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