SEO 101
First things first, What IS Search Engine Optimization or SEO? Well most of the readers wouldn't be here if they didn't know this. But still there are lots of commercial sites out there designed by people with no knowledge of SEO. So here it is:
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of methods aimed at improving the ranking of a website in search engine listings, and could be considered a subset of search engine marketing. - Wikipedia
Okay the first thing you need to know is ... Search engines index ONLY TEXT. No images.. No Flash. Well now Google says they have developed an SWF parser to index data from Flash content. And search engines are becoming more intelligent and now index PDF files and also captions of image files. But the ONLY TEXT is a very useful rule.
The key thing is that you cannot just add a magic code to your site and POOF!! Your site is first in Google listings. Okay seriously, there are many things you can do to improve your site's ranking. Every little bit helps.
It cannot do if you optimize just one of your pages. Do it on many pages. Don't bother with pages with no real content like the Contact form etc. Optimize those pages which the people are searching for. Like your Main page.. Your product listing, your article etc.
The META tags
These tags are invisible to the visitor but are read by the search engine bots.These used to be important sometime ago like the keyword tag for example. But now it is mostly ignored due to abuse by spammers. The most important ones are:
<br />
and the 'description' meta tag.<br />
<br />
Set these to be very relevant to your content. Like for example... If you sell T-shirts and caps, don't put 'Teddy bears' in your title tag and description tag(well duh..!). The point is that you should make your title and description very relevant to your content.<br />
Take care about the 'alt' tags of those images. This is the text that appears while the image is loading and also if the image is not shown for some reason. Make sure contain good keywords as these tags ARE indexed by search engines. For example:<br />
<br />
<img src="foo_bar.gif" alt="Foo bar image"><br />
<br />
Then there is the robots tag. It is not very useful now. But you can use it to specify pages you DONT want to be indexed by search engines. Now its much easier to specify this using a robots.txt file. I will write more on this in another article.<div class="googleleft"><!-- PUT THIS TAG IN DESIRED LOCATION OF SLOT Seorectangle -->
<script type="text/javascript">
GA_googleFillSlot("Seorectangle");
</script>
<!- END OF TAG FOR SLOT Seorectangle --></div><br />
<br />
Another good thing to do would be to validate your HTML code.<br />
http://validator.w3.org/<br />
<br />
You may have unclosed tags in your page or wrongly nested tables. This can confuse the spiders( not the eight legged ones... This is the name for the search engine bots that 'crawl' your site...If you didn't know) . Modern browsers can adjust to such errors and render the page properly but spiders are not so smart (I'm not talking about Peter Parker ;) ok? ) .<br />
<br />
Backlinks <br />
These are the things everyone and their grandma wants. The more backlinks you have, the higher your search engine rankings...Okay, its not that simple but still backlinks play a major role in deciding your site ranking. So submit to lots of web directories and search engines manually. There are many people that would submit your sites to lots of directories for a fee. Check out the Digital Point Forums ( http://forums.digitalpoint.com/ ). Exchange links with sites with relevant content. This well help a lot.<br />
Okay about wraps up my BRIEF summary about search engine optimization. My fingers are tired after typing for half an hour.<br />
More in next issue.<br />
<br />
Please alert me of any errors and typos.If you liked it, post a comment ;)<br />
Thanks for reading,<br />
<br />
Regards,<br />
Thomas<br />
<a href="http://traffic-seo.blogspot.com" rel="nofollow">Search Engine Optimization Blog</a><br />
<br />
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