Search Engine Optimization is just another way of saying search engine friendly. SEO means doing a bunch of different stuff to your website to make your website to be found on search engines. You don’t just want “your website to be found on search engines” you want “your website easier to be found better on search engines” you want your website popping up on a search engine you want your website to be the first result on the first page when someone searches.
In addition, you might think you want to have your website popup in any results no matter what the user searches for but actually you don’t, you also want you website to show up with the correct key terms (topics) are searched. On youtube.com when people upload a video and they want a lot of hits\views so they add a lot of ridiculous keywords (although YouTube calls them tags now days) (you can actually see what tags they added the under the video > show more > tags) you’ll often see “sex,” “sexy,” “hot,” “awesome,” “amazing,” “epic,” “funny,” “fail,” etc. tags that have nothing to do with the video. For this to happen on youtube.com it might be annoying but doesn’t matter much but if some web developer puts lot of unrelated keywords in meta tags in their website and their website pops up unrelated searches this becomes very annoying and unprofessional. Doing so will only bring negativity for those people looking for something else and when those people later search for a topic that is actually related to the site they are likely to remember the annoyance and skip over the result out of spite.
Most n00b web designers forget to give their webpages a title (that text that shows up on the top of the window of your browser and the auto text when you bookmark a website), search engines also use website’s title as keywords too.
Meta tags are put inside the <head></head> of html file, it doesn’t matter if the meta tag is before or after the <title></title>
Not all meta tags are about search engines.
Examples of Meta tags…
<head>
<title>page1</title>
<meta http-equiv=“refresh” content=“7;URL=webpage2name.html”>
</head>
A neat way to have webpage1 automatically redirect to webpage2 in 7 seconds
Example of meta tags that deal with search engines…
<meta http-equiv=“content-language” content=“en-gb”> tells the search engine what non-English language the website is
<meta name="robots" content="all"> the webbots that I'll talk about in a moment
<meta name= “description” content=“description of website which will show up with the link on the search engine, this can be long as you want with punctuation too. As many sentences you want.” >
<meta name=“keywords” content= “list, keywords, like, this, key, word”> Don’t forget to list words that are part of a keyword too like “key” and “word” as well as the parent “keyword.”
For more meta tags please see...
http://www.webmarketingnow.com/tips/meta-tags-uncovered.html#content-language
http://www.i18nguy.com/markup/metatags.html
http://www.i18nguy.com/markup/metatags.html
Fortunately keywords in meta tags was old way of finding websites back when the internet was in its infancy. (Referring to the annoyance of a thousand unrelated keywords in meta tags.)
Registering your website, like a perspective student would register to a school, is old school but it’s still a good way to get our website out there and still used today. The way registering your website works is after you have registered a webpage on google.com, ask.com, yahoo.com, etc the search engine has these things called “Web Bots,” a web based computer program – like a robot, and all these web bots do is look for and find every link on the registered page, so every <a href …> tag. This is why a lot of websites have a site index and just register that page. Some new web designers put all the links they have on their homepage, which is annoying when their homepage becomes cluttered when their site gets big. Smarter web designers do put all of their links on their homepage when registering their homepage but they hide most of them (see below); web bots can still see hidden content because web bots look in the code and thus website isn’t a mess, problem solved!
<!-- all hidden content here -->
Now that I’ve talked about “making it easier for search engines to find your website,” time to talk about “being found better on search engines” – aka getting your website higher ranking on the search engine results.
The one thing that you can do to get a search engine to find you is controlling your content – yes, I know so obvious right? “But what if I’m making a website for a company? I can’t just change what the website is about to ‘American Idol!!’” That’s not what I’m saying, say for example your website is about pumpkin slinging (see some videos on the YouTube link below if you don’t know what it is) so you would want the words “pumpkin,” “slingshot,” “sling,” “slinging,” “fling,” “flinging” repeatedly on your website. As well as you might want to avoid the phrase “smashing pumpkins” or the words “smash” and “smashing” on your website because people searching for “smashing pumpkins,” a popular rock band might accidentally end up at your page, even though the whole purpose of pumpkin slinging is to smash pumpkins, so you can start to see how complicated content controlling can be.
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=pumpkin+slingshot&oq=pumpkin+slingshot&aq=f&aqi=g2&aql=&gs_sm=3&gs_upl=11197l11488l0l11791l4l4l0l3l3l0l51l51l1l1l0
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=pumpkin+slingshot&oq=pumpkin+slingshot&aq=f&aqi=g2&aql=&gs_sm=3&gs_upl=11197l11488l0l11791l4l4l0l3l3l0l51l51l1l1l0
Other web bots actually do look at the title of the website and all the normal text on the webpage, like how we see it, and scan the page for how often a searched word (aka keyword) is repeated on your webpage, a numbers game pure and simple. That’s why it is important to have text in the alt=“” attribute in every image <img src=" " alt=" "> tag because web bots look at that text too.
And then Google came along… with a great idea that made it a giant that it is today. Google has the great idea of ranking websites by how many other websites are linked to an individual website (again with the numbers game), like how high is your website’s reputation on the internet.
Finally it comes down to Marketing Research, you the business must figure out all the keywords people think of when they’re looking for websites on the same topic as your business’s website, which sounds simple but this can easily become really complicated. Internet business mastery [ http://internetbusinessmastery.com/ ] is a good place to learn about web marketing and get a bunch of web marketing statistics. (Just like a stated earlier in the pumpkin paragraph, once you figure out those keywords then you want to repeat those keywords over and over again in your website.)
Something I not a fan of, Link Promotion is when you get other websites to have a link to your website. Whether it’s as easy as adding your link in a comment on their website or something (which is why you see links on comments on videos, popular, message boards, forums like youtube.com), or getting the other webmasters adding a link of your website on their website usually by money or some kind of business partnership, to up your linked numbers.
Something I not a fan of, Link Promotion is when you get other websites to have a link to your website. Whether it’s as easy as adding your link in a comment on their website or something (which is why you see links on comments on videos, popular, message boards, forums like youtube.com), or getting the other webmasters adding a link of your website on their website usually by money or some kind of business partnership, to up your linked numbers.
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