Search Engine Optimization
How To Make A Website > Search Engine Optimization
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 KeywordsOnce 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 TagsMeta 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 TagsAlt 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. |
