
Basic SEO To Explode Your Website Traffic
By: Nathan Lynch | Posted: 17th July 2006
In order to tap into the power of HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) elements, you first need to know what they are. In HTML, elements are bits of markup that tell a web browser to display or format parts of web pages. For example, means paragraph, and means bold – there are plenty more. These elements are used constantly when writing web pages. You should basically think of your HTML elements as the organizational and visual formatting of your HTML document.
Dynamic web pages are usually database driven and displayed on-the-fly. You can recognize by looking for symbols like question marks and ampersands in the URL. These on-the-fly web pages are hard to deal with because they very every time that they are delivered. The best way to conquer this problem is to run everything that you can through the URL rather than through post method or through sessions/cookies.
The structure of HTML is based on logic, order, and syntax and is, therefore, relatively simple to use. To make a heading, you use the heading elements (, , , and so on up to ). To start a new paragraph, you use a paragraph element (
). To format a list, you use a list element (start with
then use - ). In order to learn HTML it is a good idea to go to www.w3schools.com As XHTML is gaining more and more popularity among web masters (and search engines) it may be a good idea to learn that instead. XHTML is basically a more standardized version of HTML and it is worth learning. If you learn XHTML along with CSS, you will have be able to make extremely powerful web pages.
Once you understand that all you're doing is providing these simple structures, you realize the understated power of HTML. You see, once your HTML structure is in place with the appropriate markup, you can add CSS (Cascaded Style Sheets) for visual presentation, using a graphics design program. Good elements provide meaning and structure to your content, making it simple to add whatever design you want afterwards.
There are programs that will automatically produce static pages from a database, but it's not usually the best move. Most designers to work with true dynamic technologies such as PHP, because of the amount of time it saves. Because search engine technology is increasing, the problems associated with dynamic URLs are decreasing day by day. It is still important to have constants, but you don't necessarily have to have a huge list of static links throughout your site.
It can be much easier to put www.domain.com/article.php?num=1 than www.domain.com/articles/article1.html. A search engine can easily locate the prior so there is no real need for the latter. The only time that you will see trouble is if you have things like www.domain.com/article?num=1&userid=2424 where "userid" changes for each user. If this sort of thing happens you may run into trouble and should arrange so that the "userid" isn't completely necessary (unless, of course, you want the page password protected).
Another tag that is very important is the tag (or anchor tag). This tag is used to link to other web pages and it is invaluable to your web page because search engines like to see relevant links on your web site. Make sure that you only link to relevant sites, and while your at it, try to get a return link so that your page rank increases.
So how can you keep the functionality of your dynamic website, and make it search engine friendly at the same time? Well, suppose you have a website with products, and instead of having each product on one page you're using a dynamic, searchable database. Searching returns a list of products that meet the search criteria, and maybe a small picture – clicking the picture shows the user more information about the product.
You have to realize that search engines can't use your search box, so the only way for them to access your dynamic information is if they follow a link to it some other way. The lesson to learn is that you need to give access to all your pages with plain, text links, somehow – you can't just rely on searches to drive your whole site. What this means is that somewhere on your website you need to have a list of your products that has been organized by category – from here, you should be able to follow links to every page in your database. Once you've done this, the search engines can see your content.
The BR element is one of the more abused ones. If you understand how HTML works, you should realize that its use is rarely justified: use the P element for paragraphs instead of using the BR element to provide paragraph-like breaks. Now that you're armed with some simple information, you should consider learning more about HTML and how to use it. You used to need to learn HTML before you could create a web page, and that gave a lot of people the edge when it came to more advanced web design and development later on. If you want to catch up, you need to know what you're doing on the technical side of things.
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Tags: web browser, search engines, graphics design, html document, logic, hypertext markup language, formatting, web masters, dynamic web pages, question marks, visual presentation, style sheets, xhtml