Search Engine Optimization Tips
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David
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February 20th, 2012
In my opinion this is where you will spend the majority of your time in regards to making a website. SEO, search engine optimization is a process that will never end. The key is to develop your website with SEO in mind from the beginning so that you don't have to go back and redo your website.
There are many aspects of SEO that I'll cover from link exchanges to your meta tags. Each of them is important so it's good to have an understanding before you even start your website. As you read through each topic you may find a link to another page with detailed information about that given topic.
Selecting Website Keywords
Once you've decided on a topic for your website it's important to determine the keywords that you'll be optimizing your website for. It's a waist of time to optimize for a keyword that receives just a few requests on search engines per day.
Read more on selecting website keywords.
Creating Meta Tags
Meta tags are a snippet of code at the top of your HTML code that sort of describes your website to not only your visitors but to search engines. This is a very important part of SEO so I've created a separate page just related to meta tags.
Read more on meta tag optimization.
Unique Website Content
Unique content on a website is just as important as any part of SEO. Search engines are there to deliver information and they want unique information. It does them no good to deliver the same content on the top 10 listings. If you happen to make a website related to a topic that you are familiar with and that you enjoy, unique content isn't difficult.
Visit my page on writing unique website content for additional information.
Reciprocal Link Exchanges
Reciprocal link exchanges is the process of exchanging links with the webmaster of another site. The procedure is that you place a link to his website and in return he'll place a link to your website.
Due to the importance of linking in SEO I've created a dedicated page pertaining to reciprocal link exchange.
File Naming Conventions
When I speak of file naming conventions I'm speaking of naming the HTML files and images that you have on your website. As you can see I named this page search-engine-optimization.htm. The reason for this is to let search engines know that this page is about. If I'd have named this page web-page-10.htm the search engines would never know what the page was about.
The area of file naming is pretty self explanatory but I've decided to put together a page with examples and detailed information that can be viewed at file naming conventions.
Read more on file naming conventions.
Alt Tags
Alt tags are the name that you give to an image so that search engines understand what the image is related to. Consider this, you have your logo on your homepage called logo.jpg. Search engines have no clue what this file is related to so you give it an alt tag, in my case I would give images the tags related to making a website.
An example of an image with the alt tag included is <img src="images/making-a-website.gif" alt="cheap domain names">. This is telling the search engine that the image called making-a-website.gif is related to cheap domain names. This is a great way of giving search engines a little more information about your website.
It doesn't hurt to have an alt tag on majority of your images but be sure to not stuff them with too many keywords and certainly don't give them a tag of something that isn't related to your website.
Site Maps
A site map is a web page that is made up of a link to each page on your website. Click here to view our site map. The importance of a site map is that it's place for a search engine to easily find and crawl each page of your website which in turn allows them to index your webpage and appear somewhere in their search engine results.
Tip Of The Iceberg
What I've covered is a tip of the iceberg in regards to SEO. There are entire books and companies related to SEO. A book that I recommend is SEO Book. It's a complete book that covers just about every aspect of SEO. I've personally read the book a couple of times as new versions came out and definitely recommend that you consider purchasing it as well.
A word of warning, you're bound to find companies that offer SEO services that guarantee top results. Take this with a grain of salt because no one can guarantee top results. If you receive a call from a company don't agree to anything without doing some research on them first. I understand that they are fancy talkers but if you take the time to read something like the SEO Book you'll be able to do exactly what they can do while saving 100's if not 1,000's of dollars.
For more information on SEO I welcome you to visit our webmaster forum for more information.