A little SEO

[seymourjames +]

This is is a little thread to help people understand a little bit about SEO and to stop some confusion I have often seen on the forum.

Urls are generally changed to make them more human friendly to remember and type. It is not a panacea to gaining search engine rankings. If it were that simple the search engines would be out of business.

If you want to assist search engines successfully crawl your site then it is a case of automatically serving or submitting a sitemap which for anything more than a few pages is best generated automatically by a sitemap generator which tells google not only about the structure but .

Like this

http://dev.templatecodes.com/modules...od=tc_site_map

Now you have the choice whether to copy /edit this file and submit it to search engines manually or if this was a real site, the link could be hardcoded the in the footer for example. This will then generate the most upto date xml sitemap so that when a search engine robot comes to your site, it finds this link easily and it is away getting all your links quickly and efficiently. It would take very little to make a second link like this for humans to read/use as well. We will probably do that in a future release.

These are the big things which will impact your rankings. The order of their importance is a very hot debate but the list in general is a lot less debatable:

1. Quality of unique well written content on your site which is well formatted, built for humans and pages following good practices in terms of using title tags meta descriptions and good use of alt tags on images. Spamming sites get found quickly and are dropped from the index.
2. Inbound links to your site from other 'on-topic' quality sites who are also deemed by google to be respectable (also length of time those links have been in place, their correct formatting / use of title tags in those links) and the context in which they sit). A bunch of links from poor unrelated sites or reciprocal links will do nothing to help your search rankings.
3. Internal linking structure (site wide - can it be navigated by a human) including use of title tags within internal links.

Some other things but there are a million of them.

Age of domain, duration of domain registration, frequency of content change, duplicate content .....

The best place to start is here

Webmaster guidelines - Webmasters/Site owners Help


The basic truth is this. Build your site content for human beings first and foremost. Think about them first. The search engines want to show results which reflect the best sites for people. And they are .... good at it. Then show the search engines that other similarly good sites think highly of you too.

[Hey Me +]

There are dots in the 1st link, not working (404).

[Lhotch +]

Originally Posted by Hey Me

There are dots in the 1st link, not working (404).

The forum alters the links so you wont e able to cut&paste it. Just click the link, there are no dots.

[seymourjames +]

Just embedded it again and it seems to work now.

[shanedawg +]

Good information.

I'll add this little bit for new site owners that wish to improve their search engine rankings.

You may be tempted to hire someone to improve your SEO by providing you links back to your site. Be careful if you go this route. Nobody knows your site like you do, therefore very few (if any) people can provide you with the quality of links that you could provide on your own. Like SeymourJames said, links from sites that aren't considered relevant and of high quality will not do anything for your search engine rankings.

Taking the time to write your own relevant content and taking charge of your own inbound linking efforts will probably be your best bet.

[Hey Me +]

Originally Posted by Lhotch

The forum alters the links so you wont e able to cut&paste it. Just click the link, there are no dots.

Obviously you didn't click on it

Thanks seymourjames !