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Question: Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization

How does search engine optimization work?

Date Posted: October 29, 2007 Tagged Under: web . search engine optimization . computers . computer science . web design
Rating:
10.0

Fatekiller is wrong about meta tags. In fact, search engines such as Google have dropped the use of meta tags completely. Although they can provide some benefits, they're almost obsolete.

Search engine optimization is all about ranking well in google for a specific keyword. Lets takes the keyword "blue pants" for example.

It makes sense for me to have the word "blue pants" around my website. There's much debate around how many times you should say "blue pants" on your site (keyword density), and at what point in which google will penalize you for saying it too many times.

Another good method is having other sites link to your site, with the link name including the phrase "Blue Pants". The bigger the sites that link to yours, the better.

Other things such as putting keywords in <h1> tags are helpful as well. Also optimizing your URLs are helpful. Lets say you have a page all about blue pants. Using yoursite.com/blue-pants.html will be better than using yoursite.com/1234.html

The cleaner your code (html/css), the better. The reason for this is that search engines index your sites by using spiders (also known as robots and crawlers). The easier these spiders can get around all of the pages of your site, the better. Here's some more information about sitemaps: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Site_map.

There's some basic knowledge of some simple SEO methods.

Rating:
6.5

we will take google for example. google every so often does web crawls where they sweep the web, indexing web pages. The sweeps go through your web pages and look at not only the links, but the body copy, the alternate text on your images and most importantly your <meta> tags.

To optimize your web page for google, you need to write these meta tags and insert them into the <head></head> section of your html files of your website. meta tags include keywords.

for example here are the meta tags for my website:

<META NAME="Keywords" CONTENT="maxwell, ariss, maxwell ariss, orillia, north bay, canadore, kahuna, graphic design, photoshop, digital design, orillia ontario" />

<META NAME="Description" CONTENT="This is a website designed by maxwell ariss to showcase his collective works in desig, illustration, and photography" />

Once you have these into your html pages and on your server, it will take a while sometimes for search engines to index them.

Then you will be set my friend =)

http://www.maxwellariss.com

Rating:
n/a

I've been reading about this as well. The hard thing for me to figure out is if your site is very broad (ie contain a wide variety of subject matter), how do you develop enough content to move up in the rankings?

Rating:
9.0

I have done a lot of research on Google's site and to increase your page rank, they say that the best thing you can do is get a lot of good links to your site.

That does not say to go out and buy links or post your link on a page full of meaningless links. Content also matters a lot too if you are considering page rank.

Rating:
10.0

The trouble with s.e.o is that each engine has different protocols in which to optimize for. I have a friend who studdied this at length and has found that linkable pages with in a site, (inbound and outbound links) make a large impact. Also the words you are hoping people search for makes a difference. Articles on your site, or mention of the word study for example, all over the site would help. I have seen many people laying images over just pure text of the search terms. You can find alot of sites on this topic, but if you really know the perfect answer would you post it online?

Rating:
10.0

The interesting thing about search engine optimization is that a lot of it is based on speculation. But, here's a few things that are known pretty well.

First off, it rates a lot of things by the level of tag that is used within the code. For instance, an H1 tag will rate higher than an H2, etc. That said, if a search engine detects an abnormal amount of H1 tags on a page it will rate that page lower.

Further, it seems that search engines put an emphasis on page title. Therefore pages that are titled in relation to site content tend to do better. On SC the question pages have a page title related to that question, in general that tends to be a big plus.

Rating:
n/a

This is great information. I am just trying to get the word out on this website and wasn't sure how to get it to show up in search engines.

Rating:
10.0

Rather than type pages and pages, here are a couple of links that offer nice introductions to the topic:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization
http://www.more-web-leads.com/how-it-works.htm

If you're looking for more detailed information on how to use SEO to generate better rankings for your site in search queries, check out this rather comprehensive guide:

http://www.bruceclay.com/web_rank.htm