Search Engine Optimization
Before we start let me point out that I am no expert at search engine optimization. I have not been optimizing for very long and probably not very good at it. But here are some things that I have found out in my experience.
Keyword Density is very important, having your chosen keywords in the title tag and in the content can get you ranked high in the search engines. Title tags are very important and should be different for every page of your website.
As far as I can tell, keywords and description meta tags do not make much of a difference in search engines. From what I’ve heard, some search engines completely ignore the meta tags.
Having unique content is one of the most important things. Never copy content from other websites. Search engines, such as Google, reward websites that have unique content.
Back-links are also very important. The more back-links you have, the more search engines will take notice of you. But, if you have back-links from “bad neighborhoods” or link farms it can damage your rank.
Page loading time can play a big role in traffic. If your website takes longer than 3 seconds to load, some visitors may be closing it instead of waiting for the page to load. I suggest a minimal usage of graphics.
Make sure all of your pages are linked together so that search engines can easily find all of your pages. Sometimes it can be helpful to include a site map on your website.
Using your keywords in header tags is another good thing to do. It is best for the title to also be a header on your page.
Include your keywords in your file or folder name, for example, if I had a page about cell phones it would be good for it to be called “cell_phones.html” or “/cell_phones/index.html”.
If you have a dynamic website made with PHP, it is a great idea to use URL rewriting to optimize the URL for search engines. If you had a page like “index.php?id=contact_us” you could rewrite it to “contact_us.html”.
And lastly, having your keywords in your domain name is very good. If you had a website about hot rods, “hot-rods.com” would be a very good domain name.
I hope this article helps you a lot to understand search engine optimization and how to optimize your website, thank you for reading.