SEO - Search Engine Optimization

What is SEO anyway? SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization. According to an article in wikipedia.org , "SEO is a subset of search engine marketing, and deals with improving the number and/or quality of visitors to a web site from "natural" listing." When you go to Google or Yahoo to search for a keyword, the search engine will compile the results in the order it "thinks" best through a process called an algorithm based on your query. So what you need to do is find a way to influence that result. So how do you do that? There are two techniques called on page optimization and off page optimization. On page optimization is changing/modifying the site code to make search engine bot easier to crawl in your site. Off page optimization is backlinking. On page optimization should be done when you first start designing your web pages. Here are a couple of things you should do: - Choose your keywords carefully (Don't use words not related to your site. It can hurt more than it helps.) - Make sure your keywords appear significantly in your page content. Put one or two in bold or italics. - Make sure you use headings tag h1... in your page and it is helpful if it contains your keywords - When writing your content, try to include your keywords as much as possible without messing with the flow of your text. Remember to think about your visitors point of view and not the search engines when creating your content. - Search engine do NOT read links created by Flash or Javascript, so keep that in mind. Pages can only be found when linked with visible hyperlinks. - When you used graphics, make sure to add alt attributes in your image tag. Words on the image CANNOT be read by search engine. Plus people who use text display browser only cannot see the image. Having an alt tag can let them know what they didn't see. - Search engines don't use meta tags for site ranking or indexing anymore, so don't rely on that Off page optimization: Linking strategies Having a lot of websites linking to your web can increase your web traffic and even your rankings in search engine. Some ways to do this are: - Put your website's URL in articles, press releases, blogs, forums, and directories - Use myspace or other networking site to get more people to your site - Emailing others to tell them about your site