SEO

By now, you’ve probably heard of the term SEO. What does it mean? Well, in fact, it is an optimization of your web site to make it more searchable by search engines. Don’t know how to do that? Well, continue reading…

In order to introduce you to SEO, I will firstly, in short, explain how Search Engines work. Search Engine, for example Google, is a Spider. It Crawls. It crawls for all the web sites on the whole internet, on the whole world. It crawls as deep as it can to find more and more content it can. The purpose of crawler is to help users finding something they want – that’s why it was built for! It analyzes your content throughfully and finds as many keywords as it can. As a result, content of your pages are displayed as results on search page.

I’ll give an overview of what Search Engines likes and dislikes

Likes

Unique content!!! This is most important. Have the content on your web site being written by you, and you will go fine. If you copied content from some other web site, it means that it web site has already been crawled. When Crawler comes to your page, he will not be glad to see that you copied content – remember, crawlers are smart. Instead, he will probably avoid the content, or crawl just some things.

Search Engine Friendly URL (SEF) These are also good. Especially if you have PHP based web site. Instead of having a web site address looking like this
“www.myflowerssite.com/index.php?option=pages&pageno=6″ you should try to optimize it to look like this: “www.myflowerssite.com/index.php/pages/roses/”. See great difference? Do know that this is a bit advanced tehnique, because it uses the “url rewrite” option. Google it for details! Well, this CAN be problematic a bit. Not all sites and/or servers are compatible with this kind of optimization. To optimize web page like this, you need to find some crucial tools on Google. Those can be expensive. However, if you have a forum and/or portal, you can easily set up this option just by checking “Turn SEF on” or similar option. As far as I know, this is supported by Joomla/Mambo, SMF, phpBB and else… In most cases, you will be required for your site to be on Apache server (not on Microsoft IIS), and to rename htaccess.txt to .htaccess (notice the dot at the beginning).

Internal Links – have links to other pages of your site, on other pages. Let’s look again at our Flowers site. If you have devoted one whole page to Roses only, you will probably have a topic on how to plant flowers. Hyperlink that word “planting” to other page of your web site which includes whole topic of planting all kinds of flowers. That’s called internal links

External Links – aka Back Linking – have other web sites link to yours. We’ve discussed this a blog ago

Heading tags – search engines love them! Instead of having a tag like [font size="12" align="right"] you should use these: [h2 align="right"] and h1, and h3, and h4! These are great for Search Engines. Notice that I’ve put [ ] instead of < > to show you more clearly.

Privacy Policy & About Us – (aka Terms Of Use) – if SE crawlers can see this named links on your home page, your rank will be higher. So, at bottom of every page you have, always make sure to put these links, which may lead to some quickly-written page (e.g. for Privacy Policy – “We don’t require user e-mails. Even if we do, we won’t share it with third-party.”. Is it hard? No

Dislikes:

All which is opposite of above, PLUS:

Lots of JavaScript – well, I can’t actually say that SE (Search Engines) don’t love them, it just doesn’t meet YOUR needs. In JavaScript you can put a lot of content which is executed somewhere else, instead of having that content written in HTML or PHP

Frames – frames are OK on Google, but not on some other search engines. Some SE are even considering Frame as an other site!!! So, avoid using frames within your web site.

Click here links – I bet most of you probably didn’t know about this. Don’t put CLICK HERE text on a link that’ll lead to some page. Instead, use descriptive text of the web page that will be led to. It’s easier for visitor AND for SE. Remember when we talked about Unique Content? Well, CLICK HERE is definitely not unique, don’t you think?

I want also to tell you that there are a lot of Search Engine Optimization Tools. Look up for a SEO Elite and Web CEO. But, do know that those didn’t help me personally a lot…

Be aware of that SEO takes a lot of time and effort. But it DOES play very important role. Exist. Survive. Last. Don’t give up. Just have that key thing – time!