SEO Basics – Why Use Search Engine Optimization – Part Two

Tuesday, January 19th, 2010 at 11:15 am

This is he second part of the short SEO tutorial: SEO Basics – Why Use Search Engine Optimization – Part One.

Ensure that your URLs are search engine friendly

It is important to use search engine friendly URL’s, as opposed to dynamically generated ones that have a query string (which lets the server know which data to fetch from a database). Unfortunately, there are many search engine robots which have difficulties with this kind of URL and they may well stop at the question mark, and so not actually look at the query string.

By using a search engine friendly URL you are helping both your ranking and the users of your site. Many sites have seen an incredible improvement just because they have changed the URL scheme on it. However, the modification and rewriting of a site’s URL can be a little tricky.

Getting Linked

The really good way to ensure that your site gets linked is to ensure that it contains good content. For any site on the web, incoming links are very important, especially for Search Engine Optimization. In fact, you may find that this is the hardest part of SEO for you to implement.

But many people have found that incoming links are less important, especially where you have more specific and unique content on your site.

Do not try to fool the Search Engines

Never use such methods as cloaking, link farms, keyword stuffing, alt text spamming or any other dubious ways. Although they may work for a short period of time, you not only risk getting your site penalized, but it could actually be banned from search engines altogether.

Avoid the use of Frames

Although it is possible to provide workarounds that will allow a search engine robot to crawl frame based sites, these will still cause problems for any visitors who find that site through a search engine.

What happens is that when someone follows a link from a search result to a frame based site, they will end up on an orphaned document. This will, in most cases, create confusion for the user, as in many cases, vital parts of the site will be lost, such as navigational links.

Do not spend too much time with Meta Tags

You will find that most search engines do not place a great deal of value on the content contained within Meta Tags today. This is because they have been used too much by spammers. So instead, if you need to, use Meta description elements. Although keywords will not hurt, they don’t really help either, so generally it is not worth the effort to use them.

Some search engine sites will use the content of a Meta description element to describe a site in their search result listings. So whenever possible, make their contents unique and descriptive for every document or page.

These are a few basic guidelines in relation to SEO. But there is much more that can be done in order to increase your site’s visibility with search engines. I’ll post more SEO tips on this blog, and you’ll have access to more advanced SEO tutorials in my newsletter (go to the upper right corner of this page and subscribe).

You might also be interested in reading:

SEO Basics – Why Use Search Engine Optimization – Part One