OPTIMIZING
YOUR SITE FOR SEARCH ENGINES
Abreviations:
SEO: Search Engine Optimization
SE: Search Engines
I had a bit of spare time so I decided to write a little guide on SEO,
I hope it helps you out (and The Taz Zone could do with reading about
the meta keywords bit).
Okay, just to start us off i'll breifly explain what SEO is and why its
so important:
SEO is an abreviation of Search Engine Opimization, basically this
means we edit our site in such a manor that it becomes ranked higher in
search engines such as Google and Yahoo. There are many basic ways to
add SEO to your website such as inserting keywords, but the higher rank
you want the more complex it gets.
So
why do I need SEO for my site, what do I get from it?
Well, one of the easiest ways to find a website is to search for
it, so you want to be listed in as many search engines as you can. You
also want to be ranked as high as you can because come on lets face,
who has ever actually gone past page 3 on Google? 
Get where i'm coming from?
Right, now to actually implement SEO into your website:
Starting with the basics...
Adding
keywords:
Search engines find keywords by looking for a section in your page
called the meta tags, basically these tell the search engine what the
site is about, how often its updated, what pages it should index and
what keywords you want your site to be found under. (Keywords are the
words you type into the engine itself when looking for a website).
Incorrect editing of these tags could stop your site from being listed
at all so listen carefully!
There are basically four major meta tags that you can use:
* <META name="resource-type" content="document">
o The only resource type that is currently in use is "document"
This is the only tag that you need to put in for indexing purposes, but
use of the others is a good idea.
* <META name="description" content="a description of your page">
o Depending on the search engine, this will be displayed along
with the title of your page in an index. "content" could be a word,
sentence or even paragraph to describe your page. Keep this reasonably
short, concise and to the point. However, don't be so mean with your
description that its not an appropriate reflection of the contents!
* <META name="keywords" content="a, list, of, keywords">
o Choose whatever keywords you think are appropriate, seperated by
commas. Remember to include synoyms, americanisms and so on. So, if you
had a page on cars, you might want to include keywords such as car,
cars, vehicles, automobiles and so on.
* <META name="distribution" content="one of several">
o Content should contain either global, local or iu (for Internal
Use). To be perfectly honest, I can't quite get my head around this
one; its supposed to list available resources designed to allow the use
to find things easily, but I still don't quite get it. My advice is to
stick to "global".
To add these to your site simply paste them into the head section of
your document like this:
<title>Spider enthusiasts</title>
<meta name="description" content="Love spiders? So do we, come and
join us in our active and friendly forum.">
<meta name="keywords" content="spiders enthusiasts web daddy
longlegs">
In my example I have edited my meta tags for use with a spider
enthusiasts website. Note that I havn't seperated my keywords with meta
tags, although lots of people reccomend doing this it will actually
reduce your chances of being found in search engines. Missing out the
commas allows the SE to rearrange the keywords how it likes, for
example if I had the following as my keywords:
spider enthusiasts daddy longlegs fly
predators
And I entered the search term spider
longlegs the search engine is able to rearrange them as if you
had actually entered spider longlegs as a keyword.
Remember, choose your keywords wisely dont go selecting any random
things, if you have milkshake as a keyword and you have a spider
website people will visit and leave, which is just a waste of
bandwidth. Also try and select keywords other websites in the same
category havn't.
Moving
onto the description
Make your description short and sweet, and try to sum up what your
website is about as little as possible, again say you have a spider
website an example of a good description would be:
Spiders are ancient animals with a history going back many millions
of years. They have always been with us, an ancient source of fear and
fascination.
An example of a bad description would be:
Our website is all about spiders please come and look at it.
Show that you know what your talking about, make it sound professional
and I assure you you will get lots more visitors.
The title of your page plays a major role in SEO, try and include
as many powerful keywords in your title as you can, but try and keep it
around 40-50 characters in length and dont include commas.
Moving
away from the meta tags and onto the content:
The keywords in your meta tags need help, you need to try and add
them into the content of your page as much as possible. This gives the
keywords more weight, which means the SE's see them as being more
important and more relevent to your site.
Also the more often the content on your site is updated the higher
your pagerank and the higher your listing. SE's love updated pages,
this system allows them to pull out larger websites who actually spend
time updating the content from little personal pages which are rarely
updated.
Links links links, get as many as you can, but dont spam! You must
try and get as many links to index of your website as you can, this
will dramatically increase the ranking of your site, but remember not
to spam or take part in link swop schemes just to get a higher rank,
they must be genuine otherwise you will down, right to the bottom!
####### Well i'll end on that for this week, off to Austria next
week so when I have some spare time i'll try and add some more. #######
Hope the above helps (It was written by myself but some bits where
taken from websites, I have included a bibliography below).
Original Tutorial
by :Whizkid: for TheTAZZone-TAZForum
Originally posted on February 15th, 2007 here
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