I was browsing the Internet these days and found a really cool site with some tips and tricks related to SEO. It is http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors . The site presents a list of search engine factors and some people’s oppion on how much they affect the position of a website in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). I would recommend reading and using this list when developing a website.

As many would expect, probably the most important factor is the title of the page. It should contain the keywords of the site. From the SEO point of view, the <title> tag is probably the most powerful tag a web developer can use.

Besides the title, the content of the page is very important. This should also contain different keywords. You may use Google Toolbar to count those keywords. Simply enter in the search box some keywords and click on the yellow button shaped like a pencil. This will highlight all the appearances of that keywords in your page. I usually try to add each keyword 8-10 times on a page. This helps boost the site on the SERPs pages.

Another good thing that is worth knowing is that you should include the keywords in headings (<h1>, <h2>, etc), because the search engines believe that the page has something important to say related to those keywords. Don’t worry if the page does not look exactly how you would link, you can always use CSS to arrange the headings. I usually do this the following way:

h1 {
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
font-size: 14px;
}


When people make a search, the keywords contained in links are bolded on the SERPs. In order to make your links search engine friendly you may use Apache’s mod_rewrite module. You may use it to convert a link such as www.mysite.com/index.php?article_id=123 to www.mysite.com/global-warming/123/ for instance, if the page with the article_id 123 is about “global warming”. This way, when a person searches the Internet for those keywords, your site has more chances to appear on the result pages. A really nice tool that helps you generate the “.htaccess” file needed to make search engine friendly links (the file named “.htaccess” will usually be places in the root of your website) can be found at http://www.mod-rewrite-wizard.com/ .

I would also like to note that, despite many people’s oppinion, the <meta> tags are not very important. They may be included on a website, but this does not mean that the site is search engine friendly. A site is said to be search engine friendly when most of the factors listed on seomoz.org are treated.

Also please note that, when making a search, people usually don’t click on the 2nd or the 3rd page. They usually check only the 1st page. This is why you have to choose very careful the keywords of your website and try to optimize it so that, in time, it will show up on the first page of the SERPs.

There are more things to consider when optimizig a page for the search engines, but you will have to read the article on the page recommended above for more information.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 6th, 2007 at 3:13 am and is filed under SEO Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.