Tuesday, March 26, 2013

Basic SEO

15/15

  • According to Wikipedia, SEO (search engine optimization) is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engines "natural" or un-paid search results. 
  • Some of the top ingredients to good SEO are; words (they check every word on the website), titles (page titles are really looked at (it may be the title within the code)), links (meaning links between websites - if a website links to another website they assume it is a recommendation telling readers this website has good information), words in links and reputation (sites will good/increasing viewers are valued and moved up on the search engine web page).
  • Because people connect faulty links to their page, they give more creditability to good websites.
  • Google says: Many SEOs and other agencies and consultants provide useful services for website owners, including:
    • Review of your site content or structure
    • Technical advice on website development: for example, hosting, redirects, error pages, use of JavaScript
    • Content development
    • Management of online business development campaigns
    • Keyword research
    • SEO training
    • Expertise in specific markets and geographies.
  • There were many, many guidelines do design and content/technical; here are a few:
    • 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 has an extremely large number of links, you may want to break the site map into multiple 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.
    • Make sure that your <title> elements and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.
    • 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.
    • Use a text browser such as Lynx to 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, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.
    • 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 it appears correctly in different browsers. 
  • I love that the algorithm catches people/websites trying to sneak up to the top of search engine site. 
  • I love that they give solid advice on what to focus on so that your website can be as high on the list as possible. 

No comments:

Post a Comment