Search Engine Optimization Basics

I know there are lot of articles about Search Engine Optimization, commonly refferred to as SEO, that talk about techniques and tips. Well, I am just going to talk about the basics that you need to know, not try to show you how to do it.

Meta Tags: First and the most important in my point of view is meta tags. You need to have this on your website no matter what. Google doesn’t use it to calculate your pagerank or ranking but there are lot of other search engines that use it. Getting listed in those engines is important because it matters to google who links to your site, thats how google determines pagerank.

Page Title: Lets move on, what is your page about? I am talking about page title. It should tell people and search engines what your page is about. Shouldn’t be a mile long, shouldn’t be two words either. In my view, it should be four words or less.

Content: It thats also one of the most important things. No content means you don’t deserve a search engine placement. Whatever your site is about, content is the key to higher search engine placement. Google likes it too.

Image Tags: This is new emerging technique in SEO. Make sure all your images have ALT tags. Google crawls through images and indexes them. Be descriptive when describing images.

Robot.txt: Then there is something called robots file, this is a simple file that tells the search engines where they can’t go to on your site. Incase you have material you don’t want the search engine to index.

Site Map: A site map (or sitemap) is a web page that lists the pages on a web site, typically organized in hierarchical fashion. This helps visitors, and search engine bots, to find pages on the site. Site maps can improve search engine optimization of a site by making sure that all the pages can be found. This is especially important if a site uses Macromedia Flash or JavaScript menus that do not include HTML links.

These were just the basics. This is a must before you pay thousands of dollars trying to get your website to rank better in search engines. It takes time and effort and for you to see any fruitful results in the search engines. Your website is not the only website but you can make sure it has what other websites don’t have. This could be anything, everything and nothing. You have to decide what you want to do with the limited resources you have.