Daniel Coburn

SEO 101:

It is important to understand exactly what is search engine optimization.  I believe the easiest way to state it is that it is a method to make your website readable by search engines in such away that the pages you want to be displayed are for a given keyword.

So some major portions of it:

1. Site needs to be spiderable
2. Pages need to be unique
3. Proper use of basic HTML tags (i.e. Title, H1, H2 etc.)
4. Proper use of internal links
5. External Link Building

These are some of the very basics, the things I call SEO 101!

Your url’s need to be search engine friendly / safe.  In other words do not use query strings if you can avoid it for telling the server which page to serve up.  An Example of what not to  do: www.website.com/page.php?id=123  now if you have 10k pages you would have id= 1 -> 10,000 and Google will not like that. so instead do something like www.website.com/page/1.html where you tell the server that the 1.html is actually = page.php?id=1  this makes the pages “unique” from the url perspective.  This also makes the site more spiderable and has the ability to be completely indexed.  Also on the topic of spiderable all of the pages should be linked.  (ok well not all of them, I’ll write about page rank shifting later)  Also you need to use a sitemap.xml file!  That will make sure all of the pages are visible to the different search engines.

More in my next post.