A bit late but here it is.

First of all I want to wish everyone a great 2008 and a better start then me :).

After thinking a bit I changed the topic of these monthly messages from SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to Website Optimization simply cause there is more to tell there. In the first post of this series I'll cover basic but importend parts of Search Engine Optimization. Along with this post are the 3 images you see below, these are used to demonstrate how the techniques I use end up as search results on google. (The reason I stick with google is that I get 97% of my search engine visitors from there.) The first one is a simple text page, the World of Warcraft page on my site. The second one is a more dynamic page, it's one my most recent screenshots I made a few days ago. When writing this and future posts I assume you have basic knowledge of HTML. Are interested in optimize your builded websites or want to have a good start right away. Also all the info comes from experimenting and my own opinion how things look best!

Image 1

Image 2

Image 3

Head

The head section of a HTML page contains multiple imported tags (some of them like keywords and description seem to be outdated, I'm experimenting with it these days and will come back if they are still worth spending time on) that should be kept in mind when building a website. The head section is also the place for alternative information like Yahoo! Site Explorer and Google Webmaster Tools owner ship verification but I'll get into them another time.

Title

The title tag is the first thing people get their eyes on when searching something and should there for be inviting and interesting for them. If your title doesn't has what they are looking for they most likely skip onto the next result. A good title contains a site name for global recognition and a very short natural text to give the page a title. And in short tell whats it about.

Example:

<title>WyriHaximus.net :: Home >> World of Warcraft</title>

Body

The body section of the page is the (for the human visitor) visible part of the page. With good content and a clean and clear design most attractive for visitors. Also with most pages the body should show up nice in the results. But when you have image results like one my most recent screenshots it can show up odd (see Image 2) and not directly clear to users. Personally I add the tags of that image to the alt and title attribute of the img tag so get a more (and still far from perfect, it would be best to have a natural language piece of text to describe the screenshots, but that is kinda hard when you have 12.500+ screenshots) and better page to crawl. For a human it doesn't matter but crawlers don't have a clue whats with that page and tagging it is 1 way to give them more useful information.

Content

I cannot stress this enough "MAKE SURE YOU HAVE QUALITY CONTENT", content is key when your trying to build a successful site. Without (decent) content there is nothing to visit and visitors don't have a reason to return to your site after the first visit. Making up content can be hard and there for you should always have a vision on what your website should be about and what you want to have on your pages. Otherwise you'll be floating around with an half finished website that can be unattractive for visitors.

Design

Design is your bisnues card when people visit your site. It's the first thing they see before they start reading. People tend to leave the page if it's overloaded with ads or all kinds of things. Choosing a good design can also be difficult. Myself I'm very fond of the designs over at Styleshout. Also Oswd.org has an impressive selection of (less) good and free templates. By downloading and applying a template you aren't completely done yet. If possible try to get a unique as possible logo for you site. And by editing the templates a bit you can give it a personal touch.

Ads

Ads are something you should be really careful with. NEVER EVER overload your page with ads. And never ever use flashing, fake windows or ads that suddenly make sounds. Personaly I love Google's Adsense cause they are non intrusive and easy to blend in into the design. Also to gain a bit more attention to them but stay non intrusive is to invert the colors of your design like this (see Image 3), it's still not overwhelming but you get a bit more attention to them.

URL's

URL's (Uniform Resource Locator's) require a bit of background information before reading the next 2 sections. URL's consist out of different parts. We start with the protocol bit http://example.com/index.php?page_id=123. Then there is the host http://example.com/index.php?page_id=123. http://example.com/b>index.html?page_id=123. The file bit http://example.com/index.html?page_id=123, the file bit is also seen as 1 page, regardless how many different arguments it has. Crawlers tend to dislike such pages with arguments. The arguments bit http://example.com/index.php?page_id=123.

Raw URL's vs. 'clean' URL's

Lets make somethings clear first. Raw URL's look like this http://example.com/index.php?page_id=123. 'Clean' URL's look like this http://example.com/page/123.html. The reason search engines don't like raw URL's is because they see http://example.com/index.php as a page instead of the full http://example.com/index.php?page_id=123. You can work around this problem by using mod_rewrite (for Apache, most big HTTP servers have equivalent engines onboard) to rewrite URL's to a 'clean' URL like this http://example.com/page/123.html. This also looks better for the eyes and crawlers see it as a independent file.

Text in URL's

Ok lets take the previous part a bit further. Links are not just a way to identify what page to show but also a way of telling the users and searchers whats on the page. http://example.com/page/world-of-warcraft.html is a lot more inviting then http://example.com/page/123.html if you just see the URL. Also when you search a site and google finds the keyword your looking for in the URL it will show up in the results as well.

Next month I'll cover how to get crawlers to craw your entire site and how to use several web2.0 systems (link ping and pingback), to extend your reach even more. And I got another experiment coming up but thats kinda of a surprise and is going have a lot of work in it so don't expect it any time soon ;).

Do you have questions? Make sure to ask!

WyriHaximus

Tag it!: SEO (1), Monthly Website Tips (3) 6 January 2008, 22:30 Views: 529 3 [Mood: Coding a lot ]