SEO - Search Engine Optimisation

What is SEO? SEO is an abbreviation for "search engine optimisation."

SEO can be broken down into two categories; links and content.

1. Links includes having respected sites link to you, and having a search engine friendly navigation structure.
   
   
2. Content is the text that appears on your pages. The more relevant text the better, as a rule of thumb try to start with at least a dozen pages that each contain at least 300 indexable words.

Correct codeing is essential to ensure the search engine robots can read your content, like links your text must be in a search engine friendly format and not buried in javascript or frame sets.

The page content (text) is the most important aspect of your page to the search engines

To make your site search engine ready, first prepare the content, The first rule of the web is that content is king. Your web site lives and breathes on your ability to write compelling, targeted copy. Effective copy writing helps increase conversions by keeping clients on your site, differentiates you from your competition and gives you an edge with the search engines. With SEO Copy writing, not only do you have to write expert content that will appeal to your reader, but you also have to make it appeal to the search engines. This includes using targeted keywords to effectively deliver your message. Not sure how to do that? Well then, keep reading

Design and content guidelines

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 is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate 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.
• Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images.
• Make sure that your TITLE and ALT tags are descriptive and accurate.
• Check for broken links and correct HTML.
• 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.
• Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).

Technical guidelines

• 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, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.
• Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. These techniques are useful for tracking individual user behavior, but the access pattern of bots is entirely different. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site, as bots may not be able to eliminate URL's that look different but actually point to the same page.
• Make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This feature allows your web server to tell Google whether your content has changed since we last crawled your site. Supporting this feature saves you bandwidth and overhead.
• Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server. This file tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled. Make sure it's current for your site so that you don't accidentally block the Googlebot crawler. Visit http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/faq.html to learn how to instruct robots when they visit your site.
• If your company buys a content management system, make sure that the system can export your content so that search engine spiders can crawl your site.
• Don't use "&id=" as a parameter in your URL's, as google don't include these pages in their index.
  

Links are the second most important aspect of your site to the search engines

Having links from other web sites to yours is a critical part of search engine optimisation. As well as the obvious bonus of having people follow these links to your site, inbound links provide the following benefits:

• Search engine robots follow links between web sites The more inbound links you have, the more often robots will visit your site.
• Many search engines count links to your site as "votes" for you. They assume that if lots of web sites link to your site it must be high quality. Page Rank is Google's system of counting links.

The general rule is that the more inbound links you can get, the better. Getting more links should almost certainly be near the top of your priority list when optimising your site.

• Have other relevant sites link to yours.
• Submit your site to search engines e.g. Google at http://www.google.com/addurl.html.
• Submit a sitemap as part of our Google Sitemaps (Beta) project. Google Sitemaps uses your sitemap to learn about the structure of your site and to increase our coverage of your web pages.
• Make sure all the sites that should know about your pages are aware your site is online.
• Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.

For a more extensive review of links: Search Engine Optimisation - Back Links

Search Engine Optimisers

Many SEO's provide useful services for web site owners, from writing copy to giving advice on site architecture and helping to find relevant directories to which a site can be submitted. However, a few unethical SEO's have given the industry a black eye through their overly aggressive marketing efforts and their attempts to unfairly manipulate search engine results. Keep reading