Constructing Professional Search Engine Friendly Web Pages Part III

What makes for a great webpage? Part III

Now to finally conclude this article, I have decided to let you in on a few SEO tips, secrets and tricks. Be careful how you use them. Like everything else in life moderation is a good thing. Welcome to Part III.

6. Search Engine Optimization

Yahoo, MSN and Google is where you want to be found. The reality is that those three search engines account for almost 80% of all the search queries made on the net by users. Optimizing your site to meet the requirements of all three sites can be a chore. I have already written two articles on how to optimize your site for Yahoo and MSN and you can find them here, SEO Secrets For Yahoo's Engine and SEO Techniques For MSN. Read them and see what I mean.

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Optimizing your website for Google requires more than one article and eventually I will get around to writing it. But here are the basics. Keep your pages no more than three clicks away from the main page. Make sure that you link all your pages to your index page. Be very careful about over using your Keywords or Keyword Phrases. Provide a content rich page. This may be the single most important thing you do. Content is vital to Google. Make friends with others in your specialty and make a deal to exchange links to each others sites. Listen I know what you are thinking they are the competition why should I link to them? Hey, I say be real. Find others that are in a similar specialty not the exact same one. Try to get established as being an authority in that field. Google loves that, and most of all have a little patient. Google will find you and if you keep your nose clean they will rank you good. We tell all our clients this "let us do it right because second chances are really rare with Google.

7. Prepare a robots.txt file and a sitemap.xml file.

You can find really good site mapping sites online. Just search for them. Make a site map and a readable site map using html code. Makes sure you have a link to it you’re your home page and it back. For Yahoo make a site map too but not in xml format, instead make it in a txt file. Put each link on a separate line. No fancy coding required for Yahoo.

Many experts believe that your robots.txt file should be blank. I disagree. You should have some snippet of code on it. Use this it works wonders.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /azr94v2hh2lg/

This allows all bots into your site but keeps them away from directory azr94v2hh2lg. You don’t have a directory by that name. Its ok you don’t need one. Believe it or not the bots will crawl through the entire site looking for this folder just so they don’t enter it. Now that is a sure fire way to have the bots look through all your content. Imagine the fun when they find new links, indexing the pages as they come across them. Yeah I know I should have kept that a secret! I expect you to.

8. Blogs

No matter what they tell you BLOGS are still in. Using blogging software/structure that comes with such free blogging software as Wordpress will optimize your pages for you. Blogging systems have a linking hierarchy (categories, archives, etc.) that are very search engine friendly. It's almost impossible not to optimize your pages if you're using a blogging system. Plus, you have an RSS feed that will syndicate your content and place it into the search engines very quickly. Darn it I did it again gave away another perfectly good secret.

9. The Biggest Kept Secret

You all know that I will be fired after this gets out. So I hope someone will offer me a job somewhere. I don’t need much just a roof over my head will do, on some tropical island! OK, when the net was still in its infancy, a group of brilliant men and women, decided that blind people or deaf people would get so much out of the computer. So the changed the way a computer works so to speak, in order to give the disabled a new lease on life. Many of those systems came with text editors only for screen display. So what if you had a sight with some visually stunning pictures. Well HTML wrote the IMG tag with and ALT extension. The ALT tag would contain a description of the image.

Google gives the ALT tag significant relevance. And I mean big time importance! So listen up. Put your primary keywords in the ALT tag followed by a brief description of the image. Google loves that and believe me they find you. No need to go to them. No other search engine treats ALT tags with the same respect. How we found this out is truly a story in itself.

We had a page on our site about our company policy. On the right side of the page we had gif files that linked to Search Engine sites. One gif file had an ALT tag filled out with our primary keyword phrase and a description of the gif. The primary keyword did not appear anywhere else on the page. Not even in the title or description or even in the meta tag keywords, because we had left it out. Well one day we were conducting a manual search of our keywords and there it was. Along with three or four other pages Google found, it first found this one lonely page with one ALT tag….So use them and use them wisely. Don’t over load them with your keywords. If you have twenty keywords and twenty images then use one in each image. Don’t over use them. Don’t use the same keyword twenty times. Three times may be pushing it.

I’m done now and I have kept a trick or two to myself, for future considerations. And if you’d like to hire me, I welcome all offers. Bye for now!

Archie Glikakis
Position Front Page
SEO Consultant
http://positionfrontpage.com