What is SEO?
SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is the practice of making your website attractive to search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.
How Search Engines Work
Search engines have programs called spiders which visit web pages to determine what the content of your site is, and to find other links to scan at a later date.
- Spiders, or web crawlers, scan the content of web pages.
- They send the results of their scan back to the algorithm to be broken down and analysed.
- If the spiders encounter a link to another page or website these links are stored.
- Eventually other spiders crawl the linked-to pages.
- Therefore, the more links from other websites and pages your website has, the more frequently your website is visited and crawled.
SEO Basics
1. Have good and relevant contents
There are lots of websites just attaching pictures, pdf, or word documents on and let the visitors download the file and get the information from another application, such as M$ Word, Adobe Acrobat, etc. But from the search engines point of view, it is better to have all the text written on the site and have the other format as options.
Having a blog or news section on your site is really important. It helps building keywords, both the visitors and search engines are able to determine how relevant your website is. And it's the simplest way for the visitors to see whether you're still in business or not.Often we got questions such as "What do I write?" "Am I going to have much use of it?" from our beloved clients.
Yes, I admit that it's hard to start to write (when we're starting to have a blog, we're just putting articles from various sources that are relevant to us). But I bet most of the businesses understands newsletter, mail-out, or other form of push marketing, why not have that same information on the website as well? You'll get the google juice, you'll be able to start a conversation with your customers, and get feedback from your customers, and have a better business. If you're a pub/club, post your upcoming events on your site. If you're a fancy restaurant with seasonal menus, post your upcoming menus on the site, share recipes. Or just hire a copy writer to write every month :p
2. Link backs
All the links to your website are basically the voting system for the search engines. The more important the source links are, the higher the worth of the links are, ie. one link from The Age review site worth more than plenty links from randomwebsite.com.au.And the text that describes the link really helps with the keywords that you're after. for example: <link>best Halloween event in melbourne</link> is better than <link>click here</link>. Thus it is really important that you think about the title of your articles as many will just use your title to link directly to your article.
Be very careful of the black hat SEO companies who're trying to push the ranks by link farming, page generators - using automated tools to generate lots of pages thus renders the pages irrelevant and it becomes keyword spamming on the site. Although those methods might work for a while, once the search engines picked up on those sites, it's a lot harder to get it back.
3. Clean URLs
This section is rather simple, it's the address link for your pages. Have the URL address like http://yourwebsite.com/about-us rather than http://yourwebsite.com/index.php?id=8
Most content management systems (CMS) have this feature although it's not enabled by default (in WordPress go to Settings then Permalinks). Concrete5 CMS called in pretty URL, drupal (it's been awhile) but there's a plug-in called auto URL that will generates the search engine friendly URL based on the title of your pages.
4. Use tags
Last but not least, use the meta tags and keywords, even though recently google just announced that they have ignored it for a while now, it doesn't mean that everyone is ignoring it. There are other search engines and social bookmarking sites that still uses meta tags. And it doesn't hurt the rankings to have it anyway.
Most CMS has these feature built in, might as well use it. Quick hack for WordPress users, you can use the_tags() for the keywords meta and the_excerpt() for the description meta.
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