Welcome to Debugyeh
Tuesday, 25 September 2007
Lets Talk SEO
Search engine optimisation
It's a massive topic, and also an increasingly hard one to talk about, I can say the same things as other people have said of course, but I can of course tell you what I know works.
I've been working for the web for sometime, and getting to number one in search engine is always a difficult task. Although let me tell you, being number one Inst extremely important, its between 1 - 10 (or the first page) which helps you the most. I'm not going to tell you everything in this post, because if I did you would die from boredom. So I will give you some helpful pointers in the right direction.
URL's
Not as important as the early days in SEO, but still a very important factor, the best way to think about it is, is that search engines are dumb. Yes that's right, they are thick. They recognise .html extensions far quicker than database driven apps. This means, if your having a database driven app, then I suggest having some hand made .html pages at hand too.
Also, it can take some time for web bots to crawl your page, so changing URLs often isn't advised.
Keep your URLs simple and descriptive, like, for example if your doing a site about loft conversions, you could consider a page about getting a quote, to be named - loft-conversion-quote.html
Remember to use - instead of _ when naming URLs, in my experience this works better.
ALT Tags and Text
Remember to use text where every you can, instead of fancy images, and if you have to use images, remember to label your alt tag, using the page name, your website name, to describe it fully.
Copy Is King
Search engines love unique content, find a copy writer or write your own, but your content must be unique to any other site, this is what the search engines love the most. Consider this fully and I really suggest you do so.
I'll be back with more advice, but remember this.
Be patient, it can take up to 12 months to get well into search engines, do not frantically submit your URL loads of times in a month, search engines will see this as being un-natural, and although you may peak initially, later on this will do more harm than good. Keep it organic and as natural as possible, and avoid reciprocating links, aim for direct links.
Many thanks, I'll be back with more
Alan Hamlyn