There had been quite some confusion about search
engine optimization. A lot webmasters and siteowners believe that SEO (abbreviation) is
just about tricking and cheating search engines to gain a higher pageranking or a top ranking in search engine result pages
(SERP or SERPS) for a
particular website to be optimized. Some webmasters or siteowners
believe that search engine optimization is so complex and packed with
unrevealed secrets, that it is very difficult to understand. Both views
are incorrect. We can define search engine optimization (SEO) as the art
and science of creating webpages that cover both major requirements to
be successful: they should be search engine friendly AND user friendly.
It is doubtless very important that search engine
robots will find and spider your site correctly and give it a ranking as
high as possible, both in the SERPS (or SERP) and PageRank validation to
make it visible to search engine users. Moreover donīt forget in the
end your users and customers are humans - not the robots. Therefore it
is important to attract the real human visitors with well written,
useful content, an easy navigatin structure and an attractive,
professional looking appearance of your site.
How can you bring both factors together in a
sensible way? Well, it is not that difficult, if you know what to take
care of. In the following you will find four very basic but most
important steps for optimizing your web pages for both, human visitors
and search engine robots:
1. You should mainly focus on Text,
not Graphics within Your Web Design
To design a "search engine friendly" web
site means the search engine robots or spiders should be able to find
data on your site that they can read and follow and that they can
integrate into their data bases. We all know, that a picture can be
worth a thousand words to humans, but a search engine spider cannot read
a picture, a graphic or an image. It can only read text. A lot of
webmasters make the mistake to create their start page (mostly the
"index.html" or "index.php") with a nice looking
picture, image map, or Flash animation with the only text in it saying
"enter here" or "skip intro". Do you really wonder
why this page is not ranked high - or maybe even not ranked at all - for
the search term "Florida Vacations"?
The same appears to your headline with important
text containing your companyīs name and the most important keywords. Do
not display it as a GIF, JPG or other image format. Just enter it as
"headline" or "H1" formated text. Do not to too much
of "wonderful" design work to your website. It will all just
hurt you! Websites that contain lotīs of pictures and Flash animiations
or are basically set up as complete Flash sites may look interesting at
first glance. But they are NOT search engine friendly, and most of the
time, they are even NOT user friendly as well.
2. Hyperlinks to the Interior Pages
of Your Web should be easily found and followed by Search Engine Spiders
Your website is not only containing your Homepage
(index.html). It is also containing a lot of other interior pages. It is
very important that all these pages will be spidered and included into
the search engine index. A lot of people may enter your site directly
through your homepage. But many, if not most, will find your site
through individual searches done through search engines, that directly
will bring them to one of your other pages within your site structure.
But if you have no valid linking structure from your homepage to these
interior pages - and vice versa - the spiders and robots will NEVER find
them, because they are simply blindfolded and hidden.
The best and most secure way, that search engines
will find, follow and index all of your pages is to include normal
standard HTML textlinks to all of these pages. If you have a page
navigation system which is using Java-script or Flash only, the spiders
will hardly detect and follow these links. So do not use them. If you
have to, due to some fancy web design reasons whatsover, make sure you
include some additional standard HTML text links at the top or bottom of
all your pages, to ensure the spiders can follow and index all of your
pages. It is also important to inlcude at least a link back to your main
page or homepage on every page of your web, so that visitors that come
in "vertically" through a search engine, landing on one of
your inner pages, can easily navigate to your homepage if they want to.
3. Build Your Pages around specific
Keywords or Key Phrases
There is one common thing about human users and
search engine spiders: they are looking for high quality, most relevant
content. And they are trying to figure out what your site or particular
single webpage within your site structure is all about. It is not
possible to get a high search engine ranking for 20 or 30 different
search terms with one web page only! It is however, possible to build
and create several web pages within your web, focussing and specialising
of 3 or 5 important key words or keyword phrases each. You should then
be able to optimize these individual pages in order to rank better for
the chosen dedicated search terms.
4. Once that you have organized Your
Material well, Your important Keywords should appear in strategic
Fractions of Your Webpages
Hm, sounds difficult? Well now, if your site is
about "Florida Vacations" these words should appear in the
following places of your HTML pages (besides, in regards to have search
engine friendly pages, you should always prefer to create proper HTML
pages. Stick to PHP, ASP, Flash or other webpage formats only, if there
are very important reasons to do so)... :
a.) Put your Keywords into the File
Name or Domain URL
If your site is called Florida Vacations you
should try to register the domain "floridavacations.com" or
"florida-vacations.com" rather, then
"myxyztravelpage.com". Similarly your web pages should be
named after the most important one or two keywords. In this example the
file of your inner page about Florida Hotels should be called
"florida-hotels.htm", which gives
"floridavacations.com/florida-hotels.htm". This will do your
rankings much better than "myxyztravelpage.com/page4711.htm"
This is because search engines (as well as users)
rate the name of the URL and HTML filename and will rank the domain or
page higher to the relevant search term. And also user acceptance and
confidence will increase if you have wisely chosen your domain name.
Both, the URL and the file name are important indicators for the search
engines to figure out what the site and page are all about. Donīt miss
the opportunity to take advantage out of this fact and include your most
important relevant keywords within them.
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