Search Engine Optimisation

This tutorial deals with optimization techniques for submission to Search Engines. Most of this tutorial has been collated from this thread at aussieforum.com.
First up, submit your site to the http://www.dmoz.org directory. It really improves your site ranking a lot. But don't forget to read the guidelines carefully! Then submit your site to Google!
Before that make sure you fix any coding errors - correct all HTML mistakes
I recommend Boxer Text Editor, $59.99 USD, delivered via download only: the best text editor I have seen so far!
Use text links to get to other pages on your site.
Make sure your homepage contains text and not only flash.
A site map can help search engine spiders as well as site visitors.

There are actually two issues:

1. sites being found by google
   All you need is some incoming links from pages already listed and you'll get found. If they rank fairly well and are regularly updated then all the better.
2. getting on the first page.
   This is a lot harder, particularly if you're trying for competitive keywords. The best place to start is to head for http://webmasterworld.com. It's the best place on the net for SEO ideas and information Start here and work your way in.

Dynamic Content

Use this meta tag : < META NAME="Document-state" CONTENT="Dynamic">
Does Google index dynamic content?
Opinion 1. Google does index dynamic content but it doesn't really influence your site's ranking. Generally speaking less parameters in the URL is a good thing. Backlnks from dynamic pages are also credited.
Opinion 2. Some spiders don't index pages with query strings at all, and Google indexes some but not all dynamically-generated pages.

Articles:

• Reasons your site may not be included.
  "Your pages are dynamically generated. We are able to index dynamically generated pages. However, because our web crawler can easily overwhelm and crash sites serving dynamic content, we limit the amount of dynamic pages we index."
  BTW, the above page has lots of other useful info too for those who are wondering why Google isn't listing their pages.
• Beware of Query Strings
  "...most search engine spiders simply avoid any links containing a query string. If your site embeds query strings in links between pages, then there's a good chance the spider will index your home page, but skip all other pages in the site."
• Search-Engine-Friendly URLs
  "...most search engines (with a few exceptions - namely Google) will not index any pages that have a question mark or other character (like an ampersand or equals sign) in the URL." (2001)
• An AH 2003 thread with the subject line Google optimisation has some good reading too.
• Dynamic pages and search engines
  A recent thread titled dynamic pages & search engines in the alt.www.webmaster newsgroup has more details about how to help search engines view dynamic pages. It discusses how to pass query strings and such things that are too technically advanced for some of us, but not for everyone. Posters also give examples of what kinds of URLs search engine spiders don't index, and how changes in the URL meant that the pages were indexed.

Links

• Concentrate on creating links to (&from) other sites
• A good place to get an incoming link is from about.com.
• They have sites (subdomains) for just about everything, and loads of links.
• Google looks favourably on links from about.com.
• Do not engage in these link-swapping scams!
• Remember that links to sites with similar content seem to help more. If you are receiving a link from a site without similar content, make sure the text around the link indicates similar keywords to your site. For example, if my business designs a website for a pet shop, there aren't going to be common keywords. But if I put a small link at the bottom of their site with words like "Website design by blah.com", this will make the link more relevant to my site's keywords and therefore I should see more pagerank out of it.

Keywords

• The Permutator is a must-have tool for generating keyword phrases. The most common keyword phrases have become overused due to competitive bidding. The secret to getting clicks is to develop a large list of keyword phrases that advertisers aren't bidding on. The Permutator can generate huge lists of keyword phrases in just minutes!
  The Permutator, $49.99 USD, delivered via download only:
• You may get higher ranking because there isn't a lot of competition for the keywords.
• Use keywords in your page title, your meta tag title, and your heading tags, esp. "h1" and "h2". The page title in particular is *very* important with Google.
• Repeat those keywords in context on each page ("keyword density"). Have lots of content, and say things different ways. The best thing is decent content on what your keywords are about..
• Use keywords in links and have text links not picture links
• Use alt tag in your img tags that contain your keywords e.g. img src="cat.jpg" alt="cat lovers are cats"
• Do not use a doorway or repeat the keywords mercilessly or use text colour that is similar to background colour, they have algorithms that sniff that out and they will ignore you..
• Use really decent content that specifically deals with the gist of your keywords.
• Where you come in the results before you optimise depends mostly on what keyword you're targetting. You might be up against thousands of other sites or only ten, depending on the search phrase. Or you might be only up against 50 sites, but all very good well optimised ones. That's harder to crack than 20,000 thrown together, badly designed sites

Meta Tags

You can the following meta tags in your pages:
<META NAME="Description" CONTENT="place your site's description here">
<META NAME="Keywords" CONTENT="place your site's keywords here">
<META NAME="Resource-type" CONTENT="document">
<META name="robots" content="index,follow">
<META name="revisit-after" content="50 days">
<META name="rating" content="general">
<META name="distribution" content="global">

But lots of people say that meta tags play very little part in it these days. They do help with engines other than Google, but since Google provides the rankings for many engines now, this is largely not the case.

Google's Search Algorithm

Google uses an engine that is not swayed by design elements imposed on a site. Obviously there are ways to make a site come up better on an index, but Google is aimed at getting around many of these and ranking the true "value" of a site in terms of its content. It does this via pagerank.

For the most part, Google does weighted averages of scores derived from meta tags, keyword density, pagerank, formatting (such as heading information), titles, alt tags, and the domain name. Since it has so many metrics with which to score a page, it is able to self-adjust the validity of these metrics by way of the other ones. It is speculated that because so many people have used meta tags with no real correlation to their site (i.e. people used to use keywords like "sex" or "mp3" just to try and get their pages to show up in searches) that the weighting of meta tags in the indexing process is somewhat diminished these days. Google is aware of tricks like putting text on a page that is the same color as the background and it scores poorly against such tricks. Of course there are ways around it such as hidden DIVs and DIVs located off the screen, but you never know when Google will add another test in and all of a sudden your tricks come back to bite you in the form of a poor ranking.

Essentially, the first of the two key things to worry about is the keyword density. Try and make sure that roughly 10% of all of the words on the page are one of your keywords. Avoid arranging these the same every time though, and avoid exactly the same individual word densities on linked pages. This is not natural in real content and is easily detected as spammin the keyword density checker.

pagerank is the other way to get good rankings but beware, pagerank acts as a multiplier to the natural rankings you get from other things such as keyword density. In other words pagerank alone is not going to get you excellent rankings. But what is pagerank? well it is essentially the principle that every indexed page carries with it a vote. Linking to a page gives it an equal proportion of the vote and your vote is equal to your pagerank. This is of course a recursive problem which their servers only approximate. You can see the pagerank of a site by downloading the Google toolbar, however this does not return the actual pagerank, only a basic approximation. Google keeps the actual pageranks a secret so that you can't figure out the weighting of the metrics.

Dont try to fool Google. Use quality content and encourage people who appreciate your content to link to you. This is a sure-fire way to get a good ranking (as long as your page can be spidered, so if you have JavaScript links, have a sitemap page as well that allows the spiders to follow HTML links to your other pages).

Jason Goodridge, Axios IT, www.axios-it.com.au

Vicki Whyte

Aussieforum thread

Susanna D
Susanna's Soap Box
Women Webmasters
Keep Left Theatre

Lois

DanL

Shelley -
science geek
and procrastinator

Pascal

ieee488

I Help You Services - search engines forum