Introduction to DIY search engine optimisation

Written by Rachael Sankey


A lot is made ofrepparttar importance of search engine optimisation and rightly so. If you are serious about getting your website noticed, you will have to consider how your site ranks in search engines. If you decide to optimise your site, you will either do it yourself, or pay someone to do it for you. Doing it yourself can be time consuming but will save you money. If saving money is your priority and you haverepparttar 127996 time, DIY page optimisation IS possible.

You will want to look at three aspects:

Search Engine Submission - This involves visiting search engine websites, findingrepparttar 127997 'submit URL / site' section - and keying inrepparttar 127998 appropriate information. Some of them offer a free option but this doesn't guarantee inclusion and could take time to see results. The most important one isrepparttar 127999 open directory which will help your ranking with Google, among others. You can also submit your site to Google, Lycos, Yahoo, AltaVista, MSN and many others. Before you do, make sure you know what information you want to give them. You may be asked for a description, so have one ready. No search engine will accept sales style copy in their listings - so keep it plain. Most importantly, readrepparttar 128000 guidelines for each service - it may seem like a drag but could help your submission.

Page Optimisation - Nowrepparttar 128001 search engines know you are there, how easy will it be for them to index your site? This stage comes first, of course - so once you register you site, you can sit back and wait - if you do it for free - you WILL have to wait! The easier it is forrepparttar 128002 SEs to index,repparttar 128003 faster your site will get noticed. So what do you need to take into consideration? Here are a few tips:

Meta Tags and Description: These are tags atrepparttar 128004 top of your page (HTML code) which provide SEs with information about your site. Meta Tags are keywords and phrases, targeted torepparttar 128005 subject of your site. Make sure yours are relevant to your site content. The Meta Description should reflect what your site is about. Page Title: This shows atrepparttar 128006 top of a browser when your page is viewed. Make sure it's relevant, has a few good keywords - and is different on every page on your site. Site content: This should go without saying - make your site content relevant, useful and accurate. Reflect this in your keywords and title. Links: Any internal links should have relevant link text or Alt-text tags if they are graphic. Page Rank & Back Links - This relates mainly to Google - possiblyrepparttar 128007 most important search engine onrepparttar 128008 'net. Once indexed, Google assigns each page a 'page rank'. You can see what page rank a site has by downloadingrepparttar 128009 Google toolbar. PR is given as a rank of 0 - 10, 10 being high. Page rank relates torepparttar 128010 number of links (votes) Google can detect that point to your site. You can right click (IE6) and select 'backward links' on a website to see who links to it. As a result, many sites now engage inrepparttar 128011 sport of link building. This can have its drawbacks, if you end up linking to a 'bad neighbourhood'. If you want to build links - follow a few guidelines:

Optimizing Dynamic Pages - Part II

Written by Dale Goetsch


Optimizing Dynamic Pages - Part II

The Widget Queen Revisited You haverepparttar world's finest collection of widgets. You createdrepparttar 127995 world's best widget website. You have no traffic.

You checked inrepparttar 127996 search engines and find that your site does not appear at all, even though all your competitors' sites do. Perhapsrepparttar 127997 search engine robots cannot get to your pages to index them.

Search Engine Robots Search engine robots are simple creatures. They can "read" text to add to their databases, and they can follow "normal" links--those links that are coded to look like

blue widgets

orrepparttar 127998 slight variation

That's it. Search engine robots cannot select items from lists; search engine robots cannot type text into boxes; search engine robots cannot click "submit" buttons. That means that no matter how important our dynamically-generated page of blue widgets is, ifrepparttar 127999 only way to access that page is to select it from a list or click on a button,repparttar 128000 robot will never be able to visit it. That, in turn, means that it will never appear inrepparttar 128001 search engine results.

So how do you get your dynamic information to show up in non-dynamic ways?

The Painful Solution One ofrepparttar 128002 reasons that dynamic pages exist is because ofrepparttar 128003 difficulty involved in constantly updating -- adding and deleting -- pages from your site, based on which widgets you are offering this season. If you have a separate page for each make and model of widget, each of those pages can be spidered. They can all be reached through links that look like

blue widgets style 1 blue widgets style 2 red widgets style 1 red widgets style 2 new widgets style 1 new widgets style 2

The bad news here, of course, is that you now have to create all of those pages. This losesrepparttar 128004 benefit of drawingrepparttar 128005 widget information from a database.

A Better Solution A better solution is to create only a "shell" of each page, and then to dynamically populaterepparttar 128006 page from our database. By creating a "real" file, you can assign a fixed URL, but still userepparttar 128007 database to fill-inrepparttar 128008 page, using any of various server-side techniques (HTML server-side includes, Perl, Active Server Pages, Java Server Pages, PHP, etc.). A simple page like this might suffice:

Blue Widgets style 1< itle> </head> <body> <!--#exec cgi="myscript.pl?bluewidget-1"--> </body> </html> <p>Save this page as "bluewidget-1.html" and you're good to go, assuming that "myscript.pl" will actually return<IMG height=12 src="/the2.jpg" alt="repparttar 128009"> content you want for<IMG height=12 src="/the2.jpg" alt="repparttar 128010"> body of<IMG height=12 src="/the2.jpg" alt="repparttar 128011"> page. True, you will have a discrete page for each item in your inventory, but at least you only need to hard-code<IMG height=12 src="/the2.jpg" alt="repparttar 128012"> bare-bones of that page.<p>Another Way To Go There is yet another way to go. This method does not require creating dozens of static pages, or of having to include exotic scripts in your web pages. It also may not work for all search engines! <br><br></font></td><!-- google_ad_section_end --></tr><tr><td>Cont'd on page 2 ==<a class="mlink" href="2-Introduction_to_DIY_search_engine_optimisation_-27996.htm">></a></td></tr></table><script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-5766870852072819"; google_ad_width = 728; google_ad_height = 90; google_ad_format = "728x90_as"; google_ad_channel ="8831454965"; google_color_border = "CFB9A1"; google_color_bg = "CFB9A1"; google_color_link = "000000"; google_color_url = "431B02"; google_color_text = "431B02"; //--></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </script> </td> </tr> </table> <table width="770" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"> <tr> <td> </td> </tr> <tr> <td height="48" align="center" background="images/bg_nav_bottm.jpg"><span class="style3">ImproveHomeLife.com © 2005<br> <a href="terms.html" rel="nofollow">Terms of Use</a></span></td> </tr> </table></td> </tr> </table> <script type="text/javascript"> var HASH_ESCAPED="%23"; function TrackIt(adUnit){ if (window.status) { var adDomain = escape(window.status.substring(6)); var pyPage = document.location.pathname; var params = document.location.search; var hasAnchor = params.lastIndexOf(HASH_ESCAPED)!= -1; params = hasAnchor? (params.substring(0, params.lastIndexOf(HASH_ESCAPED))) : params; pyPage = escape(pyPage.substring(pyPage.lastIndexOf('/') + 1)); pyPage = pyPage + params; var curTime = new Date().valueOf(); var bug = new Image(); bug.src = '/track/adsenseTrack.php?pyPage=' + pyPage + '&adDomain=' + adDomain + '&adUnit=' + adUnit + "&time=" + curTime; } } function TrackIt0() {TrackIt(0); } function TrackIt1() {TrackIt(1); } function TrackIt2() {TrackIt(2); } var elements = document.getElementsByTagName("iframe"); for (var i = 0; i < elements.length; i++) { if(elements[i].src.indexOf('googlesyndication.com') > -1) { //elements[i].onfocus = TrackIt; if (i==0) elements[i].onfocus = TrackIt0; if (i==1) elements[i].onfocus = TrackIt1; if (i==2) elements[i].onfocus = TrackIt2; } } </script> <!--WEBBOT bot="HTMLMarkup" startspan ALT="Site Meter" --> <script type="text/javascript" language="JavaScript">var site="s19improve"</script> <script type="text/javascript" language="JavaScript1.2" src="http://s19.sitemeter.com/js/counter.js?site=s19improve"> </script> <noscript> <a href="http://s19.sitemeter.com/stats.asp?site=s19improve" target="_top"> <img src="http://s19.sitemeter.com/meter.asp?site=s19improve" alt="Site Meter" border=0></a> </noscript> <!-- Copyright (c)2002 Site Meter --> <!--WEBBOT bot="HTMLMarkup" Endspan --> </body> </html>