Search Engine Optimisation (
SEO) is as big a topic as you really want it to be.
I could crack on for hours on the finer points of it but the crux of this post is just to give a little insight into what IS important.
Firstly, what you need to realise is that there are many search engines out there.... many search algorythms and that makes the field of search engine optimisation an 'in-exact' science. There is no right or wrong way per se, rather a right approach, and that approach is 'trial and error'.
There are some fundamental do's and dont's, some of which I'd like to go into to help some of you with your most common questions.
A common mistake made by many who dont know any better is to buy into schemes, programs, link farms, etc all of which claim to help your ranking (This is a whole other topic but just know that some of them do, MOST don't)
Some people may buy server side technologies to cleverly serve up different content to search engines.... content a normal visitor would not see. When the content vastly differs from what is served up normally, then this is generally referred to as 'cloaking', an
SEO industry term for 'tricking the search engines'
One rule of thumb to go by when engaging in any
SEO work:-
Ask yourself, would I mind a search engine knowing what I've done here?
Would they care if they found out how this
SEO was achieved?
I think I have made my point, so on with a few small pointers that do help.
Use XHTML and CSS
If your design is a compliant one (conforms to XHTML and CSS published guidelines) and you have used the technologies effectively, then you will have a very small footprint on the world. What I mean is that your pages will contain far less HTML than other sites not using this method. Your pages will use much less tables... in effect 'code bloat' will be reduced to a minimum.
In summary, using XHTML and CSS greatly improves readability of your code for search engine spiders and maintains a good content-to-code ratio without going beyond file-size and word-count limits.
Use a good TITLE
The title of your pages should be descriptive and explain the contents of the page well. Using the default title of Home, Index, Default is a pointless excercise. The title will give a visitor an idea of the what the page is about and also gives a search engine spider an idea of how to classify the page.
This is easily the most important single element on the page.
URL Naming
Page names and domain names play in important part in
SEO. Go do a search on google for something, and you can betcha that most of those 1st page results will have the keywords you searched for in the domain name, or the URL somewhere. Go figure!
H1, H2, Italics and BOLD
H1 is a another very important tag. It is the visual equivelent of the TITLE tag and treated with high regard by search engine spiders. You should most definitly be using your keywords within this tag.
Also try to get your keywords once in bold and then once in italics. Were trying to let the search engines know that these specific keywords are EXACTLY what this page is about.
Link Text
Link Text / Anchor text should always try and be descriptive. A visitor should have some idea of what they are going to find on the end of that link and a search engine is no different. When linking within content (outside of main navigation), use a short 3 to 5 word descriptive phrase to link your most important pages. When a spider follows the link to your page it should have an understanding of the content and your title tag, h1, etc, etc on that page should mirror this.
CONTENT
Well.... this could be a very very long and in depth sub-section, but instead I will keep it brief and deal with the questions later. On your page you should try to have a healthy amount of descriptive, keyword rich content. Dont just rely on the title of the page and other factors already mentioned. You should aim to have your keywords in the content as frequently as you can, without it sounding robotic, or being un-natural to read. This is known as keyword density. All search engines differ in what is a good figure for keyword density, but all have a maximum so dont go over the top. Remember, this is where the 'trial and error' comes in.
This was in no means meant to be an exhaustive article and is only written to help people on a good footing who dont already know anything about
SEO.
I am always around for any
SEO questions ~ novice or advanced, so feel free to post in this forum (in a new thread)
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