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Definition
Search Engine Opimisation has become an industry in itself with quite a few companies around that specialise in it alone. These companies can be found by doing a search of the term "SEO." Often they offer some good advice. However, these notes here may help as an introduction.
The term SEO means doing whatever is necessary to your website to ensure that you end up with a high ranking (page one) when someone searches for you using a realistic search term (eg. "Tropical Fish" as opposed to somthing like "Joe Bidowski's Tropical Fish Website").
Search Words and Phrases
Before planning your site it's necessary to know which words or phrases people mostly use when searching for your type of business. It's not much good coming up on page one for the search word "felines" when most people, when looking for a cat, use the search word "cats." Luckily you don't have to guess at it (because it's often different than what you would expect). There are many services around that will tell you how often any given word or phrase is used for a search, and you can make you comparisons to see which ones it's best to optimise your site for. One such service can be found here at Submit Express.
Using the Words
Once you know what the best words are you'll want to be sure to include them in the text of your page at least a few times. Your URL is another place to put them if possible (www.cats.com or www.shopname.com/cats.html).
In the meta tags and page title is another place you want to have them. "Meta-" means "beyond or more information," —like meta-physics—and these tags give more information about your page to search engines. These meta-tags are not visible to you when you look at a web page in your browser, but if you want to see them, go to any web page and right click anywhere on it and select "view source." A new page will open up and the tags are toward the top of the page and look like this:
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Meta-Tags: Your web designer would include these meta-tags when constructing your site.
The Robot.txt File
This is a very simple file which can be made with a program such as Wordpad. It's simply called “robots” and is saved in the simple format of “.txt”
The Robots.txt file has very basic information in it for search engines regarding what you want them to index and what you consider unimportant for them to index. It is a courtesy to them which helps them save time and resources, because unless you have it the search engine will go through every page of your site—even the ones that have very little to do with anything you might be offering—and attempt to index them.
Contact pages, error pages and such can be excluded from indexing with the instructions you put in the robot.txt file. It's mentioned here with SEO because search engines may begin to look more favorably on sites that use it (because it saves them so much time and resources). It's estimated that only about 35% of sites have one.
If you want to see a robots.txt file all you have to do is type “robots.txt” in your browser after a website's URL (www.somesite.com/robots.txt) and if it's there, it will show up.
Age of Site
When you first publish a site it takes about a month (roughly) before the search engines realise that it exists. After that the age is probably unimportant. Older sites seem to rank better but this is probably due to other factors that come as a result of being around longer, rather than simply being an older site. I've seen sites only a month old end up on page one. And I've seen others slowly move down as they got older.
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How do you know if the search engines are paying attention to your site yet? Just type your URL into its search box...
...and see if anything comes up.
If nothing comes up you can nudge them a bit here: Yahoo site submit, Google site submit, MSN site submit, Anzwers site submit, Dmoz add site, Northern Lights suggest a site. And you can nudge a whole bunch of others here at the "Free Submission" tool to the right.
This is probably the most important.
These are links that other websites have to yours (just like the links I have above to the search engines). It's as simple as: people find your site interesting so they provide a link to it from their site for the benefit of their visitors.
But, of course, there are other ways to speed things up. Valid links to your site include listings you have on internet business directories. These can include the internet classifieds for newspapers, putting an ad in a printed classifieds costs money but often the same newspaper will have a free internet version and these are already well established. Usually these are so difficult to navigate that probably no one will ever see your ad but they still show up as a valid link.
They can include entries you've written in online forums. Be sure to use your keyword as your name, instead of using your actual name (see next page).
Then there's link swapping. Basically you contact someone with a website in a related industry to yours and offer to put their link on your site in exchange for them doing the same for you. Some sites have a whole page or more dedicated to storing other's links. You can call this a related "business directory" or a "links page."
Probably the best way to get ideas on how to build up links is to see what your competition is doing. For example, if you sell cats, you could search the word “cats” and see who is coming up number 1. Obviously this person is doing something right so you would want to investigate further to find out what.
Google Search
...and see if anything comes up.
If nothing comes up you can nudge them a bit here: Yahoo site submit, Google site submit, MSN site submit, Anzwers site submit, Dmoz add site, Northern Lights suggest a site. And you can nudge a whole bunch of others here at the "Free Submission" tool to the right.
Links to Your Site
This is probably the most important.
These are links that other websites have to yours (just like the links I have above to the search engines). It's as simple as: people find your site interesting so they provide a link to it from their site for the benefit of their visitors.
But, of course, there are other ways to speed things up. Valid links to your site include listings you have on internet business directories. These can include the internet classifieds for newspapers, putting an ad in a printed classifieds costs money but often the same newspaper will have a free internet version and these are already well established. Usually these are so difficult to navigate that probably no one will ever see your ad but they still show up as a valid link.
They can include entries you've written in online forums. Be sure to use your keyword as your name, instead of using your actual name (see next page).
Then there's link swapping. Basically you contact someone with a website in a related industry to yours and offer to put their link on your site in exchange for them doing the same for you. Some sites have a whole page or more dedicated to storing other's links. You can call this a related "business directory" or a "links page."
Probably the best way to get ideas on how to build up links is to see what your competition is doing. For example, if you sell cats, you could search the word “cats” and see who is coming up number 1. Obviously this person is doing something right so you would want to investigate further to find out what.
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If the site was www.cat-emporium.com you would go to Yahoo and type “link:www.cat-emporium.com” into the search box and click search.
(Note the "link:" in front of the URL.) The results would be all the sites that link to this company. You would then click on the links and explore what the company has done to get their link on the other site. And then, of course, you would adopt the same strategy.
For a forum entry you might have to sign-off with a name and your website address. You want to use your keyword instead of your name. A link has two parts—the text and the web address attached to it.
For example this link: web-dude, has the text or name "web-dude" but the web address attached to it is this same page you're looking at now. If, for example, you used the name “web-dude” wherever you went, your cat supplies company might start turning up on search results for “web-dude” rather than something more relevant like "cat supplier."
Also, be consistent in the URL you use. As far as links go, a search engine would consider "http://xyz.com" and "www.xyz.com" as two different sites. It doesn't matter which you use just as long as you always use the same one. ("http://www..." and "www..." are treated as the same.)
This is the part that comes naturally to people so not a lot needs to be said about it. Try to err on the side of too much content rather than too little.
Many directories that you apply to be included in will now manually check your site before they include you. If your site isn't visually appealing or doesn't have enough information on it they might not include you.
Here's another link for you to the same company Submit Express to check that everything is coordinated in your web page.
Yahoo Link Search
(Note the "link:" in front of the URL.) The results would be all the sites that link to this company. You would then click on the links and explore what the company has done to get their link on the other site. And then, of course, you would adopt the same strategy.
Using your keyword (instead of your name) in your link.
For a forum entry you might have to sign-off with a name and your website address. You want to use your keyword instead of your name. A link has two parts—the text and the web address attached to it.
For example this link: web-dude, has the text or name "web-dude" but the web address attached to it is this same page you're looking at now. If, for example, you used the name “web-dude” wherever you went, your cat supplies company might start turning up on search results for “web-dude” rather than something more relevant like "cat supplier."
Also, be consistent in the URL you use. As far as links go, a search engine would consider "http://xyz.com" and "www.xyz.com" as two different sites. It doesn't matter which you use just as long as you always use the same one. ("http://www..." and "www..." are treated as the same.)
An interesting and informative site
This is the part that comes naturally to people so not a lot needs to be said about it. Try to err on the side of too much content rather than too little.
Many directories that you apply to be included in will now manually check your site before they include you. If your site isn't visually appealing or doesn't have enough information on it they might not include you.
Check that your site is optimised
Here's another link for you to the same company Submit Express to check that everything is coordinated in your web page.