Basic SEO: What Search Engines Love (Page 1 of 4 )
This article will give you a beginner's guide to optimizing your site for search engines. It will focus specifically on what the search engines will be looking for when reading and indexing your site. These are things you will definitely want to utilize, or at least consider. So if you are a novice web designer, or just want to refresh some of the basic concepts, come join us.
Before you even begin to design your website, I highly recommend reading this entire article, along with the second part, which deals with what search engines hate. Aside from this, the only other prerequisite is that you or your web designer know and understand basic HTML and Cascading Style Sheets. Feel free to rummage through the DevArticles archives for a wide variety of articles covering these two languages.
The first thing to consider is what hosting company to use. A good hosting company will put your site on their web server and register your domain name. Make sure you pick a company that allows you to upload web pages that you've created on your own; it is vital to have control over the HTML on your pages. The company should also let you use your own domain name. And finally, they should offer some log-analysis tool, which tells you the number of visitors you had and how they got there. WebHosters should have several articles in its archives that discuss how to choose a hosting company.
When choosing a domain name, make sure that it is short, easy to remember, and easy to spell. You should also always opt for the .com top-level-domain, because most people remember .com better than any other. If you are going to use a keyword, terms search engines perceive as capturing the essence of your site, in your domain, make sure you use dashes (-), periods, or slashes to separate words. This will help you find a unique domain name for a popular keyword, but keywords in domain names generally don't help that much. It is also recommended not to use a domain forwarding service.
It's important to remember that the searchbots (what search engines use to index pages) do not follow all the instructions placed in the page's code when it loads a page in order to index it. This is because there are two types of instructions that allow the server and the browser to create the page: server-side instructions and client-side instructions. Server-side instructions are visible to searchbots because the web server follows the instructions before sending the information to the searchbots. Client-side instructions are not visible to searchbots because these are instructions sent to the browser after the server has completed its task. The searchbots get the page directly from the server.
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