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Article Title: An introduction to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and Positioning

Article Author: Daryl Quenet
Article Category: Webmaster Corner
Times Read: 1214
Date: 2007-01-26 07:45:41
Pages: 1

Welcome to my first Article in my new Webmaster Corner. In this section of my website I will highlight the lessons I have learned through my experience with managing over 60 websites, and through experiences and experiments with this website. My first Article will be an introduction to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), optimizing design, and how to maximize your search engine positioning for Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Live. You may wish to bookmark this Article as there is a lot of content to digest.

When it comes to running an effective website which, depends on your search engine results pages (SERPs), there are three major factors that can influence the number of search engine referrals (incoming searches) you get. This applies to all the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Live)

Content Is King

The first and most important thing is the content that is on your page, regardless of how much time you put into Search Engine Optimizations (SEO) for your website without the content people are searching for you will find very little return on your efforts.

Involved with the preparation of your content is analyzing the keyword(s) for your given industry. Now just putting Keywords in the keywords meta tag will get you no where without those Keywords existing in your content. This is known as Keyword Density, basically the more often you're keywords appear in the content the higher up you will come.

Now keep in mind that ultimately having the end user convert is our goal, this is getting new users to buy our product, services, or whatever your goal may be. Users unlike search engines are not interested in Keyword Density so beware of keyword spam.

And a final note on Content for this introduction is that it is advisable to constantly update your content. The longer your content goes without updates, the staler the content gets, and the lower your search engine positioning will drop. However with enough Link Building this can be negated.

Link Build Your Way To Search Engine Success

The second most important factor is Link Building. The more quality links linking to your website the higher your website content will be rated. For many of the Articles in this category I will refer to a term called Google Pagerank. The reason for this is quite simple. Generally Google will drive the bulk of search based traffic to your website. And secondly this Pagerank is generally applicable to all search engines although their algorithms vary for performing searches.

The biggest factor in Pagerank is the amount and quality of incoming links into your website. Now if a high ranking site is pointing at you chances are that it is highly ranked because it has lots of incoming links. The Pagerank scale is based on a value of 0 - 10, and Unranked. Some people will argue that Pagerank is useless, but in my opinion it's still very useful for having an indication of what Google thinks of you, and useful for finding sites to link exchange / build with.

Optimize Your Website Navigation Structure & Design

The third most important fact is how your website is structured & developed. The worst case with bad structure is that no part of your website will be cached and you will see no visitors. I have seen sites that have been configured so that as soon as a visitor contacts the web server it redirects the user to the https protocol (secure web server). Searches engines don't tend to cache anything on the https port.

For other sites I have seen Google has only cached the index page, which may have an assigned Pagerank without spidering the rest of the website. The things to remember when mapping out the structure of your website are:

At all costs avoid having dynamic URLs (ie index.php?PageId=1), a dynamic URL is a URL that contains HTTP GET variables. Search engines don't tend to spider these sites well. And to users they don't have any relevant information to their Queries. Try to use Page keys that contain your keywords, if you need to use Dynamic scripts to build your website (ie through a Content Management System), use Apache Mod Rewrites to build a static in appearance website (Notice how all URLs on my website appear to be directories).
If possible try to use the Keywords you are targeting for your industry in your URL or Files / Directories. This helps increase your Keyword Density, as well as providing users clicking through on Google information relevant to their query.
Don't constantly change your website structure. Pagerank takes time naturally to develop, and Google holds new sites back in a Sandbox. By renaming a page you can kiss your pre-existing search engine positioning away on renamed pages until their rank is redeveloped.
When designing a new site try to avoid having filenames with extensions in the URL (ie Products.asp), this can limit your opinions in the future if you change programming languages (ie ASP to PHP), as well as the platform your website can be hosted on (ie Windows vs Linux Hosting).
When implementing a new structure or new site, create a Google sitemap, and register it with Google to let Google know what to index.

Once you have decided on a website structure, or you have a pre-existing structure, the best way to score higher search engine positions is to have minimalist coding in the HTML to maximize your Content to Markup Ratio. The best way to minimize the amount of HTML code required is to use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Cascading Style Sheets allow you to pull the design out of your HTML pages and place them into a separate file. Not only does this remove a lot of HTML if you were using Tables for layout, it makes maintenance a lot simpler as all your design changes are made in one place.

If you view the XHTML code behind this website you will see there is relatively little markup language for what is displayed on the screen. When I moved my website from table based layout to Cascading Style Sheets I managed to condense my markup code by around 60%! If you have a very large site this can be even more beneficial as some search engines limit the amount of hard drive space they will allocate to caching your website.

And thus concludes my introduction to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), it may sound long and long winded, but that is really just a little bit of what goes into successful positioning your website on the search engines. If you're looking for Search Engine Optimization Services I can be contracted through www.quenet.org. Good luck on your Search Engine Result Pages and Positioning!