Search Engine Optimization

What good is it to own a website if nobody can find it? Tailoring your website to the various search engine algorithms is an essential part of the web development process.

Top Search Engines

There are literally thousands of search engines out there, but only a handful are worth worrying about. The following search engines make up over 97% of user searches. Each search engine links to the URL submission form to be included in the respective search engine index, if available.

Optimizing Content

Submitting a URL to search engines won't do any good if the search engine can't read the content of the website. The important pieces of your website that search engines read are the title, url, alt tags, h1 tags, and meta keyword and description tags. And it's not good enough to just have the pieces... they must be tied together with precision. Below are some useful search engine optimization articles you should keep in mind when planning your website.

SEO Chat - Many useful SEO articles and tools
Google Tips
MSN Tips

Sicaweb Tips n' Tricks

Search Engine Submission: Don't do it. Submit your site to a directory or trade links with a site with the highest PageRank you can find. Ideally you want to find a PageRank of 6 or 7, but you can settle for a 4. These pages are crawled by the search engines daily, and on the next crawl, they will see your link and go there, thus indexing your page. This results in a much quicker indexing than if you submitted manually, plus it will most likely give you a higher starting PageRank than you would otherwise have.
Title Tag: Make your <title> tag keyword rich, but make sure those same keywords are in the body of your website text as well.
Meta Description: A lot of leading search engines look for your content in the meta description tag. Again, make sure your description is relevent to your website, as the search engines will ban your site if you attemp to trick them.
Meta Keywords: Same as above, but instead of plain English, use a comma delimited list of keyword phrases. Note, keyword phrases, such as "web site design", fare better than individual words. The more unique your keyword phrase, the better.
Robots.txt File: Create a text file named robots.txt and include it in your root directory. Search engines read this to determine what parts of your website they are allowed to spider. Click here to learn how to format your robots.txt file.
Alt Tags Search engines cannot read images, but they can and do read alt tags you associate with images. Use them as much as you can, but make sure they are relevent.
Header Tags Use <h1> and <h2> on your website wherever you can. Make them concise and keyword rich.
Content: The most important thing you can do, more important than the items listed above, is have informative, relevant content. The goal of a search engine is to provide its users links to the content they are looking for. If your content is relevent to the user's search query, your website will be found. If you try to trick the search engines by having your title, meta tags, etc. describing one thing, and the content of your page describing another, the search engines will see through it.

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