Search Engine Optimization

[Evil Chris]

What are the *critical* components when optimizing a website for search engine optimization?

Do you optimize just the root index page? Or every single webpage on a domain? A little of both? I'm not asking anyone to give away their secrets here, just some tips on how to do a general SEO for a new site.

Discuss?

[Gruntled]

I'm by no means a master of SEO, but setting the meta tags and the keywords to match text and media contant that is actually contained on the site, and getting your robots.txt seem to make a big difference. Other than that, getting other sites to link to yours gets the SE's to index you higher. I'v spent a lot of time and effort with some of the other popular methods, but didn't really notice a difference.

[Panky]

Keyword & Keyphrase research

Keyword rich domain names

Naming of the file(s)

Site map creation

Customized 404 pages

Proper navigation

Copy with the right balance of keyword(s) & keyphrase(s)

Effective use of the FAQ page

Robots.txt file written and implemented correctly

Clean html

Each page is optimized seperately to target specific keyword(s) & keyphrase(s)

Link strategies developed and implemented

[Black Dog]

I'm no expert but I think it is best to optimize every page that the spider will see, which is basically every page on your site.

Another critical component of SEO is backlinks (i.e. links from other sites to your site). It doesn't matter how much you optimize if nobody is linking to you. The major SE's use the number of backlinks and the PR (page ranking) of those sites to calculate your ranking. Basically the more people that link to you, the better your ranking will be.

Of course there is WAAAY more to SEO than that. It's all voodoo to me.

B

[kaustic]

Oooohhh nice thread EC!

I was interested in this information as well... thanks for all the tips and clues everyone...

I plan on using a script that detecs the web-spiders and gives them a text based page to analyze, where all the keywords and meta-tags would be.... Or a simple HTML based layout.....

thanks for the info everyone

Originally posted by Panky
Keyword & Keyphrase research

Keyword rich domain names

Naming of the file(s)

Site map creation

Customized 404 pages

Proper navigation

Copy with the right balance of keyword(s) & keyphrase(s)

Effective use of the FAQ page

Robots.txt file written and implemented correctly

Clean html

Each page is optimized seperately to target specific keyword(s) & keyphrase(s)

Link strategies developed and implemented

Hi Chris, Hi Panky!

Panky how about "Image Alt text"...


Talk soon!

[sweet7]

Originally posted by monaro
Hi Chris, Hi Panky!

Panky how about "Image Alt text"...


Talk soon!

I've heard they are very important as well as title in link tags.

robots.txt is relevant only if you want to exclude pages if I'm not mistaken. Otherwise are they necessary?

[Don Soporno]

Originally posted by sweet7
I've heard they are very important as well as title in link tags.

robots.txt is relevant only if you want to exclude pages if I'm not mistaken. Otherwise are they necessary?

Im wondering the same thing

Well Guys!

Sweet, you are correct to your thinking that they exclude areas on your domain in question to from being spidered.

To my understanding this is all that it is used for and what I have read up on the subject of robot.txt is that the file's only fuction is to guide the spiders to where you want them to spider and to protect the dirrectories that you don't wish to have open to the public.
(when not using .htpasswd in such directory).


Panky, im calling for your imput and please correct me if i have gone astray.

[Sarah_MaxCash]

i spend a lot of time on the text of my page. I do the meta tags and titles on every page because I figure it can't hurt.

[Panky]

Dr. Monaro & Sweet are correct. The robots.txt just simply tells a spider not to read a particular page or file. This isn't fool proof though. There can be errors or the spider reads a file anyway.

Be careful what you place within robots.txt . It's an open doorway for hackers to examine your site. To review any robots.txt file, simply type the domain followed by robots.txt . http://www.google.com/robots.txt

Even if you just place a blank robots.txt file in the root, it prevents 404 errors appearing in the logs for when the spider requested the file and it wasn't there. Some spiders don't bother or ignore the tag altogether.

Having one or not having one, isn't critical. Some people just use robots meta and server configurations. If you do use robots.txt, make sure it is written properly and validate it.

[McAttack]

What about the path used? Panky mentioned file names and I tend to use keywords in file names and paths as well sometimes. But I've read some articles that say it doesn't matter.

One resource I like is the webpronews.com newsletter. It's probably the best newsletter I've ever signed up for, it actually has REAL information.

[Gruntled]

I've got a coupe of sites where I have a blank robots.txt, just to keep the 404 errors out of my stats. seeing the 404's in the daily stats makes me feel like something is broken.

[Cyndalie]

I've got it all covered for ya here Chris
http://www.cozyacademy.com/classrooms/traffic/index.asp

[sweet7]

Originally posted by Cyndalie
I've got it all covered for ya here Chris
http://www.cozyacademy.com/classrooms/traffic/index.asp

you centainly do!