SEO Explained
By: Bryan Hunsinger
I always get questions like: What’s hot right now in SEO? What is SEO? How can I become (number one, top ten, etc.) on Google/Yahoo/MSN?
Questions like these are referring to organic placement on the top search engines. No advertising fees, nada. I usually find myself using words like: research/choosing keywords, Google optimization, link trading, msn optimization, web directories, yahoo optimization, page rank, meta tags, keyword density, alexa rating, yada yada yada. Then I get the golden question..."How much is this going to cost me?"..followed by.."How long will this take?"
My 10 Key Points to Remember:
1) Your site needs to be attractive both to your visitors and to the search engine spiders. You need both groups wanting to return.
2) An accessible site is one that delivers its content successfully as often as possible. You will run into big problems if you have any of the following: link issues, HTML and CSS problems, form and applications, file size, and server reliability.
3) There is some debate about whether your site's HTML and CSS must be fully in accordance with all of the guidelines laid down by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), but it surely couldn't hurt. You can learn more about these guidelines at http://www.w3.org/; the site includes free services for validating your HTML and CSS code.
4) URLs, title tags and meta tags describe your site and its pages to visitors and search engines. They need to be relevant, compelling and accurate for your site to rank well in the search engines. They are good points for including your keywords, since search engines tend give these areas a certain amount of weight when indexing web pages.
5) Don't hide your text using: Text embedded in a Java application or Macromedia Flash file. Text within an image file. These files include jpg, gif, png, and others. Text that can be accessed only via a form submit or other on-page action.
6) Make sure the main keyword/phrase for which you wish to rank well is featured prominently on your page.
7) Keep all of the text on your page on-topic and of high quality. Yes, search engines really do look for high quality writing; they are capable of performing some pretty sophisticated analysis of the words on your web pages.
8) Try to keep the text of your document together. Many SEO experts say that it is better to use cascading style sheets rather than table layouts for this reason. Live, Love and Learn CSS!!
9) Create and use a sitemap on your website. You want your sitemap page linked to from every other page on the site.
10) Search engines want to index unique content; when they find pages which contain the same content, they will probably choose one as “canonical” to display in the search results, and quite possibly ignore the rest.
