Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Created: Nov 15, 2005
Updated: Nov 15, 2005
Introduction
This article will give you some hints on how to perform search engine optimization (also know as SEO) on your website.
By following these hints your site is more likely to be found using search engines like Google, Yahoo! and MSN Search.
URL
The URL of your website is the first thing the search engine will see and also the link people will click on when they want to
see your page. The best thing to do is use your major keyword as the filename of your page.
Content
Before tuning your website for optimalization you should have good content on it. Search engines will read the first part (+/- 500 words)
from your page and will try to find important keywords in it. The text you place in this part of your page is an important factor
for the search engine to determine the relevance of the page for search terms.
You should keep in mind that humans are your primary goal for your content so keep it readable.
Title
Every web page should have a title tag in it. This is the part between the <TITLE> and </TITLE> tags in your code.
This tag is one of the most important tags for search engines to see what your page is about.
Make sure this tag is a short describtion of your page with specific keywords but keep it readable because this is also the title people
will see in the search results. Make this title no longer than about 70 characters.
Example title tag: <TITLE>BartPE - The best rescue bootdisk</TITLE>
Description
Next to the title tag you should create a tag with a description of your site. This can be 255 characters long and should
be some kind of introduction to your page. Include some keywords in this tag.
Example: <META name="description" content="Every system administrator should have BartPE to keep his servers running. It is the best bootdisk ever.">
Keywords
The last tag you should fill is the keywords tag. This tag should also be no longer than 255 characters. In this tag you can put
all the keywords you want to be searched on. Do NOT put a keyword more than 1 time in this tag.
Example: <META name="keywords" content="bartpe rescue bootdisk server repair">
Links
When a search engine walks through your site, it will follow all the links in your page to find the rest of your site. If possible
do not use flash objects because they are not indexed. The use of normal HREF tags will give you the best results. Also the text between de
start and end tag will be of more importance for the serach engine than normal text.
Example: <A HREF=http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder>homepage of BartPE<A>
Sitemap
If you want to be sure all your pages can be found by the search engine you should build a sitemap and put a link to this page at least on your home page
but preferrable on every page you create. When your site is indexed the engine will go through all these links.
