Search Engine Rules

    Now that you have an idea of how website elements can make or break you when it comes to search engine optimization, we can now discuss the basic rules that govern the use of search engines. Every search engine presents guidelines for webmasters who want to be included in their search results. These rules and guidelines help in both the maintenance of search engines as well as the proper creation and designing of websites and their content.

    According to Softpedia (http://news.softpedia.com) you as the webmaster should focus on five basic things when you optimize your site for search engine indexes and rankings. If you are aware of how to do the following, the rest of SEO will come easy for you.

    The first reminder: you should optimize your site URL’s. As mentioned earlier in this chapter, how your domain is named can make a difference as to how bots and spiders will crawl over your site. If you need to include keywords in your URL, be sure they have been researched carefully.

    When you decide on how to name or label your site URL’s, be sure to consider hyphens instead of underscores. Keep phrases to about three words and avoid making URL’s longer. Along with deciding on URL’s is considering file names and file name extensions.

    The second thing that you should optimize is your page title, which is located in the title bar, or the topmost portion of your web browser which says “Microsoft Internet Explorer” or “Mozilla Firefox.” Make sure you are using keywords that are relevant and that have been well-researched for your page titles. Softpedia advises to keep the characters to 50 or less when naming your page title.

    How can you optimize website content such as pictures and other graphics? Such is the third search engine optimization rule according to Softpedia. If you will place images for your products, for example, you should name your photos appropriately, even using keywords whenever possible. Note that Yahoo and Google can index and rank photos and images. But if that is not the case, you should provide text descriptions for your images, and these text descriptions should contain the keywords you have researched.

    Web content can be optimized even if dynamic pages are being used. However, it may be required to have extensive knowledge of Java or Flash programs to be able to do so. Many internet sources explain that specific search engines are unable to crawl or index sites that have Flash or Java content on them.

    Remember what was said earlier about navigation menus? Again, one can not stress enough on how valuable navigation menus are for both SEO efforts and visitor-friendly sites. The fourth thing you should always optimize is your navigation menu.

    The titles of the subsequent pages or subdirectories of your site should be included. There are also methods by which you can conveniently include your navigation menu in all your web pages, and that is through the use of cascading style sheets (CSS).

    CSS can greatly aid SEO efforts, since websites are able to load faster, and bots can more rapidly crawl and index sites as HTML code length is reduced. You can also improve your chances of being indexed by creating a sitemap for your website, and that can be made possible through the numerous sitemap generators that are available on the World Wide Web.
Lastly, see what you can do to optimize the general site structure. This chapter has already made mention of the various elements that can be added or changed on a website in order for SEO to be more possible.

« Previous Topic Next Topic »