• Create a WordPress Blog - Trust me this is the best way to get indexed. Worked out for me many times, wordpress has an inbuilt ping Google functionality that can help you get indexed in a short time span.
• Write some content - Its somewhat hard to get a website, with as low as 2-3 pages to get indexed quickly in Google. So I suggest you write atleast 8-10 pages of content.
• Social Bookmarks - Tag and bookmark your website to popular websites and social bookmarks like Alexa, Stumbleupon, Digg, Del.icio.us and Technorati. Bookmarks on these websites get indexed daily and hence will your website get attention.
• Add URL to Google / Ping Google - add your URL to google and make sure you write the captcha properly so that they get to know a human has submitted this. http://www.google.com/addurl/
• Forums Postings - Write a small post about your website and post it on related forums. Once again this works same like the above step. Digitalpoint Forums tend to work good for me.
• Create a sitemap - Google encourages sitemaps, so why not you make one? If you dont know to do it, simple use this website http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/. WordPress users can use this plugin http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/
• Maintain Proper Links - Make sure all pages of your website are linked to each other so that the search engine spider can access and crawl all the pages that you want to get indexed.
• Google Webmaster Central - Add and submit your website and sitemap to Google Webmasters Central.
• Install Google Analytics - This step is not personally tested but but why not use it for tracking your visitors. May be Google Analytics can help get indexed too.
• A Backlink ? - If it is possible or under your budget, a backlink from a page with a PageRank of atleast 3 is quite enough to get indexed.

If you already not know what has changed in HTML 5 have a look at my article Working with HTML5 – The Future of Web

Talking about SEO. HTML 5 is a boon for SEO. By implementing HTML 5 one can say that we can now allow seach engines to dissect and evaluate our pages more efficiently. Let us see how HTML 5 affects the SEO of a typical web page.

• The foremost thing is that the XML like structure. The HTML 5 markup is XML like structure, which is the most search engine friendly structure.
• Typically your web page consists of containers that are mostly <div> tags. be it your sidebar, your content, header or footer. making the search engine index complete page including text from headers and footers. Now you can let the search engine spider know what is your main content and what is your sidebar using the <section> <header> <article> and <aside> tags. The search engine spider would be able to index your content more efficiently
• Define your main content for the search engine to focus, using <article> </article> tag.
• The <header> and <footer> tags can tell define your page’s header and footer to the search engine. Aother good use of header would be to define a post’s meta content like title, date of publish etc inside an article.
• Embedded media like videos, and audio can be optimized well enough simply like this. <video> the alternate text or the search engine friendly text </video>
• So I would suggest you to keep you eye open on HTML 5 markup as this can seriously increase your SEO score. But the sad part is that there are still many browsers that do no keep them selves updated with the latest markup. So it may take years to practically implement HTMl 5 on your website if you don’t want to compromise with your traffic

Niche Blogging

The first thing to keep in mind in niche specific blogging is that your blog posts ought to be related to your blog’s niche to rank well.

Optimizing URL

Let us go step by step, first let us create an optimized URL. Creating an optimized URL is simple, it should be meaningful, related to your Title and must be stuffed with most important targeted keywords, but keep in ind that over stuffing many keywords will penalize your blog by Search Engines.

Example of a good URL:
http://www.example.com/10-tips-for-better-seo/

Example of a bad URL:
http://www.example.com/10-tips-for-better-seo-google-yahoo-msn-search-engine-optimization/

Optimize Title

Optimizing a title is similar to that of the URL. Make sure all the important keywords in the URL are also present in your title. The title should be wrapped inside the <h2> or <h1> tags. Over stuffing is once again not recommended.

Sub headings

Sub-heading or side-heading are an important part of a blog posts. Blog posts like lists always need to have side heading. Target all the secondary keywords in your sub headings. Wrap the sub-headings n between the <h2> or <h3> tags. If  you have more child headings then use <h4> tags for them.

Content

Content is the key to SEO. Write quality content and you automatically get indexed well in google. Apart from that you get many backlinks for it. This solves your off page SEO as well. Cover all the areas that your title speaks of. While writing content I would urge you to make sure all the primary keywords (keywords in URL and the Title) occur atleast twice. Bold out all the important phrases what contain keywords for your blog post.

If you are looking for some serious traffic and to target on #1 or #2 spots for certain keywords then this SEO software may help you a lot.

Meta

Though google has left indexing pages using Meta tags but still meta tags have an importance. All the blog posts must have meta description and meta keywords. If you use the All in One SEO plugin then these tags are automatically created based on your blog post and wordpress tags.

Optimizing Images

I think that every blog post should have an image. I seriously feel odd if a post doesn’t have an image. Don’t know if you all feel the same. But then when you have images in you post, make sure you add an Alt tag to the image with related text. Google Image search is indexed based on the Alt tags. So its good if you can rank in Google Image Search too, though it is less important.

Apart from the above suggestions, if you are looking for some serious traffic and to target on #1 or #2 spots for certain keywords then this SEO software may help you a lot.

Apparently there is a rumor that blogs tend to rank well in SERPs. Is it true ? Well not sure but yes I usually see blogs top in SERPs. Basically the fundamental to ranking is fresh content. Anything I write on my blog tends to rank in top 5 for a couple of weeks & then moves down or to 2nd or third page.

Anyways leaving that alone we will see the actual reasons why your website might not be ranking well.

• Link Spam

  You are probably spreading you links all over the web like everywhere directories, forum signatures, blog comments, wikis, guestbooks and everywhere else. Beware Google sees everything, lol Google is the GOD of the web.

• Over optimization

  Consider this, your website is well ranked in google, you get nice search engine results, you are quite pleased with your “White Hat SEO Tactics” and suddenly your rank falls. WTF ? Yes that is what over optimizing is. Read this article to know more about over optimizing

• Poor Architecture

  You might have a bad architecture like improper navigation and the spiders may not be able to crawl your website properly

• Inability to drive traffic to your site

  Got No traffic ? Then whom are you writing for ? Start with a Bidvertiser PPC Campaign (Use this link to get 20$ worth of ad clicks for free) for better conversion rates.

• PLR articles

  Never ever use PLR articles again on your website. You gain nothing Write your own content or hire a copy writer

• Irrelevant Links

  You might have a backlinks but what is the use of having a link back from a sports related blog to your food related blog ?

• Useless Advice

  You took an advice from someone who told how there ranked in google and bought a ebook from them. There are so many people to help you out there, like so many blogs and seo forums that you may never need an ebook again

• Copied Content

  Your content is not original, you basically scrapped of someone else website. You stole some one else content you thief ! Don’t steal others content. Use ideas and write them in your own language. If you have a bad English you can ask others to help you perhaps once again hire a copy writer.

• Domain Authority

  The domain authority of the websites positioning above you is very high. Usually if your page is dugg with the same title, then you tend to see digg.com above your original content. If this is the reason, you probably can’t help it

Lastly if you own a wordpress blog and looking for it to rank higher on search engines then my friend Syed at Balkhis.com has written a interesting post on how to rank high in search engines.

I try to clear the activity of Googlebot and how indexing takes place.

Well most of the time a new website is indexed gradually at a slow pace. That s what I discovered on my blogs. However the speed of the crawl rate together depends on various factors, of which the most prominent one are the quality of backlink and the linking structure of your interal pages. make sure all your website pages are connected to one and the other.

The next big thing that work to me is sitemaps. Sitemaps is a great way to tell google what we have and I have felt google index pages faster when used with sitemaps. If you have a wordpress blog then Google XML SItemaps is a great wordpress plugin which creates and keeps updating you sitemap. For others xml-sitemaps.com is a great for building up sitemaps.

Once your up with this keep adding new content in order to keep the Googlebot busy with your website. GoogleBot schedules the date and time on next crawl and index based on how frequently you keep adding new content. As per my observance I have seen that any new post that I write is indexed in google within 4 hours. Hell yeah! Google loves me lol..

Another tip I would give is make sure you dont have any 404 pages or pages with no-follow tags. because these pages are eventually dumped by Googlebot on next index.

Yeah let me show you a simple trick on how to remind your visitors to stumble your post. This trick I was basically inspired by websites that spread spam but wont it be good to have a simple dialog box reminding your users to stumble your article if they liked it ?

This seems to be cool in one hand but the other way some people may find it frustrating. Anyhow sharing is what I do so here is our code.

Just put this code at the end of your page and see it working…

<?php
if( !empty( $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] ) ) {
    $data = parse_url( $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER' ] );
//check the referrer
    if( strpos( strtolower( $data['host'] ), 'stumbleupon' ) != false ) {
?>
	<script>
function mypop() {
// Redirect to stumbleupon
window.location = 'http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url='+document.location+'&title='+document.title;
// Ask the visitor
return "We would love if you can give this page a thumbs up.rnPlease click cancel to be redirected to the rating page or press okay to leave this page.";
}
window.onbeforeunload = mypop;
	</script>
<?php
    }
}