Post by Stormdance on Jul 3, 2008 11:01:16 GMT
Quick Tips
1. Give each page in your project a unique Title and brief Description before you publish. Make sure both reflect your page content accurately.
2. Check that your Title, Description and content contain words people are likely to enter into a search engine when looking for the sort of information your page provides. What would you type into a search engine?
3. Your Title and (usually) Description are both displayed in search engine listings - so they form the first impression someone sees of your site. An accurate, carefully crafted Title and Description can increase the chance of a visitor clicking on your site.
4. It can take more than a month for search engines to discover new sites. The best way for a search engine such as Google to first discover your new site is via a link from another already established site. In other words, natural discovery of your site via an incoming link is better than submitting your site to Google manually: If another web site thinks your content is worthy of a link - Google notices that.
5. Incoming links from other sites suggests your site has high quality content that is worth linking to. For modern search engines the number of genuine, relevant, incoming links is the major factor in how well a web page is ranked in the search engine listings.
6. Do not try to trick a search engine. Search engines are good at spotting deception. If caught your site could be banned and permanently removed from the search engine index.
7. Google is known to factor in page and image filenames when indexing a page. If your web page filename contains more than one word, separate the words with a hyphen, rather than an underscore character. For example, Google will see my-page.htm as two words, 'my' and 'page'. However it will see my_page.htm as a single word 'my_page' only, which is probably not what you want.
Overview
1. Aim. Search engines want to serve their visitors with relevant information that they are actually looking for - and they are evolving all the time to achieve this. Search engines love web pages containing unique, high quality, focused content that people will want to read.
2. Quality. Modern search engines rank pages by determining their popularity, on the assumption that high quality content will be popular. A web page receiving links from many other web sites in a related field is considered popular, likely to contain valuable information, and is therefore ranked higher for that subject. Conversely a page with few other sites linking to it may not contain valuable content so will be ranked lower. If you want your web pages to rank highly you need content that other sites in your field will link to - thereby proving to search engines that the material on your site is worthy of receiving links from others.
3. Content. Modern search engines determine the subject matter of your web pages by analysing the text content. Specifically they compare the page Title and Description with the main content. The text content (anchor text) of incoming links is also a factor, since that hints at what other sites think your content is about. Each web page in your site therefore needs a unique Title and Description that reflects its actual content. Remember that your Title and Description (or sometimes a snippet of the main content) is what appears in the search engine results listing itself: It's the very first impression a potential visitor gets - before they've even seen your site - and may determine whether they visit or go elsewhere.
4. Discovery. Search engines have many millions of web pages and links to crawl through, and they update their search results regularly. A popular site that often adds new content will tend to be crawled more frequently than a site with few visitors. It can therefore take some time for a search engine to first notice your site initially and add it to its index. Incoming links from existing sites directing visitors to your excellent content are the best way to get a new web site noticed by search engines - search engines will follow the incoming links and discover your new content.
5. Focus. Create your web page content for the benefit of your visitors, not for the search engines. Otherwise you run the risk of creating content that appeals to search engines, but not to your visitors, which kind of defeats the point. At the same time be aware of how search engines rank and index sites so that your pages can accurately inform visiting search engines about the overall theme, subject matter and content.
(for specifics read on below...)
Cheers,
Stormdance
1. Give each page in your project a unique Title and brief Description before you publish. Make sure both reflect your page content accurately.
2. Check that your Title, Description and content contain words people are likely to enter into a search engine when looking for the sort of information your page provides. What would you type into a search engine?
3. Your Title and (usually) Description are both displayed in search engine listings - so they form the first impression someone sees of your site. An accurate, carefully crafted Title and Description can increase the chance of a visitor clicking on your site.
4. It can take more than a month for search engines to discover new sites. The best way for a search engine such as Google to first discover your new site is via a link from another already established site. In other words, natural discovery of your site via an incoming link is better than submitting your site to Google manually: If another web site thinks your content is worthy of a link - Google notices that.
5. Incoming links from other sites suggests your site has high quality content that is worth linking to. For modern search engines the number of genuine, relevant, incoming links is the major factor in how well a web page is ranked in the search engine listings.
6. Do not try to trick a search engine. Search engines are good at spotting deception. If caught your site could be banned and permanently removed from the search engine index.
7. Google is known to factor in page and image filenames when indexing a page. If your web page filename contains more than one word, separate the words with a hyphen, rather than an underscore character. For example, Google will see my-page.htm as two words, 'my' and 'page'. However it will see my_page.htm as a single word 'my_page' only, which is probably not what you want.
Overview
1. Aim. Search engines want to serve their visitors with relevant information that they are actually looking for - and they are evolving all the time to achieve this. Search engines love web pages containing unique, high quality, focused content that people will want to read.
2. Quality. Modern search engines rank pages by determining their popularity, on the assumption that high quality content will be popular. A web page receiving links from many other web sites in a related field is considered popular, likely to contain valuable information, and is therefore ranked higher for that subject. Conversely a page with few other sites linking to it may not contain valuable content so will be ranked lower. If you want your web pages to rank highly you need content that other sites in your field will link to - thereby proving to search engines that the material on your site is worthy of receiving links from others.
3. Content. Modern search engines determine the subject matter of your web pages by analysing the text content. Specifically they compare the page Title and Description with the main content. The text content (anchor text) of incoming links is also a factor, since that hints at what other sites think your content is about. Each web page in your site therefore needs a unique Title and Description that reflects its actual content. Remember that your Title and Description (or sometimes a snippet of the main content) is what appears in the search engine results listing itself: It's the very first impression a potential visitor gets - before they've even seen your site - and may determine whether they visit or go elsewhere.
4. Discovery. Search engines have many millions of web pages and links to crawl through, and they update their search results regularly. A popular site that often adds new content will tend to be crawled more frequently than a site with few visitors. It can therefore take some time for a search engine to first notice your site initially and add it to its index. Incoming links from existing sites directing visitors to your excellent content are the best way to get a new web site noticed by search engines - search engines will follow the incoming links and discover your new content.
5. Focus. Create your web page content for the benefit of your visitors, not for the search engines. Otherwise you run the risk of creating content that appeals to search engines, but not to your visitors, which kind of defeats the point. At the same time be aware of how search engines rank and index sites so that your pages can accurately inform visiting search engines about the overall theme, subject matter and content.
(for specifics read on below...)
Cheers,
Stormdance