SEO is the abbreviation of Search Engine Optimization, and simply making your website search-engines friendly, that you try to get your websites’ pages included correctly in some search engine.
Search engines is #1 traffic source for nowadays, and that does not need a prove, does it? you can watch yourself when you need something, you directly point your browser to your favorite search engine (mine is http://www.google.com btw), type your keywords and there you are; asking the right question (here: the search keywords), the better and more relevant results you get.
so, what is the basic things to do to improve your websites reach through serach engines, here is a few:
- Page title: page title should be short, meaningful and directly to the subject of the page. page title has a higher rank than body for example when search engines look for results againest some keywords.
- MetaTags: use meta tags description and keywords , make sure you write the right keywords here, that the search engines spider (crawler) look for them.
- heading tags: use heading tags were possible, that most search engines take attention to <h1> <h2> … etc tags, and consider them as important keywords in the article.
- use as many moderation tools as you can, both automated and manual, so, you make sure you are away from spamming and the repeated and no-meaning posts (i.e: repeated comments and replies in forums Thank You).
- create a website that XHTML and better W3C compliant, don’t mess things up, use CSS+XHTML, making sure of that, you make sure search engines can extract the best keywords from your websites’ pages.
- short and meaning-full URLs with as less parameters as possible, use URL rewrite and that is, try to avoid long URLs, a zillion parameters URLs.
you can ask your system administrator to do the job, or on the application level – that is – asking the developer who developed your application.
This article is the first in a series about SEO techniques and tactics, to see all related articles click on the category SEO on the right hand.
