Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

By Jamie | April 10, 2006

Whilst reading a various books on search engine optimisation (SEO) for our new company website I made the following keynotes that maybe of use to other people. The notes are only related to areas of the subject that I feel are important to our website. I would therefore highly recommend reading Search Engine Visibility by Shari Thurow as this covers the topic in much greater depth. I hope this gives you a quick insight into the subject of SEO!

Two main types of search engines, spider based engine’s (Google) and directory based (Yahoo). Spiders based crawl websites and then index them by building a list of keywords. Directory based use classification of sites by categories and sub-categories.
It is also worth taking note of a new breed of search engines, social bookmarking see http://www.del.icio.us which was recently bought by yahoo and will likely be rebranded into My Web 2.0
Indexing search engines use three components to rank sites:-
- Text – Keywords in your domain, title tags, visible body text, meta tags and graphical alternatives
- Links – Poor HTML coding will lose spiders or trap the poor things, Image maps, Frames, Javascript, Flash and Dynamic driven sites that use databases (&%$?) can contribute to poor linking ratings
- Popularity – How many sites list links to you
Web directory search engines look for:-
- Unique content
- Legitimate organisation
- Accurate description
- Website design should consider
  - An easy to read and navigate site
  - Easy to find content within the site
  - Consistent layout through design
  - Download times
Some engines place a great importance on title tags, not using the company name or placing it at the end of the title helps, “Intranet Solutions from The Company”
Making sure your menu’s are available as text hyperlinks some where on the page, footers area is good idea for the spiders to crawl all over your site
When choosing meta tags or keywords check out Overtune and experiment with search engines see number of results returned
Misspelled words for meta tags aren’t really worth it, with Google and Yahoo! Integrating spell checking technologies often correct your searches. If you spell it wrong in the body of your text then this is okay.
Many businesses use singular and plural strategies, for example title tag “Computer Solutions for all your computers needs”
Some search engines such as Google don’t care about your meta tags. Description is often more important than meta tags
Headline tags, consider the following “Intranet Solution” versus “Enterprise Intranet Solutions for your Business ”
Write conclusions to your paragraph’s, consider this “If you would like more information about our range of intranet solutions, be it commercial or open source, email us today”
When it comes to hyperlinks on body content don’t link text like this “to learn more click here” use “learn more about intranet solutions”
When writing a description leave as many filler words out as possible (the, of, a, and… etc)
Don’t use descriptions or meta tags that aren’t related to the content of the site, search engines consider them as spam
Don’t repeat title tag inside the meta tags descriptions. This called stacking by many search engine spiders
Most import keywords used at the beginning of the description
Repeating a word more than five times is not good practice
Meta-Tags keynotes
- Place the most important at the begin
- Don’t care about case
- Commas not important
- Unless you spell a keyword wrong on the body of your website don’t do so in your meta-tags, spiders consider this spam
URL and filename considerations
- www.intranet-pc-solutions.com/intranet-solutions.html
- Is better than www.intranetpcsolutions.com/solutions.html
Using the first page or welcome content to highlight your sites section with quick explanation helps the spiders.
Requesting links to other people’s sites such professional bodies, industry etc
If you use JavaScript place it into an external file
Use CSS as they reduce the code inside your html pages, easier for the spiders and plus they speed download times as one CSS styles your whole site.
Don’t use frames
Make sure the information you added to a web directory is unique, timely and accurate
When submitting to directories keep a log of relevant information such date, description used, URL, email etc
Always provide a custom 404 error page which has various links back to you website
Don’t run the risk of becoming a spammer by doing the following
- Don’t use meta-tags not related to your site, such as “sex”, this relates back to using keywords meta-tags that are only used on the body of the website
- Word stacking, intranet intranet intranet intranet intranet intranet
- Word stuffing “Intranet solutions from intranet solution providers of intranet solutions” Spiders look out for sentences that make little sense
- Various methods can be used hide text, keywords that are the same colour as the background so can’t be seen by the user but can be indexed by the spider. Most spiders are now able to recognise this and flag it as spam. This also goes for hidden links and tiny text.
- Other areas classed as spam techniques are
  - Web Farms
  - Mirroring
  - Web rings
  - Cloaking
  - Domain Spamming
  - Page swapping
  - Redirects
  - Typo spamming “Hoogle”