Search Engine Optimization
Tutorial!
On this page you will find
a tutorial to help you with your website
or web page search engine optimization
( SEO ) and positioning ( SEP ) efforts.
Here you will learn enough to help you
get good listings with most of the major
engines and directories.
In the chapters below we
give you an introduction to SE robots,
spiders or crawlers as they are variously
termed.
We will tell you how to
design your website for better Search
Engine ratings, how to optimize your meta
tags and how to optimize your content.
Introduction
So, you have created your
website, you have uploaded it to the server,
it is looking great and you are ready
to go!
Now all you need is vistors
to see your site and they will buy your
product or service? Maybe, maybe not,
but how are you going to get visitors
to your site to bring in any orders at
all?
There are lots of ways to
promote your website and on other pages
we cover many of them, but the very best,
most economical way is to get good rankings
for your web page(s) keywords and phrases
on the search engines.
It is not just a matter
of submitting your URL's to the search
engines though. In order to get a semi
reasonable rating or even listed at all,
you need to ensure that the pages you
are submitting are OPTIMIZED for
the search engine robots and directory
editors, who/which will come and check
over your site once it has been submitted.
Search engine optimisation
is not a simple matter and if you want
to become an expert, you will need to
go away and do a lot more study. However,
what you will learn in this tutorial will
help you to achieve reasonable results,
even sometimes excellent ones.
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Background
Most of the SE's use software
called robots, spiders or crawlers which
will visit your pages sometimes up to
6-8 weeks after you have submitted them
for listing.
Actually most of these robots
do not rely on submissions, they are constantly
searching the 'net for new and updated
pages and, if you have links coming back
to your pages from other websites they
will eventually find your site. We recommend
that you cover all bases though and make
the submissions anyway.
These 'robots' all tend
to have slightly different ways of working.
Some look at the background 'meta tags'
on your page, then compare what they find
there with the copy or text on the actual
page which your visitors see. Others,
including the most important SE...Google,
simply pull information off your page
and list that in their index.
The Directories such as
Yahoo! and Dmoz use human editors to review
your website after submission, who do
the same job as the robots, plus they
check to see if your site is relevant
to the Directory category you have submitted
to.
The point we want to make
here is that your website will be checked
for relevancy against the keywords,
search terms and/or directory category
you submit your pages for. Or it will
be listed according to what the 'robot'
sees on the page.
In order to appear early
in SE search results your pages must be
optimized to ensure that they reflect
the important keywords and phrases your
potential customers will be using to search
the WWW.
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Designing your website
for better Search Engine ratings
Before we get down to detail on how to
optimize individual pages, we should make
a few comments about how to design your
website to help the 'robots' do their
job.
There are some pretty definate
do's and do not's involved here. We must
remember that these 'robots are only software
programs and that their abilities are
limited. So here are a few design do not's
first.
DO NOT
