Search Engine Optimisation
There are many many sites all waiting to take your money and offering to help you with Search Engine Optimisation - or SEO as it is commonly known.
What is SEO?
SEO means preparing the pages of your website so that they are most likely to be noticed by search engines. SEO programs analyse your pages and tell you whether or not they are optimised, and what you need to do to make they ready for submission to search engines.
Do I need to use an SEO program, and if so, which is best?
You do not need to use an SEO program - in fact there is a school of thought that some programs lead you astray, and instead of giving you good advice, actually lead you to change your pages in such a way as to 'turn off' the search engines, rather than get better listings! That there is some truth in this can be seen if you ever try to put one of your pages through different SEOs - they may give you different and conflicting advice leaving you none the wiser!
You can pay an awful lot for SEO, but this website is assuming that you are a novice, and do not have large amounts of money to invest here (although investment is a dubious term to use if you end up following wrong advice)!
Here are some general pointers to help search engine spiders and bots visit and index your site.
What is SEO?
SEO means preparing the pages of your website so that they are most likely to be noticed by search engines. SEO programs analyse your pages and tell you whether or not they are optimised, and what you need to do to make they ready for submission to search engines.
Do I need to use an SEO program, and if so, which is best?
You do not need to use an SEO program - in fact there is a school of thought that some programs lead you astray, and instead of giving you good advice, actually lead you to change your pages in such a way as to 'turn off' the search engines, rather than get better listings! That there is some truth in this can be seen if you ever try to put one of your pages through different SEOs - they may give you different and conflicting advice leaving you none the wiser!
You can pay an awful lot for SEO, but this website is assuming that you are a novice, and do not have large amounts of money to invest here (although investment is a dubious term to use if you end up following wrong advice)!
Here are some general pointers to help search engine spiders and bots visit and index your site.
Sitemaps
Put a sitemap on your website - not one that can be read by humans (although this can be helpful!), but one that can be read by search engine robots. The ROR sitemap generator is great and is free. Check it out at http://www.rorweb.com/
Spam
You must make sure that you do not have content that simply reads as a list of keywords. There needs to be a fine balance between repeating keywords sufficient times, and not over using them. Search engines will ban sites that overuse keywords. This is known as spamming.
HTML Tags
Your important tags are:
Title Tag - This needs to contain the main keywords for the page E.g for this page the title tag is 'Search Engine Optimisation'
Description Meta Tag - Again, this needs to contain the keywords. E.g. Search engine optimisation advice, hints and tips for novice and beginner website designers and builders.
Keyword meta tag - again, the key words for your page must appear here. Remember, if people are searching for 'widgets', the search engines will also pick up 'widget'. Use the singular instead of the plural wherever possible.
HINT Get into the habit of putting in the page properties as you build your page. It is something which can be forgotten in the hurry to publish your masterpiece!
Put a sitemap on your website - not one that can be read by humans (although this can be helpful!), but one that can be read by search engine robots. The ROR sitemap generator is great and is free. Check it out at http://www.rorweb.com/
Spam
You must make sure that you do not have content that simply reads as a list of keywords. There needs to be a fine balance between repeating keywords sufficient times, and not over using them. Search engines will ban sites that overuse keywords. This is known as spamming.
HTML Tags
Your important tags are:
Title Tag - This needs to contain the main keywords for the page E.g for this page the title tag is 'Search Engine Optimisation'
Description Meta Tag - Again, this needs to contain the keywords. E.g. Search engine optimisation advice, hints and tips for novice and beginner website designers and builders.
Keyword meta tag - again, the key words for your page must appear here. Remember, if people are searching for 'widgets', the search engines will also pick up 'widget'. Use the singular instead of the plural wherever possible.
HINT Get into the habit of putting in the page properties as you build your page. It is something which can be forgotten in the hurry to publish your masterpiece!
Image Alt Attributes
Although the image alt attributes are there to show visitors what they would be seeing if they allowed images to be shown on their browser, it is also an important way of signalling to bots and spiders what the page is about. Use keywords in the alt tag. This will also enable your site to be found via an image search.
Page Copy
One rule of thumb is to repeat your main or primary keyword 4 times in the text, and your secondary keyword 3 times. You will find that in order to do this you do need to have a considerable amount of content on your page. For example, up to this point I have only mentioned Search Engine Optimisation 3 times - so there's the fourth! You will find that you have to ensure the page still makes grammatical sense, as repetition is not the normal manner of speaking.
Although the image alt attributes are there to show visitors what they would be seeing if they allowed images to be shown on their browser, it is also an important way of signalling to bots and spiders what the page is about. Use keywords in the alt tag. This will also enable your site to be found via an image search.
Page Copy
One rule of thumb is to repeat your main or primary keyword 4 times in the text, and your secondary keyword 3 times. You will find that in order to do this you do need to have a considerable amount of content on your page. For example, up to this point I have only mentioned Search Engine Optimisation 3 times - so there's the fourth! You will find that you have to ensure the page still makes grammatical sense, as repetition is not the normal manner of speaking.
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