Let’s talk a bit about SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Let’s talk a bit about SEO (Search Engine Optimization). SEO means to optimize your websites / webpages in a way that will help the Search engines (google, yahoo, live, etc’) to find your site and to send you a decent amount of visitors. Common believe is that traffic (visitors) that come from the Search Engines are the best kind of traffic for a website, since they found you after they searched for whatever you are offering. Let me give you some ideas on how to optimize your site the “good way” (not the “bad way” - black hat). Some webmasters over-do the SEO so much that their site is almost unusable - very very bad…. Others optimize their sites for the wrong search terms… Some get blacklisted by the Search Engines for spamming or using Black hat methods…
I have gathered some tips that you should read and think about:
- Build your webpage for the visitor and NOT for the search engine.
- META tags are the business card of your website - write your META tags well
- Remember that search engines cannot read your images - use the alt tag
- Your site should have unique and useful content - if you have that - other sites will link to you (links from other sites to you are a very good thing for search engines)
- Don’t copy text from other websites - Google might punish you for “duplicate content“
- I can’t stress this enough - build your site for the visitor!
- Don’t try to be smarter than google - you aren’t … don’t try to pull any dirty tricks (hidden text, very small text, keyword stuffing, etc’) Google improves it’s algorithm from day to day.
- Check your server logs and make sure you have no dead links on your site (you might have a great written article on your site, but no one can reach it…)
- Use a robots.txt file to tell the Search Engine spiders where to look and where not to (sensitive data, member only areas)
- Make sure that your navigation is readable for the Search engines (HTML and not images…)
- Validate your coding
- Read the google webmaster section
These are only some tips to get you started. Read the guides, FAQ, guidelines, help sections almost all Search Engines offer to webmasters, read, read and read some more…
admin :: Jul.27.2007 :: SEO, Webmasters, google, web dev :: No Comments »
