Brandon Belew

There has been a ton of conversation as of late about SEO. We are almost bombarded with the term either by spam email or by popping up in general development related conversations. I get at least 2 emails a week promising to "Improve your sites page ranking on popular search engines!".

Is SEO important enough to warrant all of the spam and discussions? Well, the discussions maybe but not the spam! Fact of the matter is, in most cases it seems that Google and other advanced search engines pick up the content quite well on their own without having to "optimize" your site for search engine compatibility.

In today's world of dynamic content, and the use of out of the box open source cms platforms developers are having to do less and less work to improve page rankings. However there are still some things that should be done.

If you haven't designed your site yet, or chosen a name for it. Pick something unique for the domain name. A unique name, while sometimes not coming up in keyword searches is more apt to be ranked highest in the search listings then a generic name that resembles 1000 others. While I may be one of the few with this thought process, I feel it's crucial to have a unique name. Some of the other sources i've read state that you should include an item in your URL relavent to the subject matter. For example www.brandonramblings.com Which by this theory, a search for "ramblings" or "brandon" should snag this result. It may be far down the page, but it has a chance of being there.

Black Hat SEO, is it worth it?

Black Hat is a term that doesn't appear too often, unless actively searching for articles / tutorials on SEO. Black Hat SEO in my opinion is the worst possible thing you could ever do. Tricking search engines into displaying your results higher is not a good practice, and could result in your site being black listed from the search engine all together. To avoid this, do not hide text in hidden divs or the same color as the background. That is the most common way of stealing page ranks.

Sitemaps -- Do they help?

I think in most cases the answer is no. They may help initially, but if you don't keep it updated it won't work for long. For users without access to automate the process, or with a static rarely changing site the sitemaps are a moot point.

Images and flash

While I admit, I am no designer or even the best in the world at html / css. I still on occasion stop to examine how a site is put together. Now professional sites normally have this covered, local business sites and even some local news sites rarely use their ALT tags to their full advantage. Since spiders search in plain text, adding a caption or description to a photos ALT tag will help aid the search engine in properly indexing the image and or the content on the page it's on.

Now, the next no-no... Flash!

While flash is a great tool that has the capability of producing some pretty sweet websites. At the same time, to my knowledge none of the active search bots have the ability to effectively scan a flash animation for content. Yet still there are tons of heavily flash based websites being developed to this date. There are a few things that will help make the site more SEO compatible. The main one being, don't embed the fonts in your movie. If you must use flash, use flash to include a text file. This way the crawler has more of a shot at seeing your content instead of just flash files. The other solution is make use of your meta tags. Awhile back I heard that Google and the other major search engines are not really even utilizing the meta information anymore. However, in almost every book i've read since they list meta as a crucial step to making a website search engine compliant.

Friendly URLS

What's more friendly to you? www.brandonbelew.com/page/php_dev/hi_everyone.html or www.brandonbelew.com/?q=node/etcetcetc ?

If you answered the first one, you are correct. In most cases i've noticed that Google and Yahoo! will still crawl the complicated URLS, making them short and sweet will be less hassle on the bots and possibly even get you listed on a site with an old school bot that can't handle the urls.

Friendly URLS can be setup in most content management systems, if not you can also use HTACCESS and mod_rewrite to do the job.

Broken URLS

One of my biggest e-pet peives is dead links. Have you ever been looking for a file or picture on Google and got excited because you finally found it! Just to click the link and realize the image/file is missing? Yeah it's annoying! While it's not always easy to make sure every link is always alive. It is possible to setup your htaccess file to redirect missing files to a search page, or other information about your site.

To be continued.....