–– workshop home ––

Workshops

Search Engine Optimization

Techniques

  1. Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
  2. Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
  3. Make sure that your TITLE and ALT tags are descriptive and accurate.
  4. Create accurate and informative keywords and description meta tags.
  5. Have other relevant sites link to yours.
  6. Make sure all the sites that should know about your pages are aware of your site. Tell them!
  7. Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
  8. Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site.
  9. Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links.
  10. Check for broken links and correct HTML.
  11. Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).
  12. Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site.
  13. Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site.
  14. Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server.

References

http://www.abelgraphics.co.uk/glossary.php
A glossary of search-engine jargon
http://csant.info/lynx.htm
One source for the Lynx browser
http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/robots.html
The True Word on robots
http://www.searchtools.com/robots/robots-txt.html
Easy to read and understand
http://www.user-agents.org/
You can go crazy keeping track of user agents
http://searchenginewatch.com/
One of the best general information sites around on this subject. Not well organized; keep digging.
http://www.seochat.com/
An alternative to Search Engine Watch
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization
The obligatory Wikipedia link
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/topic.py?topic=8456
What Google has to say about all this