July 22, 2011
S.E.O. (Search Engine optimization)
I am currently finishing writing a small e-book (I call an e-pamphlet) on what I have learned about S.E.O. (Search Engine Optimization). The book outlines what I believe the best way to approach website development from the ground up. I have had great success optimizing sites for search engines and have sold some of my very own sites for large sums of money because the websites were so well optimized that they would routinely get 1,000+ visitors per day just from search engine referrals alone. In the web world; clicks = dollars. I am publishing a lesson from my S.E.O. e-pamphlet.
The S.E.O. Guide
A Guide to Successful Search Engine Optimization
by Brad Taylor
The following e-pamphlet will give invaluable advice for those looking to learn S.E.O. My name is Brad Taylor and I have been in the web development business since 2002 as a full time professional. I personally have developed hundreds of websites. Some of these websites were my own websites and I used these sites as my own personal training ground to find out the best way to build and promote a website. Along the way I have read kept up with press releases from companies like Google and Yahoo that have given the Search Engine Optimizer tips about how to maximize our time and efforts.
I don’t want to go into too much detail in the pamphlet about specific domains or projects on which I have worked. Rather, I would rather give clear concise instruction on what has worked for me over the years and what I believe to be the best S.E.O. approach today. I will do this in a semi-outline format. There are nine (9) major steps to doing perfect S.E.O. Starting from construction of a website:
1. Have Good Site Structure and a Clean Server Structure:
A. Structure
If you are lucky enough to build a website from the ground up and have time and money to do it (in a perfect world), you will be able to control the exact construction of the website. From the beginning you will want to put everything within the website into neat organized sub folders that will not need to be moved around on the server. Example: If you have word docs that your visitors will need to download you can put them in a sub folder called “word-docs”. And if you think you may have a great amount of word docs then you can even place a sub folder within “word-docs” called “2011”. This will help you organize for your own benefit and that of the search engine spiders. From day one you cannot be lazy when it comes to organizing your website. Spend the few extra seconds each time you save something to think ahead and organize properly. Google and other search engines reward your hard work by listing you higher. And after all, the most fundamental general rule to S.E.O. is to NOT BE LAZY and WORK HARD. Sounds simple enough but there are many buried website because the owners or webmasters didn’t think attention to detail was important.
B. Cleanliness
It is important to name your files with names relevant to your overall product as well as what that file is relating to specifically. If your website is about selling Jewelry and your file is about marquis diamonds in particular, you will call the file marquis-diamonds.html (or whatever extension type the file is). But chances are you will have more than one article about a marquis diamond so you may want to create more sub folders to categorize it or add more description to the file name. ex. marquis-diamond-article-july-2011.html
- Cleanliness: It is next to Godliness in the real world, right? So why not in the virtual world as well? Your server should be clean. You don’t want it cluttered up with files that don’t relate to that specific URL. The server space for your website is not an online storage space for your personal photos or files. Keep everything in those folders relating to the subject matter only. In fact, never put those things on the server at all. If they spend even one day on the server you may have done yourself a little damage. Not only do spider-bots sometimes realize they may have no relevance to the subject of the website, but the minute they are removed the spiders will spend a nano second extra scratching their little heads and punish you, even if it is ever so slightly. Rule of thumb: THE HARDER YOU MAKE THE SPIDER WORK, THE WORSE YOUR SITE IS OPTIMIZED.
More to Come...
