Search engine compatible

[Zynex]

Hello there,

I was wondering... what is the best way to make your website search engine compatible. I want my website to be well viewed bij search engines

Greets, Zynex

[felgall]

1. Compelling content in your web page, just enough HTML to define what the content is and an external stylesheet to define how you would like it to look.

2. More compelling content.

3. Still more content.

4. Content, content, content.

[butlins]

Don't know if felgall emphasised the need for compelling content enough ;)

On top of that, proper structure within your XHTML. Look at your site as a text file (I use the Yellowpipe Lynx Viewer Tool plug in for Firefox to see my pages as Lynx would), and you'll see what the search engine's robots see.

Make sure you're using h1, h2, h3 for your headings, rather than styling paragraph tags, so the document's structured correctly; use key words in the page title; use key words and phrases in alt tags for images and title tags for links; expand abbreviations and acronyms with abbr and acronym tags.

Spell well!

I think it's apocryphal, but I think your pages need 250 words or more on them to make Google pay attention properly. It's not a bad rule to follow anyway.

Add a sitemap.xml file (there's a free tool on the xml-sitemaps page (http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/)) and if you expand your site, update it.

Update the content of your site regularly.

While Google is not the only search engine, it does have some useful tools - if you get an account, register your site with its Webmaster Tools and Analytics tools and you can check what search terms people are using to find you and which pages are most popular, and you can fine tune the content to use these terms more often.

There's quite a good summary of dos and don'ts at (of all things!) a Microsoft Small Business centre page (http://www.submit-it.com/subopt.htm) and Google's own help pages (http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769&topic=8456).

[neomaximus2k]

Hello there,

I was wondering... what is the best way to make your website search engine compatible. I want my website to be well viewed bij search engines

Greets, Zynex

There are a number of ways you can ensure your site is optimised for search engines. Some have already been stated here, use of header tags is a good idea, ensuring your content is optimised and relevant is another.

Here are a few things you can do to help
1) ensure your main content shows BEFORE your navigation. (your navigation gets indexed regardless of where it is on the page)

2) proper use of bold, ensure that the keywords you want to optimise for are displayed a few times in the page content.

3) onpage links, this means linking to other parts of your website from your own website, so for example if you had some text that said "come buy from cars-r-us we sell red cars" you would set the cars-r-us to a link to your homepage and red cars as a link to the section of your site that has red cars

those are a few examples, if you want more then visit the article system I have on paramiliar, I post a lot of SEO stuff on there.