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Search Engine Optimization.
Good Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
by Mick
Good SEO should be incorporated at the design level of any web site but should allow plenty of room for change, as SEO methods are constantly changing. It's still not too difficult to re-engineer a current site but you will probably be missing out on some newer techniques.A few years ago content, title tags and meta tags where king. Today, while still a crucial part of any SEO strategy, there's a couple of methods which almost guarantee instant traffic.So I'll start with the most basic and move towards the newer methods later on. All my techniques are white hat and completely legal - no spamming or cloaking here.
Things to think about:
How would you like to be seen on the web? Obviously you want quality traffic, so you need the right kind of people to find you. If you're selling for example, "model trains", you could consider using this phrase all over your web site.
You could, but it might be more beneficial thinking about the bigger picture of your industry. If you sell model trains, words like "Railroading" and "Toy Trains" will help search engines like Google gain a better understanding of what your site is about.
You can also engineer individual sections of your site for specific areas of your industry to boost traffic, for example a model train site might have a "Model Railroad Scenery" section or an "Events" section. Each acting as a mini web site on their own.
Now I'll explain the technical side, again this part is aimed at the complete beginner.
Just before we begin, grab yourself a free copy of Core FTP http://www.coreftp.com put in your web site details (host or IP, username and password), familiarize yourself with the structure of your web site and download a copy of it to your hard drive.Open the file called index.htm, .html, .php. (or whatever the suffix of your index or default file) in Dreamweaver or in Notepad. Alternatively, if using Internet Explorer, you can browse to your web site and go to 'Page' > 'View Source' and save the page to your hardrive, you will be uploading this later.Remember, always make a back up of your files before you modify them.OK, now for the code:
The Title Tag
Locate the <head> tag near the top of your document, if it doesn't have one, go ahead and pop one in there directly underneath the <html> tag. You will also need to add a closing head tag which looks like this </head>.
You should now have <head> </head>
So our code should look something like this:
<html>
<head>
</head>
Next we need an opening and closing <title> tag in between our <head> tags. They will look like this: <title> </title>
Following the same pattern as before, we now have:
<html>
<head>
<title> </title>
</head>
In the middle of the tags, describe your web page in around 6 - 8 words. Something like this would do:
<title>Model Trains and Model Railroad Toys</title>
This is how our code will now look:
<html>
<head>
<title>Model Trains and Model Railroad Toys</title>
</head>
What we've done here is create a browser title tag. Search engines view this as one of the most important elements of any web page and this is what they will display to surfers looking for a web site like yours in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
The Description Tag
Another very important tage is the meta description tag. Meta tags work in a slightly different way to head and title tags, there is no need to close them.
Underneath your closing </title> tag, place this code:
<meta name="description" content=" ">
So the rest of our code now looks like this:
<html>
<head>
<title>Model Trains and Model Railroad Toys</title>
<meta name="description" content=" ">
</head>
We need to include some descriptive information in the content=" " area. For best results make it easy for a human to read but contains enough trigger words to help the search engines find you.
Something like this for example:
<meta name="description" content="Online internet model train hobby store for the model railroader. For the collector of toy trains and model scenery, plus regular events.">
Be creative and try out many combinations.
So our code will now look like this:
<html>
<head>
<title>Model Trains and Model Railroad Toys</title>
<meta name="description" content="Online internet model train hobby store for the model railroader. For the collector of toy trains and model scenery, plus regular events.">
</head>
When your site is found in a search engines, chances are this is the text that will appear underneath your title link in the SERPs.
Keywords
Huge debate has ragged for years over the need for keywords. I'm including them here because, althought they are not as effective as they were six years ago, they are still used by the majority of the smaller search engines.
Much in the same way a <description> tag works, we fill in the content=" " area with carefully selected words and phrases. Here's what it looks like:
<meta name="keywords" content="trains, model railroading, model trains, hobby, hobbies, model scenery, railroading events">
Turning our code into:
<html>
<head>
<title>Model Trains and Model Railroad Toys</title>
<meta name="description" content="Online internet model train hobby store for the model railroader. For the collector of toy trains and model scenery, plus regular events.">
<meta name="keywords" content="trains, model railroading, model trains, hobby, hobbies, model scenery, railroading events">
</head>
I've highlighted the parts you need to change in red incase you'd like to cut and paste straight into your page code. This is the very minimun every web page needs for basic SEO, but there is much more.
Going a bit further
Another handy meta tag is the Robots tag:
<meta name="robots" content="index,follow">
This makes sure the search engine robot, once it's found your web page, will read, index it and follow all links on your page. Place anywhere in your <head> and </head> tags.
While on the subject of search engine robots, a slightly more advanced technique can be used if we step out of our web page code for a second.
Every search bot checks your site for the existance of a 'robots.txt' file. Most web sites never use these so we will have to create one manually. This isn't as scary as it sounds, it is only a few simple commands which you can cut and paste.
For best results, allow the search bot to crawl all areas of your site, unless you want to prevent it accessing a CGI bin for example.
Open a blank Notepad document and put in:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
Save the file as robots.txt and upload it to the same directory as you index file.
If you want to block access to your CGI bin put:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
You can block access to any directory, such as images by adding a command like Disallow: /images/
The Body
Every web page has a <body> tag and a closing </body> tag. Inside these tags we place the main content and layout for our page.
An important but often overlooked tag which search engines love is the <h> or heading tags. For the greatest impact <h1> tags should be used but anywhere from <h1> to <h6> can be used, depending on your preference. A combination of <h1> and <h2> can be powerful.
Near the <body> tag we place an opening and closing <h1> tag, like this:
<h1> This is a heading</h1>
Recommended use for this is to put in the same text that you placed in your <title> tag, for example:
<body>
<h1>Model Trains and Model Railroad Toys<h1>
You can also repeat some of your description tag within a <h2> tag underneath. Such as:
<body>
<h1>Model Trains and Model Railroad Toys<h1>
<h2>Online internet model train hobby store for the model railroader</h2>
Search engines place importance on words within these tags and will increase your SERP placement.
In the next part I'll go through alt tags, anchor text, link building, keyword prominence, keyword density, keyword selection, RSS, social bookmarking, how to make bots crawl faster, how to keep bots coming back, gray hat techniques and probably some other stuff I'm too tired to remember.