Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is the practice in which a webmaster enhances the website in order to achieve higher rankings in search engines like Google™ and directories like Yahoo™. There are many different strategies behind this whole concept. This is just a basic overview of the search engine optimization concept. We will have many other articles that can explain many topics more in depth.

Website History and Frequent Change

One way to be ranked high in many SE’s and Directories is to have website history. Think of it as “website seniority”. Many SE’s will even check to see how frequent your website changes and updates. By adding more unique content, every time the search engine robot comes to crawl your website, this lets the robot know that you just updated so it will increase the visits on your site. The more updates you make, the more times your website will be crawled.

Unique Content is King

Google has implemented a way to figure out duplicate content that’s out on the internet. For those of you that simply use automated systems to automatically create “new” posts in your blog or website will end up failing miserably. Scenario: Google has already “indexed” a specific website that appears to have unique content, someone totally plagiarizes and steel this website’s article. Google will then end up indexing this website and realize that this content already appears on the other site that first had it. You ask, what happens? Simply, your website will negatively be effected and Google will administer lower rankings and pr to the site that had copied the content.

Clean and Valid Markup

This is a very important practice in order to index well and have high placement in search engines. You have to pretend and walk a mile in the search engine robot’s shoes. You’re “crawling” a page and keep running into really bad syntax errors, terrible nested html tags, no doctype, etc… Do you really think that search engines will want to come back? Also take advantage of special html commands such as the * rel=”nofollow” * within the tag when you don’t want the SE’s to crawl that link. I could probably write a book about this topic. I have created another post to explain this more in depth.

Exposing Both Title Tags

The reason why I had typed “both” is because there are two different title tags. The first and most important is the <title> of your web page and the other is the link title=”[Link Title]“.

Web Page Title Tag
Using a strong, keyword balanced title for your web page is one of the most important aspects of search engine optimization. The reason for this is that it’s the first thing the search engine sees and holds a very high precedence when crawled. The main objective and goal of this is to not overload or stuff too many keywords within the inner html of this tag. Try your best to keep it relevant and on topic towards the rest of the content on your page.

Link Title Attribute
It is important to create a “Link Title” on majority of static links on your website. This also displays a small tag with more information to the user upon link hover. This too should not be abused. The reason why this helps seo is that many se’s and directories are starting to target towards the disabled. For the hearing impaired and blind, there are many special computer systems that can help them navigate through websites easier. You’re probably wondering how inserting the link title attribute will help disabled people and search engine placement. The answer is, when se’s are crawling and finds that your page has many link titles, it will actually increase your exposure in search results since it could potentially help the disabled. There’s so much more that I could discuss about this topic however this posting is just an overview and I might have more postings on this topic alone later in the future. So, let’s continue on shall we…

Importance of Meta Tags

Meta tags are specific search engine tags that should be included within the head tag of your page. This concept is one of the very first implemented to help search engines index pages by relevancy. The problem is, many se’s and directories are starting to set a lower precedence on this markup since many unethical webmasters overload and abuse this concept by keyword stuffing. The use of meta tags are still implemented by se’s so it’s important to take every advantage of effective seo.

Page Rank (PR)

Page rank is one of the most important strategies towards affective search engine optimization. Page rank a.k.a. PR is when search engines review how many back links are given from other websites to yours. This now goes into the topic of “Anchor Tags” which I will discuss further in this article.