SEO & Search Engine Watch

Basics of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Considering out sourcing your SEO isn’t always a bad idea, but before you consider it you can do some basic things to help your website and how it ranks. So this article is appropriatley named the basics of search engine optimisation (SEO).

Well lets start with what search engine optimisation is - It’s where a website owner or website designer does what they can to make their website more visible to the search engines in a legitmate way.

Firstly I would like to mention that their are methods which can be considered black-hat, or wrong. Some of these include things such as link buying or ‘white text’ (where you have text the same colour as the background of your page). These methods can get your website banned from the index permenantly - and WILL NOT be covered here.

So what can you do to improve your search engine visibility?

Well I guess the first thing to make clear is that you must make your website for the user, not for the search engines - what I mean by this is that you do not deliberatley take on every method to make your website look good - ironically this can have a negative effect. So I say it again, design your website for the USER, not the search engine.

Title everything up, links, images (alt text for images), but make sure they are descriptive. Here are some examples for a made up cheese website:

Imagine this is a layout div:

<div title=”Information on Cheese including Cheddar & how it compliments Wine”>CONTENT</div>

Now that is a rough example, but I feel its complimenting of the content you might have for this page.

Next Example is a link, still keeping with the cheese theme, imageine a link to a page on cheddar:

<a href=”cheddar-pricing.html” title=”Cheddar Cheese Information & Pricing”>Cheddar</a>

Now although we are talking about title tags, please also note that URL is important, notice the page on cheddar is cheddar-pricing.html - when this page is indexed by the search engine, the URL relates to the content, which is a great thumbs up.

Ok lets change from title tags, but keep on the cheese theme.

Linking

So you have a cheese site, and you got a page on cheddar pricing, how can we improve this pages ranking? Well one way which is obvious via the title of this section is Linking. What you can do is, as obviously the interest of the site is cheese, is to become actively involved in other cheese discussions, that includes blogs, forums, directories, and become involved with the topic of cheese. Do not spam them, but in your footer / author of your posts, link to the cheese pricing page. Not only will this gain you a link to your site, it will gain you some reputation for being a ‘cheese expert’ and users who read your comments, will visit your website, and more visitors = more sales, or if you just need visitors, well, hey you get more visitors. OF COURSE this does take an element of time, but remember that search engine optimisation is long term not short. But in theory this should only take a few miniutes of your time, even once per week.

Heres a couple of tips anyway, obviously check back and I’ll give ya a few more or view a few of my other posts.

Many thanks

Wuup Team

Related Wuup Stuff:

• 25 August, 2008 -- Flash and SEO Not a Lost Cause?
• 10 July, 2008 -- Google Page Rank
• 6 July, 2008 -- Search Engine Magic
• 9 October, 2008 -- Top 10 Domain Name Do’s and Don’ts
• 4 October, 2008 -- How to Increase Google Crawl Rate

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