Search Engine Optimization
The biggest source of traffic across the internet is, by
far, through search engines. It may be an obvious point,
but you would be surprised about the number of sites that
neglect this. Almost all of this traffic comes from the
top 3. These are:-
There are other popular search engines who's traffic is
not as high, but should not be ignored. These are:-
SEO
is not easy. In fact it's huge! It's not something you can
do once, twice, or even fifty times. It's a constant ongoing
struggle, with no end in sight. But don't let that put you
off! SEO
is vital to the success of a website, and you must devote
time to it each month. We'll show you how to do many of
the things required to get your site ranking in the search
engines. Many of the sections of this site, such as Link
Partners, Finding Keywords,
Web Directories, W3C
standards, etc, all make a huge difference to the way
you rank in the search engines. So this section will focus
on how it all fits together to get you ranking, how the
techniques help and what other things you can do to your
pages to get you onto the first page of results.
Optimizing your HTML
Without properly coded and optimized HTML
pages how are the search engines going to know your site
should be top of the list for your keywords? Follow these
steps to get your pages up to scratch.
Step 1. Making sure the HTML
is good quality and without errors
If your pages have got errors in the HTML
code then the search engines will not be able to read them
properly. Why not? Take a look at this quick example. Say
your page contains the HTML:-
<html>
<head>
<title>home page</title>
</head>
<body>
<font size="5">Page heading in larger font</font>
<p>paragraph of text with some keywords and details
of your site<br>
list<br>
of<br>
different<br>
things<br>
<a href="somepage.html">click here</a>
<p>another paragraph with more text
</body>
</html>
How is a search engine going to read this?
Firstly it's going to see the heading as just a normal piece
of text. When it looks for headings it's looking for tags
<h1> to <h6>.
Secondly it could easily miss the text all together. If
the search engine was looking to extract the text from the
paragraphs of a page it would look between the tags <p>
and </p>. If there is
no closing to a tag then it will find nothing. Likewise
the link to somepage.html tells the search engine the important
text for the link is "click here", which is pretty
meaningless. The search engine also has no way of seeing
that the "list of different things" is a list
at all. To the search engine it just looks like spaced out
text. The page title is also non descriptive, and has no
relevance to the pages content. A version of this page with
good HTML
is:-
<html>
<head>
<title>Keywords and stuff</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Page heading in larger font</h1>
<p>paragraph of text with some keywords and details
of your site</p>
<ul>
<li> list</li>
<li>of</li>
<li>different</li>
<li>things</li>
</ul>
<p><a href="somepage.html">keyword
phrase</a> another paragraph with more text</p>
</body>
</html>
Now the search engine can extract the heading
and paragraphs properly. It can see that the "list
of different things" is an unordered list, and what
each list item is. It also knows that the link to somepage.html
is relevant to the keyword phrase. The title now also has
greater relevance to the pages content. Open your index
page as raw HTML
(NotePad should do it). This is how the search engine will
see it. If you've made your site in a WYSIWYG
HTML editor
(let's face it, even us pro's use them now) you may find
a few things that could do with a clean up. Common WYSIWYG
HTML mistakes
include things like:-
<font size=2>small
text</font><br><font color="black"></font><font
size=2><font color="black">small black
text</font></font>
Although this would look ok in a browser,
the HTML
code certainly isn't. You've got tags doing nothing, and
needless tags that could be combined.It should look like:-
<font size=2>small
text<br><font color="black">small
black text</font></font>
WYSIWYG editors such as DreamWeaver have functions
to try and clean up their coding mistakes. In DreamWeaver
click "Commands->Clean Up HTML..." which should
clean up a few things. But these functions are not perfect,
the only way to really clean up the HTML is to do it yourself.
It may be time consuming, but at lest you only have to do
it once, and if you making a new site, do it to the original
template and you won't have to do much later.
We can't list every possible HTML
mistake you could have on your pages. But we can give you
a list of steps of what to do and look out for.
- Validate your HTML
- Visit the section W3C
standards and make use of their HTML
and CSS
validation. Depending on the quality of your pages,
and your use of non standard HTML tags, this may turn
into quite a task. But it will in the end be a very
worth while one.
- Use good anchor text
- Anchor text is that between <a>
and </a> tags. It's
important that the anchor text you use contains keywords
that are relevant to your site and the page your linking
to. Never use "Click Here" as anchor text!
- Use heading tags
- Make sure all headings are within a heading <h>
tag, and that they contain keywords. Make sure the headings
are in the right order starting at <h1>
down to <h6>
- The rest of this step is only available to full
members.
Step 2. The right Keywords in the right place
Your keywords need to be in the right place, in the right
quantity... This step is only available to full
members.
Step 3. Meta tag magic
Ok, meta tags aren't magic. But they are important... This
step is only available to full members.
Step 4. Rankings are more than just good optimization
What else you need to be doing... This step is only available
to full members.
Step 5. Looking at the Semantics
Proper semantics can make all the difference now, and in
the future... This step is only available to full
members.
Step 6. Using our SEO tool
We have developed a useful SEO tool. It evaluates your
page and gives details of your keyword density. The full
version is only available to full
members. But you can use this sample version:-
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