Search engine optimisation is one of the most important aspects to consider when creating a website because it determines the success and popularity by controlling the majority influx of new users. Everyone serious about creating content on the internet is interested in reaching the largest audience possible — search engine optimisation is therefore an important topic to discuss in depth.
I mentioned in my earlier entry “Ranked 8th on Google” that “XHTML coupled with good page structure results in high search engine rankings” which is true but the content matters more: when a user writes a search term the search engine will judge the page against how many times that term appears. I managed to achieve a high ranking on Google by increasing how many times I wrote my name and aliases on my homepage with content in the title, headings and meta-description having the greatest effect. The meta-description tag is really important because search engines will use that instead of a content excerpt if it is relevant enough to the search term. From a variety of source I now concluded that meta keywords are obsolete unused tags and a substantial waste of time — don’t use them.
Getting featured on a popular website, usually caused by good website content, can dramatically increase the amount of visitors to your page: the more sites that link to your site the better, however the gains are simply immense when featured on a website with a high Google PageRank.
Yahoo! Site Explorer and Google Sitemaps are great resources for examining how your site is indexed. Site Explorer shows all the pages that have been indexed under a specific domain and all the pages that link to that domain. Sitemaps is a more useful resource which provides a large amount of information about your site. One advantage of Site Explorer is that you do not have to register to use it while Sitemaps require both this and verification that you are the site owner. Once logged in, however, Sitemaps provides query, crawl and index statistics including keywords used to find your site and the position of your page under those keywords. By using page analysis you can see common words in page content and external links.
Matt Cutts, a Google employee, has posted some very informative videos on his blog about search-engine related topics including “Qualities of a good site”, “Some SEO Myths” and “Should you optimize for Search Engines or for Users?”. He seems to be posting videos relatively quickly and now has eight sessions, as the time of writing this entry, hosted on Google Videos; his latest video is Google Terminology which doesn’t appear quite so interesting or useful when compared to his other ones.
Google has a section called “Webmaster Help” that contains a more specific page “Webmaster Guidelines” that help Google rank and index your website. Important points mentioned include:
- Have other relevant sites link to yours
- Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!
- Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link
- Make sure that your site actually includes the words users type to find your pages
- Use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links
- Examine your site in a text browser (such as Lynx) because this is how search engine spiders see your site
Another common point that arises is using URLs that search engines can easily index, and users remember, instead of long query strings. SitePoint demonstrates three common methods in the article “Search Engine-Friendly URLs” which I may apply to my homepage in future.
