Date Submitted: 2010-02-03
Information:
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=========>SYCRID TUTORIALS<==========
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What is Search Engine Optimisation?
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the ability to optimise your website so that it ranks/places higher within search results than it previously did. For example if your website is currently positioned 19th in Google for a good search, you may want to improve that to 1st, but how do you do it? This is where Search Engine Optimisation comes in, because through using Search Engine Optimisation techniques, you may highlight ideas and theories you where either not aware of, or have yet to perform to your website.
Will Search Engine Optimisation work on my website?
Search Engine Optimisation will work on any website, and it is likely that if you are reading this, and asking �will Search Engine Optimisation work on my website�, then the impact will be bigger rather than smaller for your developments.
Any website on the internet can be optimised to improve its rankings, however this does not mean very much may be done, it depends on who is above you in the search and what you have done previously to search engine optimise your website, so keep that in mind as you read on.
Search Engine Optimisation and Keyword Density
Keyword density plays a good part in Search Engine Optimisation, because as spiders and bots crawl through your website pages they will take note of the most frequently used words, terminology and names, which will then depend on how relevant your page is to searches that are performed by that search engine.
It is not rare to find website pages that have a keyword density of 10% but I have found that more often than not, a percentage of about 5% is common. The percentage is worked out via a calculation, the amount of times your keyword or phrase appears on the page, divided by the amount of words that appear on the page and then multiplied by 100, to result in your keyword density percentage.
Things that you should take into consideration with keyword density are, what keywords should be appearing on your webpage? Try looking at your title and thinking of 3 keywords that should appear in relation to the title, then try and rewrite your article so that the keywords will appear more frequently within your article, thus resulting in improved Search Engine Optimisation via Keyword Density.
Check your keyword density here, http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/keyword-density/
Search Engine Optimisation and hyperlinks
First of all, if you are going to through hyperlinks in all over the place, get the links correct. I�ve seen way too many websites whilst on my adventures throughout the internet, which place a link and when you click on it, it will take you through to that external link within the same page. People, users and readers, if you want some one to go to your website, then why send them away as soon as they arrive?
Rather choose the better option of allowing them to follow the link you have but into a new window or tab, it�s very simple and very effective. The code is below, where the target=�_blank� refers to opening a new window/tab.
< a h r e f = � websiteaddress � t a r g e t = � _ blank � >website name< / a >
Now on to how links affect your websites Search Engine Optimisation. Key rules are as follows, if you have a link related to your websites subject, then fantastic because it is likely going to be using those select words that you have as �keywords� (read keyword density), and as a result if you place the link, name the link and also add a title to the link, then a spider or robot, will see that keyword three times as much.
Coded example:
< a h r e f = "www.seoprofessor.co.uk� t i t l e = � SEO Professor 1 � > SEO Professor 2< / a >
As you can see the address has two words within it (SEO + Professor), I have now titled the link with SEO Professor, so if you hover over it you will see exactly that as a title �SEO Professor 1�, then you also have how the hyperlink will appear in your webpage in this case �SEO Professor 2�. The numbers have only been used for guidance points.
Search Engine Optimisation and Images
Fancy getting your images into Google image search or just attract more users? If you do then these are the following settings that I would advise to be used when placing images on your website.
Firstly, make the file name for the image relevant, rather than useless. What I mean by this is, your camera might take excellent photographs, but who is going to search for “img_3838978273.jpg”? I can’t imagine very many. If it’s a picture of a tree then name it something like, tree.jpg or if it’s a cat, name it cat.jpg. These are very simple commonsense practices, and yet so many people do not take advantage of them, follow the theory and it will benefit your website.
Secondly, when you place an image on your website, give it an alt tag. An alt tag will specify what the image is of and is good practice for complying with w3c guidelines. The reason we use alt tags is for web browsers that are having trouble reading the image data and can provide an alternative solution to a box with a little red cross. The red cross may appear still but the alt tag will also be present, and this works to your advantage very well, when you have people with some degree of disabilities, such as those who are partially blind, programs that they use can read the text on the page, and will inform the user the image is of, a tree or a cat.
Thirdly, if you are aiming for your images to appear in Google image search, then be patient because Google can take quite a while to update its image search, since it is not as fast as the web search function it has.
Search Engine Optimisation and Sitemaps.
A sitemap is a page or location that you can visit, which will list all of the pages within your website, this is useful for your users, so it’s worth having. It will allow a user to quickly identify the page that they wish to visit, and as a result becomes a vital page within your website. With that information in mind, having a link to your sitemap, in html format, within homepage or every page of your website, will be very useful, because in addition to a user being capable of using the information, when ever a spider/robot appears, it will read the entire sitemap and as a result, crawl every page on your website, unless instructed otherwise.
The second useful thing about sitemaps is that if you use tools such as Google Webmaster, then you can submit your sitemap directly to the search engine and have a spider crawl the sitemap when ever you update the information. This becomes a fantastic option when you need to create and remove a lot of pages within a short period of time, and should also help you get your website indexed within Google faster, if you are just starting out.
Search Engine Optimisation and Tagging
What is tagging?
When typing code within coding languages, we will often assign attributes to certain aspects of the website page, to help shape and define what is being presented to the user. Tagging is the result of this where the use of certain select pieces of code will result in a robot or spider seeing the information that is tagged with more importance
Why should we use tagging?
As was just mentioned, by using tagging we are allowing the spiders/robots to know that a certain phrase, word or series of numbers is the most important part of our page. That this select piece of information, which could be the title or a word in mid-sentence, has more meaning or importance than the rest of the page, not to say the rest of the page is not important.
What forms of tagging does a robot/spider see with more value?
The basic ones that everybody should be using with a simple HTML page are the header tags, which indicate headers and sub-headings within a page that has been published. They range from H1 through to H6 and can be altered through using cascading style sheets and such, without much effort, so you have no reason to worry about whether the formatting will fit into your webpage design, because you can change that.
Two of the least known tags are some to replace others, which do the same job but also indicate that they have more importance, than the original tags that they can replace. The first one is < s t r o n g > and can replace < b o l d >, it will result in the text that it wraps as being bold, just like the bold tag would do, but it also tells the spiders / robots that crawl through your website that the words wrapped within this tag, are very important.
The second of the two least known tags is one that I my self have just become aware of, and it is < e m > which stands for emphasis, and if you wrap your text within this tag, you will notice the effect is the same as the < I > tag, which makes all of your text italic. Just like the strong tag, it will be represented to the robots as something which has a higher value or more importance.
< s t r o n g > Hello World < / s t r o n g > = < b > Hello World < / b >
< e m > Hello World < / e m > = < I > Hello World < / I >
Regards,
Sycrid.
Keywords: Search Engine Optimisation, SEO, S.E.O. Optimising
Reviewer: Sycrid
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