Guide to SEO

Face it you can have the best site in the world. But if it isn’t Seach Engine Optimized (SEO) you won’t have much for visitors. Search engine optimization can lead to a difference of being on the 30th page on google, right up to being on the first page. Usually it is not the content or the lack of incomming links that is driving your page to the bottom. It is a problem getting your page to be more “machine readable”. You have to look at your page from Google’s perspective.

You can’t look at your site and say, "I have great content, great graphics why wouldn’t google think my page is worth higher mention in its index?". Well we know your page is great and content is there but have you ever wondered what your page looks like from a search spider’s point of view?

Nobody really knows they exact secret algorithm Google uses to seperate the men from the boys, but they have given us guidelines. We can use these guidlines to make our pages more “machine readable”. Although some of these guidelines cannot easily be changed, like incoming links, there are a ton that we can do right away to improve page rank and this is what this series aims to do. I want to get everyone up to speed with Google’s SEO guidelines.

This article will mainly focus on “white hat” techniques taken straight from the horse’s mouth, Google. So there will be no if ands or buts about the techniques, these are proven to help your site. You have to be careful when applying SEO techniques because Google punishes the websites that try to manipulate and trick the bots. Remember the first rule of SEO is that, SEO is about making your pages machine accessible. It’s not ment to trick search engines into indexing you by jam packing your pages with irrelevent keywords.

Let's go forth and dig into how keywords, meta tags, and directions for robots can help you rank higher in search engine results.