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SEO BOOK INDEX
The search engines are the gateway to internet content, indexing literally billions of web pages every month. Most people now have their browser home page set to either Google, Yahoo or MSN. Around 6 billion searches are performed every month. You can type a type a word or two into a search engine and find exactly what you are looking for.... Well that's the theory, anyway. In practice...
[CHART]. There are many other search engines, which are all important in their own way but when compared to the top 3 are completely insignificant. As over 95% of your website visitors will find your website through Google, MSN, and Yahoo, the information contained in SEO Book is directed at these main engines. Typically what is good enough for the largest engine Google is also good enough for the other 2 also...
A search engine sends out an online software program known as a "spider" or "crawler" which follows links from site to site, sucking up page content and storing it back in the search engine database. A spider does not see a website like a human does. It is not interested in nicely formatted content. It consumes raw content - text, images, and video. When it has digested all text, images, and video on a page it follows any links it finds to other pages, or other sites, to get some more text, images, and video. It never sleeps and, if it thinks the site is popular, comes back regularly to check for updated content. To see how a spider views your website, look at your site using...
The following exercise will help us compile a decent list of keywords relevant to our content. While it's hard work, it is invaluable. This is possibly THE most important step in the search engine promotion process, as if we optimize our website for keywords that our target customers never actually type in, then we have lost the war before we've even fought the first battle. If possible perform it with another person or two with you, in order to bounce ideas around. And have a thesaurus...
Millions of domains are purchased, then never used. They just sit on file, while the owner dreams that one day he'll get an email out of the blue offering him a zillion dollars for something that cost him practically nothing! That may be true for the one word .COM domain names registered before 1996, but the other 99% of registered domain names sink into obscurity... until they expire and get renewed by another dreamer. Older domains rank better...
While you can scour domain sales sites like www.afternic.com, don't be afraid to email a domain owner and make them a low offer for their domain, whether it is for sale or not. Here is a tried & tested method. If you see a domain that is not available but is not live either, get the owner details from the WHOIS (registrar or www.whois.net ) and email them with something like this...
A sitemap contains links to every non-restricted page in your website. It is vital for helping spiders discover and index all your public facing content. Sitemaps can also help our human visitors to locate content quickly. HTTP Sitemap It's really easy to create our own basic web page with links & previews to every page listed on our site (like this sitemap). This way we can format it nicely with our website style. But a quick and dirty way is to use an online sitemap generator, such as ...
Every site needs a robot.txt file located in its root folder. This simple text file tells the search engine spider what content it is allowed to index, and what it is not. If your website doesn't have one you could have real problems, as it is the first thing a spider looks for on its arrival. Check if your site has a robots.txt file Type in www.your-site-name.com/robots.txt (where 'your-site-name' is, of course, your domain name) and you should see some text that starts with "User-agent". If not you don't have one...
Search spiders are text-only beasts - they don't read HTML. So why bother making your site comply with web standards? Well in order for a spider to know where the formatting stops and the content begins, the HTML must be well-formed. Anything you can do to make the spider's job easier will result in a faster more efficient crawl. Possibly in the future sites with malformed HTML might not be penalized, but might not be awarded bonus points for failing to comply with web standards...
If you were in a library browsing the books on the shelves, you would be tilting your head to one side and reading title after title displayed on the spines of the books as you walk along. And based on the title alone you would make the decision to pick a book off the shelf, or keep browsing for something that looked more suitable...
Meta tags convey behind-the-scenes information relevant to the on visible information. Some search engines ignore them, others don't. To continue with our library metaphor, the first thing you do when you've picked a book off the shelf is to read the summary on the back. This is the equivalent to our description....
Meta tags convey behind-the-page information. Some search engines ignore them, others don't. To finish our library metaphor, you go to the desk and ask the librarian to search all books tagged with a certain word or phrase. This is the equivalent to our keywords tag....
Following on with the library metaphor, you might open the book and flick through the index or the sub titles, to get an idea of the content. In exactly the same way a search engine considers a page's content headings as indicative of the content. So using the H1 tag in the right way will help give certain keywords to stand out. Example: <html>
<head....
Images are for the human viewer - they mean very little to a search spider, who has no "eyes". So the spider does its best to interpret what the image looks like by indexing the image name and any additional information provided. Note that you will often see this non-visual information in the search results. This is because the spider regards ALL text, visible or not, as page information...
Comments were traditionally put on a page by the web designer as a note to himself, or to someone else. Like images, comments are for non-visual text browsers - which as you know by now includes our friends the search spiders...