The Ten Search Engine Commandments

[lhyman]

Thou shall not overlook the POWER of the search engines!
After all- where do over 80f Internet users look before finding the web site of their choice?
Here are 10 tips that will help you on your journey toward search engine heaven!
#1 - Thou shall not
Try to trick the search engines with techniques such as invisible text. This will only make your journey a difficult one. Try to work together with thy search engine brother, and HELP them to find your web site's useful content.

#2 - Thou shall not
Fill thy "meta keywords" with useless words such as "business" if your site is about "computers". Be kind to your search engine neighbor and try not to confuse him. These days, it's virtually impossible to be placed for "business" if your site is about "computers"! Narrow your focus, and you'll start to notice that it was MUCH more difficult to be a "jack of all trades", yet master of none!! ;)

#3 - Thou shall not
Submit thy site more than ONCE a month! Search engines are very strict about SPAM. If you've been submitting your site every day, chances are that you have been banned by the time you read this article!
#4 - Thou shall not
Repeat keywords right next to each other! Make sure to include each keyword only ONE TIME! Too many people make the mistake of repeating keywords over, and over again.
For Example: "computers, business, computers, components, computers"
This is a HUGE mistake, and will only make sure that you end up at the BOTTOM of the list!

#5 - Thou shall not
Use the same keyword list, and "title", for every page! Each one of your pages can get placed for a different keyword. Don't "sell your pages short". Besides, one page on your site might be seen as more relevant for a particular keyword when compared to another.

#6 - Thou shall not
Submit dynamic pages such as ASP, or Cold Fusion, because most search engine spiders can only read basic HTML pages. If your site was developed in a language other than HTML, make sure that there's AT LEAST SOME static content for the spider to read.

#7 - Thou shall
Write relevant, useful content that pertains to your web site and it's keywords. Whatever you do, make sure that writing educational, informational, and useful content is your FIRST priority. Search engines cannot read your pretty web design, graphics, or FLASH. The only thing that is of use to them is your content, and the code that verifies what each page is about ("meta keywords", {"description", "title", "alt tags", and the list goes on..).
Be Specific!
Tell your users what each page is about, and include the keywords a few times within the text. Do not repeat your keywords excessively- but make sure to include them!

#8 - Thou shall
Make all pages accessible to the search engine spiders within 1 or 2 levels of the home page. Even better, if you make a web page with a list of every page on your site (kind of like a "site map"), then the search engine spiders have a way to find all of your content!
#9 - Thou shall
Attempt to get reciprocal links between your site and other sites in the same industry. This should be easy, as it will benefit both your site AND theirs. Link popularity is one way in which some search engines judge what your site is really about. Web site's with more "link popularity" can place higher on some major search engines.

#10 - Thou shall
Be patient! You will not achieve top placement overnight. You might not even get placed at ALL for months! The major search engines can get backlogged or full, and sometimes will not even accept your submission. One thing that I've learned is that successful search engine optimization is a time consuming and laborious task. You must be patient and will learn the most about it mostly through trial and error.

[zen-r]

You're right, search engines are useful.

I used one to find out that you've actually copied your article.

Original source : http://www.marketips.com/dir2/032e.htm

If one must copy articles into x10forums, original sources should always be stated. This is both for reasons of copyright, & also (in some cases) to allow people to judge the accuracy of the information.

[lhyman]

well I got this out of my outlook notepad, I forgot to take note of the original source. (Dumb me) If I had, I would of give credit to the author and included a link to the original url...

All that I can say is, thanks for doing that for me

[zen-r]

Ok, no problem lhyman.

I wasn't intending it as negative criticism, by the way. I just noted that you have started a lot of new threads lately (a good thing for the forums) & thought it best to bring this up now in case you planned to continue doing so.

Edit :

By the way, ideally this thread should really be titled "The Ten Search Engine Optimisation (or SEO) Commandments" as this is actually what the article is about.

[allofus]

also make use of your image, table and url titles descriptions and ID's to add yet more relevant content to your website.

A search engine will see <h1> as more relevant than <h2> etc so if you can add your main keywords to these you will add some weight to your index.

<b> <em> <u> count too.

having your keywords in your domain is good too.

computerbusiness.com is bad
computer-business
computer_business will both be read as

computer business
2 keywords
computerbusiness is not a word.

Also avoid special characters in your <meta> such as title, keywords and description and a . full stop will do just that with most spiders. Stop them in their tracks.

conjunctions (and, or, etc) joining words are ignored mostly.

Variations of your keywords are good too.

greet
greeeting
greeted
greets

Huge descriptions and keyword lists in your <meta> is apparently no good eitehr and many SEO suggest 255 characters is considered to be the maximum.

look into a robots.txt file, a site map and noindex for admins stuff and consider this...

The algorithyms used by the likes of google are not public domain and likely changes intermittently so this is not an exacting science from what I can gather.

Personally I have not put much into SEO, apart from sitemaps, robots.txt and noindex <meta> where appropriate because our 'niche' or certainly our approach has been one of word-of-mouth and social / personal networking, but we are selling ideas and knowledge for free so................

[ramsankar]

Thx. Nice info

[ah-blabla]

#6 - Thou shall not
Submit dynamic pages such as ASP, or Cold Fusion, because most search engine spiders can only read basic HTML pages. If your site was developed in a language other than HTML, make sure that there's AT LEAST SOME static content for the spider to read.

I would disagree here: Languages such as PHP and ASP still produce html output, which search engine spiders read fine (I don't know about cold fusion, but ASP and PP are server side languages). Most modern pages are "dynamic", without their being problems. What you should try to do though is set whatever software you are using up to use Search engine friendly urls: search engines can't distinguish well between pages where you have index.php?option=xyz,x=bla and index.php?option=abc,y=bla, which can be a problem with software such as joomla, which can however be changed to have search friendly urls with /index for the main site, /gallery for a gallery etc. Read http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=76329 for more.

[allofus]

I would disagree here: Languages such as PHP and ASP still produce html output, which search engine spiders read fine (I don't know about cold fusion, but ASP and PP are server side languages). Most modern pages are "dynamic", without their being problems. What you should try to do though is set whatever software you are using up to use Search engine friendly urls: search engines can't distinguish well between pages where you have index.php?option=xyz,x=bla and index.php?option=abc,y=bla, which can be a problem with software such as joomla, which can however be changed to have search friendly urls with /index for the main site, /gallery for a gallery etc. Read http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=76329 for more.

Google says;

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters
Webmaster guidelines

Following these guidelines will help Google find, index, and rank your site.

Design and content guidelines

If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.

The problems can occur when there are ?+,#"$& characters, others too in the meta or url, not just for google, but other search engines too.

So even if a spider finds the page/s it may not be able to read it.

'Friendly URL's is te way to go, not only are they search engine safe, they look better, they also sound better.

Did you ever hear an advert on the radio..

go to w w w dot whatever dot com forward slash index dot php question mark special and symbol bonus

www.whatever.com/special/bonus
www.whatever.com/index.php?special&bonus=2009


which url are you wanting to deploy?

.htaccess can work this out for you.

CMS like drupal will deal with it also.

[jakeselectronics]

I'm knew to web design and what I am about to ask may sound simple to some, but bare with me.

If I am using x10hosting to host my site FREE and have a .x10hosting extension before the .com, like as in www.jakeselectronics.x10hosting.com, can I still get recognised in search engines such as google?

If so, what steps do I take to give me the best chance of this.

Jake.

[allofus]

If I am using x10hosting to host my site FREE and have a .x10hosting extension before the .com, like as in www.jakeselectronics.x10hosting.com, can I still get recognised in search engines such as google?

If so, what steps do I take to give me the best chance of this.

Jake.

Welcome to the World Wide Web.

Search Engines can have a url submitted direct to them via online forms or their bot's / spiders will follow an external link to your website and index it that way.

If google for example crawls this thread they will find your url, they also will find mine and at that point both of our url's are associated with / indexed to seo.

Some search engines use very elaborate and somewhat secretive algorithms to 'rank' a web address.

Your url will be indexed, but it takes time to build a high ranking based on keywords and content.

Example.

keyword.com
anothersite.com

both sites have 2 external links to them

keyword.com has
another-keyword.com
keywordcentral.com
linked to it.
Both sites have 'keyword' as a keyword but neither have any external links to them.



If a search for keyword is submitted the search will likely place keyword.com on top of the list because it has most relevant referenced data.



anothersite.com has
whatever.org and blabla.net linked and neither have anothersite related content or keywords.

anothersite.net has many links to it from sites that contain 'anothersite' so it will have a higher ranking.



Our website, 4allofus.com. The name is somewhat unique so if you search for it direct in a search engine it will be found, however the site has a very low ranking due to the many other websites that feature similar content and are either better structured / and / or have more links back to them, more content and more internal links.

The likelihood is Jake that short of a gazillion quid stuffed in a brown envelope and ushered to Mr Google your site will never feature at the top of a search for 'electronics' but I do not know how many jakeselectronics there are, probably not many compared with the number of electronics genre websites...

I have not looked at your website Jake so I do not know what you are wanting to achieve with the url.

I can tell you that if 4ALLofUS were dependent on search engine traffic we would be wasting our time. Our member base is from word of mouth recommendation, networking and related sites and forums / chatrooms / info / audio / video share sites so honestly we are not overly concerned with the page rank.

That said,
Our ongoing effort to 'get the word out' has seen more and more of our content featuring in search results, some of the results are rather obscure. The odd spelling mistake. I wrote an article about the leamon brothers collapse, misspelled the name of the banking cartel and it turns out that so do lots of other people who were searching for info about it. An unplanned, but unique tale of relative success.

If you going to be relying on search engine traffic I would make a couple of suggestions.

QUIT NOW...
Sorry, my sick sense of humour, a joke, but the competition is vast, VAST!


Ok my advice;
1. learn the ropes.
If this is your first website and you have had no formal training / studies then you have a huge learning curve ahead of you. Rome was not built in a day and neither was a high traffic website that relies on search engine traffic.

then

2. dig into your pocket and buy what you need from x10hosting...
Like I said before, I do not know what you are planning for your website, but if the purpose has anything to do with making money... Free lunch??? who are you trying to kid? yourself? What I mean is that you do kinda get what you pay for and again it comes back to money. Would you do business with some guy on the net who has not even invested $10 in a domain name? I would NOT!

But alas, I was stupid enough to pay over tripple that @ register .com £35 and hosted with free hosting. Learning curves.. dang

I personally am a couple of years into my own learning curve, 9 months in on running a vps. I also utilised the free hosting services from x10 and it certainly helped to get us up and running. and Jake the learning curve never lets up. If you get stuck you can always pop back to these forums and ask. There are some pretty seasoned developers frequent these forums and I AM NOT ONE OF THEM.

Lots of help available though.