SEO and stuff.

[padman]

Hi webmasters (and all others who got a clue )!

I've been asked by my boss to build a new website for the company, since the current one is plain crap. (that's my words, not his  ) It's over 10 years old, never revised and doesn't even work properly with modern browsers. Anyway, the design shouldn't be a problem, I've done a couple of quite nice (my words, not his once again  ) private homepages in the past and it needn't be too fancy shmanzy. It's supposed to be sort of an enhanced online business card with references and some pictures of projects. I'll probably get back to you all should I face any problems though.

Now to the actual topic. Search engine optimization. I never had to bother with that or just didn't bother respectively because I only did private stuff. I know about keywords in the header, but that's about it.  My question now, what are your special tricks to get your page listed in the first places on google, what's to avoid and doesn't work at all? (except for paying guys from China to spam forums with your links, I know that already  ) What's with the spiders which always browse dbf, are they neccessary for a static page which doesn't change too often? Do you have to register your site anywhere?

Any hints are highly appreciated!

Cheers, 

Pad 

[combatking0]

The following is a good place to start:
http://dir.yahoo.com/computers_and_internet/internet/world_wide_web/searching_the_web/search_engines_and_directories/submit_a_site/

The page includes a list of links to pages where you can register your page / site / domain, often for free, and the various search engines will eventually visit your site.

[benny!]

Hi,

I did some webpage-projects some years ago. Here is what I have learnt back then (no guarantee if those are correct)

- Forget about most other search engine, focus on google
- You can upload a special sitemap.xml to help google index your webpage
- Code clean, e.g. use alt-text for images and all the good HTML stuff
- Speed-optimize the page (use something like YSlow etc)
- Google's search bot algorithm is a blackbox and constantly changing, but I heard that it takes into relation your meta-keywords, title-tag and headlines. E.g. If your headline contains DEMOSCENE, your first keyword is DEMOSCENE and a h1/h2 tag of your page contains DEMOSCENE - the chance you get a good page-rank for the search term DEMOSCENE is relatively good ;-)
- There are some semantic issues, too. I heard that it is actually bad for your ranking if your page consists of a lot of h1 tags. Per defintion there should only be h1-headline for one page.
- And of course it is always good is a lot of links point to your site
- If you update your site regulary it is also good IMHO

Well, I guess some of my points are outdated and not valid anymore. The whole SEO stuff is a huge topic for its own.

Good luck with it!

[padman]

Thanks ck0 and benny!  K+

The whole SEO stuff is a huge topic for its own.

Yeah, I was afraid so. But you know it's not that the page must show up in the TOP 3 in google or something since it's a very well established smaller company, I just thought it couldn't hurt if someone can find it in Google on the let's say first 2 or so pages without knowing the company name.  Your tips sound good to me (outdated or not - I can't tell anyways, I AM outdated in general when it comes to such things  ) and I will sure keep them in mind as they can't make things worse as far as I can tell. hehe

[Shockwave]

There's lots of good advice for you already here Padman but hopefully this will help too (I know I am repeating some of the advice you've been given above - I'm sorry). 

I've devoted a lot of time to SEO so I've become quite adept at it.

• The first tip I can give you is to size up your competition, do a few google searches using the keywords that you would expect a customer to use to find your site and see what comes up because those are the sites you need to beat.
• Sign up for Google Webmaster tools (it's free!) and validate your site with it.
• Have a different description mega tag for each page and have keywords in the description, this is vital!
• Choose about half a dozen keywords that you'd like associated with your site.
• Put keywords into the title tags of your page.
• Preferably have a keyword in your domain name too!
• Google places emphasis on keywords in <H> tags, <B>, <I>  and also pays attention to the prominence of the keyword, something in a <B> tag at the top of a page is worth more than one in the footer!
• Don't spam keywords, the site needs to make sense when it's read.  Go for a keyword density of about 1.5%.
• Utilise your alt tags in your images.
• Minimise Flash, search engines can't read it.
• Be on a responsive server.
• Make sure that your links are relevant to your content.
• Try and get backlinks from other pages with relevant content and a better page rank than you.
• Create an XML site map.
• Create a Robots.Txt file.
• Configure Google Webmaster Tools to target your country for your site.

Here are two examples of sites I've used this on.
Firstly a site I did recently, optimised for;
good, builder, port talbot, honest
Keyphrase "good builder in Port Talbot"

http://www.google.co.uk/#sclient=psy&hl=en&source=hp&q=good+builder+in+port+talbot&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&pbx=1&fp=ac1173e8e69c353d
Already top of about 60,000 results after only 2 months online.

And this site, optimised for;
demo, code, coding, demoscene, forum, tutorials, programming

Keyphrase "how to code demos"
http://www.google.co.uk/#sclient=psy&hl=en&source=hp&q=how+to+code+demos&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&pbx=1&fp=ac1173e8e69c353d
2nd out of 214 Million.


Good luck!

[padman]

Thanks a bunch mate! And don't be sorry, these tips are like winning the lottery for me, since I haven't got the foggiest idea about the whole SEO stuff ( and repetitions help  to memorise them anyway.  ) It's amazing how it can work, if you know what you are doing. Some of the spammers should read this thread!  I already got a keyphrase in mind.  Let's see how it all works out. If it does, I want a pay raise (of which I'll of course donate something to DBF )

Thanks again and K+! 

P.S. The second link looks familiar. hehe

[benny!]

That is a really good list, Shocky. Thanks for sharing K++

[JL235]

That's a very nice list Shockwave, thanks.

This might sound obvious, but also keep an eye on your analytics to see how successful/unsuccessful your SEO is. There are also lots of extensions for FireFox for analyzing your site's SEO, and will give you tips on what you should do to improve it. I personally use is SenSEO, although I don't know how good/bad it is compared to others.

[padman]

Thanks JL235! Your tip has been added to the master to-do list.