SEO Tutorial

[Luckyrare]

I felt like writing something helpful, so I felt I should write something on helping you with SEO (Search engine optimization). Now I am pretty sure you have heard of SEO before but if you dont know what it is; its doing things to optimize your site in order to get more views coming from search engines. SEO can go really deep, Ill just tell you some of the basic ways.

The basic words

SEO
Stands for "Search engine optimization"

SERPS
Stands for "Search engine results pages"

Now the words crawler, spider and bot can mean the same thing but they can be slightly defined. Now to be honest I have always classed them as the same thing.

Crawler
These look for links and follows them

Spider
These download webpages

Bot
Downloads page, crawls for links/images and then indexes them

PR
Google Page Rank

Site Map
A page that links to all (where possible) links on the site

Site Index
This is a other word for Site Map

Do it & dont it

Javascript

Javascript menus can look awesome but Javascript menus are not followed by all crawlers. Now a good way of having a fancy javascript menu and getting your site a better page rank is by making a Site Map. Link the sitemap on your bottom of the page, no fancy javascript just a plain HTML link will be perfect

Image navigation

Image navigations can add a good luck to your site but these are not very good as some search engines dont like them. Like every site, a site map is very important and is a must if you are using Javascript/image menus.

hello.php?wha=my-name-is-danny

Most search engines will only index hello.php if you do links like that, if you use mod_rewrite this will make all search engines possible to index your pages.

Insert this into your htaccess file, for dynamic mod_rewrite directorys

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)\.html$ hello.php?wha=$1

Use - or _ to break up the words so you have something neat like www.mysite.com/my-name-is-danny.html

Click here

Rather than telling people "Today I wrote a cool script, click here to see it", write something like "Today I wrote a cool script called Myscript". This is better for search engines and will get you a better PR (over time).

Link building

On forums, blogs or comments, link your website! Using these spoiler tags? Your wasting your time bud; they wont get picked up by the crawlers.

Meta tags

A few search engines are starting to stop using meta tags as they are becoming smarter. I feel its still worth it. I am pretty sure Google has totaly stopped using them

Invite Google

Google is the best search bot for good results, so make sure your site is indexed for crawling.

http://www.google.com/addurl/

Yahoo is the second biggest (I think) so add yourself

http://submit.search.yahoo.com

Linking my friends

Awww your kind, if you are going to link your friends write the links like so...

<a href="http://www.myfriend.com" rel="nofollow" alt="My friends website">My Friend</a>

The rel="nofollow" tells the bot, dont follow this. "Why not?" I hear you ask, the bot may choose to follow that URL and stop crawling yours.

Unique content

Have as much unique content as possible; if the same thing is on 100's of other sites dont even bother copying it.

alt tags

Include alt tags on images, this will add more keywords for your website and index them into Google Images.

Clean code

Keep your code nice and clean, otherwise the bot wont know what to do. Try keeping it XHTML valid


How to get banned from Google (in other words a big no no)

- Change it so if its a bot, it shows a different page (also called Cloaking)
- Have hiden text (eg. have text the same colour as the back ground)
- Filling the page with words in order to get loads of keywords

Make sure you read http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html

Sites you should check out

- Google Sitemaps - Add your sitemap - This will tell Google the pages that are on your site and crawl them
- Google Analytics - View daily stats on your website, loads of amazing ways of showing them with maps and so on
- Google - Search for tutorials
- Sitepoint - Read the articles on SEO

I hope this helped you!

Moved by NintendoNews (Forum Moderator) from Website Design: Nice tutorial Thanks for your effort!

[the wombats]

good guide danielle! i agree with the google bit, meta tags are useless as google don't find them. they find how many times your page is linked from different sites or something similer.

[YouFail]

Very well done mr.Danny. Plus rep for your kindness, pity I knew most of the stuff in it but thanks anyway

Must spread reppage

[Blob]

good guide danielle! i agree with the google bit, meta tags are useless as google don't find them. they find how many times your page is linked from different sites or something similer.

Daniel..

[Luckyrare]

good guide danielle! i agree with the google bit, meta tags are useless as google don't find them. they find how many times your page is linked from different sites or something similer.

Yah, Google page rank works like this



Understand? :rolleyes:

BTW Craig, you ow me rep from when the forum got owned. I lost it =[

ty Richard

[ScottDiamond]

Yah, Google page rank works like this



Understand? :rolleyes:

BTW Craig, you ow me rep from when the forum got owned. I lost it =[

ty Richard

ur net gna get dem 5 mins of ur lyf bag danni

Edited by NintendoNews (Forum Moderator): Please do not post pointlessly, thanks

[Sygon..]

Forgetting sitemaps.

[timROGERS]

Forgetting sitemaps.

He did mention sitemaps more than once

[Luckyrare]

Sygon

Image navigations can add a good luck to your site but these are not very good as some search engines dont like them. Like every site, a site map is very important and is a must if you are using Javascript/image menus.

[Robbie]

Very nice tutorial, Danny.