap for your site. e.g. You can create a free online sitemap here. After you are done with creating with sitemap,  download it in your preferred format. This is all you have to do in this step!

Note: You can also use many other tools, plugins/mods or softwares to create sitemaps for your site. I just used the above site as an example. If you use wordpress, you can just use XML sitemap plugin which will automatically create sitemaps as soon as you make a new post!

STEP 2: Submitting your sitemap to Seach Engines

After you are done with creating your sitemap, you now have to add it to all major search engines like Google and Yahoo. MSN at the moment doesn’t accept sitemaps. You can ping them however (which I will tell you how im later). To submit it to Google, just log in to your Google Webmaster account and use the ‘Submit Sitemap’  option from there and follow the directions. (You will first need to upload your sitemap to your server using FTP to do this). Repeat the same procedure with Yahoo.

STEP 3: Sign-up fpr Google Anaylytics

Of course this webmaster tool has nothing to do with your site’s rankings or its indexing in search engines, but remember we want to ‘create’ a site that is SEO friendly and for that we need to exactly understand how-what our site looks and take steps accordingly! Google Anayltics is a stat counter for your site with detailed information like visitor’s country, search terms, visitor’s stay time, bounce rate and lots of other data. This will help you to understand which area you have to work more and concentrate on.

STEP 4: Add Social bookmarking icons to your site

Social bookmarking icons will help your site get more traffic when your visitors submit your site/post to the social networking sites. Of course this is not a mandatory step and can be skipped (as I have for now in my case).

STEP 5: Submit your site to directories

If you are not familiar what directories are – well they are a collection of links in categorical manner where people can visit the categories followed by respective sites of their choice. How does it help? Well, you get the traffic from directories when people see your site AND you get some PR of the directories and also some help in getting indexed in Search Engines. So it’s a win-win situation for you! Search for higher PR directories and submit your site to maximum directories as possible. I would recommend you to submit your site to at least 10 directories a week! For your convenience I will post a list of directories along with PR in the next article. An example site would be:

http://www.webmustang.com/

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