Over the past few months I've been obsessed about Search Engine Optimization (SEO). I've found articles online, I've read a few books, and mostly, I've done some personal research.
I'd like to provide you with a small, but hopefully valuable list of information which should definitely increase your rank in time.
- Content, content and content! I see so many sites go live with barely any content and expect to be seen. Search engine bots like for valid and valuable content on pages, the more valuable your content and abundant, the better chance of being seen.
- You can't have content without structure. With this being true, you should minimize your structure, HTML code, and maximize your content. Also, with today's HTML and CSS standards, you should write your code as clean as possible. External style sheets, classes and ids, no deprecated inline styling or tags, and try to use more CSS for design than images.
- "I see the ref, but I don't know the name of the game!"
<a href="http://michaelpstone.net">My Site</a>, what's missing? The title! Every link you have should always have a title attribute, the same goes for the alt attribute with the img tag. It's not rocket science, you just need to remember these two very simple details about these elements. - Staying on the topic of links, it's also a good idea to have a few on your page. It's also a good idea to have link backs too. An example of this would be sharing with delicious or digg. You're making that distinct page available from another source. It creates credibility for your site.
- Meta information, or data about your data, is also essential for SEO. I put this further down because for the most parts, I usually always see something for the keywords and description of a site. Although this is true, the content may not be well thought out.
- Keywords need to be well thought out and kept to a minimum. Think of your site as a niche and you're on google searching for that niche. What would you type in expecting to see results?
- Descriptions can be a bit more flexible than keywords. Description is a summary of the content on your page. If you have a lot of content on the page you should be concise and limit your description to 140-160 characters. Less content, smaller descriptions.
- Sitemaps are also important for SEO. They allow those search bots to read that file full of links and get some more information from your site. Sitemaps can be very powerful, especially if you're blogging or using a CMS and have many sub pages that need to be indexed.
Not much, but I hope it hope it helps you understand SEO a bit more and maybe even get a better rank on Google.
If you have any further information on SEO you'd like to share, but sure to comment!