(SEO) Tip 6

Assure to place your JavaScripts in external files and link to them. This will be a Search Engine friendly web page, also it makes your markup cleaner and your web page management easier.

Page Body

Your potential clients will see this part of the web site and yes, you can make pages both attractive looking and, at the same time, efficiently search engine optimized.

Page Headings and Other Word Graphics

As far as designing is concerned, many have decided to display graphics as their headings. Turning to our graphic designer, to have unique headings created, we have replaced important content from our web site.

Web site visitors are not concerned about the amount of time you took in creating an awesome heading that says “Free Leads and Traffic.” They are just interested in knowing about Free Leads and Traffic and what attributes does it have for their benefit.

Looking at it as a search engine spider, the graphic-design about free leads and traffic is just a design and spiders won’t read them. It is recommended to fill in the "alt" attribute in the "img" tag with the actual words. However, search engines do not give hat much value to them, if any, to “alt” content. It is still necessary for accessibility in order to apply some value, but, toward getting your web pages ranked well in a search engines is not promising at all.

These things also relate those strong keywords on your web pages that form the navigation menu. You probably created graphics for the words to display a mouse-over effect, but, once again, graphics and spiders really don't care about them.

Spend less time creating graphics of words, just use regular text. These are words after all. When graphics are needed, consider a form of CSS image replacement; spiders should be able to access the text of your heading.

Search Engine Optimizing Tips

(SEO) Tip 2

Finding out what spiders see on your web pages is important, run a spider simulator on all of your pages. The simulator exposes what is visible to the spiders in text and in links. There are plenty on the market at various different prices, but if your looking for a free one you can see google (Search Engine Spider Simulator).

(SEO) Tip 3

Every website should have a file named robots.txt. In this file there are instructions the spiders will follow as to what directories they should not spider (disallow). Assure to have this file present so it may permit the permission for spiders to view the content on your site. This includes access to content and to CSS. You can also detain it from reading certain pages on your site.

Page Structure

After building a search engine friendly web site, assure each page is also search engine friendly. As I said earlier, great structure is the foundation for building an (SEO) web site. Primary areas of a Web page contain the right content between the (head)(/head) tags and that which is contained between the (body)(/body) tags. The content you place in these 2 areas have a huge impact on how web pages are indexed and, to a what degree, what appears in the search engine result pages.

Designing your web page, or placing content on your web pages, NOTE: (spiders read like people). Starting from left to right and from top to bottom, but this can be different in other languages. Spiders are programmed to believe that the most important content is placed at the top of the page. Important information usually is placed at the beginning so who would anyone think of placing it at the bottom? When reading specific tags (title, h1, h2, etc.) search engines value content to the left more so than words on the right.

(SEO) Title Tag

How about beginning at the first element on any web page (title tag) ((title)(/title)). This is primarily the most important element for (Search Engine Optimization) on the entire page. The majority of the time, the content in this tag could be left blank, have a default value (e.g. “insert title here”), or it can be the companies name.

Why is this tag so important? This is the main tag used by every major search engine as an indicator of the page’s information to determine value, and, second, it's also used by the search engines as the first line in the SERPs.

Assure to place major value in this tag.

(SEO) Tip 4

Carefully pin point the attributes of the content and use your keyword (s) as the title on the page. A web site about natural waxed candles made by XYZ Company shouldn’t have the title “XYZ Company”, it should contain a title something like “natural waxed candles.” If the company name is important for branding purposes, then place it to the end of the line like this: “natural waxed candles XYZ Company.”

(SEO) Meta Tags

Changes have occurred throughout the years concerning meta tags, search engines have switched various methods of meta tags. One that has lost value is the “keywords” meta tag. A good portion of search engines don’t consider these anymore, but if you have time to create one, go ahead and do so. It doesn’t hurt.

The major meta tag that all search engines presently recognize is the (description) meta tag. Again, this tag should be exclusive on all pages and be relative information on each web page.

The proper format for the description meta tag is, for example:

(meta name="description" content=Natural Waxed Candles by XYZ Company.”).

(SEO) Tip 5

Place an exclusive description for each web page. Don not use duplicate meta tags across all pages, search engines will notice this and possibly ignore the information of the meta tag or possibly the entire page.

(SEO) and JavaScript

We all know that stuffing the top of the HTML web pages with tons of JavaScript functionalities that can be necessary for various page features is also risky. This can include, but is not limited to: mouse-overs, form validators, cookie checkers, etc. Search engine spiders see this and get stuck, and, trying to ignore it, they still have to weave throughout all that code in order to reach the original content of the web pages. Spiders also have timeouts or maximum character counts integrated with them having to sort through all the garbage, they’ll forfeit their job in spidering and leave to another site. So prevent from making web pages too top heavy by placing too much code between the (head) tags.

Understand the Search Engines and Search Engine Spiders

What is the best way to get your site into the search engines? Search engines obtain your URL either by you manually submitting your web pages directly to search engines or by other websites having a link to your web pages. Once it is recognized, then search engines send out their spider or (bot) to review your website.

After landing on your site, the spider begins to read all the content in the body of your web pages, including markup elements, all the links to other web pages and outbound links to other websites, plus elements from the page head including some meta tags 'depending on the search engine' and the title tag.

Once finished browsing and gathering the information in your content then it goes back to it's central database for indexing which can be several months (2 to 3).

Spiders follow links on pages, repeating the same procedures over and over again. Spiders are not always to bright, for lack of a better term, dumb. They usually follow basic HTML coding. Encasing a link in a JavaScript that spiders won’t comprehend is usually not the best way to go about it, spiders basically will ignore both the JavaScript and the link. Same thing goes for forms; spiders are not able fill forms out and click the “submit” button.

Understanding what spiders see, try accessing your web pages with a Lynx browser from a Unix server. Lynx is a non-graphical website, it does not support JavaScripts, this site displays only text and regular href tags. This is what the spider can see and indexes. Does your web pages work without graphics or JavaScript? If not, the spiders will not work either, and that calls for an immediate back track to re-do your site.

Once the Search Engine has all your content in its database, it runs an algorithm (a mathematical formula) compared with your content. Algorithms are unique to each Search Engine and are constantly reformatted, but, in essence, all search engines look for the important words on your web pages “based on word density” how often your keywords or phrases are used in respect to the total amount of content and they assign a value to these words based on the code surrounding the words.

They also go back to the links on your web pages. They search and look for what other websites, or pages on the same site are linking to that page. More links on a page equals more importance to that website by search engines. Having one way links from other sites linking to your website is “Very Important”, It has nothing to do with optimizing your website, but I will be covering that in a future article. Optimization wise it is recommended, to assure you link to your important web pages from more than just the index page (e.g., create a primary navigation that appears on all pages.)

Tip 1

Rule #1 of search engine optimization (SEO). Prevent your website design to interfere in such a way that the code hinders the spider (bot) from being able to index it. Which means avoiding pages with 100% graphics and no text “pages that contain all images”, or flash-only. I must say that web design and (SEO) should go hand in hand. When someone lands on a website and encounters is a log-in page, before being able to see the site’s information (text or content), then that’s what spiders will see and it will pause right their, so think a little further and let experts in the field show you step by step what you should do.

Have you thought of building Web Page entirely in Flash, DON’T.