Okay Geek Farm
Best Search Engine Optimization | SEO tips and techniques
Brandon DavenportPlease leave a comment if i forgot something
Basic
This will help you get an idea of what SEO | Search Engine Optimization is, and what it requires you to do, keep in mind, this just scratches the surface of SEO.
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Design and content guidelines
- Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
- Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.
- Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
- Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
- Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images. If you must use images for textual content, consider using the "ALT" attribute to include a few words of descriptive text.
- Make sure that your <title> elements and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.
- Check for broken links and correct HTML.
- If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.
- Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).
- Review Google'simage guidelinesfor best practices on publishing images.
Technical guidelines
- Use a text browser such asLynxto examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.
- Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. These techniques are useful for tracking individual user behavior, but the access pattern of bots is entirely different. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site, as bots may not be able to eliminate URLs that look different but actually point to the same page.
- Make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This feature allows your web server to tell Google whether your content has changed since we last crawled your site. Supporting this feature saves you bandwidth and overhead.
- Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server. This file tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled. Make sure it's current for your site so that you don't accidentally block the Googlebot crawler. Visithttp://www.robotstxt.org/faq.htmlto learn how to instruct robots when they visit your site. You can test your robots.txt file to make sure you're using it correctly with therobots.txt analysis toolavailable in Google Webmaster Tools.
- If your company buys a content management system, make sure that the system creates pages and links that search engines can crawl.
- Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines.
- Test your site to make sure that itappears correctly in different browsers.
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Code
You can copy any of the small text into your website to help the site appear on the top of search engines.
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Set up your <Title> Tag
Our site would contain a <title> tag like this:
<title>Descriptive title of your site</title>
What we put in here is based on the key word phrases we figured out above. It should contain our main key word phrase, "Alfa Romeo Alfetta" at least once. It shouldn't contain more than 60 characters. In fact, if you can make it seven words or less (discounting words like "and" and "for", which the search engines ignore anyway) you're better off.
The <title> tag must contain the main keyword phrase for which you are optimizing that page. Google in particular places heavy emphasis on what is in your page's <title> tag. So does MSN.
Set up your Meta Keyword Tag
The <meta> keyword tag will contain our key word phrases for the specific page we are on:
<meta name="keywords" content="these, are, tags, that, describe, your, website, seperate, with, comments">
Don't make this more than about 250 characters long. Don't use the same key word more than three times in it. Vary the capitalization. Don't use all capital letters unless the word is an acronym, like "SEO", which is short forSearch Engine Optimization.
Note: Don't obsess about the keywords tag. It is mostly disregarded nowadays due to abuse by people stuffing keywords that didn't belong into it. You can almost skip it entirely.
Set up your Meta Description Tag
The <meta> description tag is a description of the page. It should contain our key word phrases for the specific page we are on:
<meta name="description" content="Short, but descriptive bit about the page on your site">
This tag should describe the specific page it is on, not the whole website. This is the description of the page that shows up at the search engine when someone is lucky enough to find this page in his search. Don't make the description more than about 200 characters long. Make it descriptive, and make sure it contains your key word phrases!
We won't repeat individual key words more than twice in any one meta tag because that can get a site banned from a search engines for something called "spamdexing", which is "spamming" the index of a search engine. For more info on how to avoid spamming the search engines, clickhere.
Put Key Words in Headings
These "headings" make your browser display the text larger and set it aside from the rest of the text, on its own line. Search engines will look for and index our headings when they index the pages on our site, so our headings should ALSO contain the main key word phrases for our site, like this:
- <h1>Title of site</h1>
- <h2>Title of site - Bacon</h2>
- <h2>Title of site - Lettuce</h2>
- <h2>Title of site - Pickles</h2>
- and so on through as many headings (in this case our products for sale) as we can think of that we want to include on that page.
Headings like that are weighted heavily in the search engines -- many of them use a formula that LIKES the key words in headings more than elsewhere in the site. Don't neglect these. Use them to set off areas of text, in the same way this page you are reading is divided up by headings.
Note: Some people detest using headings because they tend to be big clunky elements in web designs, and they can add a lot of space down the page. You can easily bypass this using a simple inline style command, like this:
<H1 style="margin-bottom: 0px; font-size: 12px;">This will make a small heading with no space after it!</H1>
Put Key Words in Anchor Tags
Hypertext links on your site usually look something like this:
<a href="floor-mats.html">. Those are called "anchor tags" — that's what the "a" stands for. You can put some other information in there, which will show up when one mouses over the link. It would look like this:
Sample Anchor Tag:
<a href="blah.html" title="Alfa Romeo Alfetta floor mats"> Alfa Romeo Floor Mats </a>
-- if the link points to the floor mats page. When someone mouses over the link, they will see what you put in the title. These "titles" for the anchor tags get indexed by the search engines. Every little bit helps! Make sure the words that you wrap the anchor tag around are keywords, too, whenever possible.
Use arobots.txtfile
Make an empty file. Name it "robots.txt". Put it in the root directory of your server; usually this is the same directory where your index.html file is kept. (But not always - sometimes your index.html file is in a sub-directory. In which case, make sure you have a copy of the robots.txt file in the root directory - usually the root directory is as high as you can go in the directory tree on your server.
While it is possible to set up a "robots.txt" file to exclude some or all of the search engine robots, what you probably want it to do is to allow every robot that comes along to index your site. If you do want to exclude specific robots from indexing certain directories or certain files, you will have to put some commands into the robots.txt file. For more info than you probably want about the use of the "robots.txt" file, gohere. If you want every robot to be able to index your site, just leave the robots.txt file completely empty — but make sure it is there!
Experience has taught me that on some servers, it is wisest to put something in that robots.txt file and put it in both the root directory and in the directory where your index.html file is located. This text works inside the robots.txt file, to allow robots to access everything except what is noted:
User-agent: * Disallow: /cgi-bin/ Disallow: /tmp/ Disallow: /private/
That example lets the robots coming to your site index everything except what is in your cgi-bin directory, your tmp directory, and your private directory.
Here is an article called"Search Engine Spiders lost without Guidance"by Mike Banks Valentine, which covers in detail many aspects of creating a robots.txt file.
You can validate your existing robots.txt file using thisrobots.txt validator toolfromsearchengineworld.com.
Validate your HTML code.
Everybody knows that robots, in general, are not too smart. The search engine robots which gather information from your site can really only do two things: 1. Read text. 2. Follow links. That's all.
These days, modern browsers are much, much smarter than robots. So while you may be able to look at a page using the latest version of Netscape or Internet Explorer, the search engine robots are too dumb to see anything at all if there is a big error in your HTML code. If you have an unclosed HTML tag - for example if you have complicated nested tables, any of which aren't closed -- then that may be the point where the search engine robot gives up trying to read your site. To validate your site, use this link:http://validator.w3.org/. This will tell you where your HTML code is "busted" and needs to be fixed so you don't confuse the search engine spiders. There's plenty of advice there on how to make your HTML code validate. If you or your webmaster can't figure out how to make your HTML code valid, we can help with that. (Note: this page you're looking at right now validates. Click this link tovalidatenow!)
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Your site on google
The next step is to shout at the big guys and say "Hay I AM HEEEER!!!!!!!!" and the best way to do this is the infamus Google. This is the best way to get your site noticed as Google is the most used website in the world.
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How to submit to Google
Really, really simple - go to theadd url pageand enter your url. You can just add the homepage but I would suggest that you submit the homepage and a few important pages over a few days (one page per day) just to be sure.
Google does not have a paid inclusion program so you have to get in the good old fashioned "wait and see" way. Google does have paid advertisement options in the form of theirPremium Listings and AdWordsservices.
What is Google PageRank?
Are you obsessed with your listings on Google? Well, join the crowd. Since Google introduced theirtoolbareveryone has been overly concerned with their PageRank. Google PageRank is a score that Google has assigned to a site based on the site's link popularity, relevancy and a lot of other factors. Some have gotten so obsessed that they are refusing to link to any site with a PageRank lower than 5 as they fear this will lower their own site's PageRank. The reality is that PageRank is not the be all and end all. New sites won't have any for a few months and even sites with poor PageRank can show very well in Google's search engine results if they are relevant for the search terms.
Google on submitting to Google
Add your URL to Google
Google Information for Webmasters
Google Spam Report Page
The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
Submitting to Google: links
Webmaster World Google Forum
Search Engine Forums Google
PageRank Explained
The Handy Dandy Google Page Rank Figurin' Guide
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Please leave a comment if i forgot something
